Best of 1983 solo

OOC: Full permission was obtained from Santario for the content of this post. Beliefs and practices expressed are purely IC and not reflective of myself.

Banner By Winnie Harper

Backdated to September 24th, 2021
Of Interest To @Santario Martin

It’s a royal blue sea, the daylight dripping down in fluid rays and skipping across the surface in translucent gold shards, leaking through the barrier to the navy chasm beneath. It’s a restless sea, small waves ripple throughout, parts of the water rise above and crash atop the others. It's a sentient being greater than what abominations lurked between its filmy teal folds. It’s a thunderous sea, each wave caresses and disperses into the ether as they swell. The myth of sirens turns out to be nothing more than the ocean’s purling song coercing a captain overboard, a captain that wished to drown where a scorned lover would see. The Pacific speaks to you, translating the hymns of the Atlantic into florid nothings to engrave their print in your fingertips, wrinkles of skin searching for air.

You can’t find Santario here. At least, not until those golden flecks melt silver, tide illuminated by a milky light not raining from the sky but rather, radiating from it. The moon wouldn’t willingly let its crystal light scatter across the ocean and so it remained frozen in the night, dangling from the crescent body like icicles. The creamy beams, the white pearls dancing along the water’s reflective surface, this was a beauty that didn’t overwhelm you. It didn’t scream and wash over you, leaving the world drenched, craving, unable to ever fully dry and shake that last drop of liquified adoration from its ear. It didn’t have to. It—she—could whisper, or barely that, and a hush would blanket over the passengers. They lean forward, swallow her words from the tip of her tongue and the inside of her cheek. That was where Santario was. Within a divine miracle, wrapped in starlight and home. You choose to gaze at her, bask in the glow and soft, ashen silence.

Left to the truth, dreams would be of biting words and a hint of illusory night jasmine in first waking breath. Thus, he imagined her much more than he knew her, and that had to change.

Levi’s pace slowed and he pressed his shoulder to the stone wall of the corridor, peering through the thin gaps between the flurry of students rushing in from the Great Hall. The creak of grand doors acted as a crumbling dam, wilting into extraneous limbs to allow the inflated waters to empty into themselves. A poor replica of the sea in his mind's eye, warm bodies and a splash of disjointed colors rinsing the vacancy from every corner of the hall.

A few times a strand of the current would collide with his motionless figure, rocking his head against the wall with a dull thud, but his expression remained unchanged and his mouth a straight line. To be dealt with in private tonight, he'd comb his hair aside with his fingers once a bump began to form. Ice it, do it all again the next day. Hazel eyes stared out into the mass, and through the obscuration he was unblinking and transfixed on a shimmer of something between the shoulders of two students. Some silvery beacon, fracturing the surface which broke its promise to be opaque. A serrated edge just to her aura, it was a wonder the floor wasn't lined in red. A whirl of raven hair and he’d pushed himself off the wall once more.

There was a comfort to be found in routine. No, not a comfort. To be so would imply there were ever a time he was arrested by disorder, by a need for stability when no such craving so human as that could exist in him. What there was, in comfort’s place in all its monotony: confidence. Predictability. An asset to Levi, not a fulfilled inner need. Food, water, air, that was about the extent of his humanity. That morning had been similar to those preceding it, and likely to those following it: a pretty girl wanders in early, a green messenger bag and many books towed alongside her. For a while, you have to stare. You'll convince yourself that, if you don't, a thousand things could go wrong. A cyclone swirls and lurches over the South Pacific because your eyes darted to the side for half a second. There is something so glamorous about the blackness she spreads by touch, it wasn’t within her clothes or heritage, she was just resplendent and would still be if covered in loose dirt.

