[Morning after the rave - Harry]

[everyone_takes]

Her head hurt and her jaw hurt and, generally, Kate felt like shit as she dragged herself out of the IPD office and headed down the hall toward her room. Danny had done the whole lecture thing, making sure she understood that there would be consequences if she tried to burn anything else down again, but luckily Kate was pretty sure she was done with the whole firebug thing. It obviously wasn't going to end well, no matter what she was trying to burn down.

The night before was coming back to her, crashing into perfect clarity as she remembered all the things she'd done. For the most part, they were good things. She'd had fun and talked to people she loved, and there was Harry, of course. All good things. But she could also remember standing in the rec room, matches in her hand, trying to convince Jeff that burning down the bookshelf would be a good idea.

And now, far too early to be awake, she was doing a very special walk of shame.

All she wanted was to sleep in her own bed and she crept into the room and past the curtain that separated her side from Marshall's when they wanted privacy. Dragging her feet, her hair a tangled mess from the salt water and the night in a holding cell, she stopped beside the bed, looking down at Harry.

"You totally need to move over," she muttered, yanking her t-shirt over her head and trying to nudge him over under the blanket. "I need to lie down for about a thousand years."

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The thing about drugs, Harry noticed, was that he always slept soundest after taking them. This night - morning now? - wasn't any different than the last rave. He slept soundly, a heavy, dreamless sleep. Or, if he had dreams, they were unremarkable and unmemorable. It took some effort for Kate to get him to move, but he finally did. Rolling onto his side, Harry propped himself up by inches onto his elbow and blinked blearily at his surroundings.

"What happened?" he mumbled, hair madly askew. He could barely see six inches in front of him without his glasses, but he thought that was Kate. He thought they were in her room. But Harry also thought he was naked under the bedsheet and that couldn't be right. Could it?

[everyone_takes]

As exhausted as Kate was, it was a little strange to be climbing into her bed with her naked boyfriend. For everything she'd done back home -- and here, though that was limited -- she'd never actually stuck around in anyone's bed or had anyone stay in hers for longer than an hour or so. This was all new territory and she'd probably be a little freaked out by it later. But not now. Right now, she couldn't do much more than climb into the bed and pull the sheets up over her shoulders.

"I had to spend the night in the holding cell," she mumbled into her arm. "Apparently I thought, hey, you know what? Sleeping is for pussies, you should get up and try to light something on fire. That'd be awesome." She paused, looking up at Harry. "It wasn't awesome."

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Harry blinked several times again, trying to process all this new information and wondering if it was worth it. He decided it almost was, and let his head crash back down on the pillow as he snaked an arm over Kate's waist. He didn't think about it; it was too early to think. It just felt comfortable.

"What'd you try to light on fire?" he asked, ignoring that, yes, he definitely was naked. But that was second to how warm it was with Kate back under the covers.

[everyone_takes]

"The bookshelf," Kate admitted and even though she knew she shouldn't be amused, a little smile appeared as she thought about it. The whole thing had been really stupid, but she'd still been stoned and she figured that the drugs were at least partially to blame for it. "I don't even know where I got the matches. I don't even know why I wanted to do it."

That wasn't true at all. She remembered all the books it had been giving her and how much they'd pissed her off, but she didn't want to think about it now. "I must have been really out of it to want to actually get out of bed again." Especially with Harry in it.

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"Because books are evil," he answered sleepily. There were books about him, about him as a real person who did things everyone admired and about him as a fake person who did things for others' entertainment. But they were all evil, in Harry's book. Especially this early in the morning.

Now felt like a good time to drift off back to sleep. He was warm. He was still tired. He had Kate close to him.

Only there was the fact that he was naked rearing its head again.

Suddenly he propped himself up again, a frown creasing his brow. "Er, so, this.. might be a strange question. But did-- do-- why do I not have clothes?"

He thought he knew. Somewhere, back behind the haze in his mind, the answer was obvious. But it was also impossible and therefore not an answer Harry could rely on.

[everyone_takes]

Another time and Kate might have been offended, but as it was, bits and pieces of the night had only started to come back to her after she'd been dragged into the holding cell. She could hardly blame Harry for forgetting when she sort of only half remembered it herself. What she remembered was nice, but it wasn't all there just yet, just flashes of moments, the touch of Harry's skin, then the memory of being in the rec room.

