Knock knock-knock knock knock.

"Felinus? Are you in there?"

No answer. Frowning, Silas rose up on his toes to peer through the window of the Caretaker's office door. It was bigger than he remembered it being, the latch lower to the ground and the old, familiar wooden nameplate replaced by one bearing his cousin's name. The base bore new claw marks, including a long trio of scrapes that appeared to be marking territory. Through the glass, Silas caught a glimpse of a low table and a filing cabinet, but no sign of the lion himself.

Silas knocked again, calling, "Feli, come on. If you're in there, open up. It's Silas. I didn't see you at the Fair and I was hoping..." He lowered back onto his heels and lay his forehead against the door. He tugged at the knob, but of course it was locked. He sighed. "We need to talk. Please? This isn't fair."

...

Silence.

Silas sighed again and resigned the endeavor to failure. The Career Fair had wrapped up an hour ago. If anyone saw him hanging around the school there'd be awkward questions. It was better to go.

Shoulders slumped in disappointment, he picked up the messenger bag where he'd packed all his shrunken equipment and shuffled towards main hall. As he rounded the corner, he spotted someone else opening another office further down the corridor. When her form registered, his eyes immediately lit up.

"Maiko!"

Laughing, he jogged to greet the school councilor -- and his old school-friend -- with a surprise hug. "It's so good to see you! Gosh, it's been too long. How have you been?"

The career fair had been a success! She was ready to relax in her office and do some paperwork… Maybe drink some tea. The usual. When she opened the door and heard a familiar voice calling her name, it became apparent that it wasn’t in the cards for her. Not that she minded, Mai always welcomed company.  Before she could look and see who it was, she was being oh-so-lovingly squeezed.

“Hello?” She greeted, before turning to get a good look at her surprise hugger.

Silas!

She adjusted herself so she could hug him back, sqeezing him and lifting him in the air. “Silas! Si!” Mai exclaimed. She hadn’t gotten to interact with him much at the job fair, and had regretted it. Finally, Mai released him from her death-grasp-of-love and pushed her office door open with her foot.

“Come in! I’ve been doing great, working here, counseling students, drinking tea. I got a dog! A gorgeous fluffy thing. I’ll have to show you a picture of him. Do you want tea? Of course you want tea. I’ve also got some scones from this morning…”

Mai led him into her office, babbling as she was prone to do when excited.

Silas's laughter grew only stronger as tiny little Maiko managed -- once again -- to lift him off his feet, even if it was only a few inches. He matched her hug as strong as he could, arms tight around her shoulders, and dropped an affectionate peck on one cheek. Gosh but it was good to see her again. He really needed to get out of the booth more often.

"Tea! Tea, yes, that'd be excellent. You make the best tea." The laughing didn't stop once she'd let him down, but it did slow a bit. He hoisted the saddle bag further onto his shoulders and followed her in, sliding smoothly over the stone. "And a dog, wow. I guess that means you're not living in the castle, huh? Where're you at these days, the village? London?"

He lived in London too, but of course the city was huge, it'd  be all too easy to miss her. Silas paused in the middle of the office and did a quick three-sixty to take it all in. Cushy chairs, cute little table, it was all very Maiko. "I love what you've done with the place. It's so cute. Anywhere in particular you want me to dump this bag?"

The best tea! Oh, he flattered her.  She picked up a little teapot and tapped it with her purple-tinted wand, the water heating up immediately. She opened a cupboard that was filled to the brim with different kinds of tea. She pulled out a bag of jasmine for herself, and motioned towards the boxes, indicating that Silas could pick whatever he wanted. Loose leaf, bagged, it didn’t matter. She had it all. One of her cupboards at home was in a very similar situation. She was a known hoarder of teas and books.

“Just put the bag on the floor.” She didn’t care where it was as long as she didn’t trip over it and break her neck. “And thank you! I decorated the place myself!” She was proud of her decorating job. Mai tried her best to make it as homey and cozy as possible.

“I do live in London now.” She usually flooed to work in the morning, but sometimes she did sleep on the couch in her office when she worked late. She pulled a picture off her desk—it was one of those cheesy family photo types—she and her brother were in matching sweaters and her dog was positioned in the middle. The picture was one that didn’t move.  “There’s my brother, and theeeere’s Maslow.” She looked at Silas curiously, “Are you related to a lion?" Leave it to Mai to jump from one subject to the next.

