hope can be ferocious.

She’d always had a slight dependency on her to do lists, but right now, they seemed to be the only thing keeping her afloat. Alice lived her days by checking off things she needed to do ( practice this charm, write that essay, go to that club meeting ). It kept her moving, kept her focused on the many tasks at hand. For the first time, she felt like she’d taken on too much — but even now, she was refusing to drop anything. Not Quidditch, not any of her classes, none of her clubs. She wasn’t going to give in to that; it’d mean she was crumbling, and she was not ready to admit that something like that was close to happening. The only thing she could admit to was that her temper was growing shorter with every day that passed. She was reminded of that when she was helping Madam Pince while fulfilling a few of her Head Girl duties. “I need EVERYONE to shut up!” Eyes flashed over a group of first years, who’d been giggling at what she supposed was a dirty drawing in a Transfiguration book. “Now. This is a LIBRARY, for Merlin’s sakes. Hush.”

Ella had come along to the library with Alice when she’d gone to help Madam Pince—it wasn’t as if Ella had any need to be there, exactly, but, well, Alice was there. Not that Alice would ever handle pity well—-which wasn’t exactly what Ella would have classified it as, anyway, though Merlin only knew if Alice would understand that—-and so Ella had taken along her reading list for her Charms research assignment. It had mostly been a pretext to go along with Alice, but it was actually really useful, and she’d ended up making some solid progress by the time she heard Alice raise her voice. Ella wasn’t there out of pity, genuinely. Of course she felt awful for Alice—-though she had to assume her cousins’ opinions on the situation might vary more—-but pity could sometimes feel patronising. It was more like—-Alice had never been particularly fantastic at stepping away when things got too much, at least in Ella’s opinion, and she had no doubt that it was more true than ever. And there was a validity there—-sometimes, Ella thought, it was helpful to have things to throw yourself into, to keep yourself moving when everything happening around you would have you frozen in emotions if you stopped to think about it. The flip side, though, was that you could throw yourself into so much that you could crack. Which—-Ella didn’t really know what she’d be able to do about it if that happened to Alice, but she was sure of one thing: she would be much better at recognising it than Alice, mostly because she wouldn’t consider it a personal failure.

And so, when her Charms reading was interrupted by Alice’s raised voice, Ella wasn’t really surprised. It was a reasonable objection, after all, though Ella was pretty sure Alice would usually be a little calmer about it—-or at least, it would take a little more for her to react like that. She didn’t know what to say to the first years—-that Alice was in a bad mood, and it wasn’t just them? True as it was, it didn’t mean Alice wanted to hear it, and whilst Ella didn’t particularly think what people wanted to hear was important compared to what they needed to hear, she didn’t exactly think riling Alice up was going to make the First Years feel any better. “Maybe head to the study table by the Divination section,” she suggested to the younger students, flashing the briefest of smiles. “It’s usually available—-just watch not to knock over Illustrated Icthyomancy—it smells like dead fish, and Peeves goes nuts for it.”

She then turned to Alice, standing and picking up her list of textbooks for her assignment—-about half of which she’d collected or crossed off. Leaving her collection of books at the table with her inkwell and roll of parchment, she commented, “that was... a very vehement defence of library conduct. Seen Nuances of the Non-verbal anywhere during your library duties?”