(( OOC: Sorry for the delay
Now, a little background music for this post, if you like ))
Reid hated the way his name sounded from her lips.
I don’t remember asking you to call me by my first name. It would have sounded childish and ridiculously petty to say it. So he didn’t, hands curling in, words burning on his tongue.
But that didn’t stop his nails from digging into his palm, hands fisted, knuckles whitening, scouring out half-moon impressions on his skin. With her every soft word and every restrained look, the feeling mounted: vision blackening, stomach tightening, fire flooding his bloodstream. It was when the black spots started emerging at the edges of his retina that he, through a cloud of irritation and alarm and
angerangeranger, realized it was too far gone.
He tried to exhale, forcefully expelling breath and rage in one turn, but every breath caught in his throat like a vice, refusing to leave. Dr. Kramnik had said…..just a count till ten……but his mind was a blinding black of nothing, chest contracting in so far that it would explode, any minute.
His fingers had become numb, he realized, belatedly. White, except for the angry scratches on his palm. He slid them up the wooden frame, and hooked his fingers in, ripping the photograph out.
He raised his eyes and they darted to her own orbs like a lightning strike, unrelentingly pinning her down. Stare unmoving and still fixed on her, he raised his left hand slowly to the picture, like a statement.
When his fingers first tore the border, the willow tree behind her disintegrated.
No Room, magical or not, was going to tell him what he required. Needed.
Another rip, deafeningly loud in the silence; their very breaths seemed to be halted. The sunset sky, the road (fake, fake, all
fake ) started flickering. He tore off the first strip from the picture, right through the picture of his young self. The smell of wet ground, of oncoming rain, of cloying flowers faded out…leaving the smell of cold stone. Another tear, this time through Rika’s bright eyes. The gravestone flickered bravely, for a brief moment, then disappeared. The scene started dissolving, pixelating….like water poured down a painting. The illusion was breaking.
A brief flash of vertigo….there. Now they were standing in the room they had begun in, the Room desperately clawing on to any memory. The peach walls, the white doily, the grand piano. His fingers constricted, then with a vengeful motion ripped off the young, blonde girl’s head in the picture.
The image, the illusion of the Room around them was distorting again; the piano flickering the most of all. Somewhere, in between the flickers, Reid could see dents in the piano, long scratches, bent keys; the Room drew on his memories, and he forced upon it the memory of the piano as it truly was today: a burnt out, broken shell: destroyed by an eleven-year boy in a furious rage after he had come back from the hospital after identifying his sister.
Reid raised his fist to the air, the torn pieces of the photograph gripped in the confines of his fingers. His eyes were still fixed unwaveringly on her. He turned round his fist, and uncurled his fingers.
The pieces started drifting to the floor. The moment the first one made contact, the illusion shattered and Reid Dixon found himself standing in a cold, stone room in Hogwarts staring at Vivianna Varnes.
He raised an eyebrow, slow. Drained, vindictive and triumphant all at once.
You don’t know anything. And you never will.“Now that that little dream-world has been disposed of…….” His eyes flashed. “Get out.”