musing aloud - how embarrassing!

[Caoimhe Keating]

Open to other Puffs! :D

The New Year had come and gone, and Caoimhe had returned to Hogwarts with her classmates. The holidays hadn’t been what Caoimhe had expected. She had expected to enjoy the holiday season in the comfort of the apartment she had come to call home, but instead she was swept away to a castle in the Hebrides. The castle was impressive albeit eerie. A castle worked as a school, in Caoimhe’s opinion, but certainly not a place to call home. It was too empty, even with all the MacFustys there. Some of the rooms and halls were quiet and empty; they weren’t places that Caoimhe could linger.

Meeting her new aunt had also been strange. Uncle Ezra’s relationship with Aunt Nuala was so very formal: something Caoimhe had not been expecting. She remembered how her father interacted with her mother. It was familiar, casual and comfortable. Uncle Ezra’s relationship with Aunt Nuala seemed awkward. Perhaps they weren’t telling her everything about the circumstances of their marriage. It hurt Caoimhe to think that there was something her uncle was hiding, but she decided not to dwell on it. It would only irritate her.

Instead, she focused (or tried to focus) on the book in front of her as she sat in the Hufflepuff Common Room. Her professors had jumped right back into coursework and assignments the first day back. Caoimhe had worked hard to complete her assignments over the break, but she knew they were lacking. No matter how hard she tried, she simply couldn’t stay focused on her work. She always ended up distracted by some sort of thoughts or daydreams. She didn’t mean to be distracted; it just happened…

Caoimhe sighed with some frustration, realizing she had become distracted yet again.

“I wish I was better about this,” she murmured to herself. Realizing she spoke aloud, she blushed a little, hoping no one would notice but doubting that they wouldn’t.

  

[Robyn Healy]

“And it definitely was a monkey,” Rob brightly badgered his twin as he walked into the common room, quietly enough so that the other boy knew what he was talking about but it didn’t become instant news all over the place. He had hoped that the girl was going to be around the common room, since it was the most logical place for all their housemates to be in, but that didn’t seem to be the case yet. “Now I think of it, wasn’t there something about a basket-ful of marmosets being given to that zoo project in Irvingly in that newspaper the other day? We need to talk our lot into visiting, can we, can we?” They could also hitchhike with any older student, but that was a bit risky. Plus he didn’t feel like they knew any older students well enough so far.

Rob was also behaving younger than he was, but he tended to do so when he was excited, and he had only seen the creature just the once, so it was news he thought he could share with at least his twin, who was so behind on the news it was funny. Pausing at the entrance, he blinked and gave Ri a curious and worried look. “What were you doing all that time? Don’t tell me you’ve been sleeping!” In fact, given the older twin’s sleep patterns, as far as Robyn was aware of those, he wouldn’t be at all surprised if the other boy had caught up on much-needed sleep. Still, he’d find out the sooner he was able to badger Ri into spilling things, which so far wasn’t happening with much success.

He realized they weren’t exactly on their own at that point. Well, the common room wasn’t exactly empty at any time of the day, but it was one of the very few times when the person was close to their age and if he wasn’t mistaken, in fact their year-mate, one of the few he’d actually seen around. “Hello, there,” he greeted, because he really couldn’t pass by without doing so. “Does something seem to be the matter?” Miss Keating, at least he thought that was the girl’s name, could well be talking to herself, as he’d seen some others do, but if not, well, perhaps they could help her out.

  

[Riagán Healy]

Ri walked alongside his twin, a bit put out that he had not gotten to see this so called monkey. See? This was precisely why they should try to never be apart. "I don't know, I don't read the paper," Ri stated with a slightly wrinkled nose. All that was in there was deaths and shit. Depressing stuff. "And we can always ask Mama to take us!" He chirped, just as brightly as his twin.

"Probably," he replied, cryptic about it. He had, in fact, been asleep through breakfast. Bad dreams had plagued him in the night and he hadn't wanted to bother Rob about it.

Ri merely nodded along with his twins greeting to the girl. "Are you okay?" He asked as well.

