(( This thread will be mostly drabbles, snapshots, and short rp replies, not a single thread. Tor and I will post replies as we write them and will be tagged with the date. It focuses on the weeks after the events of Did I Say I'd See You Soon?. ))


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[Friday 10th]

Juliette has replaced him with a dog. Landis' first real knowledge of this situation comes when he strides out of his back office and nearly trips over the thing. The dog collides with his shins, yelping; Landis grabs at a shelf for balance and curses. He almost draws back his foot but then he sees the students staring. He thinks, kicking puppies. A new low.

He does not sully his shiny leather shoes. Instead he leans against the check-in desk and glares as the pup spots its master and runs estatically to frolic about her feet.

"Oh my," she breathes, bending to pet its silky little head. But she's looking at him, and her smile does not match the affection she directs at the dog. Her smile is not nice at all. "How did you get in here? I do hope you didn't chew on any Mr. Morgan's precious tomes."

"Get your dog out," he says, and she seems too satisfied with the anger in his voice when she leaves.

Sunday, 12 April, 2009
Late Morning
Staff Room

Juliette pulled the second shot with her wand, taking comfort as always in the whistle and steam, the roasted scent assaulting her pert nose, the tiny splash and persistent ripple of hot liquid as it rose in the white porcelain, doubling in sum. A silver teaspoon felled two minuscule mountains of grainy sugar, one for each shot, and they dissolved promptly before Juliette could add the splash of warmed, unsteamed milk. Creamy white swirled with rich brown, until the liquid was a proper latte, French roast and far from dry, foamless as per her preference.

Juliette preferred to take her time sipping the brew, indulging in the comforting smell that reminded her of Paris, of her parents’ dining room, of her grandmother. Foam was too quick, a substance-less tactility on the tongue.

Much as she had convinced herself that it was a fine morning (or, simply, morning, like any morning) to indulge in a café au lait, she couldn’t help using it as a ruse. A certain not-to-be-named blond man with an infuriating propensity for reading the English newspapers in the staff room had beat her to her very destination, and Juliette had no choice but to save face and go about her routine as if he were a particularly drab armchair. She took a more welcoming one, which did not include Landis’ lap.

Crossing her legs beneath a navy pencil skirt, she coaxed open a bound set of exams through which she’d been trudging with her customary red ink. The second half were unmarked, save for slovenly handwriting and grammatical errors aplenty. Whomever had taught these children to write... But Juliette took pride in knowing her grammar, which came easier to one who had been raised bilingual and schooled abroad. Mastering multiple languages forced one to trace their roots, to make ancient Latinate connections before attempting literal translations.

Her lips pressed into a slightly-parted kiss, and Juliette blew on the steam rising from her cup before taking a sip. As she pretended to read a dismal paragraph on Shrinking Solution (which very well might have been written by a teenage boy who had had his brain targeted by said potion), she glanced up and noted the maddening stillness with which Landis conducted his mornings... and his everything. So absorbed was she in feigning not to see him directly across from her, that she had forgotten the room’s third party: her new puppy.

Whimpering with pathetic adorableness at her feet, the creature drew her eyes down and her brows upward. “No coffee for you,” she explained, refusing to coo at it, lest Landis think she’d gone mad. Still, her voice was soft, sweet, befitting that of a woman talking to a cuddly animal whose tilted head and whines and puppy breath would make any normal (read: Non-Landis) person melt. “Perhaps a biscuit.”

Raising her wand, Juliette suddenly summoned a lemon biscuit from the fresh batch set out by the elves. Coincidentally the plate adorned the table adjacent Landis’ chair, and so the sweet-turned-flying saucer flew an unexpected path past him, mere inches from his perfect cheekbones, piloted quite consciously by Juliette who had swished her wand at a sharp angle to ensure the detour.

She took the thing between delicate fingertips and snapped it in half, offering the larger portion  to the animal whose paws were now pressed into her legs. Its tailed wagged near-audibly and it gobbled the cookie at record-breaking speed, sending many a crumb into the shallow bowl of Juliette’s lap. She paid it no mind while she dipped her half into her latte and nibbled at it.

