Letters to Nowhere PV Elena Closed

Letters and letters and letters. Elena's entire future was always given to her in a letter, a letter from Hogwarts, a letter from Gringotts. A letter from London.

In this case nothing truly important rested on the letter but it still had to be sent, so Elena climbed the winding stairs up to the owlery, shivering against the cold that March hadn't quite sapped away. It wasn't exactly unusual to find other people in the owlery, it's where she'd met Alan after all. At first sight she thought that she'd seen Hugh, but the boy was nowhere near her friend's height. A Hugh lookalike then, who was whispering something to one of the more calm owls. It seemed to be important, and Elena weighed the risks of talking to the kid.

After attaching the letter to a small brown owl's leg, and whispering it should simply take it to the stables, the letter was whisked away to the intended destination. The boy was still staring after the owl when she turned back around. Elena walked over and leaned against the wall, "Looks like you really want that owl to reach its destination. Important letter or is it an important person waiting to receive it?"

Ruka was so caught up in his thoughts, he barely realised someone else entering the owlery.
He really shouldn't be surprised - Plenty of people probably wanted to send letters to family and loved ones.
Still, as he looked after the owl, watching it slowly vanishing in the relatively clear sky, he got so consumed in praying for the bird to find his dad, that when he did hear a voice close by, he visibly jumped a little.
Hitting his elbow on the windowsill as he flinched from the sound, he let out a small Ouch before turning to the girl who had talked to him.
For a split second he thought it may have been Cassie, that she had come to see if he was really going to try and send the letter, but the girl in front of him looked nothing like his friend, starting by the fact that she appeared to be a Slytherin, not a Hufflepuff.

"My dad," he said carefully, not sure what the girl's intentions were. He had heard a lot of vile things about Slytherin, but Cassie had also taught him not to judge them from the start as not all of them were the bad people they were painted to be.
He shrugged his shoulders lightly like it really didn't matter that much when in reality it was all he wanted. "But I don't have a real address so all I can do is hope it arrives." He chuckled a little awkwardly, running his hand through messy coppery hair. "Guess all I can do is wait and see, right?"

The boy hit his elbow and Elena winced a little in sympathy, that was definitely going to bruise. He seemed cautious, although she wasn't sure if that was because of her hair or the emblem displayed on her blazer, probably the latter, most of the kids around liked her hair. For some reason it made her easier to talk to, maybe it was because it made her look like an outcast or something similarly edgy. Elena's hair actually wasn't blue for any edgy reason, instead it was because she just loved the colour.

"The owls don't mind too much about addresses that don't exist. They found my alleyway after all." Elena looked out over the green hills as she said that, looking thoughtful, almost like she was trapped in memories, "Waiting is annoying sometimes, I remember I used to pace up and down the owlery when I was waiting for an owl to come back. I'm a bit calmer now, not sure if it's experience or I'm just tired."

Elena laughed softly, being tired wasn't an issue anymore, although it was nice to be able to make jokes about the whole thing. Even if it might've grown a bit dangerous near the end. To herself, not to others.

Ruka perked up a little bit at the girl's words.
Alleyway?
It sounded like this girl had experience with Letters going Nowhere, like maybe she knew what it was like to live without an address.
"I was worried that, I don't know, maybe the school uses some kind of tracking system that only works on students?" He laughed, a bit embarrassed with his own assumption.
He leaned back against the windowsill, casting a look outside like he thought the owl may already have returned.
It hadn't, of course.
He turned back to the Slytherin girl, eyes sliding from her blue hair to her green Slytherin sigil.
She didn't seem like a bad person, and he was immediately reminded of what Cassie had told him about her cousins - All of them Slytherins, and all of them decent people. Clearly, prejudice was a big und unjustified problem.
"The address on my Hogwarts letter was 'Under The Stars', so that's what I put on the envelope too." He grinned sheepishly, not too sure what to say.
Sure, he'd made a few friends by now but that hadn't made him any less socially awkward.
"When you were waiting for letters to come back... Were you ever worried they weren't going to come?"
It was his biggest fear; That he would wait and wait for his dad's response but it would never come. He didn't even know what to do at the end of the school year. Once he arrived at King's Cross, would his dad pick him up? What if he didn't? Where was Ruka supposed to go?
He took a deep breath, looking down at his feet for a moment before turning his attention back to the Slythering girl.
"I'm Ruka, by the way," he introduced himself, not wanting to seem rude and blather on without wven mentioning his name.

