[atrium] deck the halls [zach]

Ari yawned, rubbing her eyes with the butt of her hand as she followed her colleagues out of the lift. Class had only gone until 2pm that day, but her head was swirling with the new information on antidotes they'd received. Potions had never been her favorite class, and while she thought she had gotten rather better out of necessity, things like poison-antidote pairs didn't stick in her head the same way charms did. Perhaps it was that there was just more to associate charms with, like the physical wand movement and the effect; during the course of her Potions education so far, no one had exactly been keen to poison any spare people at hand in order to viscerally demonstrate antidote viability.

Pulling off to the side and pausing to survey the atrium, Ari marveled for a moment at the sheer flow of people. Although she was only learning and still not working yet, sometimes she was struck with this sudden realization that she was part of this huge organization now. All her life she'd belonged to groups, she thought; her family, Hufflepuff, the DA. But nothing was quite to the scale of the entire Ministry of Magic. It was the familiarity that was unnerving; the way a passing person would nod and say "Laurier," more often than not one of her dad's friends, as if they knew her when they didn't really. And it was the relative scale of her against this whole backdrop of people. Ari was an Auror in training, fresh out of Hogwarts. She had no control over the policies enacted by the Ministry or the direction it took; just a tiny impact on the culture through her own interactions with people. If it did something she didn't agree with, what was she supposed to do about it? Would she even know about it? She had her father's legacy to follow: he had resigned his post in support of Professor Dumbledore. But there was a difference, she thought, between obvious things like that and the more subtle happenings that went on every day.

Right now, though, she thought the Ministry was doing its best, putting out the fires that always seemed to be burning around the Wizarding World. And she trusted people like Jo to do the right thing. Plus, it was almost Christmas, and there was a festive feeling in the air. Magical Maintenance had taken to making it seem to snow outside the windows. And, as she noted, a few decorations appeared to be going up. Heading toward the heaped glittering cart that was parked next to one of the biggest trees she had ever seen, Ari craned her neck to look at it, hoping to catch a glimpse of what the space might look like in a few days. Ribbons, baubles, and candles were strewn haphazardly over its surface, and its caretaker appeared to be none other than Zacharias Smith.

He didn't exactly look thrilled about his job, which Ari uncharitably and amusedly thought seemed in character before feeling bad about thinking that. Their last actual encounter had been a little awkward, but not awkward enough to prevent her from ever talking to him again, and it was early. "Hey," she said, approaching the cart and gesturing toward the yards of ribbon and the still-bare tree. "Um, do you want any help with that?"

@Zacharias Smith

Contrary to frequent assumption, Zacharias liked Christmas. Not as much as a lot of people, to be fair, but about as much as he though he could like anything. He liked that everything was different in December. Even though nothing in his life really changed, everything that surrounded it transformed visually and emotionally into something happier. Sort of refreshing, sort of comforting. Of course, for most of his life he’d never had to do the actual work of transforming it.

In previous years it had just been around the office, but this year had been an all-hands-on deck situation and Zach had been drafted to help decorate the atrium. He had a feeling his employers preferred him doing that than being around anything important. His father must have some serious influence in the department, he’d thought with a snort as he dragged the big Christmas decorations up from the basement. That, or there was a serious lack of potential replacements. The fact that he was still employed was frankly sort of a miracle, and he wasn’t sure whether to hang onto it or just screw it.

The tinsel was now swirled around his tree in as even a spiral as he could get. The more time he sunk into making this perfect, he figured, the less he’d have to do real work. However, as he was levitating the first sequined bulbs up to the top of the tree, he vaguely registered a female voice from behind him offering help. Zach clenched his jaw. Even his tree-trimming was unsatisfactory, of course.

“If it’s not in the right place then just tell me how to fix it,” he said coldly, gripping his wand tighter as he tried to maintain his focus on the floating ornament. His spellwork, already mediocre, tended to suffer greatly with distraction and he didn’t want to drop anything while being gently called out in the middle of the atrium. “I can put things on a tree as well as anyone, I’m not completely incompetent.” Ornament secure, he turned around with what he’d been meaning to be defiance. But it was not anyone to be snapping at. It was earnest little Ariana Laurier, looking a little taken aback.

“Sorry,” he muttered. Since their conversation at the HR meeting Zach had found himself thinking of Ariana. Even though it was reasonable to assume they wouldn’t run into each other again, and even if they did cross paths he couldn’t see them exchanging smiles and waves like casual friends, there was part of him that couldn’t ignore that small glimmer of understanding he’d thought he’d felt. He hoped he wouldn’t manage to put her off after two chance meetings instead of just one.

Trying to compose himself, Zach gave her a raised brow and a brief quirk of his lips. “Haven’t you got something more important to be doing?”

Her offer was met with a very defensive retort, and Ari craned her neck upwards, realizing she'd interrupted him in the middle of a rather consequential levitation. The nineteen-year-old looked down at his back again thinking that really was not, however, a very good excuse for his snappishness--after all, broken ornaments could be fixed with a good Reparo--and crossed her arms, waiting for him to turn around.

