12. Nocturnal / Slash

12. Nocturnal / Slash

Cat turned to him and said, seriously, “I think I'm turning into an owl.”

Cat was sitting on her bed, displaying previously unknown flexibility whilst painting her toenails a shocking shade of green, while Spec was on her laptop, attempting to fix the damage said nail polish had done to it. Well, he suspected that the empty packet of crisps, the half-full bottle of Diet Pepsi and her hand moisturiser had helped, too.
“Oh?” He asked, dabbing nail polish remover onto the 'delete' key, “Why is that then?”

She finished painting her small toe, untwisted her legs and stretched, almost knocking the polish over and onto her sheets.

“Because I'm a very nocturnal person.”

“Right...”
Damn 'E' key was stuck. It was as though the Microsoft Word on her HP laptop had seen a skinny little Macbook and was going, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh! Get it away, eeeeeeeeeeee!”

“And I tend to sleep during the day.”

She screwed the lid back onto the green pot (he noticed the colour was called “Witch Scale”, which didn't make sense to Spec, but he figured it had something to do with popular culture, something he wasn't really familiar with) and pushed it onto her desk.
Spec stopped trying to get something sticky (probably dried Diet Pepsi, if Cat only confessed) off the keyboard and looked at her.

“You're thinking something logical that I have missed, aren't you?”

Fascinating, she could tell.
“If you were turning into an owl, wouldn't you be able to turn your head 360° degrees?”

She wrinkled her nose, “Not necessarily. I haven't got the bone structure yet. Or the wings, if you'll notice.”

He pushed his glasses further up onto his nose, “Or the feathers, Cat. Besides, don't cats eat birds and therefore owls?”

“Maybe,” she shrugged, “ but I'm not really a cat.”

“I haven't seen many cats with green nails and hair, that's for sure.”
“Oh, haha,” she rolled her eyes at him, “You're so funny. Slash – sarcasm.”

Spec laughed, “I guess I've been hanging out with you too much – you're starting to use internet speak in real life!”

She raised an eyebrow, “Who is to say I didn't use it before I met you?”

Spec shrugged, “I just figure I'm geekier than you.”

She shook her head, “If only you knew, Spec, if only you knew. But back to my point. You will allow that I do have the sleeping pattern of an owl.”

He went back to dabbing nail polish remover onto any key with green on it.

“You have the messed up sleeping pattern of a junkie owl, who wakes up to get his fix and sleeps whenever he feels the high leave him.”

She stared at him, wide eyed and in shock. Slowly, she blinked, actually somewhat resembling an owl while she did so. He didn't mention this.

“You just compared my sleeping pattern to that of an owl on crack. A male owl on crack!”

Spec went back to fiddling with the keyboard, “On heroin.”

“Same difference!” She said, chucking a pillow at him, which he ducked, “How rude!”

He placed the pillow back on the bed.

“Yeah, well,” he poked at the letter 'E' and it finally came unstuck, “that is what you get when you call your local IT technician after midnight – oh, wait, no, I'm not a computer technician at all, I'm a history student. And it's 2am. On a Tuesday.”

Cat sat up properly.

“Yes, but I knew you were up. And you haven't complained before...”

He frowned at her laptop, which had just brought up the blue screen of death.

“How did you know that?”

“Know what?”

She had the shortest attention span of anyone he had ever met. But she was really nice, and cool, so he couldn't understand why she kept on being so nice to him.
In school they would have been in completely different circles, but university makes your circles disappear.
Maybe she really was secretly geeky.

“That I was still up?”

“Well,” she suddenly looked a bit nervous, and decided to start tidying her room for no apparent reason, “I saw you on the Facebook chat, then you updated you status talking about the fees and when I went to the kitchen I saw that your light was on. So I asked you if you wanted a cup of tea. Which you did.”

“Right.”

“And while we were making tea, I thought hey, why not kill two birds with one stone?”

“Killing birds, very cat-like.” He joked.

She folded a jumper and shoved it unceremoniously into her cupboard.

“Actually, owls eat small birds too.”

“Really?”

She folded another jumper, this one with glittery pink writing on it. Cat was such a girl.

“Yep. Guess you don't know everything, do you Spec?”

The blue screen (of death!) disappeared.

“I never said I did.”

Something fell out of the cupboard and made everything else topple over onto Cat.

“Balls!” She exclaimed, “I really should have tidies earlier.”

“Yes, you should,” he said, airily, trying to see what else was wrong with her laptop, “but hey, hindsight is always perfect.”

