Anthony "Ace" Boot (practicemakes) wrote in thesocieties, @ 2010-06-17 18:57:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! narrative, 2023: 06/june, ch: anthony boot |
narrative.
Who: Ace Boot with various professors
What: Ace gives his professors thank you notes for putting up with him for seven years. He swears he's not a suck-up, really.
When: This week, ending Thursday evening
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Ace's first stop was the easiest. For reasons both good and bad, he had spent plenty of time in the Hufflepuff Head of House's office the past seven years, and Professor Blenkinsop himself was comfortable enough with Ace's presence that he finished up a flown conversation with an apologetic smile while Ace waited. Sitting in the familiar leather chair he always sat in, Ace tapped his fingers against his knees and looked around, reminding himself that this was likely his very last time ever being here. No more trampling through here to Floo to St Mungo's, no more discussions about the quest for world domination via Hufflepuff Quidditch, and no more frustrating conversations about schoolwork and mental health. True to form, Blenkinsop accepted Ace's card and thanks with reserved aplomb and said a few words about being proud of him and knowing to expect good things from his training as a healer (which made Ace ponder whether their student-teacher relationship had evolved to the point he could make a joke about maybe being the one to remove Blenkinsop's tail in a few years, but wisely, he kept his mouth shut). They shook hands when Ace left, already feeling more like a grown-up. He went to Professor Thomas's office that evening as well, and though he didn't stay long enough to sit down, he rambled out a thank you and gave him the card and refrained from mentioning that if he didn't make it into healing training, it'd probably be because he couldn't manage an E in DADA, and he wouldn't hold that against Professor Thomas since really he'd only have himself to blame. Though he did think that thought rather loudly. The next day he went to see Professor Hookum and nearly forgot to tell her thank you and give her the card, as the two of them got wrapped up in talking about DRIVING and CARS and ROAD TRIPS. She wrote down websites for him to check, told him in vivid detail about a road trip of her own youth that left her stranded and sickleless in Luxembourg, and handed him a worn copy of On the Road, telling him--very decidedly--to not think of it as an instruction manual but to enjoy reading it anyway. Afterward, Ace was so eager to work with this new information that he decided to just shove his card to Professor Bloxam underneath her office door and not even bother trying to talk with her. Okay, in all honesty, that had actually been his plan all along, but now he especially didn't want to ruin his road trip high and good mood by spending any more time with her than he had to. He did stop in by the Potions classroom to give his thanks in-person to Professor Bobbin, who seemed slightly confused but cordially accepted the thanks and the card. On Wednesday, he ran out to the greenhouses to thank Professor Longbottom, and Professor Longbottom smiled and shook his hand heartily, telling Ace that he was happy about how well he was doing, how much he enjoyed having him as a student, and as he sometimes did, Ace felt a pang of guilt for not having worked as hard in Herbology as he could have. He visited Professor Birch next, mindful not to refer to Charms as "Charms crap", and after he stumbled through his thank you and their discussion of what he was doing after Hogwarts, he found himself surprised at her surprise that he had decided to avoid professional Quidditch. "According to everything I heard, you did Hufflepuff proud as captain," she said. Ace blinked at that, holding still and speechless for half a moment, because until she said those words, he had forgotten how much he had been blaming himself for Hufflepuff''s losing streak. Instead of unearthing the familiar feelings of guilt and self-loathing and second-guessing and bitterness, however, what he felt was the absence of those feelings. Which, even if it wasn't something to write home about, it was better than what he had been feeling weeks before. "I don't think Quidditch is for me," he said carefully, still hating how those words sounded, still regretful that he was saying them. And she nodded and said, "Trust your instincts," and Ace wanted to give her a hug for saying something that trusting even when she knew how much he fucked up, but as he didn't want to get in trouble with Brevis Birch (who could mostly certainly kick his ass), Ace instead blurted out an apology for thinking Charms was crap and fled the scene. He saved the most difficult thank you for last, and even waiting outside Professor Vector's office on Thursday evening, he still wasn't sure he'd go through with it. He hadn't been able to look her in the eye for the past two years, and for all he knew, she didn't remember him anymore. He paced and kicked the wall as he waited outside his office, chatting a bit with two fifth-years also waiting to see Professor Vector. He let them skip ahead of him in line to see Vector first, and while he waited alone, he pulled out a ballpoint pen and scribbled a motivational mantra down his forearm: YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PAST. ALL YOU CAN DO IS MAKE GOOD CHOICES TODAY. And when it was finally his turn to see her, Vector gave him a small smile and greeted him with a curt, "Come in, Anthony." (So she did remember him. Or! Or had she been warned by other professors who Ace had gone to see? Did they discuss him in the staff lounge, saying to watch out for Boy Boot, he was going around brown-nosing for unknown reasons?) Sitting across her desk from her, he did his best with eye contact, but he still ended up mumbling half of his practiced speech: "I wanted to thank you for being a really good professor and for teaching me a lot while I was in your class, and I really appreciate all your hard work, and I think we students are really lucky to have you, and though I'm not really sorry for purposely