Song Of Storms

Their house used to echo.

Resonate, dance, with the melody. With the sound of gleeful laughter, half-meant, playful taunts, with the sound of their mother humming as she cooked, the microwave whistling merrily in the kitchen; the sound of golf and tennis on the television and their father’s loud voice cheering God-knows-who-it-is-this-time to victory. There were Barbara’s heavy footsteps as she thundered down the stairs, trumpet in hand, Rika’s loud guffaws accompanying the torturous sounds of her twin trying valiantly to play said trumpet; Rika’s dead pan variations of “It sounds like its farting.”, Barbara’s loud exclamations of “Get back here, you!” as she chased Rika up and down and all around, putting the trumpet to much better use by attempting to plonk her twin on the head with it. And all the while, Reid sat in the corner room of the house, sitting and playing.

It was a part of the daily Dixon household routine, and Reid had known his place in it. He had sat in the room at seven o’clock each day, listening to the sounds, seeming for all the world that the others didn’t have a place for him in their world. But the second he stopped playing, a blonde head of hair, followed by a messy brunette, would pop within the door, enquiring why the grand piano had stopped. Because they listened to him too.

Sometimes Barbara and Rika’s chase would find themselves darting round and round the great instrument, with Reid sitting at the head of it, shaking his head in bemusement. Or sometimes they would affect the air of great critics and listen to him, Barbara’s head sticking over his shoulder, hair tickling his nose; and Rika displayed a propensity for sitting on the floor, chin propped in her hand, head cocked to the side. Or sometimes the douches would pretend to dance to the tunes with great dignity, waltzing in and around, chins up, noses high; until Rika stomped on Barbara’s toes yet again, and the façade crumbled into shrieks and laughter and the Tom and Jerry chase began.

They had a favourite: called the Song Of Storms. Contradictorily, it was a light melody, that tripped about their toes and wrapped them in merriment, ringing through their peach walled kitchen and carpeted living room, up it leaped and ran joyously out of the door, till the entire street echoed with it. It was actually a modification of the original tune, discovered when he was fiddling around with the keys, whose sheet music he had never bothered to note down. After all, he never played the original. It was a little too heavy.

Later, when he tried, after the incident, he couldn’t remember it.

It just wasn’t the same. Not without his mother’s low voice, vibrating in the base of her throat. Not without the comforting buzz of the match commentary, and his father’s excited shouts. Not without Barbara’s overdramatic vows of revenge yelled down the staircases, or Rika’s playful taunts. Not without the sound of the girls’ skirts rustling as they whirled around him in a parody of grace, giggling madly.

Reid slid his unfeeling fingers, slowly, drawing them across the smooth black and white keys. He had only meant for some rest, some peace after the entire switching incident. He had walked, and come to the Room, and seen this. Seen a room with peach walls, the paint crumbling familiarly at the edges, a small side table covered with a white-lace doily, an old, grand piano, a worn seat. He sat down.

Maybe what convinced him was the smell. The smell of ink and jasmine and home. The Room had the bloody audacity to replicate that too. Replicate the natural scent of something that was long-since dead.

He played.

The Room was echoing too. But not in the way that it should. It was ringing, resonating, drowning out all sounds, drowning out the silence. If only it could drown out the memories too.

His fingers hit the keys hard, almost punishingly. The floor seemed to be vibrating. It was the original. The title which had earlier seemed so whimsical to him……now seemed achingly, painfully perfect. The Song of Storms. The melody twisted and writhed around him, playing out a dance with the heavens. The very stone walls seemed to shudder. He knew they were stone, the stone of Hogwarts, even though it looked like the wooden walls of his room. Those walls, appearing to quake and tremble around him, as he played their song.

His fingers flew like a frenzy over the keys, hurting, hurting, hitting excruciatingly. Every note. Every note. It was peaking, rising….like a wave about to crash. Till it did, and the end came, and his fingers drew against the last notes quietly. Too quietly.

A storm was coming.

The song (before)
 
The song (now, after)

((OOC: You killed me. I read your post while listening to the song; bad decision on my part. My eyes may or may not be red and puffy. I blame the allergies.))

