clean out of ideas [gabrielle]

When Lijsbeth had signed up for stable service she had expected to be working with the horses. Grooming or exercising them ideally, but cleaning tack would have been fine as well. Even mucking out the stables would have been bearable, because at least she was sort of close to the animals that way. But no, She had to get lucky and end up clearing out an ancient tack room that had been sealed shut for decades (what sort of a fool locks a door with a charmed key and then loses the key? The last stablemaster who worked there in the 1960s, apparently).

Just her luck that one of the professeurs had hit upon the exact combination of charm and ward that had reopened the door just this morning. "You ladies won't mind clearing this room out, will you? Under the circumstances you may use magic" came the instruction. Lijsbeth looked nervously at her partner for the afternoon and smiled uncomfortable. Gabrielle Delacour, probably the prettiest girl in the school and, rumour had it, one of the smartest as well. Beside her, Lijsbeth felt dumpy and slow.

"Do you think it's too late to change to gardening?" Lijsbeth whispered as they were left alone, peering into the darkness. She cast Lumos maxima and took a step forward, hoping that whatever had been stored in there could be tidied away quickly so they could get out of here.

@Gabrielle Delacour

The last time she’d done stable service, Gabrielle had been ‘mucking out stables’ with her yearmate Andre. This had actually been totally fine for her, because Andre had eagerly done all of the actual work and Gabby had just made light conversation and patted a horse for the afternoon. The blonde thought about this while smiling politely at the professor. “Of course,” she agreed. No such luck today, it seemed.

Her expression shifted into something more like contempt as the girls were left alone, but Gabrielle tried not to hold onto that feeling. Shared suffering was better than straight up annoyance, and she could do shared suffering. “They’d probably find an exact copy, but filled with garden tools if we did,” she joked, one corner of her lips tugging in an amused half-smile. She let the other girl go ahead first as she pulled her hair back into a low ponytail, tying it with a pale blue ribbon and making sure the bow was even before drawing her own wand and following her in.

It wasn’t very clean in here, or very tidy. The many years of non-use had left the room covered in cobwebs, and there was an odd, wet sort of smell that didn't quite smell like mould. Gabby already felt like she needed a shower. There were shelves on both her right and left, old and rusted and filled with all kinds of things, illuminated in a rather unsettling way by the magical light. She glanced down at the floor, making sure to keep her clean school shoes away from whatever that mysterious black liquid was.

"I wonder if any of this is still useable," she mused out loud, slowing as she came to a set of hooks on the wall. Those were bridles, she thought, illuminating the end of her wand wordlessly to get a closer look. The bits weren't rusted or anything, though the metal clearly needed a polish.

Okay, so maybe she shouldn't be making jokes about this. Lijsbeth was about to resign herself to an afternoon of morose silence when Gabrielle responded, and the Bellefeuille had already giggled before she had considered whether she should. She risked a look and inwardly sighed with relief.

"They've probably got an infinite number of cupboards, especially for students who leave their service until the last few weeks of term" Lijsbeth added as she steeped straight into something that made an ominous squelching sound. She sniffed curiously. The smell reminded her of horklumps, but she'd never heard of any subspecies that preferred being locked in pitch darkness for several decades. Maybe they fed on the spiders that had presumably spun the many webs that hung thickly over every available surface...but then what had the spiders eaten?

The last witch who was daft enough to walk in here she mused darkly, but decided not to voice that thought aloud. It was nasty enough in here without imagining even worse possibilities lurking behind what seemed to be haphazardly-stacked piles of old feed bags on the dark shelves. "Let's move the stuff that looks decent out of here to start with" she suggested in response, sending the light at the end of her wand up to hang from the low ceiling, where at least it illuminated the small room enough to work by. Stowing her wand temporarily, she started lifting bridles from the hooks and looping them carefully over one arm. When she had an armful she carried them out into the light.

"They look worse out here...but I think they'll be okay after a good clean" she muttered as she laid them out onto a convenient bench. Oh well, they'd been asked to clear out the tack room, not actually scrub and polish whatever it was they found. "Did you want to bring the rest out? At least if anyone comes by it looks like we're already well underway."

