All that and then none [Professor Wright] on Charms

Evelyn Stones

August 24, 2020 1:06 AM

All that and then none [Professor Wright] by Evelyn Stones

CW: Reference to child abuse.

It was odd to be here again somehow, knocking on Professor Wright's door because he was just that: the charms professor, sat at his desk behind a wooden door, waiting for Evelyn so their session could begin. He seemed like much more than that now, and visiting him in such capacity seemed funny. Still, that was the capacity that brought her to his door tonight so she knocked and waited for his permission to enter.

When it was granted, she entered with a smile and took a seat opposite the professor. "Hello," she said plainly, albeit pleasantly. They exchanged greetings and pleasantries and when a moment opened for Evelyn to bring up the question that was burning in her mind, she took a breath."Sir, I wondered if I might ask you something about something that happened at the funeral," she began, feeling uncertain all of a sudden. She glanced down, fidgeting with her fingernails. "When we were talking with Mr. Carmichael, you and Heinrich both thought to draw your wands, but I didn't." Evelyn frowned, aware that she hadn't asked a question yet, and that there were a number of places she could go with this. There were a number of things she should probably take to Dr. Greene, but Professor Wright was her preferred confidante and he was kind. Plus he knew her very well, and he knew her magic.

"Mr. Carmichael said I'm a bad witch with almost no magic. When he... Uh. Hurt me... Before... I couldn't do any magic to make him stop. That's what he was referring to," she added, in case that wasn't clear. She really hoped the rest of what she said was clear without having to go into it further. "And now I didn't even think to pull my wand." She signed and leaned back in her chair, trying to project and attitude of frustration and curiosity rather than fear and anxiety. "Am I just as bad a witch as he said?"

22 Evelyn Stones All that and then none [Professor Wright] 1422 1 5

Grayson Wright

August 24, 2020 11:00 PM

I'm told there's no such thing as a total vacuum in nature. by Grayson Wright

If he was being honest with himself (something he found difficult to avoid, as a rule, often to his chagrin), Gray was perhaps more apprehensive about meeting with Evelyn after her father’s funeral than at any point since the meeting which had begun their particular association, several years ago now. He was not concerned with Evelyn losing control this time, though, but instead with whether or not anything which had happened off-campus would come up, and whether it would be better or worse if it did….

On the plus side, though, being unable to come to a conclusion made it relatively easy to say ‘of course’ in his calm, hopefully reassuring Professor Wright voice when Evelyn asked if she could ask about something that had happened. It was slightly harder to not react at once when she more or less confirmed the impression of past events he had gotten at the event (it was not, he was reasonably sure, healthy to want to go find someone and then chuck them over the ledge into the Grand Canyon) but he thought he confined himself mostly to squeezing his own hands together rather hard atop his desk as she went on, and then asked her question.

“No,” he said at once. “No, he’s not correct there at all. I’ve always believed you have the talent – that’s not the issue at all. The problem is more…well, if I may be frank, it seems to me, your father and that…man.” Do not use vituperative language in front of students. “It’s…you know I did a lot of reading about accidental magic and the development of magical talent, when we began our meetings. Children who aren’t treated well – who go through traumatic events….” He paused, trying to arrange his ideas. “There are many ways any of us may react when bad things happen. Most of the time, when children start exhibiting accidental magic, it is somehow a response to some stress, or some desire – but people react differently to those things. Some might fight – accidentally produce a hex, for example, some might run, or accidentally Disapparate…and sometimes, you just freeze in place. It’s not unheard of for children to lash out with magic after the event, when the threat has already been resolved. It’s not unheard of – though it’s rarer, thank goodness – for them to turn their powers inward, against themselves….”

