Virginia, and everything she associates with it: dogs, rifles, fleeing before a pack and hoping she’s got the endurance to outlast them.

Not Calder. (Lie.) Because that’s in the past. Heart temporarily broken, courage temporarily lost, and both those things mended with time and one good punch.

Being really, truly unable to do anything about a situation. It’s one thing to fail, or to be too late, or to not be good enough; she can blame herself for that, she can fix that, throw herself into research or practice or something. But if there was honestly nothing she could do? She hates that. It scares her.

She really has very little regard for the idea that magic and the supernatural should be kept secret from the general public. This is partly because she feels that too many unethical things have been done (and are done) to keep a lid on it, and partly because she thinks it’s silly. So she won’t just tell someone all about magic and all that just for kicks, but if she feels someone needs to know in order to protect themselves, she will absolutely tell them.

Fast-forward to the present day. She has pretty well laid to rest most of her anger; she still dislikes where she came from, but she no longer despises her parents, just thinks they’re morally bankrupt and not worth the time to keep boiling about. She is in regular contact with her sister—at this point Sarah has also left home, if less dramatically, and is puttering around the country looking for things that want to eat her, which means that Madeleine is a lot more worried about her safety than before, but much less worried for her emotionally. Madeleine has also finished her education and is now a practicing cursebreaker, with several years’ solo experience under her belt as well as all the crazy stuff she encountered in her travels. She is much more confident than she was as a student, but also more likely to think before doing something foolish (like the Moebius hallway prank she and Theo pulled as apprentices), or at least to set up safety measures before experimenting. She doesn’t have quite the same level of confidence in her former teacher as she used to; she still respects him, but he’s not the larger-than-life, can-do-no-wrong, ultimate authority on all things magical and ethical that he used to seem. And she’s beginning to feel the emotional wear and tear of dealing with the horrific things people do to each other and the times when she gets there too late to help someone.

She’s really not. Madeleine tends to take things in stride, however awkward, rude, or just plain weird they may be. She likes to maintain an air of unflappability, and therefore not likely to show anything if she does feel embarrassed. And while she does apologize for running off on tangents or getting sidetracked by theoretical ideas, she’s not embarrassed about that at all; it’s a part of herself she likes, and she’s only apologizing for taking up someone’s time.