black coffee | remus lupin [2]

69. reach the shore

｡･:*:･★,｡･:*:･

TO BREATHE HAD always been awfully difficult for Claudia. It wasn't that her lungs were weak or that her body somehow physically put her in breathless moments sometimes. Instead, it was the way the world around her made her feel. Sometimes it made her feel like it was impossible to reach the shore and take a breath.

She wasn't expecting it to happen that day. After a funeral, she would only assume that the anger against her would build up and be let out some other day.

She was wrong.

It felt a little as if all her endless nightmares came true. A recurring dream she had, much like the people around her, was that she was slowly and slowly leaving the shore and the oxygen behind. She was being pulled down. By what, she didn't know.

Her father's grip around her neck only hardened as she struggled to break free from it, his stupid ring with a maple leaf engraved on it digging into the skin close to her ear.

Not only was her head in a dooming grip, her body was struggling against the edge of the freezing cold fountain that she knew she had been brought to.

It was right outside of the manor, so close that if the others cared enough, they could watch and either help her or laugh at her.

The water felt as if it was picking her apart piece by piece, peeling off her eyes and lips and nose with its freezing self.

Although it would seem like it after, and although one can believe it was so, Claudia didn't really have time to think during the time that her father strangled and held her beneath water that was surely supposed to be frozen. She only had one thought.

And that was to get out.

It would be unnatural of Claudia Maple-Black to meet her fate with grace and acceptance. She simply didn't let the rules write her. Instead she wrote the rules.

After a long while of trying to, with all her mighty, push the awful man back by using her legs and arms and elbows, Claudia took to different precautions. Or, she planned to take different precautions.

But she couldn't actually go through with her plan, which was a very brilliant one at that. She was going to stop showing signs of struggle, which she was sure would get him to drop her with a happy grin, and then she was going to apparate away and hope that Regulus was on his way.

But she never go to do that, because suddenly the grip of his hand around her neck loosened. And then she couldn't see it in the water along with her.

Claudia was finally able to breathe, heavily and desperately as she watched her father storm off, go inside the manor and then slam the door shut.

What caused him to do so was something she couldn't find a reason for. It definitely wasn't his conscience, that was for sure.

She sat there for a while, on the frozen ground with purple lips, hair that nearly became ice out there in the cold February air, and mascara and snot running down from her eyes and nose. What she wondered was why she didn't even care. It was strange. It bothered her how unbothered she was.