Oh yeah, I had a dorm... [logan/sophia] [closed]

The key sat on his desk, face up, a rusty engraving carving the numbers '203' into the object. Since he'd returned to the school, the key had always been there. He laid it there when he first stumbled in that cold morning, when he became preoccupied with Madison and left it there. Since then, it'd been shift after shift, work day after work day, class after class. His sleep wasn't eight hours in his own bed, his own dorm, but rather a few hours from time to time in various infirmary cots, and despite this, it felt like he hadn't slept at all since he returned to Beata Academy. Or rather, since he died. Those hours stretched on, and unconsciousness never seemed to take hold. When it did, he always jumped or gasped or pulled himself back, never sure why. It was this innate pulling that kept him awake, this and Jane. He knew she was there. He wanted to talk to her more than ever, tell her he was okay, show her he would never be bothered by that disease again. But she was not okay, and he still hadn't gotten the full story as to why.

A week into his return, he picked up that key, glazed with a thin layer of dust and a dull shine from the sole lamp over his desk. It was well into the night, and he had been sitting there, waiting for a patient that wasn't there, breathing breaths he'd never gotten used to. They hurt in their painlessness. They coattailed an ugly aura of deception, of cheating. Under the atmosphere of dying cicadas, of their desperate last songs, the boy took the key, and he stood. He had to leave the infirmary. He had to go somewhere.

How long had it been since he last stepped into that room, 203? Was Sophia still there?

The questions pervaded him until he arrived at the door, climbing the stares with Atlas's gravity upon his shoulders, not realizing how tired he was until he was outside of the infirmary. It was like its own world in there, his own dominion, where he was god and nothing affected him. But outside of that place, he was nothing. Just a tired boy. The key's jagged edged pressed into his skin, and by the time he got to the door, it was stained orange with his blood. The clock on his phone read 2:03am. No one should have been awake.

The door was his crier, its sharp groan announcing his arrival to the empty, dark room. 2:04. He stepped inside.

Sophia was awake, when she probably shouldn't have been. It was strange how her inspiration seemed to stirke at the weirdest of times. She was laying in bed looking at her phone trying her best to get tired enough to fall asleep and just when it seemed she was tired enough she had an idea. Which immediately caused her to get up from her bed turn on her desk light, and get to work in her sketch book. Various sketches littered her pages, some failed, some successful of what she was trying to accomplish by the time Logan had reached the dorm.

Her hand was pressed to her face as her amber eyes looked down at the white and gray page. Her hair pulled up in a small messy ponytail. She seemed to be lost in another world, that was until she heard the squeak of the dorm door opening, which really confused her. Her dorm mates were asleep in their rooms. Was one of them sneaking out? Or did someone manage to come in?

Standing up out of her not supportive chair, she smoothed out her night gown and opened her door and looked out into the dark room. Her lamp not providing enough light to see who was out there. "Hello?" She called softly into the darkness, hoping that whoever was didn't have bad intentions. She didn't want to have to use her gift against someone.

A voice. He knew the voice well. Logan backed up to the light switch, pressing his back against the wall beside it, and leaning back, flicked on the light. The brightness momentarily startled him, but he endured it, keeping a thin smile on his face, crossing his arms. His eyes were tired, his hair messy, but he was there. "Hello," he said, yawning, looking around the room. Despite a few decorative changes and the loss of his own homely contributions, it was the same as he'd left it. His room was a white, nameless door in the corner, seemingly unopened for months.

"I hope you didn't rent out my room yet," he said, coming off the wall, a little wobbly as his head lurched in lethargy. It felt as if he were on a moving ship for a brief moment, surmounting a wave.

Sophia flinched as soon as the light was turned on, but as soon as she saw who it was her eyes widened. After that she didn't waste a second running to him and wrapping the spring boy in a hug. "Oh man how I have missed you!" She said, her eyes tearing up a little bit. She didn't think he would come back but here he was in their dorm tired, but safe.

After she was satisfied that she hugged him long enough she let him go and wiped one of her eyes. "No I haven't rented out your room yet. The school tried but I didn't let them." She said with a small breathy giggle.

Logan wasn't suprised she hugged him. He put his arms around her, flinching a bit at the touch of her fingertips. She wasn't wearing gloves. Fingers that were once large and awkward were slender and warm. He smiled wider. That problem must had fixed itself.

Following the hug, he pressed himself back against the wall, wiping the bags from his eyes, drifting his gaze across the room with a silent yawn. "All my stuff is in the infirmary right now." He said lightly, flicking the edge of his bloodied key across his fingertip. "I've been staying there for the last few days."

