i got a lot that's on my mind

[primuslune]

It's bitterly cold out lately -- enough that Remus is happy to have a good, thick scarf and coat, and a warming charm up his sleeve. Though the weather isn't very hospitable, it hasn't sent Darrow creaking to a halt. The city still runs almost as usual, though it does mean taking some risks that Remus would rather not.

Hermione does most of her potion-making in the Lamplight, because the majority of the supplies needed for doing so are kept locked up there, rather than in their home. They aren't always easy to come by. Remus has a heavy canvas bag full of some that he'd scrounged up and found elsewhere to drop off before going home at last and out of the weather. Normally, he'd make a delivery like this at night to avoid suspicion, but it's nothing doing with the cold getting even worse after the sun sinks.

As he slips past the spells that keep the Lamplight hidden from Muggle eyes, he sets the bag down as he moves to unlock the door with his wand. It overbalances, sending itself toppling down the short set of stairs at the door, to dump the contents down them. A minor setback, except Remus realizes that some of the ingredients have fallen outside the protective spells, in plain sight on the street.

Scrambling after them, he moves as fast as stiff, cold fingers will let him to gather them all up Wolfsbane, and deer antlers, and all manner of little toadstools.

Comments

[spirit_of_vitriol]

Flavia was starting to wonder if she'd picked the right route back home. It was much less crowded, this close to the countryside, more like Bishop's Lacey or the road back to Buckshaw, just with far more buildings.

Not like Bishop's Lacey at all, really. Maybe she was lost. Maybe she ought to turn back, get closer into town. Maybe--

A flash of purple caught her eye, and she stooped to pick up the small, flowered stalk that had landed at her feet--just as another hand reached out to do the same. "Careful, that's poison!" she warned.

[primuslune]

"Oh--" Remus startled, pausing stiffly where he crouched to reach for another flower-heavy stalk. Less alone than he'd thought he was, then, and he cursed himself a little for the oversight. It was a girl, quite young, with a familiar accent.

We;;, whomever she is, he doesn't have time to feel nostalgic. She's a little too clever for her own good by half, at the very least. Remus reaches out finally to pluck up the flowers, giving her a look of cool rationality He definitely knows what he's doing.

"I'm sure I'll be fine. Aren't you worried about yourself?" He nods toward her hands.

[spirit_of_vitriol]

She pauses just short of picking up a sprig herself, looking up in time to see the cool, assessing look cross his face. A look like he'd caught her out--which he has, her thoughts interject, you really ought to be wearing gloves, he's right.

Smoothly, she reaches into her jacket pocket, smoothly taking out her handkerchief, almost like she'd planned it. "I'm quite alright," she says, picking up the monkshood and holding it up. "It would have been better to wear gloves, but sometimes one has to improvise."

[primuslune]

Offering the young girl a vague smile, mischievous and still slightly wary - he's yet to be certain how precisely to extricate himself from this, but he's got half his mind on figuring out excuses - he holds out the bag he'd had all of the potion ingredients in, for her to place the dropped bits into it, including the sprig of dried flowers.

"Being able to improvise is a very useful skill," he agrees. "And certainly, it's a skill, and we get more out of it by practicing it. Flexibility, I mean It's Remus. Remus Lupin. I was just dropping these off for a lady friend of mine. I mean, a female friend. Not a ladyfriend."

[spirit_of_vitriol]

If there had been one thing Flavia learned from both her heretofore short-lived experience as a detective as well as her numerous studies of famous poisoners throughout history, it was this: given enough of a chance, the truly guilty will stumble their way into an inextricable blunder. Mr. Pemberton had done so, hiding the Ulster Avenger in the last place he'd have ever thought to look; Hawley Crippen, in his panic, booked saloon tickets to Canada when third-class would have served him even better.

It's in this spirit that she listens to the man--Mr. Lupin--hem and haw his way through an explanation. With an answeringly vague smile, she drops the monkshood into the bag. "You were giving poisonous flowers to your friend?"

[primuslune]

"Ah, well," Remus says, caught out -- but not quite.. He's dealt with more than one precocious young lady in his life And some precocious young men, for that matter. He's also dealt with a fair number of generally too nosy adults, who had needed to mind their own business.

"You could say that my friend is a compounder. Of a sort. She's very skilled, and she works with these sort of materials every day. It's not as if I was going to give her a bouquet of these as a gift, either out of ignorance or deciet. She needs them, to help me."

[spirit_of_vitriol]

Flavia nods, trying to recall the medicinal properties of aconite--as much for the mental exercise as to discern whether Mr. Lupin indeed fit any of the potential diagnoses. He didn't look in need of anesthetic; not wheezing enough for asthma; possibly quinsy, if only she could remember what, precisely, quinsy was.

"That's the interesting thing about poisons, isn't it?" she muses. "Too much, and one's dead as a doornail, but just enough and you're right as rain."

[primuslune]

"Everything," Remus says, "at the right time, in the proper amount, can be helpful. And anything, at the wrong time, in the wrong amount, can be hurtful. Plants just follow in suit, like the rest of the universe. The important thing is just finding equilibrium. You seem to know a lot about poisons, for a girl your age."

Standing with some effort in the cold, he surveys her again. There's no telling what her intentions are, or whether she's from Darrow, or from without. True, that she seems like just a young girl. A young English one, at that. But Remus has every reason to be wary.

In appropriate amounts.

"That a hobby of yours? It's good for a girl to have interests. Sorry to balk I've just never managed to have much of an interest myself, outside of my practical concerns. Why the interest? Studying to be a chemist?"

[spirit_of_vitriol]

"I prefer to call it a passion," she counters, sweetly. "It's more accurate. And poetic--a passion for poison."

Flavia still feels an immense amount of pride, saying the words; they recall for her the moment of discovery, Harriet's old chemistry book falling from the library shelf, opening to reveal illustrations of disembodied hands working a strange alchemy of fire and liquid and laboratory glassware.

"I'm interested in a career in the sciences, yes," she affirms.

[primuslune]

"A passion for poison," Remus repeats, reminded, somehow, of Severus. Despite the contentions over his having left Hogwarts as a professor, and the long history of other contentions, the thought of Severus is still a somewhat warm one. He thinks he likes her, at least a little, this girl. Although he only knows the very first thing about her.

She likes poisons.

"It's a curious thing to hear from a girl your age, if you don't mind my saying," he says, clearly not minding whether she 'minds' or not. "Most have other interests. Well, other passions. I can't say that my own run in the same direction. I've never been a great maker of concoctions of any sort Not just because my interests lie elsewhere. Those things take an attention to detail which a sort of personality like my own genuinely lacks."

[spirit_of_vitriol]

"It takes all sorts to make a world," Flavia says, unthinkingly echoing one of Mrs. Mullet's favorite aphorisms. It's trite though no less true, especially in a place such as Darrow, where one could quite conceivably encounter spacemen, ghosts, and titled aristocracy all within the space of an hour or a city block.

"What sorts of interests do girls my age have where you're from, then?" she asks, genuinely curious.