The tone which the other man, Cyrus, used, at first made Calvin believe that he was off to a great start when it came to potentially making a new friend- but then he allowed his words to sink in, and realized that the man was simply repeating what Calvin himself had said, and that the tone he had used sounded awfully patronizing- this certainly wasn’t something that Calvin was foreign to, but it had caught him by surprise when he had only greeted the man before him, and couldn’t see what exactly he had done to receive such a response. Calvin’s large brown eyes fell slowly to the sidewalk on which they were standing, both his long, unkempt brown hair and his thick, black-rimmed glasses hiding them from view as he whistled a tune under his breath in an attempt to recover from the teasing. One of the two men chuckled, and Calvin was sure that the skin of his cheeks had begun to turn a light shade of pink; the teacher’s pet had just been fooled in front of the person he was always trying to impress.
There was another flash of a camera- photographic memory of Calvin’s momentary shame- and Cyrus began to ask his questions, the sound of a quill scratching quickly along the surface of a piece of parchment filling Calvin’s ears, like a warning that he was being quoted- though Calvin had never been quite talented at determining the difference between warnings and invitations to embarrass himself and everyone around him, “I’m twenty-four, my birthday was just last month and I had a great birthday party- I got a new laptop!” He explained, almost squealing at the mention of his laptop. It seemed as if his mind had been swept clean of the event of being embarrassed as he went back to his normal way of speech, which was rapid and hardly understandable when spoken at such a pitch.
“You resigned!?” Calvin screeched abruptly, turning his head towards Gabrielle slowly, as if moving in slow-motion would add on to everything that was going on. How was it that she was just leaving the Ministry? How would she be able to wake up in the morning and restrain from visiting the place? Walking about the Ministry, getting as near to those he admired as possible, always feeling as if he were saving the world by spending his time in the Ministry- it was something that Calvin enjoyed almost as much as his extensive collection of muggle artifacts, and that was something that he would not be able to live without. “How-what-why?” the young man whimpered, his shoulders and arms drooping at his sides, as if the energy that he had previously displayed had left him the moment he had heard Gabrielle’s words, “but you were one of them…” he continued, his voice quieting even further as he went on, “one of the best- one of the people I looked up too.”
As if being hit by two bombs at one time, Cyrus spoke, bringing up a fish, which Calvin had cared dearly for, and had lost only weeks before- they were trying to beat the life out of him. They were holding his heart down, binding it with rope, and beating it with iron fists, “Pac-man?” Calvin had turned to once again face the reporter, though this time there was a significant change in his eyes; sorrow appeared to have killed off the life that usually filled his brown eyes, “My poor fish…” he croaked, as if broken, “how did you know about him, h-how did you know? Are you a friend of Reid’s? Maybe Chase knows you- no, Chase likes it when people are nice, and what you’re doing isn’t nice- it wasn’t Chase.”