Closed Tired Days & Bumpy Moments PV Pandora Smith

As horrible as it was for him to admit, something irked him about the fact that the girl before him struggled so much to get up. Was he a bad person for feeling annoyance at another person's clumsiness? Was it too much to ask that they should be miserable some place else? Webs of misanthropic thoughts crowded his mind, resulting in Laurence being dissatisfied with his own nihilism.

The giggles of some of the girls awoke him from his troubles, and he shot them a short, concerned look. He hated being embarrassed in public. His gaze wandered back to the girl at his feet. Instinctively, Laurence reached out his hand to her, bidding her to take it so that he might pull her up from that very dusty carpet that had so graciously broken their fall, but had, as Buchanan so snobbishly mused, filled the lungs of every pupil in a hundred-mile radius with centuries worth of grime now that all the dust in that ancient carpet had been scattered about.

"Do they ever clean these? That dust's a bloody health hazard."

As he waited for her to take his hand, he looked down at her, trying to decipher whether he'd seen those vivid yellow eyes previously. Had he? Had he not? Surely he'd remember if he'd seem them, right? Why did they somehow seem relatively familiar, if he could hardly remember where he'd ever seen them?

The snickering from others continued, and Laurence suddenly felt a tremendous pressure not to stand besides the girl lying on a corridor carpet. His ego couldn't take being publicly ridiculed like this, and as he looked around, miniscule, near-indiscoverable beads of sweat started forming beneath his golden locks. He was starting to crack under the pressure and sneering of those around himself and the girl at his feet.

"I don't believe we've met." the boy from Ulster spoke with a voice that cracked in 'believe''s second syllable. He liked to have eyes on him, he liked to be seen, but not like this. The pressure felt insurmountable, and though it certainly dramatic as he imagined it to be, Buchanan was still extremely uncomfortable. "Laurence Buchanan." The mention of his own voice brought him some confidence and reassurance. It was nice to hear your own name. In truth, it's what hoped would get this girl off the ground as well; 't was ever easier to grab the hand of an acquaintance than a stranger's, the young Gryffindor thought to himself. "What's your name?"

"Pandora?" Laurence scoffed. "As in, the Pandora - from Greek mythology?"

Laurence questioned the apparent need to name one's daughter after the woman who, according to Hesiod, supposedly brought all evils of the world upon man. Yet, for how misogynistic and bigoted the old Greek's myths Works and Days and Theogony were and still are, the young Gryffindor saw some admirability in reclaiming the name. After all, the original Pandora's name was originally given to her by Hermes, and means no less than 'all-gift', a testament to the collective efforts of the gods of old Olympus to make Pandora as appealing to the mortals as possible.

When she spoke up again, Laurence did his best to push those thoughts to the back of his mind, however, trying to listen attentively as she asked him about his upcoming classes.

"I've got charms at a quarter to two. What about yourself?"

With some risk of seeming rude and unattentive, Buchanan looked about the corridors, trying to find a clock anywhere. Much like the girl in front of him, he ultimately failed and felt frustrated with his inability to orient himself chronologically. Traditions and customs described that mages only received pocket watches when they came of age, which nowadays meant around their seventeenth birthday. The young Ulsterman could not help but wonder why many wizards, most of whom he considered sharp-witted and pragmatic, would cling to such an outdated convention. Still, he knew better than to question it; it took mountains to abolish tradition, and he certainly wasn't going to put in so much work for a bloody pocket watch.

Catching himself slipping away in his own thoughts once more, he regained his mental focus when he saw Pandora speak up once more. Then, suddenly, she asked him about what house he would have been in, had the sorting hat not seemingly arbitrarily thrown him into Gryffindor.

Buchanan knew the answer, but he wasn't sure whether he should discuss it with this stranger. As familiar as she seemed to Laurence, the two had just met, and he found her question to be relatively personal and intrusive.

Besides, Gryffindor had been all but his first choice. Still, he'd found camaraderie and fraternité amongst its ranks, and was too proud to speak the truth and say that he'd rather have been put in Ravenclaw or Slytherin like his ancestors. With as much subtlety as he could humanly muster, he hoped to evade the question, slyly changing the subject to the hindmost sentence she'd uttered.

"What makes you say that? It's a great shame for any given person to doubt their own intellect."

Unbeknownst to him, Laurence had quite a stuffy vocabulary, which was relatively strange for a boy his age. It had been so due to the fact that he'd been raised in upper-class circles, by well-spoken tutors and nannies. Furthermore, his natural talent and interest in all things rhetorical, literary and linguistic gave him a knack for picking out delicate words, which, coupled with his posh Ulster accent, spoken by an eleven-year-old's voice so high one would think he were a tenor, made for an audibly funny experience.