We'll Always Have Beethoven PV George Locked

There had been a few bumps in the road for Ivy's student, as well. The fire and the Blossom Ball were both still fresh in his mind, even if the former had happened over a month ago. Much like the Gryffindor girl, he had tried to keep himself tied together to avoid falling apart. Unlike her, he did a poor job of it. He kept his grades up in his favorite classes, but the rest slipped - he had earned himself some detentions trying to skip lessons in transfiguration, but he couldn't explain why he had taken to such bad behaviour.

His reactions had become just as unpredictable as his actions. He was swinging back and forth between two mentalities. A part of him thought he deserved every bad thing that ever happened to him. Another part thought he deserved for nothing bad to happen to him again. Some of his friends had seen it. Jake had asked him to repair his stuffed animal using one of his charms, only for George to blow up at him and storm out of the dorm.

It didn't matter what George did - there was a sense of injustice in everything. A pervasive feeling that something was wrong, or would be wrong, and that it was going to be his fault. Just like what happened at the fire. Just like what happened to Jake and Alan when he made them go to the ball with him. He'd taken inspiration from Ivy a bit as he constructed his new self-image - she seemed to hurt his feelings with as much ease as someone might step on a bug. Whether the cruelty was accidental or not, there would be no apologies.

He arrived on time for his piano lesson, dressed in his uniform. His normal clothes didn't cut it for piano lessons - he needed to look as fancy as he felt, up on the little stage, playing one of the little songs from the red booklet. Like usual, he jumped up to stand beside Ivy, stealing a seat on the piano bench... but unlike usual, the booklet was blue. And it had a song he didn't know in it. "Fur Elise," but with little dots over one of the letters, like in German. He wondered what the title meant - but he wondered if she expected him to play it. George looked up at her, with hope in his big brown eyes - hope to finally alleviate the boredom of playing scales or twinkle-twinkle for the millionth time.

"Am I playing this one?" he asked, leaning in toward her. He bounced in his seat a bit, looking over the notes. It was hard for him to imagine the song when he read it on the page, but that made it all the more fun to play. A reward for playing well was to know what the song sounded like played properly, without having Ivy kick him off the bench and show him how it's done. George's eyes darted back to the folder - the blue folder. A new folder.

He reached out and flipped through the pages. There was everything in here - Rachemanhoff, List, Beethoven - probably even some Panini or whatever, too. His grin was huge and bright as he read off the names of each song - bouncing on the piano bench. "Am I gonna play all of them?" He looked up to her again. Awesome! He flipped back to the first page again - Fur Elise - and settled in with his fingers on the keyboard, reading over the notes and waiting for a cue to try.

@George Henry

Ivy observed George carefully as he climbed onto the stage, wondering how he was getting on himself. Usually, the Gryffindor saw straight through any facades or fronts that her peers tried to put up, but not today. She wasn't sure if it was the sleep deprivation from the studying or if George had simply gotten better at hiding his feelings. Ivy would smile valiantly for her student as she had for her peers for the past fortnight or so, trying to push all thoughts of the Ball to the back of her mind. She was here to teach, not to mope. Get a grip, she told herself firmly, turning to look at George as he sat at the piano bench.

"Why else would I give it to you?" she responded as he leaned in towards her. Ivy smiled, raising an eyebrow as she shoved him playfully. "Hey, congratulations. New booklet. You just got upgraded." It felt honestly felt a strange to be cracking jokes, but already Ivy's smile was becoming more genuine, her posture more relaxed and her grey eyes softening.

Her words had prompted him into flipping through the pages of the booklet, eyes wide open with a grin on his face. "Maybe not just yet," Ivy replied distantly, recalling how hard some of the pieces in there were. For example, Rachmaninoff was rather hard to play, seeing as she had a small hand span. Ivy tended to avoid playing his pieces, and she wasn't quite sure why she even bothered keeping copies of the sheet music, as she could never play them. "But if you work really hard, maybe someday..." The Gryffindor briefly wondered what it would be like to teach Liszt to George - although first, he'd have to learn to say "Paganini" before that.

Clasping her hands together with a soft clap and running over the melody in her head, the Gryffindor walked to stand to the side of the piano, where she would be able to see the sheet music. Peering over George's shoulder to look at it, Ivy couldn't help but feel something was off about the placement of the sheets, before she realised that one of the pages was missing - to be exact, the second one.

"Oh, bother," she sighed. "The second page is missing," she explained to George, frowning. That's so annoying... Ivy had no idea where the second page could be at this point. It could be in her dormitory, floating at the bottom of her trunk, or lost in one of the corridors she had gone through on her way here, or even still at Bellamy Manor. She hadn't touched Für Elise for ages, so she hadn't realised until now.

