[name] has a point to prove (vindicovir) wrote in pastabsolution, @ 2011-07-20 09:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! 1998 july, ! complete, ! log, chloe zeller, roland harper |
Who: Roland Harper and Chloe Zeller
What: Two volunteers from different allegiances have to put up with each other in order to get the job done aka Heather apparently wants to hog the backstory comm
When: On one of the volunteering days, July 1998
Where: The Hogwarts Library, Muggle Studies section
Rating: PG to be on the safe side
The library at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was a quiet place. Normally a location full of young people - whether they were studying at one of the large wooden tables or perusing the many racks, containing thousands upon thousands of magical works - there was currently barely a sound. In fact, the school itself was very quiet, because it had not yet re-opened after the war and was currently undergoing an intense period of rebuilding and revamping.
A small yet hard-working core of student volunteers were busy in various parts of the castle, undergoing different tasks in order to repair minor damage to different facilities (major structural damage was, of course, being repaired by professionals). In the library itself, there was calm. Madam Pince, the librarian, was doing her usual rounds, checking piles of new and fixed texts, as two of her charges were concealed in the Muggle Studies section with various things of their own to be getting on with.
A blond boy in his late teens was sitting cross-legged on the floor, a roll of parchment and a quill in front of him, a trolley to the right of him and a stack of new books to the left. Periodically, he peered at the list in front of him to check that the cataloguing he was doing was correct, putting a new label on a tome from the top of the pile as he did so - sealing it with a tap of his wand before setting it onto the trolley. Roland Harper crossed off a title on his to-do list, picked up the next, and peered at it curiously. He frowned, his eyebrows knitted together as he flicked through the unusual looking text, vastly different in appearance to many of the others in the library. He sighed deeply. I never could understand electricity, he thought, holding the book sideways to closer examine a diagram.
Chloe stood nearby, sorting through her own pile of books. She'd come at the insistence of her parents, who had decided that she needed to get out of the house, after having spent most of May and June locked in her room. It wasn't that she hadn't wanted to help with the rebuilding of the school - it was that she wasn't interested in seeing everyone who was going to show up. She had seen some of her friends - Demelza was around, as was Yue. And she'd even spotted some of her muggleborn classmates that she hadn't seen in a year. But she had also seen people that she had no interest in seeing - both now, and ever, really. Former IS members seemed to be around, and though they weren't in quite the same numbers as others, their presence was certainly obvious. And she was also aware of the people who weren't there and wouldn't show up at any point. Andrew and Colin were the most obvious of those.
But at her parent's urging she'd come, and had found herself partnered with one of the very people she had been hoping to avoid. As they were in the same year she certainly knew Roland, though it really ended there. Chloe didn't make a habit of making friends with Slytherins, and that went doubly so of Slytherins that had been members of the IS the year before. And Roland was both.
Finishing her stack she went to gather more, rolling her eyes when she saw that he had paused. "We're never going to get done if you stop to read every book, you know," she said irritably. "I'm pretty sure they sent us to the library to work, not to dawdle and read."
“I’m not dawdling” Roland said after a moment, having taken a nanosecond to bite down a retort. He simply couldn’t be bothered arguing with certain people, and Chloe - who seemed to fall into the “let’s not bother giving people a chance because I’m so self righteous” category, at least, according to him - was one of them. It seemed like too much effort.
Instead, he turned the book around and flashed the page he’d been looking at to her. “See? It’s a picture book, but” he said, before pointing to the list that lay on the floor in front of him. “There aren’t supposed to be any in this pile. It must have been put here by mistake.”
He took a moment to uncross his long legs and kneel upwards, peering at the top of the pile intended for a particular shelf in that section. “Yeah, these are all theory-heavy, rather than basic introduction books” he mused, before standing up to his full height. “I’ll go check with Pince where she wants this” he concluded, gesturing with the book before walking towards the circulation desk.
Chloe watched his retreating form and then picked up the next book in the stack, another one about muggles, though this one about cars. Reading through it her brow furrowed as she tried to grasp on to the concepts, though some of them were more complex than others. She knew a bit about muggles, of course, as her maternal grandparents were muggleborn, but they didn’t have a car, so that idea was more foreign to her. They had a television, though, and Chloe thought that it was pretty brilliant.
“This one’s pretty elementary too,” she called out to Roland quicky, before he could catch her ‘dawdling’ as well. “So find out where it ought to go. Though it’s about cars, and some of these other ones are, as well, so maybe it ought to go here.” She flipped through the next few on the stack, considering idly that she might learn something from taking Muggle Studies. A real muggle studies class, though - nothing like the trash they’d learned last year. Even her father, who was muggleborn but had been adopted into the wizarding world as an infant, didn’t really know anything about that culture. And then maybe she could convince her parents to get a television.
“Oh, wow, if I were a muggle, I’d be learning how to drive,” she said, mostly to herself, as she read about the requirements for licenses. Chloe thought she’d probably prefer brooms to driving, though, as they didn’t seem nearly as dangerous, and much easier to control.
