Ha! Ha! I knew I'd finish this…eventually! This extra-super-long chapter (which, incidentally, started out as two completely different stories) is possibly one of the first fics I had ever planned to write, and probably the only one out there for the Anthony/Parvati pairing, and while it holds a special place in my heart, I hope everyone else enjoys it as well. :)

All That I Want

When they find out, people almost always ask him why.

"Why would you get involved with the sister of your dead girlfriend?" some people say, eyebrows raised and more often than not thinking about how sick Anthony and Parvati must be to get married, to have a life, to raise children together despite the history Anthony shared with Parvati's long-dead twin sister.

He could say that he was drunk when it first started. He could say that it was just an accident. He could say that he was out of his right mind, or that she seduced him, or that he had been drugged or hexed somehow. He could even say that it had nothing to do with their shared grief, or that it had nothing to do with the pain they felt at losing Padma and Dean and themselves.

But what no one seems to understand is that to say any of these things would be a complete and total lie.

Anthony Goldstein is sober – perfectly, somberly sober – when he strides up to the gate of the War Memorial, clad in black and snow filling his shoes as he walks. Wielding an armful of white roses, Terry is a few paces behind him; arm in arm with a blind Morag as he helps her navigate the snow-covered path that leads to the monument at the center of the cemetery. There are other mourners there, some laden with flowers and heavy wreaths to leave on the graves, but they are few and far between; others probably driven indoors by the cold and snow, and some unwilling to linger long at the resting places of their loved ones. There's one wreath close to the monument – he thinks it's Alastor Moody's empty grave, but he's not too sure – and the red of the flowers set against the green of the leaves makes him think of Christmas, even though it is months too soon for that kind of decoration.

They approach the monument a few moments later, Morag falling to her knees before it and running her fingers over the familiar names etched into the bronze tablet affixed to the base. Terry and Anthony watch her in silence, their eyes fixed on the names that Morag hasn't found yet: Lisa Turpin and Kevin Entwhistle and Michael Corner and Padma Patil. Terry shifts from foot to foot as Morag keeps searching, passing the roses from arm to arm as Anthony fiddles with the smooth, heavy stones in his pocket.

Morag kisses her fingers and presses them to the stone four times, one for each name, for each fallen friend and classmate and would-be-lover, and Terry hands her the roses for her to place at the foot of the monument. Anthony helps her to her feet, pointedly ignoring the way that Terry and Morag keep rubbing their eyes and brushing tears from their wind-bitten cheeks, and all-too-aware of the fact that his eyes are dry. He sets the stones next to the roses, one right next to the other, and when he turns back to his friends he has nothing to say.

"Let's go for a drink, then," Terry says after a far-too-awkward pause. "There's supposed to be a couple o' D.A. lags meeting up at The Three Broomsticks. D'you think we should join them?"

Morag laughs harshly at a nonexistent joke, part cackle and part cough, and Anthony doesn't answer. The three trudge through the snow as they make their way out of the near-empty graveyard, Terry and Morag joined together and Anthony lagging behind. Neville, Susan, and a few others are there when they arrive, crammed into a booth amongst students and he isn't sure who presses a glass of firewhiskey into his hands, but if he drinks it, Anthony does not taste it.

He squirms in his seat – crammed into the end as an afterthought in a booth meant for six, not ten – and tired of constantly being pushed off of the edge, Anthony takes a seat at the bar behind them. He drinks his whiskey, feeling a little more reckless than normal in his milquetoast way and perhaps more than a little buzzed, when the sight of the pretty girl at the end of the bar makes him do a double take. For a brief second, he thinks that it is Padma Patil. She is sitting by herself, tucked in the corner and her hands pressed flat against the wood of the bar, staring blankly into the empty glass before her, and it takes him more than a few seconds to realize that it isn't Padma, but Parvati.

Without even thinking, Anthony waves Rosmerta over and asks her to send Parvati a gillywater. He watches as the barmaid points towards him when Parvati tries to turn it away, raising his glass in greeting. She smiles sadly across the wooden ocean between them and somehow, they end up side-by-side, like two pieces of driftwood caught in the current. She whispers something in his ear at one point, her voice drowned out by the noise, but her hand is on his knee and all he can do is nod. Anthony turns and tries to ask Terry or Susan if they understood what she said, but Parvati takes him by the hand and suddenly they're pushing their way through the Hogwarts-weekend crowd at the tavern; heading towards the back steps that lead to the rooms Rosmerta rents out.