Even with the bubbling distance between you as she finds a seat, you can see the jewels locked safely in her eye sockets. The gems are prized, stolen straight from the discarded crown of an overthrown sovereign. In her posture was a sense of anarchy, an agent of flawless chaos, and if she fell to her knees, it would be done with elegance. Any cut to pierce skin so pristine would be as a deep blue vein, the way they painted her the same as a river cutting through Earth, making its home there. Eventually, you look away, both because it’s a privilege you could lose and because that boy dims her twilight glow. He eclipsed her, and though his eyes had that same soulful dagger protruding from his dilated pupils, it didn’t look quite as beautiful on him.

Levi spends each dawn lingering by the imposing doorway, busying himself chatting with some fortunate stranger until ebony hair goes past, just barely gracing his peripherals. It was enough. He’d know her by her shadow, by the scent she left stirring in her wake, the click of her shoes which was a tad more musical than the chorus of witches and wizards waltzing through the small hall. When she falls by him, Levi adjusts his seating accordingly: never the same place, always the same view. She neglects most of the food served, diligent to only pick at the assortment of fruits lain across the vast table, and the brunet’s hands mindlessly find each other to worsen the red dye permanently trapped beneath his knuckles. Glancing up, drifting back down, fiddling with his robes and the silverware. Mindless conversation when someone addresses him, polite but ultimately meaningless, and when they remind him of it later, it will only surface memories of improper eating habits and that damned boy.

Most important time of the day, they say.

For a heartbeat, Levi thought he'd hit the wall again. “Pardon me,” he muttered, having rammed into a rather broad-shouldered, red-tied student walking briskly in the opposite direction. The direction he should be walking. Eager not to lose his place in the swarm, Levi continued down the corridor as the fellow lion berated him, tossing a cursory apology behind him before setting his gaze forward once again. If it rose to gnaw him once the bedtime routine was finished, he'd deal with it then. The Commons only came with so many places to hide.

Today, like the others, had been long, with fixed clocks and the heavens hoisting the sun by a chain. The sole difference was the classes that filled the hours, and even those were—in the only way that mattered—identical. They weren’t defined by their professor, the subject matter, nor whether the students were cursed by an evening date with a quill, parchment, and boredom. No, the common denominator rendered them all the same: infinite lapses of time in which the ocean was drained. In its cosmic place, a dry, sandy valley littered with the corpses of breathless fish and the remnants of what ecosystems came from that afternoon’s signature whale falls. None of them, not a single one on a single day, contained Santario. The product of their age difference, minimal but hindering enough.

Upon some introspection one night when sleep didn’t come easy, Levi reached the decision they could overcome that. Restore the missed bonding time in a day's emptier hours or the weekend. He’d sit beside her in the courtyard, under the sun’s lustrous rainfall and they’d read together. The stack of books that served as her marking, from a distance it was obvious they weren’t built around potions and charms, but a human vessel’s limitations on vision prevented any further specifics. Elsewhere, he’d watch dueling practices, jaw fallen to catch flies that would, too, be amazed at what strength in magic soared through her. When it came time for the dark-haired Slytherin’s internship, the boy would sit quietly, perhaps break his nose now and then to give her something to do.

Come to think of it, not terribly different from their current arrangement. Still, classes were hell. Any twelve-year-old boy was destined to agree.

The grotesque developing figures of older students, while poisonous visually, came with advantages when meandering down the corridor. Levi stepped in single file, his small frame swallowed by the mangled shadow of his barricade, and the boy’s right hand had come to glide along the wall. There were accented whispers stifled beneath the loud hum of echoing sodden gossip, a suppressed counting of each bump and indentation in the worn stone. When his attention flicked to the gaps that allowed a mere sparkle of hope to spread through and shine on his robes, he’d treat it as the sun’s and let his tension fall, extending his neck to watch the arched ceilings fracture and bleach into a sky-blue abyss.

