| Details for After Cake |
| Summary: | After playing a cruel prank on a poor first year, Alphard and Andromena locate to the library. Alphard tries to convince her she's as bad as him deep down. |
| Date: | 1938-10-28 |
| Location: | Library |
| Related: | Cake and Apples |
| Characters |
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"Come on, Meanie.. Cheer up," Alphard laughted at her. He was wearing one of his trademark crooked grins as he looked in her direction, and playfully bumping his shoulder into hers. "We both know little fatty won't take harm from running around the Greenhouses for a few hours, trying to find those delicious purple apples. Infact it'll probably do her some good. Plus. C'mon. 'Fabled Purple First-Year Apples'?" He laughed again. "Even you have to smile a little bit."
She allowed him to bump into her, though it caused her to stumble slightly - he being bigger than she! - and slowly, very slowly, Andromena did offer him a small grin. "Fine, FINE," she admits, holding her hands to the sides of her face. "I thought it was pretty funny, but Grace /is/ a decent kid. I don't like to be mean…" She plopped herself onto a nearby seat, motioning for Alphard to join her. "Maybe you will have started something?"
"Some people deserve everything you give them. I am not the one who made her fat or stupid, am I? No. If you want to blame anyone for me being mean, you should start with her parents. Anyway, you do like a bit of meanness, I think. You're just afraid to admit it." His robes came off him, leaving only his meticilously clean and proper uniform, including a perfect windsor knot on his tie. "Mhmm.." It was with carefree confidence that he sprawled out in the chair next to her, his legs stretching out under the study table. "Infact I think you like watching me be mean. That way you can see the reactions of everything you might think, but are just too nice to say."
"That is just untrue," she argued, but not from a position of sourness, simply disbelief. "Unless you believe I am really that much of a manipulator," she suggests with a sly look in his direction. "In which case, I'd have to say you wound me. I'm the maiden! The paragon of goodliness and all that, right?" Now even Andromena did not picture herself a saint, but she hardly considered herself quite so cold as what he described!
"Manipulator? No. Just really, really repressed," he countered smugly. "Which, let's face it, is a perfect match for the maiden archtype. Trying so hard to be a sweet little girl that she represses all those natural urges to the point where one day it just.." His eyes widened with dramatic suspension as his hands came together to form a mock sphere. Like a bomb, which then.. silentBOOM, exploded, his hands slowly flowing outwards ilke the expanding contours of debris. "Explodes, and she goes off the handle completely. Better to let out the steam a little bit at a time, I say!"
"Huh," she says, considering his words and finding them rather sound. Except that wasn't /her/! "If I /was/ that way, then you would have a point, but I hardly have any repressed urges, Alphard." This said with one of those haughty littl sniffs she was just so good at giving. Sitting up a little straighter, Andromena smoothed the front of her skirt down, avoiding his gaze for the moment. "And I seriously doubt I'll be in danger of exploding any time soon."
"I don't think I believe you, Meanie.." Alphard murmured, though he was briefly distracted by the way her hands went washing down the front of her skirt. Which was entirely her fault for outlining her thighs and drawing his attention there. A few blinks and a head tilt later he recaptured his train of thought, and even lifted his gaze again. "But I suppose I'll just have to stay close by in the future so I can swoop in annd save you if you look ready to burst."
"That is the heroic thing to do," she agrees, having missed entirely his momentary, hm, lapse of concentration! "So even though you don't believe me, I take some solace in the fact you intend keep a close watch over my poor little self! Now," she turned her face back to Alphard then. "Aside from rescuing maidens and instructing first years on how best to maintain their physique, what time can you possibly have for themselves?" Andromena grinned cheekily. Alphar was not so bad when he wasn't lacing his every other word with barbs.
"I don't know. My plate is getting pretty darned full these days, I'll admit. It's pretty hard to be so completely selfless, yet somehow still manage to make time for my studies and my extra curricular activities." His eyes idly wandered the library, watching the books floating in and out of their shelves to make up for students' complete inability to put them back into their right places after finishing. "I'll just have to make due.. somehow."
Andromena giggled, covering her mouth with a hand as she did so. "A pillar of strength," she touted. "Anyway, that's why you have me. I selflessly share in your burdens so that you don't have to do it alone." She waved her hand aimlessly in the air. "Or something like that." Her eyes followed his own, briefly. There was little interest to be hand in watching the floating books overlong. "How long do you think she'll look?"