  

[Caoimhe Keating]

Just as Caoimhe had suspected, other students had overheard her. She flushed an ever deeper shade of red when the Healy twins approached her with slight concern. The Healy twins were yearmates of hers, but she didn’t know them terribly well. She was a rather shy girl despite all her wanting to make friends. She had made a few close friends, but everyone else seemed to be in the Acquaintance Zone. She had found happiness in the few close friends she had that she managed to sort of forget to make more. But perhaps this was her opportunity to do so! Yes, that was a good way to look at it!

“Oh, no! I am quite well,” she assured the two boys with a shy smile. “I just find myself getting a little distracted from my work. It seems to happen to me a lot, actually, so I was just sort of wishing that… it didn’t,” she confessed.

“Does that ever happen to you?” she asked, maybe a little too bluntly than what was considered proper. After all, she hardly knew these boys, but how else was she to get to know them if she didn’t talk to them?

  

[Robyn Healy]

Too bad, really, that his twin didn’t pay attention to the paper in the slightest. There weren’t only deaths and bad things there, some of them were rather fun – like that announcement concerning the marmoset litter. Rob thought he’d seen one, and he certainly seen the monkey in question, but he’d have to clarify it from the girl next time he saw her. Shooting his twin a worried look and deciding he’d badger him about his sleeping patterns later, he instead turned his attention toward Miss Keating, particularly as she explained her problem.

“It is rather hard to focus sometimes,” he nodded with a grin, settling into one of the chairs and lightly tugging Ri toward the other next to them. He’d rather they share one, but he couldn’t see a chair that was large enough, unless Ri had other ideas. “Particularly more complicated stuff. I wish we didn’t have to do so much writing, working out what you meant to say in a hurry while taking notes during class’s a pain, at least to me.” Lightly tilting his head to the side, he shot a questioning look toward his twin to see how he thought.

  

[Riagán Healy]

"It happens to me all the time," Ri intoned sympathetically and a small bit dramatically. His attention span was terrible at best. Rob was the more attentive of the two, truth be told.

As Rob tugged him to sit down, he pouted briefly when the chair Rob took was not at all big enough for them to share. "I don't like writing, I don't like studying. I like naps. I want a class about the art of napping," Ri said. That was his thoughts on the matter so he fell silent since he had nothing else to say. For now.

  

[Caoimhe Keating]

It eased Caoimhe’s nerves to know that she wasn’t the only one who struggled in her classes. Although, she secretly wondered if the twins could do better if they only applied themselves more. The poor girl had tried to apply herself more in class, but always found herself becoming restless or distracted by her thoughts. Did these boys suffer from the same problems? Caoimhe didn’t know. She decided it was best to not overthink things and not try to make herself separate from her housemates.

The latter Healy boy’s comment made the young Irish girl grin. “A class on the Art of Sleeping?” she mused aloud. “I suppose the closest we’ll ever get to that sort of class is Divinations.

“I’ve heard that students have kept Dream Journals before for that class. Maybe they get certain days where they can to sleep in class in order to dream,” Caoimhe said, laughing.

  

[Robyn Healy]

Grinning and shaking his head at the sight of Ri’s pout, Robyn reclaimed a different chair, dragging his twin along with him this time. They could both have this one, which should make the other either sleepy or at least less grumpy.

“Don’t encourage him, please, he’ll find excuses to sleep through other classes, too,” he laughed, knowing that given chance to, Ri’d nap through all the lessons, never mind a divination class if he ever took one. “But I heard some manage to fall asleep in that one anyway, so I don’t think I’ll be taking it. Naps on the side suit me just fine,” he mused, fidgeting around until both he and Ri were quite comfortable and he could sling a hand around his twin’s shoulders.

Wagering it was a familiar sight to the girl already, them having done so countless times in the common room before, Rob wasn’t planning to move from the spot. It was good enough for him, so he continued chattering along. “And why would anyone want to write down what they see in dreams? What if it’s just a blob of something unrecognizable?” He was honestly curious, because how would anyone interpret an amorphous blob of stuff if it showed up?