Midmorning

xi. six days

Perhaps you were expecting this to be the marker for eight days. I'd only skipped out on three thanks to Wren, but this could've been the epilogue.

I'm afraid you have more to go.

I hadn't been up at four in the morning for a very long time. The last time before Tom was when Wren and I attempted to stay up the whole night and the whole day after, which resulted in us giving up by five o'clock. We were twelve and had separate reasons for not wanting to sleep. I never found out what hers was.

But I digress.

My knees were raw. (Not because I'd submitted myself to someone's intimacy, sucked them in, crushed them up on my tongue. Don't be so filthy.) The Prefects' bathroom wasn't a pretty place for morbid things, but you don't get fussy when you need to feel something, so here I was, dipping my feet into the warm water and submerging my whole body in its expanse.

And I stayed there. A few seconds felt like hours, but a minute ticked by and I forgot a new unit could take the place of seconds and I wondered how many seconds there were in exactly three hours and now it was truly a test of whether my body would persevere or not. Every limb cursed at me, and my knees kept scraping against the hard floor.

My lungs were thick now and if I was up with the oxygen, my chokes would've echoed and shivered and someone would've heard me. However, it was four a.m. and people are often thrusted so deeply into their dreams by then that the obscurity between reality and fantasy gets smeared by bloodied fingers. Nothing is loud enough to interrupt a dream.

It's either that or they're Wren Ivchenko, prepared to yell at whoever was sloshing waves of water onto the floor as they bled under the door's cracks. My chest pounded softer as seconds went and my body would be carcass if she was late but it was all right. My body would decide.

My throat was sore with the viscosity of grating hot water but this. Was. Euphoria.

But Wren was on time.

'Briar!' she screamed but my ears were clogged and any lecture she may've been spouting drifted in and out of my consciousness. Everything was numb and black until I began spluttering on the excess water she'd siphoned out.

Once she saw I was awake, she did the unexpected thing: she held me. Her fingers were tight on my sopping clothes and, to my own surprise, I held her back.

I could see the question—what were you thinking?—whirring inside her head, but she thought she knew the answer. They always did. If everybody was so compassionate about their assumptions, I wouldn't have had to get used to the people who weren't.

Then, she began to cry. I didn't know what to tell her, so I just shushed her. I hummed shhh into her ear for so long I turned it into a lullaby and she didn't notice, but then she finally spoke again.

'Let's go to the Hospital Wing.'

No.

I shook my head. Heavy. I stopped. I clutched one of her hands with both of mine. 'No, Wren, I'm fine.'

'Maybe physically, but you—' are mentally deranged. Thank you.

'—are fine.' I finished, trying to stand up but falling to my knees again (see why they're raw?). 'It's late, you're tired.'

'You'll get a few days off,' she went on and I'd wished she wouldn't, 'It's what you need.'

I swallowed and it burnt. 'I was experimenting.'