"We took them off," she answered, grinning again, too tired to really be amused, but unable to stop herself. "We were swimming and then we ended up here somehow. I don't really remember that part," she admitted. "Then we got naked." His clothes were on the floor somewhere, she was sure of that, but she was too tired to get up and look for them now. "It'll come back to you."

At least, she hoped it would.

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"No, I--" It did come back to him, snatches of memory, hazy and indistinct. But he thought things like that, sometimes, thought about touching Kate and Kate touching him, how it would feel and what they might do. But it had all been thoughts, no action. He had been too uncertain to act still. Apparently he hadn't been last night.

Harry wet his lips with his tongue, a faint smile pulling at the corner of his mouth as he looked down at Kate and admitted, "I thought I had dreamed that."

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Looking up at Harry, Kate shook her head, glad that he seemed to be remembering parts of it. Glad that he was smiling a little, not completely horrified that they'd had sex and then mostly forgotten it until the following morning. "Nope," she said, reaching out, pressing her palm against Harry's chest for just a moment before she looked up again and smiled slightly.

"Not a dream," she promised. And there were more memories, the two of them stumbling into the room, Kate looking for Marshall, relieved to find he wasn't home. The moments before and after, when she'd been surprised by how everything felt.

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He would have blushed, or ducked his head, shown some sign of mild embarrassment, if he had had a mind to. But everything had that calmness to it that life often had when you were still a little asleep. The world didn't extend beyond the two of them, and Harry was okay if Kate was smiling at him. He hadn't messed up. She didn't regret anything. Everything was okay.

Harry leaned down to kiss her lightly, and pulled back an inch when something came to him. "I.. was saying a lot of things, wasn't I?"

[everyone_takes]

They'd both said a lot of things during the rave and in the time that had followed, but she grinned sleepily, thinking of some of the specific things Harry had said. They were things she was glad she remembered, things that people didn't normally say to her. "I think we both said a lot of stuff. You called me a golden thing," she said. "And there was a lot of talk of glowing and sparkles."

She liked that he'd said so many things, that he'd been talking as much as she was. It left fewer silences to be filled, something Kate almost always felt the need to do.

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"Merlin," he cursed under his breath, looking pained but amused. The fact that Kate was taking this so well, so casually, made it easier for him. He didn't even feel disappointed that he didn't remember anything, only flushed with an almost sense of pride. Even if he had said some silly things, he had done everything else right. ...Right?

Harry let his head fall to rest on Kate's shoulder and then kissed it. "But at least those are all good things. And true. Right?"

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"I am pretty sparkly," Kate agreed, but she was smiling as she said it. That sort of stuff... well, it was up to Harry to decide if it was true, but it had been nice to hear them, no matter what he decided in the end.

"And now, well, not right now, because my mouth feels like I ate a ball of cotton, but you know, later now, we can totally do other things that we'll both remember," she murmured. Now that the initial nerves or whatever had been dealt with, they were good, she figured. It would be easier from here on out. No matter what anyone said, the drugs sure as hell weren't all bad. "And that'll be good, too."

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"That'll be very good," Harry agreed. Of course, now that Kate had said that, later on felt like forever, an age and a half that he couldn't wait for. But he bit his lip and rested his head on the pillow again. He was tired, even if he didn't feel like it just then, and he probably needed a shower, definitely something to drink. He would have ignored all that though if Kate had said "now" instead of "later." But he wouldn't push her into anything, even something nice and jokingly.

"Later on," he said. Harry kissed her shoulder again. "Now, back to sleep, pyro."

[everyone_takes]

Laughing, she turned onto her side, facing Harry so she could walk her fingers up his arm, watching the path they took. "You know, I think I prefer being called sparkly and glowy to pyro," she teased, although she sort of deserved it at that point. Thank god her mother and father weren't here or they'd both have their own version of shit fits over this and probably try to ground her or something.

As it was, she was going to have a hard time explaining it to Marshall.

"The cop was nice," she said absently, closing her eyes. "Nicer than I thought a cop could be."

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Harry watched her fingers from the corner of his eye, unable to stop smiling just a little bit. He was in bed with a girland it felt comfortable. He tried not to dwell on that too much and ruin it though.

“Well everyone here is pretty nice,” he said. “Even if you’re trying to burn the place down, I guess. You’re lucky we aren’t home.”

[everyone_takes]

"No kidding," Kate agreed, trying to imagine what might have happened to her back in Kansas for doing something like that. She'd already sort of lost her job, so that wouldn't have mattered, but she was eighteen, so there would have been a criminal record. Not to mention what her parents would do to her.

