Who | Theo & OPEN When| Tuesday after work and Draco's nightmare Where | Diagon What | Meandering in the guise of shopping Rating| TBD, mulling over of dark thoughts incl abuse Status | Open, incomplete, rambling babble
It had been a long day at work, long and unsatisfying where the hours dragged but the workload seemed too great. Some days Theo could work and work and keep going until long after he was supposed to go home and sometimes it was a struggle for him to get out of bed to even get to work. He'd woken up groggy and feeling vaguely unsettled in Draco's bed and the memories of what had happened the other night trickled back to him like some unwanted melting ice cube in his head. He'd spent some time fussing over his friend while trying to act like he wasn't fussing before he'd had to get up and out and leave for work.
He hated the nights where Draco was woken by what couldn't really be called nightmares but more flashbacks, but he'd been glad that he had at least been able to get there and draw him out of it instead of leaving him at their mercy; odd that he had a spider to thank for that. He hadn't asked anymore about Enid but he could make some educated guesses, concluding at the end of all of them that it wasn't his place to meddle and that he certainly wasn't about to uncover her secret, if she had one, when Draco had clearly gone to lengths to keep it secret.
Still, she had been the reason he'd been awake to pull Draco out of it and as such he was strolling through some shops in Diagon trying to look for something that wouldn't be an inappropriate present for a spider-possibly magical-possibly Acromantula-possibly just some kind of patronus thing and was mostly coming up blank. He eventually gave up on that idea and decided he'd try and come up with something else, maybe spell based, if it was even going to be applicable. He started browsing for potions ingredients instead, most of them animal based as he had some theories about wandwork and he needed some raw ingredients to experiment. His Master Wandmaker had given him the go-ahead to explore on top of some of the more cerebral work he was doing, but he was getting the feeling that the wizard didn't like the fact that Theo was starting to dig, starting to deviate from tradition, so he was planning on possibly keeping this one a little more discrete.
He'd been tired at work. It wasn't the incident in the night as he rarely had more than three or four hours sleep on average and he wasn't sure that Draco had even slept after he'd woken, more likely to be his euphemistically called 'mood problems' playing up again. He'd been in a mood since before Romania, something pensive and withdrawn, but, with the weather cold and the days darkening earlier, it seemed that this was trying to drag him further into something that he might have to go to St Mungo's for help with. He hated that, saw his inability to cope not as a medical issue, not as a reasonable response to years of suppression and pressure but as a personal weakness, something that he was just too self-indulgent and weak-minded to avoid. He didn't see that this anger and the scorn he directed at himself was just making the problem worse.
He'd nearly fallen asleep while waiting for one of the Ashwinders to burn itself out and as much as his boss was aware that he had some issues and would likely have given him some leeway he still felt ashamed. He realised that he'd been wandering in and out of the various shops down Diagon for about an hour and a half now. He didn't want to go home but he found that he didn't want to go back to Draco's either, feeling in his current mood that he was maybe wearing out his welcome.
Small, skinny body cold in the icy bite of the winter wind, the gnawing ache of hunger going unnoticed in his stomach like an old friend, like a heavy weight that he'd learned to balance with, he parked himself up in the lee of a doorway, crossed his arms over his chest and tried to figure out what he'd do now.