Milking the Victim Card Closed

Life, in its grand mystery, was least imposing when it was boiled down to its cracked foundation as a sequence of developments, untimely or otherwise. Around many heads swirled questions, ceaseless searches for something so trivial as meaning or purpose, or answers to questions that by the time there was reason to ask, we would not be conscious to hear the answer. People in the end would do and commit to what they found solace in, often the promise that their domino-effect driven course served at its end to, if nothing else, feed the fish. Levi, personally, took the approach that he had far less to worry about should the end be just that, and the actions he considered real and true to be not written off as a mere test of will.

Winnie’s birthday was a checkpoint. Each day on its side was as bland and stormy as ever, but for that date, she chose to dazzle the world with her color. Generously share it with others. She loved so much, too much, far more than her body was willing to hold, and she left an oozing trail of it in her wake wherever the rhapsodic girl may wander. Levi crawled behind her, perhaps with a masked hope that some of that would stick to his palms, seep under the layer of stretched skin and poison his veins, then take a bloody ride to every blackened organ and cavity. He ended up with dry hands and red eyes. Further, parasitically latched upon the two that reminded him that only half of that was natural.

This Thursday was uncharacteristically warm, and the castle basked in the comfortable glow of the sun. Strands of daylight collapsed over the grounds, rinsed delicately along the shadowy crevices and corners that tended to hide from such a day. Today, though, the typically gruesome decline of autumn had halted, and the world began to spring to life for only a few hours more, leaving a bittersweet taste of what to look forward to and what to miss during the coming months. Beautifying death, the boy could never get behind, dancing in heaps of fallen leaves which to him were drained corpses. But this, the remnants of vigor before, there was such thing solely as living with dignity.

It was barely past noon, and the airless Great Hall had been packed from wall to wall with a variety of people he didn’t want to see. Not that they were particularly dislikable, but the lacking aesthetics of their presence drained the hall of any atmosphere, of any tint or shine, and they dared taint the memories of the birthday he’d demand live on. Keep it in a daydream, if he must, to ensure the little things that made the universe so callous never got their hands on it. The Gryffindor was hardly the dreamy sort to care about the state of things, but he cared about those who did. Levi found more interest in those who let the sun comb through their hair than the warmth itself, perhaps credited to ungratefulness, or furthermore, incapability. Motives were irrelevant at the line’s finish; he was outside absorbing nature’s never-enough gifts just like anyone else who gave a damn.

Oh, but how lulling those damns were. He occasionally filled empty minutes with pointless queries as anyone else, most often if it was compassion that made their faces light up like that. Was it the humanity that painted her tresses so vibrant, the shimmer underneath every inch of her pristine skin? Did that come directly from her grey eyes, which made up for what they lacked in iridescence with intensity? They weren’t dull like the absence of color, they were alive, an ocean crashing over sharp rocks and sweeping away everything in its reach. A cloudy sky above waters at unrest, endless, retreating within her skull for miles where there was not blood and bone, but a sea to sail.

He’d been gazing at the girl beneath the tree for the past several minutes, occasionally shifting his gaze to the side at the Great Lake. Sun rays danced on its surface, twirled and jumped from lazy wave to wave, muted whooshes dangling above. The same breeze tangling stray threads of brown hair whistled through the pages of the book in her lap, growing dust as she busied herself with a leather journal. This was their tether, the wind they shared in the distance between. That and a book of presumed thoughts burdening their shoulders when they walked. Vaguely, Levi questioned if she got hers the same way he came to own the logs. If their pages were at all in sync with one another, if they could trade and if either of them would ever know it was the severed wires of someone else.

The Gryffindor wasn’t the kind to rehearse, instead to let primal instincts run rampant and trust they knew the direction. Deception ran deep enough in his genetics that he didn’t need that careful consideration; manipulation was the will of his lashing tongue. The processes all took place in the background of his brain, overshadowed by grinding gears and raw knuckles, and the worst and long-term plans were reserved for the safe charcoal blanket of midnight. If he thought aloud, the telepaths may hear. Levi was almost unaware that his legs had dragged him across the grass, standing now beneath the green canopy under which she lounged, quick to brutally slam her journal closed. “Evelynn, right? I’ll get to the point, I can see you’re busy. I have something of a proposal for you.”

His gaze was locked where hers would be if her glance trailed up from the novels on her lap, making it clear he was uninterested in peering at the secrets she poured into those pages. Well, he was interested, more than, but she didn’t need to know that. It was secondary to studying the structure of her face, the tilt of her nose and the precise groove of her cupid’s bow. And it all came last in the race with those eyes, in which he’d drown before their relationship ever began and ended.