Nodding as he took in all her answers, Silas deposited his bag under the counter and studied Maiko's impressive tea selection. Times like this, he almost regretted sticking to coffee around the office. Imagine the fun of trying a new tea every day! There were so many different flavors: Peppermint, green, assam, darjeeling, oolong...

His eyes settled on a box near the back. which drew a nostalgic smile. Catnip. Felinus's favorite, even before he got stuck. Living with the man for four years left Silas with a similar taste. He plucked a bag from the box and handed it off to Mako, trading it for the photo.

"Aw," he said, tapping the glass near the dog's head a few times but not entirely surprised when it didn't move. "He's a cutie. Lookit all that fluff. And looks like your brother's doing well, too. He's grown up quite a bit."

At Maiko's next question, the smile dimmed. It didn't go away completely, but it did fade. Silas peered almost shyly over the top of the photograph. "Yes, of course I am. You mean Felinus, right? He's my cousin."

He stepped around Maiko to clear her path to the teapot and placed the photograph back on her desk. "That is, he's technically my cousin. Literally my cousin. Our dads were twins. But he's also kind of a brother, too? He was always there growing up and he took me in when my dad died...that was before the whole lion thing, though."

He was rambling, and gesturing vaguely with his hands, and rolling his head the way he always seemed to when he was anxious. He sighed, ran a hand over his bound hair, and sat down in one of the chairs. "Hey, speaking of...Felinus. Is he okay? Is he happy here?"

“He has grown. He’s taller than me now. Significantly taller.” Mai shook her head. “He must’ve gotten it from his mom, our dad wasn’t very tall.” She watched him tap the picture and smiled. He didn’t seem surprised at all by the fact that it was a muggle photograph, but then again she was sort-of-a-muggleborn. “But still as snarky as ever, unfortunately.” Mai said with a small smile,  his snarkiness never did bother her,  she was used to it by now.
She noticed that Silas’ smile dimmed, and Mai wondered if she had touched on a sensitive subject.

If Felinius and Silas’ dads were twins, then they would biologically be half-brothers. When Felinius wasn’t a lion, she imagined he’d look about as much like Silas as her own brother looked like her. That was a strange thought—she had met Felinius as a lion, so she couldn’t imagine him any other way. That was not likely how Silas remembered him, however.

“Felinius is fine.” Mai said reassuringly, “He seems to enjoy it here. Obviously, he’s not running around in a fancy hat screaming about how happy he is, but he seems like he likes it here. He’s content. We get along well. Or at least, I think we get along well.”  Her eyebrows furrowed together and she sat down next to Silas, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

"Oh." Silas sounded half-relieved, half-disappointed, which was exactly how he felt. It was very confusing. "That's good. I'm glad to hear you're getting along...he wasn't easy to get to know even before..."

It wasn't until the hand hit his shoulder that Silas realized how gloomy he'd gotten. He instantly tossed up his head and forced a bright smile. "Okay? Sure, I'm okay. I'm fine! Really, it's nothing...it's stupid..."

But of course, that didn't work on Maiko. One didn't become the councilor to a castle full of volatile teenagers without seeing through their most obvious tricks. Silas gestured vaguely again, buying all of five seconds before he gave up. His shoulders slumped under Maiko's hand.

"It's just...Feli didn't even tell me he was taking this job. I only learned about it from the guy who cleans the Animagical Mishaps wing at Saint Mungo's. And he hasn't written me once since he got here. It's been months." He felt his eyes prickling and blinked rapidly to keep the hurt tears from welling up. God, he hated that. The last thing he'd needed growing up was to play into the sissy Mama's-boy stereotype, and he needed it even less now. He was an adult, dammit.

"I looked for him at the Fair too. I mean, I was broadcasting across half the school, he had to know I was here. But there's no sign of him. It's like he's avoiding me."

“Oh, Silas.” She leaned in and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him into a hug. That was why he was wandering this area—Felinius’ office was just down the hall.

It wasn’t like Silas could communicate how he felt to someone he couldn’t get in contact with, someone who never responded. It would’ve broken her heart if her brother disappeared off the face of the earth, never to speak to her again. She couldn’t completely relate to Silas, she had never been in that position before—but she could see where he was coming from.

“It sounds like Felinius is very… Personal and private.”  She said softly, “Did you two have a falling out before, or does he regularly go through periods where he’s distant?” Mai’s lips curled downward into a mild frown. For some people, it took time for them to figure out how to talk to someone they cared about. And the longer they waited, the more anxious and worried the other person got. 

