Half Empty, Half Full PV Levi Drakos Closed

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@Levi Drakos

Another day, another night spent in the Hospital Wing.

Cotton filled her ears, her head, the corners of her eyes—the fibers seemed to snake through her veins, crowd her joints, making her blood pump sluggish and slow. Stifling styrofoam stiffness invaded her every move, clawing gently at her bones so that she was sure if she put her arm down too fast her elbow would shatter on the spot.

A tragedy, it was, to wake up head pounding and everything far too dry. What a shame that she had to experience the effects of a hangover with none of the fun. Instead she remembered only a night bitter and cold, the copper penny taste of biting down on her tongue, teeth too sharp in her mouth and everything else too soft.

Now it was morning. She knew this because she knew that when the curtains were down the early morning light was almost completely blocked by the heavy fabric; what little that made it through rarely persevered past the cover of her eyelids. She knew the feel of Hospital Wing light on her face, which felt distinctly different from the light in her dorm room, and the shift of people—however few—in the room, every move echoing up to bounce and skitter like a many-legged insect over the leaves of a rainforest, the grip of its feet against the soil flickering into the canopy of the high cobbled ceiling of the castle's infirmary.

Sometimes the light was welcome. Things liked to creep and crawl in the night. Things that creeped and crawled also liked to creep and crawl in the morning, but it was far easier to see them coming then, and in the night Cel knew that they could come with no warning at all, which of course made them much bolder.

There was, of course, the question of whether she could do anything about it even if she did see them coming. The answer that she had come to after a lot of debating through the materialization of every hell to exist in every mythology that decided, rather rudely, to make its home in the temples of her head was that there was a pretty good chance that she couldn't. On the other hand, dying in the dark with no warning at all was much less cool-looking than heroically fighting off a bunch of fiendish creatures and succumbing only after a good effort at making sure they harmed no others (this would, of course, be what it looked like on the outside, Cel did not really have enough care in her heart for the other students in the castle to lay down her life for them, especially even the callow innocent first years), and if there was any advantage to all the shit that they'd been through at Hogwarts so far, it was looking cool. Maybe that was why she kept on coming back.

Regardless, the point was that her affinity for light over the darkness was only because, in certain situations, the darkness was worse, not because the light was much good by itself. This was not an assertion that could be applied to all situations—in this one, for example, the light that glowed vexingly across her vision was not welcome at all. You know how black holes suck everything around them into a ditch where the fabric of spacetime is altered, and after an eternity passes for the bystanders but only a micron of time goes by for the subject at hand, it swallows and spits everything back out in the tiniest pieces they could be like a picky toddler whose parents are beginning to regret getting married and whose house is getting ready to develop sentience just to scream the words "SHUT UP?" That didn't sound like such a bad fate, right now.

All this and more she muttered in varying degrees of clarity under her breath—a bystander could, possibly, with half a ton of effort and possibly a little bit of calculus, puzzle out whatever it was she was bitching about, but the footsteps that went by were most likely not interested in the acrid complaints that fell from her mouth, sotto voce.

Unfortunately, going back to sleep probably wasn't an option either. With more effort than possibly required, Cel cranked her eyelids open like she was operating heavy machinery; that is, very reluctantly and with a good level of caution, for someone not learned in operating heavy machinery such as herself. (At this point the reader might like to replace the words "a good level" with "a buttload" if they want a more accurate description, but "a buttload" doesn't sound as sophisticated as "a good level" because sophistication requires subtlety, and as we know already Cel is all about aesthetics.) She reached a hand out halfheartedly at the water on her nightstand, stopping when she realized that her extended arm was not, in fact, long enough to reach the cup, and dropped it defeatedly with a huff. "What good is waking up if it can't be in peace," she muttered, the inside of her mouth crackling with dryness around her words. "Or to caffeine, if I want to stay that way."

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