His tone and expression were extremely bleak as he remembered things he had read. The ultimate divorce between the Muggle and Magical worlds had been a more complex matter than the most conservative history books tried to portray it as, but there was no doubt that there had been consequences to the sporadic bouts of persecution their kind had faced. Witches and wizards could, if they knew what they were doing, control magic, focus it, use it…but it still existed separately from them. It existed within them and between them, within and between other things, all in an endless, intricate web of connections, and none of the points where those threads met – people, plants, animals, the earth itself – had much of a say in the matter. There were witches and wizards, sometimes, who passionately wanted to stop being what they were, but it was generally agreed that it was impossible, short of death. There was no way to reject magic; either you controlled it, or it ran wild with you, and if that happened, Gray frankly thought it was the lucky ones who died quickly of it. There had been some horrific things done, in the past, simply to see what would happen; this was part of the reason why the Cruciatus and Imperius curses were listed among the Unforgivables, despite the wide variety of other spells that existed which could be used for torture or control. If a witch or wizard was driven out of his or her mind – really and truly, beyond recovery – with a fully developed magical ability, the results could be…horrific wasn’t the word. Something horrific was what happened when a child’s undeveloped powers took on a life of their own, filtering through a channel with no real control over them but deep wells of terror and anger to amplify them, and generally more or less ate the affected child alive from the inside. Cases where such things had happened with adult subjects went beyond horrific in the things that could happen….

“That didn’t happen to you, thank God, if there is one,” he resumed, putting those thoughts aside again, “but you were told these things, about your mother, about what the likes of him thought that meant about you, and it’s easy to convince a child of something…and your response to the things that happened to you wasn’t to fight. Based on, er, the things that have happened here, with me, I’m assuming that your abilities come to the forefront best when you aren’t frightened – perhaps anger works better for you, or perhaps it’s simply that you’ve felt you could express it when you’re angry because you didn’t believe I’d hurt you, where you might have tried to suppress your abilities when you were younger because you might have thought using them would mean being hurt further, instead of magic solving the problem. You were a child, being harmed by adult men, who were more powerful than you – at that time – in every way – “

He cut himself off again, realizing he was sounding openly angry. Harsh furrows had formed about his forehead and around his eyes. “Perhaps neither Heinrich nor I are well-acquainted with the Unforgivable Curses,” he resumed, a bit more calmly, “but neither of us has ever had any cause to fear that…individual. I’m, ah, not proud of this, as such, but while I kept my wand out in case I needed to defend you or Heinrich – “ or, though he did not plan to mention this to Evelyn, to stop Heinrich from doing something it would be difficult to take back, if it had come to that; morally speaking, cursing the man in any manner a sixth year was capable of was probably an acceptable action, but the law had only a coincidental relationship with ethics much of the time, and given the information in Heinrich’s file, it was anyone’s guess how rationally or fairly the law would treat him if given the chance – “I have to admit, my first thought was to hex Mr. Carmichael until he forgot what year it was, because I – ah – believed he was insinuating that I was – the sort of person to do – abhorrent things.” He rubbed his temples, rather wishing he could pinch out the memory of the moment he’d realized the implication and discard it. “And that he is the sort of person who’s done those things. And he was upsetting you, I didn’t like that at all, not at all…I was quite angry, actually. But as I said – he’s never been in any position to harm me, and I had no reason to assume he was the better wizard between us. Neither did Heinrich. Neither of us will ever know what we would have done in your position – but no. You aren’t as bad a witch as he said. And I’ll repeat that as many times as you ever feel like you need to ask – since I know, it’s not easy, getting things out of your head that have been there a long time. But you’re nothing like anything that man said.”

16 Grayson Wright I'm told there's no such thing as a total vacuum in nature. 113 0 5

Evelyn Stones

August 24, 2020 11:40 PM

I was gonna suggest the Hoover Dam. But uh . . . yeah, that's man-made. by Evelyn Stones

Evelyn liked magic theory quite a lot. It was her sessions with Professor Wright that made her sometimes wonder if maybe she wouldn't like law school so much as something in magic theory somehow. She wasn't exactly sure what sort of careers that could mean, especially as the idea of eventually displacing her favorite professor was rather sad, but it appealed to her. Her anger made her want to be a lawyer; her passion made her want to study magic theory. Perhaps there was something there. Maybe she could work with kids who had problems with their magic like she did. Maybe some day, she could say 'like she had,' and it would all be past tense because she'd be a good witch. Or maybe she could go on to prove that you didn't have to be a strong witch to be a good witch; she was going to get on just fine in the magical world. Like Gary said, she'd gotten this far.