Mai had half a mind to confront Felinius himself, and bear down upon him the lecturing force of 100,000 mothers. 

Silas lay his head on Maiko's shoulder, not resisting her hug in the slightest. It felt nice. So nice. Maiko was so warm and kind. Motherly. Just what you needed when you were homesick or lost or insecure. The students of Hogwarts -- and the staff, he supposed -- were lucky to have her.

"He is pretty private. And he does sometimes go off on his own for a while, but usually it's to work on some project. The last time was when he got...stuck."

Silas bit his lip. They -- he and Felinus -- didn't really talk of what had happened then. The elder Woodward had been stuck in that house all by himself, unable to change back or do magic or even open his doors. If Silas hadn't chosen that week to come looking for him...

He cleared that thought away with a slight shake of his head. Re-imagining the past did no good.

"After that, when Saint Mungo's told him that first time that they couldn't help, I offered to move him into my apartment. Or get a house or something, somewhere we could stay together. But Feli wouldn't consider it. Not for even a second." Silas got the urge to gesture again and shrugged out of Maiko's hug so he could flail his arms without smacking her in the stomach.

"I just don't get it. I mean, if it were your brother, wouldn't you have brought him home? Or, or if something -- Godric forbid -- happened to you, if you got stuck as a magpie or an owl, you'd know that you could count on him. Couldn't you?"

She released him from the hug, though it wans’t as if her embrace was so tight that he had no hope of ever escaping. In the past, he’d probably been a recipient of one of those spine-crushing hugs. Mai sat and did what she did best: listening.

Felinius and Silas’ relationship was complicated, to say the least. But then again, most relationships were complicated to some degree. For those two, things seemed especially convoluted. And it was hurting Silas, at the very least. She didn’t know how Felinius felt; their conversations never went in this sort of direction. She had the gut feeling that the lion was rather fond of her, but it was difficult to tell because he was, you know, a lion. And a private one at that.

“If it were my brother,” Maiko finally replied, “Then I would’ve wanted him to come home, to stay with me.” She shook her head, “But… In the end I would have let him go. Trying to keep people close to you when they need their space will often make them pull away.” She bit her bottom lip, “And if something happened to me, I wouldn’t want to be a burden on him. I would want to maintain my independence, to hold on to some sense of normalcy. In the end, I'd go to him if I needed him., pride be damned."

Silas nodded absently. Maiko's advice was reasonable, and sound, and thus he was certain it would prove helpful later, even if it didn't make him feel any better now. "I wish I thought that Felinus would do same. He holds onto his pride more than anyone I've ever known."

He stared pensively at the table for a moment, then shook his head and forced a chuckle in an attempt to break the solemn atmosphere that had settled over them. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to come in here and mope at you. Merlin knows you must hear enough peoples' problems, with your job. Is the tea ready?"

He'd practically forgotten the mugs and teabags they'd selected for themselves. The whole set remained wherever Maiko had set them, no doubt bubbling with impatient demands for their attention. A nice cuppa sounded even better now than it had back in the halls.

"Let's talk about something else. Something fun like, uh...sports. Or the Tournament. Or...oh!" Silas's face lit up, metaphorically. The moon tattoo on his left wrist lit up literally, but only for a moment. "Did you hear the boy who hopped on my broadcast this afternoon? The Ravenclaw Quidditch captain, Peyton...something. He used a different name on-air. But he really took to it. Improvised a whole report right there. It was really brilliant. Only time will tell if he can do that with anything other than sports, but still. Good, strong talent coming up from the kids this year."

“I don’t mind in the slightest.” And she really didn’t. Day in and day out, she was never tired of listening to the troubles of others. She had always been this way, taking on the problems of others with ease. Her own problems, however, weren’t always handled so smoothly. Mai definitely put an effort into it, but there was something about helping others that made it easier improve things for herself. It was easy to forget the soundest advice until you were giving it to someone else.

Silas, however, wanted to move on—and Maiko was happy to. She hadn’t seen him in so long! It was nice to catch up.
She stood up and fetched their individual mugs of tea, handing Silas the catnip mug and keeping the jasmine for herself. “It’s steeped a little long, sorry.” Mai grimaced apologetically.

“Peyton! Peyton Wentworth!” She exclaimed, “Yes, I heard! He was excellent. Not everybody has a good radio voice, like you.” Mai elbowed him playfully. “Merlin knows that if my voice was on air, people would be changing the channels.” It was true.  Her voice, while pleasant enough in person, simply did not translate well through other media.