Remus made a face at that, not out of ill will but rather a sign of disbelief. The smile lingered, biting the inside of his cheek as he glanced away.<br/>“Yeah, well,” he started, a sentence that never found its way through. It didn’t matter, and yet it did. A doctorate was palming through darkness, hoping to stumble upon a loose end to unravel. Remus was too close to his work to know if he was heading for a dead end, and Mulligan’s supposed blessing did mean a lot.<br/>“Maybe I can afford to take the evening off, then,” he instead said, though that hadn’t been where his mind had been at. He had been at the library ever since instructions ended, and his mind was going fuzzy at the edges.