The air was very chilly on Wednesday morning when Caiti headed outside for Herbology. Frost covered the grass and the sun, just now beginning to poke out, was peakish and wavering, barely serving to warm the skin on her face which had gone pink with cold. It was only the middle of September, but already Caiti had had to break out the old winter cloak with its silver fastenings down the front. She hugged her arms to her chest, her bag slipping off her shoulder, and hurried across the lawn to the greenhouses.

Inside, she spotted Theo, already there, and immediately made for the opposite side of the dungeon, standing near a Hufflepuff girl she had always rather liked named Penny.

"Morning," Penny said brightly.

"Morning," Caiti said back. "Chilly out, isn't it?"

"Very," she nodded. Caiti saw that her cheeks too were looking rosier than usual and she had not yet removed her gloves.

They could not talk much longer, though, because old Professor Munslow had just shuffled into the room. He had wispy white hair poking out under the Sherlock cap he wore, and his glasses were about two centimeters thick with prescription. "Hello to my sixth years," he said kindly. "Now if you'll remember last year, we worked with screechsap seedlings," he said, slow and deliberate. "Today, we'll be learning how to care for the screechsap which is nearly ready to be planted. But before we begin, I have taken the liberty of pairing you all up myself. Now let's see," he began, unfolding a piece of parchment from his pocket. 

"We have Amelia and Penny..." Penny smiled her goodbye to Caiti and went to find her new partner. Caiti did not listen too closely until she heard her own name. "Caitlyn and Theodore," he was saying. Her eyes snapped up and Professor Munslow was giving her a knowing smile like he was doing her a favor. Of course, they had only broken up just before summer. The teachers, who could usually be counted on to know all the student gossip, might not have realized yet. Grudgingly, Caiti picked up her bag and met Theo halfway, the two of them coming to stand at an open spot at the table. Caiti looked straight forward, refusing to look at him.

Once everyone had been paired up, Professor Munslow began to explain their task. Caiti tried hard to pay attention, but her vision was physically clouding with discomfort and she felt stiff and distant. In what seemed like no time at all, he was saying, "And that's that! Shouldn't be too complicated, but of course, be very careful, make sure you're wearing the gloves around the table... and ask questions if you have any. Now, off to work." He finished with a quick double clap and fell quiet.

At first, Theo tried just talking about their screechsap, reiterating all the directions Caiti had not paid attention to. She worked in a stony silence, never looking at him, but after about ten minutes, they accidentally made eye contact around their plant and Caiti's stomach did something funny. She looked away again, but this time, she spoke.

"So..." she said quietly. "I heard you made the quidditch team."

Theo seemed relieved she was speaking to him again. In her peripheral vision, she saw his shoulders relax. "Yeah!" he said too quickly. "Seeker. I'm pretty excited."

"Yeah, that's..." Caiti paused, trying hard to sound genuine. "That's really great. I'm happy for you." She glanced up at him again, but she did not maintain eye contact. It hurt too much. But even not looking at him, she felt she could see his eyes in front of her, burned into the air like spots of light when you accidentally look into the sun: bright hazel, ringed with green. She thought his eyes were probably the first thing she fell in love with.

If she had fallen in love with him at all.

"Thanks," he said.

They were quiet for a few minutes until Theo accidentally bumped one of the screechsap's branches, tickling it, and it let out a feeble screech. A small amount of orange sap shot out from the tips of the offended branch. The schreechsap curled itself up, away from Theo, as though to protect itself from the tickling.

Caiti couldn't help herself. She let out a small giggle. Theo looked stunned. She looked up at him and saw that the sap had hit him square on the nose and he had gone almost cross eyed looking at it. Caiti's hand flew to her mouth and her eyes grew wide and pinched at the corners, trying to hold in her laughter, but then Theo grinned too and let out a little laugh. A bit of the sticky sap dripped off his nose and onto the floor between their feet, and then they were both laughing. Caiti dropped her hand and giggled shyly through her closed mouth. This time when their eyes met, she held his gaze.

Theo glanced down at his own nose again and Caiti, snapped out of the moment, said, "Oh," and reached for a towel. She almost made to wipe it off for him, as she might have done a few months ago, but she stopped halfway, lowered her hand awkwardly, and held it out for him. Theo's smile faded a little. Caiti turned back to the screechsap and did not watch him any longer.

When class had ended, they cleared up their things in silence, murmured quiet goodbyes and Caiti hurried away, not ready yet to walk back to the castle with him.

---

Caiti was the last of her friends to arrive in the great hall for lunch. She took her usual place next to Marlowe and across from Sean and Evelyn, sitting down heavily so that the silverware on the table jumped. 

Marlowe gave her a quizzical and slightly worried look. "I talked to him," she told him under her breath, so that not even Sean and Evelyn could hear her. Marlowe had agreed - suggested actually - that he would not tell either of them, or anyone else, what had happened in the potions classroom the previous afternoon. She appreciated that a lot. She wasn't too keen on sharing everything too widely.