Finally, she stood up, wiping the crumbs onto the floor for the dog to vacuum. Bending down-- her chest facing Landis by no coincidence-- she scooped the heap of chocolate puppy and his floppy, baby limbs into her arms, and readjusted herself as she stood properly. With her free hand, she used her wand to float the espresso and half-graded essays behind her. She stared quite openly at her fellow room occupant. “Might your friend Dazmond know anyone who can train a dog?” She asked, before turning toward the door. She did not wait for an answer.

There are books in the library in a dozen different languages, modern languages and old, human and otherwise. All are readable with the help of a translation spell, but surely the only ones who ever crack them open are the professors, and even more certainly it was the professors who put them there in the first place. The students can't be bothered with the arcane knowledge of old Portuguese dock-haunts or German astrological advances of the mid-thirteenth century, and when Landis first arrived each books sat sad and heavy under a thick blanket of dust.

Landis, in his new job-created and bookish way, feels a bit sorry for them. Although they are now quite clean, no one touches them. They huddle together on the shelves of their respective subjects, keeping to dark corners, away from the well-lit and oft-used popular English-language books. He can always tell, even without looking at the title, when his fingertips touch their spines. It is not a knack he had before he became a librarian, but something about the job and the library changed him; now he can feel it. There is an air to them, lonely and straining, and while other books clank their chains for attention these only whisper in their foreign tongues.

So he draws them out and reads them sometimes, runs a finger lightly over marbled pages and wipes away new dust. It is his job as the librarian to take care of them, and books need to be read. Especially here, at Hogwarts, where even inanimate objects gain a kind of sentience and the books, filled with the words and breath of magic, are the worst. He can't read a lick of the Asian languages, nor Portuguese; German he can tell the titles, sometimes, a few nouns and all the pronouns, and Spanish he knows every one word out of ten. Latin and French are his best languages as he was equally tutored in each, but while his grasp of Latin is not so different from what he finds in these books, his French is less practiced, and with a handful of years between his long-ago tutor and himself Landis is barely conversational anymore. He doesn't even try with the older languages, or with Elvish or Goblin. But it is the pretense of reading that is important, not the comprehension; these books crave to be held, to be useful, so he flips through their pages and they are content. There is nothing quite so pathetic as an unloved book.

After Juliette comes to Hogwarts, he spends more time with the French texts. It's nothing anyone could comment on, and besides, he needs to practice his French. Now he is more fluent in the things that don't matter at all, knowing the verbs for obscure wand movements and the names of historical figures who died long ago. These books are hardly treatises on grammar and verb conjugations, but they do tredge the depths of his memory for words and phrases he thought he'd forgotten, and anyways one can't write a book without the proper sentence structure so there is that to learn as well. They are certainly nothing that would help him translate the sort of things she says in bed, but he finds her meaning carries over quite well regardless of language. It's a relief because after a night with Juliette, the last thing Landis cares about is additional reading.

In casual conversation she intersperses her words with French; in emergency situations or when her emotions are high, it is the first thing she speaks. He's taken to responding to her in English; mostly he understands, but he is not the sort of man to admit it when he doesn't. He thinks it delights her when he makes a mistake, but he also thinks that maybe she likes it when he speaks her tongue. Neither alludes to the fact that through her consistent and increasing switch between languages, she teaches and he learns.

It is much more obvious now that she is angry with him. Landis does not speak it at all, but she is as loquacious in one language as in the other and he realizes how she must have been editing her speech when two days later she goes off in a flurry of irate, complicated French that he can't understand at all. He catches words at random - coward, bastard, so unbelievable, such arrogance - but the rest is lost to her frosty, high-class intonation and her soft half-swallowed words.
 
There is no need to spend time with the foreign-language books now that they have a regular reader. She checks them out: racing through the Potions section, she leaves him notes asking him to order more in pointed, loopy French. He casts a translation spell so he can have the satisfaction of examining each carefully-chosen word, then pretends a difficulty ordering from the Parisian catalogs. Soon she is barely speaking to him at all, and then always in sly, vicious English. It is what he wanted, but the whole language matter is suddenly unsettling. It is not as though his grasp on it is decaying; after all, it has only been a week or two. It is just that with the books and the daily conversations, Landis hadn't realize how much of an effort he was making until he stops.