Vivianna was sitting with legs crossed on the floor of one of the Hogwarts Potions labs. Her Potions lab; it really wasn't like anyone else ever used it. She was leant forwards, head bent over a piece of parchment that she was scribbling on with a quill. The witch was working on an assignment for Transfiguration, but was finding it difficult to concentrate on her least favorite subject. There were so many more important things than Transfiguration work.

Reaching into a pocket of her backpack without having to look; the teen pulled out a vial, uncorked it one-handedly, and tipped the liquid down her throat in a practiced movement. Throwing the quill down onto the parchment, the girl went to set down the now-empty vial. Placing the vial off to her left, Vivianna winced upon the realization that she'd consumed three of those vials today. She'd been doing that a lot recently.

Vivianna had first brewed herself a simple headache draught in her second year, when she'd gotten a bit of a headache after a long day of running on little sleep. She'd used that potion every week or two for the rest of the year. It was half way through her third year, that the potion stopped working. After a little bit of research, the Slytherin deduced that she must've built up a resistance to it. So, the girl had found directions for, and started brewing, a more potent draught. For the rest of her third year, she was happy with it.

At the start of her fourth year, she was not. The human body, especially one of a young girl, was incapable of handling more than one of the potions every four days without getting terribly sick. The problem was, she wanted her potion more often than that. The Slytherin spent most of her fourth year perfecting her own headache draught. It took her almost seven months to succeed, but the girl had been quite pleased with the finished result. The potion was far stronger than anything else she could find, and contained ingredients that would not make her sick if she consumed more than a certain amount of it.

By her fifth year, she was drinking a vial of the potion every day. Vivianna didn't both to limit herself, it wasn't like the potion was harmful. In the middle of her fifth year, she ran out of potion for the first time. She'd been planning upon brewing some more that evening, but she'd taken two the day before and therefore didn't have any left. That day had been a nightmare. She'd been jittery, hot, cold, spacey, far more clumsy than usual, and felt worse than she ever had. It all went away when she brewed and drank more potion. Vivianna wasn't an idiot, she knew what addiction was. And now she knew what addiction was like first-hand.

Running her right palm over her face, the Slytherin slammed her head down onto her knee. Glancing around the lab, the redhead suddenly found the room that was usually a safe-haven, suffocating. She needed to get out. She needed to move.

Mindful of the fact she was out after curfew, the teenager walked up the steps to the first floor. Not good enough. Sighing, Vivinanna walked up the flights of steps to the second floor. Still not good enough. Bag slung over her shoulder, the redhead picked up the pace and began to jog up the stairs. She was sprinting before she could even reach the fourth floor. By the time the teen made it to the seventh floor, she was panting, and far from ready to start thinking about backtracking her steps in order to return to the dungeons.

Wanting nothing more than to collapse and rest for a minute or two, the witch headed over to the invisible Room of Requirement. Opening the door after pacing three times, Vivianna's ears were immediately assaulted by the notes of a piano. Slipping quietly into the room, the girl slid to the floor with back resting against the wall.

The song Reid, and hadn't that made her do a double-take, was playing flowed around her like air. Sometimes the notes were soft, and other times harsh and unforgiving. Just as she breathed in air, she breathed in the song, unable to prevent it from filling every pore in her body. The melody was beautiful, so hauntingly sad that goosebumps appeared on her arms, but beautiful all the same.

Then Reid stopped playing, the song over, and silence hung in the air like a tangible thing. Taking a moment to put herself back together, Vivianna knew that she'd have to announce her presence sooner or later. Unable to insult the wizard after hearing that, the Slytherin parted her lips and asked in little more than a whisper, "what's the name of it?"

((OOC: Hehe..... thank you. The song is atmospheric, and really close to my heart.
Oh and theoretically, since the RoR can expand in size, I think what I've written here is possible. Just wanted to clarify that everything is happening inside the Room. No one is literally being transported anywhere))

Her voice jerked him out of it. Sitting there, left thigh digging against an old rusted nail poking out of the seat, breaths hitting the empty air harshly in the aftermath, Reid had almost fooled himself into thinking that he was really back there. There, that night when his mother 's choked sobs had echoed up the stairs, his father standing motionless in the foyer for hours altogether, next to the little side table with the silver trumpet ; Rika sitting with her knees hugged to her chest on her bed, eyes staring unseeingly into the distance, as blank and lifeless as that of a ragdoll's. Rika, girl of the cocky smiles and bone-crushing hugs, violently twitching away from the arms of her little ( she used to assert proudly, being born a minute before him ) brother. He almost lost himself.

