invictus | harry styles au (very slow updates)

two.

To say that Poppy disliked school would be a massive understatement. She loathed school, to say the least, and spent each and every day counting down the hours, minutes, seconds until she was finally released from hell. And perhaps she was being a teensy bit overdramatic about the whole thing, but the day following the-incident-with-the-boy had been a tough one.

Firstly, she was almost certain she had failed her vectors test (purely her fault, admittedly). Secondly, her Advanced Physics teacher had basically humiliated her in front of her class by forcing her to answer a question regarding a lecture she clearly hadn’t been listening to (again, her own fault). Physics was quite horrendous, however, so she figured she could give herself the benefit of the doubt. Thirdly, lunch had made her feel uncharacteristically lonely until Ben found their table and she pretended to ignore the glares coming at her from a group of girls she had never even seen before. Sometimes, Poppy indulged in the thought of what it was like to have friends and not be a total social pariah—well, indulged in the memory. It really hadn’t been that long ago.

A knick on her abdomen throbbed as a reminder of why things had crumbled—of why she lost sleep and dealt with both patronizing and sympathetic stares every time she walked around her neighbourhood. She wondered if things might be different if she tattooed “not fragile” across her forehead…probably not, given her luck.

And, perhaps the very worst part of the day, was that her mind continuously wandered back to the stupid incident with the stupid boy and his stupid curly hair. The embarrassment buried itself deep within her like a lingering story that would be passed down through generations.

So, when the day finally ended and Ben walked her home, Poppy was more than ecstatic to arrive to an empty house. The slamming of the door behind her left a strange, uncomfortable echo pounding through the structure and she pretended it wasn’t just her. She lived in a pretty large house—it wasn’t a mansion, by any means, but it did exceed most people’s expectations of nice. It had high ceilings, an oversized kitchen, and décor straight out of a magazine. It was all just for show, however—or, at least that’s how Poppy saw it. In her mind, her parent’s logic was ‘let’s fill our house with shiny, expensive things to cover up the fact that our family isn’t quite as perfect.’ Well, at least they had a technique of dealing with things.

Poppy was two rather large handfuls of problems and she hadn’t even hit eighteen. Stupid.

With a long, exaggerated sigh into the empty space, the blue-eyed girl grabbed an apple out of the fruit bowl—fruit bowl—and headed up the ridiculously winding staircase. Her bedroom, with its soft yellow walls and mess of laundry, sat like a beacon of hope at the end of the hallway. It was where she spent most of her time, and she was pretty much over the fact that it was a sad way to spend her teenage years. She’d rather live with a handful of good books than waste her time enduring pointed stares and silent ridicule.

Just before Poppy reached her only source of sanity, she noticed The Door—capitalized like her name and her town and her country—sitting slightly open. It was only a crack, almost as if that damned cat had pressed its furry little body through, but it was the most of the inside she had seen in months. She gave the cat, Bilbo—ridiculous—a quick call before shutting the door with a gentle click and deciding on another few months before she would see it open again.

…

“Poppy Lynn,” her dad—a man with tailored suits and boring ties and too-clean running shoes sitting in the closet—voiced after dinner, when the family was cleaning up, “Remind me again why you insist on spending your weekends in the god-awful, filthy place.”