don't believe in lies

Things that go bump in the night

Tall tales or UFO's
But I believe in ghosts

Kate didn’t actually venture all the way to Hogsmeade all that often, but she had made a point to tell Ap that she would come up here, and so she had. She had made a point to come up here after work today, instead of going straight back to Tara. Or instead of going to see Hiram. She had come here. And she thought that it was worth it. There was a touch of nostalgia being back in Hogsmeade each time. And for the most part she was glad that she only came up here rarely. It didn’t seem to lose its magic this way.

That turn of phrase was probably not one that she should go about using out loud. But that was how she felt. If she came up here too much, something about this place would lose its magic. And there was something special about Hogsmeade. Growing up in the Scottish Highlands, they had had to travel down to England only to come all the way back up here for school. It had seemed pointless, at the time. But now she thought that she understood it better. There was something classic, and enthralling, about seeing a place like this for the first time that way.

The castle loomed off in the distance, but it was blowing and snowy enough that it was just a shadow. She had no idea what it was that possessed her to think that the middle of a blizzard was a good time to be up here, but she hadn’t exactly known that it was snowing like this when she had had Kenna drop her off. Kate despised the floo, and she used it as little as possible. Even now. She preferred to have Kenna drop her off places, and she knew that the elf probably found it incredibly inconvenient. But she hadn’t made her opinions known on the matter, so until she did, Kate was going to keep asking.

Shaking off the cold she headed for the bar and looked around for her friend. If she wasn’t down here, Kate was going to have to brave going upstairs, and you never really knew what you were going to find in the Dumbledore flat. She didn’t think that there was anything that was going to kill her up there, at least not on purpose, but it was what could have happened on accident that worried her. There was a lot going on up there, given everything that they did, and worked on. What it was, she wasn’t entirely sure a lot of the time. But she also didn’t ask all that many questions.

No ghosts had shown up to warn her not to go up there, so she thought that she was safe. Still, she slipped into a stool at the bar and waited for her. She didn’t have any idea if she was working, or if she would just hang around until she got home from wherever she was, but it was miserable at best outside, and the place wasn’t all that busy. The boys knew her too, she was their sister’s friend. It wasn’t like they were going to kick her out for loitering. Even if she didn’t order a drink… She should. That was only polite. But Kate wasn’t drinking anymore, and ordering water in one of those glasses just seemed like asking for some funny sickness. No matter how clean they swore that they were.

Apolline Margery A. Dumbledore • 573 • catherine's outfit

MADE BY VEL OF GS + ADOX 2.0

[nospaces]

[attr="class","cbg"]

[attr="class","cbgtop"]

[attr="class","cimg"]

[attr="class","clbox"]

[attr="class","ctopline"]Am I the only one that

[attr="class","cscriptspeci"]hears your voice on the wind

[attr="class","cline"]

[attr="class","clyrics"]Every now and then, now and then[break]
I believe in ghosts

[break][break]

[attr="class","cbody"]Being without magic was boring.
[break][break]
It was more than boring. There was not a proper word to explain the hundred different things that Apolline felt about not having magic. Time just kept on passing with no cure in sight. Both of her brothers were in their rooms as much as they always had been—working on their hallows, experimenting, and she was left… doing what? Nothing.
[break][break]
There was only so much research that she could do without going out of her mind that she couldn’t act on any of it. Most of the time, her research ended either one of two ways: her punching a hole in the wall (and more often hurting her hand more than the wall) or her throwing her notes in the fireplace, because what was the point?
[break][break]
Since she knew that it wasn’t actually a good thing to throw decent notes into the fireplace and burn them to ash, Apolline didn’t make a habit of researching more than a couple of hours a day. Punching too many holes in walls was likely to catch her brothers’ attention eventually, if it hadn’t already. Since most of them had been fixed up the next time that she’d seen them, Apolline knew that someone was mending broken walls. Which brother it was, was not something that she had the answer to. There was no way of knowing that without asking, and that meant admitting to punching the wall in the first place. Of course, they knew that it was her. Her bruised knuckles were proof of that. She was the only one that couldn’t fix her own injuries with a flick of her wand anymore.
[break][break]
Since she didn’t do all that well with being bored, unfortunately, the best solution to this was her being behind the bar far more often than she liked. There were other ways to keep her mind occupied—certain bedfellows that she could call up if she was particularly bored, but that didn’t fill up too much of her time. Better to keep them wanting more, anyway. The last thing that she wanted was to be around too often.
[break][break]
Today, she’d gotten the day shift at the bar. Well, she supposed that wasn’t quite true. She had wanted the day shift, so she had done some necessary switching to make sure that she got what she wanted. If it wasn’t a Hogsmeade weekend and the village wasn’t flooded with students, it was the easiest shift. They weren’t exactly slammed during the daylight hours, after all, and that was much preferable than dealing with the drunks at night. Apolline was certainly not in the mood for them today.
[break][break]
It had been quiet enough for her to slip into the office and make a few more changes to the schedule. Axton would likely notice that she had switched their shifts for the weekend—and would just as likely switch them back the next time he was down here, but it was worth a shot. Saturday nights were particularly annoying. It was much better to make him deal with that. When she came back out of the office, a familiar face was seated at the bar and a relatively genuine smile formed on her lips. And, considering her poor mood, that was the best she could do. “I’m sorry miss, whichever Dumbledore brother you’ve come to ogle isn’t working today. You're stuck with me,” she teased, before grabbing two glasses, figuring she might as well make them both a drink before her shift ended.
[break][break]