Reid wouldn't let himself make that weak mistake again.

He stood, the soft cloth of his shirt rustling against the piano. The screech of the seat being pushed backwards was loud enough to wake the dead.

"The Song of Storms. " He said.

The soles of his shoes squeaked slightly, as he pivoted on his heels and turned away. Not perturbed. Unfeeling, unaffected by the fact that someone else had watched, heard. Not weak. There was nothing to be ashamed of.

To the corner of his vision, there was a door. A door smelling of varnish, with long, scraggy scratches down its length and one burn mark, the result of one incident with a deodorant and a cigarette lighter. Dad had yelled at them for one whole hour for that.

The Room of Requirement. It gave you what you required. Whatever you required.

Reid walked to the door and pushed it open.

The scent of fresh jasmine bushes and impending rain hit his senses. A small, Muggle neighbourhood met his eye; a long, dusty road, a deserted sidewalk, a knocked-over trashcan at the curb. Over the tall cypress trees, the sun was setting, amidst dark clouds looming in the horizon. If you took the turn then you came to the park, the field, the long rows of streetfood stalls, then the graveyard at the dead end. He remembered it all. He grew up there.

He turned round and saw his home, with peeling white paint and a balcony lined with potted geraniums on the second floor, where Mum used to laze on long Sunday afternoons and dry her nailpaint. There were lights blinking dimly in the upper rooms, as if people were still there. Reid forced his gaze away, and looked through the open door through which he had just stepped out. The girl was still standing there, motionless.

What he required. Something, to stop him from being blown back. A totem, to remind him even as he walked down memory lane, that dreams were not reality, and would never be.

He cut a strange figure, shrouded in half gloom, not really a boy, not quite a man. Behind him in the dusk skies, clouds gathered on the horizon, threatening rain; the air laden heavy. His mercurial eyes shone grey, almost as if reflecting the thunderous skies behind.

"Coming? "

"Fitting," Vivianna pronounced, voice soft. Soft enough for her word to be considered muttered, or spoken under her breath, but loud enough the Reid almost certainly hear it. She hadn't exactly been looking for a response, or even an acknowledgment of her statement from Reid. She just wanted him to know. Why, she couldn't say.

He hadn't had any outward reaction to her presence. In a way, Vivianna shouldn't have been so surprised. Yes, she may have walked in on something that appeared to be somewhat of a private or emotional moment, but Reid almost certainly trained himself for such situations. She had. With people like them weaknesses were something to be eradicated, faults not spoken of, and soft-spots hidden and protected beyond all else. Even if someone was to guess at or discover a weak point, or crack in your armor, reacting was the absolute worst thing one could do. If you didn't react, they had no proof.

It was Vivianna's father whom had taught her that. In a way, perhaps the girl had more to thank the b@stard for than she had ever realized. It may have been her mother that had taught her maturity and independence, but her father had been the one to teach her why weaknesses should be hidden. It was almost kind of him, really, to show the young girl what she would look like to others if she'd made her old-man's mistakes. Vivianna had long-ago decided that she would rather die then end up like that.

But Reid was almost too emotionless. Hollow; like her mother. Well, not quite like her mother, her mother was worse. At least Reid was still there. If the witch tried she could probably find something lurking behind his eyes. Or in them, if the male wanted to be co-operative.

Something bubbled up within her chest when Reid opened the door that had appeared and stepped through it. From the little she could see, it looked a little bit like a less-wealthy version of the area where her cousins lived. Vivianna didn't stop to think about exactly why Reid would want to walk through a muggle neighborhood. She had the terrible habit of always doing far too much thinking around the male Dixon. Perhaps that was why the two had always ended up at each other's throats.

