bait_backup | Son can you play me a memory (Reply)

*Purpled early evening light strikes the wallpaper opposite the window, making it seem faded compared to the rest of the shadowed music room and illuminating the polished wood of the piano that falls in it's path, turning it into sleek contrasts of shadow and light and making the boy slumped against it look more lifeless than he would in proper light. He hasn't moved in some time, too tired to turn on lamps even with night just around the corner and too tired to sleep. With the piano's shadow falling over his bowed head, he stays like a statue of someone defeated awaiting the someday-inevitable drop of the instrument's lid onto his neck, his fingers placed limply on the keys and his forehead indented from resting against the fallboard.

Regulus has never needed many hours of sleep to carry on, but even though he remembers waking up from resting upon his return to England, he is having difficulty placing just when that was and how long it has been since he slept and woke up without having unpleasant thoughts and dreams in between. Unmoving as a pile of bones lying where they fell, Regulus feels the ache of exhaustion through his whole body - the unnatural prickling warmth and the headache that stretches down to his knees, the disconnected alarm by the slightest of twitches as his muscles beg for rest. Every so often, the only hint of his continued existence, keys depress and send out a lifeline call to the house, a Still Here Chord that vibrates through his skull and the quiet room. He wants to rest but there is too much left undone, too much that could happen if he allows himself to completely drift away. So he stays here, both comforted by the sound and the touch of the piano and purposefully as uncomfortable as possible to just stay awake a little while longer, as always making his body pay the price for his nerves. But for a little while at least, he is alone with the sigh of the notes.*