#this is just how my brain is wired | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thefangirlofhp · 7 months

Text

3. wearing each other’s clothes

“Are-you-kidding-me?!”

Each syllable was punctuated with a feather-pillow thump of frustration landing right over the sleeping boy buried in the folds of comfortable bedding and the dormitory mattress that Elain has discovered to be disturbingly personalized and ultimate. One of the things she’s trying to make her peace with is the uniqueness of the Ravenclaw Tower, with its frustratingly snobby doorknob and its gorgeous Common Room. Nuala did not think twice about immediately pointing Elain towards the boys dormitory, having long-since given up on the idea of getting said boy up for classes.

“Okay! Okay! Okay! Stop it, I’m up!” Azriel shouts, his hand shooting out to fend off the pillow Elain clutches tightly in her hands. She gives his head another smack for good measure, watches his jet-black hair flop with the assault and stand all over.

“How are you still asleep?!” she shouts back, his dorm room empty but for him as his classmates are already downstairs halfway through their breakfast. “You’ve got a test in fifteen minutes and you were asleep before dinner last night!”

A muffled grunt escapes her friend, who drags his blanket over his head.

“Oh no you don’t!” Elain yanks off the bedding, who has much experience getting stubborn sleep-loving people out of beds (if anyone could get Nesta up in the morning, she was such person) much to his chagrin. “I don’t believe this. Get your arse up this instant, Azriel Shadowsinger!”

He groans, curling into himself and then when it does nothing, he gives a frustrated shout.

“Who made you a clock?” he mutters, sitting up in bed, fixing her with a wild-eyed gaze and a puffy face.

“Merlin but you’re impossible, so you are,” she replies, grasping her hips. “Get moving into that bathroom before I give you a shower right here and now with ice-cold water.”

He blinks impassively at her. “You don’t know how to do that yet.”

Elain grits her teeth, her knuckles whitening over her hips. “Try me and I’ll get really motivated to learn. You’ve got five minutes to get dressed.”

To his credit, he does eventually get to his feet, not before shooting her a scathing glare, and when the bathroom door snaps shut behind him, it takes him all of a minute and a half to come back out with sharp-eyes and drenched black hair plastered to his head, water soaking the collar of his t-shirt.

“I can’t believe you’re that daft,” she remarks, shivering at the mere thought of the ice-cold water on her own head. Azriel shrugs, grabs a towel and rubs his head furiously. She prefers to wake an hour early to beat her dormmates to the hot water, to allow her hair adequate time to dry and her body to wake up of its own accord—shocking it into wakefulness is not something she’s ever considered doing. “I brought you toast.”

“Thanks,” he mutters from the midst of his self-inflicted tornado. “Can you put my stuff in the bag?”

“Sure,” she turns her back while he tugs on dry clothes and his shoddy uniform, crosses over to his sidetable overflowing with books and parchment scrolls that the house-elves of the school have long since learned not to touch—in a way, it is the picture-perfect image of a Ravenclaw student, who are renown amongst the wizarding world for being brainy twits obsessed with books and smartness. After befriending a few Ravenclaws, Elain’s realized that though each individual is a bizarre unique phenomenon, they’re all obsessive idiots hyper-fixated on a matter of their interest and without the common sense to be found in a hen. Still, not people Elain would ever want to be on the bad side of. They’re the sort of people who will go far in life, and it’s nice to have friends in such places.

Where Azriel will end up, though, is a question up for grabs. No-one can fathom if it’s a cold cell in Azkaban or as Minister for Magic; both are entirely probable. Wherever he ends up, Elain is sure it will be something worth witnessing. For now, if he isn’t downstairs in ten minutes, he’s going to end up doing remedial Transfiguration over the winter break and Elain cannot have her personal encyclopedia fall back.

Oh, but the books are a depressing sight to bear, for students meant to be having their noses buried in their textbooks and relevant sources. Elain’s eye twitches as she beholds a worn down hardcover first-edition of Bodies of Water and The Wowza Discoveries That Wizards Uncovered In Their Murky Depths that was likely never scheduled for a re-print. A brief glance at the list of students who’d ever checked the book out of the school library confirms Elain’s hypothesis that no-one would ever read it. Everyone except Azriel who has found it to be a riveting read, it seems. What with the pages full of notes.

She sighs. Stacks the non-textbooks up and puts quills and ink-bottles in his schoolbag, hunts around for his actual school textbooks and oh, of course, finds them discarded under his bed. His Charms book has actual dust on it.

