InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "I need more cowbell."

Theodore Nott (apparentlynott) wrote in intothefire_rpg,
@ 2011-06-18 18:50:00

Entry tags:

hermione granger, june2002, rating pg, theodore nott

Who: Theo & Hermione
What: Insomniac Theo out on a stumble
When: Friday evening
Rating: PG
Incomplete/Complete Incomplete

Theodore had never slept well; as a child, a teen, a young adult, he'd often woken shuddering and soaked through with fear from nightmares, startling awake at the sound of his own voice babbling, shivered awake freezing from a seat on the floor that he hadn't remembered taking. No, he'd never been a good sleeper but even that broken circus ring of nocturnal activity was preferable to the bout of insomnia he was going through now. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept, the days and nights blurring together into a light-dark grey atmosphere of itchy eyes, weary stumbles and a pounding headache.

If he'd been anyone else he might have blamed it on the way history was repeating itself. Okay, he didn't have his father sending him cursed letters threatening him to fall in line with a cause he didn't believe in but that same air of uncertainty was back, the anticipation of the fall like teetering at the top of a step and the pressure to pick a side back like a familiar friend.

He'd left his bare and melancholy room locked and charmed against would-be thieves and had wandered out of Knockturn into Diagon, meandering with his head down through the shops under the semi-anonymity of a Notice-Me-Not spell and wondering if he was just hallucinating that the last time he'd eaten had been three days ago; insomnia just left him feeling sick and he didn't want to eat, even if his was a frame that sorely needed to.

Even this little bit of excercise was starting to wear him out after days of sleepless nights, and he would later blame this very same thing for the fact that he lost his usual grace only to collide with some poor person as he turned to stumble home; a person who he realised, with a sinking heart and a growing pain in his head, knew him from school.

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apparentlynott
2011-06-25 12:14 am UTC (link)

If the concern had startled him the laughter only threw him further off balance and had he not been well-trained in the ways of physical abuse as a child he might have flinched as Hermione held her hand out; as it was, there was the barest flicker of something harried through his expression but it went as soon as it had come.

He hesitantly took her hand and shook it, sure that this was just good manners but unable as always to crush the paranoid part of him that insisted it was some kind of trick. He appeased it with an almost non-verbal charm against harm through the handshake that took two unnoticable seconds to cast before he was smiling politely the way he'd been taught. "Theodore." he said simply, withdrawing his hand to the safety of his pocket. He was secretly surprised at the mention of school - he tried not to think about those days anymore. "I wouldn't have expected to bump into you here." And literally too.

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