"Ah, ah, ah!" Tonks said rather frantically as Dubois slid into the chair opposite her.
She could feel his confused look but she wasn't going to stop to look up and greet him.
"What-"
"No! Shh!"
She scrawled quickly over the parchment she had in front of her, not wanting to miss anything out. She'd spent the whole morning doing exercises with Moody and this was the first chance she'd had to write up all her notes. And Moody wanted her back - she risked taking a quick glance at the clock - forty-five minutes which really meant that she had to be there, ready, in forty minutes because on time was basically late, according to Moody. Unless you needed to make an entrance of some kind but he hadn't fully explained that so she was going to stick with being early. It was safer for her.
Dubois just sat there, staring at her but she ignored him. She couldn't afford to give him any attention right now.
She just... needed... a... few... more... minutes...
"What on earth are you doing?" Dubois asked when she eventually paused, gave her parchment a critical look, nodded and put her quill down with a satisfied "Done!"
"Done? What do you mean, done?"
The poor guy was looking more bewildered by the second. Tonks didn't answer him for a moment as she tapped her parchment with her wand to dry the ink and roll up her parchment. She didn't want to leave it in here and have it get thrown out overnight because she forgot about it like she had last week. That had been annoying. She still felt like she was missing something from those notes.
"Writing up what I was taught today. Sorry, I couldn't be interrupted or else I would have forgotten anything."
"I hate when that happens. It screws your whole notes up."
"Exactly! Thank you! Young didn't get it."
He said that she should just leave gaps in her notes and fill them in later. No. That was not a thing she was going to do. That was more annoying than having to rewrite her notes! It just never looked good and was distracting when she was trying to revise them.
"Though they are a bit of a mess," he said, leaning over to look at her notes doubtfully.
"Well, yeah. Of course, they are," Tonks said matter-of-factly. "They're just a rough draft. I'll write them up neatly later."
If she had the time and energy for it. She wasn't really the type of person who needed neat and crisp notes with different coloured inks and underlines and other notes. Oh, sure, she didn't doubt that that worked for other people but as long as she could read her notes, she'd be fine. A lack of ink splotches would also be good.
"Wait, these are your rough draft?" He exclaimed, getting glares from other trainees in the room and he gave them an apologetic look, turning back to her and repeater in a quieter voice, "These are you rough notes?"
"Well, yes. He doesn't like me taking notes when he's teaching. Says it's a distraction."
Literally, that one time she had taken a quill out to take notes, he'd stopped talking, blasted (blasted) the quill out of her hand and just continued talking like nothing had happened. The quill had been smoking on the floor for the rest of that lesson. It had been incredibly distracting. Needless to say, she'd had to ask a lot of questions later. But she never took a quill out in front of him again.
"A quill is a distraction," Dubois said slowly.
"Apparently."
"That's weird."
"Moody's weird."
Dubois snorted at that and Tonks raised an eyebrow.
"I think that you're the only person who calls Auror Moody weird."
"But he is," she protested, stretching her arms out over the desk, she hadn't realised how stiff she was.
He shook his head, fringe flopping everywhere. "No, he's terrifying. Strict. Scarily brilliant. There's no way you'd catch me calling him weird."
"I don't to his face!"
She didn't have a death with, after all. She wasn't that stupid.
"I wouldn't put it past you," he told her.
Tonks opened and closed her mouth and then shrugged. Eh, he had a point. That was probably something she would end up doing at some point.
"But seriously," Dubois said, returning to their original conversation. "No quills? How are you supposed to take notes?"
"He expects me to remember everything," she said with a shrug. "Or, well, as much as I can."
He didn't let her ask questions later and ask for clarification on things. Even if it did sometimes get repetitive but he didn't seem to mind. He saw it as "making her mind sharp" and "learning to think on her feet". She saw it as giving her a headache but she didn't dare say that.
"That sounds horrible."
"Eh, it works."
And she wasn't about to complain. Moody would probably manage to think up something more awful as a way for her to learn. This was at least manageable. Mostly.
He scrunched up his nose. "It wouldn't for me. There's no way I'd be able to remember stuff hours later."
"You'd learn how to."
That's what she did and was still doing, after all. He gave her a sceptical look.
"You can really remember everything Auror Moody tells you?"
Tonks noted with some amusement that although they had all started to refer to the senior Aurors by just their surnames, Moody always still had the prefix of "Auror". It was kind of funny.
"Well, obviously I can't remember everything," she rolled her eyes. "So, I just do this." She gestured at the sloppily scrawled notes in front of her.
"Frantically write down all you can later?"
"Exactly!"
Dubois gave her a concerned look. "And you don't see anything wrong with this?"
She shrugged again. Right? Wrong? What did it matter? It was how Moody taught and that was that. She just had to deal with it. And she was. Sort of. It would be worse if he stopped her from asking questions but he didn't do that so it was fine. She was learning how to learn like that.
Dubois shook his head. "You're mad, you know that?"
"I've been called worse things," she said agreeably, gathering her parchment up and stashing it in her bag.
Somehow, she didn't think that she was going to get anymore work done if Dubois was going to hang about. Not that she minded, she could really use a break. Looking up at the clock, she frowned. Had she really been here an hour already? The meeting Moody had to go to would be finishing up in about half an hour.
"How are you getting on?" She asked, leaning back in her chair.
Oh, it felt good not to be hunched over any parchment.
Dubois pulled a face.
"That well?" She said sympathetically.
"Corley wants to give me tests every two weeks!"
"What?"
Tests? Some Mentors were giving tests? What in Merlin's name...?
"Yeah," he scoffed, looking thoroughly unimpressed as he crossed his arms. "Apparently it's to keep track of my progress."
"Fun."
She did not envy him. Moody had never brought up the idea of tests and she certainly wasn't. No way was she giving herself more work.
"Now I'm going to have to revise as well as make my normal notes," he complained. "He's not stopping to go over the material for the tests, he's going to keep going through the course."
"My having to take notes later suddenly isn't looking so bad, does it?" She said smugly.