And the fucker somehow was a top-scoring student.

“Look, I know you’re a gifted brilliant genius and all—”

“They mean the same,” he mutters under his breath and she has to count to five before going on.

“—but you really need to start paying attention to your studies,” she buttons the flap on the bag, brushes off a leaf stuck to the material and turns round. “Natural intelligence will get you far in life, but in school it’s not about cleverness. It’s about figuring out the patterns, the high-yield information and being smart enough to know what to memorize for exams. I know you don’t care for them, but they do determine your future, Az.”

His wide hazel eyes blink back owlishly at her, black hair ruffled wild atop his head and his scarred fingers making a sorry knot of his blue and bronze tie. “Yeah,” he replies quickly. “I know.”

“Wowza Discoveries, Az?” she softly recounts. “Really?”

“I’ll have you know it’s a riveting read,” he points firmly at her. “You can’t judge books by their covers—or titles.”

“I just think it says more about the person picking up a book with ‘wowza’ in the title than the actual book itself,” she replies.

“Whatever,” he scoffs, holding out his hand into which she dumps the bag by the strap and he shrugs onto his shoulder. “How’d you get in here anyway?”

“My feet,” she replies smartly, following him out the dormitory.

“Funny,” he snorts. “Got past the doorknob did you?”

“Excuse me, I take offense!” she yelps, crossing the expanse of the Common Room. “People outside your stupid house do have brains, you know?”

He shoots her a sharp meaningful look as he pushes . “I’m just saying, the doorknob’s existential crises lasted for weeks after your little stint about evolution and accusing it of being outdated and irrelevant.”

“I just meant the riddles it asks are stupid,” she mutters. “‘What comes first, the chicken or the egg?’ my arse. The egg actually did. The egg was a bird that evolved into a chicken. And I just as much hate that ‘a circle has no beginning’ line. Stupid doorknob.”

“You nearly made it gain consciousness,” Azriel laughs. “Professor Silver had to reset the charm on the thing which no one ever had to do since the school was made.”

Elain busies herself with brushing her hair behind her ears and adjusting her bag over her shoulder.

“Thanks for waking me up, by the way,” Azriel pipes up as they descend the staircase of the third floor. “I probably would have gotten up in time, but thanks still.”

“You really wouldn’t have,” Elain snipes back.

He grins. “Yeah, I wouldn’t have.”

“Don’t you—don’t you actually care about putting in an effort?” she pries hesitantly, finding their academic gap tricky waters to navigate without sounding like a jealous sourpuss. She does get frustrated by their difference, sure, that the three hours of effort she’d put in studying for a test he needs only quarter an hour of mild reading. Or that while she is pacing the length of the courtyard in breaks trying to get her mind to remember different potions ingredients, Azriel is napping somewhere or practicing Quidditch with his team and still he ends up as one of the top five in their year. Elain is entirely convinced he’d have come out first last year, fourth year, if he hadn’t forgotten about the five whole units they were told to revise in History of Magic and still his freakish memory had saved the day and if word is to be believed then the couple of points he lost were because the arse fell asleep in the exam and missed a word in the question.

But she’s more curious, and infatuated with this secret method of his.

“Sure, I do,” he replies. “I just soak in a lot of information, most of it not academically related, granted. But I can’t help that my attention constantly drifts. I just let my mind take me where it takes me.”

“Fascinating,” she nods, skipping the last two steps and landing with a heavy thud on her soles.

“You mean to tell me you can tell your mind to just focus on something and it does?” he demands. “Merlin’s balls, it’s like wrestling with an angry bull up here,” he taps his temple. “What’d I give to have the mindpower for that.”

“Some people would give their firstborn for your mind,” she reminds him.

“Oh, but how the other half lives.”

“Twat,” she laughs, rounding a corner that brings them to the Great Hall. A violent autumn breeze sharply whips into the corridor through the front doors, one that makes her own bones shiver and forces her to bend her knees to stay in place. Azriel squeezes a stabling hand over her shoulder, squinting his eyes against the beating wind, damp hair whipping back in the current.

“You’re going to die from a cold,” she decrees as the breeze dies down, what with the idiot not wearing neither a sweater nor a scarf.

“‘m fine, come on,” he tugs her towards the grand staircase that would take them to their first class of the day and their aforementioned test. Elain digs her heels into the ground, at which he huffs and stops as well.

