All Your Little Quirks • h.ravenclaw ✓

⚪three

Arven steals into the kitchen and looks around. He finds a pot sitting on the stove and a sweet aroma emanating out of it. Grabbing a bowl and ladle from the shelf, he pushes the lid aside and is immediately greeted with steam that rises up like clouds, momentarily causing his vision to go cloudy.

Blinking a few times, he ladles some of the soup onto the bowl and puts a lid on top, before placing it inside a bag. Then he closes the pot and tiptoes out of the kitchen.

Arven doubts his mother would refuse to lend some of her soup if he tells her about the mysterious girl in the forest, but he feels that Helena wouldn't like it if he lets everyone know about her. He hasn't really asked her how she manages to get food, nor if she has any money with her – the questions have completely slipped his mind. But after returning home, they had begun to crowd inside him, and he was left wanting to know more. There might be a possibility that Helena wouldn't want people to know about her, but that also opens up the possibility that she might be lying.

Could she be hiding from the law?

Arven doubts it, but then again, he isn't an expert in human nature. He hasn't communicated with anyone aside from his parents and the people who work with him at the farm. He finds it hard to understand people. Someone who seems nice and friendly when he passes by on his way to the market, doesn't take long to transform into a ferocious creature accusing him of witchcraft. Indeed, he vividly remembers that one time when a witch was captured and burnt in public, and then, hours later, how the whole village had gathered in his house to demand if he knew anything about the presence of more witches among them.

His father had managed to ward the villagers off with only a few scrapes. And that was the time he had stopped talking to Arven nicely.

He reaches the clearing in the woods even before he realises it. The fire, like yesterday, burns bright and high, illuminating the place and casting a mysterious aura around, though, he realises, it simply manages to concentrate the darkness around them, forming a dome of light that seems to attract the black of the evening. He pauses at the edge of the dome. Helena isn't anywhere near, and the tent seems to be empty. Hesitating for a moment, he steps forward and places the lamp on the ground, before sitting down exactly where he had sat yesterday, the bowl of soup still in his hands.

Several minutes later a shuffle of footsteps is heard, and he looks up to find Helena walk out of the piercing dark of the night and enter the dome, starting slightly as her eyes fall on him. Her long hair today is tied up into a knot at the top of her head with a strange looking stick, intricately patterned. When she sees him staring, she pulls out the stick and hurls it inside the tent, before entering it herself.

Arven waits, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. He hasn't asked her yesterday if she wanted him to come, nor has she given him any invitation. He has come here simply impulsively, and now he feels like he might be unwelcome. Why is he here again? He doesn't know.

But when Helena comes out of the tent and gives him a warm smile, he finds his worry washing away. Her hair is down now, neatly brushed, and the sides of her face are moist, showing that she has only just washed it. Only her dress is as grimy as ever, so much different than the girls and women he is used to seeing, who are always neatly and delicately dressed, trying to remain as proper as possible. Maybe the place she is from doesn't care about proper as much as it does here. He also notices the cloth still wrapped around her finger.

Helena places a fresh sheet of parchment in front of him and hands him a quill.

"I didn't expect you come here again," she says with a low laugh, her grey eyes glittering as they catch the light of the fire crackling in front of them.

Why not? He writes. And then below that, he scribbles another sentence. I got you soup.

Helena looks surprised when he hands over the bowl to her. Thanking him, she pours it into two bowls, and more questions come bubbling inside him. But he waits patiently, and when she offers him the soup, he declines, pantomiming his lack of hunger. She doesn't insist, and begins to eat her own.

"No one usually stays with me after the first one or two meetings," she says, and Arven is confused for a moment before realising that she is answering the question he has written down. "And they know me very well. But you don't, and you still came."

Why don't they stay? He asks, genuinely confused. Helena doesn't seem to be an unlikable person.

She shrugs, and through a mouthful of vegetables, says, "They think I'm too independent for a woman, and my strong personality is demeaning to them."

Certainly, that was exactly what he has found amazing about Helena. You usually don't find women living in a house on their own, let alone in the middle of the forest, in a country not her own. Initially, he had thought that things work differently in Scotland, maybe girls there are exactly like Helena. Who is he to question how the world works when the only world he lives in is a world devoid of humans?

Not anymore though.

I don't think it's demeaning.

The girl only smiles in response and puts the bowl aside, which he now realises, is empty.

"What do you do in the forest anyway?" she asks. "I didn't think there would be any visitors, which is why I didn't put any defences to keep mug–people out."

I come here often, he writes. What do you mean by defences?

"Oh, you know, the usual," she answers nonchalantly, and frowns upward, at the canopies of the trees, which are currently encased in a deep black. "My pet hyena that wards intruders off."

Arven blinks at her in confusion. He doesn't even try to pull the parchment toward him to write a response. Helena seems surprised at his silence, and looks at him with a blank look before bursting into fits of laughter.

"I'm joking, Arven," she says, and he notices tears forming in her eyes, making the grey irises glisten even more. He also notices the unfamiliar way she pronounces his name, curling the v and slightly silencing the r. Somehow, it sounds much better than how his parents pronounce it, and he decides not to correct her. "I don't have a pet hyena, don't worry."

He feels heat rising to his cheek. He isn't used to hearing jokes – no one jokes with him anymore. His father used to, in a time that is so far in the past that it feels unreal, as though he is looking into a dream he has had as a child, that has no reason to be true.

He falls into a numbness for the rest of their conversation, which simply consists of Helena talking about Scotland and about her friends. He doesn't ask any of the questions that had been eating away his mind since yesterday.