Meow

Reid was pretty mortified as the pretty female clerk- her nametag red Katie- began to ring up the purchases and he had no choice but to look at her- well... stare. Reid did not interact well with the female gender, the ones that were old enough to consider him as a partner anyway. Reid and Calvin, 'surprisingly', did not have much experience with the ladies. That was all find and dandy for Cal- Reid still had not had The Talk with him. It was less fortunate for Reid.

Pippa asked something about scratchposts and he mumbled an answer that had nothing to do with an amount as he tried to distract himself with inspecting his items, too afraid to meet the clerk's eye. Kirby lept off his shoulder and onto the counter and began to prance about, pouncing onto one of the bags of food and sniffing. He scrunched up his rear and lept on top of it before sitting in the very center, like King of the Hill. Reid grinned. Katie laughed and Reid froze up again.

Suddenly, he had Pippa rear pushed towards him. He turned red and glanced at Katie, who had found a lollipop and stuck it in her mouth, sucking on it with an amused expression, watching Reid. Red, he reached into Pippa's bag and found her purse, yanking it out and dropping it in front of her. He leaned his elbows on the counter and hunched over, resting his red face in his hands.

Pippa could never pretend to be all seeing and all knowing because she was oblivious to some – if not most things. Reid’s obvious mortification had completely gone over the top of Pippa’s head and she continued to embarrass him unwittingly. She didn’t think anything of the clerk behind the counter who was getting some sort of amusement out of the situation. It hadn’t occurred to Pippa for a second that her friend’s awkwardness had because of the girl – or rather, the way he handled women in general. They looked about the same age but Pippa wasn’t about to play matchmaker. Pretending to be Cupid would have been right up Pippa’s street on any other day but with hungry kitties surrounding her, she was eager to get them back to Reid’s and start the kitty-nurturing period. She wasn’t interested in Reid having an adolescent breakdown because of a girl. Katie wasn’t even particularly terrifying!

Nethertheless, Pippa pursed her lips when Reid dropped the purse onto the counter. He could have at least handed it to her. Huffing to herself, Pippa snatched the pink and yellow purse off of the counter and opened it up. She inspected the contents before looking at the girl – Katie. Pippa glanced up at Reid, as if waiting for his direction but when there was none, Pippa gave a heavy sigh.

“Ring this up, will you? There are roughly ten Kneazle kittens here.” Pippa instructed. The girl took her sweet time and her leisurely pace began to aggravate the usually mild-mannered Hufflepuffian. Pippa’s patience was waning quickly and she busied herself with glaring at Reid out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t know what his problem was but she was sure as hell going to find out when they got out of there. He couldn’t just abandon her in the middle of a shop. He could retreat into his mind when he was home. He couldn’t just leave her by herself like this!

In an effort to distract herself further, Pippa leaned down and picked up the brown kitty that had been purring by her feet. She cuddled him to her chest and watched the girl with thinly veiled irritation.

Finally, after what felt like a lifetime, the girl announced she was done. Pippa’s lips stretched into a relieved smile and she dropped her coco-kitty onto his feet. The animal mewed and Pippa smiled before delving into her purse for the money. She’d pay for Reid’s too, just to save him the embarrassment or whatever was wrong with him. Pippa handed Katie them money in exchange for the carrier that had been enlarged on the inside to’ allow enough room for all of the kitties. Pippa smiled in thanks and put the carrier on the floor. She watched with glee as her kitties bundled into the carrier and she turned to look at Reid’s kitty, wondering whether he’d go in there too. From the looks of him, she doubted it, so she picked up her carrier of kitties and put it on the counter before putting her purse back in her bag.

“Reid, pick up the stuff.” Pippa said, pushing Reid’s shoulder. She took the carrier off of the counter and picked up her fair share of the stuff – albeit the lighter ones - before looking at Reid expectantly. “C’mon, let’s go!”

Reid could feel irritation radiating from Pippa, but in his opinion, her irritation was rather irrelevant at the moment, when looking back. Reid had left the comfort and relaxation of his own home on a day off to be dragged around Diagon Alley by a fifteen year old girl. He was pressured into buying an armada of kittens he would be responsible for, and had been publicly humiliated fin front of a girl.

Pippa could be irritated. Reid had been a good boy thus far. And it was not as though he enjoyed being an awkward mess. He wished he had the bravery of his friend, who could get up and go sit by a girl and begin a conversation about how she looked like Princess Zelda and charm her with his sweetness. No, Reid was too aware of what females had to offer to be as charming and calm as Calvin.

Katie rang up the kittens and their toys slowly, and if he had actually made eye contact with her, he would have realized she was giving him a few glance overs. Instead, he stared determinedly down at his shoes, cradling Kirby as his stomach. The cat turned and looked up at him before leaping onto his shirt and painfully clawing up to his shoulder and perching there.

Pippa commanded Reid to act as pack mule and he stared in dismay at the cat penthouse. He picked up the bags and set them inside the enclosed areas and began to drag the penthouse down the aisle. He heard a voice say "Locomoter cat house." Katie had her wand pointed at it, a grin on her face. The cat house rose off the air and Reid blinked. Without saying anything to her, he grabbed the corner of the cat house and drug it down the aisle.

He heard the clerk call good bye but the door slammed behind him. He sighed and looked at Pippa. "You will be the death of me." And then Kirby bit his ear.

