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PAPER CONFINES. 37. / By the Morning I Will Have Grown Back
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Amoret had bug bites carving up her legs that would not heal. She wondered at what point she should be concerned at her body's sudden resistance to creams and tonics for the rashes that had developed from her scratching, but had no room in the thousand other concerns occupying her mind. As a distraction, she bit long enough on the nail of her thumb that it had broken off, and then moved on to the other fingers: all short, jagged edges. She would have chewed the cuticles raw if she wasn't so worried those wouldn't heal either.
Her anxiety had to be conscious. No breaking of skin.
So she lugged herself through the days and into November, and most of the mosquitoes scattered out of the cold. Amoret thought Tom had a way of shunning them to the meadow and keeping it shut—the tender, angry wound of the horcrux.
It didn't help that that voice was still goading her, indecipherable as it was. Her name was clear enough amongst the rest, following her through every corridor, silent only when Tom spoke.
Something wanted to talk.
Amoret did not indulge it.
She laid on the floor of his library, fingers in the bristles of the bicorn hide, sighing loudly every so often.
"Make it blue," she mumbled, staring at the ceiling.
Tom made the room blue.
Purple, she told him next, like a child granted endless wishes, bored of greater ones. Pink. Red. Back to green, the candlelight splashed across his cheeks. He didn't seem to mind; he just sighed back at her in equal frequency and kept on with whatever he was reading.
When she asked him in a gentler request to turn the room black, he paused before obliging.
The light went out. She looked into the new darkness and imagined herself sometime else.
"What are you thinking?" Tom asked, and Amoret heard the flutter and snap of his book closing.
"That I want you to play music," she said softly, like a secret, "and... I want not to be sick anymore, and to pretend I'm here because I have a Transfiguration exam next week, not—" She opened her mouth to say something else, but closed it again.
Tom conjured the phonograph, and the needle pressed down smoothly on a record he had played once some months ago during a lesson. Sombre and pretty, but similar to Chopin in a way she hadn't mentioned because of his aversion. Maybe to avoid bothering him. She mentioned it now.
"I suppose," Tom agreed stiffly, and she wondered if he did that more often now because bothering her was something he did avoid, or because he meant it.