failing my Arithmancy OWL, I'm sorry for having to do that, and I probably should have told the people in charge of the exam that my failure wasn't a reflection on you." Vector, in her many years of teaching, had probably heard stranger expressions of gratitude and odder apologies from students, and so maybe that's why she accepted his words gracefully and kept any bewilderment fully hidden behind her calm composure. "And I said the same thing, basically, but better, in this card," he added, pushing it across her desk. She laid a hand on the envelope and regarded him with sharp eyes. Ace suddenly wished he had done the Bloxam shove-under-the-door-and-run method of delivering his thanks, and even pushed himself up from the chair he was sitting in, planning to flee, when she motioned for him to sit back down. "It's always nice to hear from former students," she said evenly, maybe even kindly. "And I enjoyed teaching you. Are you doing well in your other subjects?" Ace nodded. "Yeah, I've managed." And she was still looking at him, so he amended his statement to fill in the silence. "Arithmancy was the only one I failed, and I'm planning on training to be a healer, if my NEWTs are good enough." Professor Vector smiled a little. "Your parents must be very proud." "They are," he said, grateful to have the conversation on comfortable ground. His parents were pleased with him, he could talk very easily about that. She was still smiling when she asked, "Did you want to tell me why you think you failed?" He didn't think so, but then again, he was the one who brought it up, and obviously he went through some pain to get himself here to her office, so maybe deep down he did want to. No, no maybe about it: he did. Maybe he didn't owe Vector an explanation or an apology, but he felt like that'd leave part of his Hogwarts history painfully incomplete, an eternally open wound. "When I was sick, all I thought about and cared about were numbers." He pressed a hand against the seat of his chair, flexing his fingers as he constructed sentences. He didn't want to say anything wrong. "I turned everything I could into numbers, and all I believed was that those numbers meant things. And meant everything. And when I was getting better, I wasn't supposed to even think about numbers, I was supposed to give control over the numbers to my parents and to the healers and to everyone but me, and I got resentful. I hate knowing that numbers have meaning, have meaning that I know, but I can't think too hard about them or I'll get obsessed with them, or that I'll give them too much meaning, or that I won't give them enough. That they matter, but I don't have any control over them." She gazed at him thoughtfully, as if she understood what he meant even though he couldn't stop himself from being vague, even though his thoughts and feelings were a jumbled mess to himself. "How many calculation methods are there in Arithmancy?" she asked. Ace didn't know what kind of response he was expecting, but it wasn't that. "Well, there are many," he said, feeling a bit rattled as he searched backward in his mind. "But there are two major methods, representing the two major branches of Arithmancy. Agrippan and Chaldean." Vector nodded. "And the curriculum covers both of these methods. Why is that?" "Because they both have been used by Arithmancers for centuries, and they both can reveal things, cover ground, that the other doesn't. They can be used together. They can be used separately. They both have merit." He was a little shaky about his explanation, given that he hadn't thought much about Arithmancy, other than in terms of his guilt, since dropping the course. "Because they're both tools," Vector said approvingly. "Because of the differences in how they assign numerical values to letters, each method could look at the same text or the same string of numbers, and be interpreted as something completely different." Yes, and that was the point of Arithmancy, wasn't it? That... He stumbled over his thoughts for a moment before seeing where she was trying to lead him. "Numbers don't have any meaning except what we give them," he said slowly. "I know." And he did know that. That was the point of his years of therapy, wasn't it? Becoming used to the knowledge that his problem wasn't with his body but with his mind, and that he had to change how he thought if he had any hope of feeling better, of being better. He already knew this. He already struggled with this. Vector wasn't telling him anything he didn't already know. He hadn't expected her to; this was all about him, after all. "Knowing when to say no to numbers is a valid type of wisdom," Professor Vector said, just as slowly as he had been speaking. "That's a control of its own, I believe. Numbers aren't everything. Knowing what to do with them, even if it's dismissing them, is just as important to learn. Don't you think?" The way she said it, it sounded like something he could have said, and that as much as the actual words eased some of the anxiety creeping through him. "Yeah, I do think," he said, and he relaxed his hands again, shifted his legs, breathed. "Biscuit?" Vector gestured to a plate on her side of the desk, one that Ace hadn't noticed. The chocolate chip biscuits were still emitting heat, which should have been impossible because Ace knew for a fact Vector had been here in her office for a long time this evening. There was probably a charm for that, to keep biscuits freshly baked, and Ace already had a biscuit in hand before he remembered two things: one, Vector only gave biscuits to students who solved the really difficult problems, and two, she had always been smarter than she looked and she probably did remember him, and remembered him as someone who always turned down biscuits before. He thanked her again, and she thanked him for coming to see him. Outside her office, standing in the empty hallway, he considered that that hadn't been such an open wound after all. Maybe the metaphor he should have been thinking of was that of a closing door. Ace transferred the biscuit from his hand to his teeth, and he took off down the corridor on a dead run. He felt like finding someone to hug. |