Making it count (Dorrien/open)

[isabel.ava.harper]

Isabel was in an exceptionally good mood. Today, for her, and whoever was in the same classes as she, was pretty much like a half-day. She had a completely lesson-free afternoon, and hadn't even bothered changing out of her uniform after lunch. Her friends had dragged her out to the courtyard for a bit of fun in the crisp autumn air. It hadn't rained today, which was a bonus, since they could play all sorts of games without interruption from unpredictable British weather.

Izzy had brought along a small radio, which was tuned to her favourite station and placed on a stone bench nearby as she joined her friends in silly dance-offs and games of Fanged Frisbee. Being as slim and whisp-like as she was, Isabel was always good at not getting bitten by the things, so her friends often either fought to have her on their team, or sulked and quit because she kept beating them with her wiriness. Today they had all been pretty upbeat, though, so there was no drama. Her friends had dwindled off, though, as the afternoon wore on, but she had made her excuses and stayed behind on her own, music still playing softly from the bench, where she had carelessly chucked her robes, too hot from all the leaping about.

She sang along, softly, dancing on her own in her secluded little section of the courtyard. She didn't really care if was secluded or not, to be honest, she wasn't bothered if people saw her dancing on her own, at least she was having fun. Besides, she could never resist a good beat. She twirled about like some sort of wood nymph, her blonde hair flying about wildly, a grin on her delicate face. She knew she would have to go inside eventually, especially since dinner was only an hour or so away, but right then, she was in her element. Lost in her own little happy world. Her pretty voice bounced off the grey stone walls as she picked up the chorus, pausing to turn the volume up a bit more.

[dorrien.perseus.drakos]

Was Dorrien free that day? No.

Did he think he was free? Yes.

This was mostly because he'd copied his schedule wrong (he'd been distracted by his muggle studies teacher's muggle pen, which he was using for writing down the schedule) and thus he had no idea that he was supposed to be in Herbology that afternoon. That was why he was making his way down to the courtyard - happy and content, though he was curious about where his brother and the rest of his class was. He wrote it off as quidditch and the library, but because he didn't feel up to either at the moment, he decided that he should go out into the grounds.

Normally, Dorrien would not have stopped at the courtyard. There was so much outside that was terribly exciting to explore. The forbidden forest, for example, though he got loads of warnings that it was unsafe. But he didn't need to go inside to find something interesting. No, certainly there was so much to be inquired into even in the section of the grounds that he was actually allowed in - like the giant squid. Dorrien had always wanted to have a look at it, and though he spent a lot of time trying to swim in the lake with this objective, he never got low enough to actually get to the squid.

But he did stop, because he could hear extremely loud music coming from one side of the courtyard, along with the sound of someone singing. The song was not one he recognized, which made him even more curious. He walked over to the section of the courtyard where the sound was coming from, and watched with some amount of awe and a lot of amusement as he saw Isabel Harper dance and sing as if there was no one else in the world. There was something so beautiful about how free she looked, he didn't want to disturb her. He just wanted to watch for a while. And hidden as he was behind a creeper, she might not have noticed...

But as usual, curiosity killed the cat.

And Dorrien noticed the strange little instrument playing the noise, and couldn't resist going over to it (he did take care not to get in Isabel's way though - he could do without a poke in the eye from her flailing arms) and then bent to observe the radio, and then poked it, causing it to fall over and pretty much stop. "Oops!" he exclaimed, turning back to Isabel. "I'm so sorry Isabel. I was just trying to see how that...err what it is it called? And figure out how it works. I'll fix it for you though, I promise." He picked it up, wondered if he should go over it with a screwdriver - though his dad had told him to avoid those after he scratched all the equipment in their house, including Lysa, his favorite toaster.

He looked up at Isabel. "It doesn't work on magic, does it?" Many muggle objects went haywire in Hogwarts, but that didn't mean this one had to. He cocked his head in a bird-like fashion and looked it over again.

[isabel.ava.harper]

There was a small crash, and the music stopped abruptly, causing Isabel to halt in her dancing, spinning to give the radio an accusatory look. The radio wasn't alone. Dorrien Drakos was stood next to it with a guilty look on his handsome face as he picked the tiny contraption up and began to apologize, stating that he would be able to fix it for her. She merely stared, wide-eyed, her arms still hanging in the air, mid move, before snapping out of her surprise. She pranced forward, putting a hand on his shoulder to stop him before he did any more damage.

