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chapter fifteen; the full moon bruises
It was safe to say James was friends with Amaya Santoro—better yet the witch trusted him. That was his biggest accomplishment of the week.
And perhaps she didn't trust him fully—not yet—but he would make sure she would. He would take whatever she gave him and cherish it, and the day he broke Amaya's trust would be the day he lost his sense of self.
And he would make sure he would earn her full trust. But first, he had to learn bloody Occlumency. Apparently, Amaya's mission was so imperative for the war that he needed to learn how to hide what he knew if he were ever attacked.
But he did note she told him anyway, perhaps not everything but he knew the gist of it. She told him what a Horcrux was, what bloody sickening things You-Know-Who was up to, and that they needed to find a way to destroy the Horcruxes (and find them, though in that area he only knew about the founder's artifacts).
So that's how he found himself, holed up in the library, sitting, or more so reclining, on an armchair, legs stretched out on the ground, and trying to focus on one of the tomes Dumbledore had given Amaya, trying being the keyword.
The truth was, most of the words he was reading were convoluted sentences regarding Horcruxes that seemed to always dance around how to create or destroy one, and instead focus on the abhorrent people who'd tried to create Horcruxes or the consequences of their actions. But it wasn't just the tedious book that was to fault for his lack of focus—Amaya was at fault for some of it too.
She was lying stomach down on the couch, the little burgundy journal her father had given her floating next to her as she scribbled notes in her notebook. Her head was turned to him, and now and then her eyes would stray from either the journal or the notebook and they'd land on him.
If he was already looking at her (which he was most of the time) she would blush faintly and look away, or, and amusingly so, she'd scowl at him and tell him to work and stop staring at her, "Take a picture, it'll last longer, " she'd told him. And much to her annoyance he had, he'd summoned a camera his parents had and snapped a picture of her, and his heart had skipped a beat when she laughed to the camera in resignation and rolled her eyes.
Sometimes, though, he'd find her looking at him when he wasn't looking at her, the feeling of her eyes on him had his blood rush hot, and soon his t-shirt seemed suffocating.
It was because of this, and the fact that he was focused on the research, finally doing something that was working towards the end of the war, that when James looked down at his wristwatch, his eyes widened.
"Bloody hell," he groaned as he stood up from the armchair, making Amaya glance up from her notebook, the pencil she had in her hand falling limp.
