Day 3: 11 am Meeting

(OOC: This is before winter break)

Saturday night passed far too quickly for Ana's tastes, and she once again found herself on the Hogwarts grounds Sunday morning, walking in the front doors and up to the second floor to her office. It sounded so strange to call it 'her office' but in a way that was what it had become at this point. No one else used it, and she was spending more time there than at home these days.

This meeting was one of those ones that concerned her – rather like the Professor Hayes and Melissa Finnigan one had. Except, in their case, both of the participants were rather sensible and apparently things were going rather well with them, if she was to believe the rumors that they were married and doing well. If Ana was lucky (unlikely, but then, maybe all of her hard work with these meetings would pay off eventually, right?) these two in her eleven o'clock meeting would be sensible as well.

Sometimes, Ana wondered if she couldn't talk someone else into running the meetings for her full time, like Gideon sometimes helped her. Maybe then she could be like Elijah and just sit around for a while, pretending to be doing something desperately important so that she didn't have to be going to these meetings. She missed her research, to some extent, and though she was glad with what she had done, she would have preferred to be in her lab or working with the other Unspeakables in her sections.

Eleven o'clokc was nearing, making Ana sigh and accept that until one, she would be in meetings. Then she could have a coffee break and get some reading in – maybe check on how things were going with the new Ministry laws she knew were coming. Shaking her head, she pulled out the files of those she was about to see, flipping through the pages as she waited.

For the few students who bore to them still some semblance of a religion, Sunday was a day in which early rising, while eternally unpleasant, was committed to with a strange veracity that did not belong to the figures of those trapped in the middle stages of youth and adulthood. For Cerelia Avery, the day brought a double-edged promise of happiness: the satisfaction of rousing prematurely her, often, hung over roommates and electing to endure a bumpy carriage ride which would take her into the village of Hogsmeade with a handful of others to hear the service.

What the young woman prayed for often changed. After the death of her father she had opted to pray for her brothers, hoping that they would not become similar visages to that of their father. After one disappeared and the other wound up dead, her prayers stretched to include those who had kept her safe and then began to encompass her staff whose names she could recall and the people over whom she governed – a responsibility that she had come to pray, also, that she would not have to share. It was a concept she wished upon most ardently in the chilly, village church but even she knew there was no sense in it.

11 o’clock was the famed deadline, written out in delicate script on a piece of parchment that had been thoroughly abused by the young woman from the point that she had received it onwards. She saw no sense in perpetrating any disobedience. Unlike many of those who had been incarcerated, she lacked the loved ones prepared to spring her and regardless of her trust in Katarina, she did not believe that the Rookwood woman would have the sense of mind or whit to think of her. She had her own turmoil.

Thus, when Cerelia Avery arrived at the door of the Guidance Office she did so realising that she was an hour, half an hour, forty five minutes, an hour and a half away from acquiescing to having her life signed over. She had coveted no intention of marriage. Her lands and her people were hers to enjoy while she could before she breached an age where she could convincingly adopt a child and pass he or she off as her own. No one would have asked a single question had it not been for the law. Had it not been for the Ministry.

“Good morning, Ms Levski,” Cerelia broached tartly upon entering the room, careful to close the door behind her. “I trust this won’t take long.”

Your whole life, love.