Roland came back just in time to hear Chloe’s call, and looked up from the list that Madam Pince had just given him. “This” - he held up the roll of parchment - “explains why that book made it onto that pile of mine when it shouldn’t. Anything that’s really basic, we’re supposed to take back to the front desk, because they’re for the people involved in tutoring rather than the main stacks.” He neglected to mention that he himself would definitely be requiring Muggle Studies tutoring this year, and instead put the parchment at a convenient point between where they were both sitting, so that she wouldn’t tell him off for hogging it. He was never quite sure where he stood with girls like Chloe Zeller.
Roland did look up, again, though, when she mentioned learning to drive. It was pretty obvious that she wasn’t really talking to him, but he figured that if they were going to get this job done with relative ease, talking couldn’t hurt... or at least, he hoped. Resuming labelling his pile of texts, beginning with Why Muggles rely on Religion for things they can’t explain - he resisted the temptation to raise his eyebrows at the heaviness of the subject matter - he responded casually as he worked. “I don’t think I’d pass the test. I saw some car racing on a television in a Muggle shop once, though. It looked pretty cool.”
He pointed at a picture he could see in Chloe’s book. “They didn’t look like that one, though.”
“Well it’s not like they’d have you driving immediately,” Chloe countered. “You take lessons and practice and everything first.” That being said, she wasn’t sure that even with the lessons she’d be all that great. It couldn’t be that difficult, though, if so many muggles did it so much of the time, but it certainly seemed less intuitive.
Chloe glanced at the parchment, looking at the list of titles on it, and then started back at sorting through the books in her stack, putting aside the ones that were being held back for the tutors. “Why were you in a muggle shop? I thought your type avoided muggles at all costs? When you weren’t observing them in an effort to try to figure out how to interpret their actions in the worst way possible, at least,” she added, thinking about the class last year. “You know, like your friends the Carrows did?”
Roland sighed. He’d been waiting for this. “Settle, Zeller.” He paused, thinking how to continue the discussion in a way that would get her to calm the fuck down. “I know exactly how f- I mean, messed up they were. I went to see Declan right after the battle. I know what that cow did to him. If you want to direct your anger at someone, try Aspen Parkinson.”
He shuddered visibly. The Slytherin still couldn’t get over how exactly that prat had met his end.
Chloe opened her mouth to make smart retort about Aspen Parkinson - after all, he died while fighting for You Know Who, and was Roland’s roommate and fellow IS member. So even though she figured that Roland hadn’t intended to associate himself with Aspen through his comment, all that it did was reinforce her idea that he was just like the rest of them. But his mention of Declan is what kept her from actually saying anything.
“Have you seen him since then? How’s he doing? Declan, I mean.” She bit her lip to keep from adding ‘not your dead roommate, obviously,’ even though she’d wanted to. But Chloe hadn’t been to the hospital to see him, or anyone, so all that she really had to go on was the journals. And she hadn’t seen him here volunteering, but she wasn’t sure if that was because he was physically incapable, or just not in the mood.
If Chloe had made the smart retort, Roland would have been upset. Not because of Chloe, per se, but because ever since he’d found out about Millicent Bulstrode and the manner of her death, he found the anti-Slytherin bias shown by some students to be all the more disturbing. She’d still died a brave death, in his view.
Though he could tell she’d wanted to say something else, he welcomed the chance to talk about Declan instead, an obviously safer topic of conversation. He nodded, and carried on with his work. “I have, yeah. He got a pretty bad hit to the arm, but he seems to be recovering well. You know what Declan’s like, it was the frustration of being told to stay in the one place that did for him when he was in St Mungo’s. That, and Cormac’s snoring.” He smiled ruefully.
“He’s doing a lot better now he’s at his cousin’s place. Getting a lot of visitors and stuff. Just kind of itching for news, you know?” he said, concluding his mini-speech at the same time as his pile of books.
“Right, time to go get some more, I think” he said, carefully uncrossing his legs and looking around for another stack.
“Cormac’s anything is enough to bother anyone,” she said, rolling her eyes as she thought of her former housemate. As he’d been two years older than her she hadn’t known him all that well, but what she did know suggested that he was who Declan had taken after, up until the previous year. It kept her on her toes, too, because she knew that it was quite possible to be a prat without being a purist, and she wasn’t entirely convinced that Declan wouldn’t fall into that again. But he’d certainly changed enough that it seemed promising.
“There are some,” Chloe noted, having finished her own stack right around the same time. Pulling out her wand, she levitated a two piles of books their direction. “I’ve never really spent much time in this portion of the library. I didn’t know we had this many books on muggles. Though I guess we’ll all get more familiar with it this year.” Truth be told, Chloe hadn’t really spent much time in any portion of the library - she went there when she needed to research, or if she absolutely had to get things done, but if she didn’t have to, she tried to avoid it. It was much too quiet for her tastes.
“It was always Declan I was friends with. I never really knew his brother, so I’ll take your word for it” Roland replied, getting ready to accept the books Chloe was levitating his way, and catching them. “Thank you” he replied, before getting stuck back into the task, listening to what the Gryffindor girl was saying (because contrary to popular belief, he wasn’t a complete prat).
