Work Text:
Cecilia has a headache.
To be fair, Cecilia usually had a headache. That was the consequence of having powerful Sight. (Sight with the capital S, not normal sight — her normal sight was horrible.)
It was kind of her fault, though — she’s supposed to wear these fancy Sight-suppressing glasses at school, but she nearly never wears them because it’s impossible to wear them along with her prescription glasses without both of them falling off, and they don’t make prescription lenses with the Sight-suppressing tech built-in for some reason.
(Don’t tell her to just use contacts. She’s been refusing to wear those for years and will likely refuse until the day that she dies.)
Going to school when her Sight was acting up sucked enough. But, unfortunately, going through school hallways sucked even more. At least in classrooms, there were only around twenty people. In hallways, she sees hundreds, maybe even thousands of kids, all with their own not-quite-color not-quite-shape feelings. Ugh.
(Here’s a fun secret: there’s another reason Cecilia doesn’t wear those glasses.)
When she spots Phoebe across the hall, she smiles a bit. They used to be close — real close. They’d talk for hours in the hallway and forget to go to their classes because they were so engrossed in discussion. Now, things were different, but she still liked Phoebe. She didn’t know much about her anymore, but she liked her.
“Hey, Cilli!”
“Hi.”
“Hey.” Phoebe’s face falls. “You okay?”
Huh. Maybe she looks as bad as she feels. “Headache,” she says, gesturing vaguely to her eyes.
“Oh, that sucks.”
“Ugh, yeah.”
“You should probably go to the nurse or something. I mean, we have, like, four hours until school’s over and you can’t just sit in class with a headache.”
“She’ll probably just ask why I wasn’t wearing my glasses.”
Cecilia said that from experience. Maybe she just had a bad first ten impressions of her or something, but she really hates that nurse.
“Oh. Yeah.”
See, this is what she likes about Phoebe. She just gets it.
“Hang on, I think I might have some painkillers in my bag.”
“Isn’t that against school rules?”
It was. You weren’t supposed to carry medicine with you, and if you needed any, you had to leave it in the nurse’s office. This made no sense to Cecilia — if you were having an allergic reaction or something, why should you run to the other side of the school to get your medicine?
“It’s fine. Just don’t go talking about it to the principal.” Phoebe swings her backpack over to the front and digs around in there for a bit until she finds a small, nondescript white pill bottle. “Here. You can give this back when you’re done, ‘kay? We kind of need to go.”
Phoebe holds the bottle out to her. She takes it.
(When she wears those glasses, the world is a void, dark and dull and dreary. She’s lived her whole life with the Sight — when it’s gone, something just feels missing. It feels painfully wrong.)
(More painful than the headaches? Probably not. But it’s there, lingering.)
Walking to class, Cecilia realizes that there was something… different about Phoebe. For as long as she could remember, there’d been a wide, golden eye on her forehead (one she only recognized a few years after they first met, after she’d seen a picture of it in her demonology class), but she never brought it up. She wasn’t going to judge if Phoebe had made an ill-thought-out middle school deal with the Dreambender.
But today, her Sight was picking up something else.
Something different.
Was she... glowing?
She turns around just in time to see Phoebe a second before she disappears into the crowded hallway, but a second is all she needs to confirm that, yes, she is glowing. Her light is soft and warm and very, very noticeable, and Cecilia wonders if this is another thing that only she can see, or if the others in the hallway simply don’t care enough to pay attention.
Has she always been glowing? She doesn’t know. Maybe she hadn’t cared enough either.
She takes a few more steps, tries to put Phoebe out of her mind. This isn’t important. It doesn’t matter. She has a quiz next period.
But she wants to know. (She wants to care.) So she turns around and runs back to Phoebe, the question slipping out of her mouth before she can anticipate it.
“Are you aware that you’re glowing right now?”
“I’m what?” Phoebe freezes at her words. Her breath shakes. She looks panicked — no, she looks scared.
She quickly raises her hand to her face. “No, I’m not.”
“Yeah, you are. With the Sight, at least.”
Phoebe doesn’t seem to take that well. “That’s weird, because there’s absolutely no reason at all I should be doing that,” she snaps.
“Hey, chill. I just… thought you’d think it was cool, is all.”
Phoebe steps forward. If Cecilia didn’t know her, she might have thought that she was preparing to attack. “Well, I don’t think that playing such a stupid prank on me is very cool.” At least if it is a prank, she catches her say under her breath. Then, louder, “Maybe your Sight’s defective or something.”
Okay, that was kind of a jerk move. She remembers that they haven’t talked — really, properly talked — in years. That she doesn’t know her anymore. How could she have forgotten?
Phoebe’s face falls, realizing the weight of her words. Underneath the golden glow, Cecilia can see her tangled up in sadness-fear-anger-regret. “I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant, I — ”
“Forget it.”
She walks away again, straight to class. She’s wasted her time. “That could have gone better,” she hears Phoebe mutter.
Cecilia’s hands close around the glasses in the pocket of her hoodie. On one hand, she has absolutely no reason to doubt her Sight. It had never led her wrong before. Ever.
But on the other hand…
Maybe Phoebe was right.
“Fine. I give up,” she whispers into the crowded noise of the hallway, and she doesn’t know who she is talking to — Phoebe, the nurse, herself. She slides the glasses on her face, adjusts them a bit to keep them from falling off…
The colors and shapes and feelings melt away into the gray walls, and the pain in her head quiets a bit. She turns her head and spots Phoebe, still standing in the middle of the hallway, her eyes closed. She looks like she’s about to cry. The most colorful thing about her is her shirt, adorned with little pink flowers. She is not glowing at all.
Or that is what it would seem. But years with the Sight has made Cecilia perceptive. Perceptive enough to notice the small tendrils of light twisting around Phoebe’s shaking hands—
Someone much taller than Cecilia bumps into her shoulder. With the glasses, she can’t tell if it was accidental or on purpose or accidentally-on-purpose. “Get a move on,” they say.
She gets a move on. She moves on all the way to class, all the while thinking about Phoebe’s light. She feels like she’s stumbled upon something Big and Important and she knows that she can never, never tell her.
Then she walks into Mrs. Rolczard’s room and braces herself. She has a quiz today, after all.