Parvati's room is right at the top of the stairs, littered with discarded clothes and shoes that Anthony assumes she had tried on before venturing outside, and she stoops to pick them up from the floor and chairs and bed before stuffing them into her suitcase.

"Were you expecting to stay here long?"

She shrugs and kicks the suitcase under the bed. "I came in from out of town, and I wasn't sure what I should wear."

"Where were you?" he asks politely.

"New York City…that's such a cliché, isn't it? It seems like if you've got a questionable past, that's the place to end up."

She stands in the middle of the room and moves her hands nervously across her body; on her hips, on her neck, at her sides, crossed over her chest. The tenseness of her body does not escape Anthony and he stands uncomfortably off to the side, despite the fact that the bed looks rather comfortable. He doesn't want to send the wrong message.

"How'd you end up there?"

"Dean wanted to go. Said that it was the place all artists go, and that he couldn't stay in England without falling apart. My parents were dead, my sister was dead, and Lavender and Seamus were going with him – seriously, what did I have to lose?"

She closes her eyes and bites her lip, like she's trying to push the words she wants to say back into her head, and Anthony stays silent. He shoves his hands into his pockets and watches as Parvati starts to pace across the room. She pauses for a moment at the window, watching the village move below the glass before turning back to speak.

"We lived in Greenwich Village for a while, the four of us in a little two-bedroom and working odd jobs to pay the rent. We didn't need to work, you know…we had the reparation money from the Ministry to spend, but we couldn't just sit around doing nothing. We would have gone crazy. Seamus got a job hauling heavy crates at some warehouse, Lavender took some telemarketer job where nobody would see her face, and Dean just drew pictures in Central Park for tourists."
"What about you?"

"I worked different places…an Indian restaurant, a bookstore, a couple bodegas and corner shops. I, ah, I sang at a jazz bar for a few weeks."

"It sounds like a blast."

She grimaces, and her hands twitch at her sides. "It was. Kind of. For awhile. Seamus had nightmares, and Dean kept having these, I don't know, episodes, where he'd wander off and we wouldn't see him again for a few days, and he'd show up looking like he'd gone through hell and back and not remembering where he'd been. And the worst was when Lavender almost got loose one full moon, and the Advocates – they're like Aurors, see – were on us practically the second they caught her. She was locked up for a few weeks, 'cause they said we couldn't have an Unregistered Werewolf living in a Muggle part of town without some serious repercussions. And I suppose that we were lucky that they let the rest of us off with a fine and a warning, but it all kind of went downhill after that. Seamus and Lavender moved back here, and Dean and I kept fighting and I lost yet another job, and it just, it…it…everything just fell apart and I just keep thinking that if Padma were here, things would be different."

She tilts her head backwards, sniffling and trying to keep tears from falling.

"Padma wouldn't have let Dean talk to me like he used to, and she would have hexed him six ways from Sunday for breaking my heart. Padma would have talked the Advocates out of locking up Lavender. She would have found a job that would keep her for longer than a month. She would have been smarter than me and quicker than me and better than me and would have talked us all out of moving to that stupid fucking city in the first place."

"You don't know that," he says softly, moving closer and trying to be comforting. "It was rough for everyone after the War…she might have made the same mistakes you did."

"She might've, but she was too much of a Ravenclaw to fail like I did. And I…I think it was hard for me because she was gone. I've always been a part of a duo – it's always been me and Lavender, me and Dean, me and Padma – and without any of them I just fail. It's like…like I can't function when I'm by myself!"

Parvati takes a step forward.

"I don't want to be alone anymore," she whispers, tears beginning to roll down her cheeks as she wrings her hands together. He opens his arms then and suddenly Michael's voice rings in his ear, telling him that he was always a sucker for a crying woman, but he's too distracted by the way Parvati seems to fit against him perfectly to think about why he's hearing voices. And with Parvati's face buried in the lapel of his jacket, he can't help but think about Padma.

He thinks about how she used to twirl the end of her long, dark braid when she was thinking. He thinks about how terrible she was at comforting people and saying the right thing, despite the fact that she could repeat Binn's nearly-incomprehensible lectures on Goblin Rebellions practically word for word. He thinks about how he kissed her before she left him and died, frantic and feverish and pressed up against the wall as the rest of the D.A. headed for the Great Hall, and how he was so sure that if they ever got out of this alive, he would drop to his knees and propose to her on the spot. He thinks about how he loved her – really, truly loved her – with all the courage and devotion his seventeen-year-old heart could muster.

