Disclaimer: I don't own or profit. Sad day.
It's cold. Not just the temperature, though that's nearing winter records and it's yet to be Halloween, but it's cold everywhere. My fingers are numb most the time, though they're hardly ever still. It's odd, working without exactly feeling what you're doing - watching it, but experiencing it as a stranger might. A stranger to myself then - not that it's a new concept or anything.
I haven't felt my toes in a while - ever since summer tucked itself away they've just been decoration hidden away in layers of socks and bedroom slippers and overly long fuzzy pants. But that's a physical affliction, another of those brilliant side effects that have been about me ever since that Quidditch incident. It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt - then it's point and time of reference, a brilliant ice breaker, an excuse to utter the phrase "remember that time when"...
But it's not the cold around my body that bothers me, it's the sweeping presence of arctic ice that trails the length of my spine or wraps suddenly around my heart, it's the lingering tingle of being half frozen from the inside out that affects me. No amount of hot coffee, no package of apple cider and no teapot of liquid has yet to reach the chill that lies inside of me.
Distractions are cheap. I can bury myself in books, get swept away in mind numbing shows, chase my tail round the tree till I'm wheezing and blue in the face - I can laugh and blunder about with the best of them, but there always, in those last vestiges of every smile, the cold returns; a mighty slap to the face, a sharp stab through my chest. It's a tit for a tat with that devil happiness, a constant pissing contest of give and take, happy succumbing to sad time and again. Happiness is a weak bitch. And yet it's treasured so.
I'll place my maudlin musing upon his head tonight, as it swims up to greet me, reflecting in my imagination - an image discovered in the side of a melting ice cube working towards translucent and back lit by the weak brown of my method of drowning hapless sorrows. Most nights I bear the burden of myself upon my shoulders, but tonight I'll let it sink down and into me, wave a flag at my pity party, and rebundle the bit upon my back with the first lights of the morning.
Damn Potters and their hands, always reaching and meddling and tinkering and insufferable git - he just won't get out.
He was always so warm.