Two weeks. For two weeks Annie Enright had been living with the knowledge that she was expected to compete as a school champion in the upcoming tournament task. For two weeks she'd gone to class, she'd done her work, and she'd spent every spare moment preparing. She'd arranged some help with mastering magic of a more combative nature, which had never really been her forte, and had been working on combinations, trying to streamline the wand motions until everything felt natural and automatic. She poured over note cards, to make sure she had a stockpile of facts and specialized knowledge to unleash so that she couldn't be caught off-guard by something difficult to recognize. She'd been waking up very early in the morning to go running in the freezing rain, in the hopes of giving herself a slight physical advantage – because on the off chance she was caught of guard, or her practiced combinations didn't cut it, she wanted to be able to run away. In the span of a lifetime, two weeks was a fairly short period of time. One day she might look back and find that these two weeks took up almost no space in her memories. While she was living it, however, these two weeks felt improbably long.

She was exhausted. Everything hurt. When she tried to sleep, or think, or pay attention, her head was so full of knowledge that she had trouble, getting lost in thoughts of latin incantations and wand technique and plant species and potions ingredients. She continually misplaced thoughts, pausing and panicking when she realized she couldn't access knowledge that she knew she should have had at the front of her mind. She'd had the whole weekend to drill, to reaffirm knowledge, to run around the lake reciting memorized facts until she threw up, and then Monday came around and hit her in the face. All Mondays sucked, but this Monday in particular was clobbering her.

She'd done the charms assignment, but she'd left it in the dorms. She'd done the transfiguration essay, but left her entire bag in the Great Hall during lunch. She'd gone to creatures class when she was supposed to be in Herbology and walked in nearly ten minutes late.  Once she'd arrived at class, she'd completely zoned out and spent the majority silently panicking. Her hand shook when she took up her quill. Everything was sloppy, including Annie herself. She'd done that horrible, unforgivable thing where she didn't pay attention while getting dressed and put on way too much purple, throwing off her regular purple-to-black ratio, which made her look like a perturbed concord grape.

She just couldn't do it anymore. She couldn't make it to dinner. She couldn't... function. How was she supposed to compete in a tournament when she couldn't look at her own reflection without crying? She only made it as far as the second floor before she just... stopped. She was going to meet Roh on the ground floor so they could walk to dinner together but she didn't even want to have to look anybody in the eye when she felt like the biggest fraud in the castle. She veered over toward the wall and pressed her forehead into the stone, using a two year old's logic – if she couldn't see anybody, maybe she'd become invisible. She shut her eyes tight, trying to relax enough to function, but she wasn't sure she could manage relaxing or functioning.

Mondays really sucked.

Annie was late. This was not normal. Annie was never really late for anything because she was such a perfectionist and couldn't cut herself a single break ever. It had gotten worse since they'd announced the next batch of Champions. Roh had believed, mistakenly, that the other girl would be over the moon about it. She had seemed so sure that the whole point in coming to Hogwarts was the competition. Of course she should have known her friend would be unhappy; love her though she did Waverly had become increasingly aware that Annie was only "happy" when everything was a disaster. That is to say Annie only knew how to function when she was panicking... and it wasn't so much "functioning" as curling up in a little ball and wanting to die.

What had started as an off hand desire to save the girl from herself all those months ago had developed into a real friendship, but was also very hard for Roh. She didn't know how to make things better for the other girl and often got frustrated. She tried not to let it show but Annie was so sensitive that even when Waverly wasn't upset or frustrated the other girl was still apologizing constantly. Given all this information, there was a sick sort of dread in the pit of Roh's stomach as the minutes ticked by. Annie was rubbing off on her because the normally calm and collected Slytherin was suddenly traveling down panic road, worrying that the other girl had pushed herself to physical exhaustion and collapsed out by the lake somewhere.

She'd told Annie a dozen times not to go running at night without her but... Shaking her head the lofty toffee skinned girl tried to snap herself back in the moment. It wouldn't do for both of them to completely fall apart. Someone had to stay tethered to reality. She would just go look for Annie. Hogwarts might have been a big Castle but Waverly had had six years to get lost in it. She always found what she was looking for eventually. As she trudged up the stairs she gave a wistful look back toward the Great Hall doors and patted her tummy as it rumbled in protest, "Soon my precious, soon," and had to bite back a giggle. At least she found herself amusing, that was something to hold onto.