"Oh, no, really, it's ok, Dor," she soothed, trying to put herself in the way of his tinkering. She bit her lip, as if the confession she was about to make was ridiculously evil and would get her sent to Azkaban or something. "It's, uhh, it's not mine. I borrowed it from one of my friends in my dorm. I'm sure it's fine, though. I'll just put it back under her bed and she can fix it herself, or something. She'll know best." She nodded her head so hard her neck began to ache.

And had she really just openly told someone of undeniably sly plans she had toward a friend? Oh, sweet Merlin, all the dancing must have gone to her head! Well, it was too late now, and even though she was sure Muriel would be furious if the radio was truly broken, she felt the need to protect herself and Dorrien very strongly. She also told herself that next time she decided to borrow any of her Muggle-born friends gadgets, she would make sure to read up on how to fix them if anything went wrong. But then, she didn't even know what Dorrien had done to make it go off. Her green eyes looked up, saucer-like, into his as she gently tried to take the radio out of his hands.

"Did you, erm.... Did you move it? Or drop it?" She was losing her train of thought slightly, being so close to him, his face not too far away from hers at all. He was very good-looking, Dorrien, and though they were friends, Isabel had always had a bit of a girly thing for him. She didn't like the idea of him finding out about it, but a small smile crept onto her pale pink lips as she gazed upon his perfectly symmetrical face, with wonderfully messy hair on top, and the most lovely, warm eyes. A small sigh escaped her lips, and she clamped her mouth shut with an awkward giggle.

[dorrien.perseus.drakos]

She kept trying to resist him and take the radio away from him, which was not really that easy because Dorrien absent-mindedly kept pulling it back towards himself. Of course, if he'd realized that Isabel wanted it back he'd probably be bending over backwards to give it back to her, but he was so fascinated by it that he hadn't really noticed. And he was only half-listening to her as well, so fascinated was he by the inner workings of the tiny musical thing that he hadn't had time to realize what she was saying, though he was listening to various bits and pieces.

And then she asked him about what had actually happened, and he snapped back into attention, and blushed a bit. "Okay, so I just wandered by and happened to hear...err...singing. And then I came here, and I saw the...radio? And I wanted to see how it works so I tried to touch it, and it...err...it fell." That was when a few more spots of red appeared on his cheeks, which made him sort of ignore Isabel's somewhat ditzy response to him (as far as he was concerned, she was always like that - and so was he, so what difference did it make?). But he did notice the guilt on her face, and then he started piecing together the pieces in his memory.

"Wait a second, did you just say you BORROWED it?" he said, looking at Isabel like the sky had fallen in - because, well, just because! She was Isabel! She didn't do things like that. Also because well, then they were in a real fix. "Now I have to fix it, or she'll know you took it and you'll be in trouble. I better not use my screwdriver though..." He paused for a moment thought, and then pulled out his wand - probably the worst thing in the world, because all his friends knew that while Dorrien was sometimes quite brilliant with a wand, there were times when he really failed at using one. Massively.

[isabel.ava.harper]

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!!" Isabel flung herself with all her might in front of Dorrien's wand. Probably a very stupid thing to do, but the thought of him accidentally destroying the radio propelled her forward, regardless. "No, really. It's not that bad. It'll be fine. I'll put it back. She'll never know." She gazed at him, almost hypnotically, as she tried to convince him of her words, like a demented snake trying to stun it's victim. It probably wouldn't work, since Isabel was no predator, and just looked slightly insane, above all else, but she had to try.

Her slender body squeezed itself inside his arms as she ducked under the radio he still had a solid grip on, placing herself firmly between Dorrien and the music player so his wand was pointed directly at her head. She smiled up at him sweetly, eyes still a little deranged as she wondered what he would do. If he stepped around her and carried on with his reckless plan, she had already resigned herself to the fact that she may have to resort to more physical means of stopping him.

She wasn't above kicking him in the shins, or worse, thwacking him over the back of the head, stealing the radio and fleeing for her life. Though maybe she was getting a tad ahead of herself on that one. She tried not to breathe in too deeply, his scent was, well, for a nerd, he smelled wonderful, and though she should have felt outrageously awkward wedged up against him like she was, Isabel only felt at ease. The only reason her fists were clenched was because she was ready for anything. How had this gotten so tense? One minute she was dancing, not a care in the world, the next, she was physically restraining Dorrien Drakos - the Dorrien Drakos - from getting her into a ton of trouble with her dorm mate. "What is a screwdriver?" The question left her lips as an afterthought, brows furrowing as she gave him a confused look.

