Closed You Can Hear It in the Silence

Vanity didn't often thank teachers for anything, not even quietly in her own mind, but she had to say she appreciated Professor Alcott-Ward's decision to make Cornelius do his fifth year over again. It was nice to have him in her year and in her classes, even if they only really hung out sometimes and spent the times they did hang out making fun of other people. Cornelius was kind of awful, but so was Vanity. She preferred kind-of-awful people to the nice ones any day. They weren't so sanctimonious and fake. It was how she found herself hanging out at the park with him during the break. It was so boring at home, and Vanity was happy to escape the house. What was the point of having an older brother who graduated if he didn't even move out? A job at the ministry hadn't improved Emery's mood any. Neither did living with their parents, she guessed. She could kind of sympathize on that point.

The two had found a spot near the pond in the park where they could just hang out in the grass, despite it being a bit too cold for it. Vanity had her sketchbook with her and was doodling in it, drawing cartoony caricatures of their professors. "Does this look like Castillo?" She asked Cornelius, holding it up to him. She adjusted her jacket a little, fighting a shiver. She should probably zip it up, but she was wearing a cute top and didn't want to hide it. She wondered if Cornelius had even noticed it. She wondered why she cared.

Somehow at the end of the year, Cornelius was almost okay with having been held back. Almost. Sure, his future was ruined and his family were barely speaking to him, but... why couldn't he have been a year younger? Maybe he wouldn't have been a complete f*ckup and ruined his life if he had been in Vanity's year from the start. He hadn't ever really expected to make friends in school - Cornelius was more than used to what people seemed to all think of him, and he'd always seen schoolmates as nothing more than a temporary frustration to be waited out, but now... Maybe having a friend was the motivation he had always lacked.

Though if Cornelius was honest with himself, he had longed for Vanity to be more than a friend for a long time. He didn't know why someone as beautiful and popular as her would bother with him as a friend to begin with, but every so often... it almost felt like she was seeing him just the way he saw her. His heart skipped a beat whenever he remembered the time they had taken Felix Felicis together, and he had really thought... just maybe...

And now here they were, tucked away in a quiet, secluded corner of the park, just the two of them. What else could that mean? Unless he was being a huge creep, reading into it far too much, and projecting all sorts of things onto a girl who just felt safe enough around him, her trustworthy good friend? Of course he was - a girl like Vanity could never like him, and here he was, thinking all sorts of creepy things about her when she trusted him so much, what a-

Cornelius' spiral of self-loathing was interrupted by Vanity's voice, and he looked over with a blink, doing his best to focus on the drawing and not ogle her. "Oh, hell yeah." He grinned, blown away as usual by the quality of her art. It was sublime, and only made him feel even more inferior with his miserable doodlings. "You should draw him being eaten by a venomous tentacula."

Vanity grinned when Cornelius said the picture looked like their head of house and nodded enthusiastically at the suggestion he had. She did note with some disappointment that he barely looked at her. Maybe she really had imagined they might have had a moment last year. Sometimes she wondered if Corn even liked girls, though she also sometimes wondered if he did like her. It was confusing, but not something she could just ask. "Good idea." She said instead, doodling the plant vaguely around the tiny professor Castillo. "He's not the worst head of house, at least. Imagine having someone like Carter. I bet he makes the Hufflepuffs hold hands and sing songs at their house meetings." She said with a smirk. Her opinion of Professor Castillo had gone up significantly when he had just given them a bunch of paint-filled balloons and let them loose. Though she still felt like she should have gotten credit for the idea