Love is a Fickle Thing...

[Jacob Corrion]

February 14th, 2008
12:57pm

It was so indeed but it was not welcome from Robert Shaw for numerous reasons. And while no, he hadn't exactly professed his undying love and devotion to any particular soul under his command, nor Corrion himself (thank Merlin for that small blessing), he had managed to once again wedge his way beneath Corrion's skin and make his blood boil. And he was personally growing tired of the man's ability to be both locally elusive and unwilling to die.

So here he was on Valentines Day where within his wake was a broken (and magically repaired) second floor door and about-to-be-lopped-off-gargoyle statue because Shaw ahd managed to poke the caged lion with a stick again and successfully run away AGAIN! It made him sick, or at the very least extremely nausiated to know that his best efforts were still too short to catch he who was quite possibly the smartest criminal mastermind since the Dark Lord's first assentment to power...

Of course, lately everything seemed to bother him, most effectively was Pevensie's continued lack of year 1931 firewhiskey, but even that took a second chair to Shaw's taunting editorial.

"Tamis you tell this wretched statue to let me up there before I tear it apart in one-inch fragments!" the auror bellowed, compeltely forgetting the timeframe of the day. It was ironic that the chances of her being locked away in her tower reprieve to hear him were slim, and slimmer still that she would oepn the door but damned if he cared. If she was there, he would bellow and she would either tell him to get lost or shut his yap and enter, OR if she wasn't there, he would scream his bloody head off until she showed up and hexed him or again told him to get lost...

In the end either would work. He was pissed, he had no decently preferred alcohol, and so he turned to other means of venting. One man's coping skill was offically another one's step from a good day into a very bad one. Valentine's Day, the day of love, call it what you would but in his job love apparaently came tough, and that was only because everyone (including his co-workers) seemed to want him dead...

[Tamis Raynor]

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Tamis Raynor lifted a head splitting with the ruckus going on down on the seventh floor entrance to her office. It was muted, considering the distance, but fell like an anvil to her currently very sensitive head. Groaning, the Headmistress covered her source of pain in an effort to muffle the noise, almost toppling an empty bottle of 1931 fire whiskey to the floor as she did so.

It was already a bad day, and getting progressively worse.

Valentines Day held nothing but grief for a woman that could not even send the man she loved a card without worrying that the owl would be intercepted and it would put him in danger. And the students in the school seemed to be taking solace in the Day of Love to cover still lingering fears from the Deva invasion. Raynor herself had seen to it that cupid allusions fluttered around the Great Hall that morning for breakfast. Raynor, a strict drinker of tea and adamant advocate against any alcoholic beverage other than wine, had in fact locked herself in her office, asked not to be disturbed and just emptied the previously mentioned bottle.

She had expected to be left alone to her drunken stupor and regret it tomorrow when the after effects of it gave her a worse headache than the one she already had.

Apparently someone was not of a like mind.

"Tamis! ...wretched statue! ... let me up! ... tear it apart!... one-inch fragments!"

An actual whimper escaped the woman's lips. And she sat up carefully, peeling away a piece of parchment that stuck to her forehead. The source of the jolting noise was not going away. She would have to silence it.

She stood up ... and regretted it as the room turned Topsy-turvy.

Somehow she made it to her door (ignoring the comments of the portraits) and down impossibly steep steps without falling flat on her face or breaking anything. The stone gargoyle slid to the side as she approached to reveal the swimming image of a red faced Corrion.

"You." She stated thickly, wondering why she couldn't stand straight... or still. "Will not. Vandalize. My school."

A frown crossed her lips. That was not what she had wanted to say.

[Jacob Corrion]

For a moment the commotion had ceased and just as any traveling salesman stops knocking long enough to look through your front window, so too did Corrion stop his annoyance long enough to listen for footsteps. There were none. Well bugger that then! I know she's up there, and I know she can hear me! And I know she knows the meaning behind this little annoying p**s-ant of a bloke in the paper! the auror thought as he began kicking the door/wall/entreeway once again.

