Sometime past 11pm


"I mean, it was pretty clever right??" Adrestia remarked as she returned to the living room in a new change of clothes. "Gotta hand it to the muggles. They've got imagination."

The witches had been out for dinner and a movie, retiring to her flat after the thrill that was Cabin in the Woods. She wasn't as versed in muggle stuff as her girlfriend but she liked their films and hey... you won't catch her complaining about sitting down in a dark room with her favourite auror in the whole wide wizarding world.

Well, outside of Andromeda, but you're not allowed to count cousins!

Adrestia's flat was much the same as always. Cosily neat, with explosive pockets of mess here and there; her latest hobby was watercolours, which explained the easel she'd set up in the kitchen side of her living room. She'd hidden her early paintings and left out the pretty little ones of flowers. Sunflowers, daffodils, whathaveyounot.

"I feel like I haven't done anything much at all today," she said as she joined the other girl on her new mint green sofa, stretching. "But I'm tired anyway? Unfair."

Tia kicked off her house slippers and brought her legs up, folding them beneath her. She draped an arm across the back off the couch, along Fauna's shoulders, and smiled a lopsided smile. "I think movies tire me out. Also, not going to lie, it was also a little scary."

Wasn't she lucky to have brought her sexy auror home. Now she felt perfectly safe.

Fauna had been admiring the watercolors as Adrestia sailed into the room, looking incredibly cute in her cropped white top and navy trousers. The flora forgotten, Fauna in her bare feet stepped around the clutter of art supplies and hugged herself in the oversized blazer she'd borrowed from Tia. It smelled of the museum, somehow, of parchment and the faint scent of Tia's flowery-spicy perfume. Smiling, she sank into the sofa and curled up against her girlfriend, her skirt settling around her, giving her a peck on the corner of her mouth to kiss the tired away.

Of course Tia would be tired the day after the full moon, but Fauna wouldn't remind her of it. She was happy to blame it on a scary movie. She was very happy her girlfriend had wanted to see a movie. Such a muggle date!

"Scary? No, not me, I wasn't scared," Fauna hugged Tia around the shoulders for a moment, like she had during the movie. During all those scary parts.

"Er, I was a bit embarrassed because I really thought we were seeing Into the Woods," she widened her eyes, the corner of her mouth giving a twitch. "You must have been wondering when the baker and his wife would pop out of the cabin and offer the little girl all their bread rolls."[1]

Fauna had described the first few scenes of the musical in great detail to Tia before they'd gotten to the movie. The spooky poster of the cabin should have clued her in, but what could she say? Her attention had been on Tia.

"Anyway, my favorite part was probably that first scene in the cellar, and then the one in the cubes.[2] The group of unsuspecting teens is sorting through all those creepy items, until the final girl picks the diary. And it's only later that they realize they chose which artifact would try to kill them."

Her voice was hushed, and kind of delighted, even when talking about monsters killing people. The movie had been that good.

1.	Fauna has a few years yet - 2014 - till Into the Woods comes out
2.	Cabin in the Woods - the cubes

Adrestia laughed good humouredly at her girlfriend's admission, planting a kiss on Fauna's forehead. She wasn't going to bring up the whole hey-isn't-this-supposed-to-be-a-musical thing. In fact, she had been expecting the actors to burst into song for the first half hour of the film!

Her arm came around the other witch's shoulders now with a squeeze. Although their real lives bore marks and instance of violence, there was something about the way Fauna discussed the movie... well maybe it was just the magic of fiction. That darkness, and all that blood. You could relish the atmosphere as long as it wasn't happening to you personally.

"The cellar!" she leaned in and matched the hush tones. "You know we have something like that at the Museum, right? It's this immense storage hall full of relics we haven't yet examined or even identified. Super dangerous, I got chills watching those muggles handling stuff."

Just imagine all the chaos those teens could have caused in an actually-dangerous place. Some curses were worst than blood thirsty monsters. Some curses turned you into a monster.

Tia nudged that thought aside, before it could incite memories of last night.

"Those guys controlling the whole thing," she played with Fauna's hair as she talked, "gave me Mysteries vibes. I bet they have even scarier stuff on level nine. Or something like the cubes scene even. I heard Morgenthau has talking skeletons in his office."

