around the world | sol

[edward remus lupin]

i know for sure

that life is beautiful
around the world

November 2024
Marisol Leandra Lobera Navarre

Teddy’s brow furrowed in concentration. Normally, he picked things up faster than this, but the year and time before that had been quite challenging. The constant travel was something Teddy enjoyed greatly about his work, but the more he went back home, the more he felt that emotional pull. This past summer, he purposefully accepted more work to keep him home while using his stored-up personal time. At the start of Autumn, their presence was typically requested at the Museum proper as they trained up new employees. His gran was certainly happy with the arrangement, but the muted brown tone of Teddy’s hair spoke volumes of his mood.

”Merlin…” Teddy sighed while lightly scratching the back of his head. ”Conjugations will be the death of me.” Working at the museum, it was a given that they would learn pieces of different languages or begin to recognize words, runes, and all the things. But learning a new one entirely…well, that was a challenge for anyone—muggle or magical alike. But Teddy, as always, tried not to let it get him down. He smiled softly at the girl sitting across from him. A recruit that year all the way from Mexico. Naturally, Teddy had a hundred questions but really, it was supposed to be her venue to ask him questions.

With this many years under his belt, Teddy could have easily taken on the role and responsibility of a full curator at the Museum. But then his traveling would drop to once or twice a year. He wasn’t in this role for the glory or the titles; he did enjoy all the aspects of it. This role meant he interfaced with the archivists often, especially to determine where an artifact might fall in terms of the museum collection and to ensure it was truly free of curses and properly preserved. The overlap helped everything run as seamlessly as possible. This didn’t stop side projects from occurring, like Teddy learning tidbits of Spanish from one of the new trainees. ”So, any thought on whether you might specialize?” Some archivists chose to focus on specific areas and collections. Naturally, this museum meant they all specialized in magical history, but there was always more. Teddy waited curiously for an answer while tidying up the loose papers sticking out of his notes and drawing notebook.

template by vee

[Marisol Leandra Lobera Navarre]

November 2024

Sol was still waiting for the post-graduation high to fade, but she hadn’t quite exited the honeymoon phase yet. She supposed she should be grateful for that, but it left her a little apprehensive to be this excited about things. Because where was the existential dread? Where was the annoying drudgery of washing her own dishes and complaining about the rain and telling herself that she ought to cook more while she ate out for the fourth time that week? But no, she hadn’t quite banished the giddiness of defying her mother yet, or the surreal feeling of being in England after having begged to visit all her life. Things were still charming enough not to have become frustrating yet. But there was still that apprehension that things were too good to be true. It didn’t feel right to be this happy.

Still, Teddy Lupin made her a little nervous. Because Sol had done her research about all her new bosses (she was training to be an archivist, after all, and she figured that they knew how to pick the best of the best). So anyway, she’d looked them all up. In any public archive, just to learn about them and pick up some handy-dandy insider tips. That meant she’d seen the Auror report that’d been filed half a century earlier about the werewolf attack that’d turned his dad. She knew who’d been named. And even though Sol wasn’t sure how public the knowledge was in Britain about her father – well, it was out there. She’d had to put on her job application that she was a werewolf. And her attack had been well-recorded in Veracruz and by whom, and well…she was a good archivist, but she was surrounded by them too. It wouldn’t take much for someone, Teddy included, to put two and two together.

So yeah, she kinda wondered if he secretly hated her. She returned his smile somewhat nervously, tucking her hair behind her ears and focusing on the grammar worksheets she’d found online and printed out. “Well, at least Spanish has rules. English is just five different languages smashed together,” she said absent-mindedly. At least he was trying to learn properly though. She’d picked up English by watching enough TV until she could speak with a passably American accent. But she had no idea what most of the rules were. She picked up a random exercise and slid it across the desk. “Try making up a sentence with some of this vocab,” she suggested, although she hadn’t actually glanced at the page first. Who knows if her instructions even matched the exercise.

