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annoyed

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God damn it, Will, I thought we were even something like friends. I realise that I'm largely an apothecary with some pretension of being an alchemist (though I'm no Dumbledore and will never be what Dashwood will be some day), but I did post-NEWT work at Durmstrang and they even let me teach there.

You might have told me what the problem was, instead of letting your war hero boyfriend, your journeyman, the uniformed Canadian, Officer Fuckup and a girl who used to pour ale and wash dishes in a Durmstrang boarding house try to handle it.

...of course, if I hadn't been so preoccupied with bloody staffing decisions, and making sure that Chattox and her bizarre notions aren't the only Slytherin voice in the reorganisation of the school, and the relationship I don't actually really have (we have sex, but experience has taught me that's not necessarily a relationship), I might have figured it out on my own, mightn't I? So we are both fools.

At least it's gone now. And Dolohov even made himself useful for once. It's also possible that Miss Popescu might make something of herself, if guided properly. Her guardian is Červenka. I should write to him about her. His methods were often shocking--he actually read Muggle journals. But results you couldn't argue with. (Of course, that attitude, as I was told repeatedly, is why I'm an apothecary, not really an alchemist.)

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uncomfortable

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She's gone. Michaela's gone and I have to wonder--what have I done? Being with her is exhilarating and wonderful and everything I ever dreamed it would be when I was a boy. She's amazing, and I can forgive Zsuzsanna for being what she is, because I wouldn't want to be bound to Zsuzsanna, not now. And yet there are so many times when I don't know what I should say.

She has to know I can't have approved of her marriage, and I won't say it; it would be pointless and cruel, and she's learnt her lesson, I'm sure--I can't think, based on the things she has said and done, that she's happy in their world. I don't think about it at all when she's with me, of course. I adore her, and I want to make everything right for her. I always have. Yet I want to be sympathetic, because I know how it was to lose Larisa, and I cannot understand it but she must have loved him as I did Larisa. She must have; it is written all over her.

I just don't know how she could. Loving a Muggle would be like falling in love with a child or an imbecile, wouldn't it? They're not animals--they have intelligence--but they are not like us. At the very best it would be like falling in love with a cripple. And all of the lies and deceptions...I can't imagine how anyone lives that way, or manages to bear, let alone subvert, the injustice of that world. Particularly as a woman. It could only be worse if she were an invert. I wonder what she thinks of it all, but I am terrified to ask.

Her grandfather--well, the less said the better. Time was he wouldn't have tolerated my debauching his granddaughter under the same roof, but I honestly don't think he noticed. Goyle feels badly for the old man, and so do I. He isn't long for this world, but I don't want Michaela to have to grieve any more.

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shocked

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What a morning. I wasn't going to go to breakfast--I was going to make breakfast here for myself and Michaela, so that I could linger here until it was time to give my first lesson of the day--first-year Potions. I haven't even had a first-year class yet, and I've already heard that half the Gryffindor first-year boys have used up most of their supplies torturing their female classmates, so I was not looking forward to that.

Instead we were awakened by Chattox--which was damned embarrassing--and she's been looking at me oddly ever since Zsuzsanna was here, too--who told us that Claire Jeannot has died.

This is the worst year yet, and I daren't say anything to Michaela about it because she was a Ravenclaw herself, but things were different then, or at least they seemed to be. I'm used to Ravenclaws losing their books and their cauldrons and their shoelaces--but not fellow students.

Aurélien is beside himself, but of course he won't let it show. I expect he'll have to be actively forbidden from coming to lessons if Chattox is serious about him taking the day off. On the other hand, that's probably all for the best. I fully expect him to reek of hashish for at least the next three days and I can't say as I blame him--I'm just glad Emily doesn't recognise the smell.

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ardent

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Be careful what you wish for, you might get it...and then not know quite what to do with it. It's not that I don't want her, I want her more than anything, and now that I've got her, I don't quite know how to handle it. It was rather awkward this morning and I think I died three times the first time I saw her father, but I've always loved her, even when I thought it was never even a remote possibility. I had let myself forget how beautiful she is but I've more than remembered now.

