Nathaniel Mordue
January 31, 2020 12:26 PM
Preoccupations (prefects' lounge). by Nathaniel Mordue
Sylvia was off with her girlfriends, which meant that most likely, Nathaniel should have been seeking out Jeremy. He needed to spend as much time as possible with his brother, either to hopefully provide some stability in Jeremy’s life or at least keep him out of trouble. If he wasn’t doing that, he should have been studying, or monitoring the Teppenpaws, or otherwise being the perfect Mordue and perfect prefect and perfect beacon of perfection. At the very least, in the comfortable semi-privacy of the prefects’ lounge, he should have been ‘charting’ – filling in the stupid charts Dr. Greene demanded of him about his moods and energy level and times of day when those occurred.Instead, though, he was sitting in the most closed-off corner of the lounge, his back to a wall so he could see anyone approaching for any angle, with a book open in his lap, open to a letter secreted inside the pages.
It was foolish, of course, carrying it in a textbook. He should have kept all these things that he wasn’t supposed to have – his old photographs with his mother in them, letters from her, gifts she had given him over the years – all locked away in the bottom of his trunk in his room, out of sight, if he would insist on keeping such things at all. He didn’t, however, seem to be able to keep himself from playing with fire – putting his mother’s portrait on the nightstand in its old pride of place, hanging his walls with portraits of his real home, even wearing an old locket of his mother’s – a relic of the time when they had had a real family, when his father had still been with them – under his collar every day.
Destructive behavior can be a plea for attention, Dr. Greene had observed over the summer, trying to analyze his near-collapse the term before and The Letter he had sent to Sylvia last term. When you don’t express your feelings to your loved ones in healthy ways, they can emerge in distressing ones that don’t really help you pursue your goals.
Nathaniel thought that might have been good advice to consider now, if he had been at all clear what his goals were. He did not want to be disowned, after all. If that happened, he lost Sylvia and he abandoned Jeremy, and he couldn’t do that. He didn’t want to get caught with things he wasn’t supposed to have, didn’t want to be interrogated about them. And yet, he couldn’t seem to force himself to follow the most prudent courses of action, or even the second-most prudent, as destroying all these mementoes would be the most prudent thing he could have done.
At least, he thought, this particular fit of irresponsibility had something vaguely resembling reason behind it. This letter was about photography, and that was a subject which had been much on his mind lately.
He couldn’t get Tatiana Vorontsov out of his head. Part of this, of course, was the same old same old. The rest, though…what she had said, her wild Muggle portrait idea which told stories. It seemed impossible. Portraits might have the capability to learn lines and act out a script – maybe – but they were fickle, would have to be convinced. They couldn’t just be asked to play the same thing over and over again whenever someone wanted to see it. And that assumed a painting would have the memory capacity for such a lot of information – dialogue, costuming, movements, settings – anyway. So how could it work? It couldn’t, just as he’d told her.
He kept turning it over in his mind, though. One could play records, after all – recordings of sounds – and play them over and over. So could it be possible to do things with images? Some images were more mobile than others, and if one took pictures at the same event, they could – within their range of movement – reflect different points in the event. The trouble was, though, that they often waved at the audience, rather than doing what the people had been doing, much less acting as though an audience wasn’t there and acting out a play, so even if one photographed individual scenes….
He looked over his mother’s words, which were unhelpful but reassuring, and heard the door open. He turned a page quickly, so he could turn another before anyone could get close to him and thus safely obscure the page. He looked down over the information about the history of the camera obscura, then up to nod politely at another prefect, all very proper.
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Nathaniel Mordue
Preoccupations (prefects' lounge).
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Heinrich Hexenmeister
February 02, 2020 1:30 PM
Do you want tea? by Heinrich Hexenmeister
This was not the first time Heinrich had come to the Prefect's Lounge since the school year began and he'd become Aladren's newest prefect. The prefect meetings were here, after all, and he had even come by a few times on his own before now, just for the novelty of a new room where he hadn't been allowed before. He did not frequent it often, though. His room was more private, making that his first go-to for a place to escape the rest of the school. If he was feeling irrationally social, he could go to the common room and wait for younger students to need a prefect, or go to the library where he might run into more people than just Gary who he actually spoke to semi-regularly.He was not feeling irrationally social today, but he wasn't quite feeling isolationist enough to hole up in his room either. If the weather had been nice, he probably would have gone out for a run, but it was raining, and his desire to run did not exceed his desire to not get wet.