Professor Wright's explanation spoke to that part of her brain, which she appreciated because it was easier to think than to feel in conversations like these. Poor Professor Wright, bless his soul, seemed like he felt exactly the same way most of the time. She really did like Aladrens on the whole. At first, his moving on without comment or clarification made her think that maybe he didn't understand, but when he kept talking she was sure he did. That was another nice thing about him; he could understand and never have to say so to make her feel seen.

As he went on, however, she had a realization about something she'd never even considered before. Part of it was the underscoring of the fact that he cared about her and worried about her, which she had known but which was nice to see. He seemed sincerely compassionate and sad for the children who turned their magic in on themselves, and she could only imagine why. If her bouts of elemental forces were turned inward even in their own form, that would be awful; a ball of fire burning in her stomach was figurative often enough but literal? And that wasn't even to say how awful it would be if it was the raw force of magic that turned in on her. She well understand the feeling of being betrayed by her own body, and she hated to imagine it would be like in an even greater sense.

That aside, the professor was correct; Evelyn had never had more than a cursory anxiety of being alone with him and that had been short-lived. On the whole, Evelyn trusted Professor Wright entirely and she'd never even really worried about earning his ire, let alone his actual anger or retaliation. She'd never had to be afraid with him. And he and Heinrich had never had to be afraid like she had.

That was an almost unimaginable idea. To think there were people who didn't go through life like she did made sense cognitively, but she couldn't imagine what that would be like. As far as she knew, of course, Ness didn't go through life the way that she did, but Ness also was more vulnerable in some of the ways that Evelyn was herself, even just in terms of size, and there was something innate about the sort of fear that went along with that. It was the thing that made you check over your shoulder when you were walking alone, although at Sonora, that might still just be her.

More than that, while she was well aware that Heinrich and Professor Wright had more in common with the people who had harmed her than they did with her, at least physically, she had never considered that they were aware of that. What must it be like to be so much larger and stronger than other people? She thought of CJ, about the only person she'd ever met that was that much larger or stronger than, since even the first years weren't that much smaller than she was, and her heart seemed to be trying to batter itself to bits on the inside of her ribs. The thought of someone hurting him, in any way . . . of someone even as strong as she was hurting him. And she'd only been a few months older.

She wanted to reassure Professor Wright but she wasn't even really sure what she was reassuring him of. He seemed to be grappling with the fact that even for a moment, in the mind of someone whose opinion was unarguably invalid, he had been capable of something awful. To a good man, to a safe man, that idea was so disgusting and horrific that it made him have a physical reaction. She was sure that was true of Kir and Fionn too, but it wasn't a conversation she'd had at length with them this way and they were both more used to being around people who had experienced such things, so the shock of it had probably worn off some. Or else, they hadn't been actively put into that role in a twisted monster's view of the world, at least not for a while.

Guilt made Evelyn's stomach tie itself in knots and she felt like she must be the most self-centered person to not have bothered checking in with Professor Wright about this or any other issue, but she pushed that aside. This guilt belonged solely to her father and to Mr. Carmichael and to all of the other bad wolves out there, not to her. Unlike lycanthropy, these wolf bites did not a new wolf make.

It was odd to think of Heinrich as be as confident as Professor Wright had been, or at least enough confident to hold his own in the moment. It was odd to think that, of the four of them standing there in that moment, two of them knew exactly what happened and the other two knew basically what happened, and the only one voted off the island was Mr. Carmichael. He was the one who did something wrong, not Evelyn. He was the monster, not Evelyn. He was a monster because he was Mr. Carmichael, not because of anything else. Men, Evelyn knew, were not inherently monsters, but they had always seemed inherently more dangerous to her. It had never once crossed her mind that perhaps, as much as it frightened her to know what people were capable of doing to her, it frightened some of them to know what people were capable of doing with the same bigger, stronger bodies.

