Open RP: Henry in the library.

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

Camilla had warned him about the dog-Latin he would have to endure if he wanted to find any spells here. And yet he's ploughing through several books, snorting incredulously at points, it's true--but still reading them.

It seems his intent is to learn all the spells in the Hogwarts library by rote. He hasn't even got a wand yet. He is, however, making notes with a very expensive-looking pen, pages upon pages of cramped handwriting.

His eyes hurting him a tad, Henry Winter takes off his glasses and idly looks up, to see if anybody else is around.

Comments

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'For one who picked the profession of teaching, surely you would not ever want to completely leave it,' Henry offers, putting the cap on his pen.

[lemondrop-party.livejournal.com]

"I never have left it," Albus replied with a firm nod.

So, Henry Winter had undertaken advanced study in transfiguration, without the guidance of an instructor, and without a wand.

Henry Winter also had no interest in sweets, which meant he was not familiar with Albus's Chocolate Frog card. Considered by many the greatest wizard of modern times ...

It behooved Albus to Keep An Eye on this young man.

"May I?" he asked, for the sake of politeness, but he was already taking the seat beside Henry's, and peering at the page to which the text was opened.

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

Not so different from Julian at all. Henry is obliged to move over, shifting his notes away from Albus' eyes; so he cannot see the pages and pages of notes all on animate to inanimate objects.

Just in case it should have to be done again.

[lemondrop-party.livejournal.com]

Keen as ever, Albus noted that shifting of papers. He did not so much as try to glimpse what Henry seemed to wish him not to see. An attempt would only heighten the young man's caution. In time, Albus could discover for himself what Henry Winter was after. The serious scholar always confides in his mentor. Who better?

"Ah," he said, speaking to the page more than to Henry. "This requires a command of magical theory. It speaks well you've gotten this far without instruction. What you can do with proper instruction, now, that will be something to see."

It was both flattery and truth.

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

None better than Julian.

'To be honest, it's simply the spell names that give me the trouble,' he confesses. 'I can speak Latin fluently, and the mangling of it sometimes troubles both myself and my fellow scholar--Camilla Macaulay. I knew her from college,' he explains, 'And she arrived here slightly before me.'

Because Henry Winter will not open up to just anyone, it seems.

[lemondrop-party.livejournal.com]

Albus noted the name, Camilla Macaulay, an unfamiliar name to him. There was a time he knew the name, face, and history of every child under this roof (and they were all children, to him, even the instructors really). He had much work ahead of him.

"Wizarding Latin contains a wondrous profusion of forms," he commented diplomatically. Albus delighted in its perverse difficulty, in truth; this was clearly not a viewpoint the earnest young classicist would share. "Consider this in itself a form of transfiguration. Cut off from the scholarly world for centuries, the wizarding community maintained its use of the scholarly language, but just as regional Romance vernaculars arose after the fall of the Roman Empire, wizards developed their own vernacular in their isolation from international academia. It was not a decline due to laziness, Henry. It was an isolation born of necessity. In isolation, thoughts can grow strange. They can also grow more powerful than they ever could have been among the common run of men."

His words were calculated to appeal.

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'Mangled words and verses,' Henry says slightly scornfully, 'Are much less powerful than their original forms. The pen is mightier than the sword--and for all the magic in the world, can it ever truly affect you as much as a single line of Virgil? of Homer? No, the isolation did no more than degenerate the language, to my mind; power is no excuse for being slapdash.'

[lemondrop-party.livejournal.com]

"Slapdash? What a word for it," Albus countered, voice mild but eyes steely. "Think of the so-called 'magic words' you'll have read as a child. Abracadabra. Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. There's a reason they sound like gibberish, Henry. That is the way true words of power sound to the uninitiated: like nonsense. When you learn to truly read them, they will feel to you otherwise. They will feel like nothing you've ever known."

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'If it's all the same to you,' Henry says, instantly cold again, 'I'd prefer not to think of when I read those.'

In a darkened bedroom, alone.

'I am sure proper language and power can be combined. It will just take time.'

