Closed The Fear of What Could Be PV Leo

Interacting With: @Marshal Mozor | Dialogue Hex: #143314

As was regrettably remembered in infamous incidents of bluntness and bedtime brooding, the bakery-bred boy of the Oaksworth family was awful at expressing empathy. He, the stoic standards of Slytherin and subsequent succumbing to peer pressure notwithstanding, didn’t consider himself wholly unable to have compassion for the common plights of peers. Didn’t truly desire to consider himself as such, anyhow, despite proud proclamations of inhumanity and partaking in acts that supported the title of juvenile menace far more than flimsy moral standing. Being a schoolboy thrust into a pitiless pit of poisonous vipers, being subjected to survival lessons instead of the scholarly speeches he’d become accustomed to, being simply who he was. All were taking tangible tolls on whatever normal members of the student body were left, all were given a rather generous portion of evidence to be real. Yet, there were equal measures taken by a past polluted with loving, living parents and a generally comfortable upbringing, which made the whole conundrum a source of even more confusion. Empathy, as his father had put it, was trying on someone else’s shoes when they were sad or happy or mad or all three, somehow, and seeing where they were coming from. It’s just that other people’s shoes were too tight or too large, their socks of materials that caused his skin to itch and of patterns that he couldn’t recognise. Leonard had a terribly truthful reputation of seeking to head out of his microscopic comfort zone, so what reason was there to venture out of others’?

Many, many reasons, of course. Arguments abundant, bounteous bases, and he would ignore them all to remain his cowardly self. He was a researcher, and impartial as the majority of his work requested he be, live experiments featuring test subjects picked up along the halls or selected after quarters of an incomplete conversation were exchanged had a tendency to go every which way except the narrow path he tried utmost to funnel all the pandemonium into. It was not his job to, it was his job. It was also his job to accept that he was not employed in any definition of the word, but he could survive being fired from one of his two hundred and ninety-four economic obligations. Ninety-five, were professional perfectionism to have a specific subsector called ‘berating the self for letting a drop of pumpkin juice seep into, confirming you were, in fact, the plebeian whose lack of loquaciousness haunts you every single moment’ considered its own occupation. Which it was going to be, considering how messily the first ritualistic feeding of the last day at the castle went.

A vehement (very nearly violent, had a sixth year’s screech owl’s talons gone any closer to his face) myriad of emotions were wafting through the air as mealtime took place. Quite frankly, the snake didn’t understand any of them. Breakfast at the Great Hall was always a time of chaos and war and anything else children thought appropriate before nine in the morning, but he found that it was the beginning and end of every academic year that were assigned responsibility for the worst of these sensations. Gossip was swiftly shot from the mouths of machine guns, each bullet ricocheting as the echo of the structure tossed some paring of hearsay about Bethany Something’s parentage his unwilling way. He had, despite the time slotted for breakfast being just as long as every other day in school, not a second to enjoy any of it. It being inordinately loud, on this fine day that he started seven point two minutes later than he would’ve liked. He had taken to the hobby of fixing his tie’s Prince Albert knot every two minutes and tugging mercilessly at his grey woollen vest as he traversed throughout the corridors as something of an apologetic oblation, which seemed to have taken effect. Notably, that one bloody corner he’d always forgotten to turn at finally didn’t smack his face with solid wall, but more notably was a familiar sleepwear-clad figure among the heads, tails, and assorted extraneous body parts that definitely didn’t belong where he saw them.

“Marshal?” Components of the constantly cheerful creature that was fellow dragon trainer Marshal Mozor were recognisable: shaggy blonde hair, fair skin, pyjamas displaying dragons in such conspicuous manner that removed anyone but fellow dragon trainer Marshal Mozor from being the culprit of walking right past him. Yet still, the grin was missing. Not a grin, mind you, but the grin that ensured business of the universe was proceeding as usual just as the dark circles underneath his orbs of vision declared that existence was continuing on its merry, farcical way. Well, he supposed now was as good a time as ever to find out if the first year had secretly enrolled his moodier twin Morshel Aldoos Mozor. He pushed past the growing crowd of corridor countercurrent to catch up with the lion, feeling a familiar sort of worry in an unfamiliar sort of situation. It was concern for someone that was not him, and it could only be explained by the fact that the unconcerned someone had become concerned. Was it force of an occult plague, awakened by one of his multitude of mistakes? Was it a direct effect of his actions, a string of careless, less-than-flattering sesquipedalian syllables somehow reaching the other’s ears via backstabbing grapevine? Or was it something else, something the most precise person he knew missed?

“Marshal, you, er,” he bit his lip and paused, sending a frantic search-and-rescue call out for the next part of his sentence. Such sesquipedalian syllables, flattering or not, were now barely scraping out of a suddenly dry throat. One would think that he would be able to sort out his thoughts by now, that he would have gotten half accustomed to his state of puddle-of-putty being, and one would be so very incorrect. “Are you looking forward to the summer? I’ll write as much as I can, but recently my Mum’s gotten into all that Greenpeace, ‘be a lover, not a litterer’ sort of crowd. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s just rather obvious Hogwarts is very dedicated to the whole classic parchment and scroll deal.”

“It feels a bit strange, doesn’t it? We won’t be seeing this place for a while.” Contracted somewhere in the personal pet peeves top twenty surrounded by peeves for actual pets: stating the obvious. Observance was meant to reveal the unknown by looking at the unknown from a different perspective–in the same dress shoes he and himself owned, thank you very much; you couldn’t identify a cumulus cloud from a particularly shy and sluggish sheep if you merely described a puff of white moving along a centimetre a second. What use were gaudy swashes of the broadest strokes when the little details could say so much more? Besides, at some point, to the buzzing shock of many, hypocrites had conveniently fallen off the list entirely along with liars by his seventh month at hoggy, warty Hogwarts. “I can promise second year will be fun for you. We’ll totally get to merchandise some spinoffs of your current attire by then.”

As was bitterly bored into the minds of many a nursery numpty thinking their harlot’s gamble of an artificially flavoured apple juice box would earn them the privilege of accessing the brilliant brain of Leonard Oaksworth, the prattish prince of privileged pessimism was awful at making friends. It was intentional on some occasions, unintentional in a handful, and by unicorn hook or arcane crook, Marshal was met with neither fate. He didn’t desire, truly or falsely, for such to change any second now. Turning to another name beginning in ‘m’ for an answer proved right too many times to remain a trivial epigram, Murphy’s law stated that anything that could go wrong will go wrong. Something was wrong, that much was clear, and that was fine because everything else was right. Everything would be fixed, whatever everything was, and they would have the better part of a decade to go through together, fire and friendship included.

And then there was the most obvious outcome of this conversation, taunting him in the fashion of a phantom feline whose disappearance and appearance alike preceded one of the worst nights of his life, and in the same fashion of the spectre’s casual invisibility was that he knew next to nothing as of then. It was five post meridian he had met Marshal, a faultless example of the furry, flaxen, fearless Panthera Leo, and it was their parting in the rousing of dinner. It was a time he was too nervous to track but he was sure was simultaneously too late and too early he really wanted to meet Marshal, and he didn’t really know how to describe the Gryffindor as of that moment. This could go horribly, all his words taken as toxicants and sustaining him for years to come on sheer regret for ending a blossoming…anything.

It was time to forget the hypotheticals, he reminded himself. Marshal was way too excited for that, he was far too whatever he was to remember basic functions, and. If they were running in the perfectly wrong direction, there would naturally be no energy left to spare in the action of running back, and that was perfectly alright. Right?