“I didn’t know either. I’d have liked to have had the time to continue with Potions, but at least Muggle Studies this year will be interesting, judging by the look of some of these new books we have” he added, holding up the one on top of his new pile to show her, a glossy looking tome entitled “Sportsmanship in Muggle Sports, and what Wizards can learn from it”.
“I know a bit about muggles, because of my mum’s parents, but not a lot of what these books are talking about. Like the cars part, or the electricity part, or the telephone part. Those seem fun, though I think I like being able to actually see the person you’re talking too, like you can with floo.” She flipped idly through a book on telephones before placing it in the stack of books that was going back to the Pince.
“Ooooh, I wonder if that has anything about football,” she said, reaching her hand out for the one Roland was handling. One of the things that Chloe’s grandfather still clung on to from his muggle youth was his strong support of Arsenal. Her grandmother was a Chelsea fan, and the main reason they had decided to get a television in the first place was so that they could continue watch games. Chloe had seen a couple, and though some parts of the game - such as being penalized for violence - were a bit foreign to her, and she thought that the game was a bit slow at times, she still enjoyed watching it. “It’s not quite as good as Quidditch, but my grandparents love it. They watch games all weekend.”
Handing the book over to Chloe so she could further examine it, Roland quickly scanned the rest of the pile to check that none remained that should go back to the front desk, and continued his labelling.
He pondered aloud as she mentioned football. “That’s the one where they’re only allowed to use their feet, right? I only ask because I know there’s some where they’re allowed to use their hands as well. I get a bit confused.”
Filling another shelf on the book trolley, he went on. “The running around must make good exercise. Hadn’t thought of that, but it makes sense to enjoy what you’re doing for fitness purposes.”
Pausing for a moment, he found a thin, pamphlet-style mini-book on electrical safety that had accidentally been tucked into the pages of a larger textbook. “Here we go, another book on electricity...” he said, adding it to what he was mentally referring to as the Pince Pile. “I didn’t realise it was dangerous. You learn something new every day, I suppose.”
“The one with only the feet,” she said, frowning. “That’s why it’s called football. Wouldn’t they call it handball, if you used your hands?” Chloe’s first instinct was that Roland didn’t know what he was talking about, asking a question like that. He was, she remembered again, a Slytherin and an IS member. But sometimes muggles made decisions she didn’t completely understand, so she grudgingly admitted to herself that he might be right.
“Dangerous how? Dangerous like magic can be dangerous if you use it wrong, or dangerous like why are they using it?” It seemed pretty harmless from what she’d seen, but she hadn’t really had that much experience with it. Chloe finished off her pile, and moved to his, sorting through the last group of books in their area.
Sitting back to allow her better access to the books, Roland picked up the speed, knowing that they were almost done, and just in time coming up to a break, which would be handy. He slid some books along the trolley as he replied, so that there would be just enough space for the ones that were left.
“I’m sure there’s one that looks kind of similar, but they can use their hands as well as their feet, so it must be a different sport. Someone left a Quidditch magazine in the common room that had pictures in it, of the pros trying out different sorts of games, that sort of thing. There was one where you hit a small ball with a big stick... I think it was called golf” he declared, getting through to very near the bottom of the pile.
“I mean like how magic can be dangerous in different ways. Someone on my uncle’s street once set their house on fire by accident because he’d left something switched on too long. I suppose it’s probably very safe, if you’re careful.”
Labelling and stacking the last book, he looked at the trolley, satisfied at a job well done. It could certainly have been worse. Looking back at Chloe, he asked “do you want to go and take our break now and shelve the books later, or do it now and have a later break?”
See, Roland. You can be perfectly nice when you try, he thought.
Chloe tried not to let the surprise show on her face that Roland seemed to know more about some muggle sports than she did, as that didn't quite mesh with her view of Slytherins or the IS in general. She supposed that he did get the information from a wizarding magazine so that accounted for it, but still, she found it odd.
"Take the break now, probably," she said, raising her hands up over her head in a stretch. Neither the task nor the company had ended up being quite as bad as she'd originally expected, though she supposed that probably had something to do with the fact that Roland was alone. Get him with some of his Slytherin and IS friends and she was quite sure he would revert back to what she expected of his type - biased, power hungry, and a touch of cruel. People didn't change the way he came off as having done overnight.
"I'm going to go see if I can find Yue - I think I saw him working right down the hall when we came in here. But I'll meet you back here in fifteen minutes or so to start shelving?"
Roland nodded. "Sounds fair" he said. Had Chloe vocalised that particular opinion, he probably wouldn't have challenged her verbally (unlike others he associated with in the past year, he wasn't spoiling for a fight), but he would certainly have felt the frustration that people in certain quarters didn't want to give former IS members a chance.
That said, there was something in the saying 'actions speak louder than words', and as Roland got up to go and get refreshments, the fact that he and Chloe had managed to get through their first work session without hexing each other was a matter of progress made.