Home Sweet What?

They hadn't been able to get away with much money, not unless they wanted Father to be able to track them, but it was enough to purchase a house in a community near that wizarding university they'd been hearing whispers of. The Rushes had been talking about it at a dinner party, and it sounded like fun. A lot more fun than dinner parties, anyway. Kit hadn't been sure if he could take another spinster attempting to sing over poorly-played piano without pulling his hair out.

They'd been told that the house was small—two bedrooms, who'd ever heard of such a thing?—but it was still a surprise. Oh, he'd stayed in a hostel once for the hell of it, and that had been an adventure in lack of privacy and hygiene, but this was an actual house.



"The living room's clean," he noted. It was roomier than the outside of the house had promised, but then, there wasn't much in it. "Momo put my flag up." His flag was a painting of sorts, on panels and hung over the fireplace. Momo was the house-elf they'd elected to bring.

Tian glanced briefly over at the art as he took off his coat and flung it over the nearest chair. "Wonder if all the places have windows like that," he said, weaving his way through the room to peer through the glass wall. "Wonder if any of them even care that someone could get in that tree right out there and stare in." Maybe he should test that out. He pushed his sleeves absently up toward his elbows.

Kit chuckled and gave Tian a light punch, not much of anything. That would be something to do. He finished unbuttoning his own long coat and lay it atop his brother's. Momo would find them and put them away at some point. He headed for the hanging chair near the window and curled into it, giving a push to start it swinging.

"Listen to that," he said, then quieted. Rather than silence, rather than complaints about lessons or haircuts, it was the sound of people, young people, doing whatever they were doing in their own nearby houses. He heard some kind of musical instrument that might have been a guitar, heard unselfconscious laughter, and random shouting.

Tian looked over at his brother and gave a slow grin. "I bet we could walk out of here right now, knock on a door, say hey mate, we're new in town, know a party? and we'd get one. And not some bloody ball with powdered noses." Or maybe they should throw a house-warming party and just invite the whole damn street.

Kit stepped out of the chair on the upswing and ran his hands lightly down his front, smoothing his clothes. "Let's do that," he said. "We can look at the bedrooms when we're ready to crash in them." He could see the look on his mother's face at the slang he'd just used, and the fact that no one would be saying anything about it was amazing. He could crash wherever he wanted.

"Right, come on," Tian said, winding his way with a nice little bounce in his step. The thing in the middle of the room totally wasn't actually a table, but he didn't actually step on it on his journey. "None of these people have probably ever even been to a ball. We're the weird ones for a completely new reason this time." Weird because of culture instead of sneaking off in the middle of a ball to see if a wall was as climbable as it looked.

Kit slid open one wide glass door at the center of the windows and stepped out into the late afternoon air. It was cool, but a little activity would fix that, and he opted to leave his coat. He left the door open, too. He wasn't accustomed to the notion of locking up, and surely Momo would take care of things while they were out.

"So, which way first?," he asked.

Tian stepped out and stretched into the endless sky before he dropped his hands to his hair to pull it briefly away from his neck. Hell if he knew where to head first. "This way," he said anyway, taking a long step to his left. "There's more sound this way." He thought he smelled something good, too. Food was always a good way to dive into a new group.

More sound, more people, more fun. Maybe he'd find someone here, where girls walked around in trousers and in skirts short enough to see leg, where ties were more often wrapped around people's heads than their necks. Hopefully it would take a while for their parents to figure out where they'd gone. They were legal adults, but he knew the kind of pressure that could be put on them as encouragement to go home.

It was a party, one leaking out between two houses side by side. People stood with colorful cups—plastic?—and leaned out windows. Kit's lips spread into a grin. "Where's the booze?" he asked, and headed after the thumb crooked toward house number one's kitchen.

Tian was distracted, rooted in place by the legs on that girl there, and the one beside her, and the one beside her, but once he realized Kit wasn't by his side, he leaned sideways enough to trigger actual leg movement. The cup of booze he was handed didn't smell like any he'd ever encountered. "We're having better booze at our party," he murmured, though he took a pull from the foul-smelling cup. Might as well, for the experience.

It was only moments later before Kit returned, two plastic cups in his hand. "You have to try this," he said. "It's the most foul thing I've ever drunk." He pushed a cup forward, then saw that his brother already had one. "It's beer, it's some kind of ale." He took a drink, then made a face. "Hippogriff piss," he declared.

"This is horrible," Tian said. When he looked around, though, he noticed that at least not everyone was drinking this swill. "You picked up two, though, that means you've got to finish them both." Then maybe they could snoop around and find something worth drinking. Or just call Momo to bring a flask or two, that was always an option.

Kit laughed. "Like hell I will," he said, and watered the grass with one. He slipped the full cup into the empty one and took another drink, grimacing. "There's so much skin here," he said, just for his brother. It was something these people would never understand. They walked around like this all the time. Kit's longing gaze followed a girl with shoes so high that they impaled the grass twice on her way inside. If only he knew how to talk to them.

"It's ridiculous," Tian said, his eyes following the back of a girl's knees as she walked. Who would have thought something so stupid could be such a turn-on? "And it's smooth...and tan...and she's pale with freckles...I didn't know you could have freckles on your thighs..." Taking another long pull from his flimsy cup wasn't so bad when he could watch Freckles flirting.

"I saw a girl with some when we went climbing," Kit said. "The one with the shorts and the knee socks." There was no mistaking which shorts he was talking about. He'd never seen running shorts before that day, and he would likely never forget them. "Right here," he said, and trailed his fingers in a little arc from the front of his thigh around the side.