"Cedimus, an subitum luctando accendimus ignem? Cedimus: leve fit, quod bene..."Karl's tongue felt useless in his mouth. He stared at the sentence he'd just read over, hating the sound of his own voice, and took a breath, backing up a few words.
"C—Cedimus... leve fit, quod fertur—""It's
cedamus, the second go-around. With an 'A'."
Karl nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of a familiar voice, clutching
Amores close to his chest, likely bending the thin pages a bit in the process. Karl's dark eyes shot up, filled with an instinctive shame, and... upon resting his gaze against a calm blue one, he felt some of that embarrassed heat leave his face. "Johan," he breathed, like it was perfectly understandable that the young man would find him here. "You... found me?"
Johan didn't answer right away. Instead, he drew nearer, a handsome tweed jacket and dark turtleneck seating beside Karl on the rock wall separating the old wishing well from the street. "Seems so," he finally murmured, reaching over with a delicate hand to tip the book of Latin poetry back, saving the poor thing's pages from an untimely ruination against Karl's winter jacket. "Did you not want to be found?"
Karl wasn't expecting a question like that. Did it matter whether he wanted to be found or not, now that Johan was here? Did any of his previous thoughts matter? His heart, flutter-bird thing that it was in his chest (Johan was sitting so close...) seemed to speak a resounding no. "I-I guess not," he breathed out in a sheepish chuckle, though he would have tried for
Not by anyone but you, if his mouth were just a little more eloquent, or quick. "But it's fine. You're... fine. How are you?"
Karl felt warm under his clothes from the gentle, yet somehow piercing smile from the other boy. "A better question would be, how is poor Ovid? Rolling in his grave, to witness his work getting crushed and mangled." Karl's brows quirked up, then knitted, the light feeling in his chest starting to cage itself in.
"I... I'm trying to get it. For some reason, it all just... it doesn't come out right, when I try to recite it. Even in private," Karl's words were spilling, now, hesitant at first but now a deluge of his tangled thoughts. "Even in private I stumble over my words. I don't know—I'll never be able to live up to Schuwald's expectations. I'm not... cut out for it. Not like you."
He hadn't meant to turn so venomous. Karl took in a short, sharp breath, a wince in its own right, and turned his head to look up at Johan's face, placid and sweet as ever. "I-I didn't mean..."
"I was talking about that hug you gave it, when I startled you. You'll curl the pages, like that... then you'll really be in trouble with Schuwald." Karl felt the pressure in his chest fizzle in confusion, as Johan reached over to the book splayed open over his lap. With a gentle hand he smoothed out pages that had been slightly creased, and Karl watched with a shameful glow to the tips of his ears. He'd... he'd assumed too much, just then. Assumed Johan was criticizing his Latin recitation skills, when Johan had been nothing but polite to him all this time, ever since Lotte had introduced them. His head was so loud with insults hurtled at himself, that he'd put them into Johan's mouth without realizing—
"There. As good as an ancient book like this can be." Johan's voice brought Karl back to the present, blinking out of the dark and into the grey of the cold winter afternoon. He looked up, met that kind gaze once more, now... much closer, only for a few seconds, before Johan returned to his upright seat. "But you know... this weather isn't good for it. Cold, and damp... bad for books, those two things. Bad for book readers, too."
Karl stared at the open book in his lap, and as Johan's words sank in, found himself gathering it up and shutting it with a soft thud and a softer sigh. "I know. I wish I could blame my verbal stumbling on the cold, but I can't. It doesn't matter where I am." He thumbed over the book's well-worn spine. How much love had Schuwald sunk into this book, when his eyes still worked? Into all of his many hundreds of books? It was... difficult to imagine such a cold man as him loving anything, much less something so soft as poetry. Karl squinted as a fat snowflake alighted on his lashes, bringing up a hand to rub the bite of cold away.
Johan shifted, and stood with a near silent brush of fabric. The boy seemed to move like a ghost, Karl thought, and the snowy terrain only added to that silent image. "The snow is picking up. Will you walk back to campus with me?"
The offer seemed to strike a delayed response in Karl, still staring at that rust-red book and its crumbling gold lettering, when the brunt of it finally sank in. His heart leapt into his throat instinctively, then settled with a softer, giddier excitement, standing automatically to reach into his backpack resting on the ground against the wall. "Sure. Yeah, I'd be happy to walk with you," his voice sounded blessedly casual, to him, but when he looked up from the cloth he was gathering out of his backpack, an almost knowing, pleased smile looked back at him. Karl felt himself start to smile back, wondering what it was for—if it was for anything at all. Johan was one of the first people Karl had ever known in his life to smile at absolutely nothing, and while Karl couldn't possibly understand such a thing, it enchanted him nonetheless.
He wrapped Ovid's
Amores in protective cloth and slipped it into his backpack with haste. He was on his feet proper and falling into step beside Johan before the snow had much of a chance to collect on his dark curls.
"I'm not one to pry," Johan lied softly, as he laced long fingers behind his back, "but how did you find yourself at a place like that?"
"Oh, the old well?" Karl murmured, casting a glance back over his shoulder at the disappearing little structure, watching it be eclipsed by shrubbery as they turned a corner. "I... come here, sometimes. Or, did, when I was a freshman. It's... one of my spots, I guess."
"Like the roof? A place you go to think," Johan's voice held a genuine curiosity to it, and Karl felt his heart flutter once more, reawakened by the realization that Johan had... remembered that. Remembered what Karl had told him on the roof. His hand burned, suddenly, a phantom reminder of the way that Johan had gathered his hand in a cage of pale fingers and pressed it, held it, as tears fell. He wondered if Johan put as much weight on that moment as Karl found himself unable to resist doing.
He quickly darted his hand into the pocket of his jacket, smothering it before it caught the yearning fever in his heart. "Yeah. Just like the roof."
[Raffle post]