The Belle laughed and Gabby’s half-smile shifted into something a little more like a smirk. Endless, filthy cupboards? Gabrielle raised an eyebrow, considering it. Most of the palace was so pretty that it actually made a little sense — and wasn’t as paranoid as it sounded — that the professors might have to make up a job here or there. “Character building,” She replied casually, an eye-roll in her tone if not her expression.

“Sure,” Gabby agreed with a polite smile. Her grey eyes skimmed the shelves, looking for things that looked 'decent'. Most of the stuff in here was pretty old, she thought. Old enough that it was either ruined or only savageable by magic, in her opinion. She glanced up as the other girl spoke again. Did she want to bring the rest out? Well, She didn’t love a sixth year telling her what to do. She didn't love the other girl making all of the plans. “I’ll get these boxes first,” she said, her tone light but decisive.

Also, she wasn’t going to use her hands if she could help it. Gabrielle pointed her wand at a pile of mysterious and extremely cobwebby wooden boxes in one corner, levitating them in front of her as she made her way outside. Was she showing off? Perhaps a little. They were witches, after all, weren't they? And manual labour wasn’t nearly as character building as some of their teachers liked to pretend.

“There’s something on your shoe,” she told the other girl as she passed her, moving out into the properly lit outdoors and lowering the boxes to the ground.

Lijsbeth had the sudden rogue thought that if they claimed everything was useless, they could just pile it all up in one corner and be finished in half an hour. Especially if they did it using magic, which apparently Gabrielle had decided to do.

Oh. Okay, has she said the wrong thing? Having captained the Belle Quidditch team for the past year Lijsbeth supposed she was used to making suggestions for others by now. She bit her lip and hesitated for the merest fraction of a second, before deciding that both working on different things was probably going to make it go faster anyway. She stood aside for the older girl and was about to go and collect the rest of the bridles when she spoke again.

"There is..? Oh" Lijsbeth glanced down and mentally dismissed the black, tarlike substance immediately. If she cleaned it off now she would probably just step in something again in a couple of minutes, though she had a feeling her companion might be unimpressed with her lack of concern. "It's funny, the smell in there reminds me of horklumps. This looks a bit like their secretions, but I don't know how they'd survive in a locked room, unless there's another way in" she said thoughtfully, temporarily forgetting that not everyone shared her interest in magical creatures "I'll clean it when we're through here". She attempted a half-smile and went back into the room to collect the rest of the bridles.

"Is there anything interesting in the boxes?" she asked over one shoulder as she looped the remaining bridles over her arm.

Horklump secretions? Wonderful. Excellent. “There probably is, don’t you think?” Gabrielle asked offhandedly. Another way in, that was. The room was a little too… Humid? Or something? To have been airtight all this time.

She smiled politely when the Belle said she’d clean her shoe later, but Gabby wasn’t looking at her anyway, so it wasn’t really necessary. Lijsbeth disappeared back through the door and Gabrielle sighed, glancing away, back in the direction of the school, as she lowered the boxes neatly to the ground. She didn’t really want to be here. Shouldn’t stable services be in an actual stable?

Gabby waved her wand, blowing some of the cobwebs off of the boxes with magical wind. She tried to flick the lids open with her wand too, and when that didn’t work she tried with one hand, and the tips of her fingers tingled. Magic. “I can’t open them,” she answered, sounding mildly impressed. They must have been sealed with some kind of spell. Gabrielle was a pretty adept young witch and thought, perhaps cockily, that she’d be able to get in with a little effort. However, breaking into mysterious boxes wasn’t her job today, so. She left them.

Back into the dark, damp shed, then. “You’re a sixth year, aren’t you?” she asked lightly. She knew the answer. “Are you excited for your final year?” There were only a couple more months left of this term before the summer break. She side-stepped the black, sticky stuff and enchanted a small pile of what looked to be mostly tangled ropes to float ahead of her as she made her way back outside.

