Well, this is awkward… (for al or dorcas or both!)
yelling or screaming at the top of their lungs because they ‘just need to let it out’ (a)
She startled at the presence of someone else. Maybe it was the sort of thing she should have expected -- after all, screaming usually alerted others to your presence. Especially when there were no words in the scream, just a pure release of sound, some frustration. Anger. Alecto turned on her heel to face him, arms crossed over chest in protection against -- what? She didn’t know. Judgement, maybe. The need to fall back into the role that had her screaming in the first place. Yes, looking back, sitting on one of the benches that lined the street and just shouting into the night was not the brightest idea Alecto had ever had. So much fo her supposed intellect.
“I’ll have you know, nothing’s wrong.” Her words contained all the tight control she’d shed just moments earlier. Well, of course it did. Nothing would make her want to put it back into place more than being caught without it, in the most embarassing way. Normal, coping people didn’t shout into the night over nothing, she was sure. Probably Moody was here to slap her wrists and tell her to calm down with her pureblood angst, because out there in the area in the night, people had real problems. “I just -- needed to let that out. Won’t happen again, you have my word.” Bitterness tainted the words in her mouth, the air as they met it, and she couldn’t help the flinty stare she fixed his way. “Is that all --?”
accidentally having fallen asleep on the floor somewhere.
To say she was just as surprised as Dorcas was to be meeting like this was, perhaps, an understatement. A slight one, sure, because Dorcas seemed fairly surprised by Alecto’s presence here on the lovely, lovely floor in the back of Flourish and Blotts, but she figured it was a fairly even match.
For one thing, lovely though the floor was, Alecto had no recollection of intention to fall asleep on it. She’d had the day to herself -- truly to herself, not to herself in the way it was when someone sent her out to do something and didn’t keep track of how long it took her to return. No, no one had been around the estate this morning, and she’d been able to leave with no questions. There were no boring meetings on the agenda relatives set up sometimes, to keep her busy as they could lest she go off and start doing something silly like making friends that weren’t pre-approved, or forming ideas. Her first stop had been the bookstore. Nice, neutral ground should she run into anyone she knew, but also the sort of place that had always had a calming affect on her -- something she’d picked up in her years as a Ravenclaw. Alecto rarely slept well, or for long, so perhaps this shouldn’t have felt like such a shock. Still, she righted herself from where her head had laid pillowed on a stack of books, and gave a slight, mocking wave at the blonde. “Oh, hi there. Wasn’t expecting to see anyone come my way.” Calm as anything, she picked a book up off the stack and began flipping through it, eyes never leaving the page -- a clear dismissal if there ever were one. “Was there anything you needed help with?”