Who: Mandy and Daphne When: Sunday night, around curfew Where: Astronomy tower What: Academic fervor
It wasn't quite after hours yet, but Daphne was sneaking all the same. Theodore was off studying for once, and she found herself oddly missing his company for perhaps the first time since break. At her wrist, the bracelet he'd given her at Halloween, and in her arms charcoal and parchment. The astronomy tower offered unique prospects for artistic creativity (and a bit more realism than overblown stick figures, no matter how delightful their reaction). It was a Sunday, and with no reason to assume that anyone but her would have interest in the night sky at such a late hour, she simply burst in, starting at the presence of another. "Evening." She closed the tower door and sidled over to the nearest telescope, avoiding the table that appeared to be drowning beneath a slew of papers.
Minute adjustments made to her telescope were accompanied by the record player set up in a corner, Bach spilling out into the night air. Mandy had retreated to the Astronomy Tower as a way of escaping the idiocy below in the school and the fights that had blossomed over whoever had pasted the portraits over the House Points. The afternoon and early evening had been spent with Arithmancy calculations until the sky had darkened enough to justify setting up her telescope. She'd worked for hours in her own company, completely absorbed by the night sky. Daphne's abrupt entrance broke her concentration. Not bothering to hide her glare, she nodded back. "Good evening."
And with that glare, Daphne's features tightened into a vague sort of smile. With a profound sense of purpose, she veered away from the telescope she'd chosen first and moved to sit directly beside Mandy. With a beatific smile, she settled chalk onto parchment onto the nearest corner of their shared table, apparently oblivious to the papers she covered in so doing, then leaned forward to glance through the telescope.
Mandy simply raised an eyebrow, not moving when Daphne leaned in front of her. "Something I can do for you, Greengrass?" She shifted slightly, checking the notation she'd made onto the parchment supported by a large book on her knee, then put eye to telescope again, once Daphne leaned away.
Daphne rested a pointed elbow atop their table, pinioning a few scribbled sheets beneath it. "Yes, actually. Find me something more interesting than," her chin angled as she peered over at Mandy's parchment, "Caelum?" An eyebrow raise; Daphne's recollection of Astronomy was vague at best. "I'll trust in your judgement as a brilliant astronomer." An idle hand flicked vaguely at her own telescope.
"It's only uninteresting because you know nothing about it." Words spoken absently and with only a partial realisation that they'd even been uttered. "You should have come up earlier before I became ten sorts of involved in this constellation. Sorry. My text's on the table. Third chapter should give you something worth looking at, but you'll have to find it yourself." She glanced at Daphne for a moment, grinning only a small bit before reaching across and disrupting Dapne's own parchment, finding one that contained a long list of equations and checking it.
"If I don't know about it, it's clearly not worth knowing!" She swept up Mandy's textbook into her lap and flipped through to somewhere in the middle. "Earlier wouldn't have been much good for stargazing, would it have?" Daphne ignored the disturbance to her parchment; so long as they weren't chucked to the floor, she couldn't be damned about them. It didn't take her long to shuffle through boring bits on space dust and clouds to find something really interesting. "Ooooh." Her finger whacked an image of a nebula and then slid down to find the appropriate location.
Mandy's eyes slid across to the picture that Daphne had tapped. She leaned over, reading the description. "Good luck finding it, unless you're planning a trip to a place like Arizona. That one's so far out in space that these telescopes here won't find them. You'd need to find images from Hubble to do that, I'm afraid." Gently, she retrieved the book from Daphne's hands, and flipped through until she found a diagram of constellations found in the winter sky. "Those will be your best bet."
Daphne frowned in protest as Mandy collected her book back. She'd understood very little of what the other girl had just said. "Where's Arizona?" An absent question as she peered over the table to the constellations. They were so boring... she wanted color, excitement, aliens! "Alright," with disappointment plain, she looked across the little numbers laid out beneath (BORING) pictures.
"Arizona's in the States, West Coast. Desert." She frowned, contorting her face as she did calculations in her head, then looked at Daphne. "You sound disappointed. Why?"
A shrug rolled lazily off Daphne's shoulders as she peered back to the telescope laid out before her. She remembered enough to tick the little knobs into place, to make sure the lenses were properly aligned, and she squinted through it between adjustments to regain the feel for the night sky. "It's nothing. Constellations don't offer much in the way of art." As if in response to this though, a hand swept out to gather the parchment teetering precariously at the edge of table into her lap.
"Ah." She paused, then. "It's really too clear for the sky to be of any interest but to astronomers, tonight. A shame, though. There's stark, cold beauty in the sky, tonight. Be interesting to capture it on paper." It would, in fact, be an ideal night for night flying -- excellent visibilty, no wind. Just cold, and dark, and stars. Mandy could feel herself want to physically retreat even further from the world, locked up here.
