Addiction
~~*~~
There are files on your desk, sent from the Ministry. They're here because you're behind, just like everybody else in your department. You know you should attend to at least some of them, especially those with HIGH PRIORITY stamped across the front, but you won't.
Your children are downstairs, eating. They probably don't know you're home yet, seeing as you came in through the fireplace in your office. You probably should go down there, kiss your daughter on the forehead and sit with them, but you won't.
Your wife is in the kitchen, watching over a bubbling pot of onion soup, anxiously awaiting your return, worried about the amount of time you're spending at the ministry and in your office. You should go greet her, assuage her fears and eat dinner with her, but you won't.
Instead, you reverently remove a vial – the Vial – from inside your cloak, and place it on your desk ever so carefully. The lengths to which you have to go to acquire a memory that is not your own without raising suspicion make caution vital. You wave your wand around the room and the door locks with a click, curtains draw themselves across the only window and with a quiet whine of metal on metal, a custom made grate – through which no wizard or muggle on earth could get through – slide across to bar the fireplace.
You are alone. Completely alone.
Carefully, you cradle the Vial – you've dropped one before and that was not enjoyable – and make your way over to The Cabinet. Once you're there, in front of The Cabinet, you carefully, lovingly, caress the button hidden in the engraved patterns. It opens with a series of quiet clicks. You don't notice you head bobbing back and forth in time with the sounds. In fact, you don't notice anything but the Vial in your hand and the blue light pulsing from The Cabinet as it folds back to reveal It. Suddenly, it's no longer about the ritual. You need your hit.
You need it now. Now.
Without care, you wrench aside the slowly unfolding doors of the cabinet in your way. With shaking hands, you uncap the vial, and let its blessed contents fall into the basin before you.
You touch the surface.
And as you fall, all your problems – work, your wife's complaints, everything – disappear. They belong to someone else now, some poor man trapped in a life that reached its peak and served its purpose years ago. Some sad washed up ex-celebrity stuck between a job drowning him in paperwork and a family drowning him in responsibility he can't, and doesn't want to handle. It all belongs to someone else now. The adrenaline hits you, humming in your veins. You're inside the Pensieve, and it feels so good you don't even have words for it.
You're home.
~~*~~
Author's Note: Credit where credit is due, which in this case must go to the author of the piece that inspired this one - I believe it was called Halycon Days, a much longer, much better piece than my own. If you liked what you've just read, or you're just interested, the search function on 'this here' website should lead you right to it.
Thanks for reading.
~ Quill.
