sapphire || fred weasley

fifty-two

Triggering content, viewer discretion advised.

July 23, 2001

When Fred's brown eyes abruptly opened in the middle of the night, he frantically began searching the bed for Beatrice before realization fell upon him.

She wasn't there.

Just like she hadn't been there the night before.

And the night before that.

And, the night before that.

Two months and a half of living his worst nightmare and he knew it was far from over.

He also knew that sleep wouldn't come to him again until there was at least a glass of firewhiskey in his system to numb his mind.

Every single night was the same thing.

A dream about Bea that quickly turned into a nightmare as her screams of horror and fear while being dragged out of Hogwarts by Fenrir Greyback made his eyes shot open, only to realize that it wasn't a dream and it wasn't a nightmare either.

It was reality.

When Beatrice soul wrenching screams weren't haunting him, it was the image of Percy dying right in front of his eyes at the hand of Augustus Rockwood.

Or Lee's shocked expression when a curse collided with his chest, a hole in the middle of it and a pool of blood staining his skin as him and Fred realized that the curse had ripped his heart out of his chest cavity. He died exactly three seconds after it happened.

Or the pained and horrified scream his father let out when Bellatrix killed his mother in a duel before the battle could end. A curse so vile and dark that there weren't even ashes to scatter nor a body to bury.

Those were the ones always present in his mind as a reminder.

He couldn't even bear to think of the other hundred deaths he found himself responsible of.

Friends and people he knew from school dying in front of his eyes like the most brutal and macabre muggle movie to ever been created.

If he did, he knew he wouldn't be able to come out of the spiral.

It had happened in the first month after the battle.

The battle.

It still haunted him.

He was sure it was never going to stop haunting him. Ever.

The eighty-six thousand and four hundred seconds of every day the battle flashbacks were constantly in the back of his head.

Whispering like the faint hiss of snake before lunging itself towards its prey.

Reminding and blaming.

Cruelly reproachful.

Beatrice was always in the front of his head however.

He couldn't get it out his mind the image of her terror-stricken bright blue eyes as she screamed and was dragged away from him.

He didn't want the picture of his worst nightmare becoming a reality to leave him anyhow.

It was a reminder.

It was the reminder that she was still out there and he would never stop looking for her until either he found her, or died in the process of finding her.

It was the reminder of guilt and resentfulness against his own self for not leaving how he had once promised to her. For not running away together to a place where no one knew them where he was supposed to build her her dream little cottage with a vast garden full of green trees and flowers and nature.