It was odd too to think of how big a difference people doing the right thing could make. What might have happened if she'd gone to the funeral alone? She doubted anything like had happened before would happen again, but the fact that it was a doubt and not a certainty also made her stomach tumble a bit. If she hadn't managed any magic, what would she have done? They'd all said that if she really didn't want those things to happen, then she could have stopped it, but why should she have to stop it? Why did it take a grown wizard and a nearly grown wizard to physically defend her to make those things stop? What if she'd had the sort of grown-ups she was supposed to have had in the first place and her parents had protected her? It was hard to imagine that she couldn't have some sort of influence for the better when even something like threatening to turn somebody green and otherwise standing up, being strong, and being brave could make such a difference. Funny somehow that Evelyn had always thought of people as either scary or not scary, but Mr. Carmichael frightened her a lot and didn't frighten Heinrich or Professor Wright at all. Heinrich and Professor Wright's actions made Evelyn feel good and safe and warm and had been enough to quite literally scare Mr. Carmichael away. Perhaps being a good wolf meant only biting at the right time, and always always barking first.

Professor Wright ended his response by promising, in not so many words, to always have her back. To be there whenever she needed someone to help her feel better. In a darkly ironic way, for the same reason that Mr. Carmichael's words hurt so much, Professor Wright's helped; Mr. Carmichael knew what her magic could do when she was petrified, but Professor Wright knew what her magic could do the rest of the time. She wanted the Professor Wrights of the world to believe in her much more than she cared whether the Mr. Carmichaels of the world (hopefully just the one) did.

"I wouldn't have minded if you'd hexed him," Evelyn said finally, smiling a little. She took a breath, feeling like, for all the thinking she'd just done, she hadn't found very many of the right words. "It feels silly to just say 'thank you' because it doesn't seem like enough. I've never ever felt unsafe with you, sir," she added. "What he said was all wrong. I'm really glad you and Heinrich were there to make sure I knew that, too. And I'm so sorry that you had to deal with that. I think that it sounds like it was not easy for you."

22 Evelyn Stones I was gonna suggest the Hoover Dam. But uh . . . yeah, that's man-made. 1422 0 5

Grayson Wright

August 27, 2020 8:16 AM

Plus, stray atoms and whatnot. by Grayson Wright

“Yes, well,” said Gray, somewhat ruefully, “I wouldn’t have minded hexing him, either, but Professor Skies might have minded me doing so. Slightly,” he added dryly. He rather suspected Selina would have been somewhat more inclined to go give Carmichael another dose of the same or worse than to fire him, had it all come to that…. “However, in any case, I’d prefer to deal with problems without that kind of thing, if I can…if he had twitched a bit further, though, I’d have happily hexed him into oblivion,” he added grimly.

He was a little surprised by how touched he was when Evelyn said that she’d never felt unsafe with him. He had expected as much, more or less – Merlin knew he was not physically imposing, and he couldn’t help but doubt that his attempts to imitate a forceful demeanor at the funeral would have gone mostly to waste had a sixteen-year-old on hand not been far more capable of that kind of thing – but it was pleasant to hear nevertheless.

Truthfully, it had unsettled him, realizing that someone (Carmichael) had been something like unsafe with him. He didn’t do things like that, it was simply not a thing he did – and yet, he’d done it. Of course, what was he supposed to do have done? How could anyone be faced with something like that and –

“It’s not easy for anyone, I suppose, seeing someone hurt someone you care for,” he remarked. “I’m glad to hear that you haven’t felt unsafe with me, I appreciate that. I hope that’s always the case.”

16 Grayson Wright Plus, stray atoms and whatnot. 113 0 5

Evelyn Stones

August 27, 2020 3:08 PM

So when you said vacuum . . . you didn't mean Hoovers? by Evelyn Stones

CW - Reference to childhood sexual assault, internalised victim blaming.

