einhorn

It isn’t fair to put her through such grief — he knows. The panic-stricken look says it all. Her plea sends it home, makes Sidney wince as he sits himself upright on Rowan’s bedroom floor. He plays it off as though the fall had at all harmed him. In reality, the despair in her voice hurts worse than any carpet burn.

“I’d throw rocks at your window instead, but that would wake your mom up.”

Sidney reaches out to brush Rowan’s hair back out of her eyes. He struggles to match the rest of her part. In the end, it looks even more disheveled than when he’d started.

“— wanna go somewhere?”

There’s an all-too-genuine sniffle - a byproduct of the stress that has already come and gone. The feeling of remorse dissipates the moment Sidney proposes the idea of sneaking out. Dark, tearful brown eyes flutter curiously at him.

“ — Yeah, always,” she enunciates with a half-smile, an assured nod. Rowan begins to rock back and forth on her heels.

@einhcrn has been roped into some kind of delinquent nonsense.

“Rowan… Rowan! Ro! Pssssst!”

Sidney Hoover wavers slightly on his perch, fingertips blanching with effort from his vise-grip on the window sill. Previous mishaps involving rooftops ought to have deterred him from these late-night escapades, but he still found himself scaling the side of his best friend’s house years after the fact. Almost as though the brain damage had wiped all traces of post-fall trauma from his mind. 

With his free hand, he brushes the black-and-white curls from his eyes and taps on Rowan’s window again. This time, more urgently.

“Ro, I know you’re awake!”

There are very few things in this world that make Rowan truly nervous anymore - being constantly held back by a parent will do that to you - but this doesn’t include seeing her best friend clinging to the edge of her window sill just minutes before midnight.

The concern hits like a stab to the chest. She can remember that fall like it had only happened hours ago, and the urgency of it has her rushing to open the window - not too quickly, of course, but quickly enough to yank Sidney into the house. More precisely, onto the floor of her bedroom. She doesn’t seem to register what she’s just done until moments later.

“ 𝚑𝚘𝚠 𝚍𝚘 𝚠𝚎 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚢 𝚏𝚛𝚎𝚎? ”

        “ 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚍, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚋𝚎 𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚏𝚞𝚕          𝚠𝚑𝚘 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚐𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚙𝚘𝚠𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚘. ”

Nearly a year into her studies, the school was still so unfamiliar to Rowan. There was rarely a moment its dark walls did not impose on her spirits, as though some kind of influence lurked within them. It was possible, of course, that this influence was integral to the school’s very foundations. Even with her narrow worldly experience, Rowan understood  that some places were alive. Buildings like this usually had all kinds of thoughts, feelings, desires; some were much more ravenous than others. The university happened to be one such place. The voice knew it, too.

The voice was something - more appropriately, someone - Rowan had only recently become acquainted with. Having spent an entire childhood up to her neck in religious teachings, she  once suspected it to be malicious. Her mother would have thought so. Would’ve acted on it, too. There was no doubt in Rowan’s mind about it.

To this day, however, this voice had not proven itself a threat. In fact, it behaved quite the opposite - when it spoke, she felt her thoughts calm, sometimes to the point where she didn’t think at all.

Whether it posed a threat to others was still debatable, but for the most part it seemed benevolent.

Rowan had managed to keep it entirely to herself thus far. The voice was never intense; usually it spoke only in whispers of no decipherable language. Other times, however, the voice was an influence, a power. Ignoring this power had consequences, but Rowan didn’t spend her entire young life under someone else’s rule only to offer up her freedom to disembodied voices. 

It was from this same voice that Rowan learned of a young man named Allen, and had she not been warned to keep away from him, she might have passed him by entirely. There was hardly a thing about this “Allen” that constituted as dangerous, at least from Rowan’s observation.

Although the voice insisted, it didn’t keep Rowan from practically stalking him from afar. It was just baffling to her how unassuming he was, how careful and uncertain. Perhaps a little sad.

It didn’t take very long for curiosity to get the best of her. On this evening in particular, Rowan caught a glimpse of Allen just moments after leaving her practice session. With her violin tucked under-arm, Rowan followed behind at a distance - she’d had practice sneaking around, and knew how to place her footsteps so they didn’t attract attention. Rather than following Allen through the same door, she slipped through one of the side exits - all the while ignoring incoherent whispers.