The man actually muttered an apology at her instead of persisting in his displeasure, though, so she uncrossed her arms, a little bit puzzled. Zacharias had just assumed that she was showing up to berate him, and that her offer had been a backhanded one. Ariana couldn't quite tell whether this was because he was projecting, and a similar offer from him would have been equally backhanded, or whether his colleagues really did treat him this way. She wasn't quite sure which she preferred, either.

"Um. Hi," she said again, as if to assert her presence as a non-threatening, non-criticizing agent. She shrugged, spreading her hands briefly in a vague motion. "I just got out of class, there are plenty of groceries in the fridge, we cleaned the apartment two days ago, my brain is too fried to study, and this whole thing looks like more than a one-person job, so no, not really?" Ari smiled with a hint of self-deprecation--she'd basically just implied that the only things she did were training and chores, although most of her friends were at work at 2:15 pm on a weekday.

"And for what it's worth, I don't think even the worst person you might have been expecting can complain about how you've done the tinsel," she gestured up at the perfect spiral, grinning.

Embarrassed was an understatement. Zach figured he probably had a reputation for unprovoked rudeness, but he didn’t want the person he was trying very deliberately not to alienate to believe that it was deserved. “Oh,” he said. His instinct was to brush her off. It wasn’t too much of a job, and he’d been trying to waste time anyway. But he didn’t want to seem rude, not to her.

Zach perked up when she complimented his tinsel. It was a really stupid thing to be pleased about, but he looked back up at his work and laughed weakly, giving Ariana a smile. “Maybe that’s the career change I’ve been looking for,” he said. “Wonder how much interior decorators make?” The thought was laughable, in a sense that seemed obvious, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.

Though Zach would accept compliments, he was sort of reluctant to let Ariana help. He didn’t truly have any doubts about her capability—quite the contrary—but there was some part of his perfectionism that convinced Zach he was the only person for the job of the moment, even when he was rubbish. “If you want to help, you can, I guess,” he said anyway. “I’ve been doing these ones—“ He pointed to the box of the largest ornaments. “—Three around, and then under the gaps in the next row.” Surely she could follow the pattern he’d established well enough.

He picked up the next box of baubles, these ones star-shaped and slightly smaller. “What do you do in class?” he asked casually as he looked down into the ornaments. He’d always been sort of curious.

Ari didn't think he'd laughed the last time they'd talked, so it was oddly satisfying to get one from him now. She laughed at how different it seemed a career path, but looking up at the tinsel and the carefully placed ornaments, she didn't think it sounded that crazy. "Hey, looks like they could use your skills in the business," she grinned. "Have you ever seen pictures of those old pureblood mansions? I reckon they could all use a modern update." The worst had been the ones they'd put in the Prophet because the previous occupants had been killed as Death Eaters during the Battle. "They probably don't make much, but then, neither do we," she shrugged.

She craned her neck upwards towards the rows of tinsel and nodded. "Sounds good." Ari herself would probably have sent them all up at once, haphazardly, were it her job, but Zacharias seemed like he wanted to do it very meticulously, so she started levitating them one at a time, squinting at the placement from all directions before actually hanging each one. She was tempted to also conjure some sort of stick for measuring distance, but she thought the man might think she was mocking him or something.

Ariana was good with charms, and levitation was straightforward, so as long as her eyes were trained on the appearance of the tree she could talk and work at the same time. "Oh...we rotate through a few teachers who have different expertise. It's kinda like specialized versions of Defense and Transfiguration and Potions. I thought we'd practice dueling more or something, but this year we're doing a lot of noncombat stuff, like disguise and tracking and how to make ourselves sound like old people," she said, temporarily taking a break from levitating to point her wand at her throat and make a solid if not thoroughly convincing attempt at a vocal transformation. She was improving, but she thought she didn't have enough experience with older adults to do it right. "The Defense part is kinda like when that nutter Crouch taught us though. He got the vibe down." Going back to levitating, she added, "and there's some contextual stuff about history and laws. Not my forte." Ari wrinkled her nose; she hadn't kept on with History of Magic for a reason, considering it had been her lowest OWL grade.

She finished the second row, following his example and then squinted up. "Does that row look okay?"

“Huh,” said Zacharias. She’d spoken in a joking tone, the way he had done, but some part of him was genuinely flattered. He had never really spent time with the idea that a career could suit him. Maybe his mother had said something of the sort, but he discounted most of her opinions about him at the outset. They didn’t come from a very informed place. The opinions of an acquaintance probably shouldn’t have meant much more, of course, though somehow he found that they did. Zach trusted compliments only from people with no reason to want to make him happy. Maybe that was why he’d liked talking to Ariana so much. It had been a long time since there’d been someone in his life between critic and supporter.

“Dunno how modern those places could get,” he said with a small smirk. “I’d probably just tell them to chuck out all their ugly heirlooms and start over.”

It occurred to him that he knew nothing about Ariana’s family. The way she’d spoken made it seem acceptable to speak about the rich and fancy with her as if they were another species, but he didn’t really have any idea—she did have a father in the Ministry so it wasn’t out of the question. The awareness of his assumption made him flush a bit, and he busied himself with hanging another bulb.