[attr="class","cnotes"]587 ● @ kate ● outfit

[attr="class","cred"]MADE BY VEL OF WW + ADOX 2.0

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DON'T BELIEVE IN LIES

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

TALL TALES OR UFO'S
BUT I BELIEVE IN GHOSTS

Coming to be friends with Apolline Dumbledore had been a happy accident and Kate could honestly say that. Some of the friends that she had had been around for a long time, and she thought that they knew too much about her. Some of them, like Draco, she didn't mind. He was never one to judge her for her choices, and she returned the favor. Yet, she had always felt like there were some of her 'friends' that she just wasn't quite Yaxley enough for. And there were others that made her want to take some sort of headache potion before she had even seen them.

Apolline didn’t quite fall into any of those categories. They were alike in some ways. Both interested in the dead far more than was truly what one would call healthy. And yet, here they were. She didn't know if it was something that just happened to them, or if there was some sort of divine plan out there in the universe that they were supposed to have been friends, but Kate often didn't question the universe. Most of the time it seemed to know what it was doing.

Most of the time. Not all of the time, because it had meant that it had taken magic away from all of them, or a good majority of them. And whatever sort of divine plan that was, Kate could have done without it. She didn't need her magic to do her job, any of her jobs really. But that didn't make the loss of it any less real. She had relied on her magic for a lot of things, and she didn't want to think about a future where they were never going to get it back. Magic dying out was not a short term problem, because unless they figured out how to get it back...

Thinking of such things was not her job. She wasn't exactly equipped to do anything about it, but that didn't stop her from worrying. It hadn't stopped her from worrying since everyone had gotten sick and Sloane had opted to put herself in a coma, and Kate knew that she had her reasons and she couldn't be angry with her for it, but even though she had woken up just fine, she had worried. And that worry and concern for her family, and her friends, persisted.

She knew that Apolline was without her magic as well, and she was simply glad to see that she was down here working, even on a slow day, and not upstairs saltily staring at work that she couldn't do right now. She was one of a great many that had lost something, career wise, when it came to all of this, and that was enough to make just about anyone worry.

Laughing lightly, Kate shook her head at Apolline's words, "Well damn, here I was thinking that I might just try using my wiles against them to get free things." She had done that in other places in the past, but something told her that it wouldn't have necessarily worked on the Dumbledore brothers. "I guess you'll have to suffice, and I'll have to pay for my... Water?" The last part came out as a question, but she honestly had no idea what else they had in here that wasn't alcohol of some kind.

@ ap • 560 • catherine's outfit

MADE BY VEL OF GS + ADOX 2.0

[nospaces]

[attr="class","cbg"]

[attr="class","cbgtop"]

[attr="class","cimg"]

[attr="class","clbox"]

[attr="class","ctopline"]AM I THE ONLY ONE THAT

[attr="class","cscriptspeci"]hears your voice on the wind

[attr="class","cline"]

[attr="class","clyrics"]EVERY NOW AND THEN, NOW AND THEN[break]
I BELIEVE IN GHOSTS

[break][break]