In truth he knew nothing of the sort, and believed nothing of the sort but he was angry. His subjugate command were imbeciles and paper-pushers, and about the only partial truth would be that she (hopefully) would be able to advise him as to a course of action other than responding to the bloody thing. The subjugate fiasco of her clamoring about above was drowned by his own ruckus and when the gargoyle suddenly moved aside and the bloodshot eyed, completely indignant and best of all royally plastered Tamis Raynor appeared before his face any further aggression toward the school was indeed muted from his amplified voice, though soon to be spoken words would have nothing to do with it.

"You. Will not. Vandalize. My school."

Tough words for someone who was swaying too and fro like a wind-whipped high rise, words that carried no singular snarl or bite other than what the boisterous (and taunting) smell of intoxication gave her in agitation. No doubt her head was pounding, she felt like vomiting and the truth was, seeing her pass out now would bring him more relief by distracting him from figuring out how she'd made it down the ruddy stairs. And it was then the full force of it hit him: Tamis Raynor, she-who-always-drinks-tea-with-everything, she who hardly touched anything harder than wine except in spare sips, was actually completely and without excuse drunk and here he was without a/his/any camera!

And the ironic thing was, it was all quite possibly, probably (although he would continuously deny his bad fortune) his fault. You see upon hearing of her impromptu promotion of another education hierarchical ladder rung he'd given her (as many other former compatriots of the force probably had) an obligatory gift in celebration. His choice was quite possibly what was staring his eyes to near-bemused tears, for you see his way of congratulating Raynor had been to present her with his then one of twenty, bottles of year 1931, perfectly aged firewhiskey...

He'd expected her to trash it and send a thank you card, or at the very least mail it back apparently she'd not the intention to do any of them but this was indeed the last place he expected to find good liquor. Oh well, this was what she paid for in her own unspoken way! Now she knew why he enjoyed it so bloody constantly and refused to put it down. And while he wasn't truthfully sure if she was downright drunk or simply heavily hung over, in the end it didn't matter because in the end, he had a permanent memory to which he planned on having added to his personal pensieve.

When he finally found his vocals again, and most of his internal laughter had subsided he could do nothing more than place a cocky grin on his face and forget about Shaw completely. He had a rarely seen control panel before him, and he wanted to push all the colorful buttons to see what havoc he could unleash on the world.

"All well, Tam? You look like an alley cat after a rainstorm!"

[Tamis Raynor]

A puzzled expression filtered across the Headmistress' normally stoic visage. It was as if he was the drunk one; as if he was the one swaying worse than a boat caught in a hurricane. For an insane question like that, perhaps he was. He should know better. He knew her other form and how she felt about that particular member of the animal kingdom...

"I don't have a cat." She stated with a trouble frown. "I'm allergic."

Absurd question. He knew that. It was something she had in common with Banks -- and she would have to see about these floors. They kept tilting dangerously under her feet. She meant to put a hand out on the wall to steady herself, but it jumped back two paces, and wasn't there when she reached for it. Due to the sudden misplacing of the wall (she would never admit that she misjudged the distance), she was thrown off balance. Which, as one might guess, was not the best of conditions to occur when one had drowned in an entire bottle of aged fire whiskey.

Thrown foreword, she had to grasp the other man's shirt instead to remain indignantly on her feet rather than indignantly off them. A small laugh, yes laugh for that most certainly was not a giggle as Tamis Raynor simply did NOT giggle, escaped her lips at her own foolishness. She straightened, brushed off imaginary dirt from his robes, and reached for the wall this time before putting her weight on it.

She returned the grin on his face, not understanding why he was wearing it, but fearing that she would miss out on the joke if she didn't.

The floor jostling again wiped it off her face and she frowned up at him again. And, somehow managing to sound solemn:

"I think I might have had too might to drink," she admitted at last.

Might? That was not the word she had been looking for... was it?