Low tolerance was what made her shut herself in a dormitory she didn’t belong in. There were so many things she didn’t like and snow was one of them. She didn’t have a lot of experience with it, for one (three hundred years and she had done a good job of avoiding it), but what was really just a bit of a breeze was relative to a blizzard for her and she was done. She was done with all of it. Shivering from head to toe, she knocked the snow off her shoes and coat and feeling stiff as she had been, once, under a multitude of scabs and healing scars. The common room gaped at her presence and she blinked at it as she shed her hat and gloves. It was nearly impossible to charm with gloves on, clunky and clumsy as they were.
There was never any intention to stay there, though she wasn’t really aware that it was the teachers’ dorm she was in. If it didn’t concern her, she generally went unconcerned. There was a very clear organization and privilege to it that she didn’t see in her own building, however, and she carried herself over to fiddle with the knob of a lamp and take in the very real presence of silence. Feeling properly drenched, now, she gathered her hair back and walked the length of the room if only just to look and reclaim the sensation of having fingers. Upon numbly picking up an aesthetically-placed book, there was a muffled shout and tension overcame her, startled by a mere action begetting such a bizarrely out of place sound. It took a heartbeat before she knew very well that the likelihood of the book emitting it was slim, even if she was placed at a magical institute. Looking up at the ceiling, she blew away the hair that fell across her face and carefully removed her scarf. She was listening, this time, when there was a shattering sound, though she couldn’t have said anything for what had been uttered. Brow crinkling, she found the stairs and climbed them as she breathed life into her fingers. More curious than nosy, and distantly bothered by such disturbances, she stared down the empty hallway and held tightly to her discarded items. Nothing stared back at her, and as much as she was content by silence and being alone, there was something very wrong with nothingness.
Katesch had never been given a time frame, and she tried not to let it both her, but she remembered so very vaguely the moments when she began to get her feet back from under her. Bloodying the sands beneath her burning feet, she had felt the negativity clinging to her bones, tongue running in a frothy obsession over strung puppet strings. Again, and again, she could feel the climbing scream found in empty eyes, gazing into a nightmare of dirt and infected, swollen, spotted flesh under matted hair and over thin and broken bones. How long did it take to make a living body a nightmare? Regardless, she remembered the endless expanses of emptiness before memory, and then inside after her mind could cling and grasp reality. Being alone didn’t bother her, but when silence turned its back and showed the pus-wide wounds of nothing, it turned her upside-down until her throat choked her heart.
In the very second that she realized just how gutted the hallway was, she was startled again by a curse pinging against the back of the corridor. She knew the difference between tones, and a knock sounded by her own hands on what she had no business even putting those knuckles near. Pupils contracted, the frantic movements she could barely hear had her wrapping her thin fingers around the handle. An equal balance of karmic energy in her life, perhaps, let there not be a lock to resist. The words that were being said became so much clearer and she bit down on air, widened eyes tipping over glass and discarded books. Words failed her, but she could still hear, and dropping her things, there was a fine line between the adrenaline of breaking in and hearing sheer terror bleeding in the air. Except for the pleas sliding underneath the door, the spacious dorm gaped in the same way the common room did. Her hands slipped against the doorknob and she stared at the cardinal red adorning her fingers for a moment before horror seized at her throat and the closet abandoned privacy in her own desperation.
There were faces she could never forget, seared into her memory even as they held no consequence in the future, and though she could not say the same for this man anymore, his had been one. There were a dozen or so reasons why, but necromancy was the friend that loomed in her thoughts and there was a battle of repulsion scraping against the inside of her skin. It was the scarlet hair, even without his face, the stature crumbled in childishness, the voice, and it was as if in the minutes she had seen him in the shop, she had memorized every inch of his danger.
Dropping to her knees, she let out a breath, and wondered of herself how she could get him to look up over bared forearms. A steady, small set of Hangul peeked out into the air. ‘Professor?’
After years of feeling the way Qadira had sat through her own terrors, she could never leave someone in reflection. He had not threatened her the first time and he had not called her here. He was vulnerable, and she was treading on thin ice, despite her desperation to escape the cold.
