Antithesis

Chapter 72: Abuse

Adrian opened the gate, pausing to run his fingers over the texture of the wood. It was cold, soft and broken from the repeated frost and thaw of spring and winter. The cyclical pattern of the year that rained abuse and froze it solid. Crystalline destruction over the unmentionable passage of time.

The gate creaked, snapping and rattling like the clicking beak of an owl. Ice accumulated in the joints and cracks.It  stiffened, wood bowing and warping under the pressure, before the glassy ice broke apart like a frozen shoulder forced into rotation. Bits of cartilage and bone spurns snapping off, grinding into powder.

“You sure?” Lutain asked quietly, his body a snug scarf around Adrian’s throat. Adrian hadn’t the time to work anymore on using heating charms, he didn’t want to choke on the nosebleeds just to keep Lutain warm. He wasn’t used to it, both the unconscious charms and the heavy scales of his friend. The snake had been gone for so long, it was almost a foreign weight around his neck, the light strangulation both a threat and a sign of affection.

“No,” Adrian confessed, his nose steaming out moist air in the morning. “I’m not sure about this at all.”

Lutain nestled closer, his body still fighting the temperature even as he caressed the skin of his chest. The wards of the property washed right over Adrian, feeling thick and strange. Uniquely like sliding his hand into a great bowl of gelatin. Slimy and wet, without an residue on his hand.

“I need to do this though,” Adrian confessed quietly, tapping his fingers again and again on the wood of the fence. The wood of the gate, that he still struggled to walk through. “Or It’ll haunt me. It’s something I should have done a while ago.”

The words hung there, as the wind itself held its breath and gently whispered as it brushed against the siding of the house.

“Okay,” Adrian breathed out, almost soundless with how breathy his voice was, “let’s do this.”

Adrian stepped forward, his boots crunching as he walked along a downtrodden path towards the rickety front porch.

The overhang kept the snow off the deck, the support posts were covered in spiraling ivy and other decorative festivities. Holly hung from a front window, with fake charmed cardinals chirping in a wicker nest. Adrian lifted one hand, pausing as he hesitated to gather his thoughts.

He could still turn around. He could theoretically walk away and climb back on Mylla (and bruise his tailbone further). He could return back to Remus and Tonks and forget that he had ever made a stop to begin with. He could play ignorant, forcing himself to dismiss the overbearing fear and terror he irrationally felt.

(He knew, that if he walked away he would never come back.)

This was his chance, and in the face of death, even he hesitated over something so fickle.

It was a strange thought, a strange sense of fear. Dying was the cessation of life, the ending and beginning of something nobody knew anything about. A great mystery, the thoughts and focus of millennia.

But this...Adrian knew everything about this. He knew their eyes and faces, the small quirks and the way they would shout. Facing them here, even with the knowledge of every possibility, was much more terrifying than facing the unknown. More terrifying than dying ever would be.

He had to do this, for a sense of peace and for his sense of vindictiveness. He didn’t know if it was targeted at them, or targeted at himself.