stardust

i will still be here (stargazing)

"There was an automobile accident," a harried looking woman told her as she was exiting the King's Cross station. "It was just down the street. It's been blocked off by the ambulances; you'll want to go out in a different direction if you want to make decent time."

She nodded distractedly, scanning the throngs for any signs of her family.

She twisted her fingers together, looped a thick strand of red hair around her index finger until the tip turned white from a lack of blood, ran her tongue between her teeth in a quick linear motion, bit her lip, the inside of her cheek, the side of her tongue, but they - she thought, for a moment, that she saw a flash of gold-red-gold in her periphery, but when she turned to look, there was nothing except the aureate glimmer of her eyelashes in the sun - never came.

Resigned to the fact that her family wasn't coming to pick her up - they must have forgotten, there could be no other explanation - she considered hailing a cab before remembering that she had no Muggle money, and that even if she had, the overall fee for a ride from London to Surrey would be quite substantial. Sighing, she made her way to a secluded alley and thrust her right hand out over the street, waiting patiently for the Knight Bus to unfold itself into the non-magical world.

A short but harrowing ride later, and she was letting herself into her house. The door was locked, and the spare key was missing from its hiding place. An exasperated sigh expunged itself from her lungs as she made her way around the back, jiggled the partially open window further open, lifted herself onto the sill, and squirmed inside, barely sparing a thought for the Unlocking Charm she was so fond of; with Minister Gaunt freshly re-elected, magic performed in the Muggle world was even more strictly prohibited than ever.

She wandered back to the front of the house to unlock the door, and dragged her trunk inside, struggling slightly as it got caught on the jutting step just outside the doorway. The heavy wood was Charmed to be Feather-light, but that didn't stop it from being awkward to manoeuver as it thudded sluggishly up the steps and into her room.

She sprawled on her bed, her feet resting on the sturdy lid of the trunk, and stared up at the ceiling, which was the same as it always was: the glow-in-the-dark stars she'd stuck onto the ceiling during Christmas break were still there in the swirling conglomerate she had accomplished by jumping on the bed and smacking the cheap pieces of plastic against the pale paint; if she turned her head, she could see the various polaroids - in color and in black-and-white - which still adorned her walls haphazardly, taped onto the previously empty spaces without rhyme or reason.

She wondered where they could be: they were not at King's Cross, nor were they at home, and she was gone for enough of the past six years that she no longer knew her family well enough to guess at what their preferred haunts may have been. She refused to think about the auto accident the woman at the station had mentioned. It seemed unlikely: her parents had both been driving for years - decades, even - and as far as she knew, neither of them had ever gotten so much as a speeding ticket, let alone gotten involved in something so severe as an accident requiring ambulances, of all things. And she may not have been around much, but she did know that her sister wasn't one for driving when there were others around to drive her. So there was an accident, but it couldn't have been them. She refused to even consider it; somehow, even contemplating that either of her parents might have gotten into an accident - especially when they were so, so careful about everything they did - felt almost like a betrayal, though she knew that that was ridiculous.

So, really, what must have happened was that they had gotten stuck behind the accident, and with the ambulances arriving on the scene, they weren't able to get out. They must've gotten stuck a few blocks down from the station, on their way to pick her up, and - of course - with an accident requiring the involvement of emergency personnel, traffic would have been backed up in both directions. There would have been no way for them to continue forwards to pick her up, and no way for them to turn around and return home with how congested the traffic would have become.