The Art of An Ending

Chapter Nine: The Hogwarts Express

Erica spent a lot of the last week of the holidays doing nothing but lounge around on the sofa, which was a rather lot like what she had been doing for the previous weeks, except this time she was doing her utmost to annoy Avery. She would sent small paper aeroplanes folded from the Daily Prophet chasing him through the house and repeatedly bumping into his head, and she would insist on putting her feet in his lap whenever he sat close enough to her. It wasn't so much that she wanted to annoy him, but rather she was tired and grumpy and wanted Avery to feel exactly as tired and grumpy as she did, which resulted in a lot of arguments between the two of them.

The most famous of which occurred when Erica charmed his Death Eater mask into a bright, obnoxious sort of blue and wouldn't undo it (she had changed the colour components using Alchemy), which resulted in a shouting match so loud and severe that the neighbours had actually called the Muggle police on them. This had led to a lot of questions they didn't necessarily know how to answer, such as why there was an owl in their living room and what a teenage girl was doing living with a man who was clearly not old enough to be her father (they told the police that Avery was her older brother, but they didn't really seem to buy that).

Nevertheless, Erica was fairly certain that Avery would actually be looking forward to her return to Hogwarts, though she was proven to be wrong when he cooked her favourite- beef wellington- the night before she was scheduled to head to Kings Cross.

"It's not that I'm going to miss having you around," he insisted, but the wine had made his cheeks flush pink and his tongue a little looser than usual, and his smiles come a little easier, "It's just that it's going to be strange not having you around."

"I do tend to have a rather large presence," Erica grinned slightly behind her own glass, though admittedly she was only drinking pumpkin juice, having declared a dislike for the taste of wine.

They had spent the entire day together packing up all of her things back into her trunk, which had actually taken the whole day. It was surprising how far her stuff had spread throughout the flat, and half of the clothes in the wardrobe had ended up being hers, which she packed away begrudgingly, complaining about wrinkles. By the time they were done, the flat seemed too bare, as though it had the personality stripped out of it once more, though all of Avery's things still remained.

"I suppose a large presence would be what they're calling it these days," Avery laughed, then smiled, and Erica joined him, because this was the last night they would spending living together for a long while, and because she wasn't sure when, or even if, she could be able to return.

Her departure the following morning was as quiet an affair as their last dinner together had been, and ran far smoother than Erica had expected it to. She woke early, dressing in the usual skirt and shirt combination she wore under her robes at Hogwarts, before having a quick breakfast with Avery in the kitchen consisting of orange juice and pancakes made from the leftover batter they'd used for the yorkshire puddings the night before.

Then it was only a matter of shrinking down Erica's trunk and tucking it into her bag before they headed out of the flat together to start the long walk to Kings Cross. It was a cool morning, though the sun still managed to peak out from behind the clouds every now and again, and they kept idle chatter to a minimum as they walked along.

Around an hour and a half later they arrived at King's Cross Station, immediately recognising two grim-faced Aurors in dark Muggle suits, though they didn't seem to be waiting for them and let them pass into the station without a word.

They headed towards the barrier between platforms nine and ten and pretended to lean casually against it whilst talking before slipping through sideways and directly through the solid barrier, finding themselves, a second later, standing on platform nine and three-quarters, where the scarlet Hogwarts Express stood belching steam over the crowd.