RP: Reflection
Characters: Cho Chang.
Location: Flat.
Date: August 20th, 1999
Status/Warning: Private.
Summary: Cho plays dress up with contemplation.
Completion: Complete.
For the storms weathered, and those still below the horizon. Here's to lucking out! Love, Percy.
There was no such thing as lucking out, really. Not when it came to real luck.
And that was the thing.
-
She sat on her bed, scribbling vague thoughts in the margins of Percy's adoration.
Her skin felt like paper, and for the first time she noticed: in the right lighting it all went almost translucent, like parchment over a candle. She waggled her long fingers, flexing them like claws, and grimaced at the veins standing out in her wrists.
This led to an exploration of her (stick figure) arms. Under no stretch of the imagination could they be anything but thin, but perhaps a kind translation might be 'possessing of a starved grace'... For they really were pretty, in that dollish way her genes tended to favor; almost as if they could snap between two fingers. Especially those wrists! Even Cho could admit, they were terribly small.
Starved grace. Would that be irony, or something worse?
To find the answer, she modeled for herself. Like many answers -- that elusive boost of confidence, the reason she deserved one thing and not the other -- the quest lay in the mirror.
She took out her wand, thrusting it out in front of her as if ready for attack. For a moment she was ferocious, thinking of how cinematic it would be to wrestle her own reflection; this faded to a sort of amused apathy, imagining how badly she'd be beaten.
That girl had years of this under her belt.
Dropping the act, Cho did the only thing she could and threw her wand down. Both hands shot up in surrender, eyes widened, her mouth forming a silent negatory. Now, there was something convincing! Close contenders were her (virginal) bedroom eyes, a look of disdain down the bridge of her nose, and vague disinterest.
Vague disinterest happened to be the sexiest, she was sure, out of those three; bedroom eyes were convincing, but somehow terribly wrong in this context. There wasn't really anything cinematic about taking your doppelganger to bed, especially if it meant dying as soon as you looked in their eyes.
That had been Cho's least favorite legend, growing up; she'd always worried that she was the apparition, not the other way around. Looking at herself now, she could almost believe it; one had to assume the doppelganger was evil, after all. Except... Cho wasn't. Not entirely. It was just she'd never been good, either, except at things like kissing and hurting people's feelings. It just wouldn't be fair if she were the clean copy.
Percy was really the only chance she had, and there was where real luck came in.
Brushing her hair back out of her eyes, she sat back on the bed, wondering what to do next. The answer came in opening the old trunk: time to model responsibility, and hope it might come limping back when it saw her looking bloody amazing. As she stripped down, she tried to see herself as Percy might; she tried to imagine the exact light in his eyes, and how it burned differently with every successive item of clothing. (Measured increments.) In the end she crouched over the trunk in her underwear, unable to remember anything but what his hands had been doing instead.
It didn't hurt her to think she had failed in treating it all as a science, measured and precise; she'd ended up wrong, after all, and it had made things more like a dream than an exercise. (How to thank someone for something like that, for taking you out of your head?)
Cho worried over this for a moment, eyeing the pictures she'd taken with him weeks ago, and found that the only way to remedy this was to forget about it entirely. At least for now. Time to explore a different kind of pain: old school clothing.
Admittedly, seventh year's Ravenclaw scarf didn't have quite the same flair in summer. Digging deeper down, neither did the first sweater she salvaged; actually, it made her look a bit of a tart, standing there in underwear and half a schoolgirls' costume.
I'm not half bad as a tart, if I do say so myself.
And she'd played many roles, but never that one. At Hogwarts, there wasn't enough room; she hadn't gotten up to things with anyone, being too much of a broken heart, and for the most part she'd frightened boys away before they ever thought of undoing any buttons. ... Or at least, for pride's sake, before they'd ever put those thoughts in action.
Schoolwork had been a good distraction from all of that, hormones and shite. Hadn't she always been there to put the cho in scholastic? On second thought, there was a reason it wasn't pronounced that way.
"Because it would sound stupid," she reminded herself. "Sort of like you are."
Her reflection didn't talk back; they both stood still, blushing. Cho stripped herself of her past, which fit conveniently in three and a half feet of space -- and there, didn't that feel nice? If only everything could be the same.... And perhaps one day it would be. (In heaven.)
Could I fit in a trunk like this? According to the weight she'd gained, maybe not; but that was probably wishful thinking. Lucking out. When she struck a pose again, her ribs defined themselves beautifully, splaying for their reflective twin. Back in bed the theory book was open, and the topic was consonance.