He blinks away tears as he thinks about the future they might have had together; their bright, brilliant, utterly possible future dashed upon the jagged rocks of reality, which in turn makes him think of how much Padma would have teased him for being so weepy and maudlin.

"It's…it's not going to stop hurting, is it?" Parvati says thickly, her voice caught somewhere in her throat and her hands making fists in the fabric of his shirt. He rests his chin on the top of her head and holds her tightly until her breathing once again turns slow and even.

"I don't think it ever will," he says when her crying stops, letting his hands fall away from her waist. Parvati stands completely still, and Anthony doesn't reach for her when her hands fall to her sides, doesn't move when she wobbles in her heels, doesn't grab her and hold on like he wants to. The bed looms ominously in the corner, looking both terribly frightening and terribly inviting, but neither Anthony nor Parvati make any move to go near it.

She lets go of his shirt and her fingers curl around the soft fabric of his tie, and Anthony stumbles closer when she tugs on it. Parvati's hands come up first, grabbing Anthony's shoulders like she is going to shove him away, but she doesn't. She doesn't push him away. She pulls herself in, her body small and shaking against his, her mouth a second away and then her lips soft and clumsy against his own. He tries to say something – he doesn't know what, but probably something random that would "kill the mood", as Michael would have put it – but Parvati doesn't let him; she opens Anthony's mouth with her tongue and presses inside, and Anthony's brain seems to shut down.

"Oh, wow," he says, leaning back on his elbows once Parvati pulls away. He is on the bed with no idea how they'd wound up there, and he doesn't really care because Parvati is sitting ramrod-straight beside him, her hands folded tightly in her lap and her eyes trained on the floor. "Have you always kissed like that?"

The corners of her mouth quirk upwards into a small smile, but it disappears almost as quickly as it came. Anthony sits up and rests an arm around her shoulders, fully expecting her to once again lean in close and cry, but she doesn't. Parvati pushes him backwards and hovers over him for a moment, but then their mouths are meeting again and his hands are slowly traveling under her blouse and he can't think of anything else but the way she feels, right here and right now. She straddles his lap, helping him pull his sweater over his head right before tugging at the buttons of her shirt in an effort to pull it loose.

"Padma," he moans, and when Parvati freezes his heart stops cold.

"I'm, I'm sorry," he stammers. "I didn't mean to, you know, honest…"

Parvati hesitates for what feels like an eternity. "Did you ever –"

"No." Anthony doesn't avoid the question, nor does he provide a lengthy answer. He could tell her no, he and Padma never slept together. He could tell her that he'd wanted to, but she'd wanted to wait, and he'd thought that there was time enough for them to do just that. He could tell her that he doesn't understand how Padma could be so utterly alive one moment – so connected to the world in that moment where she kissed him – and how she could be lying cold and lifeless on a table in the Great Hall just a few hours later.

But he doesn't. Instead, he just says No.

Parvati does not move; her hands tight on his shoulders and her lips in a firm, thin line. Anthony feels sick at heart and he leans in to kiss her again, hoping to distract her, but Parvati pulls away and he falls backwards into the rumpled bedding. She opens and closes her mouth a few times, as if the words she wants to say keep moving around in her mouth and she can't put them together just yet. Anthony can only stare up at her, momentarily quieted by the solemnity of her face, her breasts, the dark hair brushing her shoulders.

"I'm not my sister," she says firmly, the deafening silence between them finally broken. "She's dead, I'm not, and we shouldn't do this."

He stares at her for what feels like a lifetime, and once he is certain that she isn't going to change her mind (about the sex, about the crying, about the grief or the pain or his stupid, stupid mistake) he gets up and starts to dress. Parvati pulls her knees up to her chest and rests her chin on her kneecap, staring at the floor all the while and looking like she's about to crumble into pieces.

"I'm sorry –" he starts, silently wondering if for almost going through with this or for loving Padma first is the best way to end his train of thought, but Parvati cuts him off before he can pull the words from his mouth.

"No, Anthony, you aren't," she says quietly, finally lifting her head to look him in the eyes. "But thank you for saying it."

He looks back one last time from the doorway before he shuts the door; wanting to memorize every inch of her face and burn it into his memory forever. Her blouse is still unbuttoned, her hair is short and mussed, and when her eyes meet his he feels a heavy, vice-like ache gripping his heart, but he closes the door behind him and goes back to join his friends.

