Paper Confines

xx. A Morning in June

PAPER CONFINES.
20. / A Morning in June

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       The green candlelight dilated in the surrounding dark. Big then small then big again: a heart pumped manually by Tom's meticulous hand. Amoret kept her eyes on the flame but could feel his trained intently on her open mouth as her breath followed the flicker of the lit wick. Big then small—in then out. He'd told her to stay focused but she felt more entranced. The flame left only a small beacon in the black of Tom's library, drawing her full attention to the intricacies of the light. The colour. The shapes that formed when her vision started to blur, spheres stretched across the bookshelves like the stilted shadows Sybil used to follow along the street.

Tom commanded the dark and everything in it, and it wasn't hard to see the peculiar prowess he had with magic so ornamental as this, and it wasn't at all harder to wonder what he'd learned it for. Other than to have another notch in his belt that Amoret didn't, or another opportunity to have her think about him exactly as she was thinking now. The subtle smile on his face suggested so.

Amoret hadn't forgotten his aspiration to be a professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts—she assumed he had bigger, more heinous plans now, but the instinct to teach and the precise method to his madness was at the forefront of her first lesson. She wasn't so far detached from her academic eye not to pay attention.

"You're drifting away," he said, seated opposite to her with his chin in his palm and a critical arch in his brow she could spot without looking at him. It bothered her less that he wore it and more that he was becoming someone she knew things like that about.

"I'm not. Don't distract me."

"Your breathing changed."

She spared an unsettled glance at him. "Why are you listening to my breathing?"

"To make sure you're paying attention. A good thing, too, since you're not."

She was sure her breathing had changed—their fight in the courtyard was still rendering Amoret breathless every now and then, and there was the unmistakable feeling that her ribs weren't quite where they used to be, like puzzle pieces jammed halfhazardly in place. But that was none of Tom's business. Amoret huffed, snapping her focus entirely and leaning back in her chair. "Did you honestly do all of this when you were practicing legilimency?"

Tom leaned back in suit. "Yes."

"Is it common practice?"

"There is no common practice. Legilimency is a gift; I always knew it was mine, I just honed it this way."

She sighed. He pushed the candle towards her and the green light glowed in her eyes.

"Put it out."

"What?"

"It helped me but it's distracting you. You need to be in the dark."

"I told you it isn't, this is just completely tedious and—" Amoret cursed and slammed a hand on the table. Tom was in and out of her head so quickly she didn't have time to process it, let alone fight him.

"And you're afraid," he mused. "Is it the dark or me?"

"Don't do that," she hissed.

"Then resist." He pushed the candle even closer. "Put it out and we'll try again. Or we can start with your lessons instead."

No. Amoret still hadn't resolved the issue of how she was going to teach him without actually teaching him, and dragging his lessons out for as long as she could before getting home was a solution she wasn't expecting to last long. "Fine."