Evelyn cocked an eyebrow with heavy skepticism, showing exactly what she thought of Professor Skies having any problem with Professor Wright hexing someone for being a legit creep to her students. The deputy headmistress would probably do a lot more horrifying and painful things than turn the man green, at that. Violence, Evelyn knew, was relative. It was also a lot more commonplace to her than it seemed to be to many others, and she was working hard to recognize that in herself to avoid it coming up again later. She'd been thinking about that with CJ; Evelyn didn't know what discipline looked like unless you either took House points or gave bruises. She thought that Heinrich might, but she couldn't exactly imagine him doing anything that his uncle would ground him for either. She knew about the cyclic nature of abuse, and she wanted to be the end in a line that, as far as she knew, also started with her. That was easier said than done.

Evelyn beamed at Professor Wright's response then. "You care for me," she repeated. She had suspected as much and it wasn't the first time the professor had said as much, if not in so many words, but it felt so good to hear. And especially that he said it casually, as if it were the most obvious, natural thing in the world that she should be cared about. "I remember the first time we had a session and you asked me to write things down that cause me stress. I was weirdly open about it, but I remember you thanked me afterwards. You said it would be helpful. You weren't upset with me for having problems with my magic and you didn't blame me for stuff at home. I think that's when I started thinking I was probably safe." She smiled a little at the memory. "I was so so scared to come see you alone in your office," she added with a bit of a grimace. "But that wasn't because of you."

That made her mind click in a new direction and she paused, considering. Professor Wright was a boy. Well, like, a man. But he was a dude person. She wasn't sure how he felt about adult activities with adult company, but he was a dude and an adult, which meant he could maybe be more helpful than some of the people she'd talked to. Plus, he knew her. But it would be weird. Worth it? She ran through it in her mind briefly and decided that yes, it would be worth it.

"Sir, could I ask you a question that . . . sort of relates to dating?" she asked, a bit nervous. The question had been lingering in her mind since she'd talked to Gary and she hadn't been sure what to do with it. It was tangentially related to these sessions, since strong emotions seemed to play a role in accidental magic and panic seemed to play a role in hindered magic, but that was it. She thought that Heinrich might die if he found out she was asking their mutual professor this, but he also knew they had these sessions and probably would understand. "Doing stuff because you had to is different than doing stuff because you wanted to. Is that . . . that's right? People-- a person-- he would understand that, right? He would know I didn't-- I haven't-- " Her breathing was getting faster as the familiar panic rose in her chest, because what if he didn't understand?! She knew she could ask Kir or something, and she knew that any of the McLeods would give her a kind, thoughtful answer, but it felt too much like that sometimes. Like sometimes she didn't want the 'right' answer, she wanted a gut response. Because her own gut was screaming and feeding it head knowledge wasn't helping all that much. "I'm sorry," she said, pulling herself together and hoping that the professor was doing better than she was. "I just . . . I don't want him to think I'm all used up. I want to believe it's different. If it's the same-- I can't-- I don't--" She glanced up, pink in the face and anxious. "I'm sorry, sir. We can talk about something else."

22 Evelyn Stones So when you said vacuum . . . you didn't mean Hoovers? 1422 0 5

Grayson Wright

August 28, 2020 11:29 AM

Astronomy, actually. by Grayson Wright

It was a bit strange, having what he’d said rephrased in more direct terms. Once, of course, this had been commonplace, but these days, he didn’t have an editor, and in those days, the material being revised hadn’t been…personal, usually. “Yes,” he agreed. He couldn’t really think of much more to say about that, at least that was helpful (he could invariably find more things to say, but just because he could didn’t mean he ought to).

Her shook his head without even thinking of it when Evelyn said that he hadn’t been upset with her for her lack of control over her magic or because of her dreadful homelife. “You were no more to blame for your difficulty with magic or the problems in your home than you were for the color of your hair,” he said. “It would have been absurd for me – or anyone – to be upset with you because of that. I appreciated that you were able to explain some of it so well, so that I could help you more effectively,” he explained.

