Edmond Carey
March 13, 2010 3:43 PM
Planning, or Why I'm Not A Crotalus (tag: Cassie Kerrigan) by Edmond Carey
In a way, Edmond had known there was going to be a ball at the end of his second year since his first, but he had not made the connection between the event and the need for him to do anything until midterm. The look on Julia's face the evening she realized he didn't have a young lady to escort to the event was not one he'd soon forget; she hadn't even had to talk much about what people would think before he'd agreed to find an acceptable date after the holidays.If there had been anyone of great social import in his year or the one below it, Edmond doubted he would have even been allowed to select the girl himself. He forgot that he was a Savannah Carey; Julia just ignored it. She had been talking about his potential wives since he had first shown signs of magic, and she considered his biological father's continued existence a minor handicap in being the one to decide which option he ultimately married. For now, though, she had very reluctantly agreed to let strategy alone, though she hadn't neglected to point out that blood was more important than a girl's intellect in these things.
That line of thought worried him. If Julia tried to force a complete idiot on him in a few years, Edmond was afraid she would leave him no choice but to rebel. The very thought of doing that was distasteful to him, but no other idea he had come up with struck him as better. For now, though, he felt he could get by without worrying about it too much. He did, after all, have far more immediate problems to deal with.
Asking Cassie to a party wasn't, in theory, a difficult one to deal with - they were in the same House and year, so she was more or less continually around. Something had occurred to him, though, that very seldom crossed his mind once he'd thought about it for a while, and that was the reality of a chance of failure. She was, after all, very smart and, less importantly, pretty. Someone else might have already gotten to her while he was worrying about being turned down. Being publicly rejected would be awkward, and since he did like her, he'd rather avoid all that if possible.
So, to minimize the potential damage, he had come up with a plan. Instead of asking her somewhere with a lot of people, like the common room or class or the dining hall, he'd just ask her on the way in or out of the common room. The gaping hole in this plan - that their Housemates all used the same door, and could enter and leave it as they pleased - hadn't chosen to reveal itself to him ahead of time, so he spent a long while pretending to be very interested in invisibility to avoid odd looks, and became so caught up in a book on it that he almost missed his target altogether.
Once he noticed her, he had to get her attention much more quickly than he'd planned on, and so sounded more flustered than he would have liked. "Ah - Cassie," he said, marking his place in the text quickly. "May I speak with you for a moment?"
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Edmond Carey
Planning, or Why I'm Not A Crotalus (tag: Cassie Kerrigan)
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Edmond Carey
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