the girl who lost it all [d.m]

thirty two: ostium

ostium: gate, door, entrance

———

ELARA didn't speak for three weeks.

It wasn't that she didn't want to—it was just that there was nothing to say. She couldn't feel anything, couldn't bring herself to face the reality of it all.

That Iris was dead.

If she opened up that gate, she would crumble. Every single emotion she'd been avoiding would suffocate her, smother her. Drown her.

So she kept it firmly closed and stared at the world from the other side of it.

Her friends tried to get her out of it. Val, Hermione, Luca, Jasper—even Demetrius found it in him to approach her and try to get her to say something.

But Elara just stared at her hands, tracing over the snake tattoo on her finger, fiddling with the bracelet Iris had made for Val and her.

It was a delicate thing, woven from jasmine flowers that only bloomed in the spring and it was already brittle and frail, most of the petals having already fallen away.

But it was the last thing she had of Iris—so she kept it on.

She kept it on as she lay on her side in her bed watching the moon set and the sun rise, kept it on while she sat on the rooftop staring at the trees, kept it on while she knelt in the snow, shivering, teeth chattering and attempted to numb the burning in her hip.

Hermione scolded her for that, of course. Terribly. Elara knew she was being rash—her body still hadn't healed from three weeks ago.

Her shoulder still throbbed every once in a while from where George had to pop it back into its socket and there were stitches under her chin and along the outside of her thigh. There was an ugly purple bruise marring her ribs, another spreading across her collarbone where it had shattered and Jasper had healed it. Her back had been torn up by the explosion—but it had always been scarred from her time as a prisoner so it didn't look very different.

She hadn't been able to hear out of one ear for the first two weeks and it took a mountain of effort to swallow even one bite of food because her throat and neck muscles were sore. Her headache stayed throughout, pounding away behind her eyes and flaring up at random times.

The physical pain was agonising—but at least she could make it go away. She could take a Draught and slip into dreamless slumber or kneel in the snow until her body numbed and she nearly caught frostbite.

But the pain within her—It was something she couldn't face. Not yet. Not so soon. Not when the wound was so fresh, when the sound of Iris' raged scream echoed in her ears everytime she lay down in her bed. Not when all she could think about was how she left her, how she'd left her best friend to die.