Okay, yeah, it was kind of delicious to talk about spooky stuff. "Oh the motorcycle scene!" Adrestia ricocheted back to the movie in that flighty way of hers. "Hilarious. I don't even know why," she snorted. "Just. Watching that dumb beautiful man smash right into a wall..."

She gestured with one hand, a chef's kiss. "Art! Or as the French call it..." her voiced dropped into a terrible mock accent, "art."

"Wha-at," Fauna questioned in a sing-song, quirking one eyebrow at the idea of the museum hiding so many ancient, dangerous relics. She wanted to explore the storage hall sometime. After hours. With Tia. She'd get distracted by Tia immediately, and then they wouldn't be in any danger, would they?

"Oh, I know what you mean."

Level Nine was full of mad scientists. Just look at Sasha.

"I hear the skeletons have dance parties and each one can only beatbox in 'ah', 'hm', or 'um'."

They'd learned from the best! She didn't feel too guilty poking fun at Morgenthau, as she used plenty of er's and um's herself. Fauna laughed a little and turned her cheek against Tia's shoulder at her terrible French accent.

"Um," she straightened, but not too much, enjoying Tia's hands playing with her hair.

"Level Two," Fauna paused, glancing up at Tia's face. If she had a flower for every time she mentioned Level Two, Tia would never run out of bouquets to paint. Still, Level Nine couldn't get all the spooky glory.

"Level Two," she went on, "has the most dangerous evidence room. Really! All the things that should remain lost end up in that room, organized in towers of mayhem. I'm talking about clown dolls that move, and musical instruments that play on their own. Uh, and cubes! We do have cubes, kind of. Whenever we bring in something new, it goes into a transparent cube and gets checked for curses and such. But that doesn't always mean the curse is removed. Sometimes, the cursed thing just... gets filed away. And if the case goes cold, it sits there. Waiting, to hop into the pocket of an unsuspecting Auror, so that she may gift the cursed item to a very pretty curator who has a place for it in the museum-"

A smile broke out on Fauna's face. "Er, just a second."

Fauna must have something silly. She rummaged around in the pockets of her blazer, only to very quickly realize that the pockets were empty. Fauna's pockets. Were never. Empty. Who knew why, but she always walked around with half her desk's contents and at least two notebooks along with several winter scarves and gloves.

Fauna poked her head up and glanced over the sofa at the coat rack. Where Fauna's coat was hanging.

She looked Tia, who was so lovely and humored her and laughed with her and let her borrow her clothes.

"Wrong jacket," she blushed.

It was her second hushed admission of the night and her third blush, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.

Tia's dark eyebrows climbed and climbed as her girlfriend described the dangers of level two's evidence room. All the while she smiled, though inside her heart gave a leap of anxiety - she could forget the age gap at times but there was a good decade between them. So she worried. Fauna seemed so young to be juggling those dangers.

Quite without meaning to, Adrestia had drawn the other witch closer.

            "Er, just a second."

The eyebrows came down, puzzled, and then shot back up as she laughed again. They laughed so much when they were together. And Fauna... Fauna blushed all the time. Not everyone looked so pretty when they blushed.

It was, at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, very becoming.

"You..." she was at lost for words for a moment, and kissed Fauna - one hand going to the lapel of the blazer. It was meant to be a quick, affectionate peck but her lips had other ideas, the one kiss becoming two and three and four lingering ones instead.

Tia pulled back, bumping her nose against the freckled one. "No dangerous curses tonight, okay?" she implored earnestly and in a whisper because of how close they were huddled together. "I like us when we're in one piece."

Curses didn't actually scare her - the Lycan's curse was the start and end of that fear - but ever since the castle incident she was keen to avoid trouble. Trouble might find them anyway, why wave a landing flag?

"Music?" she said in a lighter voice, slipping off the couch with another kiss. "I asked Reducto to source me some muggle records!" Adrestia walked to a little turntable perched on a stool by the fireplace across from them. "They're not half bad."

In an attempt to curry favour with the auror, Tia was really making an effort to understand muggle things. And music was universal anyway! She slipped a record out of its sleeve and adjusted the needle accordingly.

As the song started, she went to the mantle and took out a little terracota smoking pipe. "Have you heard of them? Daft Punk?"

Adrestia checked the pipe chamber and took a puff, blowing out a cloud of soap bubbles.