Ivy straightened up, thinking to herself. "Seeing as Für Elise is so well-known, there might be some copies of the sheet music backstage," she said. She turned to her student, apologetic. "Wanna go digging around in the back with me?"

George had done a better job constructing himself today than he would have done when he first met the girl. It had been in part her own fault - but there were other things, too. The more he succeeded in his classes, took to his studies, and watched other people, the better he got at making himself act in the right ways. Being a writer had been the best part - really looking at how each word made people feel, even if it went beyond the meaning of the word. It was fun to make up an image of yourself and play pretend with it.

But he wasn't applying those skills as strongly as he might think. There was no acting as he looked through his new booklet - only genuine joy, his regrets of the past month pushed away in his mind as he tried to imagine the tune of the song. His finger pressed one of the keys in idly, making a quiet sound. He was still as impatient as ever. The girl gave him a playful shove, and he swiped half-heartedly at her, trying to slap away her hand but missing entirely. "To tease me?" he guessed, looking back at her as he tapped the key again, another high-pitched noise colouring the conversation. "You always play stuff you say is too advanced. You're a torturer."

That was probably the only reason she kept teaching him, anyway - it amused her to watch him suffer. In fairness, he made it pretty amusing. He scoffed as she offered him a bit of motivation - maybe someday. "Are you implying I haven't been working really hard? I could play you the scales up and down for the rest of my life with my eyes shut and ears plugged. I've worked hard!" he insisted, as if his passion made him any more prepared for List or Paganinny.

George tried to look professional as Ivy leaned in over his shoulder to look at the music, his hands returning to their proper places on the keys, poised to play when she asked... but then she explained the issue of the missing page. "Oh, come on..." George said, deflating instantly. "Missing where? Are you sure I can't just... you know, make something up in the middle?"

Winging it had never let him down. To test the theory, he carefully, slowly played the very end of the first page, before transitioning into what was most definitely just some fancied-up version of twinkle-twinkle. Halfway through, his hand came down on the keys and the piano let out a harsh cry. "Right, I give up. Let's look."

The boy jumped up from the bench and wiped his hands off on his uniform robe. "There might be," he agreed, nodding at her theory. If it was so popular, there were bound to be some laying around. He kicked himself for never thinking of this before - if there were some real tough songs laying around, he could learn to play one and show it off to her when it was time for the next lesson. Then she wouldn't have any doubt he was working hard.

He rushed ahead of her, rifling through the sheet music left behind by other performers who used the rehearsal room for their own practice. Lots of songs, but no Elise yet... he left behind others' books in quite a state, pillaged for their Beethoven and left in disarray. "No luck." As the search continued, he supposed he ought to engage the girl in some idle conversation. "How've you been?"

@George Henry

It was good to see that George hadn't lost his pesty, impertinent way of doing things that annoyed her so much. Ivy's eyes dropped to look at the key he pressed down on absentmindedly, resisting the urge to slap his hand away from the piano. She had always hated it when George played random notes for no reason other than to satisfy his boredom, and although Ivy was irritated, she was also relieved that he still had the energy and motivation to tick her off. (The day he stopped annoying her would be the same day that pigs learnt to fly.) "Wait, so I'm the torturer?" Ivy's grey orbs would flicker back up to look at her student, the corners of her lips tugging upwards with amusement. "Me? Hey, I get bored with scales as well. They're only the most boring part of piano, ever." Perhaps that was why she had forced him to pracrice them so much...

Well, in his defence, he had been working rather hard. Ivy agreed with him on that part, but it was fun to watch him suffer. "You're welcome to try one of my pieces if you'd like," Ivy challenged, raising an eyebrow with a smirk. She flipped the page to the piece she'd been playing the first time they met, La Campanella, and pointed to the first note. "Go on, then. La Campanella. No? Alright, Für Elise, then."

Of course he wanted to improvise. Ivy groaned loudly. What the hell? It took every fibre of her being not to slam her face into her palm. This was a piano lesson, not a jazz club. "George," she said, with the superior air of someone speaking to a very small, idioitic toddler, "You can't improvise classical musi-" Oh, forget it. He was already playing, and... wait, was that twinkle twinkle? Ivy let out a snort of laughter, unable to help herself. It was such a George thing to do, insist that he could improvise classical music and then play twinkle twinkle, of all things. She winced slightly as his hand came crashing down onto the piano. The sound of random keys being played without warning was rather jarring and unpleasant, and she would have yelled at him for it had it not been for how satisfied she felt for proving her point. "I told you," Ivy grinned, following him into the back. "I told you."