He sends her an owl a few days later, mostly out of guilt, asking if she'd like to meet him for lunch or coffee or dinner. He thinks that she'll throw away the invite and never talk to him again, but the promptness of her response surprises him. They agree to just talk first, just really get to know each other before they meet face to face again, and every day Anthony finds himself spending fifteen or twenty minutes in the morning bent over a letter from her and trying not to burst into hysterical laughter. They bullshit each other via owl post, making jokes about their weekends, her endless job hunts, his work with Hermione Granger, all the while finding little things that they have in common. He makes all the dorky jokes that his family used to make around the dinner table, stupid puns and little trash-talking digs, and Parvati comes right back at him. She loans him a book, he loans her a record, and neither one mentions The Incident, as Anthony's started referring to it in his head. Overall, it's a pretty good system.

Friday, she asks if he wants to grab dinner with her at the Leaky just as he's getting ready to leave for the day. He knows Hannah Abbott owns it now, and that a lot of their old classmates and D.A. compatriots go there after work and on the weekends, and Anthony figures that it's probably a group gathering she's inviting him to when he sends his reply back to her.

The Leaky Cauldron is decorated from head-to-metaphorical-toe for Christmas, and Anthony can't help but feel a little put-out at the blatant disregard for Hanukkah in their adornments. Green and red garlands drape themselves across every shelf, heavy wreaths hung from every alcove, and mistletoe hangs in random places across the ceiling – encouraging behavior even more unsavory than usual among the pub's patrons, who at least tried to hide their indiscretions between the pools of eerie, supposedly festive lighting filling the room. It's kind of dark in the pub, and not very crowded. He goes straight to a booth in the back, and when he looks around he doesn't see anyone else he knows there. And when Parvati walks in, snow in her hair and bursting with apologies for being so late, Anthony's heart beats just a little faster than it probably should.

Even after all their fantastic conversations these last few weeks, finding out they like so many of the same things and have the same quirky sense of humor, it's still a shock to be sitting right across the table from her, closed into the little booth in the back. He's acutely aware that his long legs take up a lot of room and pulls them in, trying not to brush his knee with hers. He smiles at the waitress when she tells them the evening special, then turns back to Parvati, who drops her eyes quickly to the menu.

It's just a dinner at a pub, he tells himself, deciding between sandwiches. It's not like she asked you out to a real restaurant, or something.

His head is buzzing, though, as he tries to sort it out. If she thinks it's a date, it must be his fault. She's going to think he did it on purpose, because seriously: who goes on a date by accident?

Parvati asks if she wants to split some chips and he looks up at her briefly, shaking his head no. He's probably worrying about nothing. It's stupid of him to assume that she's interested in that way, especially after their agreement not to do things of that nature. He swallows hard when she thinks that. There's his real problem. If she were anyone else, he wouldn't have a problem making sure that they weren't on a date. He probably wouldn't have even gone in the first place. But now that they're actually here, and he's worried about what she thinks, doesn't it mean that some part of him wanted it to be a date?

The waitress is back, asking if they're ready. Anthony looks up, orders a chicken sandwich, and looks away. She gets a chef salad. When the waitress leaves, Anthony makes himself meet her eyes and smile. They pick up the thread of their conversation easily, slipping back into their usual jokes. He realizes what he's been doing is flirting, and his toes curl inside his shoes. He thinks of Padma, and of how they agreed to do the exact opposite of this, but its okay for them to have a harmless little flirtation, right? Everybody likes to flirt. Sometimes he flirts with the girls he works with when they've gone out drinking after a long day at the office, just teasing them or making suggestive little jokes, but no one takes it too far.

It's only fine if everyone's on the same page, he thinks as their food arrives. Only when no one expects anything more.

She spears a piece of lettuce, he digs into his sandwich, and they eat in silence for a moment. Parvati gets a sly look in her eyes and reaches across to sneak the pickle off of his plate. Anthony smiles and slaps her hand by instinct, and she smiles back.

"So, do you have any exciting plans this weekend?" he asks before taking another bite of his sandwich.

"Kind of," she answers, looking straight at him. "I just bought a new couch, and I think I'm going to repaint the living room. The paint looks like terrible in there, all these ugly greens and browns. Ugh!"

