Arthur Carey
December 08, 2012 10:32 PM
Considering the future. by Arthur Carey
What do I do now?The question drifted into Arthur’s mind quite suddenly, but he was not, as he looked up from and put down the long, rune-written scroll he had been reading before it came, very surprised by it. It was, after all, a question Arthur had been thinking about on and off for almost two weeks. Normally, he would have though that was long enough to figure out nearly anything, but as far as he could tell, this particular question still had no good answer, which was why he could not go too long without considering it. It was not an urgent question, precisely, since for a while the school would keep providing him with things he could pretend were answers, but soon enough, he knew, he would have to go home again, and then he would be right back to it: What do I do now?
It was, he thought, quite the mess he had gotten himself into. In the space of a day, he had gone from feeling quite in control of his life and everything around it to having his brother angry at him, his former partner more than a little alarming to him, and one of the eight most important people in the family aware of him, and not at all in any way that he might have chosen. It was enough, he thought, to distract anyone from such mundane matters as CATS, at least every now and again.
He sat back in his comfortable, dark blue upholstered chair – sometimes he did get tired, he thought, of black and blue – and rubbed his eyes behind his reading glasses before looking over the table he had spread with books and notes, not really taking in any of them. This week’s Charms essay lay open, the ink on the last paragraph still glittering in places as it finished drying, while a note on one side reminded him that he needed to work in a certain concept from Arithmancy into his term paper for that class. The runic manuscript he had been studying had started to roll back up on itself – stupid, he thought, how the publisher had felt it was necessary to try to mimic his idea of the real thing, it was most likely an anachronism and just made the thing harder to handle – but he could still see some spiky shapes here and there. A massive history book stood in the middle of some Potions books, despite him not really having any plans to read that this afternoon, and there, sticking out somewhere around page four hundred, as though it were a bookmark –
Arthur pulled the small piece of parchment out, smoothing it out as it made a valiant effort, even after all this time in the history book, to curl at the bottom and rereading the short message. As usual, it disappointed him by not having changed in the slightest.
I’ll still paint every Wednesday at two. J.
He ran his hand over his face again, looking at the words as though that would make them rearrange themselves in such a way that he’d be able to break the code and know what she really meant, what she was really doing. Then, maybe, he would be able to stop half-wanting to go see her again.
He missed her. Arthur had realized almost as soon as he got back to school that he missed her, even more than he missed the way things had been before midterm in general. Jane was the only person he had ever met who he thought was truly his intellectual superior in every way, and he thought he might have eventually come to love her a little for it. Plus, knowing that he could never hope to match her, he had been able to ask her assistance with his work without shame or any loss of face, which would have been helpful in the months leading up to CATS; already, he was running into problems with his Arithmancy that he would have been able to easily resolve before, since Jane had had a tutor in that for the past three summers and was very good at it…..
He was learning, around his mandatory subjects, the ones the school took an interest in, as much as he could as quickly as he could about Ancient Runes, Astronomy, Arithmancy, Divination, and History of Magic on his own time, and he still couldn’t keep up with her. And yet, he had still underestimated her because…why? Because she was a Teppenpaw? Because she was a girl? He didn’t know, only that it had been a mistake. He had known she was smart and talented and agreeable, but now he knew that she was almost certainly dangerous as well.
Which brought him back to the same question: What do I do now?
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Arthur Carey
Considering the future.
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