Staff Room
After Students Curfew


Maker his body hurt, ached all over as it never had before. The Spring could not come fast enough where he would get a long break at home with his lover, and their cat. (Well...Chaz's cat that he has taken to, and would totally fight for should they break up.) Already he missed the purring little wonder beneath his feet and thought only of the powers that cats had to heal. Hell, his hair even hurt, and when he took it down Gale let the silver strands fall about his shoulders and down his back with a small moan of agony.

"What a day," He spoke to no one particularly, or really to anyone that cared to listen. "I could drink an entire keg right now just to make the ache go away." With his robes still on, he didn't have the strength to take them off and hang them at the door. Instead he found the biggest chair he could find and sat right down in the midst of it with a large plop and a sigh.

"Is it just me or are the students just getting worse," He said again with his eyes closed, "What I wouldn't give just for a few warm days to get them out of the castle." Gale knew it was time he found his own place, and not live on the grounds with the rest, but he certainly would miss this little bit of....bonding time (should one even call it that.)

Althea smiled, as she walked into the staff room, to find Gale sitting in a large chair, and she sat down next to him. "You believe that? Well,  I think everyone's become a bit sick of all the cold weather." She slipped off her heels, crossing her legs in the large chair. The Hufflepuff commonroom had been buzzing tonight, and she could have sworn her head was thumping almost as much as the children's feet on the floor.

She didn't want to admit that she was exhausted. She didn't want to admit that she was feeling just like Gale, or that this job had gotten very hard very fast. She didn't want to admit that she was feeling less than positive today. She was a positive person! She found joy in the smallest of things! But today, it was hard. Three kids fell asleep in her classes today. Three. That was a new record, and not a record she was proud of.

But even her hair was reflecting her feeling that day. The typical mess of curls had straightened. It had created a bob of sorts, and she just didn't have the energy to recurl it. She pointed her wand at her heels, transfiguring them into softer slippers, and slipping them on her feet, as she sunk into the chair. She missed Dallas, as she hadn't seen him in days because of her exhaustion from the students. Between that and her work, she just didn't have time. She hoped that soon enough she'd have time to hang out with him again, as she played with the small turtle around her neck.

"How is everything, Gale? I feel like it has been forever since I've seen you last." She said, her kind smile coming back, and her dark circles seeming darker. She had really missed her friendships that she hadn't been able to dedicate time to. Like Gale and her's.

He didn't know how she walked around in those shoes all day, and frowned at how they must ache. With a small smile he pulled out his wand to pull her chair closer so that way she could put her feet up in his lap. He would rub them for her.

"Things are well, M'dear. Everything is going rather smoothly despite how tired I feel all the time," One look at her and he could tell she was doing the same. "Ready for the weekend, and to get home to my beloved," She was lucky to have her sweetheart so close, Gale couldn't wait to live out of castle and away from the others. He couldn't wait to go home to his lover every night and not just two nights a week.

"I was going to surprise Chaz with a trip to Paris for spring break, but with his new job I don't know if he can get the time off. I am half tempted to trade the tickets in for somewhere tropical and warm. Disney World even." He grinned knowing that would cheer her up.

"What about you? Any big plans for the break?" A little soon to be thinking about that, but right now it was all Gale could think about.

"

Maiko’s day had been busy, to say the least. Some fifth years had some falling out, and the counselor had ended up mediating a rather long discussion between them. At the end of it, it seemed like they were doing better—but chances were, she’d hear about their next new crisis within the week. Listening to people all week discuss their issues was rewarding, but it was also physically and mentally exhausting. She was going to go home this weekend, and Mai was so looking forward to harassing her little brother and playing with her puppy. Kohaku probably wouldn’t admit it, but Mai suspected that he would be happy to see her too. Not seeing each other for months at a time had been rough, and buying a house for them was the best decision she had made, even if she didn’t enjoy being in debt to her grandparents.

She entered the staff room and saw Gale and Althea sitting together, and she gave them both a tired smile. She draped her arms around their shoulders familiarly and leaned forward.

“Long week for you two as well?” Mai inquired, looking from one to the other. Althea’s hair without it’s curl still looked cute. Being a teacher probably had as many trying moments as being a counselor did, but she was sure that in the end, it was worth it for them. After all, it was worth it for her.
 

"Very long actually," He smiled and kissed Maiko's cheek before sitting up a bit to better look her in the eye, "I actually have something I need to talk to you about. About the Trumble children. When you have a few moments?"

Dallas’ coat had been feeling much heavier lately, like it was threatening to drag him into the ground at any given moment. After putting away a stack of graded papers in his office, he realized it wasn’t his coat feeling heavier, it was the work load on his shoulders, not the leather that shrouded them. Too exhausted to make his way all the way down to his cottage just yet, Dal decided to visit the staff room, which was rare indeed. He hadn’t realized that teaching was as exhausting as a long day’s ride, but his groin didn’t ache afterwards and there was much more paperwork.

