#saidthecat

Reese wrapped her coat around her and stepped out into the crisp Savannah air, looking around the neatly decorated city with a feeling of wistfulness. She liked it here at Christmastime, she did, but it didn’t have the same charm as being at school. She’d dropped out (or more accurately, run away) before she could start junior year, and that meant missing out on Christmas Weekends filled with spiced cider with friends, decorating Christmas trees, sledding on Christmas trees (and occasionally actual sleds), midnight champagne toasts, and endless rounds of Mariah Carey’s All I want For Christmas Is You.

Reese got none of that stuff here at home. Savannah was pristine and felt like home most of the time, but today it felt lonely and like she’d made the wrong choice, coming home and hiding from her future. And the only place she could think to find solace was Luke’s Diner, even if there was the off-chance she might run into her ex-boyfriend there.

And sure enough, as soon as she sat down at a table, Andrew came over to take her order, with that look on her face that Reese was never quite sure if she wanted to kiss or smack off of him. “Why so sour, sweetheart?” he asked her, wagging his eyebrows at her, and Reese just gave him a death glare. “Just get me coffee, please,” she snapped, not really in the mood for his games today when she was already feeling lousy. 

“Okay, but I’m going to need you to do something for me first,” Andrew told her, and the grin on his face made Reese very uneasy. “What do you want, Andrew? I pay for a service, I’m supposed to get my coffee, there aren’t supposed to be conditions.”

“Nope, not a customer condition -- a Christmas tradition,” Andrew corrected, pointing upwards. Reese gaped at him in disbelief when she looked up and saw mistletoe hanging directly over her table... the table she always sat at. “Are you kidding me?! You put mistletoe over my table?” Reese hissed. It was brilliant, honestly -- no one in this town ever sat there but her, knowing it was notoriously where she came to read for hours on end. And as annoyed as she was, she almost had to laugh at how ridiculous it is.

“You know what, Andrew?” she asked, looking around the diner and realizing most people were out caroling or celebrating with their families somehow. “My day’s bad enough already, it’s not like kissing you would make it any worse.”

Shock registered on Andrew’s face; he’d probably expected her to hit him or engage in some kind of verbal smackdown instead of actually standing up on her tiptoes and pressing her lips against his. She didn’t pull away, either; Andrew’s arms found her waist on instinct, and Reese’s hands came up to rake though his hair as she pressed her entire body against his.

She was mad at herself for leaving school, for coming home...for seeming to find Andrew at every turn, even after he’d left her behind without a word so long ago. She just wanted to kiss away every bad memory of the law few years, to lose herself in the moment. And kissing her ex was as good a form of self-loathing as any, right?

The bell over the door clanged as another customer came in, and Reese practically jumped away from him, breathless, already feeling ashamed of using that as a way to solve her problems. She slammed five dollars on the table, not looking at the new customer or at Andrew. “Thanks for the coffee,” she said, even though he’d never even managed to give her what she’d ordered. Keeping her head ducked down, Reese darted out the door, mad at herself for using Andrew as a distraction and even madder at herself for missing the feeling of his lips as soon as they were gone.

It was seventh year, and the Hufflepuff Common Room was mostly empty. A lot of their classmates had gone home for the holidays, and he was the only one left in his dorm, with Hugo off in Egypt with his family and Joe always going home. And Ryder was having the weirdest dream. 

He was basically living the movie Frozen. Except maybe it was more like Frozen 2, once Kristoff and Anna were already married and she sang her snowman song again. He could practically hear ‘Do You Want To Build A Snowman’ in his sleep, and he rolled over, trying to pull the colors over his head with a groan.

It was holiday. It was too bloody early for his body to wake him up.

Then Ryder realized it wasn’t actually his body. Someone was shaking him awake, and he blinked the sleep out of his eyes only to have Lily’s face come into focus, her lips moving as she sung the song to him.

“Thanks for invading my dreams with your song, jerk,” Ryder laughed, playfully hitting her with a pillow before trying to pull her into bed with him. He’d gladly roll over and go back to sleep spooning, but Lily had that determined blaze in her eyes... and was already dressed in snow gear.

“Come on, sleepyhead!” she protested, and Ryder sat bolt upright when his brain finally caught up. “Wait, did it snow?” He loved the first snow of the season; they always spent it together, but it had come freakishly late this year. Lily nodded excitedly, and Ryder shoed her away.

“Okay, okay -- go grab some bacon from the elves and I’ll meet you outside the common room when I’m dressed,” he pleaded, kissing her forehead and then practically falling out of bed as he scrambled to get up. Lily disappeared in a flash, and Ryder hopped into his pants, both legs at one time. He hurriedly dressed, then raced down the stairs, flinging the Hufflepuff portrait open and climbing out to find Lily there waiting. 

