cigarette daydream || james potter

"Soft speak with a mean streak,"

The final few days of the winter holidays were dwindling away, casting a somber shadow over the isolated valley as the time for the twins to return to Hogwarts drew near. The cozy cottage, usually a sanctuary of warmth, felt suffocatingly tense in the wake of her father's volatile temper. Although the grandfather clock downstairs had long since chimed the midnight hour, Estella lay wide awake beneath her sheets, the heavy silence of the house pressing down on her. The weather had taken a bizarre, unseasonal turn; instead of the biting frost that usually gripped the Welsh hills in December, a stifling, heavy humidity had settled over the countryside. She tossed and turned, her sheets tangling around her legs as she tried in vain to court sleep. Her bedroom window was pushed wide open, propped up by a small wooden block, allowing a desperately needed, cool night breeze to ripple through the gossamer curtains, bringing with it the damp, earthy scent of the sleeping garden below.

Frustrated by the relentless restlessness coiled in her muscles, Estella slowly shifted into a sitting position, careful not to let the springs of her old mattress groan. She resolved to find a book to pass the time until exhaustion finally claimed her. Every movement she made was calculated and agonizingly slow; the cottage walls were notoriously thin, little more than plaster and ancient timber, and she knew with terrifying certainty that her father would absolutely go mad if any stray noise disrupted his sleep. She froze, her eyes widening in sudden panic, when the heavy, solid shape of Oliver, her large ginger tomcat, suddenly leaped off the foot of her bed. He landed on the exposed floorboards with a distinct, echoing thud that sounded like a gunshot in the dead of night.

"Oliver," she hissed in a frantic whisper, extending a trembling hand to call the cat back over to the safety of the rug.

The stubborn animal completely ignored her. He slinked across the room, arching his back in a long, lazy stretch directly against the base of the dark, freestanding wooden wardrobe. The pressure of his weight caused the warped latch to give way, and the heavy door swung open with a slow, agonizing creak. As the door shifted, the pale, luminous moonlight streaming through the window flooded the interior of the wardrobe, perfectly illuminating the polished wood and sleek twigs of the Cleansweep broomstick leaning quietly inside.

Estella stared at the broom, a sudden, reckless impulse sparking in her chest. She climbed back into bed, forcing her eyes shut to try and sleep again, but within minutes, her impatience blossomed into a desperate need to escape the suffocating walls of the house. Moving like a ghost, she rolled out of bed, her bare feet mapping the silent floorboards. She gripped the smooth handle of the broomstick in her hand, slipped past her bedroom door, and crept down the narrow, creaky staircase, holding her breath with every step until she successfully slipped out through the latch of the back door and into the cool sanctuary of the night.

The back garden was a wild, overgrown expanse of dark grass, framed by the silhouette of the rolling hills that rose up like sleeping giants against the starlit sky. Stepping onto the damp lawn, Estella mounted the broom, kicked off the ground, and shot instantly into the night air. The relief was instantaneous. She flew higher and higher, the humid weight of the valley floor dropping away as the biting wind rushed past her, sending her long chestnut hair flowing wildly behind her like a banner. A brilliant, unbridled smile broke across her face, and she let out a series of breathless, delighted laughs, completely intoxicated by the freedom of the open sky. She climbed higher, ascending until the thin, ethereal night clouds began to swirl around her ankles, cutting her off from the rest of the world.

Down below, hidden by the shadows of the cottage's slate roof, the heavy wooden back door was violently shoved open. Estella, lost in the ecstasy of flight, never noticed the rigid figure of Lyall Lupin step out onto the grass. His eyes blazed with a mixture of terror and fury as he raised his wand toward the sky, locking his target onto the silhouette of his daughter. With a sharp, aggressive flick of his wrist, a silent, invisible force gripped the broomstick, severing her control and violently dragging the wood down toward the earth.