Her reply was muffled by the mountain of clothes in her arm, but the last word was clear, “Smartass.”

Spec grinned.

They worked in silence for a while, Spec still at the laptop, doing his best to free up memory space by defragging and deleting unused (and some frankly useless non-personal) files, while Cat had sat down on the floor and was folding her clothes neatly.
She had a full pile and was putting them away into the cupboard when Spec noticed that she was humming something he recognised but couldn't quite place.

“Hey Cat?”

“Yeah?”

“What's that song?”

“What song?”

She did this, at times. She would hum or sing a few words without realising, and it mystified Spec, because he didn't see how such an action, even if it was subconscious, would make her not hear herself.
“The song you were humming.”

“I was humming?”

She hung up a blue dress.

“Would I have mentioned it otherwise?”

She turned to him and smiled, “I suppose not. What did it sound like?”

He sang the last bit he had heard from her.

“Oh, of course!” She started singing the rest, “I'll get your heart racing in my skin-tight jeans, be your teenage dream tonight!”

He made a face, “Really?”

“Really.” She nodded and continued, “I'll let you put your hands on me in my skin-tight jeans, be your teenage dream tonight!”

“What if I don't dream of girls in skin-tight jeans?”

Cat laughed and sat down on the bed again, bringing her legs up so she could rest her head on her knees.

“What do your dream girls wear then?”

“Not skin-tight jeans, that's for sure.”
He double clicked something, to pretend he was doing something useful.

“”Do they wear elf robes, schoolgirl outfits or the Princess Leia costume?”

Spec went red. Damned fair skin.

“No, not that it's any of your business.”

“Dirty nurse?”

Spec blinked a few times in rapid succession, “What? No-”

“Sexy goth girl?”

“Stop it! If you have to know, the girls I like tend to wear what they like, not what they think they'll look sexy in. T-shirts, jeans, hoodies.”

Cat nodded in understanding, “The guys I like have a similar dress code.”

Spec opened a Mozilla window, to see if the Internet was connected – the final item on his mental check-list.

“Comfort over vanity. It's simple.”

Cat hummed in agreement.

He managed to connect, spied the headline 'Slash for Supers' on the current page and promptly decided he couldn't do much else to fix the computer. How she knew what slash was, was beyond him.
He stood up, “Ok, your laptop is fixed and should also be running faster as well.”

“Excellent! Thanks so much – I'll buy you breakfast tomorrow.”

“No you won't,” he said, “because you'll be asleep, while I've got a nine o'clock lecture. See you tomorrow.”

She waved at him from the bed.

He was about to open her door when she called him again.

“Hey Spec?”

She was still sitting on her bed, but she had a slight frown on her face, as thought she was concentrating really hard.

“Yes, Cat?”

“Do you want to go to see Deathly Hallows with me when it comes out?”

Spec took his glasses off and wiped them with the edge of his t-shirt, “I didn't know you liked the Harry Potter series. I thought you were...”
He trailed off, leaving the thought incomplete.

Cat sighed and let her legs fall back to the floor, “Say it. You thought I was a Twilight girl, didn't you?”

He looked around her room again, full of pinks and girly magazines and glitter.

“Well, yes.”

“You're such a Ravenclaw,” she laughed, then reached behind her and took out a Gryffindor tie, “but that's ok, because Ravenclaws are cool.”

He smiled at her.

“So,” she continued, “Deathly Hallows on Friday, midnight showing? I'll buy the popcorn if you buy the tickets.”

Spec couldn't seem to stop smiling, “I'd like that. Should I dress up?”

Cat smiled back, “Most definitely. If you can, that is. As what?”

“I can.”

“As who?”

“Whoever really.”

“One of the characters?”

He surveyed her for a moment before replying with a quote from a film she had made him watch.

“I can be whoever you want me to be.”

A moment of silence as she realised what he had said and she blushed, looking down. But instead of rejecting him, like he thought she would (he should never have done that, what was he thinking, she was cool and now she wouldn't even speak to him) she licked her lips and looked him in the eye.
“How about you stay you, and I stay me, but instead of belonging to this silly world, we pretend we can do whatever we want as students of the best school of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Europe?”

“That sounds good.”

“Excellent. Would you pretend to be my date?”

“I would be honoured. See you on Friday at six?”

She smiled as he left, “At six. In full robes and with wands.”

“Of course. Goodnight, Gryffindor.”

“Au revoir, Ravenclaw.”