The Dragon Variation

Chapter Twenty Four

The Night is Darkest Before the Dawn

October 2002

It is familiar. The walls, the cleanliness, and that god awful shrill voice.

Her perception changes when she realises that the monsters in her nightmares are protecting her, simultaneously, those same monsters have taken everything from her. Almost everything. Is that possible?

To be protected by monsters? And their payment is a soul?

Because that is what it feels like. Nothing adds up and it feels as though her very existence comes with a price. Like she is born to die.

Her life has never had consistency. No one stayed. No one notices her. Even as a Lieutenant in her District, she considers herself to be someone of very little importance to anyone, she feels more of a burden on Draco than anything.

Seeing the things he's put himself through to keep her safe, it breaks her heart, and she takes no other course of action other than blaming herself; wanting to be close to him, but the closer she gets the more he hurts.

But consistency doesn't even so much try to make an effort with her. Always being thrown into new places with new people to do an entirely new job doesn't sit well with her. She wants to hermit. She never had a consistent home, or friends that lived to see their eighteenth birthdays.

Draco and Snape are the only people in her life that have remained. She'll raise hell to keep them.

Her vision swim and hazes back and forth. Her eyelids gradually slide open. Her mind had been bouncing around for days in her subconscious with all the new information that is ready to burst her flood banks.

But the invasiveness of Tom simply built more walls and dams in order to stop the memories and information spilling.

After a few minutes of lazy blinking, her eyes snap open. Everything in the room is white.

Always white.

She's decided that she hates white. Plain and blank and too much to let her imagination run riot, see things that aren't there and hear people who are—

—Are actually by her bedside, mumbling and chuntering quietly amongst themselves.

The whiteness of the room is equally blinding and harder to adjust to than Olli anticipated. It is mostly outlines, shapes and colours.

After roughly ten minutes of laying in silence, too fatigued to move, and counting her breathing, in and out, the door clicks in the corner of the room.

She shuffles only slightly, but enough to be heard.

A brown-haired healer with a cunning smile step into view. The lighting does render any help in identifying who she is—until she speaks.

"Ah." Astoria hums. "She's awake."

Olli stirs quickly, glancing quickly around the room.

Another hospital room. A familiar hospital room.

The same one she was in after the Derby.

This is Draco's suite, she deducts. Same chair, same space, very large bed, and x-ray images of a broad torso still hanging against the lightboard.

She waits for her eyes to readjust as she keeps talking.

"Ah, she is awake. My, my, two months in on my service and you've already dropped out?" she gives a faint, condescending chuckle. "I'll hand it to you, I've had healers drop sooner than you, but really, Ophelia? I thought you were quite promising. I guess you don't have the guts, do you?" She says with the least amount of sincerity she can master.