In this dream, it was the afternoon. The sun was performing its lucent bow above the castle, albeit muffled by a sky cluttered with clouds, leaving a muted golden tinge seeping out upon the stone surfaces and skipping off the jade overgrowth that peered from the crevices of the Courtyard. Flecks of dirt were illuminated by it, drifting through the air in the occasional direct beam like moths flocking to a flame. A fraction of space widened every year between the drab stones they walked upon, cracks bridged by a deep green moss that brimmed over and crawled along the floor. Our Gryffindor protagonist sat with his back to a pillar, defined face often buried behind the thick pages of a Transfiguration textbook. In perfect intervals, his eyes would peek over the top to glance at Santario, who rested on the fountain’s edge with a book in her grasp.

Despite the Courtyard being rather lively at this time for those who weren’t enchanted by the architecture of Great Hall, the scene felt deadened. Perhaps this was a result of the overcast, a dreary grey tone shifting aerially due to the clouds, though it felt more significant than that. An intensity existed within this silence, not unlike the orchestra that sounded within Santario's hushed reality. Memory, melody, sympathy, symphony, each aspect of her was not comparable to just one sound, but to a collection of them, this nuanced and intricate piece. His void had miles in radius alone, and she should not have been enough to fill it, yet it closed around her, and the things she couldn’t heal were simply no longer there. Not scars, not stitched wounds, only snowy ethereal soul where there used to be bloody cavities.

This was right for a Friday. She was a creature of habit in many ways, fortunately for Levi; nearly every other day the ebony-haired snake alternated between spending her lunch in the Courtyard and interning in the Hospital Wing. On adventurous afternoons they’d deviate from this schedule, wander from one to the other but never elsewhere. There was too much exposure in strolling casually into the infirmary (pulling down a ballcap would do little in that setting), so those days were wasted kicking bare ground outside its doors until the clock rang to busy himself. The outdoors provided much more cover, a reasonable explanation for his presence if a sturdy visor failed him, and it was on these days he buried himself in uninteresting text to look away and study the spotlighted subject.

It was this time of day she'd unveil the second type of book from her messenger bag, those not written in exclusively three-syllable words and describing more than incantations and preaching enunciation. The distance between them brewed a murk in his vision, preventing specific titles or authors from being distinguished, but the sight would provoke a genuine smile. Having assumed all of this time that she was pureblooded, a belief he stood strong by now, it was interesting to watch her lose herself in what could be called a muggle’s habit. Pleasure reading in balmy weather, the rhapsody of the fountain's gushing water providing rhythm to the words. It was charming, the way she didn’t have to scream from the rooftops her elitism, how the world didn’t have to fall to hell’s tripping hazard just so she could reign above. No, that was natural. Her head was burrowed in the cosmos and theirs were still trapped on Earth, but her feet were rooted with theirs and no flames climbed up her ankles.

Her, a navy lined book cover, and the occasional bitten pastry pulled from her bag, a cocktail of what no one could guess rouses a dream girl. It was relieving to see her eat, a sporadic unsweetened baked good was far preferable to a life survived only on a cup of peaches and whatever unprepared food was sprawled out across the Slytherin table when dining. She repeated her breakfast routine at dinner—Percival included—and this meant all her nourishments came from a couple savory bites wilted atop her tongue due to the rotten air of what Levi would respectfully refer to as Mattperce. It was worrisome, the possible unhealthy result of a developed aversion to food not prepared by her own or Mother Nature’s hand. A pretentiousness maybe nurtured by her childhood, or a delicate array of taste buds, but something nonetheless that carved its place in his logs, and permanently in the back of his mind.

He blinked, and the sun dimmed into a hallway's torchlight. She'd turned a corner. Damn it.

Despite the lack of windows in this section of the corridors, Levi could feel the evening’s presence trickling through the air, a plague spreading violet and indigo gradients across the rest of the deepening dusk. A weight settled on his shoulders, a heaviness he felt each night, possibly that of the daylight as it dipped beneath the barren trees out of sight. Each step Santario took toward the fork in their road was another tick on the minute hand of the clock, in sync with the stampede of students that were gradually dispersing in different directions to their respective common rooms. What was left was largely a foaming green sea, a lone speck of red and gold protruding from the restless waves. Engulfed by taller peers in silver-lined robes, it was easy to remain hidden in their final stretch.

