Usually, Claudine didn’t have a problem with Defence Against The Dark Arts.
She wonders why today, of all days, has her struggling to perform a Patronus.
Was it because she had been so stressed lately? Exams were around the corner, and she was laden down with student council duties as well, but they were just her everyday commitments, so she doesn’t quite understand how it would be contributing to stress of any kind.
“Expecto Patronum!” She tries again, but all that comes from the tip of her wand are some pathetic little silver wisps that fade off so quickly that it could just have been her hopeful thinking.
Ever since she had found out that Tendō Maya had been able to produce a fully-fledged Patronus before she did, Claudine had been raging to the heavens, if there were gods of any kind. How dare that infuriating woman grasp the spell faster than she did when Defence Against The Dark Arts was her top subject? She should stick to dominating Charms and winning the approval of every single professor in Hogwarts, for goodness sake—ah.
Was this where her stress was culminating from?
Claudine groans and buries her head in her hands. Why and how does that annoying woman manage to weave her way into all her problems every single time?
She swore she just got a thousand times more pissed off. At this rate, she was inclined to just blame all her sour moods on Maya, which, to be honest, wouldn’t be far-stretched at all.
“Hey, Kuroko.”
Claudine looks up to see Futaba enter the empty classroom she had been practicing in. She squeezes her way past the tables that Claudine had magicked to the side to make space earlier, and stops in front of her, a hand on her waist and brows raised.
“Futaba, bonjour.” She relaxes. “I thought you had detention?”
Futaba grimaces and crosses her arms. “Yeah, that’s been worked out already. Professor Kirin just made us clean—or should I say, I cleaned all the girls’ toilets. Kaoruko didn’t do jack shit.”
Claudine snorts. “Sounds about right. I seriously don’t understand how you manage to put up with her.”
“Hear her whine your ear off ’nuff times and you’ll be forced to heed her every command.”
She raises a brow. “I highly doubt that that applies to me.”
“Ya might be right,” Futaba grins good-naturedly, and hoists herself up on one of the nearby tables, letting her legs dangle off its edge.
“No,” Claudine shoots back, reassuming the position she had been in earlier: wand out at arm’s length, shoulders and back straightened and legs shifting to maintain a balanced stance. “I am right.”
“Okay, Miss Child Prodigy,” Futaba laughs, waving her wand, and flowers from the nearby potted plant start picking themselves. With another careful, practiced flick, Futaba gathers them and weaves them into a crown. She settles it on Claudine’s head, much to the latter’s poorly-concealed delight. “What’s gotten ya this cranky?”
Claudine huffs, “What makes you say that?”
“I was watchin’ ya for a while—”
“Creep.”
“—and you were brandishin’ your wand like ya were fightin’ some dragon,” Futaba says, unperturbed. “Is that how ya summon a Patronus?”
Claudine crosses her arms defensively. So much for finding some empty classroom to practice in. “Totally.”
“Not.”
“Okay—” Claudine admits, giving up on all that practicing and just collapsing, legs crossed, on the floor. She had been at it since the end of lessons, and she’s certain that if she chose to look out the window, the sun would be barely peeking out behind the spires of mountains that circled Hogwarts. “—maybe not.”
“It’s Tendō, isn’t it?”
Sometimes, Claudine hated how spot-on Futaba was in pinpointing her moods. Did Tendō Maya occupy her thoughts that much?
...maybe.
She groans out loud, rubbing her face furiously with a palm, as if it could possibly erase her frustration. Futaba watches amusedly, swinging her legs back and forth, waiting for the rant that was sure to come.
“That little shit,” Claudine hisses, and Futaba stops fidgeting. “She didn’t tell me she could do a proper Patronus. Dickhead. Asshole. Bastard. Putain—”
Claudine doesn’t manage to finish her sentence — she didn’t have time to scream, even — before she’s shot up into the air by her robes and whizzed out of the classroom door (which was, thankfully, left open) at the speed of light.
Futaba could only gape at the spot she had been in, now decorated with fallen orange petals.
Maya doesn’t know how long she’s sat here waiting for Hikari to wake up so that she could continue tutoring her on the Care of Magical Creatures (though, she felt that Nana was a better person to ask, but that might be because Hikari just wasn’t so comfortable around someone as amicable as their fellow Slytherin was). Her legs were growing quite numb sitting on the floor and leaning against the common room’s couch reading up on the History of Magic.
Behind her, Hikari snoozes away, limbs awry all over the sofa, her mouth slightly open as she snores lightly, evidently still very much in the land of dreams. In the past hour, she had managed to hug Maya’s head somehow, and Maya had to prod her in the side to get her to let go of the fist she had tangled in her hair.
