Author's Note: Yes I'm back, and yes it isn't a long and lengthy one and yes I do apologise but once again that irritating thing called life has decided to knock upon my door. Please enjoy, and if you don't please go eat something tasty then feel better and try again.
Or not.
I don't mind.
To each their own.
Sometimes he imagines things in different colours. Words and tastes and sounds. He thinks of what they would look like. He does that with people too.
To him, most people are grey. A mix of light and dark. The scale can go either way.
His mother was almost white, with tiny hints of blue. His father is jet black, if there were a darker colour his father is that too.
He can't make out what colour he is. He thinks 50/50 most of the time.
But when he took a shortcut through a tapestry and saw her like that, with Draco's hand up her skirt, her head rolled back he was the most blinding scarlet.
He was in a room of auburn tones with a ferocity he could not control. Theodore did not get angry. He did not yell, he did not fight, he did not become unruly.
But all he can see is her floral dress ripped up her thigh, her stockings in a bundle at her ankles and he wants to break things.
The touch feels like the colour of lightning at first, then it cools down and he can't pinpoint what the colour is because all he can feel is her palm against his fingers. And all he can think about is how they've stopped shaking.
Her eyes remind him of the colour of leather lace up shoes.
That night the shadows rush by him and in the light of his wand he studies the pages. He hopes the puddles won't grow tonight.
Something she had written on that parchment stands out to him. She didn't write like the book did, she wrote how she saw things. She wrote about what one of the runes meant, and her cursive becomes rushed –the feathers running faster.
It looks thoughtless. It looks lost. It looks as though she became someone else, someone who wanted her opinion on paper. She is someone who wanted him to read it.
'This one is a brilliant study (page 257 in the book) because there's nothing like it at all in the English language. There are so few runes we've discovered that are similar to this one, because we can't define it. We can only describe what they must have meant. It's fascinating. Babblin will probably test us on this.'
He writes all he can find about the rune. He hopes it sticks.
The way their hands look together is wrong. Draco interlocking his fingers, Pansy's itching into a claw. Draco needs to touch her, he can see it in his eyes. Like there's a rope in Draco's stomach that pulls him to her.
Like he's a bee, trying to rest on the flowers on her dress. Theo imagines them dancing, Draco's hands looking for something he can't find. His fingerprints leaving black stains on her skin.
Theodore looks out across the hall, gold painted across bent heads and tired laughs. The voices feel like darkness, blue and black and yellow pin pricks of stars filling the hollow.
He imagines that unruly hair in delicately pinned rolls that sit on the edges of her shoulders. He imagines wearing the shoes in her eyes and watching her smoke, watching her lips part, watching the release and watching her lids close for a moment.
He imagines taming that unruly hair with the very tips of his fingers. He brushes it back ever so slightly, and walks home with her eyes and her lips.
"You're okay though, right?" He imagines a harp playing while Blaise speaks, he imagines pouring bourbon so he doesn't have to look at the frown between Blaise's eyebrows.
It is the first time Blaise has asked in eight months. He used to envy how easily Blaise would be lost in himself, how he never cared about others, how he trusted them. But Blaise is like a hedge maze, he's the same until he isn't. And in so many ways Theodore has hit dead ends, he can never find Blaise's centre. He doesn't know if Blaise ever finishes.
But if he does it's the look Blaise has now. His dark eyes sparking a soft and deep mahogany in the pits of Theodore's ribs.
Sometimes when he imagines he can sleep, he feels like he's swimming in his sheets. Because they surround him, folding around his bones and he can cover his head and disappear.
The breathing of his roommates sounds like the tide when it's dark and early morning, the beach in the middle of winter. He feels swallowed whole in the linen.
His mother used to paint patterns on the ceiling above his bed. Only when it was storming, and the dark seemed endless she'd light her wand and tell him tales of people who led incredible lives of love and laughter. He'd always fall asleep before the ending, so he never found out if they left.
He imagines them now, trapped in their perfect existence like animals in soft cages. He imagines the way the darkness looks to them, and how they wish upon the moon.