He stops chewing for just a second, then finishes up the bite and swallows. She never mentioned that she'd left her room above The Three Broomsticks. "It sounds like it's going to be fun city at your place, then. What color do you think you're going with?"

"Oh, hot pink, definitely," she says. "I want something that matches my dollhouse…that's kind of the focal point of the room. I want you to keep that in mind when you're working, Anthony."

"Oh, I'm going to be doing all of this?"

"Of course…what, did you think I'd do all the hard labor on my own?"

He smiles, and that's that.

It's a spur-of-the-moment decision, really, inviting Parvati to spend the last night of Hanukkah with him and his family. They arrive at the last possible second, and Anthony's grandmother answers the door before he even raises his hand to knock, pulling him into a tight hug and nearly knocking him off-balance in the progress.

"Anthony, darling!"

"Hello, Nanny," he says, trying and failing to break the abnormally strong hold Lonia Linski-Goldstein has on him. "Happy Hanukkah."

"And to you, sweetheart. Oh, it's so good to have you here with the family! I made your favorite dinner, too, just in case you decided to join us. Now, who is your friend?"

"Nanny, this is Parvati Patil," he says, gesturing to the woman beside him. "She and I went to school together."

"It's very nice to meet you, Mrs. Goldstein," Parvati says, beaming as she holds out a plain white box. "I brought cookies. Anthony said that I didn't have to bring anything, but I felt that it would be rather rude if I didn't, especially after showing up here unannounced."

"Oh, thank you, dear. I'm sure Anthony's nephews will enjoy them – Noah and James have such a sweet tooth, I'm surprised all their teeth haven't fallen out of their heads. Now come, come! There's a party inside and it is far too cold to be standing on the porch!" The sleeve of his grandmother's sweater slides down as she takes the box from Parvati, and Anthony catches sight of the numbers tattooed against the soft flesh of her arm. He smiles a bit wider than he normally would as she ushers them both into the house, forcing himself to look away and hoping that Parvati hasn't noticed anything out of the ordinary.

It's normal, as far as Hanukkah's with the Goldstein family go, but Parvati seems dazzled and dumbstruck by the ceremony his family puts on as they light the candles on the menorah. His Auntie Rachel dims the lights as his brother lights the Shamas, and together they all recite the blessing.

"Baruch atah Adonai," Aaron starts, his voice deep and measured. Anthony glances over at where Parvati stands across the heavy wooden table, and the excited, nervous look on her face makes him feel warm inside. "Eloheinu melech ha-olam, asher kid'shanu, b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu l'hadlik neir shel Chanukah."

They all sit as Anthony's father moves the menorah to the little serving table off to the side, and his mother pours the wine as his grandmother brings out the Chinese takeout. Aaron and his wife, Marie, somehow manage to get Anthony's nephews to sit still in their chairs, and Anthony takes the seat next to Parvati after he helps his aunt and uncle pass around the dinner plates. Anthony looks around the table as his father dishes out the food for everyone, listening to the laughter and the chatter that makes the scrubbed oak surface rumble, and Parvati taps him on the shoulder before he can even start to eat.

"I thought your grandmother said that she made your favorite dinner."

Anthony checks the label on the carton of fried rice. "She did – this is from Zhao's Chinese Eatery. It's quite possible that Fa Zhao is the greatest chef alive…if he weren't an eighty-year-old Asian man, I just might marry him."

"Be that as it may, she said that she made it for you. This is just take-away, not a home-cooked meal."

"Hey dad," Anthony sighs, setting down his chopsticks. "What's that joke you always tell?"

Louis Goldstein looks up from his lo mein and grins. "What's a Jewish woman's favorite cookbook?"

"What?" Parvati giggles.

"The phone book."

Anthony and his brother dissolve into laughter as their mother playfully bats her husband on the arm. Parvati rolls her eyes and starts to talk with Anthony's brother about his boys and the bookstore he and Marie own in Golders Green, and the night moves on pleasantly enough as the dinner is finished and the candles on the menorah begin to melt. Noah and James, once freed from their parents' watchful gaze, disappear into the kitchen and return with handfuls of chocolate gelte and the worn wooden dreidel Anthony used to play with as a child. James practically pulls Parvati out of her chair when she asks just what it is that they're playing, and it's odd, because watching Parvati and Noah spin the dreidel on the floor of his grandmother's sitting room reminds him so much of Padma; spending the Christmas holidays at Hogwarts and teaching her about Judah and the Maccabees, of the miracle of the oil, of the rules of the dreidel game.