The idea of another way into the abandoned store room sent a little thrill of excitement through the sixth year. There was still a small, childish part of her that remembered summers with her siblings a little too fondly and wanted to explore until she found the secret entrance, no matter how dirty she got. Logically, it was probably a hole in the ground or a space that had been dug by generations of rodents, far too small for a student to fit through, but she liked the idea all the same. Not that she mentioned that. She had a feeling Gabrielle would find the idea of crawling around at the back of the room less entertaining.

When she brought the rest of the bridles out, the older girl was attempting to open the boxes without success. 'I suppose we could try a blasting hex" she said with a giggle, though she doubted there was anything much of interest sealed inside. Probably they'd find obsolete books abraxan care books that were no longer part of the school curriculum or something equally useless. Better to leave them for the professors to sort out. But the next question startled her slightly, and sent her mind off into a tailspin she wasn't prepared for.

"Yes..." Lijsbeth answered, feeling her heartrate quicken even as she tried to convince herself everything was okay. She had hoped vaguely it was just a random question but no, there was more, and she didn't even want to think about it. She wasn't excited for seventh year, she was terrified for the end of her sixth. Despite being told repeatedly that she was sure to pass, that professors expected her to get good grades in almost all her subjects, OWL exams still felt like a huge black cloud hanging over her. If only she could just fall into a coma and wake up when they were all over.

She realised she was standing, gripping the bench with both hands, bracing herself as she fought to regain control over her breathing. Gabrielle probably thought she was an idiot, and that thought of course made it worse. One...two...three...one...two...three She opened her eyes and stood up straight, ignoring the wave of dizziness and forcing a smile. "I guess...I need to get this years exams out of the way first" she said, her voice coming out far too high pitched and shaky than she would have liked. Vaguely she fiddled with the bridles, not quite able to focus her mind back on what they were supposed to be doing.

[ooc: well that escalated quickly! sorry gabby]

The longer this went on, the more uninteresting and tedious everything was getting, and they’d only been here for ten minutes. Last year, she’d done her student service in a gallery in Chatoeil; this was so much less glamorous she was almost embarrassed to be here. Lijsbeth didn’t seem to be having much of a bad time at all, which Gabrielle was both unsurprised and disapproving of. Lijsbeth giggled. “Be my guest,” she told her, gesturing casually at them. Personally, she didn’t care about mysterious wooden crates in an old forgotten shed. She played absentmindedly with her ponytail, then flicked it back over her shoulder.

The other girl went quiet but it took Gabby a moment to notice; she was only making polite conversation because doing all of this in silence sounded like an even worse time than it already was. She paused by the door, though, glancing at Lijsbeth. “That’s true,” she answered cautiously, raising one quizzical eyebrow. She moved through the door, then lowered the pile of rope to the ground beside the boxes. She hovered for a moment, then sighed internally and decided she should probably ask. “Is everything okay?”

Her fingers were moving but as Lijsbeth watched them, it seemed as if some independent force was making it happen. Somehow she couldn't connect it to her own body actually making it happen. Everything felt disconnected, but that was good, because when her mind went like this it meant she didn't need to think. She could just space out for a bit until the panic disappeared.

Except she couldn't, of course because she was standing in the dusty end of the storage rooms and she wasn't on her own. She wasn't even with someone who knew about this - her friends had become pretty good at noticing the signs and providing a convenient distraction in the form of taking a walk or even asking her to be their study buddy. Reading through notes and trying to remember everything was scary in itself, but at least it felt like she was actually doing something positive.

"I'm fine..." she began automatically, but her voice still sounded like that of a much younger girl and there was a quiver in it that sounded like she was on the verge of tears. She should find something to do, try and open the boxes or go and clear one of the shelves, but she couldn't quite remember how to make her feet move. She looked across at the other girl, willing her not to get annoyed and to give her a little more time to get herself together as she asked "Are they really as hard as everyone says? The OWL exams, I mean?"

I’m fine.

Her voice was shaky — Oh Merlin, was she going to cry? Why? All the seventh year had done was ask if she was excited for her seventh year, a perfectly normal question to ask. Gabby knew all of the right things to do, of course (light shoulder pats, sympathetic expression et cetera), when people cried, but she really didn’t like it. She felt some distaste at the concept of crying in front of a stranger, and some embarrassment for the other girl in advance, for good measure.