"Getting a little ahead of yourself, aren't you?" It was asked with a smirk, his attentions finally meandering their way back to the Ravenclaw. "We haven't even gone snogging in the broomcloset yet, and you want to share all my burdens?" His playful mocking tone broke into a hushed chuckle. Because loud ones got you docked points. Not that he cared about those points too much, but it sucked being at the bottom when they'd won the trophy last year. "Oh.. I'm pretty sure she's dumb enough to search around for days. But let's not hope she does, or we'll," not he " will probably end up in trouble for it."
She coughed at his nonchalant comment about snogging. "I was only being generous," Andromena manages, voice low. "You know, as a friend." Boys. Always thinking with their…ahem. "Nonsense," she tells him imperiously, drawing herself up, eyes fluttering shut. "/We/ can't get in trouble for anything." Because she had done nothing wrong, and would not take the fall for anybody, not even her new-found companion. "Grace does not seem like the type of girl to tattle, so you're safe there." No more we's on her part, this was all for Alphard.
"She seems the kind so stupid she's happily tell the Professors about how her new friends Black and Rowle told her about the secret of the First Year Purple Apple tree." As if sensing exactly what she was thinking, he leaned towards her, his dark eyes shimmering with amusement. "You knew there was no apple tree, but you didn't stop her. Didn't even try to. Infact.." this added with a voice dripping of careless laziness. "You were the one who put me up to it. Leaned close and whispered it to me. I mean.. I didn't want to do something so cruel to a poor little first year." His eyes blinked, as if threatened with tears. "But I'm just a silly little boy caught in the nefarious web of the scheming and manipulating Ravenclaw."
She leaned in with him, eyes narrowing to mere slits whilst his filled with crocodile tears. Just when they came close enough to feel one another's breath upon their cheeks, Andromena drew away, laughing. "Please," she exclaims, wiping at an eye. "You'll have to act better than that if you intend to convince a professor of /my/ guilt. Seriously. Me? Put /you/ up to such a thing?" Anothe laugh before she sighed, staring upwards. "That'll be the day. 'Meanie' Rowle lives up to her nickname."
Alphard had to choke down his laughter to keep from attracting hushed growls of 'silence'. "You're probably right. The Professors have been out to get me lately. Doesn't matter if I'm telling the truth or lying. Real unfair, if you ask me." He made the dramatic sigh of a tragically persecuted innocent. "Anyway, I'd not snitch on you. Friends are friends, right?"
"Right," she agreed. Alphard might behave differently when push came to shove, but Andromena really believed in that. "Why do you think you're being singled out?" She queried, generally curious. She rested her chin upon her fist, watching Alphard as he reigned in his own laughter. Andromena felt somewhat guilty for not having done the same.
"That blind freak Mopsus just dislikes me because he's an ugly little Half-Blood," Alphard muttered under his breath. "And Viridian because he's a filthy Muggle born. I don't even know what Dumbledore has against me," perhaps except for besides being a mean spirited bully who always seemed to pick on the easy targets. "But he has something against me. Why else would he stick me with Denholm all the time in Transfiguration? Anyway. Still not got anyone to take you to the dance?"
Andromena listened with a grave expression, takin in every word as though the gospel truth. "Sometimes the brightest stars make others jealous." Perhaps that was the wrong thing to do; encourage his ego, but it's simply what came tumbling from her lips. Andromena had been about to say more when he asked her about the dance. She shook her had in the negative. "No. I haven't exactly put myself out there, though," said coolly.
"That's true, isn't it?" Alphard agreed, drinking in her words like they were the sweetest nectar. If there was one easy way to always get a pleasent reaction out of the Black, it was to feed his already enormous ego. "It's a shame, really, but at least you see it." Which pushed her a couple of rungs up on the social ladder in Alphard's opinion.
"I guess plenty of girls'll go alone.. It's usually the ugly ones, though."
Had she been seeking a way up that ladder? Certainly not. At least, she did not see it that way! "That's true," she admitted, looking towards her feet. But she wasn't ugly, so there was nothing to worry about. "I just hope the ugly boys don't ask me to dance," said with a visible cringe. What could she say? Andromena /was/ a rather vain and haughty girl. "I'll just pretend to feel sick if so." A sudden thought should she be accosted by some wheezing twerp.
"They're going to, you know," Alphard said with a shrug. "The last couple of days before the dance, everybody looks for any chance they can get at all to find someone. They'll see lil mousy Meanie sitting by herself at the library and think: Something has to be wrong with her, why else wouldn't anyone else ask her out? Then the next thought goes.. if there's something wrong with her, then obviously even someone ugly has a chance." With a lazy push away from the table, Alphard got up to his feet. "Anyway. Gotta find the book I was gonna read. I'll be right back." And once he got his book he wasn't going to want to socialize anymore, even if he'd still sit next to her.