[memory] What: Memory Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing. Warning, this memory contains: Teen rebellion, revenge thoughts.
You're not meant to be out of your dormitory at this hour, and your heart is pounding with fear, or maybe it's exhilaration at the possibility of being caught. You've pulled a jumper over your pyjamas and keep to the edges of the hall as if the shadows there might keep someone from seeing you when there is nothing really to hide behind.
If you're caught, there's the possibility that your parents will pull you out. It seems a slim possibility, the likelihood of them sending you a sternly worded letter expressing their severe disappointment in how they've embarrassed you - that's more likely. Perhaps they'll send someone to pick you up, perhaps not.
There's a sound as you reach the end of the hall, near the staircase that leads down from the dormitories towards the common areas, and you pause, heart pounding.
Instead of focusing outward, for a moment, you focus on the internal circumstance, and then that focus turns outward.
He was supposed to meet you in the room at the end of the hall. You've been giddy with the anticipation of it for most of the week. Being noticed, figuring out a plan to find some time together in defiance of the Head Boy or the instructors, it's all been something to look forward to, but as you pause, you realize he's not there.
The noise came from below, and you slide back into one of the shadows nearest you. There's someone downstairs, this is something known as certainly as you heard the sound earlier, an innate knowledge, that the someone is waiting for someone to cross the stairwell. There's the question of whether he was caught somehow, and the game was given up in this, or the possibility - not entirely without any merit - that it was set up purposefully, and the person waiting below is specifically waiting for you.
It might be unnerving how quickly your mood turns, how quickly your heart goes from pounding in anticipation to fury coursing through your blood. You could kill him - although your head reminds you that you don't know. You. Don't. Know.
Jaw clenches, and you stand, motionless in the shadows: One of the knights of armour that pretentiously line the walls.
There is a footfall on the stair. You should have left already. Crept back to the room before they could come, but you didn't. You don't move, still. A focused thought: I'm not here, I'm not here, I'm not here.
A professor stands at the top of the stairs, glancing both ways down the hall. The man turns towards the room where you were intended to meet him. The door is pushed open, and you think if something could just keep him.
Something fell. And the Professor quickly enters the small closet fully.
You don't ask why, or how you did it, or whether it gave too much away. You move.
Quiet stockinged feet down the corridor. No looking back. The door is much lighter than it typically feels to you, and it doesn't creak at all as you latch it back into place, creeping underneath the covers of your bed and pulling them up to your nose.
The certainty that someone will come and look fades with each passing moment, and eventually you turn to your side. You don't want to think that he sold you out, but you know, somehow, that he did. Your temper feels hot, and you want to avenge your bruised heart with a whirlwind, but know better. There are things worth risking expulsion for. He isn't one of them.