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SO HEARTLESS, YET SO FULL OF FEELINGS
OCTOBER 31TH 1994
RAPHAEL WAS, HUMBLY SAID, recognised by many people as one of the most intelligent magical beings in his school, Beauxbaton. Sure, he was no Apollo or Athena, but he was inordinately smart in his very own way.
Where Apollo and Athena didn't get the concept of feelings, and Raphael could vividly remember Theo once calling the latter a sociopath as if it just happened yesterday, he was raised in a house where a certain motto was painted in thick layers on the walls; LOOK UNDERNEATH THE UNDERNEATH.
He spent majorly of his life observing his surroundings. It all started when he was five years old, after young Raphael Delacour visited the Black manor with his parents and was then met by an odd grumpy child with anger issues and the habit to disappear under his nose.
Young Raphael was of course intrigued by the strange girl and so after they arrived back home, he had asked his father—the wisest person young Raphael had known, now he knew it was his mother who was struck by the wisdom—how a child could be so young and yet so utterly bitter.
His answer was pinned in their living room, the longue in the Delacour manor where Raphael and his parents lived his mother's family, Raphael's cousins. Look underneath the underneath, that sentence haunted him for ten years now. It appeared in the strangest times, whispering faintly in his head whenever he was in public, near other livings whether it was muggles, wizards and witches or magical creatures like the unicorns in their garden.
He observed the people around him, studied their behaviour and the characteristics of them.
At first it was the mere curiosity of a child, one that yearned to see more of the world he had to learn to live in, to see deeper from the surface, knowing that other people wouldn't. Then slowly it turned into habit of his own. Whenever he would go outside his eyes would follow the movements of the men and women around him, memorising their features, trying to make a picture out of them. Sometimes he would ask himself a question like, How was their day? Where are they going? Do they have a family?
It was easy for him to do so. He was a Delacour, it was in their genes to be calm, graceful, and observant to the core.
At some days, there were moments where he even unintentionally did that with his own friends. He watched Daphne biting her nails anxiously, an act that the girl hadn't done since she first learned how to polish them, her lips chapped from the chewing she had done only minutes before.
