Toys are to play

Obscured

The wall was getting closer and I let out a huge howl when we got through it.

We what?

I gasped against the hand, holding myself in place as he pushed us into a room that wasn't supposed to be there. It was like a part of the Common Room that was hidden for some reason, and the wall my head was about to crash into a few seconds ago was fog only.

My Uncle Tony, before he died, taught me several little magic tricks to play at school. At the time Greggy had not showed up and I usually stayed alone at recess. So I had plenty of free time to practice, and I got some of the simpler ones. One of them was made with mirrors. And these mirrors, placed in the right places with the right angles, could create an effect so real I was sure I could see a ghost in there. Magic is illusion. It plays with ours minds. It tricks us. And that wall tricked me like uncle Tony's mirrors.

Peter Filthy turned my body around and I closed my eyes. I could feel evil exaling from him, madness, coldness.

"Let me go!!!" I cried. There was no immediate response. I felt his breathe leaning into me. I screamed. My uncle was dead and so was my father... He suddenly was cleaning all messed hair from my face and all I could do was whimper and contract the musculature more than it could be contracted.

      "Shush!" He said huskily.

      "Don't shush me, your monster!!!"

      "Angel! It's me! Open your eyes!"

And those words combined with its voice jabbed through my tympanum. The gallows holding my eyelids detached one by one. The tones changed from brown to green, and I was greeted with a pair of emerald eyes — the eyes I haven't realized I missed so much.

His hands were still on my cheeks.

"O-oliver? Why did you do that to me?" I felt my insides paining. He bit his lips.

"I don't know if you noticed but people think you are a rebel. We must sustain this idea."

He let go of my face and I immediatly missed the steady weight of his hands.

"I was almost getting mad looking for you, Angel."

"Why?"

"Pay attention," he spoke calmly, his voice serious. "Oxygen needs us. We need to unite our powers, me and you. They are a hundred, we are in twelve. But we have something they don't: a plan. I just made it out but the others will follow instantly. Now I want you to describe the chain."

I stayed motionless, watching the way his eyebrows curved in little wrinkles when anxious. No way I was going to describe the chain, not now while people were fighting and dying out there. I wasn't taking Oliver's orders.

He suddenly reduced the distance between us to almost nothing. "Are you underestimating my intelligence? Keep this in mind: I am the commander, you are the soldier. I tell the rules, you follow them." His voice harsh and I hadn't realized I was walking backwards til I felt a real wall stopping my bones abruptly. The air went unexpectedly colder. "You have no idea how much you are important to us. So please do what you are intend for."

His hands leaned on the wall and his fresh smell invaded my nostrils. He was doing something to me. There were hundred of feelings around my mind and for a second I could perfectly see what he was getting with that. Oliver knew what he was able to do, he was seducing me, to control.

He is doing this because he knows I am w...

"Wearable." Oliver said and disengaged from the wall.

My eyes opened in a flash.

"W-what?"

He smiled and went some steps back so I could see his entire person. "These pants, they are pretty wearable. I sent someone to buy it after my other black jeans was soaked and destroyed in the flood. He had bought a number under mine but I just realized it fits."

I will continue gapping like a drooling troll and pretend he just didn't say that.

"You see, Angel. I almost slapped this person because he bought it wrong. I called him stupid for not understanding the size I had said. Sometimes we think somebody is unwise, that if he made a mistake once, he will do it again. But most of the times this person is being honest and all you have to do is take the risk and give him a second chance."

And that is what the pant's story was about. The walls around us seemed whiter than the walls from the rest of the Common Room. Oliver's darker clothing only increased his highlighting, which scared me a bit. How could he be so... so...

"Okay! I will do it!" I said, and he opened a smile. I don't like the way this thing is going.

•••

We both had to work together to get it done. I described each curve, each detail of the chain. And he had the job of molding my thoughts onto ice.

"No, a little more- um- thinner."

"This way?"

"Yes, no, yes! That way."

"Great." He cautionsly held the chain to me. We've made it, and that was even more beautiful than the original one; I could see small waves of smoke surrounding the tube's surface. Oliver had glued fine crystals of ice on each other with tiny dots to make the chain. Unfortunately he couldn't make the dagger inside. But that was fine.

"Your turn." Oliver reminded me with a smile, probably wondering why I was spending so much time only staring.

Okay, then. Imagine, Angelina, imagine.

I still felt the icy vapor in my palms.

Wish this merely piece of ice were silver.

Wish it shone like these walls.

Wish it could fill my boss with pleasure.

"Angel..."

"¡Um?!"

"Do it now or the chain is going to melt"

"But I am alre-"

And I remembered what had happened two days before, when I tried to turn George back into a statue and my power didn't work. Maybe something very, very bad happened with my powers. Maybe I had no powers anymore.

"Are you feeling well?"

"No"- that's all I could say. I don't know but something strange was happening with my vision. It was all becoming black.

"Angel. Talk to me. Look at me. Angelina."