OUR FOREST OF THORNS | tbosas ✔️

015 || Something, Anything, Everything

Before straightening back up, she ripped the page off the device, crumbling it in her hands and throwing it to the corner. She turned around only once she had her cigarette in hand, along with her lighter, surprised to see Coriolanus stand in the open doorway with a fragrant awkwardness to his stance, to his wide eyes looking around with a hint of an emotion trapped between confusion and pity.

"Coryo," Daphne called, managing to make him flinch back to reality, even at the cost of prying his eyes off of the layered blackboards he spotted and was intrigued by. Once their eyes met, she smiled, "The door?"

"Oh!" His exclamation was only an extra confirmation that he had all but forgotten there was a door behind him that he should be closing.

Thankfully for him, Daphne didn't seem to mind, given as she had chuckled at first, and then sighed herself without a care in the world into her old chair at the desk, cigarette between her lips soon to be releasing a thin line of smoke towards the high ceiling.

"It's just...," Coriolanus hesitated, trying to find the right words once he closed the door and could finally turn his attention back to the room itself, "...not how I expected your room to look." Try as he might, though the whole room was a wonder to the senses in some way, his eyes circled back to the blackboards, filled to the brim with calculations, all save for one — that one had a single equation on it, written right in the middle, with signs around it that what had been written there was frantically erased time and time again. It was unfinished, even a mind barely initiated in Mathematics, like his, could tell.

"What did you expect it to look like?" Daphne asked, her voice audibly calmer now that she had that desired relief with her, forming a haze of smoke around her head.

"Well," Coriolanus gulped, gathering his thoughts. The truth was that he simply didn't expect her room to look so much as his own, not when their social classes had been separated so vertiginously by the war. But without the ability to draw comparison while keeping his financial condition wrapped in a decent foil of secrecy, there to salvage his dignity, he had to consider the very essence of what made Daphne's room such a whiplash observance to him. Finally, taking one hasty step forward to unfreeze himself from the vicinity of the door, Coriolanus spoke, "I admit, I expected it to be more like you."

"Our bedrooms reflect the state of our minds," Daphne recited mechanically. "It's the only thing I picked up from that single psychology book that ever passed under my fingertips. One good line in a book as thich as my forearm, it made me sick," she rolled her eyes, sitting up from her chair and slowly dragging her steps forward, to meet Coriolanus in the middle of the room. "Trust me, I am aware how this looks. Though I don't have people coming here often to tell me this to my face, simply remembering so vivdly my childhood bedroom gives me enough reason to realize that this particular decor may look unbefitting."

Coriolanus couldn't even properly rejoice over the fact that he was the first to be visiting her in her own room's privacy — though he had a hard time conjuring up images of anyone else in Daphne's life that might have qualified to get there before him —, that he was flanked by another peculiar idea, one that swept clean the board of his mind and gave him an exercise of logic with a clear conclusion: the facts were that she had grown up in a different room and this current one looks a whole lot like an unfinished project that has been paused and morphed prematurely into a bedroom, something that it was never supposed to be. "Did your father force you to stay here?" He frowned upon his conclusion to that logic exercise he employed in his mind.

With just a bit of shyness to him, Coriolanus casted another glance around himself, noting how good the vase with the roses from him looked on her nightstand. This time around he also managed to catch a curious sight of a pink nightgown on the side of her bed, but most importantly he had gained an appreciation of how, though overcrowded and obscenely small, the room itself wasn't by any means disordered. That very system hiding behind how things had been arranged was making it so very clear that the room belonged to Daphne.