In other words, real luck.
Location: Flat.
Date: August 20th, 1999
Status/Warning: Private.
Summary: Cho plays dress up with contemplation.
Completion: Complete.
For the storms weathered, and those still below the horizon. Here's to lucking out! Love, Percy.
There was no such thing as lucking out, really. Not when it came to real luck.
And that was the thing.
-
She sat on her bed, scribbling vague thoughts in the margins of Percy's adoration.
Her skin felt like paper, and for the first time she noticed: in the right lighting it all went almost translucent, like parchment over a candle. She waggled her long fingers, flexing them like claws, and grimaced at the veins standing out in her wrists.
This led to an exploration of her (stick figure) arms. Under no stretch of the imagination could they be anything but thin, but perhaps a kind translation might be 'possessing of a starved grace'... For they really were pretty, in that dollish way her genes tended to favor; almost as if they could snap between two fingers. Especially those wrists! Even Cho could admit, they were terribly small.
Starved grace. Would that be irony, or something worse?
To find the answer, she modeled for herself. Like many answers -- that elusive boost of confidence, the reason she deserved one thing and not the other -- the quest lay in the mirror.
She took out her wand, thrusting it out in front of her as if ready for attack. For a moment she was ferocious, thinking of how cinematic it would be to wrestle her own reflection; this faded to a sort of amused apathy, imagining how badly she'd be beaten.
That girl had years of this under her belt.
Dropping the act, Cho did the only thing she could and threw her wand down. Both hands shot up in surrender, eyes widened, her mouth forming a silent negatory. Now, there was something convincing! Close contenders were her (virginal) bedroom eyes, a look of disdain down the bridge of her nose, and vague disinterest.
Vague disinterest happened to be the sexiest, she was sure, out of those three; bedroom eyes were convincing, but somehow terribly wrong in this context. There wasn't really anything cinematic about taking your doppelganger to bed, especially if it meant dying as soon as you looked in their eyes.
That had been Cho's least favorite legend, growing up; she'd always worried that she was the apparition, not the other way around. Looking at herself now, she could almost believe it; one had to assume the doppelganger was evil, after all. Except... Cho wasn't. Not entirely. It was just she'd never been good, either, except at things like kissing and hurting people's feelings. It just wouldn't be fair if she were the clean copy.
Percy was really the only chance she had, and there was where real luck came in.
Brushing her hair back out of her eyes, she sat back on the bed, wondering what to do next. The answer came in opening the old trunk: time to model responsibility, and hope it might come limping back when it saw her looking bloody amazing. As she stripped down, she tried to see herself as Percy might; she tried to imagine the exact light in his eyes, and how it burned differently with every successive item of clothing. (Measured increments.) In the end she crouched over the trunk in her underwear, unable to remember anything but what his hands had been doing instead.
It didn't hurt her to think she had failed in treating it all as a science, measured and precise; she'd ended up wrong, after all, and it had made things more like a dream than an exercise. (How to thank someone for something like that, for taking you out of your head?)
Cho worried over this for a moment, eyeing the pictures she'd taken with him weeks ago, and found that the only way to remedy this was to forget about it entirely. At least for now. Time to explore a different kind of pain: old school clothing.
Admittedly, seventh year's Ravenclaw scarf didn't have quite the same flair in summer. Digging deeper down, neither did the first sweater she salvaged; actually, it made her look a bit of a tart, standing there in underwear and half a schoolgirls' costume.
I'm not half bad as a tart, if I do say so myself.
And she'd played many roles, but never that one. At Hogwarts, there wasn't enough room; she hadn't gotten up to things with anyone, being too much of a broken heart, and for the most part she'd frightened boys away before they ever thought of undoing any buttons. ... Or at least, for pride's sake, before they'd ever put those thoughts in action.
Schoolwork had been a good distraction from all of that, hormones and shite. Hadn't she always been there to put the cho in scholastic? On second thought, there was a reason it wasn't pronounced that way.
"Because it would sound stupid," she reminded herself. "Sort of like you are."
Her reflection didn't talk back; they both stood still, blushing. Cho stripped herself of her past, which fit conveniently in three and a half feet of space -- and there, didn't that feel nice? If only everything could be the same.... And perhaps one day it would be. (In heaven.)
Could I fit in a trunk like this? According to the weight she'd gained, maybe not; but that was probably wishful thinking. Lucking out. When she struck a pose again, her ribs defined themselves beautifully, splaying for their reflective twin. Back in bed the theory book was open, and the topic was consonance.
In other words, real luck.