Saturday, May 7th, 2005
“God, I’m tired.” Severus closed his eyes, leaning his head back, not quite far enough to hit the curtain covering the window behind him, behind the bed he was sitting on, but nearly there. His back, not exactly the center, but close, ached from hours of being pushed against the wooden frame, his hands resting on the top of his knees to keep them from scratching his painfully itchy feet—he was allergic to mosquitoes, but it was May so they were unavoidable. All he could feel was the dull pain of it all, only dull because he was so used to it.
“Go to bed then.” Remus suggested, eyes not straying from the T.V. which played the same video for the fifth time in a row. He was sitting on the floor, maybe a foot in front of the bed, wishing he had something to lean against but unwilling to touch the bed frame. Maybe it was unresolved trauma from Fenrir hiding under his bed to turn him as a toddler, but he either had to be on top of a bed, or at least a foot away from it; so a monster couldn't reach out and grab him.
Severus crawled off the bed, standing next to Remus, and put his hands on his hips to lean back as far as possible without doing a full backbend. Or, more likely, falling down as he hadn’t done a backbend since he was ten, and that was a very long time ago.
“Oh.” He heard himself cry out, completely out of his control, right before the joints made a loud cracking noise, then crawled back onto the bed. But, before he could settle back into his cross-legged position, his hand made its way to the left side of his right foot, scratching it as he reminded himself that would just stir the venom to the top making it itch more.
Still, the feeling scratching those bites gave him was better than an orgasm, it certainly felt like one and allowed him a small amount of relief for a few short seconds. Though, could you really blame him? The bites were approximately one to five inches wide and nothing helped at all, except oral Benadryl. Worse still they only had children’s because he couldn’t take pills, outside of his required meds, he somehow found a way to force those, and despite the fact that he was much bigger than a ninety pound eleven year old, the pharmacy said he couldn’t take more than ten milliliters every four hours, at most.
Remus rewinded the video, which was forty-eight minutes long but he only watched the first forty minutes of, to watch it for the sixth time, and Severus settled back into his place.
“Are you gonna sleep?” Remus still stared intently at the screen as if he had never seen the video before.
“Probably not.”
“Okay.” Remus would usually protest more, try and convince him that it was important to give his body what it needed, but the video was much more important right now. He had to watch it.
“Aren’t I supposed to be the autistic one?”
“I like this video.”
“I can tell….Are you okay? I mean: is this an OCD thing?”
“No….I don’t think so….Maybe.” Remus really wished the older man would be quiet so he could watch the video in full, missing no words or ever getting lost in it, but that wasn’t about to happen. He would get lost anyway.
Severus opened a new tab on his laptop, his new laptop. He had a desktop computer before, but it got so bad and slow that even he would admit it needed to be thrown out, so now he had the laptop.
Can OCD make you rewatch a video over and over again he typed into the search bar, annoyed, but not surprised, when it made OCD lowercase. Still the annoyance turned painful when he read the small blurbs of text before you clicked on an article and the first said that OCD could make you rewatch videos, and the second said it couldn’t.
He quickly clicked off of the tab, knocking it off the computer all together, to avoid a meltdown, but he still wasn’t happy about it.
“Google says maybe.” He informed.
“Okay.” Remus just kept watching, he nearly had the words memorized, like Severus did with his special interests, but wasn’t quite there yet. He would keep watching until he could recite it.
Then watch it more.
Severus no longer knew what to do, Remus had control over the T.V. and it felt wrong to use his computer to do the same, he didn’t want to read or write, and he wasn’t going to do anything that meant leaving Remus alone.
It was impossible.
He changed position, laying on his side so his back was to Remus and the T.V., right leg crossed over the left one in an arch. It was harder to type like this, but otherwise more comfortable.
The off-brand Benadryl finally began kicking in.
“What’s even the point of this?” Remus asked, distracted from YouTube by an ant crawling across the floor. He remembered the time Severus told him that his house growing up was overrun by ants because there was an ant hill under his kitchen and many in the surrounding properties.
Severus went back to his original position; the other one was wrong. “The point of what?”
“This. Us just sitting here.”
“Does there have to be a point? Can’t we just be here?”
“It’s not very…exciting….Not very movie-scene-perfect.”
“We’re not in a movie.”
“But, if we were, would anyone want to watch it? It seems pretty boring.”
“I don’t think we would be a movie.” Severus disagreed. “Maybe a T.V. show, a series of episodes, each different but with an overall narrative. Slowly, slowly, leading us to the end of it all. But, even the end, the end of the show, the finale, isn’t the real end. Because we would keep living on. We would keep being….In the mind of the viewers and in the things they wrote about us and, especially, in our little world.”
“Characters don’t end with their stories.”
“Right, they have more adventures, just off screen….Those matter too, right?”
“This isn’t much of an adventure….Just sitting here, watching the same video over and over and over again….This is nothing.”
“But, it’s not. It’s human, it’s us. Every story doesn’t have to be action packed, every day doesn’t have to be stressful or overwhelmingly happy….We can just exist, quiet and boring, sometimes….I like it.”
“Do you?” Remus’s gaze went back to the T.V.
“Yeah….Moments like this are my favorite, I love doing nothing with you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Severus observed his laptop, completely useless at the moment, but which he wouldn’t sit down no matter what. “....It’s just being here with you.”
“I love you too.” Remus whispered, and rewinded the video again.