"I would've been grounded for the rest of my life, I bet," she said. "Besides being put in jail."

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Harry grinned slightly and said, "Better than W-" before catching himself. The grin dimmed fractionally and he struggled to come up with something else to say.

"If we lived in the same world, I could have broken you out, easy," he said. "Probably break a bunch of Muggle and Wizarding laws, but it'd be worth it."

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"Then we'd have to go on the run," Kate said sleepily, but she was smiling. It was nice to have someone who'd break her out of jail, even if it wasn't necessary and there didn't seem to be much magic in her own world. Harry would break her out, Marshall would help her hide the body, she didn't need much more than that.

"We'd have to wear disguises," she continued, her eyes closed, still grinning a little. "We would have to get you a ridiculous handlebar moustache and I'd get a long brown wig and a fake mole."

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Harry laughed at the thought, and added, "A hairy one." It was only right, he thought, for that imagine.

"There's a potion back home," he explained. His attention was on Kate's smile, the way her eyelashes fell on her cheeks, so he spoke softly and without much attention to his words. "It'll change you into someone else completely for a few hours. It's not that bad once you get used to it. We could do that, run all over the place."

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"I'd like that," she murmured softly, thinking about how nice it would be to escape into someone else, even just for a few hours. It was the sort of thing she'd tried more than once back home, but it never worked out entirely, not like it would with a potion like that.

"We could be anyone we wanted to be," she said. "We could be each other or total strangers. Disappear into a crowd together and no one would have any idea where we'd gone."

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"Yeah," Harry agreed, sounding almost wistful. He had hated scrounging around the back country of Britain, wearing his Invisibility Cloak all the time, Hermione worrying that they've spent too long in one place or what might happen. But laying there, spinning a dream of it with Kate, it didn't seem so bad. This could have worked, if Harry didn't have the weight of the world on his shoulders and tipping over onto Kate.

"I'd miss seeing your face though," he said.

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One eye opened at that and then the other, and Kate smiled over at Harry. These were the things she'd wanted Ben to say, the things he'd never seemed capable of -- because he'd been a creep, of course -- and Gene had just been weird from the start, but coming from Harry, it sounded genuine. Nice. Nothing like she'd had with anyone from Kansas.

"It's a pretty spectacular face," she agreed, then leaned over to kiss him, even if her mouth felt like cotton, even if she'd just spent the night in jail, because it was easy to forget those things when someone like Harry said something like that.

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"Amazing," he agreed, just before her lips reached his. Harry kissed her softly, his hand cupping her cheek, and felt a kind of serenity wash over him. The past few weeks, even what had happened last night, didn't matter at all. He could live in this moment, just here, and be happy.

He pulled away an inch, a teasing grin on his face, even though it was he himself he was making fun of. "Amazing and golden."

[everyone_takes]

"And sparkly," Kate reminded him, her arm slipping around Harry's waist, fingers trailing over his back. "You're not allowed to forget sparkly. It's a totally integral part of my face."

It was nice, too, being able to tease Harry. That was just something she did, the way she communicated with a lot of people and it wasn't mean spirited -- most of the time, anyway -- but some people just didn't respond very well to it. "You also told me you'd keep me safe from some kind of lake gremlin." She couldn't remember the name he'd said, only knew that it had been something she'd never heard of.

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"I don't know," Harry said, pulling a critical face as he looked over Kate's face. "It's significantly less sparkly now. Not sure I can call you that." If Kate could tease, Harry could tease right back. He wasn't as good at it, he thought, but it still felt nice.

"Lake gremlin," he echoed, searching his memory as he tucked a strand of hair behind Kate's ear. "Do you mean the merpeople or the grindylows?"

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"Grindylows," Kate repeated, nodding. "That's the one. You promised to keep me safe from them."

They probably weren't on the island at all. All the magic seemed to be random and like nothing anyone would have seen back home, but it wasn't impossible. And since she had no idea what they were, it would be good to have someone to keep her safe from them, it that were to ever be an issue.

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"That I can do," Harry said, nodding firmly with an almost proud look. It was mostly for show though, as he added, "There are plenty of warning signs. No one could accidentally fall into that trap."

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"Like what?" she asked, surprised that she was still even able to speak. Earlier, in the jail cell, she'd been sure that she'd wander back to her room and crash, probably sleep for about ten hours, but she felt better now. Even so, she had no desire to get up and go anywhere, but lying here made it easy to forget the last few hours, the uncomfortable bed in the holding cell, the cop watching her every move.