Dallas wandered down the dim halls after student curfew and located the staff room, opening the door with a creak of the hinges. He spotted Althea’s not so curly top and Gale’s waterfall of silvery locks, Maiko stood between them, her willowy arms swathing over their hunching shoulders. He fingered the material of his hat and strode deeper in the room. “Howdy” He smiled at the trio, grinning particularly at the Head of Hufflepuff House, he was meaning to invite her down to his cottage, he made a mental note to send her an owl later this evening.

“If I have to read another misspelled latin genus tonight, I’m hanging up my hat and sleeping for the rest of the month.” He breathed, sinking into a soft seat, the cushions enveloping him in much needed plushness.

She raised her eyebrows in concern.

“Of course, you can talk to me about them anytime.” Mai said gently. She had known the Trumbles for a long time, though she hadn’t talked to them much beyond a simple greeting in the hallway. It seemed, they were too uncomfortable with her to talk yet, and Mai was patient. She wasn’t going to push, even when she knew how hard things must have been for them.

“If you want, you can talk to me about it in my office tonight? I’m not going home this weekend.”
Then, Dallas made his grand entrance! She had not interacted with him hardly at all, though he seemed to be a friendly, charming guy.

“Bonjour!” She replied, arms still wrapped around her two coworkers.
She looked around the room. “It seems like we’ve all had it rough.” Maiko stood up straight and clapped her hands. “You know what this means? We need to have a night at the Three Broomsticks. If not tonight, some other time?”

A few crucial minutes after Locksley's arrival, an odd sound echoed from the staff room door: a series of soft-ish thumbs followed by something hard scraping down the wood of a door. Anyone who'd ever owned a large dog would recognize the plaintive requests for entry immediately.

Normally, Felinus would not have struggled so just to get into the staff room. In his years at St. Mungo's he'd gotten rather adept at opening doors with his teeth. However, tonight his mouth was occupied by an iron kettle the size of a standard cauldron. It contained his evening tea, which had unfortunately gone cold while he'd been herding the third-years down from their Astronomy lesson. The fire had gone out in his office and he didn't want to pull the house elves from their chores just to light it up again. Hence, the staff room. If he could ever get in.

"Blasted doors," he muttered as failed again to get a grip on the knob, his much-too-large paw slipping over the metal latch. "Half of them open on their own, how hard could it really be to enchant the rest of them? 'Keep the students on their toes' my paw..."

Then, she heard the thumps on the door.

The very sort of thumps that her giant, fluffy, bear of a dog did often when he wanted to be let into whatever room Maiko was in back at home. She heard the doorknob moving.

Maiko squeezed Althea and Gale’s shoulders affectionately and pulled away from them to answer the door. She opened it wide, and was unsurprised to see Felinius.

“Looks like my favorite lion!” Maiko exclaimed exuberantly, then put on her fake-stern face. “When are you coming to my office for tea and cookies? Hm?” She raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms over her chest in mock-anger. "Gale here can attest that my cooking rivals that of the house elves! Really, why must you hurt me like this?" It was quite obvious that Mai wasn't genuinely upset, just poking fun at the caretaker.

Ezia was in the foulest of moods, and anybody that wasn't visually impaired could see it. Soma had gotten in one of her moods and for all intents and purposes had taken reign over the desk in the Potions Master's office and refused to budge from the spot, leaving Ezia with the sole option of doing her grading in the Potions dungeon. Which—no. It was cold, it was drafty, smelled like a badly-kept laboratory, for all her and her students' dedicated cleaning—forced dedication on the students' parts. Obviously. All in all, it was just a really unproductive environment to be reading and correcting the unintelligible and often imbecilic essays of her students. Top that with current events in the castle and you had the perfect wrath of Lucrezia Di Luca.

Which left her with either doing the grading from her bed, which was never a good idea, seeing how red ink usually ended up everywhere or finding some other room in the castle to suit her purposes. It was Friday, so she thought most professors actually had a social or personal life, as such she hadn't thought for a second that when she'd open the door to the staff room, followed by a floating stack of parchments, she'd find not one, but four members of the staff. And the lion. Whatever, his job was. Odd, didn't even begin to cover Hogwarts and its staff... To make matters more pleasant they just happened to be the incredibly irritating ones as well—there was Kesali, or as she heard him being called, Professor Unicorn (tho one with obvious personality issues), the Muggle Studies professor, droll and irritatingly gleeful, the school counselor, who made Ezia want to crawl back into her skin and get the hell out of Dodge, and then the Creatures professor, who simply struck her as being akin to a lost puppy. And the lion. Again—what even?

