dreaming with your eyes wide open [cordelia]

[Deleted]

At first, Wesley had been nervous to be in an entirely new country. He had been thinking so much about the coup and his grandfather and everything that could possibly be going wrong back home, and hadn't actually thought to let himself enjoy his time in England. His cousins had mentioned that while he was in Diagon Alley getting ice cream, they had gone to a different wizarding locale, which was actually near to the school they'd be attending that fall. They had said that Hogsmeade was wonderful, and the entire night he had been regaled with stories about the various shops, especially the candy store. Wesley had decided that he needed to visit the village for himself. But, just like with Diagon Alley, he wanted to see it without any of his cousins present - partially because he was worried about attracting attention to himself, but partially because feeling normal was actually sort of fun. He didn't have people tracking his every move, and it was weird, but he also liked it. Wes was walking down the streets of Hogsmeade, and even though he hadn't yet reached Honeydukes, he felt like a kid in a candy story. Everything was interesting, and the world felt so much bigger than it ever had. There was so much potential in everything, and he had to stop for a moment to take it all in.

[cordelia regan smith]

@wesley

Going back to Hogsmeade while it wasn’t the school year was odd. Cordelia had never wanted to be near the castle grounds during her break, but it also hadn’t been her idea to go out there either. Her parents had dragged her along as they wanted to go shopping and see the wizarding town when it wasn’t absolutely packed with students. That made sense; she hated it when it was busy too. Crowds were obviously never her thing, and while she could deal with them whilst in Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade during the school year, it was refreshing to be somewhere were only a few souls wander the streets. Most of those, she assumed, were locals that either lived there all year round, professionals conducting business since it was quiet there, or people like her family – the ones taking advantage of the empty stores.

Cordelia was equipped with one of her trusty cameras, as was her thing, and had split up from her parents about an hour earlier. Her initial thoughts on the trip were rather negative at first, but once she discovered the unique look she would be able to get through her pictures, all of that went away. Snapping shots of shops completely void of anyone but their employees became increasingly interesting as she went from one to the next. The few people wandering about managed to make it into a few of her pictures, long shots down the main drag of Hogsmeade, showing the scale of emptiness that she was seeing with her own eyes. One set of pictures consisted of a boy that happened to cross in front of her lens exactly as she was taking them. She had been completely absorbed in her framing that she hadn’t even seen him coming down the street. Quickly pulling the camera away from her face, Cordelia checked to see if she had managed to miss him, or get him in every shot. To her disappointment, it was every single one. Shrugging it off, she brought the camera back up to try once again.

[Deleted]

Wes had vowed to himself once that he was never going to be as paranoid as his grandfather was. Assuming that the world revolved around him wasn’t something that he ever wanted to do, and he felt like paranoia involved a fair level of self-absorption – or at least, his grandfather’s brand of paranoia did. But when Wes saw a girl, pointing a camera his way, he couldn’t help but feel a lurch of fear. Not even a week in Britain and the paparazzi had already found him. He didn’t know how to explain how it felt. He wasn’t angry, but he wasn’t quite scared, either – it was just like he was a kid, far away from home, who knew that dangerous things could happen if his whereabouts were public knowledge. Wes didn’t like approaching strangers (as a rule, they approached him), but he also didn’t like the idea of the girl having a picture of him… and even less the idea that he didn’t know why she was taking pictures of him in the first place. The young prince squared his shoulders and strolled over to the blonde girl, trying not to look too intimidating… not that he was sure he could look intimidating even if he tried. “Hi, I’m Wes.” Wesley said, glad that his years of schmoozing with politicians and royals was finally, actually useful in real life. “I couldn’t help but notice you were taking some pictures…” He cleared his throat awkwardly. He wasn’t used to having the whole ‘no pictures’ conversation – normally citizens were encouraged to take pictures of their royals, and if they weren’t, then a guard would deal with it, not Wes. “I was wondering why you were taking photos of me?” There was no reason to assume this freckled blonde girl was interested in assassinating him until he had more information, after all.

cordelia regan smith

[cordelia regan smith]

@wesley

Cordelia was still caught in her own disappointment about the state of the photos she had just taken when she heard a voice come from somewhere in front of her. It was introducing itself as Wes – a name she was pretty sure she didn’t recognize – and she glanced up from the screen on her camera to see a boy standing there. Her blank stare as she tried to figure out if she had seen him before probably didn’t help if they had never met, but that was nothing new for her. The boy started to say that he saw her taking pictures, and Cordelia was pretty sure she knew where this was going. This was how it always went, after all. He was either going to ask her what she was taking photographs of, such as the surroundings, people, the typical stuff, or he was going to ask her to take pictures of him. If this turned out to be another portrait request, she would probably walk away without saying a word. Her last encounter had involved Gilderoy pestering her relentlessly for a portrait photo shoot and she hadn’t relented at all. If he didn’t get them, some random boy named Wes wasn’t going to either.

