He goes down to the dungeons to think. Think about his passions, think about his pains, think about anything and everything. He thinks how nice it is to just think sometimes. How sometimes, he can hear footsteps echoing above his head. How the stones on the wall make no sound when he raps them with his knuckles. How the few rays of sunshine that escape through the lone window illuminate tiny particles—shining like pixie dust.
Sometimes he thinks about his relationships. His relationship with his father—who, tough and unmovable in public, is cruel and angry to him and his mother. He thinks about his mother who fills her hours with meaningless activities—fixing her hair, commissioning tapestries. He thinks about how furious his gather gets and begins his never-ending torrents of criticism but how his mother turns the blind eye—too busy pretending she isn't bored and miserable. He thinks how he'd like to shut them both out of his life.
Sometimes he thinks he thinks too much.
-
She goes down to the dungeons to escape. Escape from the noise, the complaints, even the laughter. She goes to avoid her friends, to avoid their expectations, to avoid the burning suffocation. They don't miss her anyway.
She knows he goes down there too. She sees him sometimes, sitting in the same spot, underneath the small window, in the dark, just out of the range of sunlight. The first time she stumbles upon him, she had stopped, hesitated at his serenity and walked back to the stairs, sitting there for awhile before leaving.
He knows she comes down here too. Her favorite spot is right beneath the sunlight—face upturned and aglow from the warm rays. Her golden brown locks glisten and wreaths her head like a halo. She looks like an angel, bathed in light against the otherwise darkened room.
When he finds her there, he stays in the hallway, under the dim orange glow of the torchlight and watches her, wonders if she comes down here to think. Thinks how he would like to stand next to her and be warmed under the sunlight, and by her. This is when he realizes how cold he is. How cold he always is.
Then he goes back to the blank stares of Crabbe and Goyle, back to the empty words of his friends. Back to Pansy's nosy, "Where have you been?"
"Thinking," he would say. "Thinking about you." And she would wrap her arms around him and kiss him demandingly, but she's cold too and all he wants is to feel warm again.
-
The next time she sees him there, he isn't sitting in the dark anymore. He sits directly under the rays of sunlight and it shines on his pale skin and pale hair. He has his knees pulled up to his chest and he shivers. He looks vulnerable and innocent like this and she wants to go to him, to envelope him in her arms but she catches herself. She's hot and he's cold. Fire and Ice don't mix.
01/11/04 - J-J