The Vortex: Rectification

Chapter Twelve.

Chapter Fifty-Two.

Sleeping the night still doesn't come easy, even when the houses are full and there is always someone moving about in the darkness and creating a familiar thud against the ground and click of locking bathroom doors. I can see the light shift and the plants brush against the closed windows of the living room through my open window.

It's always open now, very rarely do let it fall closed and have the four walls press in around me again, perhaps if I did let it lock closed my mind wouldn't stray so often to all the half-complete tasks that I have left spread over sofas and coffee tables. In the many months that have passed since I made it out of the cell Dracius designed for me, everything feels like it's moving in slow motion while having passed by in a blink.

Instead of facing everything head on it feels like I have only been drowning in all the things I have felt I should be doing but can't quite find the energy too. Like constant conversations have gone in but they never stay, all the time spent staring at old research hasn't made a new and miraculous idea form in the recesses of my constantly exhausted brain.

Making an endless supply of potions that we don't currently need, seem like a waste of all my supposed capabilities. It doesn't help with the guilt of wasting materials on whims that deep down I always knew wouldn't work, solutions to problems that seem forever out of my reach. Aleera has never been an easy problem to solve, not just because blood curses are wildly understudied, and random spells created by maniacs contain a plethora of complications that I'm not smart enough to figure out.

And if I am? Then it's probably been buried somewhere deep down in the centre of my chest where I push down all the trauma and fear that the last six years have thrusted onto me.

Most days it doesn't even feel like I'm a witch anymore, for so long it was so embedded into me that sometimes it felt like it wasn't magic because it was that normal. I remember being irritated that I wasn't so fascinated and constantly awed by the knowledge, now I crave the easiness of knowing who I was every day. I can get rid of a headache in an instant, send you to sleep or heal and ailment with one potion but everything else is still trapped inside of me.

I don't feel like I'm really me a lot of the time, like maybe all of this isn't real and if it was then I wouldn't have grief knocking the breath out of me so often. Things with Jamie would fall into place, instead of holding us captive in this limbo we have been sucked inside of despite our respective protests.

Being around him is the closest I've come to feeling something bright since Dracius snatched me away, maybe even before then, but I don't think I am ready to feel any of that quite yet. That's where the honesty within myself needs to come in, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that supressing my memories that lead to my magics repurposing is directly linked to not being able to now.

The tendrils of it that I can feel up and down my arms, that tingles my fingertips, and the centre of my chest is what I latch onto. Like maybe I can pull the string through the crack in the floorboards, metaphorically obviously.

Having frustration rising through my body doesn't help the attempt either, my eyes narrowing in on the front door in front of me. The lock on the rounded silver doorknob refuses to click open no matter how clear the enunciation is both in my head and verbally, every precise swivel of my fingers leaves silence in its wake.

"The glare might be hindering the spell at this point 'Rora" Jamie chuckles, his presence floating over me as he enters my space. Leaning against the windowsill to watch my poor attempt at doing a spell I learnt at twelve.

Sometimes I wonder if he showers in calming potions and that's the reason that my heart slows, and frustration drains my shoulder's when he surrounds me. When he catches my eyes from across the room, or his hand brushes over my lower back when we are all crowded into the kitchen.