Sophia frowned. He must have not been getting a lot of rest at the infirmary from the way he looked right now. "I'm sure we can worry about your stuff later. I'm sure you want to rest up right now anyway." The spring girl turned away from Logan, "I can go get you some blankets." Sophia started back to her room before she stopped finally remembered that Logan wasn't there when she didn't need gloves anymore. She turned back to him, "I'm sure you noticed I don't need my gloves anymore."

"That would be great..." Logan said, giving a weak smile. When she started back, Logan made his way to the refrigerator, feeling like a stranger in someone else's home. Drinks lined the shelves, those in which he did not leave, leftovers with notes not in his hand writing. He pulled a water from the lowest shelf and uncapped it gingerly.

"I did." He answered her question through the vacuum of the bottle, a cloud of fog covering its inner surface. A quick swig and aah later, he slackened his wrist and lowered the water, adding, "I'm sure you noticed I'm not coughing every five minutes."

She nodded with a smile. "I sure did." She turned away and went into her room to grab a blanket. "I'm guessing where ever you went off too fixed you?" She asked as she took one of the spare blankets off her bed and returned to where Logan was. "I have a blanket for you." She held out her arms that were holding the blanket offering for him to take it.

"Sure." Logan bit his lip and took the blanket, folding it over his arm and hugging it to himself. It was better to leave it at that, that it fixed him. The shadow upon his irises waxed and he closed his eyes for a brief moment, making his way to his door. The doorknob seemed lower than he'd remembered. It seemed smaller, too. Had he grown or was he so out of place? Where the doorknobs elsewhere larger? The only familiarity with the door was the creak it made, a blissful creak, a tune that had accustomed itself to his ears too often for it to slip through the cracks so soon. It's expiry knew decades, not months.

"I missed this," he said, hardly loud enough for anyone else to hear. Louder, he reiterated, though did not turn. "I missed you. Everyone here. I've been here for a few days, it's kinda sinking in that I'm here..." Logan took a step into the room, dodging a familiar loose panel that plagued every late night shift he worked. He never wanted to wake anyone up. Though apparently, it wouldn't have mattered that night.

"Why are you up so late?" the boy asked, laying out the blanket.

"Well I'm glad your back." Sophia said following him to his room, stopping in his doorway, then he asked why she was up. She folded her hands behind her back and got an uneasy smile on her face. "Well I was about to sleep, but then I got an idea and just had to draw it before I forgot it." She wasn't even going to mention the part that some of the sketches didn't work out. "I guess it was lucky timing that I was up when you showed up." She shifted slightly. "Though it seems like I sapped all of your energy from how tired you look." Sophia said with a small giggle.

"I'm fine," the boy insisted with a smile, sitting down on his bed, the dull springs giving him a small but uncomfortable hop. Despite how his eyes may had looked, his weary grin wasn't so different from his wakeful. "I don't have a shift for a while, so it doesn't matter how late I sleep. I can stay up, I promise."

To prove his case, he took his fingers and widened his eyes, like a kid making a funny face. "Now, talk to Uncle Logan, tell me what you were drawing."

Sophia didn't really like the idea of him not going ahead an resting up now but she couldn't protest because she would have done the same thing if she was in his position. She opened her mouth to speak but closed it as soon as he spoke again with a funny face but it wasn't the face that got to her it was rather what he said. She let out a giggle, and then spoke. "I'm gonna have to stop you right there, I won't say anything if you call yourself Uncle Logan again." Sophia said to the spring boy.

"Fine." He yawned, stretching it out into infinity, blowing it up louder than it need be. In the floofy voice of the yawn, he continued, "I rescind uncle, show me what you've been working on." The boy fell back on his palms, which he planted slightly behind himself, his arms straight down, his chin turned to the fold of the ceiling and wall, where the paint chipped the most and the marking of a poorly-hung mirror splotched brown in an otherwise blue landscape.

Sophia smiled and then retreated into her room to grab her sketch book which she then proceeded to place on the boy's lap. "There is a few people in there, and the idea was working on was some characters for like a show or a game or something. Some of them are people, some of them are ghost creatures kind of thing." She explained to Logan. The sketch book was almost filled, but she had extra sitting in her desk ready to be filled whenever she needed it. She hoped he would like it though if he didn't she wouldn't make him.

Logan was drifting. It was hard to admit or even try to play it off, as when she placed the sketchbook in his lap, he flinched awake, like a jolt of electricity had hit him. But his eyes floated naturally across the page, and he took her words with the fluidity of an underwater atmosphere.

The lightning crashed through the water. Ghost creatures. Logan cut his thumb open on the crease of the paper, almost naturally.

"That's nice," the boy murmured, his eyes overtaken by shadows, walking, looming figures marching towards an imperceivable end. He spoke in a flutter, almost too softly for even himself to hear, breathing his next words with an unconscious daze to his voice. It was introspection, these words, flurrying forth as he rubbed his eyes and his temples, his bleary, tired mind.

"...they don't look like that..."