"You did?" he said with a frown. But the other two were now peering at them in confusion so Caiti said nothing more for now. Instead she asked Evelyn - who was muggle-born - for help with a question she had been unable to answer on her latest muggle studies homework regarding the persistence of the postal service in a time of increasing reliance on electronic communication.

Evelyn talked her through her thoughts on the subject while Sean tried to catch Marlowe's eye. Marlowe pretended he was very interested in his chicken pot pie and ignored him.

"So, you ever figure out that potion?" Sean asked him, raising his eyebrows. "Said you had to make it properly today, right?"

Marlowe nodded. "Yeah it's been sorted," he said easily. "Caiti helped me yesterday." 

Caiti glanced at Marlowe, worried he might say more, but he just took another bite of his lunch.

Sean, who seemed to have expected some further elaboration, waited a beat too long before he said, "Good."

Caiti wanted very much for the other two to leave so she could talk to Marlowe normally. She wasn't sure exactly why she didn't want to tell them. She and Evelyn had always talked about everything, and Evelyn had always been the biggest supporter of her relationship with Theo, the only person, really, that she had ever talked to about it - the good or the bad. She had especially been there for Caiti when they had first broken up. 

But something stopped her anyhow. Maybe, she thought, it was that she had acted so normally all summer, and Evelyn had been over a fair amount. Or maybe it was that Sean, who had never liked Theo (although she suspected that had more to do with the fact that Sean knew Theo had kissed his little sister on a regular basis for nearly two years than with Theo's actual character) was sitting right across the table from her and wouldn't like to hear that she was still wasting her energy worrying about him. 

And maybe too it was that, she had already given over to vulnerability in front of one of her friends and did not much like the idea of having all three of them looking at her like she was a loose canon, about to explode in a fit of tears at the slightest thing. She was not, really, that delicate after all. She had just had a bad weekend filled with self-doubt and a mixture of pitiful regret and a desire to understand what she could not.

It did not seem likely that the conversation she wanted to have, however, would be happening. Sean had launched into a lengthy discussion about quidditch tactics with Marlowe, based on something he had apparently overheard the Slytherin team captain discussing with his fellow teammate. 

Marlowe got sucked into Quidditch conversations easily and was persuaded to leave them much less easily. So Caiti, knowing she had a long walk ahead of her to the North Tower for Divination, brushed his shoulder as she stood to leave, said a goodbye to Evelyn - who was the only one listening to her - and who was looking rather miserable at being left in the middle of the boys' discussion all on her own - and began her walk upstairs.

---

Marlowe finally got a chance to check in with Caiti that night in the common room. They had all four been doing work together, seated around one of the round, dark wood tables in the loft, but a few minutes previously, Sean had realized they had prefect duties and were supposed to be patrolling the corridors that evening, so he and Evelyn left, and as soon as she was sure they were on the other side of the door, Caiti put down her quill and looked at Marlowe expectantly.

He stopped mid-sentence on an essay about the redeeming qualities in trolls despite their rather stupid and violent outer shell (Professor Poke, the Care of Magical Creatures teacher, was rather fond of attempting to humanize the sorts of creatures that people commonly tried to avoid rather than care for, a phenomenon which had been inspired in him by Hagrid, his own professor).

"So," he said. "You talked to him."

"Yes," she said, and then, surprised to find that after anticipating this conversation all day, she did not know what she planned to say, she stopped, looking anxious.

"And how'd it go?" Marlowe prompted.

She frowned in thought. "Well I suppose it wasn't horrible... but it wasn't good either. We laughed a bit, but then it got awkward."

"And you didn't say anything about..." he trailed off.

"About breaking up? No. Just about class. And him being on the quidditch team."

"So it's not really resolved, then," Marlowe said. It was not a question.

"No," she agreed. "It's... well I don't know what it is. I don't know how I feel." She propped her elbows on the table, chin resting on top of her hands. "I don't know whether I sort of want to talk to him again, or never want to see him again," she said in frustration. Her eyes lit up with some sort of fiery passion for a moment. 

Marlowe thought for a minute. Something about the tone of her voice had awakened some kind of fear in him that he did not know he had. Something that felt very much akin to jealousy. Still, he looked away from her and said, "You know, Caiti, if you wanted to... to try again with him-"

But Caiti cut him off before he could finish. "No," she said resolutely. "That's not what I want."

As if on cue, Theo and his friend Colin came up the steps. Caiti sat up very straight, arms by her sides. Before they reached the top though, Theo spotted Caiti and, although she and Marlowe were the only two up there and there were plenty of other tables, he mumbled something about it being "too full" and started back down. Caiti saw Colin roll his eyes in exasperation, but he followed his friend back down.

"I hate this," she said, bitterly, and when she suddenly returned to her essay she wrote with such force that twice she scratched holes right through her parchment.

---

After an hour or so, Caiti decided she was going to bed, and she left with her things. Fifteen minutes later, she was crawling into her four poster and under the covers. She curled up on her side, clutching fist fulls of her comforter. She did not close her eyes to sleep, but stared blankly into the dark, blinking much less often than normal.

She couldn't get Theo's eyes out of her head. But they weren't the only thing that seemed burned into her vision permanently. Marlowe's face swam there too, and even more than that the feeling of his arms around her the previous day, the way he had held her.