[lemondrop-party.livejournal.com]

Oh, but Albus suspected something of that. Why else did he speak of isolation? A boy like this Winter never came from a bustling busy household like the Burrow. And here Albus had found him, in the library with texts unassigned to him, making notes for his own cryptic purposes, alone.

Though not entirely alone at Hogwarts; Albus would have to find out more about this Camilla Macaulay.

"Well," he said, getting up from his chair, "a wise man avails himself of the tools to hand. A wand would be a good start. You can find me in Gryffindor House, Henry Winter."

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'Mine is Ravenclaw,' he answers, almost terse. 'Good morning.'

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

From between two bookcases, Camilla slips into view just in time to catch the sight of a surprisingly agile old man leaving the table where Henry's ensconced. She alights on the seat beside her lover captor friend classmate and gives him a very curious look indeed.

"Who was that?" she whispers.

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'One ex-headmaster of the school,' he says quietly back. 'Albus Dumbledore. We had an interesting discussion on the nature of magic.'

He moves papers off the chair the other side of him, so she can sit.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

"Oh." Camilla's eyes widen. "He's in Hogwarts: A History. He's dead."

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

Stupid, stupid, stupid, he curses himself. The history first, never the language. Too often he forgets this is a different world.

'Yes, but so am I,' he points out, trying to save face. 'What is he notable for, besides being the head?'

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

"I can't even say what all," Camilla says. "The extent of the index under his name is ... fairly long. He was headmaster here for almost half a century. And he was involved in some wars. And he's apparently linked with some important alchemists." She's still whispering. Her voice gets even quieter and she has to lean in toward his ear to make herself heard when she says this last: "What did he want from you?"

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'Apparently nothing,' Henry says, slightly angry, sounding like a petulant child. 'He advised me to get a wand and complimented me on my grasp of magical theory. He didn't even offer private lessons, though he admitted he gave them.'

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

"He does?"

A thinly perceptible vein of greed shooting through that whisper, now, and glinting metallic in her eyes.

"Did he say he wouldn't teach you? You know how Julian always was," Camilla muses. "With Richard, remember, for example ..."

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'Well...'

Henry sits back and considers. 'No. He didn't. But I don't like him half as much as I liked Julian. He mentioned reading as a child--and you know how I did it.'

He smiles, though. 'Richard--there's a name I haven't heard in a while.'

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

Camilla smiles too, no warmth in it. "Don't you miss our old friends?"

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'There was only one ever worth missing,' he tells her.

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

It doesn't even occur to Camilla that Henry could mean Julian. Julian was never her friend. Her teacher, yes. Perhaps even her god, at one time, insofar as Camilla could ever worship anything outside the closed circle of herself. Nothing so close as a friend.

(Could Camilla ever consider as friend someone constitutionally incapable of desiring her?)

Now, what he does mean, that she can't decide with complete certainty. At first she thinks, of course, it's her he means. But -- would Henry call her a friend? They haven't been lovers since before he died. They circle around one another, each only approaching so far. She's not sure when that pursuit will end, or how it will end -- if she'll allow herself to be caught.

(Do you call your prey a friend? Do you call your goddess a friend?)

Delicately she reaches to lay her hand lightly over his, his left hand, the one that isn't holding the pen. "At least you came back."

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'I found a way,' he smiles. 'It wasn't too hard.'

It was hard. He is lying. But it was worth it.

He did mean Julian then. Camilla is not a friend, but she's something more special. He just wishes he knew what she was.

Who is the predator, and who is the prey?

[c-macaulay.livejournal.com]

"You always did," she says. "Find a way." Does she admire him for that? Yes and no. She takes it for granted. It's Henry. It's what Henry does.

Find a way to give her what she wants.

That he can influence her, guide her to want things and not to want others, doesn't really cross her mind. She's always been so self-contained. Of course it was her idea to get away from Charles. Her idea to go to ground in the Albemarle. Why wouldn't it be? She's never questioned it.

What she wanted at Hogwarts was for Henry to come back from the dead. And he did that.

Though she's never asked him ...

"Why did you?"

[onewinteryday.livejournal.com]

'Come back? I thought that would have been obvious,' he says. 'To keep my philosophy strong. To see you. 'Live forever.''