Green Eyed Monster | Draco Malfoy

106. The Blackest Waters

Chapter 106 – The Blackest Waters

I felt numb, like the world around me no longer had air for me to breathe. The feeling of that suffocation had spread through me like an icy chill, and it was threatening to take over and freeze me in place as I looked down into the eyes of my best friend.

Daphne was gone. She was gone.

"NO!" I couldn't turn my eyes away from the lifeless body of my best friend as Theodore attempted to dig her out from beneath the rubble. All the while he screamed in agony, trying desperately to wake her despite her lifeless eyes watching me expectantly for my reaction...but I felt like I couldn't react at all. I felt like this couldn't be real. I felt numb...and for a brief moment, I felt nothing.

Theodore shook her again, causing her head to lull along her shoulders in a way that made me worry her neck might break...though it wouldn't matter if it did. Not anymore.

I felt my first traitorous trickle of emotion when a warm weight pressed itself to my shoulder. I motioned my head to the side, acknowledging the person but still unable to tear my eyes away from the girl with the bloodied, wheat hair – apparently, that was not reaction enough. I was whirled around, away from the haunted eyes and into a pair of emerald, fearful ones. Harry was horrified – but he didn't dare to say anything. I was glad because the numbness made it so I doubt I could have responded.

As if the air that had been sucked from the environment around me, none seemed to linger in my lungs so that I could have comforted my brother. There was nothing in me to claim that I was okay, that I would be okay...because honestly, I wasn't convinced I would be.

My shoulder burned, reminding me of my injuries and the last moment Daphne had been alive when she had pushed me out of the way of the collapsed wall. The pain was the trigger that made the panic begin to claw at my chest like an angry bowtruckle trying to scramble free...

I wish I could have stayed numb. At least I could think a little more clearly without feeling like I was drowning in my sorrows.

I wasn't ready to mourn. I wasn't ready to panic.

She couldn't be dead. This wasn't real – it was all a vision that I would be able to change, a vision that I would soon wake up from with my regular cold shiver. When I woke up, I would be living somewhere in fifth year, I would confide about my problems with Draco to my best friend, and then I would go snog him in the corridors while we abused our power against useless little Ravenclaws so that I wouldn't have to do my homework.

I wanted to go back to that.

Let me go back to that.

"Daphne, please!" Theodore sobbed, holding her to him hoping she would wake and hold him again. Her body remained limp in his arms, somehow shrunken by his grief. "Daphne, Daphne, wake up!"

But she wasn't sleeping.

I looked back to my brother, blinking back the tears that I could not control as I tried to rectify the feelings around me – I felt pain, I felt numb, I felt cold and weightless...and all at once I was still somehow heavily worn down by lead in my shoes, keeping me firmly in place.

Harry looked over my shoulder, perhaps he said something – I could hear nothing but the ringing in my ears and the screams of Theodore and the Weasleys as they tried to resuscitate Fred. I could hear the sobbing around me and the pounding of my heart as I tried to will myself to move, to look away from Daphne's dull, lifeless eyes...

Suddenly, I was being held. I was being held away from the gaze that would forever haunt my nights. I could hardly feel the sensation against my desensitized skin, but from the way I still could not move, I realized I was being held tightly. It took me a long moment to tell past the grime and the soot that I was being held by Draco. Over his shoulders, I still watched her eyes...it took Draco only one extra moment to rotate me on the flagstone so that I could break eye contact.