Evelyn Stones
October 19, 2019 8:22 PM
Study d-- hang out? [Tag Heinrich] by Evelyn Stones
As it turned out, trying to become a better person, become a better witch, participate in challenges, attend class, and keep up on homework was hard. That was without the extra responsibilities of being a decent friend, eating, bathing, etc. The second challenge was done now, which left only one more, but that also meant the end of the term was drawing closer and closer. It was far enough off yet that Evelyn hadn't yet hit panic mode, but close enough that she was more worried than ever about the homework she had been neglecting. This was an area of her life that she was sure Professor Wright would particularly like to have cleaned up, so she wanted to do her best.Charms homework was significantly easier than it had been before, a fact which had inspired Evelyn to seek help from her other professors during their office hours as well. While she didn't see any of them nearly as frequently as Professor Wright, and mostly focused on the classes in which she was struggling (which meant Professors Hawthorne, Brooding, and Skies saw her the most), she still benefited from the extra time taken to ask questions and clarifications.
Attending office hours did not check off the homework lists though, so Evelyn had taken herself to the library the Saturday after the second challenge to begin making her way through her work. She had thought at first to invite Ness there to join her, but spent more time with Ness than she did with another friend that she wanted to see, and she worked with Ness in more classes already anyway. With that, she had invited Heinrich to join her. She left a space open at the table she had chosen, but not too big a space. All she could do was hope he actually showed up, so she wanted to make sure there was room for him, but she also didn't want to be reminded of his deciding not to by a big vacant spot if that turned out instead.
Hair up in a messy bun, Evelyn pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged on her chair. Textbooks and parchment were laid out in front of her, as well as a bottle of water - the only consumable allowed in the library unless she was feeling really brave - and Edgar snoozed happily within the fields of a scarf Evelyn had brought for that purpose. She took a moment to pet the little pygmy puff's head with the end of her forefinger before retrieving her Transfiguration book and doing her best to pretend she wasn't looking out for the approach of a familiar face.
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Evelyn Stones
Study d-- hang out? [Tag Heinrich]
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Heinrich Hexenmeister
November 12, 2019 1:20 PM
Homework is safe by Heinrich Hexenmeister
Heinrich was feeling pretty good about the year. His team was holding onto first place overall in the challenge rankings, his English was now fluent if still badly accented, his grades were rising with his increased ability to understand the class lectures (and they had never really been bad to begin with), he was enjoying being the potions assistant, and he had a friend in Evelyn. That last had started last year, but now they were actually meeting up on purpose and voluntarily - as this most recent invitation to join her in the library proved indisputably - which solidified their relationship in Heinrich’s mind from ‘kind of a friend’ to ‘definitely a friend’ which was something he hadn’t had at Sonora before.She still didn’t know everything about his parents. He wasn’t sure if she ever would. It just wasn’t something he wanted to talk about or admit to, and he couldn’t imagine how it could possibly come up in conversation where deflection or refusal to speak wouldn’t be the more natural or immediate response that he’d make. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her with the information at this point. Well, he mostly trusted her. Probably. She hadn’t revealed everything about herself either, but he thought he knew enough about her, and he thought she knew enough about him, that further details wouldn’t hurt them at this point. Their friendship, new as it was, was solid, and built on oversharing long before either of them had been really ready to share even the amounts of information they had shared to a virtual stranger. They both had wolves. They knew that about each other.
Heinrich even knew some of the things she fed her bad wolf with. That wasn’t something she knew about him. Most of his bad wolf food was all tied up in The Secret, and he couldn’t loosen any of it without revealing the whole of it, which made the idea of doing so even more intimidating and unlikely to occur. Which, of course, was one of the things feeding that wolf: his fear, his inability to share.
And Evelyn wasn’t calling him on it because she didn’t know, even though that was their agreement, the basis of their friendship: they had pledged to help each other fight the bad wolf, and he was failing to give her all the information she needed to help him do so. It left him feeling guilty and like a bad friend, but fortunately today was about homework not wolves.
That was another thing that pushed them into definitely friends territory. Heinrich couldn’t remember ever doing homework together with anyone before. It had always been a solitary activity. Even before the aurors upended his life, his friendships had all been largely superficial, based around play, or Quidditch. That Evelyn wanted to homework together implied to him that she valued his intelligence and work ethic. That they still often ended up talking about philosophical existentialism suggested she valued his depth of character.
That they didn’t do much that was fun together much might just be an oversight they needed to correct, but it might also mean she didn’t think he knew how to have fun.
And, frankly, Heinrich wasn’t sure she would be wrong. Hilda accused him of that often enough.
But homework today. Homework was easy. Homework was safe.
He could do homework. He was an Aladren. It was a House imperative.
It didn’t take long to find Evelyn already seated at a table with her books spread out around her. He took the chair with the most open space left in front of it, and filled that space with his own books. “Hallo,” he whispered, in deference to their location. A quick evaluation of her current book of study led him to the conclusion, “Transfiguration first?”
He pulled the appropriate one out of his stack.
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Heinrich Hexenmeister
Homework is safe
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Evelyn Stones
November 12, 2019 1:38 PM
Would that it were. by Evelyn Stones
Heinrich had come! He had come! Evelyn was safely out of the range of proximity-based friendship and into an area wherein they hung out because they wanted to. Heinrich wanted to hang out with her. Heinrich wanted to hang out with her.There was some voice inside her head that chastised her excitement, assuring her that it was only going to make it hurt so much more later when her hopes were dashed. For a long time, she had been pretty convinced that no one could possibly want to hang out with her unless they wanted something from her. Sometimes, she still thought that. Most of the time she still thought that. Except evidence was to the contrary so far; Ness, Malikhi, Julius, sometimes her House mates, and now Heinrich all wanted to hang out with her on purpose. There was literally nothing she could offer any of them, so it must not be for sake of gaining something from her, and she didn't think any of them were the sort of sadists who would lead her on just to make it funnier when they let her down later. No, this was more than that.
