#orch.starter

Curled up in the staff-room, feet tucked underneath her, Cass flicked through old travel journals, wistfully sighing at the weight of her own adventures. She couldn’t go back. Would never go back. Because things could never, should never, be the same way twice. Where was the fun in that? All the same, it was bittersweet to relive her own memories, mournfully longing to be out in the world once more. Hogwarts was big. But the world was bigger.

Ears twitching at the sound of footsteps approaching, Cass spoke without looking up from the pages. “I wouldn’t sit there if I were you, it’s cursed.” Reading the final sentence on her page - a very graphic account of a lovers touch in Barcelona (oh how she longed for the sweetness of sunshine, winter was far too melancholy for its own good), she closed the book, looking up for the first. Breaking into laughter, she batted away her own words, playfully grinning. “Nah, I’m just messing with you. Peeves hasn’t been here in here in years.” 

When Marlowe Daedalus was in the zone of his work all else fades away. Which was why he had scheduled his life down to the minute: class time here, office hours there, grading papers and meals combined to save time, and nights were his thesis.

Or it would have been if he had a thesis to work on.

Instead he is reading a theory on the origins of Everte Statum, a dueling spell, and hoping that a particular line or phrase would reach out and grab him as it had years ago. But he couldn’t see beyond the basic, couldn’t find it himself to have any passion about it except in the ways he could introduce it to his student in a few weeks. 

Marlowe was scribbling in the margins of the textbook when he heard the knock on his open door. “Whatever it is not now I am busy.” It was becoming to difficult to fit the notes into the thin white spaces and it was even harder to concentrate when he could feel someone hovering just outside his field of vision. Looking up he squinted above the rim of his glasses. “For Merlin’s sake wh — “ The visitor’s blurry expression became clearer as he pushed his glasses up the brim of his nose. This wasn’t about inviting him for a drink and idle conversation. “What happened?”

   long after dinner had concluded, dana left her private chambers to sneak up to the astronomy tower for a quick smoke. she'd been trying to get back into working on her research - motivated by the start of the new semester - to the point where even during dinner she'd had a book on the table and was reading through the chapters at a mad man's pace. up until now, she'd been reading and making notes about several new publications in her field, and though some were enjoyable to read, none of them brought anything new to the table and thus did little to help further dana's own work.