“Here,” she unwinds her neatly wrapped scarf from around her neck and slings it around his own considerably longer one. “You can’t be an idiot in Ravenclaw. It doesn’t look good for your house.”

“If I keep it on will you drop it?” He asks from behind the knit yellow and black wool.

“Yes.”

“Fine,” he mutters, tugging it away from his skin but nonetheless slinging the longer tail over his shoulder. “I’ve a test to flunk.”

“Liar,” she chirps back, following him towards the classroom.

And sure enough, the next day when their marked tests were handed back and Elain twisted in her seat upfront to catch Azriel’s eyes from the back of the classroom, he held up an unfolded scroll with an almost annoyed red A+ scribbled in the corner and mouthed I was wrong at her. She rolls her eyes for good measure, but turns back to her own scroll and the exhilarating A marking it.

Sure, cleverness gets one far but so does hardwork and effort.

42 notes · View notes

carnivalcarriondiscarded · 8 months

Text

excuse me i need to Muse on something for a moment

so in Wally's secret 'vinyl' audios, specifically the last few (if we're listening to em in chronological order), obviously he starts to sound more strained/distressed. his breathing is more labored, like it's taking all of his energy to make contact.

but the audio that really caught my attention was the "But i still can't see" one. cause he just said he has more eyes than he did before. he knows We draw them a lot, and it's thanks to that that he can see. but he still can't see?

so my question is: where is Wally physically? cause although he can (assumedly) see the WHRP goings on, he can see through the eyes We draw, that could all be on a, uh... more Intangible level of sight. like the spiral pit is forming an eye, and then there's the eye on the ceiling in the secret Staff Only section - could Wally be in the pit, that space between his reality and Ours, "watching" through the eyes? but unable to actually see with due to the pit being pitch black nothingness? is he somewhere else? is he stuck? he can see, but he can't... see.

(or is he trying to explain an abstract concept - he's not actually viewing anything, but he can sense it. like how he knows We're there, even if he can't see or hear Us. but he just doesn't have the words to describe it other than using physical senses - see, hear, look.)

and him saying "...that I can see. But it is still... I can't..." but it's still what, Wally? dark? something else that he doesn't have the words to describe, so he just says that he can't see?

i know that in the Livestream Trivia Document (compiled by @/the neighborhoodwatch) there was something said about Wally being in a box. my first thought reading that was "oh, so he's in storage? the physical puppet, i mean?" which would make sense - show's over, there's no more use for him. pack 'em up and put him away. but that paired with the "can't see" audio makes both seem a lil... connected.

Wally can't see > he's likely somewhere dark > the inside of closed boxes are dark > Wally's in a box. (or maybe the Neighborhood is the box? it's a stretch, i know, but the map is a box. television sets are often set up in "boxes". maybe it's less of a physical storage box and more of a 'boxed in' sort of thing...)

one question i've had since the Start of my interest in this incredible project is: how is Wally communicating? how has he connected to the site? how does he connect to our reality? the pit almost definitely has something to do with it - most likely acting as a bridge, or the deteriorating of the barrier between our two 'worlds' - but if Wally is in a box and Not the pit or even just in the puppet's reality... how is he reaching us beyond just seeing through the eyes he's given?

or is he in their reality, and he can contact through the pit or something, but he can't actually see the other side? Our side? he knows it's there - that We're there - but none of it is visible to him. maybe his apparent disassociation in the 14 bug audios is a demonstration of him contacting Us. we can see through him, but it's a one way street.

and speaking of the pit - i just had a thought. his whole thing with Us letting him in, opening... the pit on the neighborhood map is getting bigger and clearer. but the presumed Other Side, the one on the Staff Only ceiling, is small. it's the size of a ceiling panel. it seems to me that Wally is chipping away at his side of the pit or 'portal', trying to reach Our reality, but he needs Us to do the same thing on the other side. the QA can hear him calling, but there's no phone on their (Our) side of the pit. how do We call back???

there's a fundamental barrier & lack of understanding between Wally and the QA/Us. he's trying. he wants to be let in, but what does that mean, really? let him in where? open what? he's desperate. he wants us to understand. he's trying so so hard Without the right tools to clearly communicate what he wants. he can't see Us, We can see him, both know the other is there, but there's no way to connect. and the attempts are hurting all parties involved, however unintentionally