This was so, of course. He didn’t perfectly remember that meeting, but he thought that thanking her for the disclosure might also have been an acknowledgment of something else – that trust was a gift. Perhaps it was simply because his parents were both extremely private people, extremely reserved, but he couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t known that on some level. Perhaps Evelyn had made that initial gesture because she hadn’t had a lot of better options, but she had still done that, and that wasn’t to be ignored.

The shift to a question about dating was startling, but Gray restrained his confusion to an upward quirk of the eyebrows before nodding. “I can’t say for sure that I’m expert enough on the subject to answer, but I’ll do my best,” he said.

He blanched slightly at the realization of where she was going with the question – where was that damn psychologist when you needed her? Or even Mrs. McLeod? – but remained outwardly calm. He had gotten rather good at that over the years, he thought.

The question was, he supposed, understandable. And important. It was obvious that Evelyn’s childhood had been so deficient of proper things that she had trouble with essential concepts, even years after intervention had begun. She was now a young woman in a romantic relationship. None of which made the idea of discussing that any more comfortable for a forty-year-old bachelor who only knew of these things in a very academic way….

“Let’s speak in very broad terms,” he suggested. Evelyn and Heinrich were both his students, and good kids he regarded well, and preferred not to think of them specifically in such a context even aside from the issues of school rules and whatnot. “Nothing you are forced to do is the same as something you choose to do. Anyone decent will understand that, much less someone who cares for you and respects you. You…what happened to you isn’t something that uses you up or – anything like that. It doesn’t…what happens to us doesn’t make us less as people.” He actually removed his glasses in agitation. “I keep going back to Mother, you ought to meet her sometime – but I only ever met one set of my grandparents. The other set, her parents, pretended that Mother didn’t exist; as far as I know, they never knew she was still alive after she turned seventeen. Did that mean Mother didn’t deserve a family – or that she should have expected being part of one again after she married to be the same as being part of the one which sent her away had been?” He frowned slightly. “That sentence was a bit convoluted, I apologize for that – I don’t know exactly what the right thing to say is. But you aren’t flawed or less in any way because of what happened to you, and yes – choosing to do something is different from being made to do even the same thing. That makes all the difference in the world.”

16 Grayson Wright Astronomy, actually. 113 0 5

Evelyn Stones

August 28, 2020 12:19 PM

Oooh because we're superstars. by Evelyn Stones

Evelyn felt very sparkly when Professor Wright confirmed that he cared about her. That was pretty special stuff. The really cool thing was that he didn't care about her because he felt bad for her, as he had clearly not been terribly keen on their lessons at first. The plan was to help her and be done with it. The McLeods also didn't just care about her because they felt bad, she knew that, but part of their role in her life had become to care for her. It was different than someone just caring about you because they did. She continued beaming at him right through his next response. He was the sort of person that made her think that maybe grownups were okay and maybe men were okay and maybe things were going to be okay. He certainly wasn't the only one, but it was nice.

Her gauge for okay-ness had shifted dramatically over time. It had started, and remained for an unpleasantly time, pointed anywhere but at herself. She was the problem. She was the wrong one. It had also lingered a long time on men and adults. She'd always been aware consciously that some adults were different, but she couldn't quite trust them the same way. The same was true of anyone of the male persuasion. She distinctly remembered the first time she met Malikhi, sitting at the Pecari table for their first Opening Feast, and they had been playful and it was all well and good, but he'd also frightened her. He'd shaken her by the shoulders a bit and she had realised that maybe it wasn't just adults who sucked but boys as a whole. And then Heinrich had shown her that wasn't true, and Gary and Parker. And the McLeods and Professor Skies showed her it wasn't all adults, either. And Professor Wright showed her that even people who were both could be good people.

