WHO: Theo & OPEN to any Slytherins WHAT: Theo can't sleep WHERE: Slytherin Common Room WHEN: Tuesday, around 3am WARNINGS: Theo warnings, TBA
I couldn't end it there As her wooden bones grew through her skin Crumbled naturally As her limbs and leaves had broken free Twenty years before She said, "Don't open your eyes and you can swim" Wanted nothing more She said, don't open your eyes
Theo bolted up from bed, and he hadn't heard himself, but he knew he'd been screaming. He could feel it in the sore jagged points in his throat and in his scattered breathlessness.
He was just glad he had a working wand now, and could do things like put a Silencing charm up around his bed, or perform a cleaning and drying charm so that no one knew he'd wet the bed. Again.
Even without it, he'd still have needed a drying charm to deal with the sweat soaked through his hair. It wasn't as good as actually getting a shower and drying off with a towel, but it was 3am, he wasn't going to wake up the entire Dorm just because magic didn't make him feel as clean as actually washing did.
Even with his bed, clothes and body dry, Theo didn't want to try going back to sleep. The things that waited for him in his dreams hurt, even if he knew rationally that it was just echoes of pain in his body.
He woke aching.
He slipped out of bed, silent as he ever was, relieved that he didn't seem to have woken any of his roommates. He knew that he'd set the Silencing charm that night, but he could never really trust his own work.
He closed the dorm room door carefully behind him and made his way quietly into the Common Room, deserted at this hour. He could have curled up on a sofa for once without being chased off by upper years, or snuggled into the almost dangerously plush cushions of one of the armchairs, but he found himself drawn to one of the great windows that showed off what the subterranean Slytherins were left with as a view.
The sight of the surface of the Lake from below had entranced him when they'd first moved in, and it had yet to lose it's novelty. Even now, in the dark, where it was little more than cold blackness, Theo could still see the moving textures of nocturnal things slipping past the glass, some faint glow of the bright night that managed to come through the surface of the water. It was nothing like seeing it during the day, its watercolour greens and the fascinating creatures that swam by unconcerned, but it still settled something in Theo the same way that seeing Thestrals did.
Well, almost.
He tucked his knees under him on one of the seats under the window and leaned in, resting his head against the surface, pillowed by his hair so that he wouldn't leave a mark, so that the cold wouldn't chase him from his reverie prematurely.
His heart rate was already slowing down, settling into something soothed and regular like the waves the Lake didn't have.
He wouldn't go back to sleep, but sitting here in the silence was the next best thing.