Sunday, 19 April, 2009
Early Evening
Juliette's quarters

The thing smelled of mint and vetiver and cypress. It was perfectly tailored, free of infinitesimal snags or creases or fading. It were as if someone had charmed it so; it was Darian's work, she knew. But the scent...

Juliette brought it away from her face. She'd breathed it in like a schoolgirl daydreaming into her pillow-- a light pillow, weightless, air for feathers. Her eyes fluttered open. The hands clutching it became most distrustful of her expression, her favored sense, her nostalgia. In a fit of logic-- wrath-- she treated it as if it weren't a soft pillow at all, nor a perfectly fine shirt (as it appeared), but some contagion hellbent on breaking her. She threw it on the ground like a child, staring at suspiciously. The puppy poked its head up from its resting place on her bed, tilting its raw cocoa snout, one ear flopping to the side, the other perking comically and against its will. A lazy spectator. Juliette made no comment, vocal or otherwise. If the dog knew her indecision, he was a faithful friend and a great keeper of secrets.

Juliette stared down at the bewitched garment for a moment, tiny frown gracing sultry lips. Unlike the puppy, the shirt could very well be a spy; it was as knowing as any of those books Landis mastered over. To Juliette, it smelled like him, was made for him, and thus must think like him. To him... If she returned it, would he sense her in it? Had it been with her too long? Perhaps she should burn it, a token of her affection, and send it back in a pretty package, ribbons of silver. But he wasn't like to wear it, not here, not when so many people had seen her in it (and so many others had seen them argue). She was annoyed that he probably would not care whether she burned it or folded prettily, or returned it at all; she was annoyed he would think her a child, annoyed she was acting like one.

A murmur of French and she picked it up again, the dog looking ever more curious. He yawned, stretched his paws into the feathery white bed, and placed his passive gaze over silky, puppy-sized arms. He seemed to melt into the blankets in a way a human never could. Had they forgotten so easily how to luxuriate? Was it a lost cause, to enjoy something so wholly and without catch?

 Juliette gave the shirt a well-meaning shake, summoning a wooden hanger. She put it in the very back of her closet, behind her winter cloaks and beneath hat boxes of floppy sun wear and pointed witch's ornaments.

The rest of his things she put in a small maple chest, few as they were. Among them: two leather-bound books, a necktie, and a watch she might have borrowed from the night stand while he’d slept. If he knew she had it, he'd said not a word.

Thursday April 11th

Landis is at breakfast the next morning. So is Juliette. She looks ready to curse him again but, as the remaining students watch avidly, takes another seat. He spends his breakfast reading the newspaper; she eviscerates an orange. When he brings his tea to his lips he finds the liquid inside has been transformed into coffee, black and bitter with the remains of his lemon still floating in its depths. It's a terrible combination and she's turned it cold as well.

There's something more to the gesture than he cares to think of, a nostalgia and a reminder as helpless as her rage. Still, he drinks all of it, unblinking, as if he didn't notice the change, and then leaves with the first bell. Perhaps there is something in that gesture as well.


Tuesday, April 21st

He wonders how intelligent the thing is. Very, he decides, as it is lifted happily to snuggle against her chest. It is ridiculous to be jealous of a dog, and so he is not - but he is very very annoyed by the way she feeds it bits of food off her plate and it grins down the table at him (he imagines), looking very pleased.


Wednesday, April 22nd

He is not a professor but he is a Head of House, so some evenings he patrols the dungeons after hours. He was a student in this house and he knows all the best places to snog; he checks each spot for lovers and mischief-makers before he considers the job done.

He does it less than he used to, for he is very aware that as the darkness hides him it can also hide others, and this is Juliette's territory as well. Landis thinks longingly of the time when he could walk tall in his own kingdom, but he does not begrudge her her space. She'll be over it soon; they severed ties early. She'll likely have a new flame within weeks. He thinks, a woman like Juliette does not stay single long.


Thursday, April 30th

Landis tried to avoid addressing her, when he could.

If he called her Ms. Vaillancourt, as he used to, she would be angry. If he called her Juliette, as he did when they were close, she would be angry too. If he didn't call her anything at all, she would notice... and be angry.

Really, she was a most irritating woman.




"For someone with such a marked distaste for the librarian," he said dryly. "You're in the library an awful lot."