"That could be true, my other theory is that owls have magic too, and can find anyone." Elena's strange theories were growing more frequent, "Under the stars? That sounds like a nice address. Mine just said The Alley Between Fifth and Doran St."

From the way Ruka was staring at Elena's house crest it was definitely the whole Slytherin thing. To a point Elena believed that the Slytherins back then had just cause to fight against the 'Side of Good', the blue haired girl wouldn't save those who'd left her behind. Why would anyone else do that either? Probably because their moral compass pointed towards the world instead of themselves but that only lead into a rabbit hole of Ethics.

“Worried they wouldn’t come? Sadly no, I was always hoping one day they’d stop. Freedom coming with the price of a friend.” Elena frowned as she remembered pacing and wishing that there would never again be a next letter, “That’s a nice name Ruka. I’m Elena, Elena Jones. Nice too meet you.”

She smiled at him before a letter was dropped on her head, “Thank you Owl, very kind of you.”

Elena put the letter safely in her pocket to read later, “So where are you from Ruka?”

Ruka hummed thoughtfully at the girl's theory about the owls, slowly nodding along as if to agree. "Yeah, maybe," he said, looking back out the window again. He really hoped the Slytherin girl was right, that the owls had magic and would find his dad either way.
"You lived in an Alley before coming here?" he asked, not judgmental, just curious. He really hoped it didn't come across as too personal a question, but she did volunteer that piece of information so he figured it was safe to talk about. "We lived out in the fields," he said quickly so she didn't think he was judging her should she have been just as address-less as him. "Not a lot of streets close by, that's probably why my letter said 'Under the Stars'. Not that I'm complaining, at least there's not a lot if mugging going in in the Countryside." He chuckled lightly, shrugging his shoulders like it didn't actually matter where he had lived or how he had liked it.
He looked away again, feeling strangely awkward about having this type of conversation in an Owlery with a practical stranger. He looked down across his own robes, the red and gold Gryffindor sigil a stark contrast to her biting green Slytherin emblem. He'd heard that especially Gryffindors and Slytherins did not get along well and he wondered where that stereotype came from. Afterall, this girl, with her blue hair and distant eyes, seemed just as approachable as Cassie or Veronica.
He turned back tonher when she talked about wishing the letters would stop coming, not really understanding what she was talking about. Maybe she had overbearing parents, or terribly annoying friends, but he didn't really feel like prying about this sort of thing.
Instead he just smiled when she told him her name, nodding in recognition. "Elena," he repeated, reching out to shake her hand a bit awkwardly.
Elena seemed nice, trustworthy, and part of him felt like he wanted to tell her all about how he hadn't heard from his dad, how he didn't even know where to go for holidays if he didn't reply, how he was constantly worried that something may have happened to him, but he reminded himself that this girl was still a practicing stranger, so instead he settled for looking out the window again while saying "i grew up in Ireland." He smiled lightly, thinking about the green fields, the forests and animals, the wind that made the fire in their performances dance along with them. "Right around this small town called Mullingar, but we mostly stayed in the surrounding countryside." He decided to take some steps back from the window after Elena had received her letter, not wanting to have an envelope dropped on his face as well. "What about you? What part of the world is your Alley in?"