His question had kinda distracted her, and her mind had gone racing off in a million directions as she wondered what the right kind of answer might be. Complete honesty? A humble sort of refusing to answer the question to maintain an aura of mystery? Just choose something at random and then specialize in it for the rest of her life to maintain the façade? But in the end, she had to be honest. It was hard for her to choose the kind of answer that seemed right when she didn’t actually know what that meant. She was still suffering from little-fish-in-the-big-pond syndrome, and adjusting to the fact that she was on her own here. “I thought I had to know something before I could specialize?” It seemed fair to say that she’d hardly left the backrooms of the museum since she’d joined, trying to learn their extensive filing systems and get to know the archives. She’d touched a Merlin artifact maybe once or twice, when they’d come back from restoration and needed to be reentered into the system. Still, she did have a ridiculous amount of information about Merlin in her head now. She’d probably read just about everything the museum had on him in their training guides at this point.

edward remus lupin

[edward remus lupin]

i know for sure

that life is beautiful
around the world

November 2024
Marisol Leandra Lobera Navarre

”Only five?” Teddy feigned surprise. It was a statement he’d heard in the past. His travels throughout the UK had introduced him to many languages that were not English. This fascinated Teddy, of course, because it meant the culture was still alive. Since his employment at the Museum, he naturally found himself in Wales most of the time when not abroad, so he’d picked up a few Welsh words here or there, but he’d long since given up attempting to pronounce the famous long village name that came naturally to the locals. Still, it was always fun to see people try and lose their breath about halfway through.

Teddy peered at the paper Sol handed him. She was energetic and driven, which contrasted with the more reserved nature of some of the trainees. He remembered his own experience keeping his hands in his pockets, afraid to touch anything for risk of breaking it. Curious but feeling his attention span waning, Teddy ran a hand through his hair. For now, it gleamed a golden brown in the light—the lightest he could manage these days. Considering the year so far, the appearance of his favorite teal or some other ridiculous color was rare, if not nonexistent. One might call him brave, considering he’d been dealing with tragedy since he was weeks old. But Teddy would never claim to be.

Shrugging lightly, he considered her point. ”It helps. Sometimes people know what they want to focus on when they begin training.” Teddy certainly hadn’t, but he’d been fine with that. Preferring to keep an open mind about things. Which also allowed him to travel more.

template by vee

[Marisol Leandra Lobera Navarre]

Her next laugh came out a little more genuine at Teddy’s skepticism about how many languages had smashed together to become English. Sol smiled down at the worksheets as she began to reorganize them by subject, rather than their printing order. She’d downloaded whatever she could find and started to build a portfolio, but her hands itched to sort and resort whatever was closest into a way that made sense. Cut and clear categories that could quiet the noise in her head for a while. So now she began to puzzle over the right order for grammar lessons, since she could never quite stay still for long. As soon as she’d finished one thing, it made sense to immediately seek out the next big thing around the corner.

“It might be more. I was horrible at Arithmancy in school, though. Nobody understood why I kept taking it every year, but it was the only class I was okay with ditching.” She shrugged slightly, very casually, as if it were another way to say ‘oh well, sorry but not sorry’. Sol had been a good student, really. She’d loved her classes, and getting answers right, and staying up late to read multiple new books every week. Every year before final exams, she’d pull a study blitz at the library to get salvageable marks in Arithmancy, even though she’d only ever suffered through the subject and complained about it to anyone nearby. But things had gotten hard for her at school when all the bad blood about Fenrir had come out, and suddenly everybody’d seemed to know her business and been on her case all the time (sometimes in a bullying sort of way, but mostly in a suffocating overprotectiveness). She’d needed some alone time, and ditching class had been the only real way to guarantee nobody could stumble across her while she sulked.

Sol peeked over the grammar sheets as Teddy messed with his hair (his hands almost always seemed to find their way back there) and seemed to bounce his attention around. “Not that you don’t look great, but you’re not conjugating the past tense right now,” she said dryly, cheeks flushing a bit as she looked down again and reshuffled the papers in her hands so they’d be sorted by difficulty level rather than grammar tenses. Something about their new order didn’t satisfy her, not any more than the previous combinations had, so Sol sighed and dropped the papers. They still felt as disorganized as her own thoughts did, especially on the subject Teddy had chosen. Specialization was one of those life-changing decisions that scared her a bit, since it meant committing to something that would shape her professional life. “But how can you even know what you’re good at if you just choose the first thing you come across?” Her voice grew a bit in volume and indignation as she followed that line of thought. “Like, imagine I just spend the rest of my life reading about Merlin’s overdependence on spotted mushrooms in his potions because that’s all my supervisor’s let me do this week. Why did he write so much about freaking mushrooms? St. Mungo’s could send their insomnia patients to my lectures.” She huffed and picked up the papers again – the only thing that defined Sol more than her embarrassing tendency to say what was on her mind was her stubbornness.

edward remus lupin