I don't want her to just get up and go back there--even if I didn't feel about it the way I do, she's clearly miserable there--but I don't want to scare her away. She can't very well live in my rooms while I'm teaching, we're not married and it's certainly much too soon to even think about asking her something like that, I learned that lesson a few weeks ago and I am amazingly grateful, now, that I was refused.

(The wolves can have you, Zsuzsanna; they know what to do with you, I never did.)

So I don't know what to do, except to take her as she comes to me. She got a letter of some sort this morning, I don't know what that was about, and I won't pry, but afterward she did decide to extend her stay a bit. I've no idea whether that's about me, or about whatever was in the letter. It doesn't really matter so long as she stays, if she stays I have time to convince her.

And then I had to cane Jeannot. His bare arse was probably the last thing I wanted to have to contemplate after luncheon today. I expect I may have been harder on him than he expected, but getting caught by the bloody Canadian? Well, he deserved it.

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annoyed

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This is not my week. Zsuzsanna was here yesterday with her wolves; Nadya Karkaroff won't talk to me for any length of time; and now, Olive has gone and got herself into trouble spiking Myrtle Dolloway's birthday cake with an Engorgement Potion, and I can't laugh it off, because McGonagall brought it to my attention and if I don't do something about it she'll go to Emily next.

I suppose Miss Hornby will be assisting me tomorrow in the apothecary seminar, which she would have attended anyway, and then the rest of the day she can spend cleaning up the laboratory, scouring cauldrons, cleaning retorts and alembics and cutting up potion ingredients, while I keep watch over the Saturday afternoon duelling practise.

McGonagall will doubtless think it an insufficient punishment because she will not understand what it means when I am required to take fifteen points from my own House on account of Miss Hornby's misbehaviour. I ought to take some points from Dolloway for not having the good sense to get her problems solved in-House, but Emily would probably object to that, and being Dolloway, she'll earn her beating soon enough. I don't think there will be anyone happy in the fifth-year girls' dormitory after the prefects' meetings on Sunday.

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morose

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It's quiet here, as it always is the last few days before a new term begins. I'm starting to wonder if I'm really cut out for teaching. Laurens visited last week, which was pleasant enough, and so did Zsuzsanna. But I was a fool, and I asked Zsuzsa to marry me over our morning tea. I should have known she'd never agree to marry. She wants to be Countess Báthory after the war, not the wife of a professor, and if we win the war, she will be, because Vollmann and her sister will be dead before they let that happen. I don't think I'll get her into my bed again.

Am I really beginning to get to the point where I can imagine having a wife who isn't Larisa? Do I want to be there? I don't know what it will be like, after the war, to walk through the halls of the Institute again, only without Larisa. I've almost stopped looking at other people's children and thinking that our son (or our daughter) would be that old, if she had lived to give birth.

I've been remiss about visiting Polly. I used to like sitting with her because it was nice to spend time with a woman who expected absolutely nothing of me, but for the last year I've wanted sex, and lots of it, and no man will ever get that from Polly. Zsuzsanna was always absolutely reliable in that regard, but now I'm not sure I still know how to talk to a woman I could actually marry, someone like Michaela Blackwell (if I could ever get past the terrifying infatuation I remember from my school days!) I suppose it could be worse. I could be carrying a torch for CC Allison or Leah Lindsey, whom I always suspected of being in love with each other.

I wonder what Elie will think of the dorms.

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bored

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I am going absolutely mad. I have to get out of here. Goyle's busy fooling around with that old orrery that hasn't worked since Mathers and Blackwell were students, Polly is the portrait of happy domesticity, and Stuart's vamping around like she's hoping someone will open a vein.

I'm going to Londinium today to see Laurens. We'll go to Serrano's and Goulston's, and then we'll do a Nightshade bookshop-and-pub crawl. The apprentices are driving him mad(der); I'll be doing a public service. Laurens has never killed a patient but from all reports he's come close to killing a few of the apprentices. I wonder if Emily has anything she'd like me to take up to her sister?