So here he was. He opened the door and stepped inside and almost turned around again when he saw the room was already occupied. Had it been Gary, there wouldn't have been a problem. Heinrich was mostly comfortable sharing a space with Gary now. He wasn't sure he'd go so far as to call them friends or anything, but they had common interests, and that was enough.
Had it been almost anyone else besides Nathaniel, he probably would have apologized and retreated. Mikey didn't bother him, generally speaking, and Caitlin at least didn't have seniority on him, so maybe he would have made some tea and left, like that was all he'd come in for, had either of them been the one already seated in the lounge. Leaving them their prior claim but not conceding that he had equal rights to be there. That was a good idea, actually, a neutral opening, so he went directly over to the counter to start making tea. "Do you want tea?" he asked politely, as if this was something ingrained in his culture, like he was British or something instead of German. Well, he'd had tea time at home in Germany but, as a ten year old, Heinrich had always considered the cake part of that tradition infinitely more important than the tea. He hadn't even liked the tea much.
Truthfully, he still didn't. But he could sip some down if he had to, because meeting people was just plain awkward in his experience, and this would at least give him something to do with his hands, and equally give him an excuse not to run away too quickly and an opportunity to retreat with honor in just a few minutes.
And in those few minutes, he could test the waters to see if maybe Nathaniel was interested in talking to Heinrich. If not, he could leave with no harm done. If he did, well, maybe the superficial similarities lining up between them this year might result in Heinrich actually making a second friend, one who wasn't a girl and brought with her girl-shaped complications.
Point one, they were both new prefects this year, chosen by dint of being the only available person in their House and Year. Point two, they were both on the Quidditch team, and Nathaniel was even working closely with Heinrich's sister as the team's two Beaters. Point three, well, he wasn't entirely sure what had happened to Nathaniel this past year or so, but he was pretty sure there was a bad wolf involved, and he knew a thing or two about bad wolves.
Having started warming the water, he took down one tea cup from the cabinet and then glanced over at the other fifth year before reaching for another.
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Heinrich Hexenmeister
Do you want tea?
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Nathaniel Mordue
February 16, 2020 6:14 PM
I suppose it can't hurt. by Nathaniel Mordue
Nathaniel had no objection to Heinrich, and - as far as he knew, which admittedly wasn't far - no reason to shun the other fifth year's company. Therefore, he arranged his face in a polite smile to go with his polite nod when he registered who had entered the room.Since he had spent four and a half years in classes with the guy, though, Nathaniel did not bother turning another page in his book to better conceal his mother's letter at first. When he made the decision, it was initially because previous exposure to Heinrich made him think the interaction with the Aladren prefect was unlikely to go all that much further. When he followed through with it further, it was because he was surprised to be abruptly offered tea.
Tea was not, on the whole, something he thought of as a thing guys just took together. Admittedly, his only real models for how other males socialized together without women involved adults (who drank alcohol, it seemed, or nothing at all) and Simon and his roommates (who had had the additional excuse that they were all in a year together and also had food in front of them), but he didn't think it was a thing, usually, between people their age and gender. When he thought of taking tea, he mostly thought of either being ill, or of Aunt Avery and - in happier times - his mother presiding over tea parties with other women and tiny iced cakes and miniature sandwiches that seemed utterly pointless to him in their insubstantiality. However, there was nothing actually objectionable about the beverage, and he knew it was quite the thing in other countries. Plus, he was pretty sure tea was generally caffeinated, and while he was also reasonably confident that it wasn't as good of an upper as coffee, anything was better than nothing.
"Sure, that sounds like...nice," he said, his tongue not deciding between two ways to finish that sentence in a timely fashion and so coming out with an amalgam of them both. "Thank you," he continued, pretending the slip had not happened, because that was simply what one did when anything went wrong. It was just ignored until one could almost convince oneself it hadn't really happened at all, if enough effort was put into it. "It's nice having somewhere we can get things without worrying someone's going to want us to...prefect at them, isn't it?" he added, using this as an excuse to firmly close his book, though he stopped short of putting it in his bag yet, as that might draw more attention to it than just sitting with it.
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Nathaniel Mordue
I suppose it can't hurt.
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