Quote:
Originally Posted by
lemon 
The bow tie made so much sense now. And.. and Alice was feeling out of place. This was why people wore skirts on dates, apparently.
Fireflies. "Also Headlight Elaters. Type of click beetle. They're bioluminescent insects, too, the brightest in the world. More than fireflies. They have two luminescent organs in their prothorax, I think, but they constantly glow and they don't.." She was.. rambling about bugs. In the middle of some kind of romantic gesture he'd planned. "I mean.. but.. those aren't.. the ceiling ones.. they're.. they're fireflies."
Biting down on her lip to keep from saying more until her brain started functioning again, she stood up again and glanced over at him. "You did all of this." For her. "Why?" Her standards weren't very high.
Alice would have been happy with, like, a picnic, he knew.
Okay. Dying a bit on the inside because... because talking about beetles wasn't exactly how he envisioned stuff going. West just wasn't used to second guessing himself but he definitely was doing exactly that. Second guessing. He could recover this though, right? He was an Odessa and a Slytherin. He was WEST. He could DO this.
The little mental pep talk might not have helped with much, but he did gamely say more words.
"I never seen one of those Headlight things." And he liked that she knew about bugs. Just another thing on the list of things. It was a big list too. A big list of little things.
And now she was asking things. West was outwardly still and yet there was a tension about him. Internally he was climbing up the walls and twisting himself into impossible mental knots of sharp-edged panic laced through with the pesky feelings which had made him think this was a good idea to start with.
Yeah, he did all this. And she still wasn't going inside and was he supposed to just stand here and cling to the door handle so that his knuckles would be white forever? Why HAD he done it? Because he liked her? And it was too cold to comfortably go on picnics? And there wasn't a Hogsmeade weekend scheduled for ages? And there weren't any rooftops that you could safely cook pancakes on around here? And because he had stuff he wanted to say for real and proper and things to ask and for things to not be all secret and so that he could snog her and hold her hand in public? Or well, not snog her in public really because West liked to be private about things, but hand holding and stuff...
West swallowed nervously and fixed her with a steady look.
In summary,
"Because I wanted to."