Presently, she had a leg thrown over Maya’s shoulder, and Maya finds that she doesn’t really care anymore, so instead she thumps through her textbook, hoping to find something that she hadn’t already studied in order to quell her potentially everlasting boredom.
But at the back of her mind, lounging there as they usually did, were her thoughts of Claudine.
She smiles. Even when she wasn’t around, Claudine always did manage to find a way to make her heart a little lighter, her muscles a little more relaxed and her day that little precious bit brighter.
The mood necklace resting on the skin of her chest warms, as if the mere thought of Claudine was enough to make the Gryffindor flare up.
Chuckling to herself, she cradles the heated metal of the necklace — its usual green, marbled surface now a shade of red similar to that of Claudine’s eyes — that ends right before the dip of her v-necked grey sweater. Claudine got mad more often than the average person, which, she had claimed, was merely a result of hanging around Maya too much, so this sudden change in mood wasn’t unusual.
But as she idly runs her thumb back and forth over the necklace’s smooth pendant, she observes the angry scarlet swirling and blending into a more alarming, worrying and vibrant shade of red.
Maya’s never seen this shade of red before — at least, not in the past week when they had gone to Hogsmeade and bought the matching set of mood necklaces sold in a quaint little shop right by the bakery.
“They’re charmed to show your partner’s emotions,” the shopkeep had told them, beaming at how Claudine hadn’t let go of Maya’s hand even as Maya teased that they didn’t need to get them as Claudine was just angry most of the time, thus there was no mood to read.
“That’s only because I’m around you so much,” Claudine had mumbled, hiding most of her face under the grey scarf she had stolen from Maya’s trunk — guess Maya’s never going to see it again — and squeezing Maya’s gloved hand in hers.
But what brought the heat to her cheeks was when—
“Sometimes, I just can’t tell what you’re feeling,” Claudine had huffed, “so we’re getting them, no questions asked.”
It had been meant for her, and yet she’s glad that she could see Claudine’s moods too — it made for an...easier way to properly understand her sometimes-contradicting behaviour. Not that Maya didn’t already know how to read her like a book, but it was just nice that she could get some extra assurance.
She wants to treasure their relationship as much as Claudine did.
She wants to treasure Claudine like Claudine treasures her.
Maya carefully examines the necklace again, the warning shade of red still worrying, and she sighs heavily. It was most likely stress, the one other thing that Claudine almost constantly felt alongside anger, but she theorises that this was probably some breakdown, and she was torn in between wanting to give her time alone and wanting to be by her side, comforting her.
“What’s wrong?”
Hikari’s awake, and she awkwardly shifts her leg from where it was dangling off Maya’s shoulder.
Maya shakes her head, letting the necklace rest on her skin again, where it seeped a cold warmth. “Nothing to worry about, Kagura-san. Shall we continue where we left off?”
“No,” Hikari says simply. She regards Maya with a look no different from the poker face she always wore, the light from the fireplace flickering in her eyes, dancing against backdrops of cerulean blue.
Maya thinks that if Claudine thought that she was expressionless, she hadn’t spent enough time with Hikari.
Hikari’s gaze drops to the necklace. “Saijō-san.”
“She might need space.”
“The summoning charm.”
“What?”
“She wears your robes,” Hikari states flatly, sitting a little straighter, and Maya smiles sheepishly.
“She prefers her attire loose.”
“You are both the same size.”
Hikari was deadly effective in proving a point.
Maya looks down at her necklace again, at how the red had managed to appear more intense than it did a while ago. “But—”
“I’m going to find Karen,” Hikari says a-matter-of-factedly with a shrug of her shoulders. She slides off the couch with a cat’s grace, leaving Maya staring at the Slytherin’s back as she slinks out of the room.
Well, that was that.
Maya’s glad Kaoruko wasn’t here to witness it.
But now that Hikari was gone, her thoughts wander back to where they had been originally.
The summoning charm, huh?
She gets up, snaps her book shut and strides into her room to get her wand. But Claudine might not appreciate being...hoisted into Slytherin quarters, so she heads to the nearest empty classroom she could find.
She holds her wand out. Claudine...should be on the second floor of classrooms. She pictures her robes clearly in her mind, channelling all her concentration into remembering its texture, outline—
“Tendō-san!” Karen barrels into the classroom with her usual energy, stopping directly in front of Maya to flash her her characteristic grin. “Did you see Hikari-chan?”
Maya blinks at her proximity. “She went looking for you a while ago, actually, Aijō-san.”
