She sits beside the undulating lake, her nervous fingers picking at the grass. The stooped oak provides a welcome span of shade, and yet her skin pricks with goosebumps. A book rests among the manicured green blades, but she is much too distracted for reading .It is a perfect summer day and she takes no notice.
She is too busy dreaming.
Her fingertips brush the grass and she sighs audibly. Her auburn curls feel heavy on her shoulders and she swats at them, irritated. She is irritated. She is fed up.
She is fed up with dreaming.
Her jaw tenses almost imperceptibly, but a strange emptiness has taken over her eyes. The flickering, reflective honey shade is replaced by a dull mud, her thoughts oozing mundanely along behind the pupils. She is dreaming, of him again, and she is irritated with herself for it.
She glances at the sky, her eyes skirting the sun, a perfect circle of white against the endless blue, so perfect it is like a painting. She rubs her cool arms and swears quietly. She is frozen in the heat and it makes no sense and she is fed up.
She yearns for true cold.
He is brooding again, slouched quietly against a willow by the lake, studying the girl with auburn hair who sits across the lake. Her expression is unreadable, and he is irritated with himself that he should even want to read it.
The shimmering lake draws his gaze from the girl. The blazing sun is chopped into watery reflections on the glassy surface. He licks his lips, enticed by the water. The day is hot.
He unlaces his shoes and discards them. His black cloak and starched shirt are folded neatly, caressingly, and slid onto a tuft of sweet grass. He loosens his belt and pulls down his trousers, revealing black boxer shorts. His torso is pale as marble and just as solid.
Slowly and with care, he slides one foot into the chilled water, delighting in its coolness. He takes a few more steps and is waist deep. The cold paralyzes his legs, numbs them, and it is nice not to think. It is nice to be numb for once.
He wades in further until the permissive sandy bottom starts to give way beneath his feet. With a rush of adrenaline the young man dives smoothly beneath the surface, his entire body now submerged in the water. A pleasant coolness sweeps over him as he powers toward the center of the lake, his arm muscles rippling with each robust stroke. Finally his head breaks the surface and he flips onto his back, relishing the combined sensations of hot sun above and cool water below. He floats for a moment, enjoying the peace. Enjoying the isolation.
He thinks it must be easier to be isolated.
She is watching him now, running her tongue impatiently across her top teeth. A surge of vertigo overtakes her and she presses one clammy palm to her forehead to steady herself. Her heart is beating very, very fast. She prays for clouds, a typhoon, anything that will prevent the convergence of the scintillating sunlight overhead and its paralleling spot of brightness in the lake. The cool blonde head seems to shimmer more than any celestial body.
Feeling angry with herself, she clambers unsteadily to her feet and begins to stride purposefully around the perimeter of the lake, hoping that a walk under the sun might clear her head. She focuses every blood vessel and muscle and tissue and nerve ending in her body on not looking back at the lake and the dazzling brightness it contains. Instead she glares at the ground six inches ahead of her toes, and her eyes are so trained on the delicately swaying grass that she barrels right into something with a painful and surprising smack, something wet and very solid that feels strangely like taut skin. Bare skin.
She looks up and immediately wishes she hadn't. Her throat begins to constrict uncomfortably, and her robes feel suddenly tight around the neck and shoulders. She feels the need to gasp for air, but her windpipe seems not to be cooperating. She settles for a quietly choked-out splutter and tries to glare evenly into those steely grey eyes. Or are they green? The color is faintly jade, perhaps with tiny flecks of gold around the pupils. Perhaps they only look steely, because the look these eyes are giving her is cool and appraising like an impending storm is swirling beneath them.
"You should watch where you're going, Granger," the mouth before her suggests quietly. His voice is surprising gentle, and though she strains to detect the hint of mockery and arrogance that usually taints the young man's words, she cannot find it. "Been daydreaming again, have you?"
She swallows and prays that her words will come off cool and indifferent. "I suppose I have, yes." Damn. She can hear the softness and perhaps a trace of loneliness in her own voice, and wishes she did not sound quite so vulnerable. His eyes (grey? jade? gold?) flicker for a moment, like a dying flame crackling out its last embers of warmth before dissipating completely.
She can almost see the smoke curling. "Well, you'd better get your act together. Final exams are next week and I know how you hate to slip." His voice dips silkily on the last word in a manner that makes her heart convulse involuntarily. Eyes coiling to derisive slits, he slings his cloak swiftly over his bare shoulder and brushes past her with an almost palpable coldness. She shivers and wishes perversely to be warm again.
She wraps her shaking arms around her torso, as if trying to protect herself, and glances out across the castle lawns again. On the far bank of the lake slouches a weeping willow tree, majestic despite its obvious age. The pale green buds spill out over the grass and seem to sigh mournfully when stirred by the breeze. How openly it weeps and shares its sadness. How openly it can be lonely, and yet offer the protection of its green cascades to any who wishes for it.
The young woman needs this shelter, but she also must weep.
About twenty feet away, a boy around twelve years of age sits with his schoolbag in his lap and sheets of parchment stacked on the grass beside him, presumably an essay or a lengthy letter. A sudden gust of wind sends the pile arching neatly into the air like a paper rainbow. The boys swears loudly and jumps up, grabbing for the sheets, but already the parchment has fluttered onto the lake. Water quickly saturates each sheet, turning it a slightly darker shade of creamy beige, and after a few moments the ink begins to run into pools of black and the breeze propels the parchment further from the bank.
The boy presses his hands to his face in sadness or irritation, but the shivering young woman cannot take her eyes from the lazily floating parchment. Soon forty drenched sheets are drifting across the rippling surface of the lake, spreading and curling like flames.