"As if I would let you stop me," Vivianna said after a short moment. But despite the way the words had been phrased, her tone was not challenging nor sarcastic. They'd simply been stated, as one would state a fact.

Walking forwards, the female stepped through the door herself. Vivianna found herself pausing for a moment before pulling the door almost all the way shut behind her. There was still a small crack through which one could look back into the room the two students had once been standing in, preventing one from completely forgetting that they were still inside the Hogwarts castle. The Slytherin was aware, surrounded by the smell and feel of nature, that such a thing would be far too easy.

Turning around, the redhead grabbed Reid's right hand and clasped it with her left. It was only a few seconds later that the witch realized exactly what her limb had done, seemingly without her permission. Knowing that it was a little too late to pull back without looking like an idiot, Vivianna kept her hand where it was, figuring that if Reid had a problem with it, she'd find out soon enough.

She walked forward, looking nothing like the wary-eyed, sharp girl he had met on the tree that day. She stepped out of the door, and almost let it fall shut, the wooden frame hitting the base with a soft click. There was no confusion in her eyes. No sympathy. No pity.

Reid didn't miss it.

Didn't miss the crowding, the concerned voices, the sad stares. The irritating clicking of the tongues, the sounds of sympathy, the questions. The questions. Like it was a bloody television show, and he lived to entertain. His life was his own frickin' business, and anyone who thought merely being there at a wrong moment entitled confessions of 'secrets' and bubbling out of emotions deserved nothing but spittle thrown back at their faces.

Enough of being psychoanalyzed by strangers, who picked apart his behaviour and words and judged and came to stupid conclusions about trauma and guilt and misdirected anger and who bloody f*cking well didn't know him and never would.

And maybe that, the absence of that, was what stopped him from throwing off her hand.

His hand stiffened, his eyes flicking up to hers. It wasn't the patronising hand on the shoulder, the condescending reassurances of 'everything's alright' that never made anything alright. (He was being paranoid, she knew nothing, his face had told her nothing). But still. His hand hung limply in hers, not returning the grasp, but not recoiling away either. It felt like....like a companion gripping your hand, ready to start on the road together. Not reassuring. Just....there.

Reid started walking.

The wind was fresh, moisture-laden, rain-scented. It zipped past him, ruffling his dark hair, blowing his fringe askew over his hair, wafting through the hem of his untucked shirt ; whistling in the gloam. They crossed wan pools of sunlight, and shadows cast by cypress trees, under looming buildings and old streetposts. Turned the corner of the road, towards the familiar rows of now-empty stalls and cafes. Somewhere far off into the distance, he could hear faint, ethereal voices: cheering, laughing, the honking of a school bus, the ringing of a period bell. Snatches of conversation and giggles of people that seemed not to exist. They wouldn't meet them on this road.

The road that stopped in a dead end. They reached the end, and Reid stretched out his left hand, pushing. The old, rickety gate opened creakily, and he stepped in, shoes squelching believingly in the mud after rain, that could be seen but wasn't really there. He walked, navigating quietly through the disorganized rows of white marble slabs and crosses and epitaphs. Through mazes of old graves and new. By the right of Mr. J Faust who died of cancer, to the left of Colonel Amy Wright who died for her homeland, between the graves of Mr and Mrs Jeremy Coventry: on whose graves were inscribed: You were supposed to die before me, you twit and You have a lot of missed anniversaries to make up for.

He walked and walked, the warmth steady in his hand, till he came to a fresher patch of earth near a quiet corner of the yard, below the willow tree. Another delusion, it had been four years. It shouldn't be fresh. Except in his mind.

Reid didn't grip back. He didn't gently wrap his fingers around hers like the witch had been hoping. If it was anyone else, the girl would be analyzing her own actions, but this was Reid. Reid was different, and she had promised herself that she wouldn't overthink any of this. Overthinking around Reid only led to defensiveness, anger, confusion, and fighting. This wasn't the time or the place for that.

He hadn't pulled away though. He hadn't tugged his hand from hers, or slapped at her arm, or made some kind of snarky comment about neither of them being children whom needed to be led. Vivianna didn't outwardly smile, but inside she felt the smallest thrill of pleasure. Oh yes, that most certainly counted as a victory.