The Gryffindor wrinkled her nose at George's method of searching through the papers. Did he really have to make such a mess? "Can you not?" Ivy asked irritably, rolling her eyes. "You know, there's a way of doing thing tidily, right?" She shook her head and righted the sheets, scanning them over as she did so in case George had missed something. Nope, he was right. No Für Elise to be seen anywhere, which was more frustrating that she liked to admit. Missing sheet music was the most annoying thing in the world - at least this wasn't some kind of performance or concert that they were preparing for.

"Oh, I'm fine," Ivy responded automatically, riffling through another stack of papers. She was lying, but there wasn't really anything about her that would reveal that to George - her smile was just about right, her tone was casual and lighthearted. There were times when she wished she wasn't so good at lying, because it was so exhausting to see people brush her answer off - although it had never occurred to her to let people know upfront about her feelings. Perhaps that was her problem: she was too proud to let anyone know about her weaknesses. But she was only human, it had to come out at some point... If he sees through my lie, then I'll talk about it. If not, then I'll let it be. "How are you?"

"That is exactly why you are the torturer," George said, cearly perplexed by Ivy's questioning. The reasoning was straightforward. "You know they're the most boring part, but you still make me practice them. Instead of... I don't know, just playing songs 'til I get it right." Though he understood how impossible that would be - you needed foundations before you could build up. It was why they only taught things like reparo and tarantallegra in Charms. To give the slower students some time to build up. But George felt he was quite exceptional. It was true in Charms, but perhaps not in piano.

He went for another loop around the rehearsal room to right all the stacks of sheet music that he had wronged, grumbling as he returned them to their folders. It pained him to take care when he knew that somewhere among it all was a copy of Fur Elise just waiting for them. His instict to tear through it in search of his prize was almost too great to suppress. But Ivy always acted with better manners than him, and the last thing he wanted was to give her another excuse to rub his nose in it.

"That's good," George said quietly. He had no reason to suspect a thing, even if he may have cared about how she was truly feeling. There was no indication to the contrary, so she must be fine. Even if he knew the vast conspiracies and lies that humans were capable of cobbling together, he still had the natural tendency to take people, mostly, at their word. If she wasn't fine, she would have said as much, surely. That's what he intended to do when she asked him in return.

"I'm okay," he said, with an unusual pause. This might have stood out to Ivy, if she knew his usual routine. He was never just okay. He was good, usually, sometimes dandy, rarely grand, but never just okay. There was something on his mind, but he wasn't sure how he could gracefully.. shoehorn it into the conversation without killing the fun mood. He was hoping that she wouldn't be alright. Not in a mean way - but in a way that meant that they could talk about it. "I'm sorry I couldn't go to the ball with you."

He paused his shuffling, lifting his head to look at her. "Did you go after? I went with Alan. From Gryffindor," he said.

@George Henry

Despite the fact that it had been Ivy herself who had chosen to lie, she couldn't help but let out a soft, almost inaudible sigh of disappointment as George replied with the same response she had recieved for two weeks. She knew it was stupid, and yet she couldn't help but resent the boy in front of her slightly, wishing he had seen through her lie. It wasn't his fault, but she still blamed him a little for it. Ivy had hoped that perhaps George would have been able to... never mind. It didn't matter now, did it? She was quick to shake it off with a shrug of her shoulders, and when she smiled again, it was almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

Perhaps her misdirected anger was the reason she decided not to push it when he responded, despite the unusually lengthy pause and the even more unsual reply: I'm ok. Her expression didn't change as she flipped through the pages again absentmindedly, only pausing to look up sharply at the mention of the Ball. "That's alright," she said, "I still went. With Zyk - Zykeal Lane." Ivy's face didn't show it, but her heart gave an aching squeeze in her chest at the mention of Zyk. Gosh, it must have been ten days since she last saw him at the Lake... how quickly time passed.

Not wishing to talk about the Ball, Ivy's eyes darted around, looking for something to grab and talk about and fell on a yellow box made out of plastic, located on a shelf behind George. "What's that?" she said loudly, marching past him to pick it up. Ok, this clearly wasn't the smoothest transition for conversation topics. Ivy almost never changed the topic so quickly and abruptly... Why are you so afraid to talk about it? a voice in her head snapped at her. Why don't you just face him and talk about it? Ivy opened the box viciously it almost fell off her lap. "Stage makeup!" she announced even louder, as if trying to drown out her thoughts. "Have you ever worn makeup?"

"Zykeal Lane? I feel like I've heard the name Zyk before, but I can't remember where. I might not have," George said, pausing to lick his finger to turn over the next sheet of music. But there was a nagging feeling that he had missed some subtle cue. Her sigh of disappointment was almost inaudible, but among the quiet shuffling of papers, it was the only thing he could hear. The boy straightened up his neck, looking to Ivy with an indignant sneer. "Don't sigh at me, I stopped making a mess!"