She looked back down at her camera as the boy said he had noticed what she was doing, and then he asked if she was taking photos of him. That was strange. She didn’t get that question all that often, aside from Gilderoy, who once again was so self-centered that he always thought everything was about him. Which it kind of was while around him. It was hard to escape that most of the time. Cordelia mulled the question over for a few seconds, wondering how to interpret it. Yes she had taken photos and he had been in them, but that was because he had walked into the frame as she had been snapping them. Did that constitute as her taking photos of him? “I-I uhhh…” she started, gripping her camera in her hands a little tighter. She had no idea why it mattered to him whether or not he was in the pictures. They weren’t exactly flattering, blurry mostly. “Y-You were in the st-street s-so I d-didn’t think it m-m-mattered,” Cordelia added, pointing towards where he had just come from. As far as she was concerned, he was just another fixture to life in Hogsmeade.

[Deleted]

When the girl responded to Wes, she was stuttering, and the boy wondered if he had accidentally come off as intimidating in his questioning – if she was scared of him, or if the stutter was just a normal thing. He was going to assume the latter, just because he hadn’t said anything particularly threatening. All he had done was ask a question in a tone of voice that befit the situation (basically, a calm one). After taking a moment to consider his question, the blonde girl eventually said that he was in the street, so she didn’t think that it mattered whether or not he was in the shot. “It doesn’t matter.” That was Wes’s knee-jerk response, and he immediately regretted it, because it kind of did matter – or at least, his cousins would probably say that it mattered if they heard about the meeting later. Or, worse, if they saw the pictures. “I just – have this weird thing about privacy.” Wes explained. Lusie had told him that he had an accent when he spoke, so Wes was going to hope that came through in this particular conversation, so that when he continued to explain, he wouldn’t seem like he was neurotic (even though he definitely felt that way, given what he was talking about and with whom). “Where I’m from, a lot of people are… not happy with me.” Wes kicked himself mentally. That made him sound like he was a fugitive. As far as he knew, things hadn’t gotten that bad yet, which meant he needed to revise his statement. “I mean, my family’s…” Was there a humble way to say ‘kind of a big deal’? Wes didn’t think so. “My family’s important, so people think I’m important, and that makes it hard to get any sort of peace.” That was perhaps the worst explanation anyone had ever provided as to why he didn’t like his photograph being taken, Wes was sure. He was just going to hope that the girl didn’t think that he was as self-centered as this conversation was making him out to be… though honestly, he couldn’t blame her if she did.

cordelia regan smith

[cordelia regan smith]

@wesley

So it didn’t matter that he was in the picture, but also did? Cordelia was confused by the conflicting responses she was getting. She understood the privacy bit; she liked to enjoy hers just as much as anyone else, and squandering that for someone else was never her intention. But that didn’t change the fact that he said it didn’t matter and then it did. Was it one or the other? Keeping her mouth shut, she opted to continue listening to him instead. Eventually he would have to make up his mind, because she was not the right person to be doing that for other people. Making a decision on whether or not to raise her hand to a question in class was agonizing at its finest, and typically lasted double or triple the amount of time that it would have been to just answer the question in the first place. There was absolutely no way she could make the decision for the boy to want to be in the photograph or not, that was solely up to him.

Staying quiet seemed to work because he kept talking, talking about how where he was from (and she just then noticed his accent), people weren’t happy with his important family, which made him important as well. Cordelia’s ears didn’t really hear the rest of what he was saying, mostly because she was starting to get nervous that this boy was a clone of her encounters with Gilderoy, just not as confident as the Ravenclaw was in himself. Cordelia waited a few more seconds to see if he was finished talking before taking her own turn. “S-So what d-do y-you want m-m-me to d-do?” she asked. Trying to figure out what exactly he was getting at was difficult. On one hand, he was either an heir to a Mafioso, her years of watching classic film noirs now setting alarms off in her head about important, ill received families, or Gilderoy 2.0 and using the premise that he was someone important to try and get her to ask more questions. The best part about all of this was that the pictures weren’t even good. When the boy had stepped into frame, her settings hadn’t been set up for his movement, the shutter speed being slower so she could capture still images better. At most, he was a shadowy blur in the frame. Cordelia simply didn’t have the heart to tell him that yet.