It didn't actually take her that long to find the other girl. She was pressed face first against a stone wall with her eyes closed tight. There was a strange sort of relief that flowed through Waverly's limb as the panic subsided for real. Unlike Annie, she could stop herself once she knew the thing that was stressing her out had either come to pass or hadn't. Annie was fine, at least physically. She wasn't collapsed in a heap somewhere trying to send telepathic cries for rescue. Of course it did beg the question about how alright she could really be if she were trying to walk through stone walls. Shoving her hands in her sweater pockets Roh approached carefully, lips pursed to one side as she propped her hip against the nearby window sill, "So, I don't know if anyone has told you this, but licking rocks doesn't actually have any nutritional value you".

A ghost had stopped and asked her if she was okay. A ghost. Someone who was dead, and had likely been dead for years upon years, had asked Annie if she was okay. She was already feeling totally broken and useless, but that little question, as well-meaning as it was, only cemented that fact in her mind, driving it home. Was she okay? Well, no, but was she ever? She'd sniffled and she'd nodded and she'd gone right back to pressing her forehead into the wall, perhaps because, at the moment, it was the only task she felt she could successfully accomplish. A ghost couldn't help her. She couldn't even help herself. Maybe, if her heart would just stop pounding like that, or if her mind would just expand the tiniest bit to yield entry to the slightest hint that she might not die at any minute, she could keep on walking... if that was even the goal.  She wished she were a stone stature, or part of the wall. All stone walls had to do was stand there, waiting for hormonal, stressed out teenage girls to come headbutt them.

This wasn't Annie's MO – not really. She was better at frantic. Panicking, crying, flipping through cards – it all felt productive. This wall-standing business, however, was just the opposite of that. There was no multitasking going on here. She wasn't mentally recalibrating her schedule or  thinking critically about upcoming tasks that needed completing. She was just standing, just breathing, listening to the blood rushing furiously past her ears.

Waverly was the first person to address her since the ghost had, and at first she made no attempt to acknowledge her friend. Her teasing barb may have been funny on a different day, but at the moment she found no humor in it. She may as well have said 'blah blah blah.' Before, derailing into the wall had felt oddly necessary, but now that she was being watched by someone she liked and respected and didn't want to hate her, she felt weirdly self conscious about how totally depleted she felt. The only sound she was able to produce right away was a long and needy sounding whine, which, in her own mind, communicated everything she might have wanted to say with words. She was pretty sure that if either of her parents had found her like this she'd have an ass kicking to look forward to. The good news was, as long as she kept that on the forefront of her mind, she wasn't worried about homesickness. One less thing? She'd take it.

“Can I stop?” she finally spoke, her voice emerging small and weak from somewhere inside of her. “I'll start again tomorrow, I swear, but tonight I just... I... please... I need to stop.” She wasn't entirely sure what she was asking – to stop the world? To stop the ride so she could get off? To stop staring at a stone wall at close proximity? Mostly, though, she seemed to be trying to express the desire that, just for a few hours, she wanted to stop being Annie. Being around her was exhausting for everyone else, sure, but she never got a break from her. One evening of real fun sounded nice. One evening might be enough.

The sense of relief Roh had experienced turned out to be incredibly short lived. She had found Annie, yes, but things were wrong - and not in the typical way that things could be wrong with Annie. Waverly had gotten used to her incessant need to be moving, the flipping of her cards, the way the other girl would chew her lip until it was mottled and raw. Whatever help the Christmas gift of worry beads and calming perfume might have been would not work today. She would not be able to placate Annie's neuroses or brush it off.  This was alarmingly clear as the other girl gave something akin to plaintive bleat and looked at Roh with eyes too tired to cry.

When Annie was too tired to muster up tears there was a problem, and worry lines soon creased the Slytherin's forehead as she reached out and wrapped her arms around the Salemite in what she hopped was a comforting hug. Annie didn't like to be touched, but she seemed alright with hugs and she certainly looked like she needed one in that moment. Standing like that for a bit, it was only when Annie spoke that she pulled back and dropped her arms, expression cautious. "Annie you can quit anytime you like. You don't need permission to do that you just have to want to," she of course realized as soon as she said it that Annie did in fact need permission from someone else. She wasn't good at cutting herself a break, ever.

Taking a deep breath Roh have an authoritative nod, "I hereby decree that tonight will be your night off. There will be no studying, no flip cards, no lip chewing, and absolutely under no circumstances any further thought or talk about the third task". Roh hoped that by sounding like she knew what she was talking about she would be able to soothe the other girl's frazzled nerves. It was a fairly tall order, considering the usual state of Enright's nerves and the fact she seemed to want to be catatonic at the moment. Chewing the corner of her mouth she chose her next words carefully, "If you trust me I promise tonight I can help you turn your mind off, and possibly get you a few hours of sleep too. What do you say"?