She tugged his hand until they were out on the grounds, feeding him bacon as they walked with her other hand, and then once they were outside, she started to roll the first ball of snow up. Ryder watched her warily, just in case she was launching the first snowball attack of the season, but it was just the two of them -- there was no need for play war when their friends weren’t around to give them a hard time.

By the end, there was a kind of lopsided snowman in front of them, Ryder’s scarf and hat perched on it, bacon making up it’s eyes and mouth for lack of anything better to put there. It wasn’t beautiful, or artistic, or anything like that. But it was theirs, and that, to Ryder, was the best thing in the entire world. 

Normally the first snowball fight of every year, the first person Ryder recruited for his team was Lily. No matter how good or bad she was, she was his best friend, and then later on his girlfriend, and she was always on his side.

But not this year. This year, Lily and Kitty told him because of their ‘marriage’ pact he couldn’t even watch Shrek with them as an exam study break. And that meant war.

He knew it was a joke and it wasn’t like he hadn’t asked Kitty to be his second-back up wife in the future anyway, but he still was planning on giving his best girls a hard time for their mock-betrayal. So Ryder had dragged Henry and Jake out of bed early, glared at them to remind them to get along, and had started rolling up balls of snow to hide behind a snowbank in preparation.

The girls would probably come out to try to go ice skating, or build a snowman, or whatever it was they did after breakfast, and Ryder sat prepared. Jake grumbled every now and then about how it was cold and he didn’t care enough about their stupid fake marriages to sit and wait, but the second the castle door opened and they spotted Lily’s flaming red hair, he shutup and grinned too, picking up a snowball fight.

They could wait by the bank and have all their ammo, or they could go straight into battle -- and Henry made the first move, yelling ‘Charge!’ as he got up and ran towards the girls. Ryder picked up a few extra snowballs, running after him, leaving huge footprints in the snow as the wind whipped against his face.

He tossed the first one from far away at Kitty, hitting her right in the boob, and grinned sheepishly as he watched them try to scramble to make snowballs of their own. The boys totally had the advantage, and Ryder crossed the distance between himself and his girlfriend, dropping a snowball directly on her head.

“Gotcha,” he said, smashing another one in her face with a grin. Lily pouted at him, and he tipped his head down to kiss her nose, handing her one of the extra snowballs. “I’ll let you switch teams if you let me watch Shrek 2 with you guys,” he added, waiting to see if she’d take the snowball -- and the deal. Otherwise, they were prepared for total victory.

The last time Andrew had ended up in the hospital, Reese had really thought he’d never end up coming out again. He was scaring her, more than she could put into words, and seeing him lying limp in a hospital bed was too much for her to handle. She’d thought she was saying her goodbyes.

But today, he was getting released, and she wasn’t going to waste a single second with him. She was sick of being scared of the past, and even sicker of pretending she didn’t care about him.

When he was escorted out of his room, she was there to meet him at the hospital’s front door. Standing on tiptoes, Reese kissed him on the cheek, looping her arm through his like she had all those years ago when she’d been his girlfriend. Maybe he didn’t want her to be that now, but until he told her otherwise, she was just going to slip into the easy routine of the past, and pretend like nothing had changed, even if everything had. 

“Didn’t think I’d see you here,” Andrew told her, his face not quite a frown but pretty close to it. “Last time I talked to you you were pretty mad at me for the choices I was making.” Reese just shrugged, bumping her hip against his as a light snow started to fall. It was rare for Savannah, and her entire face lit up as she ignored his comment completely. 

“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it!” she said, twirling around with her arms out, her hair going in every direction around her. She laughed, partially out of childlike excitement about the snow but honestly out of relief to see Andrew as she spun, there in her line of vision, outside of a hospital bed.

His recovery wasn’t going to be easy. Keeping him clean definitely wasn’t going to be easy. But Reese wasn’t going anywhere, not this time. “Don’t think the cold’s getting you out of walking home, though, mister! You’ve been lazy and in bed all week, plus this gives me lots of time to tell you about all the new books I read at your bedside while you were sleeping!”

This time Reese laced her fingers through his, smiling at his surprised smirk, as she tugged him through the cold in the direction of Luke’s diner.

“I think that defies the laws of ‘I told you so’, Lily. Does it really count if we both told each other so? Besides, we caught them snogging -- that’s not proof they’re dating yet. You know how Kitty is, she hate-snogs people, she snogs them to teach them how to do it... she might not even like Henry anymore and could just be training him how to kiss the next girl.”