Katy ran.  She bolted through the trees at an all out sprint that made the trees blur.  Her legs jolted with the impact against the frozen ground but it did not deter her.  She ran further and further until her lungs were screaming from the exertion and the burn of cold air being inhaled sharply.  Even then she didn't stop.  The rage and pain in her chest wouldn't let up and she just... she needed to be free of it.  If only for a moment.  She'd run into the forest and maybe when she collapsed from exhaustion she'd be able to think straight.

Why?  Why had all of this happened to her?  She only had one thing in this world worth living for.  Her mother was the only bright spot in the world beyond Hogwarts and she would've taken her place in that car without a second thought.  There was nothing she could do.  Her mother was dead and her presence here at school was held up by a very tenuous thread.  A misstep, an accident, and prank, and any day might very well be her last.

Figaro poked and prodded at her every time he saw her, not caring in the least that she had no answers for him.  She couldn't play quidditch ever again and she couldn't tell him why.  And he wasn't even the worst.  Her words fell on deaf ears.  Her pain went ignored, and her rage went suppressed.  She was running out of the strength necessary to keep going as though everything was ok.  What was she going to do?

Tears mixed with cold spatters of rain from the bleak sky.  She shook her head but the steady pound of her feet didn't falter as she hurled herself onward.  Eventually she stopped but only because her body refused to go any further.  She fell to her hands and knees and shivered with cold and emotion.  Her ribcage heaved as she sucked in air. She just wanted this feeling to go away.

It was Monday.

That idle thought passed through Alvis's mind, fleeting in its simplicity. It was Monday, the day after Valentine's, and he was in a fine mood. Last night, he'd had a date with his...well, he supposed Zoe could be called his girlfriend now, even if they'd never used the term...and it had gone even better than he'd expected. Alvis had been floating on the residual happiness ever since and thus found himself too restless to remain inside the castle.

It was an interesting change for him, because he almost never frequented the grounds. He liked the astronomy tower, and he liked the library. He liked the Ravenclaw common room and the Great Hall and he liked being indoors. And yet, today, despite the blustery rain called for an umbrella, he found that he liked the outdoors almost as well. It reminded him of home and childhood, wandering the sparse woods between his home village and the local market. He'd have to start coming out here more often.

But then, on the edge of his mind, he felt...something. Something utterly alien to his current content demeanor, something that couldn't be accounted for in his own person. Sadness, desperation, devestation... He looked, and saw a familiar figure hunched on the ground.

"Bevans?" Alvis moved closer and reached for the girl on instinct, then pulled back his hand. He might like to be touched and held when he was in that sort of state, but other people weren't always so welcoming, and he only vaguely knew her. "Bevans...Katy, what's wrong? You're not hurt. What are you doing out here? What's happened?"

It was testament to her distraction that she didn't notice company until he was almost on her.  The moment she did realize, however, she tensed up.  She threw herself away and skittered until her back was against a tree.  It was on the tip of her tongue to demand that not touch her but he didn't really make any move to touch her again.

"What do want, Norling?" she snapped.  Realizing that she was huddling on the ground like a scared child, Katy pushed herself up and brushed dirt off her skirt.  "What does it look like I'm doing?" she asked snidely.  "Clearly I'm running."

She paused and looked around uncomfortably.  Now what?  Swallowing and tapping her fingers, she decided to just walk away.  She didn't want to be alone but she didn't want to talk to anyone either.  Especially Alvis Norling.  He'd never done or said anything to her but they weren't friends either.  This really wasn't any of his business. 

Alvis hesitated. Common sense told him to keep moving, and he might have done so if he'd been anyone else. but he got the feeling -- in the way he always 'got feelings' -- that Bevans didn't actually want that. He drifted a little closer and tried to angle his umbrella to keep the rain off them both without touching or crowding her.

"You're not running now," he said slowly. "You've been crying. Here."

He held out a handkerchief, careful to keep his arm within Bevans's reach but far enough that she wouldn't have to touch him if she didn't want to take it. The handkerchief was a bit ink-stained from living in his pocket with the quills, but clean enough that he felt justified in offering it.

"We could take a bit of a walk, if you like." Alvis gave Katie an awkward smile. No judgement, no pushing, he had to let her do the opening up if this was going to work. "It's no good to run in weather like this. You'll get soaked, and the wet ground makes it easy to get hurt. Much better walking weather than running, I think."

Katy gave Alvis a baleful look for his trouble of being nice to her.  Of course she wasn't running now.  Clearly she was standing and putting up with Alvis.  He was unusually considerate for a student.  She'd known many who weren't half as nice as he was and even more who weren't half as polite about personal space.  That didn't mean she had to like him though. 