"Yeah, it wasn't the nicest place but I'm here now." Elena said it as if she was repeating the sentence instead of saying it for the first time, "The fields? Sounds nice, I saw lots of the countryside on the train here, maybe I should go out and look at some point."

Elena gave a small smile and listened to what Ruka had to say, he seemed like an interesting kid. Elena shook the offered hand, trying her darndest to make sure it wasn't awkward. Not that it worked that well, "I'm from East London, learned my high class accent from listening to BBC radio."

The Slytherin thought for a second then dropped back into the cockney accent she usually deliberately hid, "It's an absolute privilege to be meetin' ya Ruka, even if it's in a strange place yeah?"

Elena coughed after that, then returned to the polite speaking voice she was known for, "Yeah, I hide that like, ninety percent of the time. Cool isn't it? Well, it would be if anyone knew I had that. I don't know why nobody's gotten suspicious actually."

She laughed nervously, it's been a while since her accent had been used at all. If her situation was bad she tended to start swearing, her accent was on lockdown though.

Ruka smiled at Elena's words about being here now. It was a good way to look at things, really, wasn't it?
Yeah, life may not have been a walk in the park up until now but at least they were here now, right? 
"The countryside was alright,"  he said, thinking back at nights spent in the fields or in forests. "As long as you have a fire going over night so you don't have any wild animals coming for you." He laughed lightly and leaned against the wall so he could keep an eye on both Elena and the window at the same time.
Their handshake was as awkward as expected and Ruka made a mental note to himself to not shake hands with kids his own age unless they offered him a handshake first. At least the mood was lightened quickly by Elena revealing her real accent, and it made Ruka laugh out loud in childlike wonder.
"Wow," he said, still laughing brightly. "You must have listened to the Radio a lot." He grinned, trying to think of the last time he had heard anything on the radio. It must have been over the speakers of a random market place when they had done some performances during a festival season, but he couldn't say he remembered a lot of people talking there. "But, why are you hiding it? It's a good accent. Suits you." He tried to give Elena a reassuring smile to not make it sound like he was criticising her way of talking. He just didn't see a need for changing her natural accent, especially here where so many students came from all over Britain, with a variety of accents on them.
He pushed himself away from the wall when an owl came fluttering through the window, swerved right past his head and then landed on a pole close-by. To his disappointment it wasn't carrying a letter for him. It would have probably been too early for it anyway.
"So," he said a little awkwardly, not wanting the conversation to end just yet. Despite constantly being surrounded by kids, he still felt like he didn't get to talk to people enough, mostly skipping through the corridors by himself or practicing old choreographies by the lake. "Have you always known, then? That you'd get away from your alley and go here instead?" He wondered how his life would have changed if he'd known that soon enough he would go to a school for magic, with a warm bed and three meals a day. Would he have grown impatient? Stayed even more hopeful? Given up and just waited for his owl to arrive? "It was a pretty big surprise to me, when the owl came, I mean. I thought it was going to attack us, really, I'm still a bit traumatised."

"Still, sounds nice, even with the wild animals." Elena smiled.

"Well, I suppose I can leave my accent as it is for a little while." Elena smiled, happy that she didn't need to fake the accent anymore. It was automatic at this point but it felt at least a little bit good to use her original speech, "Honestly I'm mostly hiding it because I didn't think some of the purebloods here would really like a cockney like myself. Bit vain of me I know, but it's sorta like my hair yeah? Distraction."

Dodging owls appeared to have become the new official Hogwarts sport, Elena should make t shirts. They'd sell well, especially if they had glitter on them, people love glitter.

"I didn't actually." Elena shrugged, "If I'm tellin' the truth, I didn't even know I'd be able to stay here after I got the owl. Thought I'd be dragged back into that life by circumstance or just flunkin' out right? But that professor Griffith sorted it for me. He's a good one, got a good soul."

Elena laughed a little bit, "Those owls do like to hurtle outta nowhere don't they. Poor things probably kill themselves with fright too, I know I would moving that fast."