Fauna would have agreed to just about anything after those series of kisses. Avoiding curses, though? Easy! Their evening would be nothing but pleasant and fun.

When Tia headed to the turntable, Fauna stayed cozy on the sofa to watch her, admiring her ankles, of all things, and the small of her back that peeked out from under her cropped blouse, and then distracted just as pleasantly by her words.

Muggle movies, muggle records.

Her eyebrows raised a little as a soft smile crept up her face and stayed there. No one had ever made such an effort to understand muggle things before, to better understand Fauna who had come from that world. Of course, Tia was an inquisitive and openminded person, and she enjoyed learning new things for curiosity's sake, but Fauna felt sure she was the catalyst of this interest, and it gave her all the warm and fuzzy feelings.

Daft Punk?

"No, I haven't - oh wait!"

Fauna sat up straighter, listening closely to the intro. She bobbed her head a bit. Her shoulders joined in with the bobbing. And then -

"One. More. Time," she sing-songed with the song. Who hadn't heard of this? Wixes. But Tia knew!

"The French blokes in the helmets. They were in all the raves and clubs and on the radio when I was growing up. They still are! I think they started in the 90s."

Fauna rose from the sofa, "They wanted to look like robots. I don't remember why?"

She'd only heard their music and a few things about them. Fauna paused, then widened her stance and moved a few steps forward, accompanying each exaggerated step with a stiff arm movement before she died of embarrassment. What could she say? She wasn't meant to be a robot.

Tia was so far away! She had to reach her. Fauna ducked her head down, laughing, and she danced normally (normally for Fauna) the rest of the way to her girlfriend. She danced a little in place near the turntable, patiently waiting for Tia.

In the meantime, unable to resist, she blew on the nearest soap bubbles until they drifted away and popped.

Oh good! Fauna knew them!

Tia produced another scattering of colourful bubbles and grinned at her girlfriend's bizarre dancing form - the robot! That particular icon of muggle culture had trickled its way into modern magical consciousness. She kind of knew what they were about, from general chatter, but not really? And she vaguely recalled her mum reading her an old story about a man who fell in love with a woman who turned out to be a machination[1] but that had been an eerie story.

Nothing eerie about Fauna doing the robot.

"Robots!" Tia giggled, replacing her pipe as some of the bubbles started to pop - releasing faint clouds of gillyweed. She joined the other witch with a lively look. "What a concept, right?"

Adrestia slipped her hands around Fauna's waist under the blazer, timing her own little dance to the beat so that their hips could mimic the rhythm together. "Machines that look like people. And they make sweet, sweet music," she raised her eyebrows and bobbed her head a bit.

If there was any awkwardness in Fauna, she could never really pick it apart from the auror's regular charm. Tia smiled to herself. No robot could ever equal a Fauna, who looked tempting even in Adrestia's bookish blazer. It was impossible to 'program' any machine that would result in... all this.

Freckles and elegant hands and an endlessly inquisitive mind. To say nothing of more hidden charms.

"What's like the wizarding equivalent of robots?" she mused out loud. "It just seems like a total power trip, you know? Making beings, even metal ones."

1.	The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann

Fauna thought for a moment, bobbing to the beat of the music as the bubbles popped and a faint mist of gillyweed rose in the air. Tia's flat was such a bright, happy place. Her girlfriend always posed such interesting questions, and Fauna could daydream and sound a little silly when she answered and it was all good!

She glanced over at Tia's bookshelves, spotting two marble-like bookends that seemed to be supporting a forsaken potted plant rather than the towers of stacked books on every shelf. Were those bookends in the shape of figures? Or was that just her imagination?

"Galatea?" She raised her eyebrows, her smile widening. "You know - that statue that came to life, from Greek mythology? Maybe it wasn't a myth. It sounds like something a wizard on a power trip would do."

Galatea(s) in ancient times, then golems in biblical times, then - oh right. All sorts of animated beings in Hogwarts times. That was the official name for the medieval times.

"Oh! And suits of armor, and paintings, and all of those animated things that are sort of like artificial intelligence or a preserved kind of intelligence. I forgot about those."

Her eyes twinkling, she looked at Tia, curious what had come to her mind first. Her hands drifted to the knot of Tia's blouse, fidgeting teasingly with it, before settling on her girlfriend's hips again.

