Outfit

Glad that for once in the evening after dinner no one was in the common room, Vulpes reposed upside-down in a black leather armchair by the fire. Today had been a pretty good day. All the classes went well, he even managed to earn a few points, and dinner with Aurora had been quite fun, even if it was just the two of them.

Bobbing and swaying to the music emitting from his headphones, Vulpes reached down and slipped his journal from his bag. It had been longer than he meant since writing his last entry, but oddly enough he didn't feel a great need to write down the last week down. Nothing major had transpired. Instead he flipped to a blank page at random and began sketching a picture of Aurora.

After a time, Vulpes became much more interested in his very poor artwork than the music that filled his ears. He didn't even notice his headphones had fallen from his head until he could hear the noise of his pencil running across the paper. Blinking in surprise that he was so distracted he didn't feel them move, Vulpes closed his journal and slipped it into his bag. With a huff, he began groping the ground for his fallen headset.

They couldn't have gone far. But for some reason he couldn't seem to find them. Sighing heavily, Vulpes gracefully rolled off the chair and onto his feet, focusing his attention on the ground around himself.

"Oh where, oh where could my headphones have gone?"  he said in a  singsong voice. "Oh where,oh where could they be?"

Unfortunately for Vulpes, someone else was going to be in the Common room. In fact, Gracie was making her way to the dungeons now.

Soundlessly—contentedly—she moved down the corridor, arms full of cat and hair pulled back into a sad excuse for a ponytail. Dinner had gone well, as usual, although this time she was heading to bed directly. She was exhausted; there hadn’t been any classes at all that day, true, with it being a Sunday and all, but by no means did that mean it was any less tiring.

Having friends, she was slightly ashamed to admit, was work, sometimes. And even more so, perhaps, when one was in Slytherin. . .

Just before they reached the front door, Gracie gave the feline an unimpressed look. “Lazy,” she whispered, scratching him under the chin. “And evil, making me run after you all over the pitch like that. What are you going to do when I choose not to, hmm?”

Greebo only rumbled in reply. He was very much a cat in the now; worrying about the future was for other people—like Gracie. He didn’t have to worry about things like that, thank you very much.

Shaking her head, Gracie set him down gently. Hopeless, she thought, fighting back a smile. Then, she turned to the door and opened it. . . and heard singing.

Eyebrows raised.

The singer was a thin, lean and not very tall—not much taller than her, anyway—and blue-tinged hair fell over his face. He was also on his knees, clearly looking for something, and wasn’t anyone she recognized at all. Not beyond the fact that he was a fifth year like her, anyway. Frowning slightly, Gracie quietly began to approach him from behind—only to be distracted by the pair of headphones hiding not too far away from him. “They’re right there,” she said, unthinkingly.

Hearing a girls voice behind him, Vulpes perked his head up slightly. Having a Slytherin girl talk to him outside of class was a rare occurrence, and it was never one he expected to go well. All of the girls in his year particularly frightened him. Turning slightly, he saw the bright blue of his headphones and smiled. "Ah, thanks," Vulpes said, plucking them up and placing them around his neck. Now standing, he prepared to see who actually bothered to help him.

Oh shh... Vulpes's heart sank like a stone. Gracie Slant. Like all the Slytherins, Vulpes really had little to no familiarity to her. But there was just something that made her slightly more horrifying than the others (except Kitty Li). "Uh, h-hi Gracie," Vulpes said, trying his best to keep his voice level. "How... how are you this evening?"

Not exactly loving the feeling of her eyes, Vulpes dropped his gaze... and noticed a cat. "Oh my god cat!" he exclaimed, forgetting present company. Quickly he stepped over to where it was laying, and knelt by it.

"Hi, kitty! Aren't you just adorable!"

Bemused, she simply blinked at him. So he knew her—or rather, her name, at least. Huh.

Still doesn’t explain the dread, though. . .

“Just. . . peachy,” said Gracie, eying him warily. On some level, Vulpes’ reaction wasn’t unexpected; when you punched someone (or others) often enough, people tended to treat you a bit more carefully. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember ever speaking to him. With hair like that—black tinged with a bright, almost obnoxious shade of blue—she was sure she would if she had, but she didn’t.

And while she was wracking her brain for something to say, Greebo was watching him just as warily—although in his case, ‘calculatingly’ wouldn’t have gone amiss, either. Despite the noise the boy emitting, that great, fluffy head peered around from behind the armchair, as if hoping that there was, perhaps, compensation at the end of the long, noisy tunnel. He didn’t have to put up with this.

“You may want to back away a little,” Gracie said dryly. “He’s a bit of a cow, when he feels like it. Who are you, again?”

Suddenly remembering who he was in the company of, Vulpes stood back up, blushing slightly. Well this was certainly an emberassing first meeting. Not that meeting anyone in Slytherin was anything less than. As the years had gone by it became more and more apparent that he really did not fit in to the house at all.

"Vulpes Connor," he replied casually. "I'm not surprised you don't know my name." Vulpes gave a slight shrug. It was true, really, the fact that anyone knew his name was rather incredible in his mind. He usually did such a  good job of hiding in the background.