She ignored the handkerchief he held out for her, not because it was ink-stained, but because the gesture was entirely too intimate for her.  Instead she wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater and continued down the path regardless of the rain.  She hated to admit it, but she approved of Alvis's easy presence and didn't actually mind if he followed her. 

"I'm fine," she said tersely.  "I just needed to get out of the castle.  It's too... stuffy."  Crowded, nosey, cramped.  Confining.  Katy could hardly think anymore and she was almost never allowed out of her common room, much less the castle, so she had to take advantage of the opportunity, rain or not.

Alvis nodded, tucking the handkerchief back into his pocket. "I can understand that," he said, though he knew they two required space for different reasons. For example, he doubted that Katie ever had to worry about having her thoughts drowned out by her older housemates' exam panic. Of course, Alvis wasn't even sure if Hufflepuff fifth- and seventh-years even got exam panic. For all he knew, that was a uniquely Ravenclaw affliction.

He idled along beside her for a bit, letting silence pass between them so that Bevans had a chance to collect their thoughts. After a comfortable lull had passed, Alvis tiled the umbrella back just enough to let him peer up into branches of the trees.

"You know," he said. "According to Jungian psychology, the forest is meant to be a location of self-discovery. It's a place where inner demons might be faced and defeated. Of course, that mostly applies to narrative symbolism, but if you believe in the collective unconsciousness that i's not hard to say that people come to the woods looking for a similar sort of relief..."

He shrugged and went quiet again, staying silent long enough for Bevans to take the opening if she wanted it.

Katy looked up at the tree branches with unconcealed skepticism.  Collective unconsciousness?  What the hell did that mean? She rolled it over in her mind a couple of times and figured he was talking about fate, or something like it that made everything something more than random.  Fate.  There word ignited a bubble of  confusion and anger within her.  If there was a fate, then someone or something had decided to make her father an abusive asshole and take her mother away early, leaving Katy alone in the world.  If there was a fate, it was cruel and uncaring.

If there was no fate, then all of this was just needless suffering with no rhyme or reason.  Katy was just unlucky to a comically tragic scale.  How had she gotten to this place?  Why was she alone? 

Katy wrapped her hands over her elbows and hugged herself, though not against the chill of the day.  She took  a deep, shuddering breath, and studied the ground with a shrug.  "It's better than being trapped in the common room," she muttered.  "At least the trees don't try to actively avoid me." Like my classmates do, she finished in her mind.

Alvis didn't need his legilimency to hear the end of Katy's thought. Her body language telegraphed loneliness like a beacon on a moonless night. He thought back over the last few months and came to the sad conclusion that she was right. People had been avoiding her, especially the Hufflepuffs, which struck him as odd. That house was normally so friendly...

"That's understandable," he said softly, not wanting to re-ignite the flare of anger and rage he'd felt shortly before. "It is rather crowded in the castle."

He shrugged, leading into another long silence where only the soft rain sounded between them. Bevans had closed up again, folding in on herself like a turtle trying to hide in its shell. Perhaps leaving her to stew hadn't been the best idea. A distraction, then. Or misdirection. Maybe he just needed to keep talking.

 "I think people mean well. They're not trying to avoid you, really. They just don't know how to...it's not easy to approach someone who's hurting if you don't know how to help them."

Katy wanted to protest.  She wanted to say that they didn't have to say anything about what had happened and she wouldn't want them to anyway because it wasn't any of their business!  She didn't say any of that though because it wasn't Alvis's fault.  In fact, he was being far nicer than almost anyone else at this point.  Her expression softened a bit in conciliation.

"You don't seem to be having any trouble," she mentioned off-handedly, as though it didn't mean as much to her as it really did. 

She shoved her hands into her pockets and kicked a rock on the ground.  It tumbled a few feet and landed in a puddle.  "I don't need anyone to fix me," she added.  "I just... I just need to figure out how to be normal, I guess."  It wasn't something she was ever good at before her mother... passed away and she had no right to expect she'd be good at it now but there was always a part of her longing to fit in.  That's part of the reason why she missed Jay so much.  He'd made her feel normal. 

Alvis shrugged, his eyes wandering to the muddy ground beneath their feet. To say the he had no trouble approaching her would be incorrect. What he had was less trouble than others, because others were unable to gauge responses as he did.  Which was, of course, for the best, given how his mind did it.

That thought, combined with Katy's next train of conversation, brought on a rueful, self-depreciating smile. "I doubt it. 'Normal' is a statistical average, not a state of being. No one's actually 'normal', least of all anyone at Hogwarts. At best, we all fall along a spectrum -- I'm 'less normal' than you, you're 'more normal' than me, etcetera. It's all relative nonsense, if you get right down to it."