Right around the time when Annie hit puberty, just when her every problem and concern seemed like it had been magnified by a million percent, her mother had decided she was no longer going to employ a nanny. Annie had felt lost. She'd always had a nanny, every day of her childhood and even in the summers after she'd started school. Her mother said that she was old enough to mind herself. That may have been true to an extent, but when her mother took away the nanny, she also took away Annie's entire emotional support system. By virtue of their contracts, those nannies had always been there for her, whether she was stressed out beyond all belief and needed an ear or just needed transportation to the beach for the day. As soon as that support system was gone the only person who could give Annie advice was, well... Annie, which also made her the only person to blame when things went wrong. It had been a long time since there had been someone around to hug her when she got like this.  Though she was not the best when responding to awkward physical contact, she melted into that hug like she'd done it a million times, trying to leech off of Waverly's strength.

Waverly was tall and Annie was comparatively short, so the embrace was difficult to maintain for the both of them, and their necessary parting seemed like a perfect time to ask if she might be allowed to stop for the day. It was only Monday, and the idea of keeping this up for the whole entire week was enough to make her want to jump from the top of the astronomy tower. She couldn't even imagine keeping this sort of schedule up for another day. Roh's suggestion that it was up to her to decide if she wanted a break made perfect sense, but it seemed a lot easier said than done. She couldn't be the one to decide to stop. She couldn't live with that guilt if something went wrong. And that word she'd used – quit – it didn't describe what she wanted to do at all. “No, no, that's... that's not...” she half whimpered, her front teeth worrying away at her bottom lip, “I don't want to quit. I just want to... I don't know. Um. I just want to do something else?” She felt as pitiful as she sounded. There were no words to describe her insatiable need to live in an alternate universe, just for a little while – someplace with less pressure, and maybe a little less gravity, too.

”I hereby decree that tonight will be your night off. There will be no studying, no flip cards, no lip chewing, and absolutely under no circumstances any further thought or talk about the third task.”

Annie just nodded, taking her friend's words as seriously as she might have an actual decree. She didn't seem genuinely relieved yet, however. She was still chomping on her lip, and she knew that not thinking about the one thing that had been dictating all of her life choices for two weeks was not going to be easy. Permission or no permission, she was going to feel like a slacker. Even just standing here felt unproductive! She really, really wished she would suddenly come down with some terrible illness so that someone might order her to take a nap and she could get some sleep in without guilt. If she kept this up then there was an excellent chance of that happening.

”If you trust me I promise tonight I can help you turn your mind off, and possibly get you a few hours of sleep too. What do you say?”

“Please!” Annie squeaked, her face all scrunched up and desperate. She sounded more like a starving child begging for food than an overworked student begging for an evening off. “I am so, so tired, I can't even tell you how tired I am,” she gushed with a deep sigh. “My mind is just... it's just... it's not working. I'm forgetting things and I'm just... worried,” she explained. This whole tournament was too complicated for her poor, overworked brain. There were too many factors..

“What do we do?” she asked, her eyes growing huge, hungry for the promised release.

"First thing we do, is get out of these uniforms. They not only make sneaking impossibly hard, but also if you don't want to feel like Annie Doright for the night you can't look like her either," Roh didn't even wait to see if the other girl was going to follow, instead just heading for the stairwell leading toward the Dungeons. She was already going through a list of possibilities in her head, things she had on hand to help the other girl relax and get out of her own head for a little while. Roh didn't rely a lot on potions or other herbal remedies to set her at ease, she didn't really need them after all but she kept some things hidden in the lining of her trunk on nights when she couldn't seem to sleep or turn off the ticking of her brain.

When it came to sneaking people in Slytherins actually had a bit of a break from the other houses. There was no Portrait to talk to, or Ghost to deal with, just a wall and password. With most everyone still at dinner Waverly didn't actually see it being much of a problem, at least getting in wouldn't be. If they stayed too long getting out might be more difficult. Glancing over her shoulder, she kept her voice low and gestured forward with her head, "keep close, I'm sure Wiedman and her cronies would just love to gossip about why I'm sneaking a girl up to my room". It was no secret that there wasn't much love lost between Roh and Liviana, they were just too different to ever agree on anything, also gossiping was not something Waverly enjoyed and was all Livi and her crew seemed to do.