Although that didn't explain why she was talking to him. Normally Vulpes would not care, welcoming the conversation. But Slytherin girls were usually ones he tried to avoid. While some of them seemed rather nice, there was always the impression that they had some dark motive lurking behind their pretty face.

And considering the house was rather well known for that, it was very likely they all did.

Up and down Gracie looked at him, expression thoughtful. Even closer up, the boy was thin, almost weedy-looking compared to those others she usually hung out with (although, that may be simply because his hair was bigger than theirs, too. . .), though by no means was he as easily to write off as he had been when he’d been on all fours. Those two inches he had on her weren’t enough to prevent her from noting his weird blue eyes—and they were weird; she’d spotted some strange blokes in Diagon Alley, sure, but none of them had eyes like that.

“Gracie Slant,” Gracie supplied, unaware that he already knew—or simply uncaring if he did. It was hard to say. “That’s Greebo,” a slender finger pointed at the cat lurking around the furniture. At the sound of his name, silver-tufted ears perked up and their massive owner eyed the pair carefully. “He’s easy for anything warm, fluffy, and with its heart still beating.”

Like yours, she almost added, but didn’t. Instead, she replaced it with the slow, lazy smile of someone on the cusp of deciding if it was worth knowing you or not. “Might I ask what you were doing before the singing?”

Vulpes smiled and glanced back at the cat. "Well hes certainly a cutie," he said with a smile, resisting a great urge to cuddle with it. It sure would be nice to have a cat. But Vulpes was slightly worried about what would become of it if any of the other Slytherins found out it was his. In all likeliness if he ever got a cat it would end up living in Gryffindor with Cytherea. At least then it would go mostly unharmed.

Smiling he nodded when she mentioned her name. Naturally he knew it, he had just called her by it after all. Although the only real reason Vulpes knew the girls name was because of his mental list of Girls to Hide From in the Hallways. In fact it probably helped keep him out of a lot of trouble when he ducked out of sight upon seeing one of them.

“Might I ask what you were doing before the singing?”

He blinked and tilted his head to the side. "Before the..." Vulpes trailed off. Just how loud had he emitted that childrens tune? To him it seemed much quieter, but clearly that wasn't the case. And now that she was asking what he had been doing, Vulpes had a hard time remembering. "I was..." he thought, furrowing his brow in thought. "Reading. While laying upside down on the chair," Vulpes smiled and made a slight motion towards the chair behind him.

Technically what he had told her was a lie. Although the thought of pulling out MacBeth had crossed his mind, so there was at least some truth to it.

Gracie smiled faintly. Greebo certainly was adoration-worthy; with that thick mane of dusty black and that perpetual expression of disdainful confusion, there was, without a doubt, no doubt about it. There were many things that could be said about nearly thirty pounds of fluff and laziness, but the most oft-used one of them all was  ‘cute.’

Brow raised, she drew close toward one of the sofas and leaned against an armrest. “‘Upside down’?” she repeated, only a little skeptical. A light brush against her foot had her glancing down—Greebo, she saw—and she scooped the cat up and gently tossed him into the couch. She looked back at the boy with a much wider smile. “What book would possibly warrant that?”

True, there were other things she found more interesting than talking about books. But at that moment Gracie decided it couldn’t hurt to find out a little more. She talked outside her normal realm of friends so rarely. An opportunity to learn something about those she never spoke to. . . Well, she wasn’t that tired.

"Uh, yea, upside down," Vulpes said casually as if it were nothing. Which to him, it wasn't. "I have a habit of reposing in strange ways." He shrugged slightly, hardly seeing why it mattered. In truth he just found it boring to sit normally in a chair, legs crossed. So he just did his best to lay in any direction that was comfortable at the moment. Upside down just happened to be the most commonly enjoyable pose.

Vulpes gave a slight smile. "Any book really," he said in the same light tone. "It doesn't really matter what I'm reading, tragedies, comedies, fantasies," Vulpes shrugged again, deciding best not to go into his enjoyment in Muggle Science Fiction novels. Probably not a genre that would be well received in the presence of a Slytherin.

"I am really that invisible?" he asked in a much more sincere voice. "Because, well, I'm often laying around the school in some odd angle or the other." Again this was the truth. Vulpes hung out of trees, and lay across the stairways more times than he could recall.

"Not that I really expect someone like you to notice someone like me..."

As he spoke about books, Gracie listened, patient. To be honest, she wasn’t much of one for fiction; unless they were encyclopedic and or textual, she preferred to spend her idleness napping or thinking. Comedies and fantasies were alright sometimes, but only if they didn’t resemble the Wizarding World. Why live through something from a Muggle’s point of view when that was already her life?

Eh, to each his o-

Eyes narrowed into green slits. “Someone like me?” she repeated, slowly easing off the couch. Suddenly she was very, very wake.

A spike of temper always did have that effect on her.

Softly, Gracie padded away from the sofa and... not towards him, exactly, no. Rather, she moved behind it, one hand trailing lazily along its back. She never took her eyes off him. “Do elaborate, won’t you?”