She continued and he nodded along, until the unexpected change in her voice made him jump. “Goodness,” Zach muttered, looking at her with wide eyes. “Well, that sounds sort of fun, I guess.” More work than he’d prefer to put into anything these days, of course. If there’d been anything good about the last few years it was that the expectation of constant improvement was gone. He couldn’t imagine taking more classes as much as he couldn’t imagine fighting more evil. But the skillset was intriguing.

“What?” He hadn’t really looked at what she’d been doing, and almost forgot she’d been doing it. “Oh, yeah, that’s fine.”

Ari laughed. "But you must understand, we've had this goblet in the family since the 12th century, when, er, our illustrious ancestor who..." she tried to think of some people who had made it onto Chocolate Frog Cards--which were definitely the greatest advantage Wizarding kids had ever been given on History of Magic O.W.L.s--for particularly stupid reasons, "was the first person to lose a chess match...to a goblin...drank poison from it to preserve his honor?" It had really fallen apart at the end, but at least she'd given it a go. "Or someting stupid like that. I guess I need practice in creativity," she admitted. "Maybe that's why I can't make top marks in disguises." It didn't really bother her--given her fairly blunt nature, Ariana rather doubted she'd be staffed very much on missions where disguise formed the core skill set--but maybe it was an accessible improvement. She'd been more of an inventive writer when she'd been a little girl, but had become sort of difficult to want to make up stories about something else when there was so much going on in the real world.

"Sorry, didn't mean to startle you," she said swiftly. "It's a mixed bag, I guess. Some of the subjects aren't things I would have picked to learn more about, I never did like Potions, but some of it is really interesting." She paused. Teachers like Murdock tried to hammer home the idea that learning what they were learning could be a matter of life and death, but Ari could feel two conflicting pulls in her and on her classmates' faces when it came up. Death seemed so much more real to her, she thought dimly at times, than someone who had just gone to school normally: where death might be a grim figure confronting the Three Brothers, it was instead the white eyes of a thestral overlaid with the eyes of the fallen many times over, and curses rushing towards her arrested self, soundless but somehow carrying the thunder of great waves. But then, the struggle between life and death had become something all too ordinary. It was easier, in that sense, to just think of it as school. "It's kind of nice to still be doing something kind of like school, too, I guess," she said, after what had seemed like a long time but waas probably just a beat. "It's pretty familiar. Don't have to really confront the 'real world' and all that."

She wondered what Zacharias would think, glancing at him sideways. He seemed both like he would be glad to leave school but that he didn't really like what he was doing here. Ari wanted to ask about it, ask if he was serious about leaving, but she didn't want to pry, either. Zacharias was prickly enough and she'd just gotten him to kind of laugh. "You know?" she settled on, figuring he might choose to keep going in that direction while she got to mimicking her last row of ornaments. It struck her that she'd done a lot of talking about herself out of that same nervousness about prying. She hoped she didn't come across as making everything about her.

Zach listened, waiting for a few long moments just to be sure she was done. It would have been quite alright with him if she’d just done all the talking and he just internalized it as she went.“Yeah,” he said, sort of lamely, with little to offer but agreement. “I never really thought about what I was going to do with myself after Hogwarts. Dunno if I could process it.” After a while he had sort of expected the world would end before he ever had to start thinking about adulthood, and he’d been frankly a little bit grateful for it. Not that he thought things would have been any different in peacetime, of course. Zacharias figured he just lacked the capacity to plan. If life was going to hand him excuses, though, he would take them—even if his weren’t quite as good as other people’s. He’d long since learned to settle with whatever he didn’t need to work for.

He scoffed quietly then at the notion that he’d have been reluctant to leave Hogwarts. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever thought about it that way. Usually he envisioned his schooling as an hell he’d been aching to escape, full of meaningless work and minimal freedom, but now that Ariana brought it up, he was realizing just how unready he’d been—still was—to be responsible for himself. “I mean,” he said, to make sure she understood, “I hated school too, obviously, but—“ He stopped. Maybe it wasn’t as obvious a statement to her. He’d just assumed, again, that they were alike in all ways just because they were in some.

Rolling his wand awkwardly between his fingers, he shrugged. “It’s really not that bad here,” he said. “I mean, it’s pretty easy, and I don’t have to live with anyone else, so… I don’t mind.” It was unusual that he’d say something of the sort unless he was trying to reassure someone. His work was easy, yes, but it took more out of him than he’d care to admit and there was no denying he was miserable. Probably he was just a negative person. He didn’t even have an idea of what a life he’d be happy with would look like, if he were to dream of one.  He’d probably choose to lay about doing nothing all day, indulging himself whenever inclined and owing nothing to anyone but himself. But even then, there would still be a voice deep in him that admonished him for choosing it. His father’s voice, perhaps—or any of a hundred others still ringing in his ears.

Zacharias realized he’d stopped hanging ornaments. He looked blankly back at the tree, whatever concern he’d had about how it looked now lost somewhere in his brain. It felt like he should say something but he had no idea what.