CURSED: FROM THE BEGINNING [D.M]

-(35) all the time in the world

ZILLIAH wakes up, sweating from head to toe. She catches the moonlight beaming in through the window but her vision is a blur. Her head throbs painfully as her heart tightens around in it's cages, her throat utterly dry. The world seems to spin around her as she is just trying to will her lungs to take in air and let her breathe.

While at this, she feels a hand on the small of her back and impulsively crawls away from it, fear clogging up her mind even further. She has always been subject to undesired touches- upon both her body and life.

She only remembers the fear of it all.

Fear of those two men. Of her family. Of her power. Of the dead.

Of herself.

She still is afraid of it all.

"Zilliah?", a voice calls out her name but it feels as it is being uttered from upon the shore while she's already several feets below the sea. A sea where all her monsters coil their hands around her neck, dragging her deeper and deeper along with them, raw and real pain pounding off every last bone of her forsaken body, the pillars of her mind crumbling.

She remembers Sirius' face. The woman's and the countless others' too. She remembers it all. It's always the same words. The same terror. The same pain. The same unbearable agony bleeding through her terrible panic.

Death is forever going to haunt her. Grief and misery will tag along too. An inseparable trio clutching onto the roots of her very soul.

"Zilliah? Can you hear me?", she hears the voice again, attempting to cut through the fog of her mind like a blade trying to plough it's way in through a solid wall. Futile. The villains of her mind weren't going to give in that easily.

They gnaw and claw at the life in her, draining her, choking her. She is dying. She is always dying.

"Focus on me, hey? Here. It's Draco. Listen to me."

It's Draco.

Draco.

That's the one word that seems to grasp her back into her reality. "Dr- Draco?"

"That's right. It's me. It's just me. You're alright. You're safe. You're with me."

She's with him. With Draco. She understands this much. Yet, as his hands reach out to her, she flinches away from it, an unexplainable fear sprouting from the surrounding darkness that was not of the night's.

She can smell it in the air. In his breaths.

No, it can't be-

"Zilliah, look at me please", his voice laced with pure worry snaps her attention back onto him. His usual silver eyes, now a darker grey from the lack of proper light falling upon them, are fixed upon her, tense yet understanding. "It's just me. I'm not going to hurt you."

I'm not going to hurt you.

He is understanding her mind. Her thoughts. Her actions. But still, all she can do is stare at him like he is an empty ghost.

It's almost as if she is floating out of her body and watching over the whole of it. It's as if she is watching the realisation dawn upon her figure on the bed. It's as if she is watching herself pull the pieces of her mind together. It's as if every part of her wants to run away, run afar from this possible danger, yet-

Yet.

In a minute she watches her figure crawling deep into his chest, finding home in a lethal black abyss.

___________________

"McLain has been expelled", Draco mumbles from where he was seated opposite to her in an armchair while she was on the bed, the both of them digging through their plate of pancakes he had brought in a few minutes ago.