She cleared her expression though, keeping her gaze polite and curious rather than irritated as Lijsbeth met her gaze. No, she was clearly not fine, and while there was an annoyingly curious part of her that wanted the information about why, she was also happy to just go on pretending that nothing was happening. Later, she might ask her friends if any of them knew what was up with the Belle quidditch captain.

The blonde tucked her wand under her arm and dusted her hands off, even though she hadn’t really touched anything in here. She felt dusty just by being in the dark, cobwebby room. “Well,” she started, taking a small step towards the bench, but not leaning on anything. “It’s different for everyone, of course,” she said. “And I don’t know what classes you’re doing. But I don’t think it was that difficult,” she added.

Even as the question was out she regretted asking it. Most of the time she just pretended the exams weren't going to happen, so she could imagine she was just studying for some random event in the far future. Only her closest friends knew how anxious she was, and now she'd all but blurted it out in front of a virtual stranger. Lijsbeth expected the worst, laughter or some cutting comment, so was surprised to hear words that were...not exactly reassuring, but sensible.

Strangely, hearing 'it's different for everyone' made her feel better than her friends telling her that everything was going to be fine, or professors reminding her that her grade average through the past two years had been merveilleux. All that told her was that there was pressure on her to do well, that everyone expected her to do well, and they thought she as making a fuss about nothing. But weirdly this vague, pale series of comments - probably meant as platitudes - focussed her mind.

"I guess so" she said, realising she could breathe again. She released the bridle she'd been twisting around her fingers, clenching and unclenching her fists. She took a tentative step and discovered her legs were behaving again. Good. She could carry on with what they were meant to be doing.

"I've always done okay in medical studies. And magical creatures" she offered, more to herself than for Gabrielle's benefit as she went back into the old tack room and bent down to the bottom shelf "Yuck, I think these used to be saddles. There's no way they're salvageable" She stood, and used her wand to extract the first. Some things even Lijsbeth wasn't willing to touch with her bare hands. Feeling a bit more comfortable she added "I guess it's just the practical stuff...having to demonstrate spells and being scared I'm going to screw up. Is it true you have to do the exams with everyone else watching?"

When Gabrielle said it wasn’t difficult she wasn’t really trying to be comforting, she was just unafraid to brag in front of others. Her yearmates knew she did well  — she wasn’t the top student of her grade in any of her classes (she had a social life, after all), but she wasn’t too far below that level. And if she’d been experiencing a fear of failure somewhere underneath it all in the lead up to her exams, she’d repressed it so heavily that even she could barely detect it. It was almost as embarrassing to care too much about that stuff as it was to do badly.

“Medical studies is probably the hardest one, so it’s good that it’s one of your better subjects,” she commented with a small, one-sided shrug. She was glad there weren’t any tears, and tried to listen to the other girl’s voice as well as her words to check if there was still a chance there might be.

Gabrielle glanced at the ‘saddles’. “Ew. It’s sticky in here, isn’t it? Humid?” She assumed they’d been protected with magic at some point — both humidity and heat could ruin leather, if she remembered correctly — but clearly they were protected no longer. “Not really,” she answered. “You might have the exam in a room with other people but they’re all doing their own thing, you know.” She watched Lijsbeth do the work, then copied her rather reluctantly, levitating a wooden container filled with chipped horse brushes off of a shelf with wordless magic.

“Do you have specific grades you need to get, or…?” After a beat, she added, “Veterinary science, or something?” as a guess.

It was easier to talk about the scary stuff while doing something else. How come she'd never figured that out before? But then she realised, somewhere she'd always known that. Why else did she get up to go running before anyone else was even awake? It wasn't just to counterbalance her love of cookies and any other kind of sweet food she could get her hands on.

"Yeah, I guess..." she replied blandly, though she knew it was true. Medical studies was something a lot of people struggled with, she just supposed she'd always had a head start because of - she veered away from that thought befoe it could be completed as she brought the saddle out into the main stable store, then shook her head and continued to levitate it until it was out of the door and dumped unceremoniously outside. "I suppose whatever protective spells they used wore off ages ago" she said, giving the thing that had once been a saddle one final glance.