[dorrien.perseus.drakos]

Dorrien had been about to do the spell, when Isabel came and plonked herself right in the middle of him and the radio.

"Isa, you should give me some warning before springing around, I was about to reparo you," he told her with a grin, and then playfully tried to push her away, except that she was extremely adamant about staying where she was, so Dorrien didn't push it. Except that she was standing, well, wedged in an extremely tiny space between him and the radio, which could not be a very comfortable position for anyone to stand. Also she looked kind of wonky, with that expression in her eyes - though Dorrien immediately berated himself for thinking that poor Isabel looked crazy in any way.

"You don't look crazy at all!" he told her in a comforting voice, and then stopped. Oh god. He had just spoken his mental thoughts and now she would think he was making fun of her. There was an awkward silence where he thought about how to make this better, but he had no idea what to say. Where was Damon when one really, really needed him? He could feel himself turning an extremely vibrant shade of red.

And that was when a way out struck him, though it was a slightly awkward one. "A screwdriver?" he said, trying to sound as normal as he could without looking terribly guilty. "Oh, a screw driver is a muggle device used with screws." He turned back, rummaged around in his bag, and got out a shiny screwdriver with a yellow handle. "I'm not sure I know how to use it yet, though," he told Isabel. "Because I scratched Lysa with it already...you know my toaster, right? So I don't want to try it out on someone else's radio."

[isabel.ava.harper]

Wait a second.... Had he just told her she didn't look crazy? Blinking at him, Isabel wondered whether she had mentioned anything about being crazy in the past few minutes. She could have sworn she hadn't, but then, why would he just randomly blurt something like that out if she hadn't already put the idea in his head first. He had said it in a comforting way, after all. Unless.... Oh, sweet Merlin! Did Dorrien think she looked crazy!? A look of dismay crossed her face, and she found herself lost in thought as he explained what a screwdriver was. She was hardly taking any of it in, until he pulled out a long metal stick-like thing from his bag.

She studied it for a moment, wondering what you were meant to do with such a thing, and thinking poking at the radio with it wouldn't really do anything other than scratch it to death, like Dorrien had once done to his toaster, Lysa. Yes, she knew about his pet toaster, and yes she thought it was a tad insane, but she would never say anything about it. So he was quirky. That wasn't necessarily a bad quality to have. But he obviously thought crazy was. How could he say she was crazy? Or had he? She couldn't remember his exact words, but it was something along those lines! Something that made her feel like she'd been stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver. How could he say such a thing?

Instead of allowing tears to well up in her eyes, Isabel merely informed Dorrien, "Well, I don't need Reparo-ing, and I don't think that thing will help the radio, so I'll just take it back," and went to work prying the small device from the Ravenclaw boys vice-like grip. Finally prizing it out of his fingers, she tucked it neatly behind her back out of his sight, and took a few steps backward, putting a nice gap between herself and Dorrien. She shouldn't have felt so wounded by his words, but she couldn't seem to make the feeling go away. Maybe it was because she had a minor crush on him. Maybe it just hurt to think she thought him lovely, and he thought her crazy. She was blatantly being over-sensitive, which is why she didn't say anything on the matter. She merely stood there, looking at him, the previous twinkle faded considerably from her eyes.

[dorrien.perseus.drakos]

Dorrien couldn't tell if she was offended or not.

Really now, you could never tell with girls. Just last week he'd very politely asked a ravenclaw girl what she thought of certain muggle books. It had all looked like they were having an awesome conversation for over an hour, but then in the end she'd broken down and started crying on his shoulder and telling him all about her family and her problems and then he'd told her that he hadn't wanted to bring all that up, he'd just been trying to talk about books - and then she had promptly huffed away after telling him that he was the most insensitive guy on earth. He seriously did not understand it.

He didn't think Isabel was that kind of crazy though. She was - a good kind of crazy. His kind of crazy. But that still didn't mean he'd wanted to talk to her at all about her being crazy or anything of that sort. While he was lost in this thought, she'd taken away the radio and gone a little far away. She didn't look upset - she was not, at least, crying (Dorrien did not do well with crying girls) but she didn't look happy with him either. And she had before, even though he'd broken that radio belonging to her friend. Which meant it had to be the whole crazy thing. Oh dear god, why couldn't he keep his mouth shut?