An owl soared overhead, hovering above one distant student in particular before they vanished together. That spectacle ignited something, the faraway sound of flapping wings fomenting his vexation, and when his eyelids batted shut, he was marching up the Owlery's cold spiral steps.

The first Friday after the beginning of the school year was when he noticed it. Levi had already found himself seated parallel to Percival Gray, who’s biased unattractive quality wasn’t offset by Santario’s calmly alluring temper. Not many minutes of sore staring elapsed before she came through the open doorway, but it was enough to raise an annoyed curiosity and perhaps leave purple craters along Percival's flesh. The following days, he’d paid more attention in the hour leading up to dinner. Throughout that weekend, he learned of the evening walk, which didn’t last beyond Sunday's closure and additionally, didn’t prevent her from seating herself beside Percival the very moment possible. Two more days passed, and that Wednesday he’d followed her to the Owlery, a ritual exclusive to two detached eves of her week: Wednesday and Friday.

Because most of the students had already begun to flock into the Great Hall, the Owlery was rather deserted. A few first years came descending from the staircase sporting puffy cherry eyes, likely having sent letters signed with their homesick signatures to grieving parents. Santario would ease past these and arrive at the bottom landing, Levi loitering behind halfway to the top, partially blurred by the rails of said staircase. The vacant arches in the tower allowed a loving breeze to sway and some withered leaves to have dotted on the floor which he'd be careful to avoid. It was as close as they'd ever get to an autumn indoors, the occasional faint splash to be heard from birds utilizing the fourth landing's grimy fountain.

He’d peer through the bars as the girl beckoned an owl, always of similar appearance: dark feathers adorned in light, multi-colored spots ranging from beige, to white, to cream. Often, striking emerald eyes gazed into his from over her shoulder, hands busy tying a strangely thick parcel to said owl and whispering whatever instruction was necessary. Her serrate inflection was cloaked by the flapping wings and its vibration fell just short of his ear. The moment the bird began to drift from her grip, Levi would rush out of the tower, and although Santario was likely to have heard a brash exit, the only evidence she’d ever catch was a fleeting glimpse of deep brown hair.

As the weeks flowed on, he still hadn’t uncovered exactly what the envelope held. He doubted it to be the common letters of feigned sentiments among others in her year, for a number of reasons that slowly began to unfold with time. Namely, the last reply she received was on September 7th, a day marked in the September calendar of his logs, yet the parcels continued to be ritualistically mailed off twice a week with nothing in return. In so many ways, Santario was arcane; Levi couldn’t read her to see any sign of disappointment or satisfaction cascading over her flawless mien. The serpent could be carved of stone and he’d know no difference but that her chest didn’t swell with intermittent breaths. However, he continued to watch, and bore no intention of ceasing as long as those visits persisted, wondering each time if a clue would sink to his feet.

If it were a film, it’d be in black and white. Shots of her, close and almost vaporous with a gossamer quality, each immaculate detail heightened by the audience’s own affection, and they’d leave that night thanking their deities that she was real. His would be far off, half of his figure always masked in a symbolic shadow of ambiguity. Together it’d be bizarre, if you watched you would wonder why you were so enthralled, some chemical reaction, some hysterical and useless compound drawing you to the screen like a magnet. The end would be bittersweet, just as it was in real life, unable to say goodbye as she disappeared around that final corner.

Curfew was inching nearer with each person to clear from the corridor. They’d seemingly evaporate, leaving only our two love interests standing yards apart, and then it was only him and an empty hall. Stillness rinsed even the darkest crevices, any residue of the student body’s presence replaced with a thin layer of dust. Levi turned, taking long strides in the opposite direction back toward his own common room. In the eerie silence that had settled in the corridor now, a single declaration would ring off the ceiling and blow through each blaze. “Goodnight.”

He would sleep, dreamless. He would wake. And he would do it all again.