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The semester wears on. Bella studies and flies and reads through the library elves' recommendations and accommodates Sherlock's sleep schedule. (Artemis Burberry is actually tolerable enough on any subject but Sherlock, and is more than happy to avoid him on occasions when Bella is around to sleep over with Tony for a night.) She gets A's in everything except Transfiguration; she gets a B there, because she eventually compromised with the teacher on the subject of live animals. Bella will work with bugs, but she wants to be very good at bugs before she messes with mice. Some of the mistakes the other students have made with their rodent subjects made her want to throw up, however easily they were put right.
She explains this compromise to Feral, when the semester changes over. She's just in the next segment of each of the core curriculum courses - no electives till seventh grade, when the brooms course is over with - but they'll have all different teachers and schedules and classmates. (Feral is still in her Defense course, and now so are Sherlock and Tony; she has the twins in brooms and theory, too, and Feral in potions.) "Bugs are really stupid and they have really simple nervous systems. You could probably get a B like I did if you would work on bugs."
occluminous
"I don't really wanna set bugs on fire either," says Feral.
occluminous
"Do you squish them when they get in your room?" Bella asks.
"...Sometimes, why?"
occluminous
"I'm not sure why you'd squish them but not want to burn them. They can't feel much of anything."
"I dunno," he says, shrugging. "Maybe I'll find a bug and set it on fire and see how I feel about it."
Feral laughs.
"...It's funny that I'm going to set a bug on fire to see if I want to or not?"
occluminous
"Well, if you worked out doing bugs instead of mice with the teacher like I did ahead of time and then it turned out you didn't want to that'd be a wasted effort. You can just find a spider somewhere outside and check real quick."
"Okay." He shrugs again. "I'll do that, then, I guess."
occluminous
"And then you won't have to be held back in transfig' any more."
He grins. "Yeah, that'll be good."
occluminous
"I wonder if they'll skip you up to grade level or what."
"Bet you they won't," he predicts.
occluminous
"Yeah, probably not, unless there's standardized tests for it later that I haven't heard about yet."
"And if the standardized tests involve mice, I'm back to square one."
occluminous
"...That's true, I guess that's probably part of them being. Standardized."
Feral shrugs.
occluminous
"Well, you could at least stop having to sit out entire lessons. You can get really really good at sixth grade stuff," she snorts. "And practice outside of classes, if you want to catch your own bugs and read other years' textbooks from the library, I dunno if you care enough."
"I probably don't care enough," he says.
occluminous
"Oh well. At least I found a way around the problem. I'll even do mice once I'm good enough - I guess you can too when you grow out of the fire thing."
"If I grow out of the fire thing," he snorts.
occluminous
"Did you ever ask the library elves to help you find stuff about it?"
"Nah."