A part of her had to admit that Marlowe might have been right when he alluded that perhaps she did not want to be broken up with Theo after all. In many ways, she missed being his girlfriend. But then, perhaps it wasn't really Theo she missed. Perhaps she missed being anyone's girlfriend.

It was a selfish thought, but the feeling of being held had reminded her what she had lost. Though now she thought about it, she wasn't sure Theo had ever really held her that way at all. She remembered, much less fondly now, how he had always been so eager to brush over whatever was upsetting her, never very willing to take the time to listen. A quick hug maybe, and then he would kiss her and make her forget, temporarily. It had felt like enough at the time, but had it been?

When she finally drifted off to sleep, much, much later after all her classmates had found their way into their own beds, it was not Theo on her mind anymore. It was Marlowe: his mischievous laugh, and the way his eyes were lighter and more liquid when he was excited, and the way his dark hair curled across his forehead. And his hands, smoothing over her back and in her hair, telling her without words that it would all be okay.

---

Meanwhile, Sean and Evelyn were out in a corridor on the sixth floor where they'd been assigned to patrol for the evening. Evelyn sat on the floor underneath a portrait of Hengist of Woodcroft with her legs stretched out in front of her and an expression of utmost boredom on her face. Her Prefects badge glittered on her chest and her wand lay by her side. Nearby, Sean was pacing back and forth, swinging his arms rather too enthusiastically for his lackadaisical way of walking. He kept looking at Evelyn every few seconds. She had been staring at the wall in front of her, eyes glazed over, but this time she caught him.

"What?" she asked, one side of her lip quirking up.

Sean opened his mouth to answer, scrabbling for some explanation. But just then, for the first and probably only time in his life, Peeves came to the rescue, providing a distraction that made it unnecessary for Sean to answer. Somewhere to their left, they heard a great clattering of metal that sounded as though something was tumbling down the stairs from the floor above, followed by a distant cackling that was growing louder and clearer by the second. Evelyn stood up quickly, grabbing her wand.

"What's he up to now?" she asked.

Sean shrugged and they hurried towards the source of the sound. It became clear, as they reached the staircase, that coming to see what the commotion was about was exactly the wrong thing to do. "Oh goody!" he shrieked. "Prefects! Prefects come to see old Peevsie's little joke! Well you've missed it," he looked down at a suit of armor which lay crumpled on the floor. One disconnected arm had slid some ways away. Sean could have sworn it was groaning. Peeves' body followed his gaze, and laughing again, he began to perform a series of somersaults in midair. "But don't worry, I've got another one." Stopping his flipping on a dime and without a trace of dizziness, he zoomed upward, coming to rest on a large, golden candelabra above them. He began to pluck the candles out, and sent them each whizzing one or two at a time at the pair of them.

"Protego," Sean said, whipping out his wand with a bit of quick thinking. The candles bounced off his shield charm instead of off of them.

"Peeves, stop!" shouted Evelyn. "Put those back!"

But he just laughed and continued to pelt them. Evidently, the shield charm had worn off because one of the candles suddenly sliced through the place where they all all stopped henceforth, smacking into Evelyn's shoulder. Her hand flew up to the place she'd been hit.  "What are you going to do little prefects? Going to get old Peevsie in trouble?"

"We'll go and tell Professor Osset!" she shouted. "Stop it!" she added as another candle hit her dead in the chest.

"Not scared of him, not scared of you! Not scared of anyone, not even poo!" Peeves chanted, demonstrating an enviable level of maturity.

"Fine, then!" said Sean, pulling Evelyn out of the way as another candle headed her way. "We'll go and find the Bloody Baron!"

Peeves stopped abruptly. "You- you wouldn't," he said, suddenly much less confident.

"Oh yes we would," Evelyn argued, folding her arms. Peeves, incensed, stuck his tongue out at them and chucked the last candle in his hand hard at Sean and zoomed away, purposely banging into everything and making a lot of racket.

It was only when he had pulled away to avoid it that Sean realized he had not dropped his arm from around her ever since he had pulled out of the way of the approaching flying object.

"Well," he said awkwardly, "Guess we have to find a way to clean this all up."

"Right, yeah," she said and she pulled out her wand and began using the banishing charm to send the candles back into the candelabra while Sean repaired the dismembered suit of armor. About half the candles had been returned to their rightful places when Evelyn stopped, rubbing her shoulder again. "Wait, that actually really hurt," she said, looking belatedly half-stunned, half-amused. Sean patted a spot above his knee gingerly and nodded.

They looked at each other. Sean's face split into a grin. Evelyn couldn't help but mirror it. They began to laugh, Evelyn quickly accelerating to the kind of laughter in which no sound comes out. She had stitches in her sides and was doubled over, clutching at her middle. Sean had his hand on her upper back to support himself. Finally, when they had both calmed down, still grinning, Sean nodded slowly as if coming to some sort of resolution and said, "You know, Peeves, he's alright."

"Yeah," Evelyn agreed. "He's got his redeeming qualities."