Reid began walking and the redhead was quick to match his stride. Not walking ahead of him so that she was leading the two, but not walking behind so that she would have to be tugged along. Reid's strides were a little different that hers, but the female only took a few seconds to adapt, walking smoothing beside the male with his hand still held in hers.

The place was obviously very familiar to Reid. He walked with a steady sense of purpose, without paying any attention to his feet. It was almost as if his legs had walked the streets so many times that they could to it all on their own. The only thing Vivianna could compare it to was the way she could stumble out of bed and into the dorm's bathroom with her eyes closed, having done it so many times that it was even more natural a movement than the levitation charm.

Vivianna's curiosity was spiked, but she kept her mouth shut and refused to say a word. This was very much not the time to be grilling Reid about his past. Reminding herself why overthinking was bad, she walked quietly alongside the Dixon. When they reached a rickety gate, the Slytherin had to close her eyes for a moment to compose herself. A graveyard.

Walking through the gate, Vivianna forced her gait to remain in sync with Reid's. He had brought her to a graveyard. Why had he been willing to bring her here? The two of them had never been shy about using the other's weaknesses against them before, so why the hell would he do something like this now? Was he trying to show that he trusted her? Had Reid felt like he needed someone there? Had her presence just been covenant? Vivianna's mind began whirring faster and faster, before the teenager internally stomped down in her own thought process. Licking her lips, the redhead told herself once again to just stop thinking. It was harder than she'd thought to turn one's brain off.  

But then they stopped. For a moment, Vivianna couldn't bring herself to look at the writing engraved into the headstone. Then, unable to resist the compulsion to look, she tilted the angle of her neck and read. The wind ruffled her hair, frizzing it out ever so slightly, and some of the moisture in the air settled onto the back of her neck.

Barbara Dixon. Died at eleven. Born the same year she was. The same year Erika was. The same year Reid was. The most miniscule of shudders ran down her spine. Erika and Reid hadn't always been twins. They'd once been two thirds of a set of triplets. The thought almost made Vivianna sick.

She was an only child, but the girl pictured for a moment what it would feel like to loose her cousins, whom were practically siblings to her. Or what it would be like to loose her darling Bertie. Her brain couldn't compute such a situation. The Hogwarts student could only hope that it would stay that way.

Uncharacteristically, the Slytherin didn't wonder how Barbara had died. She didn't ponder upon the effects this could have had upon Reid and Erika. She didn't even come up scenarios of the possible ways this might be linked to Reid's and Erika's current dislike of each other. Instead, the girl just stood, hand still wrapped around Reid's, and any words that she might've said having died long before they reached her tongue.

The ground lifted in a stiff breeze, buffeting the white blossoms dallying loosely by the wispy branches, stirring the dust at their feet. They grew only here, did these flowers. Quiet, frail, ephemeral as the passing wind. Reid didn’t know their name. But they looked…..right, scattered as they were, nestled underneath the cool granite that made up his sister’s tombstone. He had never laid flowers on her grave. A pointless sentiment. It wasn’t like she could smell them.

He didn’t kneel, now. Didn’t run a caressing finger over the smooth, worn stone. Didn’t touch the earth which held the cold, rotting body of his sister, six feet down. Didn’t matter, after all. Didn’t make one jot of a difference.

Instead he turned his head to the side, and watched the girl. Watched the conflict flash through her features like running paint, the flickering emotions dart in and out of her eyes like rippling water. It was interesting, how much more he could see now as compared to the first time they had watched each other, atop the barren tree in Hogsmeade. Or maybe that was because she was so clearly out of her depth now. Maybe that was the way to put her off her edge. Not by aggression, or pithy remarks or trying to gauge weaknesses. Just by doing something so unpredictable (vulnerable, a voice murmured) that she couldn’t find her feet.

He took pity on her.

“I’m over it, Varnes.” His lips curved slowly, so slowly, into a ghost of a smile that made his face seem even sharper. His voice was low, barely heard over the wind. “I’ve been over it for five years, and I couldn’t care less now, so you would do well by not caring either.”