"She never could get the hang of spinning the thing," he says to no one in particular. His father gives him a strange look as he pours them both another glass of wine, but Anthony just shrugs; too busy thinking of Padma trying to steal his gelte when he wasn't looking to explain anything.

"Anthony used to talk about you, you know, when he'd send home letters from his school." Anthony's grandmother says fondly, pouring more wine for the young couple in her kitchen as they both slide into the barstools next to the island counter. Anthony can hear the near-deafening noise from the rest of his family outside the swinging wooden doors, but it's so relieved by the relative quiet in the kitchen that he doesn't react to the wrongness of that sentence, at first.

Parvati lets out a little gasp of shock and playfully bats his arm. "Did he?"

"All the time," his grandmother grins. "Always going on about how you'd beaten him in some test or how you'd gotten him in trouble when he didn't deserve it. Oh, he wrote about other people, too, but I could always sense a little more affection in the letters he wrote about you, Parvati. And after you were both made prefect! Oh, he was so happy that he finally had someone to talk to that really understood him."

"That wasn't me," Parvati says quietly, her smile faltering. Anthony can feel his cheeks start to burn. "That was my twin. Padma was the one he wrote about, not me."

"Oh! I'm so sorry, dear. Please forgive my mistake…this old mind of mine is always switching names around." Lonia pats Parvati's hand affectionately and gives her a warm, apologetic smile. "I had a twin sister myself, you know."

"Really?"

"Mm-hmm. She was a few minutes older than I was – always lording it over me, too – but she was charming and sweet and had such a way with people. Our father was a tailor, and Tosha, bless her soul, could sell anyone anything, no matter what it was they came in for. There could have been hand-sized holes going all the way down the back of a dress, and I guarantee you that Tosha would have convinced the woman buying it that they were simply for ventilation!"

Parvati giggles and fiddles with one of the loose chocolate coins that are scattered across the table. "If you don't mind my asking, what happened to her?"

His grandmother sets down her wine glass, and Anthony chews his lower lip. He knows how this story ends.

"She died in the camps, dear. I was sent to Dachau, and she and our parents were sent to Auschwitz. I…I never saw her again. I never saw any of them again."

Parvati makes some sort of noise that sounds like a cross between a distressed "oh" and that odd, nervous laugh people tend to make when they are uncomfortable, but Lonia Goldstein pats her hand again and gives them both a sad smile.

"It was a long time ago, Parvati, and I miss her every day. But I know that I'll see her again, and when I do, I want to be able to tell her that I lived my life the best I could without her."

Parvati opens her mouth to say something, but at that exact moment James bursts in through the swinging doors, his face smeared with chocolate and Noah on his heels. Lonia excuses herself as James grabs her by the hand, and the two small boys lead her back out to where the party is moving in full-swing, prattling all the while about the pile of presents they haven't opened yet. Parvati looks at him, Anthony looks at her, and before he can stop himself, he takes her hand.

"Come on," he says as he leads her to the swinging doors. "There's a whole roomful of people out there waiting for us."

They are both full-grown adults, and it isn't like they haven't done any of this before, but they do not go any further than fond touches and good-night kisses until the end of their tenth "real" date. They can see their breath on the air as they laugh their way out of her favorite restaurant, their heads swimming from the bottle of wine they'd polished off over a few hours of easy conversation.

Anthony feels confident enough in the unlikely possibility of Parvati running screaming towards the hills to comment on the pink of her cheeks, which, incidentally, matches that of her Weird Sisters t-shirt and cupcake-shaped earrings. He cringes inside later on, realizing far too late that it was a clumsy excuse for a compliment, and he thinks that he should've told her something classier or more romantic…or at the very least told her how much he liked her hair.

He feels it's up to him then, and when he presses her to the cold bricks outside the steps of her building to kiss her properly, their bodies more shadow than color in the hazy pool of light of the streetlamps, Anthony can't help but hope like a sixteen-year-old version of himself that they can finally take it further that night.

She invites him upstairs for a cup of coffee, and he kisses her softly on the end of her bed, but they don't move further than that – they are both far too drunk for any type of decisive decision on the matter; winding up falling asleep above the covers still dressed in their street clothes. And when he wakes up the next morning, with Parvati's arm draped across his chest and her breath warm on his neck, Anthony can't help but smile and think that maybe – just maybe – things are going to get better.

For the both of them.