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| With incredibly tired legs, Orrin Weasley heaved himself up another couple of steps, the bronze telescopes in his arms rolling around dangerously as he struggled to reach the astronomy tower. Professor Sinistra was a charming woman, or so he thought, but she had absolutely no common sense whatsoever. Her head was permanently up with the stars, up on a planet where gravity was one fifth of the Earth's norm, as how she expected one lad to carry quite so much equipment was far beyond Orrin. She'd merely ducked her head into the Library, summoned him with a floaty wave of her hand and asked him politely enough to take the telescopes up to the tower for the midnight star-gazing session. Of course, once she's asked that of him, everybody who would have possibly helped had vacated the library as quickly as they could. And how could he say no to a teacher? He was a Prefect, but not only that a Weasley. Professor Sinistra had taught his father, Percy, when he had been at school, so it would have been absolutely disgraceful to refuse her. Percy wouldn't have done it. So, although the task looked near impossible for just one person, he'd been forced to nod dutifully. There must have been at least a dozen in the pile she'd pointed at, and how on Earth he was going to get the hatch open was a mystery, but he'd nodded. It was a foolish thing to do, especially in retrospect, but he'd had no alternative. Feeling very out of breath, he was forced to stop and lean against one of the cold stone walls to both calm his chest and adjust his grip on the telescopes. They were fiddly objects, constantly slipping away from his curled arms of banging painfully against his wrists. Still, there was an upside, as he could see the hatch to the top of the tower. All he had to do was get it open, stack the telescopes in a corner (making sure that they were all clean, neat and had no marks on them whatsoever) and then he could get back to the dorm. It was growing close to after hours, and he wanted to be back before some idiot Prefect reprimanded him as a joke. They wouldn't understand that he was running an errand, because it was any opportunity to humiliate a fellow student with these people. Any opportunity and they were in there like Errol Flynn. As Orrin pushed himself away from the wall and struggled up the final few steps, he heard a voice and almost dropped the telescopes. It couldn't be the Professor up there, seeing as she'd floated on by in the opposite direction, heading more towards the Transfiguration classrooms than her own tower. Also, it was far too early for the students to be setting up their equipment. A scowl crossed his brow. He wasn't in the mood to encounter some arse of a first-year who was simply mucking about; the telescopes were making his forearms ache and that, quite obviously, was putting him in an absolutely vile mood. Still, what could he do other than find out? Somehow, Orrin managed to wriggle his fingers into his robes and pull out his wand. His arms looked incredibly uncomfortable and he was holding it by the very tips of his fingers, but he got it to wave in the right motion. With a quick mutter of accio steps, the hatch opened and the stairs gently unfolded themselves, the bottom one coming to rest just in front of his feet. Which was incredibly handy. As he ascended them, he got a firmer grip on the telescopes (just in case it was a rowdy first-year and they decided to hurl something at him dropping a dozen telescopes on his toes wouldn't be a nice way to end the evening) and then stuck his head out, peering around the astronomy tower with the scowl still lingering. It lightened, however, when he recognized the voice when it spoke next. 'Why can't life be simple likes stars? Hearing this, Orrin quirked an eyebrow. It made him want to reply, but first he'd have to settle the telescopes in a nice corner and then make himself known, as not to frighten Ms. Krum. She was nice, from what he'd seen of her, and she played well for the Gryffindor Quidditch team as seeker. He was obliged, by the law of the house, to never admit she was good (for, although Ravenclaw and Gryffindor got on pleasantly, the winner could only ever be one of them), but she was. And he'd just admitted it. So there. Quite who he was defying by thinking that exact sentence Orrin didn't know, but he was suddenly far too preoccupied with clambering through the hatch and making a pyramid of the telescopes to really care. Stars aren't all simple, you know, He murmured casually whilst stacking the tubes, I didn't mean to eavesdrop, by the way, but I was just coming up the stairs... they really aren't. I mean, unless your idea of simple is being a luminous ball of plasma that begins as a collapsing cloud of material and ends with a massive burst of beta decay because the core can no longer support the mass. I wouldn't think collapsing and having ones electrons driven into protons is very simple-- He broke off. He'd just swanned into the astronomy tower, completely unannounced, and it had only just occurred to him that Alais was there for a private reason. Orrin absolutely hated getting involved with girls and their private problems. He'd never understood how hair could be such a major crisis. Oh dear. Did I intrude? |