It had been a long week. Jintae was standing by the window in the staff room that loomed over the courtyard below. A few professors came and went over the course of the afternoon, but many were busy with their own problems and rest themselves before their next class that many either didn’t notice or deliberately paid little attention to the animal-loving professor. It wasn’t often that he spent time in the castle, particularly the staff room, but the kitchen staff had prepared a special treat today: honey cakes.
It didn’t matter what your relationship was with the other professors or the students in the castle. One did not simply miss honey cake day.
The sweet pastry did wonders for the professor’s moral. He had lost his class roster to a foal thestral shortly after returning to Hogwarts from some important business in the Ministry that was being discussed. Not much progress had been made during the meeting, and there hadn’t been much brought up. But not being a member of the council himself, and being a known and registered werewolf had put him in a tight spot in terms of negotiations.
The man hummed to himself as he chewed on the pastry. The door on the opposite end of the room opened and closed with a deliberate softness that did not register with the werewolf as being a familiar form of action from the faculty. He lowered the cake from his face and turned his head just enough to look through his peripheral vision. The werewolf drew in a slow breath and frowned. He drew in another breath through his nose this time deliberately sniffing.
The smell of rats was something that all manner of professors and students had to get use to when living in such an old castle. They were managed well; his Main Coon cat Dwaeji being proof of that for his size and healthy build. But it was rare to smell such a potent cluster of them in such a small space. The professor pushed the remainder of the honey cake into his mouth, uncaring if it actually fit in his mouth properly at all and quickly but carefully moved from the far window to the center of the staffroom.
A medium-size box sat in the center of the foyer space and a small pack of rats crawled out, sniffing searching, scavaging, running, and trying to find a way to reach the honey cake that was sticking out of his mouth. The professor was not at all phased at the sight of the rodents. He grabbed the few that he could by the scruffs of their necks and tried to return them to the box. A few squealed angrily and a few even tried to bite him.
“I know,” he muffled with the deep set frown that formed around the cake in his mouth. “Let’s take you back.”
He held the box awkwardly with one hand, and one of the larger rats with his free hand. He shuffled carefully to the door and wiggled his foot between the partially opened space until finally he could stick his whole foot through. He pushed and then braced his knee into the slightly wider space, and then with a third attempt he was able to kick the door just wide enough to squirm through. A few of the rats were unhappy with the jostling and rough treatment. Two of them used their sharp claws to climb up his arm and into the hood of his robe, while another scurried back and forth between his shoulders. He might of laughed at the tickling sensation were it not for the fact that this box of rats had been abandoned and were clearly in a state of distress was no laughing matter.
The professor swung his head from left to right trying to find any sign of the person who may have dropped them off. A couple of first years snickered at the sight of the professor, his hair unruly and pushed back with a tight band, making him look like an erupting volcano, and with rats freely crawling on him trying to reach for the cake in his mouth. His nose guided him to the left and he eventually spotted a girl holding a rat in her hand.
“Wait!” He barked through the cake… that dropped out of his mouth.
”What?” The student asked with feigned innocence.
The rats scurried off of the professor and out of the box and immediately began fighting over the pastry he had lost. He stared at the fray with a sudden sense of hollow loss and regret. He closed his eyes, drew in a slow breath and exhaled. He relaxed his mind and reminded himself that there were more honey cakes in the staff room. He exhaled, eyes snapped open, and he extended the box that now only had one small very confused rat inside.
“I believe you forgot your pets.”
Deedee watched what she would have deemed as ‘a very amusing scene’ transpired in front of her. She bit down on her bottom lip, trying her very best not to burst out laughing as she gently let go of the wiggly rat and let it scamper down her pant leg.
“Oh, you mean those?” she asked, scratching her head and then crossing her arms in front of her chest in a show of ‘I have no rats, see?’. “Those aren’t mine. They’re yours, aren’t they? I mean, you are the care of magical creatures professor, right?”
Deedee cocked her head to the side and blinked her eyes at him. She got out a lot of sticky situations by acting like a complete idiot. Not that most of her professors believed the act, but she was usually cute (and tiring) enough that they let her off the hook.
She had never really interacted with this professor much, but he seemed... okay. A little weird, maybe, but no weirder than half the other people who lived here. Most people avoided him. He was a known werewolf, after all. But since Deedee literally lived with werewolves all around her every day, it wasn’t exactly something she was that scared of. She wasn’t sure why people were so worried. It wasn’t like he was running around the school on a full moon tearing people limb from limb.
Although, if this didn’t go according to plan and Professor Kim was more of a hardass than she was used to, she might prefer to get torn limb from limb. Boy did she hate detention.