[attr="class","cbody"]Working at a bar was obviously not her grandest ambition. It wasn’t any of their dreams, actually, though her brothers seemed to tolerate it a bit better than she did. No, running the Hog’s Head was just the family business. It had been their grandfather’s bar. If their parents hadn’t died, it certainly would have been passed down to them. Instead, when their grandfather had retired, they had taken over. They kept the place open, they wasted their nights bartending, because that was what their grandfather wanted. He wanted the place to stay open. And, in all honesty, it was definitely more than a little bit necessary. As accomplished as they all were, none of their work really went to something that would give them much of an income.
[break][break]
Most of their experiments didn’t yield a profit. That wasn’t what they were trying to do. Their experiments to recreate the Hallows were more for them than anyone else. When they were successful, then time would only tell what would come of that. Certainly power. But money? Right now, that was just not a part of the work that they were doing. That meant that they needed to keep the bar running. They needed that money to survive.
[break][break]
Right now, that was fine. As much as she didn’t like bartending, she could tolerate it. Especially these days. Annoyingly enough, she didn’t have all that much else to do with her time. Without her magic, her experiments were at a standstill. She could research, but there was only so much of that she could even tolerate. It was too frustrating to read and research without being able to use her ideas. It was enough to drive her crazy some of the time. That was why she even came down to the bar these days. Bartending was annoying, but it was something that she could do. It kept her mind occupied enough that she stopped thinking about everything else for a while.
[break][break]
It was when her mind wasn’t occupied that she had problems. That was when she couldn’t stop thinking about it. About what she couldn’t do. The fact that her brothers could—that they were able to continue their own work, that they had a chance of beating her to successfully recreating their hallow. She didn’t want them to beat her to it. But there was no way of knowing how long she would be without magic. There was no way to know when a cure would be made. Would it? Was anyone capable of the magic or the science involved in making a cure? Or was she going to be without magic forever?
[break][break]
Apolline didn’t even know what she would do, who she would be, if she had to do something else with her life. There were aspects of necromancy that she could still partake in, but it wasn’t the same. There was so much that she couldn’t do now, so much that she would never be able to do if a cure wasn’t found. It was something that she really didn’t even want to think about.
[break][break]
Instead, she was going to focus on her friend. That was the only thing that she could to. It was much better than getting caught in her own thoughts. That wasn’t going to do her any good when she still had so much of her shift to go. Though she was naturally unfriendly, getting in that bad of a mood while at work… it wasn’t a great idea. “You could have tried, anyway… they’d like to think they wouldn’t fall for it.” They were much better at getting the big tips than giving things away, though she supposed they also knew when to give out free drinks if that worked in their advantage. “Water’s free, Kate. You’d better tip me well for pouring it for you,” she joked, before passing her a glass of water. Once she had, she poured herself two fingers of whiskey. It wasn’t too early for a small drink. “How have you been, then?” Apolline asked, before savoring a small sip of the vintage.
[break][break]

[attr="class","cnotes"]684 ● @ kate ● outfit

[attr="class","cred"]MADE BY VEL OF WW + ADOX 2.0

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DON'T BELIEVE IN LIES

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

TALL TALES OR UFO'S
BUT I BELIEVE IN GHOSTS

There were a lot of things in Kate’s life that she didn’t really try to explain. It simply seemed easier, at times. She spent a good majority of her time talking to ghosts, and that was something that made you sound a little crazy. She knew that. But she also knew that you didn’t just speak with the spirits. You had to try and understand them. There was s time when it was more difficult. When she was first learning to talk to them, there was a complexity to it. There was something that she didn’t quite know how to tap into. At least to talk to those spirits that didn’t manifest in this world completely.

But there was a way. If she opened herself up to it. If she let them come to her, instead of trying to call for them, or track them down, she often understood what it was that they wanted. What it was that they needed. And then there were always the cases that she couldn’t help. The ones that she couldn’t identify. Or the ones that she couldn’t give what they wanted. The ones that had unfinished business that Kate couldn’t do anything about. Because all of that unfinished business stuff? She thought that it was true. There were so many spirits wandering the world, just looking for a way out. A way to move on.

There had to be something here, something in the physical world, that anchored them. That had been one of the first things that she learned, and calling them back… It didn’t work. You couldn’t call them back, not once they were really gone. It messed with something. There were limits to everything, and there were limits to magic. You didn’t get to call back the dead, without there being some sort of price. And she thought that there was evidence of that everywhere. Calling someone back from the dead… She had only seen it work once. And even then, she was never quite sure what she felt when she was around the woman. Something… Something that never quite felt… Right?

But that wasn’t her concern. Or at least she had decided that it wasn’t. She wasn’t going to pry any more than necessary, and she didn’t want to talk to Blair’s spirit any more than she thought that her sister-in-law would want her to. No matter where that spirit actually was. She had talked to her, on a few occasions, but she wasn’t going to go there again. She didn’t like talking to dead family members, and maybe Blair Lestrange hadn’t been family to her, but she was family to her brother, and that was close enough. Griff had loved the other woman, as much as Blair would let anyone love her.

Kate didn’t like the idea that there was something that was binding them all together, and that it was pain, and suffering. That it was something that they couldn’t handle. That they couldn’t control. She knew how hard things could get. She knew how low low could be. And she didn’t like it. She didn’t like the thought of anyone else knowing what rock bottom felt like. But there was a part of her that thought that that might have been the only thing that they all actually had in common at all. Rock bottom could be a solid foundation, if you could get your feet steady again.

“I’m very charming. It could have worked. Maybe…” She thought that she could have gotten a free drink out of Al easier than out of Ax. But she wasn’t going to debate that right now. She couldn’t take a drink. She wasn’t going to risk that. Nothing was worth slipping and losing everything. Not now. Not ever. “I’ll pay for your time spent. Don’t you worry.” She rolled her eyes a little bit, but she wasn’t going to remind her bartending friend that she was sober on the off chance that she went on a bender and started looking for something stronger than the alcohol. No one needed to remember the crazy. And she didn’t think that Ap even knew to start with.