“Ah.” Karen leans back, mirroring Maya’s reaction. “What’re you doing?”
Maya smiles. “Practising, I suppose.”
“The summoning charm we learnt in class earlier?”
“I’m surprised you even remembered that, Karen.” Another voice comes, and this time, it’s Junna, standing with her arms crossed, a hand lifting to shove her black, square glasses up her nose. “Weren’t you sleeping half the time in theory?”
“Jun-Jun!” Karen exclaims, rushing to the newcomer, effectively forgetting about Maya on the spot. “I practised with Kuro-chan earlier!”
Maya dips her head in greeting to Junna, and the Ravenclaw gives her a curt nod in return, taking it as an invitation to enter the classroom.
“You’re practising the summoning charm?” Junna asks.
“Yes.” Maya turns to Karen. “Where did you see Saijō-san last?”
“Some classroom on the second floor,” Karen hums. “She said she wanted to practise...practise...pat—pat-ron-uses...?”
“Patronuses,” Junna corrects.
Patronuses, huh?
It checked out against Claudine’s schedule, so it should be right.
“Are you going to summon Kuro-chan, Tendō-san?” Karen bubbles, her eyes wide.
“The charm doesn’t work on living things,” Junna says quickly.
At Karen’s crestfallen expression, Maya confirms, “Yes, it doesn’t. However—” she holds her wand out to the open door of the classroom and chants, “—Accio, robes!”
And she waits.
It took a little longer than she expected it to, but Claudine zooms into the classroom, pushing past Junna and Karen, and slamming right into Maya’s arms. The two plummet into the tables, and Maya ignores the fully-body sting as her back hits the wall, holding Claudine close to soften the impact.
“Tendō-san!” Junna and Karen call out in unison, but Maya raises a hand to stop them.
“I’m alright.” She tilts her head down to peer at a dazed Claudine. “Are you, ma Claudine?”
A grunt. “Are you an utter nutcase?” Claudine lifts her head, pretty eyes narrowed in irritation. “You’re lucky that I cast a slowing spell. I could have fucking died from whiplash.”
“I trusted that you would,” Maya says casually, smiling down at her and tucking a stray strand of blonde hair behind Claudine’s ear. “You’re amazing like that.”
Claudine turns an interesting shade of red at the unexpected compliment as Karen giggles and Junna turns away in second-hand embarrassment.
“You’re not off the hook,” Claudine threatens in a very non-threatening way, given how she always looked like an angel in Maya’s eyes. Also with how she still clung cutely to Maya’s robes.
She must have realised it, however, as she abruptly lets go and rises from their intimate position, brushing her — Maya’s — robes down. She offers a hand to Maya, who gladly takes it.
Mostly, though, Maya’s surprised that Claudine wasn’t angrier about it.
“So? What was it you summoned me for when you could have tried, oh, I don’t know, finding me instead?” Claudine drops Maya’s hand and glares hotly at her as Junna reassembles the tables with an incantation and a flick of her wand.
“Proving something,” Maya says, gesturing to Karen, who waves.
“Show-off,” Claudine scowls, though her lips twitch upwards in a tell-tale smile.
A friendly, affectionate, relieving warmth radiates from the cool metal against Maya’s skin now, soothing and comforting.
“And, I just wanted to see you,” Maya says softly, stepping closer to her. “Right now.”
Claudine’s jaw hangs open as Karen giggles again, and Maya could swear that she could hear Junna’s inner screaming fest.
“Get a room,” is what Junna says instead, and she stalks out of the classroom, her ears red.
Karen follows soon after to look for Hikari, though not before thanking Maya for the demonstration and giggling a few more times at Claudine’s flustered face.
Now left alone together, Maya flicks her wand, and the door shuts and locks itself.
“You see me enough times every day,” Claudine tries her hand, arms folded across her chest and gaze averted.
“Not nearly enough times, I’m afraid,” Maya responds smoothly, stepping forward and gathering Claudine into her arms. At least she could tell that Claudine was distracted from her thoughts, so that was one of her goals accomplished.
“Okay, what do you want.”
Maya looks down at Claudine, at the beautiful blush blossoming across her cheeks, bathing her skin in an attractive glow no natural light could ever give her. Well, maybe in the mornings they woke up together when Maya had gone to France to meet Claudine’s parents, but that was a different story.
“You,” she answers truthfully, and Claudine’s blush darkens. “But what do you think about going to Hogsmeade together this Sunday?”
A heavy sigh, and then Claudine leans up to press a soft kiss to Maya’s lips. “I want butterbeer.”
At least she’s distracted.
“Whatever ma Claudine wants.”