Once past the dungeon wall, Roh ushered Annie toward the girl's dormitory, thankful for a moment that no one seemed to be around. It didn't take them long to reach the promised land and Roh gestured for Annie to seat herself on one of the beds (the one next to various snapshots of the Roh-Ballentyne's), "With the height difference we're going to have to shrink the legs a bit, do you want a jumper or something more daring"? She turned to consider Annie for a moment, eyebrow arched, Waverly's sense of style (could it be called that) was not for everyone. She wanted to get Annie out of her comfort zone but not so far out that the other girl would become catatonic, "I think I have some purple jeans that would almost fit, they're too short for me but I just can't throw them out," she was more muttering to herself as she tossed the trousers to the other girl, feeling around the lining of her trunk, "how much do you trust me"?

Annie followed, and she followed frantically, like a baby duckling whose instincts required it to keep close behind its mother. Roh was the only person keeping her sane right now, and she needed to keep up with her long enough to figure out what her plan was. She was a little frightened to learn just what the Slytherin girl had in mind, if she was being honest – but she was also slightly excited, and more than a fair bit relieved to not have to be in control at the moment. Her thinking muscles were sore from overuse, and this definitely was not an instance in which she'd be able to come up with a plan herself. She knew nothing about breaking rules, or even about relaxing in any productive way, so she needed her wild haired mentor to guide her tonight. She didn't feel great as she scuttled along behind her friend, more like a tag-along kid sister than a peer, but she kept up. The world still felt incredibly heavy on her shoulders, and none of the pressure had actually gone away. It was nice to be moving, though. At least it was productivity, even if it was the wrong kind of productivity (compared to what Annie was used to, anyway).

Most of Annie's brain power was currently being dedicated to the deceptively complex act of keeping herself calm. She wasn't paying too much attention to her surroundings (just enough to stay upright and not take any headlong trips down the stairs). She knew the Slytherin dorms were located in the dungeons, but that was the extent of what she knew – she'd never needed to actually go there, and she wasn't allowed in even if she had. It wasn't until Waverly explicitly said that she was trying to sneak her into the dorms that she officially registered what was going on – and by the time she gathered her wits and picked her jaw off the ground, she was already halfway through the common room. You couldn't really get more conspicuous than purple clad, wrinkle browed Annie. Luckily, it was mostly empty, and because nobody was actively looking for her, she didn't show up on anybody's radar.

Annie sat down gingerly on the indicated bed, but her facial expression suggested that something with many legs had just crawled up her butt and, at any moment, was in danger of crawling back out through her mouth. She did not want to be a killjoy, but her gut was writhing with nerves. If pinched hard enough, it seemed very likely that she would begin bawling. At the same time, however, she was visually exploring the space, taking it all in. It was a place she'd never been before and might never go again, and it was strange to think that she may have been occupying the space where her mother once lived back when she'd been at Hogwarts. It was even stranger to think that her mother had once lived in a dungeon.

”With the height difference we're going to have to shrink the legs a bit, do you want a jumper or something more daring?”-

“I...” Annie trailed off, finding her voice for the first time since she'd realized where they were – though it seemed her words were still missing in action. “I don't know. I'm not... just... anything is fine. Hayden picks out all of my muggle clothes, so I just... I usually wear what he sends, so I don't really know...” she explained haltingly, trailing off. Hayden's name had come up on occasion between the two – he was her brother's significant other and her co-conspirator when it came to procuring her a passably stylish muggle style wardrobe. He was Santa Claus – provider of blue jeans and name brands and everything he'd want to wear if he were a sixteen year old girl. It was definitely a symbiotic relationship.

”I think I have some purple jeans that would almost fit, they're too short for me but I just can't throw them out.”

Annie nearly groaned when Roh said purple. Instead she just sighed a shuddering, breathy sigh. “They're purple?” she asked tentatively, as if there was any possibility that she'd misheard. The look on her face gave away that she wasn't pleased. She wore purple all day, everyday – and today purple hadn't been kind to her. When they landed on her lap, it was confirmed. “They have holes,” she informed her friend as she lifted them up to examine then, sounding skeptical. “They're... um... are they supposed to be like this?”

”How much do you trust me?”

“I trust you, I just... okay, I trust you. But can I look in a mirror before we leave? I just want to make sure nothing's showing – like, that you can't see my underthings through the holes or anything. And, like... just to make sure. Okay?” she begged. She was thoroughly uncomfortable – but her mind was miles away from the source of her stress. Wardrobe related stress wasn't nearly as oppressive as what had been on her mind today. "Promise to make me look normal?"