Heartbeats [ON HOLD]

one | obsession

◆◇ obsession ◇◆

•─────⋅☾＊☽⋅─────•

Iron fills Quyen's mouth as the barely-healing skin around her fingernail breaks, a harsh but effective taste that automatically refocuses her attention to the derivations in the tattered textbook in front of her rather than the nonchalant smile that breaks out on Thea's face when she completes the Chemistry numerical on the board in record time.

Flexing her fingers to prevent them from cramping, she raises her head again, despite her best efforts to keep it down, her gaze wandering around the room— the giant clock that echoes a bit too loud for comfort, the brick walls on which portraits of famous chemists rest, chemists whose discoveries she's spent hours reading up on to the point where she may as well be friends with them, their unblinking, all-knowing stares surveying her every move, and their thin-lipped mouths whispering to her, 'Keep looking at us and you’ll never be one of us,'— only to find her eyes zeroing in back on Thea. 

Thea Salvador and her all-knowing stare that surveys her every move and her smug smile and her chalk-dusted sweater and her cavalier eyes that meet Quyen's own and the smirk that dances on her lips before she turns her head around to face the blackboard once more.

And even though she can't stand her, even though there's nothing she would like more than to get that smug fucking smile off her face, even though she wishes her eyes would wander anywhere else, Quyen can't help the awe that blooms in her chest— or claws at it, more like— at the grace at which Thea solves the equations that are too complex for anyone else to comprehend but too easy for her to do the same and more.

While Quyen has to struggle, though struggle may be an understatement, to remember the reactants and the products of chemical equations, while her brain works triple-time to act as the catalyst that causes the explosion of the caustic acid in its crevices, messily scrawled equations are ingrained, practically tattooed in Thea's brain, and fuck, is it frustrating. 

Formidable, impressive, even, but more than anything, frustrating.

It's worrying— how much she lets someone she doesn't know anything about, apart from their strikingly brilliant brain, affect her life, but she needs this. More than anyone, she needs this.

Valedictorian. She's been working at it ever since she— your parents, she has to remind herself, your parents enrolled you— was enrolled into Alderville High, and she won't, can't, have anyone else ripping it out of her hands. 

She's had enough ripped out of them, and they’re tired of the bruises, she thinks. She’s tired of them too.

Logically, there isn't anyone else who could possibly take the spot of Valedictorian away from her. The sculpted, prying eyes of the busts have watched over her since her first day here, they know how much she's worked for this. 

With late nights slaving away at numbers that begin to swirl in front of her, serving as an erratically effective means of a hypnosis when her ADHD refuses to let her rest until she's entirely finished (a blessing when she has lab records due the next day and hasn’t begun them as yet, a curse when her pages are filled with an unreadable scrawl of words because her eyes are refusing to cooperate with her brain), and with early mornings spent formulating a schedule that she knows she won’t follow— the busts and every other inanimate object at the school know exactly how much she’s worked for this.

No one can take this away from her, but Thea's getting uncomfortably close to doing so.

Softly, she exhales, returning her attention to the scrawled notes in her textbook's margin, black ink smudged into the ringlet of her coffee mug, again, barely readable, but she knows these notes by heart. They’re the same ones she hadn’t been able to recall during the surprise— is it really a surprise when you’re spending your entire life preparing for a test?— test a week ago.