by Chloe
Quill to Parchment
pg
Tom/Lucius. Welcome home, Tom.

He dipped his quill into the ink well and watched the nib absorb the silken fluid.

It was moments like this when Tom felt his most alive. In simple actions he found pleasure. He discovered that the feeling of air on his skin was a tantalizing experience. That his nerves sang with obscure pleasure when they were as much as brushed up against.

He could hardly walk through grass in bare feet, the feeling far too exquisite for words.

As a boy, life had been monotonous. There was nothing but sun and evening. He was a marred, useless creature. Dirtied with the terrors of his childhood, left and abandoned- a veritable bastard and treated as so. Now though, the world sang at him. It called to him with ghostly eyes and death's faint tune from drying lips, all the creatures who had shunned him as a child now blinked at him through placid glass with bejeweled eyes.

There was nothing in the world, he concluded, like finding out you could still feel.

Tom had thought that he had died. The unforgiving darkness had enveloped him like the harshest of cloaks. It had choked him and suffocated him and forced him to repent to an unseen, uncaring entity. And he'd done it. He'd humiliated himself in the darkness. He'd prayed to a God he never believed in. He'd promised his most valued possessions, his sanity, his life, and his dreams.

And now he found he lived. And there were things, things he had to take care of since he was finally restored to the world.

Tom lifted the quill from the well, the feather brushing the pale curve of his hand and sending shivers down his spine. He set the nib to parchment and began to write in his careful looping penmanship.