“I’m fine. Just came up here to check on you. Living with those two brothers of yours, when everyone knows how competitive you three are. Just making sure you’re still alive an all.”

@ ap • 728 • catherine's outfit

MADE BY VEL OF GS + ADOX 2.0

[nospaces]

[attr="class","cbg"]

[attr="class","cbgtop"]

[attr="class","cimg"]

[attr="class","clbox"]

[attr="class","ctopline"]AM I THE ONLY ONE THAT

[attr="class","cscriptspeci"]hears your voice on the windl

[attr="class","cline"]

[attr="class","clyrics"]EVERY NOW AND THEN, NOW AND THEN[break]
I BELIEVE IN GHOSTS

[break][break]

[attr="class","cbody"]If she got through a shift without putting something unpleasant into someone’s drink, then she would dee it to be a success. She just could not tolerate being down here too much. It was frustrating. Being without her magic was frustrating. It was just not a situation that she should even be in. It wasn’t something that she should have to deal with. She was a Dumbledore. She had not even thought that she would get sick. Maybe that was arrogance, but she truly hadn’t even worried about it. That first day that she had woken up feeling awful, she had written it off. She had told herself that it was something entirely unrelated, for as long as she could. Until she just couldn’t anymore. There came a point in time when she couldn’t convince herself that it was something else. She had gotten sick, and she had known how that was going to end.
[break][break]
And even now, she could not get used to it. It was unacceptable. Every day that she woke up without magic was just impossible for her. She had been deep in research before the epidemic. Every day, she felt closer to recreating the Resurrection Stone. Now there was no way for her to move forward. It just wasn’t even possible. She could research, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t put that research into any new experiments. She just had to watch while Alistair and Axton continued their own work, wanting nothing more than to set all of their research on fire to stop them from beating her to their Hallow. Apolline had always thought that she would be the first. The longer that this epidemic went without a cure, the less that seemed like a reality.
[break][break]
This was something that she had been working toward for years. They all had. She knew that their grandfather didn’t understand—that he couldn’t understand. It was a road he probably would have rather them not go down. That was the benefit to him not living in Hogsmeade. If he still lived at the pub, he could see up close how invested they were in this, and she was sure that it would remind him just how much his own brother had put into the same quest. No, it was definitely better that he was not fully aware of that. It wouldn’t help anything. It wouldn’t do them any good at all.
[break][break]
Though she supposed it would benefit her at this point. She couldn’t do her own experiments, so maybe she should slow them down by getting their grandfather involved. That would be an amusing way of distracting them. They would be pissed about it, but maybe he wouldn’t even tell them that it was her that had invited him over. It would just look like he’d popped in and walked into all of the experiments that went on in the flat upstairs. That would definitely put a wrench in their plans.
[break][break]
Axton would likely see right through her and know that she had been involved. She had no doubt about that. He had gotten good at reading her in the recent years. She couldn’t pull something like that off without him getting one look at her and knowing that she’d had a hand in it. Apolline didn’t think she’d like to find out the retribution to that. He still had his magic, which usually didn’t end well for her since she didn’t have hers. There were more than a few times in the past months where he’d casted curses on her that he knew that she couldn’t lift—and knew that she couldn’t ask Alistair to lift without their brother asking a dozen questions that she didn’t want to answer.
[break][break]
Even before she had lost her magic, he knew some curses that she did not know the counter-curse for. He had always enjoyed that—subjecting her to something that she couldn’t lift on her own. It meant that she had to get him to do it for her, and that was never easy to do. It usually involved something demeaning that she at least pretended to not want to do.
[break][break]
But that was just not the point. For now, there was no way for her to slow their research. Until her shift was over, anyway. Afterwards… well, that would be another story all together. She could entertain Kate until then. There was nothing else to do anyway. It was not a particularly busy day. “Yes, maybe. They do think their god’s gifts to women, after all,” she rolled her eyes. Axton did more than Alistair, but she wasn’t going to complain about that in front of her friend. There were some secrets that were better kept very, very concealed. This was one of them. For the time being, anyway. “Good. That’s what I like to hear.” Not that she was going to complain that she’d wanted something as easy as water. Kate didn’t really drink, not or as long as she’d known her anyway, so her not drinking was not really a surprise anyway.
[break][break]
Shaking her head at the woman’s words, she took a swig from her glass before setting it back on the bar. “All still breathing. For now, anyway. Tomorrow might prove to be a different story.” She was joking. Mostly, anyway.
[break][break]

[attr="class","cnotes"]889 ● @ kate ● outfit

[attr="class","cred"]MADE BY VEL OF WW + ADOX 2.0

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