It wasn’t a request.

---

Vulpes flinched at the girls glare. That last sentence clearly came out in a way that was unintended. Which meant he was probably about five seconds from being spattered all over the common room walls. Better talk fast, then.

"I just mean," Vulpes said in a quiet, slightly shaking voice that gave obvious mention to how horrifed he was. "That someone like you, who is pretty, popular, and socially adept - an extrovert I think is the word, probably wouldn't notice someone like me who is, well, the opposite," he shrugged and gave a weak smile.

"I didn't mean it in a bad way," Vulpes continued earnestly. "I just meant that I'm pretty invisible and usually stay that way," he swallowed rather hard. The fact of the matter was that no one aside from Aurora ever spoke to him unless to specifically make fun of him in some way. And Vulpes, while not wanting to be prejudice, was bracing for that moment to come in conversation with Gracie.

“Flattering,” she said flatly, clipped tone clearly indicating that that was not the case. “Your way with words. . . Summed me up in a nutshell, you did.”

Sarcasm etched into her voice like acid, she added, “No wonder you’re in Slytherin.”

His sorry explanation hadn’t moved her a bit. Oh, Gracie knew where he was coming from; by some fixed stroke of luck nearly all the ‘pretty, popular, and socially adept’ were just that—‘pretty,’ ‘popular,’ and ‘socially adept’—but even that wasn’t an excuse to make her sound like some, some Bubble-Headed popularity bint. Part of her pride came from knowing that she wasn’t like that, and the way he’d written her off told her that she more or less was.

Irrationally—or rationally, from her point of view—that weak smile and picture of abject dread  he gave her made her want to hit him. It felt like she was being guilted for stepping on an ant she hadn’t even stepped on. It was so... so... infuriating.

“If you’ve got any issues with your perceived ‘invisibility,’” Gracie said, lip curling with scorn, “then do something about it.” Fingers dug into the leather exterior. “But don’t use it as an excuse.”

---

Vulpes gave a huff as his patience began to thin. "Gracious you really are pegging me as someone different aren't you?" he asked in an almost bitter tone. "All I stated was factual; if it's suddenly bad to be such it's certainly news to me." Really, what was the deal with extroverts? Why did they always have to be so bitchy about the fact that they were sociable, and assume that all the introverts loathed them because of it. Human nature certainly was a curious thing.

"And I'm not using my social invisibility as an excuse, nor do I care about whether I am or not," Vulpes sighed and sat back down, crossing one leg over the other. "I'm merely saying it's a likely explanation as to why you'd never have noticed me up until this point in time."

"But please, think I'm looking down on you, or insulting you, or whatever when I'm not. What do I care, it's your opinion."

“Mhm.” Gracie couldn’t have looked less impressed than she was already. ‘Skeptical’ would have been an apt description, especially if it was edged with a word that began with a ‘D’ and ended in an ‘N’. Like ‘derision.’ 

She matched him huff for huff. “You were were the one who brought it up in the first place,” she pointed out, head tilted to the side as she surveyed him through green slits. Gradually her grip on the back relaxed, although gunmetal-tipped fingers drummed impatiently against leather. “And while the ‘me versus them’ mentality is a reality in this House, you don’t have to go about catering to it. Perpetuating the problem and all that shite.” The word rolled off her tongue like smoke. “It doesn’t help your claim of objectivity—if that is what you’re claiming.”

Not that she cared, or anything. Eugh. Why was she even arguing? She should have just left him to his stupid singing. . .

Gracie forced herself to relax, although a fist would find itself propped on a hip. “Look, I didn’t come here for a fight,” she said, calming slightly. She was tired, damn it all. That spark of anger had given her a buzz, but only temporarily. She wanted to sleep. Irritably, she raked her fingers through her hair. “I was just curious, is all.  Nothing else to it.”

Vulpes rolled his eyes. This girl really didn't seem to comprehend the difference. "Actually, I gave an exposition that you took as an accusation," he said wearily, reaching into his bag and pulling out a very worn copy of Macbeth. Placing the book in his lap, he looked up and shrugged at her. "Therefore, I hardly see how I perpetuated anything. It's more you either; instantly assumed that I had some instant spite for you due to the fact that you've never noticed me, which is ridiculous," Vulpes heaved a sigh. "Or, you just completely misunderstood," Although based on your reaction I doubt it. he thought mildly.

"But I suppose that has something to do with the house, after all."

It was an absurd thought to him that because he was in Slytherin it was instantly assumed that he loathed someone who would be socially above him. Vulpes couldn't care less, it didn't matter in the long run. But for whatever reason, Vulpes noticed it to be a natural occurrence.

A slight chuckle passed his lips at her comment about not coming for a fight. If that were they case, why was she so prepared for one? It seemed that regardless of what he said, she would take it in the worst possible way. "Nor did I, but you seemed to want to debate, so I figured I'd comply." Again he shrugged, not really sure how that would be taken. "Not that I mind," Vulpes added almost as an after thought. "Verbal exchanges often provide entertainment in some way. And this one was no exception."