Daphne peered over at Mandy before jabbing her eye back to the tiny little lens. She supposed there was some aesthetic quality to the blanket of stars and the gaping emptiness between, but it did not strike her in the way that, perhaps, it struck the other, and the charcoal remained still in her fingers. Waiting until Mandy got back to work, she glanced sideways instead, fingers responding to the curve of nose and jaw rather than that the sparkle of ice and atmosphere.
Unaware of the scrutiny upon her, Mandy continued on her work, incapable of being bored with it when others surely would have been. She quickly forgot Daphne's presence, starting now on an outline for the paper (for this would be no mere essay) on the constellations she was tracking and how they interacted with one another. She made notes to herself, scribbled all over the parchment and without any sort of order -- to look into where they fall into the lore of the Centaurs, their effect on Divination, calculations on how old she thought they may be. The list went on and on, Mandy scribbling all the while and muttering softly to herself.
It was a bizarre symbiosis; Mandy's near fervor was of supreme interest to the other girl, and she even went so far as to -turn- to keep her eyes focused in the low light on the object of that interest. Fingers scraped charcoal across heavy parchment, a pinky crooked and flicking forward to smudge appropriately at times. A head tilt, and fingers were drawn, clutching quills, tweaking measurements, scattered in the periphery; occasionally Daphne returned to fill in details, shade the jaw, color the hair, consider the figure, attempt the emotion; concentration and delight mingled with Mandy's soft features, rounded cheeks and sparkling eyes.
Then she dropped her quill, cursing as she leaned over to pick it up and knocking her head on the telescope on the way back up. Eyes watering with pain, she held ink-stained fingers to the crown of her head. "Ow, ow, ow." She looked over at Daphne, then, and caught sight of the parchment the other girl had been working on. She frowned slightly, then returned her attention to the telescope jarred severely out of position. "Bugger me. It'll take an hour to get it back where I need it." It didn't matter, anyway; she'd lost her concentration and her head hurt now. She slumped back into her seat.
It took every ounce of restraint Daphne had not to burst out laughing; she couldn't immediately ask if the other girl was alright for fear of sounding -incredibly- insincere, and when she did ask it still didn't have -quite- the right amount of compassion throughout. With an astute peer at the telescope, she reached over to move it just -so- (and nowhere near the original position). "Right about there," she said, nodding firmly. "What exactly were you doing, anyway?" Parchment to table; with lost intrigue, her subject had lost Daphne's interest as well.
Mandy shook her head, unable to smile until her head stopped throbbing a bit. "No, that's not the issue. I've lost where I was up there." She pointed upwards, then leaned towards the telescope. "See? This has been knocked askew." Deftly, she returned it back to an approximation of where it needed to be, sat back and shrugged. "And this is wrong now, too. But it doesn't matter, not really. I'll do it again tomorrow or Tuesday. Why were you drawing me?"
Daphne nodded, as if interested in the diatribe, and then blinked at the abruptness of the question. "Why not?" Lazy fingers trailed over charcoal sketches as if unconcerned, but they were careful not to smudge the sharp shadows and details there; "you're more interesting to look at than some stupid pins of light in the sky."
"We'll agree to disagree, then, because those pins of light are infinitely more interesting than I." A check of the watch wrapped around her wrist gave the time as two hours past curfew. Mandy's only reaction to this was to start gathering her parchments, forming them into neat piles before putting them, along with her texts, into her schoolbag. A wave of her wand silenced the record player, and she carried her telescope to the corner she was assigned.
Daphne wondered idly if -this- would be the night she'd be caught and detained. Aurors crept through the halls at this time, but she figured she could always claim to have fallen asleep. A sigh; Ravenclaws had it easy - she had to make it down to the dungeons. She strongly rejected the notion of "agreeing to disagree," and as she shuffled the charcoal drawing into Mandy's abandoned bookbag, she gathered her things with a final comment. "Well, Brocklehurst... if that's honestly how you feel about yourself, it's how everyone else'll feel as well. Night, then." A prim smile, and she swept up her things to depart.
She slung her bag over her shoulder and marched to the door. "I'll wait. Sinistra's given me a pass and if we see an Auror we'll tell them you were assisting me." She shrugged, not afraid to abuse her privilege in this way. It wasn't often that she actually had company. "I can only go so far, though."
Daphne paused at the door at this and peered back in. "Ravenclaws and Slytherins unite? I suppose we must in grave times like these." The grin belied the graveness with which she said these words, but Daphne waited, -delighted- to share in such an abuse. "Few floors down is all I need, really... I'll be sure to send the aurors after you if they catch me."
"Hm, yes. Strength in numbers, and so on." Mandy had long ago got over her fear of the castle at night, except for Peeves exacting some form of mischief upon her. She paused at the point where their paths diverged. "Good night, Greengrass. Thank you for the company."
"A pleasure, Ms. Brocklehurst, of course," and to that Daphne tipped an imaginary hat, and with a (ladylike) cackle, flew down the stairs toward the dungeons, parchment clutched to her chest.