Who: Juliette Warrington (can be open, it’s just a long log) What: touching her first baggage When: Friday afternoon Where: her hut --> somewhere outside in open space Status/Rating: complete as a log/low
Three. I bet it’s only three. Jules opened her eyes to the unsurprising view of the powder blue tent above her. It hadn’t changed since that freakishly tall, silvery blonde girl had set it up. The foreverness of the tent only added to the foreverness of their new world: harsh in every aspect, endlessly cold, white, and expansive. Juliette assumed their little island hadn’t changed - that it must still be an island - but she also hadn’t ventured out far enough to be certain. She barely wanted to leave the tent.
Honestly, she was starting to fear she was becoming depressed. An ugly word, just to think it. Of course it wasn’t like it’d been going on for months - just some days, a couple of weeks tops. Maybe it was normal to want to lie in her bed all day. Sometimes she read, sometimes she doodled on spare pieces of parchment. It was the warmest, comfiest spot she could think of now. Well, she could think of one even better but she also kept trying to stop herself from exploring that option. Option. Like he wouldn’t say yes.
She let out an annoyed huff, tired of lying around even if she didn’t want to be out in the cold. It could be a fun place to experience. Part of her imagined some specific details to this environment and her curiosity told her to check it out but overpowering that was the part of her that didn’t want to be alone out there. Maybe she could drag Scorpius around later, when she really felt like moving.
For now her mind wandered over her personal bubble space (one thing that tent was spectacularly good for) until it landed on the fullness below her. Baggage. Daunting. Stupid. Useless baggage.
Only it wasn’t useless - every piece contained something of hers, didn’t it? Her wand was in there, she knew that. Jules hadn’t particularly been ignoring her baggage, she just had a lot of convenient excuses. She thought about it multiple times, still. Obviously it was the only way to get her wand and the need to succeed had started burning a fire inside her until she couldn’t ignore it, especially not when stuffed into such a small area with nothing but a few personal belongings and a pile of luggage bigger than her.
She had rolled over on her side so that she could see pieces jaunting from the corner of her view. While she didn’t think of herself as scared, her breath had picked up with the nerves of facing this foe. After a last, determined sigh, Juliette set her jaw and sent herself over the edge, coming onto her knees and toes (cushioned with a few pairs of socks). She stayed bent beside her cot as she threw it all to the wind and quit hesitating, reaching for the first piece of luggage she saw rather than thinking about it for another second.
Pretty immediately, she regretted her decision. Every old thought of her real mother came flooding over her - every late night she pushed Daphne aside for the distant dream of where she actually came from, every recreation of her mother and how her life might be different, the emotions all filled her up and she sat back, mouth hanging open.
It wasn’t like she did it constantly. She hadn’t even had these thoughts in a while, though she could admit they were still around. She never even had a true reason. Daphne had been there almost since she could remember, and they had a lovely life together. Just the mere knowledge of having a different parent made her crazy sometimes. The what-if’s and the wonderings of who she might be raised by someone else. Jules liked to think not much would be different, probably because of how much she enjoyed her life (until a certain point), so reaching for this abstract idea didn’t work on a few fronts.
But there it was, burning in her heart and mind. She fiercely wanted to cry for a minute as it consumed her and eventually she came back to realizing it was all to do with baggage. Her wand. That’s why she was there, kneeling on the floor of a tent in a hut in the antarctic. This is what baggage was meant to do to them. While she had heard the words, the process, she hadn’t anticipated the actual cruelness of it all. At literally every turn it was like Delphine was aiming to make them absolutely miserable. Jules didn’t see the happiness behind any of it; maybe Delphine was somewhere having a great laugh at them all, clinging on to some small hope of her promise, while falling apart in every other way. Maybe there was no Delphine and a group of sadistic fucks had them all running good. The possibilities went on.
“Happy. What a joke,” Jules had to clear her throat and rub her eyes before she got herself back onto her cot where she sat on the edge, trying not to get sick. When she closed her eyes, all she could see was this old photograph, her favorite of her real mum, and it all became just too much. The tears finally escaped. Tired of it all, she fumbled and ripped the tent open so she could run out into the snow, away from the huts and all that crowded space. Out there, at least, she could breathe, even if her face was all wet and she hadn’t even put on shoes.