"You must think I'm an idiot."

The ring on his finger responded by shimmering in the sunlight that pervaded the tower, its silent brightness damning enough. Tapendra stared at it in silence as he sat, slumped at his desk. Darian had left just minutes before, leaving the professor in a storm of confusion and frustrated tension.

It was difficult to deny he found the man attractive. Impossible, at this point. And Darian knew he found him attractive; the press of the man's body, the way his lips curled into that infuriatingly knowing smirk - all of those made it abundantly clear Darian knew.

This wasn't love, though, and that made it even more...odd, to Tapendra. There was no love blossoming here; it was almost purely physical, at least on his part. Had Darian not been...well, Darian, Tapendra would have dismissed him over a year ago. But the man radiated a kind of confidence, a sleek sort of grace, that he couldn't deny he found painfully tempting.

And he shouldn't have. He knew he shouldn't have. He'd learned his lesson years ago, learned painfully clearly what this sort of attraction could lead him into. So why hadn't the lesson stuck?

 The ring gleamed again, and he reached down and twisted it again. He started to pull it off his finger, but halfway there realized what he was doing - even if it was habit - and slid it back into place. The ring and what it represented was the larger issue, the omnipresent force of which crushed him even more than any doubts about Darian's intentions.
 
The simplest way to deal with Judy's death, to move on, had been to suppress the mourning. He'd laid about depressed for several  long months before he'd realized what effect that was having on his sister and daughter, and had almost overnight shoved the feeling of loss and hollowness down deep into his mind somewhere. All those things he'd never said, the things he wished he hadn't said, the things he wished she'd said - gone, as far as the outside world was concerned.

 He'd forced the cheerful facade until it had become fact, until shoving away the twinges of guilt had become habit. So long as he didn't think about it...

Dolly had told him months ago he needed to move on, that Judy's ghost couldn't hold him forever. But he knew one thing many people didn't; Judy had not been the sharing type. For all her strengths, for all the things he loved her for, she had been jealous, petty and almost possessive at times. When she'd been alive, he hadn't minded - in fact, he'd liked it. The way she had bristled and glared when others seemed to be coming onto him, however vaguely, had given the unsure boy a sense of self-worth.

But in death it meant that he knew without a doubt she wouldn't approve of...any of this.

He dropped his face into his hands, rubbing his temples. The worst part of it all was that he knew that he did want this. He wanted something, at least. He'd gone without any real sort of intimacy for years and now that he'd, however foolishly, gotten himself into situations where it occurred again...he missed it. He hadn't even realized how much he'd missed it, but that elated feeling of being close to someone like that was fulfilling, emotionally so, and the fact he knew his wife would have hated him for it made the guilt almost over powering.

But it wasn't just him, was it - it was Cyhirae and Georgiana, too. He wasn't an independent entity; anything he did would affect them, wouldn't it? What would they think of him, for getting himself into this kind of situation with -
The door at the base of the tower opened and he jumped, panicked for a moment. Was it time for classes already? No, it couldn't be, he was still...

Then a familiar mop of reddish hair came up the stairs, and Tapendra both relaxed and felt terribly guilty. It felt rather like two realities intersected in the tower, then; the calm, cool and comfortable life he led here at Hogwarts, and the fevered, confused and fun world that Darian occupied.

"Cyhirae," he said, letting his breath out. The smile on his face was a bit forced. "Is something the matter?"     

Cyhirae stopped at the top of the stairwell and glanced over at her father who was sitting in his desk in one of the alcoves. She hesitated slightly when she took in his frazzled appearance. Her father’s smile was forced which usually meant one of two things. Either he was either worried about something and didn’t want her to know, or he was upset with her and didn’t want her to know. Both prospects were not good for her, not good for what she wanted to ask her father about.

“Uh… no. Nothing’s the matter. I just had a question. If you have the time.” She and Ambrose had been together for nearly a month and a half, and her father had yet to react at all in her presence which made her nervous and was making Ambrose even more nervous. She was, admittedly, getting tired of Ambrose’s worrying about whether or not her father approved of them, or if he was going to have Professor Storm handle it.  The best way she figured to calm her boyfriend’s nerves would be to just ask her dad how he felt about them. The worst he could do is to confirm Ambrose’s fears.

She picked a chunk of her hair and began playing with it nervously. Just asking had seemed so much easier on the way up the tower, but now that she was in front of her father the words seemed so much harder to say. “Are you upset? About me and Ambrose dating, I mean?” she blurted out, “You just never seemed all that happy about the thought of me dating.” Cyhirae nervously began braiding her hair while looking everywhere but her father. “But you haven’t said anything about it since and I just wasn’t…” Realizing she was babbling, Cyhirae didn’t finish but just looked hopeful at her father.

He relaxed, visibly, at her assurances. It was normal talk she wanted, then, which still shook him up a bit. She'd appeared like some spectre, it seemed - timed to remind him of where he should be and what should be important to him. And she was more important to him than he could really comprehend.

He hadn't done well by her, had he? She'd handled her mother's death better than he had, and she'd been there for him when by all the rules it should have been the opposite.

He sat up in his chair and listened, smile a bit less forced but also fading a bit as he relaxed.

"Well," he looked at the clock. "I have a class in half an hour, so..." He gestured with a hand for her to continue, leaning forward on his elbows.

Her question wasn't quite what he'd expected, and he sat up a bit in response, face contorting. He wasn't...upset about her choice in boyfriend. Not persay - certainly not on a level he really wanted to talk to her about. It was dumb and petty, he knew.

But the reality that she was growing up was a difficult one to cope with. and Ambrose - for all his good and bad points - was really a sign of that, more than anything else. Tapendra sat back a bit, letting his breath out as he considered how to answer.

"I'm not upset, no," he said, smiling briefly. "Just, you know..." He was trying to figure out how to say what he felt, in a way she'd understand. "You seem...young. To be dating," he said, finally, rather lamely.