☆彡･:*:･ ────── 𝐏𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐈𝐀 | In which a dyslexic, skittish Hufflepuff named Gian Adams finds order in Remus Lupin, a boy who unwittingly invited chaos.
[𝐂𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐲 @Hellmiina]
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The pinnacle of exams was clawing a ladder of strain that tore students off their monoliths of embroidered hubris and the triumph that waged daily wars of the insipid variety. The stalemate of a cramped palm stained by ink uncoiling the tension on sheets or skin or grass was like the divine celebration at the end of war; soldiers returned home, some to domestic comfort, others to drinks and gluttony and amaranth. This was the same minus the eternal trauma and human casualties. Students drank and laughed and played games, while others just slept.
Gian preferred to simmer. He had spent all morning in the common room, just laying on the floor with his eyes on the ceiling and his ears blushing at every fulsome leap of his insides. He hated the effect his thoughts had on him. He hated how something so shapeless could render him immobile. If he was going to fall apart, he'd rather it be something concrete. He'd rather see the bruises than just lay there, perfectly spotless yet utterly demolished.
Opal eventually convinced him to come down to the kitchens for a private jam biscuits and tea session before he would be condemned home for the remainder of December. He agreed, not only because he knew she'd be terribly skeptical if he didn't, but because he would do anything to submerge all his grievances in the drab, monochrome turmoil of adolescence instead of addressing the hellish pain that embroiled agony inside him at every waking moment.
He still hadn't seen Remus, nor any of his friends, and by the end of the second week in a row, he was about ready to pillage the Gryffindor dormitories and demand to know what his problem was. Or at least just to get an answer to his question.
I remember. Do you?
If he didn't, then he'd steal whatever macabre potion poisoned his memory and sap it on his lips to forget too. He refused to indulge the heartbreak so instead kept it under lock and key, his heart a caged thrush clapping for morsels that Remus just wasn't giving him.
Do you?Do you? Do you?
The words flashed in his mind in brutal punches. Do you do you do you-
It stopped having tempo or sense, it just lived there now. Plundered all his wisdom and grit and just fucking lived there.
The hastily scribbled note wreathed through the nexus of thoughts in his head as he sat at the table sipping on honey infused tea. Opal was rambling on about something to do with a question she couldn't stop agonizing over from the Transfigurations test, while he just sat there, a mindless shell sitting haphazardly with fissures cracking up his casing with every shattering echo of his heartbeat. There was a geyser of sorrow pressing its way up from his ribcage and knocking on his teeth for deliverance, but he swallowed them back and chewed on the relics, chasing them down with a scorching gulp of tea.
The hot drink broiled through his insides, coercing a virility into his nerves that roved up to his head where images collapsed, once again reminding him that the genesis of music lived inside him, even when he hated it. Even when he wanted nothing more but to rip the ivory keys from the eroding strings splitting into corrosions of his heart; even when he wanted to just fucking forget, even if it was just for a minute. He could sit there and have a conversation with his best friend without being haunted by volatile pictures of hands climbing the banks of his chest, lips crushing veneers into valiant bursts of declarations, each adage their vessels leaked a paragon of heightened temptations, crumbled fear, and glory that could rupture them if it fell too low. Too fast and Gian knew—he just knew he'd be the first to break.