As it turned out, friendship felt nice. It also felt different with each friend. Evelyn hadn't expected that. Friendship with Malikhi felt like walking along an old bridge; it was exciting and beautiful and special, but also prone to breaking and there was too much fear there. Friendship with Ness felt like a good shower; it was warm, gentle, cleansing, healing, and totally vulnerable. Friendship with Julius felt like an inside joke; there was no real guarantee that they were on the same page at all, but she was pretty sure they were in the same book at least.
But friendship with Heinrich was different, in part because she was almost sort of embarrassed. Heinrich was older than her, cooler than her, nicer than her, and wildly mysterious. She couldn't stand in the face of everything that Heinrich was when everything she was seemed so much smaller. Not to mention the fact that he knew more about her than most people and knew things about her that even Ness didn't know, except they didn't have all the background to make that seem normal. It seemed like they were playing catch up to make sure their friendship was high enough to justify the depth of a relationship built on insecurities, fear, and loneliness. Except that it wasn't as hard as it should've been because Heinrich really was nice and kind and Evelyn really was happy to see him.
She focused on that as he took a seat, and quickly moved her stuff so he had more room. "Hallo," she replied, smiling vibrantly. "I'm glad you came." It wasn't the sort of thing she would normally have said, because it admitted to a fear that he wouldn't have come, and it expressed more emotion than she tried to, but that was just the nature of things with this Aladren. The fact that her two closest friends were in that House made all the suppressed resentment of having been sorted into Pecari bubble up again, but she squashed it. She was where she was supposed to be probably hopefully maybe.
"Transfiguration is hardest for me," she replied, showing him her homework which had only her name written at the top and no actual text yet. "I figured it needs my attention the most right now. I'm not blowing stuff up so much now, but I'm also not making anything happen when I wave my wand either. That makes transfiguration a bit hard." Ah, okay so maybe this was why she hadn't been sorted into Aladren.
Evelyn looked up at Heinrich again and found the same mystery in his eyes that always seemed to lurk there. She wondered if her own eyes said so much without ever saying anything at all.
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Evelyn Stones
Would that it were.
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Heinrich Hexenmeister
November 12, 2019 3:44 PM
This is nice by Heinrich Hexenmeister
Given a little more space, Heinrich pushed his non-Transfiguration books out to fill the available area and give him room to get his own homework sheet out. He hadn’t started his yet either, and the first thing he did was catch up to Evelyn by putting his name on the page.“Transfiguration is hard,” he agreed. Honestly, it didn’t test as badly as, say, Herbology and Potions, where all the vocabulary and names for things were in the wrong language compared to the text book he used for reading the lessons and completing the practical assignments. His grades were lower in those two due to his not recognizing what was actually being asked about on written exams, though he understood the material just fine. Both professors were pretty good about accepting make-up work when the problem was so clearly a language barrier, but he wasn’t sure the CATS would be so forgiving next year and he was trying not to go to them for that so much anymore. This year, he had both English and German texts and he was trying his best to get by on just the English, but he couldn’t always manage it.
By contrast, in Transfiguration, the actual spellwork was more complex than in any other class and his struggles with the subject were more like anybody else’s. The only solution was exhaustive practice. Written work though, he could probably help Evelyn get through without endless tedious repetition.
“I can help with the theory,” he told her. “However, practice is the only way to make spells better. Unglücklicherweise.” He smiled at Evelyn, raising an eyebrow to see if she could guess the word. It was nice, being able to intentionally sprinkle a German word into his conversation every now and then, because his friend was trying to learn his native tongue.
It was nice, having a friend.
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Heinrich Hexenmeister
This is nice
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Evelyn Stones
November 13, 2019 2:48 PM
You really think so? by Evelyn Stones
It felt good to hear that she wasn't the only one struggling with Transfiguration. She had heard people say that it was one of the hardest subjects - objectively - but it was hard to tell whether they were just being nice or not. She didn't have the advantage of a bad relationship with Professor Skies to blame so she figured it must have been herself that was the problem. However, Heinrich had a hard time too. She thought others probably did as well, but it meant a lot."Do you think people are born good at certain things? Or do you think anyone can be good at anything if they really try?" She was proud of herself for not sounding desperate when she asked, although she suspected Heinrich would be able to piece together why she was asking. They'd already talked about being better wolves than their parents, but did predisposition apply to skills and talents too? What if Evelyn was just destined to never be very good at magic? That was a bummer to think about. She wanted to argue that she had strong magic in her genes - look at her father or CJ - but she also knew she had stunted magic in her genes. She'd never thought of her mother as a squib, just a muggle, but she couldn't help wondering whether that had impacted her own abilities. Ness had mentioned that it could be other things too, like fear or an unhealthy environment, but it was hard to know for sure.
"I'd really like to be good at magic. I've been here for almost three years and I'm still not even good at basic stuff. Maybe I'll just stick to theory. I'd love your help with that," she smiled, grateful for his offer.
She thought again of her conversation with Professor Wright about theory books for Charms and thought that maybe a magical researcher job would be fun. She wouldn't need to do much magic, just observe it and take notes. That would be a good fit for her maybe.
"That means . . . maybe . . . " She paused, trying to sound out the word again but with little luck. She didn't know what it was she was sounding out. "Maybe 'practice makes perfect'?"
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Evelyn Stones
You really think so?
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