severin connolly ; river tam (bytwos) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-11-26 01:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | river tam, sirius black |
Who: Severin and Toby
What: A chance meeting on a crowded street.
Where: Downtown Seattle
When: Black Friday
Warnings: None
It had been some time since Severin had taken a trip into the city - in fact, he hadn't been back since he'd moved to Academy. Being in the city made him think of Will, think of the things he'd done wrong and the things he could no longer easily do, and so he had stayed away from it.
Still, he had to go back sometime. He couldn't avoid people for the rest of his life, and the very thought of the hurdles he could no longer find his way over always filled him with frustration. So he set off for downtown on Black Friday, walking into the shopping district with his shoulders squared. After the masquerade, he felt sure that he could make this work, somehow.
He hadn't thought about what day it was, focused so closely on his own determination to go somewhere and try to at least pretend at normality that he didn't realize his mistake until it was far too late. Regular crowds he might have been able to handle, but this was pure madness. People flocked from store to store in loud groups, their thoughts all ricocheting off of one another, a din, a tidal wave that swept him up.
He only made it half a block walking before he had to run. He didn't know if he would be able to make it if he doubled back, so he plunged through the fray instead, until the battering waves of thought left him so disoriented that he was forced to duck into an alley. The sound was marginally better there, just a touch quieter, and he tried to grab at his own thoughts, remind himself which were his and which weren't, to calm down. He leaned against the brick, desperately scrabbling for his usual methods of coping with this many people at once, counting or logical progressions, but every time he started a foreign thought came barreling through about 'this deal' or 'that girlfriend' and blew it to pieces.
He tried putting up walls - he'd done it once, so he knew he could - but without the buffering of a separate identity to hold the thoughts back, the improvement was marginal at best. So he breathed, and he counted his breaths, and he tried to decide whether making a run for it was worth it, all while fighting very real tears at his own inability to surmount this obstacle. What sort of genius was he really if he could conquer every trial except the ones keeping him from getting back to normal?