"I'm dying of thirst here!" Elixa protested from the sofa, bare feet up on the other cushions, pointing in the direction of the kitchen at the back of the flat. Johann merely chuckled from the kitchen. She had sent her old friend an owl demanding his company and a couple of decent bottles of wine when he finished work, keen for some company that wasn't Arcturus.

"I see, demand my company and my wine." He retorted, wand in hand, performing one of the charms he appeared rather adept at - uncorking wine without a hitch or too much noise.
"Too right!" The protest came from the next room where Elixa watched his progress. She'd demanded he brought the wine - the flat was out of it, and she knew he had some good stuff stashed from his Ministry excursions overseas.



When the bottle dripped its remaining life into her glass not more than an hour later, the fire was popping and cracking in the grate of the Diagon Alley flat, the whole room reaching the homely, comfortable temperature that didn't require a thick jumper. Elixa pulled her legs and bare feet up onto the sofa beneath her, away from any draft that pulled in for the fire while Johann sat cross-legged out of habit soon after settling down originally.

"Tell me there's another?" The apothecary asked, her arm propped her head up against the back of the sofa while cradling her wineglass in her left hand.
"Possibly... but not until you finished telling me the story." Her oldest friend teased, setting down the empty bottle on the floor his end of the sofa, and retrieving his own half-filled glass from the table between them.

As he shifted forward and back to do so, her eyes followed him, taking in the fact he'd been eating lately, as the shirt he was wearing seemed to fit him a little better than it had back in January. She'd not noticed any change until that moment, and her mind became preoccupied. Was she was a bad friend for being inattentive? Would she have noticed if he was wasting away? She'd never asked him how he was doing with the potions, whether she could help him. Through the wine and her week, she suddenly felt rather guilty indeed.

"I think the Daily Prophet got most of it from my colleagues." Elixa shook her head, the hand that propped her up against the back of the sofa moved to touch her neck, her fingertips very gingerly exploring the skin and the sore tendons.

The memory of the altercation in the apothecary's dark storeroom was still fresh in her mind, and despite the healing of her bumps and bruises, the feeling of someone restraining her lingered. He'd not been a stereotypical dark and dangerous wizard, that was for sure, but he was still desperate, and willing to threaten violence on her to escape the aurors. He'd managed to get in and right to her, without anyone stopping him. The wizard beside her had done much the same, and succeeded without violence to steal.

"I never believe everything I read in the papers though." Johann retorted, not letting her get away so easily. For someone who carried newspapers with him, and read up to six a day, the statement left her wondering why he bothered. He'd clearly read the Prophet's account of the incident, and found it lacking. Uncomfortable about the way he pushed the point, she shuffled on the other side of the sofa and avoided his eyes.

"Maybe some other time." She spoke quietly, and finished what was left in her wine glass rather quickly. If she was honest, she adored a bit of gossip, but not when she was involved. She would hear all sorts of things in that hospital, but for all there was patient confidentiality, the same was not always applied to colleagues and their moments.

Being the subject of discussion, how she'd been disarmed, rescued by an auror, hadn't gone down well with her. Some of her colleagues had fought in the battle of Hogwarts, along with her housemate, somehow against that everything seemed trivial. She felt like she was a fraud, and if Johann felt there was more to the story than the paper reported, she wasn't sure she could provide the dramatic twist, not now.

"Right." Johann replied, not in quite his usual tone, pronouncing every syllable. He sounded miffed, so Elixa snapped her head up, her long dark hair falling forwards before her ears and over her hand that was about her neck. Her eyes narrowed as he finished his glass of wine and then reached to put the glass on the table. He remained leant forward releasing his fingers from the glass slowly, thinking. It was a visual queue that he was contemplating leaving, weighing up if he'd done something wrong.

"Look, maybe I needed the company this evening." She told him awkwardly, fearing he might go through with his contemplations and leave her alone. "Maybe I needed someone else here for a bit."

Johann was still looking out towards the fire, away from her, the warm glow from the flames adding colour to his pale complexion.
"I thought you had him?" He asked, making the slightest of movements with his head towards the nearby armchair which belonged to Elixa's absent housemate, Arcturus. Whenever he was in during the evenings, he would be occupying that very chair, with a book, his kneazle on his lap. He'd become such a regular fixture, that Elixa could picture him there at that moment, ignoring the two of them in favour of reading.

"He's not here though, is he?"

With a creak of the sofa, her old friend sat back again and exhaled slowly, drawing his eyes from the empty armchair to look at her again. She couldn't quite read his expression, whether he felt that he had been called as a substitute, or in place of the wizard he knew Elixa had been drawn to from the first moment she'd met him, or whether it didn't bother him at all.

"Are you two..." Johann asked tentatively, not knowing how to phrase the question. Elixa shook her head.
"No such luck." She admitted, expression drooping. "That's why I'm glad to have you." She reached for his hand, and gave it a squeeze in a bittersweet moment.



The fire in the grate had long puttered out, smoke snaking up the chimney in the breeze which dragged through it, and the embers had cooled to a pile of white-grey ash. On the sofa remained two bodies, one curled against the other. Elixa's head had found a pillow somewhere against Johann's ribs and stomach, her long dark hair draped over her features and her hand draped across his knee. Above her, he slept in short bursts, occasionally nodding awake in a bleary haze, surprised at where he was, but unable to move for the weight pinning him down.

At some point the conversation had stopped, mid-sentence. They had discussed dreams, night terrors, and fear of the midnight hours. Whereas he hadn't dreamt for months through lack of sleep, potions and physical self-neglect, in his recovery they had returned, and he was none too fond of them. Elixa had confessed she had woken in a panic several times the previous nights since her encounter in the apothecary, and feared to sleep alone in the house.

Whether this had been a cunning plan to finally attempt to convince her oldest friend to join her in bed, Johann hadn't understood, but he'd woken to her gripping his leg, and burying her face into his side. He supposed she had nobody else to turn to, save for wooing one of her occasional partners into bed, or convincing Arcturus.

When the other wizard alighted at the top of the stairs and found them in the living room, Johann had woken with a start, eyes squinting against the pool of light from the lamp in the kitchen. He'd pressed a finger to his lip, prised Elixa's fingers from his leg and cradled her head down onto cushions before tugging the blanket over her feet and up over her shoulder.

She would wake alone, not quite able to remember when Johann had left, none the wiser that he had brushed her housemate's cheek fondly before he'd departed without a word, drawing his coat on with bloodshot, shadowed eyes, in need of returning to Colin's to sleep, despite dawn's grey light beginning to creep through the crack in the curtain.