passing afternoon — open
A hand drifted to the back of his neck, eyes closed shut in a brief moment of rest as fingers worked flesh in a desperate attempt to dispel fatigue. Truth be told, it wasn’t the sudden increase in workload that had exhausted Peter to the bone, it was the weight of the sadness that he carried on his shoulders at all time... or the anxiety to be precise, brought about by the imagined fears that haunted his waking days and plagued him with worry. With his work, he became almost mechanical, robot-like, performing tasks with precision and diligence. But during every moment that he could - on his lunch break, the brief reprieve from patient to patient, before going to bed - his thoughts drifted to the boys he’d spent the last seven years with and now weren’t in frequent company of. He knew it would take some getting used to, but he hadn’t anticipated just how much getting used to it would ask from him and honestly, he didn’t know if he had any more to give. Solitude was never a thing that he dealt with well and it was starting to scare him what his mind might tell him to do.
Sat on a stool behind the bar of the Leaky Cauldron, the tips of his toes only just barely touching the floor, Pete sighed to himself, hopeful that someone, anyone, would respond to his want to meet. The world would carry on with its problems, all he asked for was an hour, two hours tops of peace and quiet. No secret meetings, no planning, no talk of previous schoolmates that may have gone over the fence since they left the hallowed halls of Hogwarts. This was a time for friends and friendship, nothing more, nothing less.
