a healthy fixation

[Eliott Cavendish]

you're breaking my heart all the way
i need your madness just to get through the day

Eliott had spent the majority of his afternoon in town, just wandering and watching people walk by, as he so often did. People rarely noticed, and that was the most important thing. Today, he was clad in a simple white, button-up shirt, untucked, a pair of black slacks. He even donned his favorite hat, an old-fashioned black fedora, which threw his rather pale, sharply-defined face into shadow. His dark, shaggy hair was left loose, falling to his chin and slightly in his face. A placid expression crossed his facade, as if he were happily lost, looking on with distant, wide brown doe's eyes. But he accomplished virtually nothing as he walked, which was also typical of him, as he was incurably lazy.

But now, as evening began to settle in, he made his way slowly back to campus, enjoying the way the streetlights flickered on the leaves and the sidewalk. He decided to head to his favorite building, the library, of course. He had come to think of it affectionately as his laboratory. And when he finally made his way through the tall doors, a vague smile curled at the corners of his lips as took in the sight. Shelves wall-to-wall, filled to the brim with entertaining and informative books. He wasted no time in approaching a nearby shelf and beginning to browse, soon pulling out the works of another one of his favorite authors, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.

Once he pulled it off the shelf with nimble fingers, he rose to his full height once more. He began to flip through the pages absentmindedly before he even reached a place to sit, but he had long ago mastered the art of walking and reading at the same time. He made his way over to a vacant armchair and a table, on which perched a small glowing lamp, near a very tall window and sat down. After he settled down, he spent several minutes just intently reading, though he had surely memorized the words by this point. He muttered incoherently under his breath, and soon straightened before setting the book down on the table in front of him. He pulled a rather worn little notebook and pen out of his pocket and began to scribble away, fast becoming wrapped up in his own little world.

[Aiden Thomas]

Aiden glanced up from his book as a young man clad in enough black-and-white, complete with fedora, to look at home in a 1920s movie walked in. The younger boy had been here for hours, immersed completely in a copy of a book entitled The Sum of All Fears. Like most of his fare, it was an exciting adventure story set in a world Aiden barely knew. Now he dragged himself away from Jack Ryan and the other inhabitants of Tom Clancy's prose to observe the reality of the Minute Hill Preparatory School Library. It was later than he'd thought, late enough that other than himself and a lone librarian sorting returned books in a corner, the man in the fedora was the only one there. Aiden's vivid imagination placed whover it was, despite the fact that this was almost certainly a fellow student here in twenty-first century Minute Hill, firmly in a production of some twentieth-century spy thriller not unlike the one he'd been reading. The works of Tom Clancy had that effect on some people, so at least the freshman wasn't alone in this mental game. When the fedora guy, as he was quickly named in Aiden's mind, put down his book and began writing quickly in a worn notebook, Aiden could almost believe that his spy-thriller thoughts were true. He eventually reapplied himself to the story, but kept glancing up over the top of the book in fascination.

[Eliott Cavendish]

it's a million o' clock, too hot to sleep
a rotten taste in my mouth, and my eyes are deep

Eliott just continued to write away feverishly in his little notebook. This was his method. The instant he felt inspired, he wrote it down just the way it popped into his head, and that his how it stayed. Immediate and unedited. Perhaps he'd come up with a name for the technique one of these days, but he hadn't bothered thus far. When he had at last exerted all his efforts to get his thoughts recorded and slowed down somewhat, he paused and set the notebook and pen in his lap to take a moment to flex his fingers and examine his surroundings. He took off his hat now as well, and ran his fingers through his hair before sitting back. He hadn't realized how late it had gotten. The place was virtually empty, except for one boy nearby who was reading a Tom Clancy book.

When he stopped to glance at the boy, he was surprised the find that the boy appeared to be watching him from over the top of his book. He blinked absentmindedly for a moment as that fact registered, and looked to each side of himself to check and see if there was someone else there that he hadn't noticed. But the wasn't, so he simply shrugged and looked back over at the boy, who appeared to be a freshman, with a small serene smile on his face, and raised his hand briefly as a gesture of greeting.

[Aiden Thomas]

When one of his surreptitious glances showed that the fedora guy had stopped writing, Aiden gave up on The Sum of All Fears altogether and just stared blankly at the hypnotizing fellow occupant of the library. The fluorescent lamps set into the ceiling just like at many another school cast the only light that fell on the surreal scene before him. Wildly, Aiden wondered if he was dreaming.

Then the fedora guy noticed him, glanced around, and then raised his hand in greeting. The younger boy's jaw dropped in astonishment at that. Is this even real? he wondered again. Nothing like this could ever happen in real life. It has got to be a dream or something! All regard for propriety abandoned, he just stared, mouth hanging limply open, wondering what sort of impossibilities might step out of the pages of one of the many books around him next.