I find it hard to do when I'm around you.

@octavia

For the first time in a long time, Cassius was nervous it had been nearly a month since he’d let slip that he’d had feelings for Tav, it had been during their slow dance out on the school grounds when he’d just relaxed and felt at ease. It was weird, being in such close proximity to Octavia had both calmed him and made him nervous at the same time. Every time he looked at her his stomach did flips and her smile seemed to light up his world every time he saw it. He’d asked her on a date there and then… or more accurately spluttered it out and had been more than a little relieved that she’d accepted so quickly but since she’d accepted it, he’d been avoiding her as best as possible; it was hard but he was somehow managing it. Today though, he finally decided to swallow his fear and take her on a date, if he did it immediately, he’d not be able to back out and he was doing that quite a lot.

He had a picnic basket in his hand; he’d visited the mess hall just before lunch and gathered a few different snacks for the duo to enjoy, he had his guitar draped over his shoulder and he was planning on performing the song he’d written for her. Part of this was what made him so nervous to be with her, Tav had seen Cas play his guitar plenty of times, but this was the first time he planned on specifically performing for her and he was terrified that she wouldn’t like the song he’d written for her. But as he kept reminding himself, he’d not know until he actually showed her it, so it was a waste of time coming up with ‘what if’ scenarios that possibly not even happen; especially if Tav had been telling the truth when she admitted that she reciprocated her feelings.

Cassius strolled through Auriga Hall towards the shared study area, he wasn’t sure if Tav would be there but he also knew that it was one of two places she’d be. If she wasn’t here, he’d just go to the Greenhouses to see if she was there. He pushed the door open and scanned the area, smiling when he saw Tav sat in the far corner and he went up to her, his stomach was in knots again but he tried his best to hide it as he pulled the chair across from Tav out and dropped into it, setting his guitar on the floor beside him and placing the picnic basket on the table, deliberately blocking her sight from whatever she was studying. ”Fancy going for an early lunch, curls?” He asked, his voice trembling ever so slightly with nerves. ”It’s really warm outside after all.”

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[attr="class","lyric1raven"]don't forget to breathe

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[attr="class","lyric2raven"]And I keep losing my focus
There's something happening
I can't keep cool

[attr="class","textbodraven"]Part of Octavia felt like it was a little trivial to be getting excited about something like a boy when her life was so... so horrible. Admittedly, things were better than they had ever been in the last year, but they were still undoubtedly horrible. She wasn't even getting a proper education, she hadn't been able to reach her parents in over a year--everything about her life was urgently horrible. Octavia had more or less consumed herself with preparing to become an animagus in the last few months, and now that she was actually going ahead with it--now that she had had that horribly bitter mandrake leaf under her tongue for a week--Octavia thought that she would have grown a bit more reserved. Logic always won over in the Ravenclaw's mind, so the logical move would have been to keep to herself more in the month that was to follow. This transformation... it had been her dream for so long, and it was the only thing keeping her sane as of late. The only thing making her feel like she was really a witch, no matter what the Pyxis professors said and no matter how shitty of a wand the Ministry decided to give her.

But that hadn't happened. Eerily enough, Octavia had found herself growing closer and closer to Cas over the last week--but it had really been happening for a while at this point. And she really couldn't help herself, which was just such a strange feeling. It wasn't that Octavia didn't realize that it was hardly the time or place to fall for a boy... it was that she didn't want to stop falling. And that was a pretty scary thing to admit to herself. Something that Octavia had had a tough time coming to terms with--but that was the nice thing about having to keep a mandrake leaf in her mouth for the next month. It gave her a lot of silence and time to just think about things, so as scary as it was to accept that Octavia was falling hard, she had also had an incredible amount of time to think about it all and realize that scary, sometimes, was not the worst thing in the world. And the scary that came with spending time with Cas was a good scary--which was an oxymoron, yes, but Octavia didn't really care. Technicalities seemed to matter less and less when it came to the Gryffindor.

Forcing silence upon herself also came with a lot more reading time, Octavia had realized. So she had been spending a great deal more time in the library, as meagre as it was. But Octavia still had a great deal of the books she had taken with her from Hogwarts back in her fifth year. All of them, actually, because anyone that stole in Kolna stole things of value--and people on the verge of death did not exactly see the value of Falco Aesalon's autobiography. Octavia had resolved to spend her day reading up on the animagus potion, though, and perhaps forgoing one or two of her classes. Not that they were particularly important, and Pyxis was not exactly the type of school that had prefects. She hadn't expected any company in the library for the whole day, really, which was why someone sitting in the chair across from her had caught her attention so easily. Octavia looked up from her note-taking, her eyes, wide with curiosity, meeting those of... Cas. She smiled and raised an eyebrow as he set the picnic basket in front of her, her gaze focused on him as he spoke. "Sure, I could go--" Octavia started speaking, but with the mandrake leaf in her mout it had come out quite slurred. She winced slightly, then pulled out a plain piece of parchment and quickly scrawled her reply on it and slid it over to Cas with a sheepish smile, "Mandrake leaf makes me sound ridiculous. But yes, lunch sounds fantastic."

@cassius | 664 words | outfit

[attr="class","cred"]MADE BY VEL OF GS + WW

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Cassius loved spending time getting to know Tav, once upon a time he would have deliberately irritated her and stop her from getting any homework done, purely because it was adorable how irritated she got when he distracted her. Kolna and now Pyxis had changed things. There weren’t many Muggleborns his age that he talked to and Tav was the only person that he had lived with and knew in Kolna, that she’d become his comfort and provided him with a companionship he craved after being kept away from other people for so long. Now, he enjoyed watching Tav studying, the way she scrunched her nose and furrowed her brow when she concentrated was cute and he always found himself grinning like an idiot when he watched her, it probably made her self conscious, or maybe it stroked her ego. But Cas didn’t mind, he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her.

He shifted his guitar on his shoulder and set it on the floor beside him as he took a seat at the table across from her, leaning on the basket he glanced at the book she was reading; it was hard for him to read upside down but after a few attempts, he managed to make sense of the upside-down and back-to-front words. Cas knew of Tav wanting to become an animagi, it was one of the things she’d told him all about and then, of course, there was the time they were sat in the greenhouse and she was doing a little experiment with the leaves. Cas had faith in Tav that she could do it, the ever-studious witch would read and reread everything she needed to do to make sure she was certain before acting; it was one of the things he found endearing about her. When she wanted to do something, she put her mind to it and did it.

The wizard laughed when Tav tried to talk, but all he could make out was slurred words that sounded foreign to him. She seemed to realise it too because before he got make a smart ass comment about her sounding drunk, she was scribbling something down on a piece of parchment. He reached for it when she pushed it over to him and scanned the cursive writing, his lips curling up into a smirk as he read it, before pushing it back to her. ”It has been blissfully silent the whole time you’ve had that in your mouth.” He teased, winking at her. ”How much longer do you need to keep it there?” Cas asked, she’d only had it in a week; that much he knew but he wasn’t sure what the length of time for keeping it under your tongue was supposed to be. ”Bring some parchment whilst we go on the grounds if you want, we’ll just keep up our conversations this way.” He chuckled, he wanted Tav to succeed in preparing to be an animagi, so if she had to write and he had to talk, then so be it. At the end of the day, it might be easier for Cas to talk about how he is feeling a little more in depth if he knew that Tav couldn’t give him any witty responses and throw him off with his nerves.

”Shall we go? Or do you want to finish up what you’re doing?” He asked, glancing at the parchment and waiting to see what the Ravenclaw wrote back.