She watched her girlfriend's face, already fond of the way those expressive eyes darted here or there when she was thinking.

Adrestia nodded along to Fauna as well as the music - she was really feeling it, with the gillyweed, and the hands fiddling with her knotted shirttails were deliciously ticklish. Her hands drifted a bit lower, clutching in approval. It was hard to believe when they were together, the difficult lives they lived outside of it.

"Oooh suits of armour, right!" she repeated, wrinkling her nose. "I guess. It would be creepy if those suits started doing whatever they wanted though. Or if they started building other suits..." Tia winked at the other witch. "Little baby suits of armour."

The last thing wizarding society needed was their little creations pulling a Frankenstein on them! Their existing troubles were perfectly satisfactory on that front.

"I was thinking of that play, Pygmalion. Which is based on Galathea? Maybe?" she pulled a face, as if asking the air, and met Fauna's gaze. "I saw the movie when I was a girl, My Fair Lady. The ending wasn't the same but it was nice. I totally had a crush on--"

Adrestia stopped abruptly and laughed, tucking her head into Fauna's neck. Oh gods she was too high. She had a crush on Aubrey Hepburn, with those large blue eyes and dark hair and pink pout....

"Sorry sorry!" she pulled back, cheeks hot. "Literally just realised I had a type."

Tia slipped a hand along the side of Fauna's pale neck, fingers sliding into the back of her hair. "Lucky me," she grinned.

"No, sorry! I mean, please don't apologize. No sorry allowed," Fauna laughed, her face flushed and delighted. So flattering!

"I'm your type then," she gleefully stated the obvious, shrugging her hair over her shoulder and losing the beat of the music for a moment.

"My type is - well, not necessarily Audrey Hepburn, though it's like, who wouldn't be attracted to her?"

Fauna was impressed that Tia had seen that movie. She wanted to tell her just how she felt, emboldened by the bubbly air and upbeat music.

"I have a crush right now," she laced her fingers with Tia's free hand, her head leaning in slightly to Tia's touch.

"A crush on a pretty witch who knows stuff. I really like her hair - uh, brunette?" Oh help. "And glossy and - I like that we can borrow each other's clothes but also that you're a bit shorter than me so I can cuddle you and pretend to be a badass."

What was she saying now?

"Your face, just like, your face, Tia. I love how your eyes are listening - uh, you know what I mean - and for most topics you seem just a little bit amused, and I especially love it when you roll your eyes up in exasperation or look sideling because it makes me laugh and I can imagine what you're thinking - like when we're with the other curators. They'd say something like, uh actually, it's puhg-may-lion not pig!"

Fauna chuckled under her breath. "And your laugh, and your smile."

Fauna too, smiled. It was easy to laugh and smile with Tia. Fauna paused then, thank Merlin. Terrible with words. She really liked Tia's mouth, whether smiling or laughing or pursed in thought.

She leaned in, losing the beat again, but not caring. Some things - this kiss - were more important.

Tia didn't think she was the kind of person who blushed or startled easily in regular life - but she had set aside much of her defensiveness around Fauna, bringing the other witch into her whirlwind of hobbies instead of allowing those things to stand between them.

So she blushed, yes, bowing her head to lightly kiss Fauna's neck as she was reminded of being slightly shorter. Adrestia never minded being shorter. It gave her better access to laying sweet kisses on sensitive collarbones or, remembering their island getaway last month, deeper wells. And she liked that it made her girlfriend feel like a badass.

Fauna totally was a badass. Only a badass was allowed to make Tia want to hide her face in the shoulder of the wooly blazer.

             "And your laugh, and your smile."

Adrestia laughed, the chocked-off sentimental kind. She lifted her face from, Fauna's shoulder in time to be kissed - and she kissed back, softly but slowly. Lips wet and mouth pliant with patient hunger. The older witch slid both her hands back down to Fauna's waist underneath the blazer, then on second thought up to the lapels.

"Want this off of you," she pulled back from the kiss to speak, nuzzling along the side of the other girl's jaw and down to her neck once more. "Yes?" Tia murmured and this time, when she kissed Fauna's neck, she lingered with intention, to taste.

Fauna was warm and alive and more enticing than any onscreen beauty, any Greek myth. Tia spent enough time around maps and statues and relics and art. What she wanted was this.