"That doesn't mean no one ever was upset with me because of it," she pointed out when it sounded like Professor Wright was dangerously close to absolving himself of a gold star. He'd done things right and he'd been important and she wasn't going to let him get away with thinking he'd just barely cleared the bar for humanity. It was a low bar, in Evelyn's experience, but even if it wasn't, Professor Wright had pole vaulted the high jump.

His disclaimer about his own expertise in dating made Evelyn curious but she thought that he probably wouldn't appreciate her prying into his personal life. As far as she knew, he wasn't married, but that didn't mean he didn't date. It also didn't mean he did. Either was fine and Evelyn wanted to tell him that because that's what she would tell a peer, but a peer was probably just coming into that realisation that they didn't want to date, whereas Professor Wright had had much longer to be comfortable with himself. Plus, maybe he was dating a lot of people unsuccessfully and that's why he felt he wasn't an expert on it.

A bit of hope made a cocoon in Evelyn's stomach, not quite brave enough to come out as more than that until Professor Wright apologised because he didn't know what to say. Everything he said, everything that sounded so much like what Evelyn wanted to believe, was what he really thought. It wasn't just the right answer. He understood and he could still offer reassurances. She thought it was safe to say that Heinrich did indeed fall into the category of caring about and respecting her, even if this was in 'very broad' terms, and she found herself nodding as the chrysalis of hope in her spread its wings. Her head shook in the right places; it was easy to agree that someone else deserved better than what they'd experienced before. She smiled a bit at the idea of meeting Mrs. Professor Wright, thinking she had rather a lot to thank the woman for. When Professor Wright finished speaking - which was probably good because the poor man looked almost hilariously uncomfortable with this conversation, even if he was willing to put that aside to help her - Evelyn considered his words for a moment in silence.

Kir had said something to a similar effect at one point, suggesting that if she wanted to be with someone who didn't want to be with her because of what she'd experienced, then she really didn't want to be with that person anyway; they weren't worth it for her. He hadn't said it in so many words - he'd been rather careful to avoid saying it like that actually, she suspected - but the point remained for her: if someone didn't respect her boundaries, then they weren't the right someone for her. Plus Kir's quiet disclaimers about respecting their needs and wants and all that, since their desires were equally valid.

"Thank you, Sir," Evelyn finally said. "Sorry to put you on the spot. I . . . feel better." Her hands reached up to her forehead, trying to press out some of the anxieties that had been living in her brain since the funeral. Well, since long before that really. The thing was, she didn't think of herself as an anxious person and she doubted many others did either. She wasn't anxious so much as resigned to potentially false beliefs about herself and the world. As she'd gone on, she'd come to find that, yes indeed, many of those beliefs were false. The funeral had brought that to the forefront though, and she rather felt like she wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep for a long time. Maybe once this session was done, if there was sufficient time, she would find Heinrich and they could curl up for a nap in the MARS room again. If not, her own soft bed sounded lovely. "I'm really tired of bad stuff happening to me. Not to say it's always happening to me, sometimes it happens because I do something stupid. But I feel very . . . free. Bad stuff that happens now can be things like acne or a bad grade on that essay that I promise will be done before Monday, stuff like that."

She smiled, remembering something she'd been meaning to show him. After talking with Gary, she'd taken his advice (which was always a risk but it seemed safe in this case). While she wasn't sure she could say it was strictly Gary's advice that had done it, she'd been able to make progress.
As it turned out, the stress relief that comes with losing your abusive father and knowing you're going to be safe can do a world of good for your ability to do magic. Glancing around the room for suitable objects to use, Evelyn retrieved her wand and waved it, muttering the incantation for a switching spell and grinning with delight when a glass on a nearby bookshelf and the inkwell on the professor's desk switched spots within an inch or so of accuracy. The feather quill that had been propped up in the inkwell was annoyingly inside the cup now but otherwise it was pretty successful. "I couldn't have done that before," she grinned. "Thank you for that."

22 Evelyn Stones Oooh because we're superstars. 1422 0 5