He shook his head, letting out a quiet sigh of his own. She could be so irritable over the smallest things, sometimes. And she would never say anything, she'd just roll her eyes, and sigh, or rub her forehead, and if you asked her what the matter was she'd just say it was fine. She was a good teacher besides that. It was like pulling teeth to get her to say what she was thinking unless it was something she'd volunteer out in the open - like "you're a mess," for instance. That one came quite easily.

"I never even made it out of the locker room. I had Jake there with me too because I didn't want to leave him alone in the common room. Just ended up making a bigger mess by taking him, though," George said. "A Slytherin guy came in looking for the bludgers so he could release them and ruin the ball. And then some mosps showed up. I don't think he did the mosps, though - I don't even know where you'd get mosps."

The sudden swap of conversation topics went off without a hitch when George located the stage makeup. Of course! Stage makeup! Why hadn't he ever thought of it? His entire supply had been snuck out from under the nose of the old flying professor. Little did he know what a treasure trove was waiting in here, unguarded, waiting for him to get his grubby hands on it and steal it away. "...Once or twice," George said, walking over to examine the box with feigned disinterest. "Is there much there?"

@George Henry

Ivy stayed silent as George mused on the name Zyk, unwilling to offer any information about him. It was easier to keep her mouth shut, she decided, to keep the pain and the memories locked up today. "Mhm," she responded uncooperatively, grey eyes focused on one of the dusty corners of the room rather than on George's face. At this point, she was honestly just hoping that he would drop the subject. He had missed the opportunity to talk about feelings, she thought to herself spitefully.

However, any resentment Ivy held towards the Hufflepuff soon faded as he recounted his own experience at the Ball. Her expression turned softer, and she turned around ever so slightly from where she was standing, watching George's face carefully from the corner of her eye. "Mosps are more common than you'd think," she said, recalling the contents of the book she had dug up in the library a few days prior. "They're native to Scotland. I just didn't think... there'd be any mosps around the castle. I don't know, Hogwarts just feels - felt safer."

The correction she made was small, perhaps even unnoticeable to some, but to Ivy, it made all the difference in the world. Now that she thought of it, she had been foolish to think that it was safe here. A little over than a month prior to the Ball, she had encountered a hag in the Forest. Somehow, she should have known that the Ball wouldn't be safe enough to attend. The professors had cancelled it for a reason... and of course, they had been stupid enough not to listen.

The distraction she had made with the stage makeup seemed to have worked, because while George was moving closer to take a look, the disinterest on his face made Ivy's stomach turn over unpleasantly. "Well, let's find out, shall we?" the Gryffindor said, arching an eyebrow with a grin. She flipped the lid open and her lips parted slightly with surprise as she surveyed the contents of the box. The makeup was in surprisingly good condition, as far as she could tell - the eyeshadow wasn't crumbly, the lipsticks looked firm and quite solid...

"There's quite a lot in here!" Ivy reported with a laugh. She picked up one of the brushes and tapped George on the nose with the fluffy end. "Hey, you any good at applying makeup? Forget Beethoven, you'd probably find Für Elise too easy anyway. I'll find a harder piece to learn another day... I'll teach you to do your eyes or something today."

George wrinkled his nose at Ivy's statement that she thought the castle would be safer. "I guess you haven't been reading my articles," he said, with a haughty puff of air from his nostrils. He didn't care all that much - lots of people had better things to do than pay attention to the things going on around them. She had probably been busy finding a backup date after he said no. "I can't blame you too much though. I figured it would be fine to go. I don't know why anyone would bother targeting kids with... whatever it is they were doing. I still feel bad about making Alan and Jake go..."

The boy's eyes lit up when he saw the treasure trove of stage makeup that the pair had stumbled across. It was perfect! And it would have been a perfect find, too, if Ivy hadn't been there. Thankfully, she seemed to feel it was fine for them to use, and hopefully wouldn't begrudge him for taking a few samples home with him afterward. "I'm alright at it," he said, with a moment of hesitation. He wasn't great at making himself look good but he made a damn fine badger, that much was certain. "I usually do it for like, costumes, not like how..."

He turned his head to study Ivy's face for a second. "Not like how you... do it?" He didn't want to offend her if she wasn't actually wearing any. It had become increasingly hard to tell whether flashy effects on someone's face were makeup, some kind of spell, or some sort of magical disease that it was uncouth to mention in conversation. That wasn't such a worry with her, though - he'd stepped on her toes so many times that she'd grown used to kicking him for it.

"I can figure out Fur Elise," he agreed, going cross-eyed to look at the fluffy brush as it tapped his nose. "Now, make me beautiful! Is there a mirror there?"