There had always been many a Pippa’s genetic make-up; one in particular irked her to no end though. Out of the two sisters, Pippa had wound up with the lithe, nigh on useless body where as her sister had the broad shoulders and tendency to fluctuate in weight. Moreover, her sister was far stronger than Pippa was though she made extreme efforts to be just as useless as Pippa. Their family was unbalanced and that was proof of it. Pippa, who spent more time playing sport than doing anything while she was at home, was tall, thin and had flimsy little arms. Her sister on the other hand, who spent hours in the gym to take off her weight and spent even more hours with their mother trying to win the attention of some boys, was short, squat and kind of, to put it nicely, chunky at times. But that worked for her. She got it off and she stayed thin for a while until she was kicked to the side by one of her boyfriend’s and she spent the weekend eating ice cream. The whole point was though that Pippa’s sister was stronger – and had it been Eleanor that was faced with the objective of carrying all of these things, she would have griped about it but she would have been perfectly able to do it.

The mews of the cats were slightly distracting also and so Pippa was sagging on one side as she lifted the kitties to look inside the carrier. When her carrier bags began to graze the floor, Pippa yelped and lifted it, determined not to lose any of the things as she wandered towards the exit. What still bothered her though was Reid’s bizarre behaviour. Pippa wasn’t always a confident little sprite. She did have a little trouble dealing with people she didn’t know. She liked the company of people she knew well. They pumped her full of self-belief – whether they realised it or not. She could be likened far too much to the girl that had sat sobbing on the floor of the Defence against the Dark Arts classroom when she was left to her own devices. Her friends made her happy and she was determined to make them happy. The only thing she hated was when they, Reid in particular today, would retreat into themselves and leave her on her own in the real world.

Pippa gave a little jump. She could feel her tights beginning to lose grasp of her thighs and she wasn’t entirely sure what she was supposed to do about it. Pippa bit her lip before blowing a piece of hair out of her eye. She paused by the door to let a few people enter before ducking out just before the wood had a chance to swing back on its hinges.

Once outside, the hustle and bustle of Diagon Alley washed over Pippa almost painfully. She looked about herself, taking in the eye-splintering colour that seemed to explode wherever it had the opportunity to do so. She blinked and took a step back, overwhelmed by what she saw. Her eyes then darted about the Alley, seeing things that otherwise wouldn’t have been seen had no one been putting effort into looking. A group of wizards were huddled in a shadowy alleyway between the Apothecary and a dingy bookshop. Students that looked a great deal older than Pippa were slipping into Knockturn Alley. A person on a balcony above was indulging in a cigarette while watching what was going on below. Further up two witches were arguing while their children hid behind the skirts of their mothers’ robes. People were everywhere and for the first time, it suffocated Pippa.

The Hufflepuff took a step back and bit her lip again. This time, her teeth cut into the slightly chapped skin there and she felt a little blood trickle into her mouth. Pippa licked her lip, taking the blood away, and continued to stare. She blinked rapidly and shook her head, trying to gain perspective again. She gasped in some air and turned at the sound of Reid’s voice. Pippa blinked again and swallowed before beginning to wrack her brains for some sort of witty response. There wasn’t one waiting for her, though, much to her dismay. All Pippa could say was,

“I’m sorry.” She licked her lip again and looked around, her eyes growing wide as Diagon Alley affronted her with its colour and hyperactivity. She whirled her eyes back to Reid and shrank a little closer to the elder man. “Could we go?” As much as she adored Diagon Alley, it scared her a little bit. She was far too used to the grey and the murk of the Muggle World. This was too much – there was too much happiness in a world so shrouded in war. It was an oxymoron to everything going on in the Wizarding World.

Sometimes, Pippa hated she had one foot in each world. She didn’t feel lucky at all when those thoughts passed through her mind. There were two types of wars – Magical and Muggle – and both were lethal. The fact that she could be hurt by both terrified her. In the Muggle World, it was total war with people using terror as their weapon. She was a target, as was her next door neighbour, as was the little old woman and her terrier two streets away. In the Wizarding World it was also total war but it was specific. With the blood that ran through Pippa’s veins, her position was even more precarious. She didn’t know how people could go into battle like and act as if nothing happened afterwards. She didn’t know how people could deal with knowing that they could be killed at random because someone simply could. She didn’t know how people could put on a brave face. Walking among them were people that would kill for their warped beliefs. They would kill people like Pippa.

Pippa sighed shakily and looked up at Reid again. She licked the blood off of her lip once more and glanced down at the carrier when one of the kittens mewed. She tapped the top of the carrier with her fingernails and rolled her lips against each other, mildly surprised with the amount of blood springing from the cut.

“This place is sort of suffocating isn’t it?” She asked Reid, managing a half smile. “C’mon, I’ll make us some tea.”

Reid might have been flustered from the encounter, but that did not make him oblivious. It was in Reid's nature to know when something was wrong, and at Pippa's response- which had a point and had not traveled through three different subjects, which meant something was wrong- and the look on her face, Reid could tell that something was up.

She asked if they could go, scooting towards him, and he said, "Of course, Pippa." He reached down and pulled the bags of toys and kitty supplies from her grip and forced them through one of the opening of the kitty house that was levitating at his side. Pippa spoke and he turned to glance at her, following her wide gaze to the bustling street.

Diagon Alley was chaotic, but Reid had never really paid any attention. At home, he had been one of five magical children, and he had been the forgotten middle child as well. Chaos was something Reid was well aware of. That was why he preferred a quiet day at home to a day tramping through Diagon Alley where he felt as though he were back home with Mum and Dad.

She tried to persuade him with tea, but he did not need persuading. Home was calling him. He glanced down at his watch and said, "Calvin should be home about now. We'll go to the apartment, show him the damage, and have a nice cup of tea." He picked up Kirby and held him to his stomach, grabbing the kitty house with the other hand and poking an elbow out at Pippa to apparate them home.