Besides, hadn't grandpa always said that normal was boring? Normal people got desk jobs at the ministry and spent all their lives plowing through paperwork. It was the interesting people, the ones who started shops or broke curses or went off to herd dragons, who had all the fun.

Though, it occurred to him that Bevans may think his lighter tone to be making fun of her. His smile faded and he tilted the umbrella back again to shield them both from the soft rain. "For what it's worth, Bevans...I think you're quite normal. Relatively speaking. You're just..." He struggled for the right word before he finally settled on, "Melancholic. That is, a bit...well, sad."

Then he winced. Way to tell a girl she's depressed and mopey, Alvis. Surely that was something she already knew.

Katy huffed, uncertain if she should be insulted by being called normal.  Yes, it was something that part of her longed for but really, didn't everyone one want to be special in some regard?  Special, yes.  Weird, no.  She didn't want to be flat out weird.  Maybe she wasn't.  She didn't think she was.  But honestly, why was it so difficult to make friends?  Why didn't the normal people she surrounded herself with ever seem to make the cut?

Nonsense.  That seemed an apt description of the whole thing.  She didn't like those people so why on earth would she care what they thought of her!  She didn't care so it shouldn't hurt, but, for some reason, it did.  Very much.

She took a deep breath and pushed that thought away before it made her cry.  "I'm not going to smile when there's nothing to smile about," she replied defensively.  "I'm a good friend and a good person.  Just because you people don't like me doesn't mean there's something wrong with me.  I haven't made a single good friend in four years so my sadness isn't the reason, is it?"

Alvis raised an eyebrow, settling the umbrella handle against his shoulder. "No one ever said there was anything wrong with you. But did it ever occur to you that, perhaps, you have difficulty making friends because you set yourself at a distance from others by calling them things like 'You people'?"

It was almost amusing how similar Bevans felt to Casey in that moment. Too different to be understood, too testy to approach, too stubborn to admit to problems that might be her fault...at least Katy was willing to own up to her loneliness. Casey wouldn't have admitted it under pain of Cruciatus.

"It's difficult to embrace friendship when you keep everyone at arm's length," mused Alvis aloud, giving the umbrella a bit of a spin so that water droplets scattered behind them in an arch. "Hard to tell if anyone would like you or not if you don't let them close. Never too late to start, though. Hell, I only made my first 'good friend' at the end of the last school year." Though it had taken six months, a body switch, and a near-drowning for said friend to admit that...

Katy's face grew red with angry embarrassment.  Did it ever occur to you, she mocked silently.  Of course it had occurred to her.  She wasn't blind, or stupid, and she could list her faults until the sun set but that wasn't really the point.  The point was that Alvis had no business accusing her like this.  She stepped aside, out from under the shelter of the umbrella and took a deep breath, grappling for control over her emotions.

She stared at her toes and focused her attention on the expansion of her chest as she breathed.  She could feel her heart beats, as though they were happening at the base of her throat.  Her hands ached, not quite trembling but only just.  She clenched them into fists and closed her eyes.  After taking a deep, steadying breath, she looked at Alvis and said,  "You talk like an adult but you aren't one.  You don't know me."

Her gaze, for once, lacked the usual malice and defensiveness.  It was sad and quiet, weary.  She shrugged.  "I'm not mean to people on purpose.  I just -"  Katy's breath quickened as she tried and failed to find the words to articulate herself.  She could just tell when people weren't worth her time?  She just wasn't used to people being friendly?  She just... couldn't find the words to bring her closer to other people.  Katy shook her head, realizing this was as lost a cause as any she'd had up until now.

"Look, Alvis, thanks for the talk, but I should probably get back to the castles.  I'm still not allowed to spend much time out of the common room."

Alvis sighed, letting the jabs about his maturity slide off like water on a duck. He couldn't dwell on half-hearted insults, he had to remind himself that the slight sorrow, confusion, and frustration he felt were not his own. They'd been building through the whole conversation, and he couldn't quite tell if it was because he'd been unknowingly trying to read Katy's emotions or if her negativity only got stronger the more they talked.

Besides, as much as he didn't approve of her methods, he understood where Katy was coming from. If he hadn't had this issue -- if he'd just been a normal person with a normal brain, coming from a small town with no friends and a lot of quirks and all the social skills of a baby goose -- he wondered if he would he have turned out like her, all sullen and resigned to a life of isolation.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. They were different people after all.

Alvis inclined his head in a slight bow, a motion he'd seen his father and grandfather take to concede arguments with unruly customers. "As you wish." He offered her the umbrella, tugging the hood of his robe to show he had an alternate cover of his own. "You can take this if you like. Pass it off to a Ravenclaw if you don't feel like hunting me down. It'll find its way back eventually."