"Isa, wait!" he told her, because she looked like she was going to go away and he couldn't let her get away while she was still mad at him, could he? "Isabel!" he repeated. "Don't be mad, I'm sure I can fix it." What could he fix? He wasn't entirely sure. Though he was sure that if he could have some time with the radio..."And I didn't mean to say that crazy bit either. I don't know what I was saying." He sounded more than a little crazy himself at the moment, considering his rambling, but he was upset that she was upset. He took a few more steps forward, and very awkwardly tried to take her hand in his, before giving her the best puppy dog expression he could muster up. "Pllleeeeasseee Isa?"

[isabel.ava.harper]

She was considering making a quick exit, along the lines of "well, it was nice seeing you, Dor, but I gotta go", and fleeing from the courtyard at top speed. He couldn't let that happen though, could he. Dorrien being, well, Dorrien, had a rare moment of clarity where he recognized that he might have said something wrong, and began to apologize. He was adorable when he apologized. Isabel had witnessed it before. Not with her, but from a distance, where she could safely grin to herself without being caught. He stepped closer to her, shortening her well formed gap quickly, and even making an awkward attempt to take her hand in his.

Her heart began to bleed with the agony of not giving in to him, and she loosened the one hand a bit, so that it was less of a challenge for him to tug it into his own as he turned the puppy dog eyes on her. She wanted to cry. This was hardly fair. Chewing frantically on her bottom lip, she held his gaze for a moment, trying desperately to find some sort of resolve, and failing miserably. With a sigh, she gave in, shoulders sagging under the weight of his stare. "I'm not mad at you, Dor," she told him, now attempting to brush it off, as though she hadn't thought twice about him calling her crazy. "Honestly."

Now to try and cover it all up with a distraction. "I just don't want you getting in trouble with Muriel. She can be really moody when she wants to be. I'd rather just cover both of us by not letting her know. Is that sly?" The question flew out of her mouth immediately as she realized it sounded like quite a Slytherin thing to do. Isabel wasn't usually like that, but if it was to protect her friends.... She did have little snippets of cunning in her to tap into when needed. The thought of Dorrien realizing this side of her horrified her, though, and her face twisted with uncertainty as she wondered what he would say. She didn't want to tar her reputation in his beautiful eyes. All for a stupid radio.

With an angry huff, and a frustrated growl, she flung the arm that held the radio in the air, giving it an agitated shake. "This thing is not worth the troub-" Isabel finished her sentence with a shocked screech as the radio blurted to life with her shaking, blasting down her ear and causing her to lose her grip on it. It tumbled down, seemingly in slow motion, and she scrambled for it, hands desperately fumbling to save it as it cascaded into a whole new world of trouble....

[dorrien.perseus.drakos]

The pressure of her hand slackened, and before he knew what he was doing he'd already pulled her a few steps closer. He was glad that she'd said she wasn't mad at him - but then she confused him further with the whole Muriel thing about the radio. Oh, so was that what she'd been mad at, if at all? He'd imagined it was about saying she wasn't crazy, but clearly she had (thankfully) not noticed that or didn't care that he'd said it. But of course, Isabel being Isabel had confronted him with another moral dilemma - how was he supposed to tell her that she was not, indeed, right?

Or perhaps she was. Who was he to judge? She'd be the one getting into trouble over the whole thing. But she looked really upset all over again, so he opened his mouth to talk to her, when she suddenly turned angrier than he had ever seen her, and shook the radio so hard that it started working again - and then promptly threw it down, straight at his foot! "Oww!" he said, as the radio promptly came in contact with his foot, and then bounced down on the floor, still blaring loudly. He let go of her immediately and hopped around a bit, the radio had hurt more than he'd have supposed from such a tiny little thing.

After a moment, then pain subsided and he looked back at the radio in awe. It lay on the floor, still giving out music, though it wasn't the sweet song that Isabel had been listening too. In fact, the song currently it was currently shouting out was bad enough to make Dorrien turn a mild shade of red. It wasn't like he'd never heard bad words before, having lived his whole life with his brother, but he certainly didn't want Isabel to hear them - except that he was now very afraid of touching the radio at all. So, instead, he briefly looked at her, turned redder as the words got worse, and turned away, contemplating hitting the damn thing with his foot.