If you really are, spoke a voice, strangely like his mother’s low soprano. Then why is the Room showing you this?

A cold sheen, quite like that of metal, swept over Reid’s eyes so quickly that you would almost have missed it. His right hand tightened painfully over hers, before unclenching fitfully and withdrawing back to his side, skin pebbling over due to the sudden lack of warmth. Her hand would probably bruise mildly, later. Bear a mark left by him.

“You can tell the whole world, if you want to.” You’re not special. “So don’t give yourself any ideas.”

He turned, and with the first step that he took, something cracked beneath his shoe.

The shoe shifted to the side, to reveal a small, rectangular object, half-embedded in the soil. Mind blank, Reid reached down till his fingers scraped against the smooth glass, against the jagged crack that ran down the entire frame, brushed against the worn, white end of the photograph preserved beneath.

F*ck.

There were three of them, sitting on a stone ledge, snapped unawares. There were the two of them, blonde head and brunette bent close together, mouths twisted into identical mischievous grins, staring at something behind the cupped surface of Rika’s hand like it held the secret of the entire universe. There was he, slightly off to the left, lazily toeing the grass at his feet with oversized sneakers; pretending not to care but eyes darting back to the other two still. And there, Barbara’s white fingers, thrown back carelessly to her side to grip her brother’s wrist, making him a part of the picture. Behind, the sun rose on the sea, both eternal elements of nature, both seeming now to mock the children with their permanence, their unchangeable nature. The sun still rose on the sea, even today. But the children were dead and long gone.

He remembered. Remembered with astounding clarity how he had clung on to his mother’s skirts the entire day, trailed in her footsteps, begging her to allow him to put the framed picture in Barbara’s cold, frozen hands; so she would have something to remember them by. But his mother was too tired, too frazzled, and he watched in silence at the crowd of black lowered the pale brown, rectangular box into the ground, sharp edges of the frame digging hard into his hands. And the crash, the light tinkle of glass breaking as he hurled the frame at the willow tree watching over his sister, resolving never to set foot here again.

Stupid, stupid, stupid Room.

The broken glass edged over his thumb, parting skin with an ease that seemed cruel, coaxing a single drop of blood to run down the wooden edge and drip into the soil.

In the distance, he could hear thunder.

Vivianna hated this. Reid shouldn't look like that. Reid should be smirking, insulting her, something. She didn't know how to handle Reid like this. Vivianna had never been good with any kind of emotion. The Slytherin had always just analyzed her own feelings; dissecting them like student would a pig in a muggle science class. Then she'd rationalize them, and learn from the experience. Well, that was what she usually did. There were times when certain emotions didn't want to be dissected, when there was nothing rational about what she was feeling. Then they would be shoved into the back of the witch's brain, to be bottled up and fester with everything else the teenager didn't want to deal with. It was a very large bottle.

However bad she was with her own feelings, she was ever worse with the emotions of others. Sure, she could read them off a face like words in a book, but she couldn't deal with them. Vivianna could still remember the first time Bertie came to her crying. She'd been at a complete and utter loss. To this day all she was capable of was hugging him and hoping that it would be enough. Thankfully, it usually was.

But then Reid spoke, and the words tore through Vivianna's brain like a whirlwind. It was a lie. It was so very much a lie that the witch almost winced with the falseness of it. It was impressive though, if she'd only just met him she probably would have believed it. For just a moment her mind flittered to Erika. Erika wasn't like the two of them. Erika couldn't peal the truth off of faces the way that they could. Could the Ravenclaw really think that? The Reid didn't care? The Slytherin hoped not, neither of them deserved that.

Reid's words proclaiming that she shouldn't care ran once more through her mind, and Vivianna opened her mouth to speak. She was going to say something witty. Something about not caring about Barbara, that implied that she cared about him. But then Reid squeezed her hand hard for only a second, and she let her lips fall back together. She would bruise, it had never taken very much to mar her skin, but she didn't care. She didn't care, because Reid had pulled his hand away.

But then Reid turned and stepped on a photograph. The picture contained three children. Three happy children. One of the girls was easily recognizable as Erika, and the boy couldn't be anyone else but a young Reid. That meant that the blonde had to be Barbara, the girl under the gravestone. All three of them just looked so alive in the photograph. It was ironic, really.

