Haunted

12 | over and out

The first thing she did was scream. Hazel opened her mouth and let the noise fly past her lips, though she was immediately embarrassed by its sound, lacking tenacity and willpower. It sounded as though she was mimicking a horror film but was trying not to make enough noise for her neighbors to be concerned. It was the scream of a wimp, someone who didn't wish to be loud. She blinked and waited for a moment. For what, she wasn't sure. Perhaps to see if Malfoy would come to yell at her? But he didn't, and a smile grew on her face as she knew she was firmly in her Occlumency world. For even as she felt herself smile mentally, she could feel her physical lips, and they remained still. It was as if two different versions of herself existed, and yet she could feel them both simultaneously and distinctly.

The book had called the Occlumency world a mind palace. A place that was only hers. What she did in her mind palace was disconnected from what she did in reality. She could scream all she wanted in her mind, and nobody would hear. She could dance, cry, laugh... Hell, she could even try to learn how to do a cartwheel, and nobody would know.

She stood from her seat on her mental couch, and walked to the mezzanine's railing, folding her forearms across it and looking right at the chandeliers hanging only feet away. Then, Hazel closed her eyes and gathered all of the frustration that had been percolating and building in her gut, and she forced its escape.

The scream was different this time. It came from a hearty place. It had depth and character. But most of all, it had volume. This was not the scream of a person who wished to be quiet, wished to go unnoticed and fly under the radar. No, the sound that escaped her lungs was purposeful. When she ran out of breath, a laugh tumbled from her mouth. A gleeful, almost manic kind of laugh. Because this, she thought, was the feeling of freedom.

She took in another deep breath and shouted again. And again, and again, and again. After the first five yells, she transitioned from wordless shrieks to bellowing all of the thoughts that she hadn't voiced. "Motherfucker!" she shouted, testing the word out in the space of the library. It felt wrong, both to scream in what was known to be a quiet location, and to be screaming such an expletive. But the knowledge that nobody would know or hear her made it tolerable.

"Fuck this! Fuck all of this! Fuck Malfoy! Fuck Carrow! Fuck Pansy! Fuck Boulder!" she screeched into the open air, throwing out the names of those who had caused her anxiety and frustration over the last week. "Fuck the Order!" They'd caused her to lose her memories. They'd put her into this situation.

"Fuck being Seventeen! Fuck being Hazel! Fuck—" she stopped, feeling tears rush to her eyes, her throat suddenly closing itself up. She slackened her grip on the mezzanine's railing, failing to remember at what moment her fingers had clenched around the cool iron, now warm under her hot touch.

She stumbled backwards and let herself fall back onto the couch, leaning her head upwards until she was staring at the moving painted ceiling. She watched the woman in the painting brush her fingers through her hair, watched as she pinched her face to spark a rosy blush across the apples of her cheeks. Hazel detected a tear crawl from the corner of her eye, but she didn't bother to wipe it away.

Misery was sinking like a stone into her gut, heavy and excruciating. The more she focused on its weight in her body, the faster her tear ducts worked, spilling wetness down her lashes until she could taste salt on her tongue. It had been roughly three weeks from when she awoke as an amnesiac. Those first few days, she'd struggled nightly with what had happened to her, unable to deal with the tragedy of losing her memory. But as time passed, she made friends, and things started to feel like they weren't quite as bad as she thought. The sadness and anger and feeling that she'd been done an injustice began to fade to the back of her mind until, in the past week, she'd forgotten it was there at all.