"Oh. That's okay then. I guess" Lijsbeth once again employed her favourite word as she considered this new idea. She'd imagined trying to cast spells in front of half her yearmates, but neglected the obvious fact that they would be just as busy concentrating on their own exams to bother watching what she was doing. If she did something massively wrong she supposed they might turn and look, but as that hadn't happened since her third year it was unlikely she was going to have a sudden relapse of incompetent magic. As she extracted a second saddle she said "Thanks", feeling faintly embarrassed as she did so.

This one seemed wedged into a corner and simply summoning didn't work, so she crouched down to see what the problem was. No sense in casting a spell that unwittingly brought the whole shelf stack down around them. "I hope so" she said, speaking more loudly with her head under the shelf - aha, there it was. A raondom stirrup had got wedged between the saddle and the top of the shelf. She summoned that wordlessly an caught it in her hand, grimacing as it shed layers of rust and dirt "I thought about healing for a while, like my Dad, but I'd rather work with animals" she turned on her heels and grinned "Like you couldn't guess."

I guess… Gabrielle glanced at the other girl, expressionless as she tried to catch her expression. She looked away just as quickly, though, realising it didn’t really matter. Lijsbeth was pleasant enough, but they weren’t friends. Gabby was graduating soon; everything here at school seemed less and less important as her final exams crept closer and closer. Even her friends, even the guy she’d been seeing recently, and especially people she didn’t know very well.

I guess. Gabrielle didn’t roll her eyes, but she often felt like she was surrounded by indecisive people, and this felt a lot like that, so she sort of wanted to. She had no idea what was going on with Lijsbeth, and honestly didn’t really care. She levitated the container she was shifting up to the bench, then levitated one of the brushes up out of the box, bringing it towards her so it floated right in front of her face. She didn’t want to touch it, but she didn’t need to do so to inspect it.

The wooden handle looked a bit dusty, but fine, and the bristles actually looked okay too. She wasn’t willing to touch them to check, but the box of horse brushes was suspiciously undamaged, considering it had supposedly been decades since anyone had been in here. It sure smelt like it had been decades, but… Gabrielle recalled her earlier thoughts about professors “finding” hidden little rooms full of gross stuff, and felt skeptical about the whole thing.

She grimaced sympathetically when the other girl’s fingers wrapped around the stirrup she’d just summoned. Yuck. Veterinary medicine was just a guess, but it was correct, apparently. Gabby thought she’d rather die than be surrounded by sick animals all day, but each to their own or whatever. When Lijsbeth turned around to grin at her Gabby gave a small smile. “I thought about healing, too,” she told the other girl. “For a while.” She swept a stray hair behind one ear with her index finger.  “I think I just wanted to do something more academic than my sister or either of my parents.” She paused. “Had something to prove, or something.”

Lijsbeth bent her head to one side and rubbed her face briefly with her free hand to disguise the grin that threatened to appear on her face. The idea of the girl working as a healer, when she could hardly bear to get her hands dirty with a few cobwebs just didn't seem possible. Maybe she'd just considered it until she'd realised there was likely to be blood and sh other substances to deal with on a regular basis.

She understood wanting to prove something, though. "Yeah, I get that. I'm the fifth of six kids - my brother and sister are in your year, actually - and it feels sometimes like I just want to do something different to any of them." It wasn't a case of being more academic, though, given that their Mum taught muggle studies and, well, she supposed Gabrielle must know Katelijn fairly well. Given that her sister had only discovered studying a little over a year ago - just before her own OWLs, funnily enough - it was unlikely that the two of them were friends.

She straightened up and summoned the second saddle again, and this time it came easily, though it was in no better condition than the first. that could go outside for disposal later, as well. "What are you planning after you graduate?" she asked as she returned to the little storeroom. Already it was looking somewhat tidier. She wasn't overly interested in the reply, but now they were at least communicating in a friendly fashion and Gabrielle had helped stall her latest bout of anxiety, Lijsbeth felt quite amenable to this line of conversation.