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title: Continuing with the Corruption date: august 23, 2002 Metabolism is a wonderful thing. Percy has got these cravings sometimes, for food. He goes down to the kitchen and loads a plate of biscuits and goes upstairs to work. Fifteen minutes later, all he has to look at is a blank scroll, an empty plate and crumbs scattered across the table like constellations. So he goes down again. After an hour it becomes a pattern, and it stays a pattern for the rest of the night, woven into the fabric of time like an old friend. He falls asleep after a few hours, after one in the morning, when it’s too dark and quiet to be anything but dead to the world. But not too fast, because fast is something that Percy Weasley never does; it’s something that happens to him. Sometimes he thinks of Oliver, he doesn’t think of Oliver per se -- more like things that remind him of Oliver. The always-wet grass on the Quidditch field, short-cut brown hair, blue skies with Oliver zooming into them and away from him. Percy had never thought in his wildest dreams he’d get dumped in such an amazingly theatrical way; if he squinted, it would be all very prettily metaphoric but Percy was never one for the unspoken things in life. “Is there anyone?” Percy had asked. “No,” replied Oliver, and failed to look even remotely sad. “It’s only you.” And Percy understood, because if anything, Percy has always been the one to understand and to explain it to the more slightly perplexed of the masses. So: yes, Percy has always understood he’s always been a blip on somebody else’s radar, or the curious hitch in static playing on the radio of somebody else’s ears. A month later, Percy was doing his rounds as a Prefect, comforted by ritual and wondering, vaguely, who else was, when he saw short-cut brown hair and thought: Oliver. And Marcus, afterwards; Marcus with the name like a Roman Emperor who cuts off tongues and makes Christians tread on the hot coals of their beliefs and laughed. He wanted to call out one of their names (because at this point in time their names looked as if they were tangled up in the other’s teeth) but didn’t, and instead stayed in the darker places of the corridor and stared at the way Oliver and Marcus’ skin was dully reflected off a suit of armour, and how it tinged their hands and bronzed shoulders a rusty silver. One in the morning, he thinks. One in the morning and the sound of wet mouths and the slip-slap of tongues and the click of teeth and deep, throaty incoherence. One in the morning, and the time becomes engraved in his mind. A few years later, when he’s forgotten the encounter, he can only go to sleep after one, but he can’t for the life of him figure out why. |
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