It seemed a little strange, to her, how happy Reid was in the picture. She'd always just assumed that Reid had been like her. Vivianna had always been manipulative, calculating, and colder than most. She'd needed to be, her childhood had ensured that. But Reid had been truly happy once. He'd had a real childhood, had probably been no stranger to tag and mischievous giggles.

Vivianna knew she could have had it far worse, but it wasn't every five year old that needed to comprehend and accept that your parents didn't want you. She'd practically lived at her aunts house after that, whenever she could get away with it. It was better, but not easy. Of course it wasn't, she'd been a little girl in a house of vampires.

But to know that Reid had once looked like that; all innocence, and faux nonchalance... it made it almost painful to look at him now. Vivianna hardly disliked her lifestyle, but she wasn't oblivious enough to think that there weren't certain things that she'd never be able to experience in the way other teenagers did. She'd gone through fazes of hating her parents for that, now she just didn't like them on general principal. The thing was, she'd been doomed from the start to live and act like this. Reid hadn't been, and Vivianna couldn't help but think that it almost made the whole situation worse.

"Don't worry Reid, I haven't gotten any ideas," the redhead said softly, watching the drop of Reid's blood sink into the dirt. For Vivianna didn't have an idea, she knew.

(( 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.”

((OOC: I wrote a ton, and then lost the entire thing. Version 2.0 isn't as good; blame my wifi. And that song, you killed my brain. ))

She had said the wrong thing. Of course she had. There was a reason that Reid had been tolerating her presence up until this point; she had hardly spoken. The girl had known that herself and Reid in a conversation only ever ended up with one or both of them mad. But she'd spoken anyway.

Vivianna was used to saying what she wished to. She didn't walk around speaking anything that came to mind, of course not, she did have secrets. She wasn't, however, used to filtering herself for the sake of others. If other people didn't like that, it was their problem, and her friends had quickly gotten used to it. That she'd bitten her tongue earlier around Reid was a rare occasion in and of itself.

Vivianna watched as Reid ripped up the picture of his sisters. Something that felt oddly like anger but wasn't bubbled viciously inside her chest. She would kill to have siblings like that. Family that cared. For Reid to literally rip them apart like they didn't matter made the pale girl clench her right fist in restraint.

But then Vivianna caught a glimpse of Reid's face, and the fist instantly relaxed. Oh, Reid cared. Whichever supposedly wise man had said the opposite of love was hate was an idiot, in her opinion. Anyone with sense knew that the opposite of love was indifference. For someone to feel hate or anger, they had to care in some way or another. And Reid was very, very angry.

Blinking repeatedly in an attempt to stop her head from spinning, Vivianna looked around at the large, stone room. The room was completely empty, only holding herself, Reid, and the ripped pieces of photograph.

All of the pieces were picture side down but two. The first was only a few inches from where Reid was standing, and depicted the smiling face of Barbara Dixon. The second was a diagonally torn piece, the very first piece that Reid had torn. The triangle contained the young face of the wizard himself, cut diagonally across his chest. The face stared up at her in a way that was almost scarily different from the way the other teenager regarded her now.

Not completely sure why she was even doing so, the redhead bent down and grabbed the triangular fragment that had landed only centimeters from her left foot. Shoving it in her pocket so fast that it was unlikely Reid had seen what was on it, Vivianna released a quiet breath of air.

With that, the student began to walk toward the room's exit. It was obvious that the Dixon didn't want her here. She could've stayed and started a shouting match on the off chance that the wizard would given in and allowed her to stay, but Vivianna hardly saw the point. Her footsteps echoed loudly with every step, despite the fact that she wasn't wearing heels.

Tugging open the heavy door, the teen tried really hard not to read into what that might mean. Stopping halfway through the doorframe, the redhead turned, and opened her mouth as if to speak. It only took a moment for Vivianna to press her lips back together, where they twisted into a wry smile. Something dark lurking in her eyes, the girl shook her head slightly before turning back around and shutting the door firmly behind her.

Vivianna didn't get much sleep that night.