"Good evening" she said slowly, eyeing each of them with thinly veiled skepticism and a dash of displeasure for a moment and got on with her business. She levitated her stack in and closed the door behind her, making for the closest free chair with a flat surface and setting to her task, but not before letting out a long sigh and shaking her head disbelievingly at the first lines of one essay.

The air went out the moment Ezia stepped in, but she had that affect on people didn't she? It must have been a requirement for her job title, as it seemed every potions master in the history of Hogwarts had spider legs for hair and venom on their lips. My....what beautiful lips she did have.

Blinking from his train of thought he realized he had been staring and quickly darted his attention somewhere else, despite how he wanted to ask how her grading was going. That little sigh he knew too well, essays were always his favorite. Especially from the ones who really didn't give a damn.

If Felinus could have blushed, he would have the moment Miss Biladeau-Yukawa opened the door. How he hated it when people had to do things for him! Especially something so simple as opening the door. He wasn't a house pet, for Merlin's sake.

"Fank oo," he mumbled around the kettle's handle. "Ah've been...busy."

He used impediment as an excuse not to elaborate the answer to her question. What was it about young women in this school trying to serve him tea? First Healer Torret's daughter, now Maiko. He didn't object, exactly, but it was rather odd. Who looked at a lion and decided 'you need a biscuit'?

Felinus carefully maneuvered his way around the counselor to avoid jostling her with his kettle. He made his way through the surprisingly crowded staff room to the fire, where he settled the iron teapot on the hook generally reserved for cauldrons. All of his lion instincts screamed at him to get away from the blaze, but he pushed them down, crouching to blow on the embers until they sparked enough of a fire to warm the tea.

With that, he settled on the rug and turned his attention back to Maiko with a respectful incline of his head. "Good evening, Miss Yukawa. And Professors." He rolled his shoulders to relieve the stress and settled his hug head on his paws. "Please pardon the intrusion. The fire's gone out in my office, and catnip tea does not favor being chilled."

Gale, who had a rather explosive Charms class today, and a meeting with Landis Morgan, certainly should have just returned to his office, but he was glad he came. Felinus was always wonderful to visit with, and his other friends were here too. It was nice, certainly.

"Do you need me to come start it back for you, Felinus? I certainly can. Though...we don't mind the company," It took everything in his power not to scratch the lion behind the ears, but he had to keep in mind that this wasn't a pet. He was a person--trapped.

"Come let me tell you about how one of my students set my other students on fire, before I had the chance to with the dragon." What a day.

Ezia attempted to tune out the mindless chit chat of the professors around her, but when Kesali opened his mouth to bring up the one affair that had actually managed to get a rise out of her since she had joined the Hogwarts staff, she immediately froze. Her hand stopped pushing the quill over the parchment and her eyes raised to watch the Charms professor impassively.

She placed the quill in the ink holder and dropped back in the chair lazily, eyes still glued to Kesali. She crossed her legs and placed her hand in her lap humming softly under her breath as she raised a curious eyebrow. "Do you often let students set other students on fire in your class, Mister Kesali?" she asked casually, no inflection to her voice. If he noted on the lack of title in her addressing, Ezia couldn't really be bothered to care. Only those that earned her respect, earned the professor title.

She was rather curious how Kesali could be so gleeful given he had just lost all respect from most of the students that had attended that debacle he called a lesson. From what she had heard, he hadn't even started the lesson before he went and had his nervous breakdown and made a spectacle of himself. The student body would be talking about this fiasco for months, if not years to come. Hogwarts standards had sure lowered severely since her time as a student...

Once the kettle was settled over the fire, Felinus made his way to a nearby cupboard and -- now able to more easily negotiate himself without a mouthful of cooking equipment -- tugged open the door to retrieve a large bowl, which he brought back to the fireplace and placed on the mantle.

"There's no need, Professor," he said in response to Nightingale's question. "The house elves will get it going again at the end of their rounds. But I do appreciate the offer, thank you."

Though he still felt himself a level below most of the faculty -- hence the persistent titles -- Felinus found that he enjoyed Nightingale's company, once the Charms professor had realized he wasn't either a vicious animal or a pet. The pale man could be a bit overly-affectionate, but he meant well and obviously cared deeply for his students. Felinus could appreciate that.

The lion settled on the rug between the teacher's seats and wrinkled his maw at the talk of dragons and fires, but before he could ask Professor Di Luca butted in from the other side of the room. Felinus eyed the icy Potions Master with an arched brow, a remnant of a human facial tick that looked almost cartoonish coming from a lion. Di Luca always struck him as being somewhat familiar. From her age, he suspected that she'd been a few years beneath him at Hogwarts, but never caused enough trouble for a prefect from another house to bother remembering her.

"I should imagine that regular fires are your department, madam. From what I've heard there's many a temper flaring in your dungeons of late." His ears flickered lazily in Kesali's direction. "I do hope your incident didn't leave too much of a mess. There's only so much my house elves can get to in one night."