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He hesitated for a second to swallow down his laugh. Of course she had thought he meant something magical. Harry had been the same way once, but now it was cute to see it in her. "Like warning signs. You know, the kind on a stake you stick into the ground? They usually say things like 'Keep Out' and 'Danger.'"

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With a snort of laughter, Kate shook her head, looking amused. "So not like, some crazy spell that makes you glow when you get too close?" A warning sign seemed so simple, like something someone might do in Kansas and she was pretty sure no one had any type of magic in Kansas.

"I'd want to do everything with magic if I could," she said. "Everything."

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"Nope. Just regular, old signs," he said. "If we had magic, maybe we would think something up, but..."

Harry was not about to let the fact that grindylows technically had more magic to them than he himself did get him down. He ran his hand lightly up and down Kate's arm. "It never gets old," he said. "It really never does."

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Goosebumps broke out on her skin and a shiver snuck up her spine at the feel of Harry's hand on her arm and Kate turned to him again, smiling faintly. "You could do almost anything, couldn't you?" she asked, thinking about the things she'd heard about the books and movies.

"You could fly," she said, trying to imagine what that would be like. She'd always liked flying, being in an airplane, watching the ground disappear into perfect patterns below.

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He bit his lip softly as he grinned at the question. Truth was, there were a lot of things Harry couldn't do, because skill or magical law prevented it. But he didn't want to disappoint Kate with explaining all that, when essentially what she said was true.

"I could," he said. He sounded wistful, maybe even a little pained at the admission. It felt like a long time since he had felt the wind in his face. Maybe he should take Buckbeak out sometime soon. "If I had a broom or a flying creature.. or an enchanted car or something, yeah."

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"The only way I could fly is in an airplane," Kate said, tipping her chin against her shoulder, thinking about that. She hadn't been on many planes over the course of her life, her family hadn't exactly been rich enough to take that many vacations that didn't involve packing up the car and going to their grandparents' place.

"I think I'd like that," she said. "I think it'd be my favourite part, if I could do magic."

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"It's my favorite," Harry said, his grin growing a little wider. When he was with Kate, Harry never questioned his decision to stay with Kate, especially for comments like that. He didn't think he could be with someone who didn't love flying.

"I'll take you out on Buckbeak one day," he promised. "If he approves of you."

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"As long as he doesn't peck my eyeballs out," she answered, fingers walking lazily up Harry's chest and then down again, tracing a slow pattern on his skin. "I need those for seeing things and batting my eyelashes at you and doing the whole big eyes look to get out of trouble."

But the thought of that, of being up in the air on a creature like that... it was definitely cool. Sometimes she missed her family more than she could even put into words, but other times she had to admit that life here was giving her more than she would have had in Overland Park.

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Harry chuckled softly. "I would miss your eyes," he said. "We'll have to make sure he likes you. Maybe you can get him a nice, fat, dead rat," Harry suggested, taking care to enunciate each word. "There's no way he'd peck you to death then."

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"Oh, boy," Kate said dryly, her fingers pausing in their movements so she could look at Harry, her eyebrows raised. "A nice fat dead rat. That sounds... really disgusting." But if that was what she needed to do to get on the animal, then she would. "As long as someone else kills it for me, then we're good."

But she was not going to kill anything herself.

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"..Maybe the hunting crew will do that for us," Harry said awkwardly. The last thing he wanted to do as well was hunt down a rat. He never stopped to think about where Hagrid had gotten things to feed some of his creatures.

"Or maybe we'll just have you bow."

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"I can do that," Kate said, pushing her hair off her face again, working her fingers through tangles that felt like they were never going to come out. This was what happened when you got high, went swimming and then spent the night in jail.

"I had lots of practice from my recitals," she said.

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"A trained bower. I'm sure he'll like you now." There was some amusement in his voice, but not a mocking kind. He wasn't sure practice in bowing helped, but he couldn't imagine Buckbeak not liking Kate.

"We'll do it then," he decided, rubbing at a blurry eye with the heel of his hand. "Tomorrow. Or... sometime after a lot of sleep."

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"Lots of sleep," Kate agreed, curling closer to Harry, glad that Marshall was wherever the hell he was for the moment, that they were alone, here, and that they didn't have to go anywhere else until they wanted to. That all that stuff, the bowing and being responsible, that could all be put off until later, until hours of sleep were had. "Next time we'll find a bigger bed," she murmured.