Cleo James
April 27, 2018 7:45 AM
New Year's Revelations (tag Parker) by Cleo James
It was December thirty-first. There was due to be a party on the pitch with fireworks in the evening, in order to welcome in the New Year. Time for fresh starts and resolutions and all that… Cleo definitely wanted things to change, although she wasn’t sure exactly how to put the idea into words… She needed to tell Parker though, she knew that much. Telling him was not the resolution itself, although it needed plenty of resolve. But she wanted next year to be different, and she knew that this needed to be resolved for that to be possible. Whether Parker stuck with her or not, she needed to get this done, and then get a fresh start at midnight.She had been sick at the start of the holidays, shortly after setting the Crotalus table on fire. At first, she had freaked out at the idea of taking medications designed for humans - what if they weren’t suitable for her and something weird happened? - but as the medic had pointed out, she had taken them plenty of times before with no ill effect; she was different, no less human than she had been then, the only difference now was that she knew. In some senses, that wasn’t totally true… From a safety point of view about potion consumption, it probably was - anything she’d taken before was clearly safe. Socially… it wasn’t entirely accurate, because how people reacted to her was going to change as she got older, and she was going to have some decidedly non-human effects on them. But what the medic had said had still struck a chord with her. She wasn’t any less human than she had been before…
She had asked Parker to meet her for a walk. She still wasn’t really sure how she was going to tell him. She’d gone through it a bunch of different ways in her head and they all seemed either stupid or just… inarticulate. Ranging from the blunt ’Hi. I’m not entirely human to ’So, I guess I’m not responsible for all the weird things going on this year which would logically lead on to questions of why she might have been but was a bit obtuse, and also, she still didn’t know how to say it when it finally got to that point. How did you say that to someone?
She met him on the steps, and led the way into the gardens chattering about the gardens and the plants - the snow! So, unusual. It was neat, huh? And she brushed some of it off the leaves with her fingers - her whole demeanour distracted and nervous. Once they’d got a little bit away from the school (but not out of sight of one of the elves, who “just happened” to be gardening in that area), she slowed her pace, her chattering petering out into silence too. After playing with the snow, she’d shoved her hands into her jacket pockets to keep them warm, and now she balled them into fists, feeling the nails digging into her palm, trying to give herself focus.
“Parker… When you reading about creepy creatures at the start of the year. Did you… did you read anything about veela?” she asked. She hadn’t mentioned them directly in her letters, she’d been too scared to. The closest she’d come were harpies. But they were probably in similar books, and maybe he’d come across them…
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Cleo James
New Year's Revelations (tag Parker)
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Cleo James
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