Falling Slowly (A Hogwarts Lovestory) - Fred Weasley Fanfiction

Prologue | Everything to Help You Sleep

I was breathing heavily. Shaking all over my body. Trying hard to get enough air in my lungs.
It felt like dying a little bit, even if I knew that pleasure wasn't mine today.

My shaking was not just the physiological reaction of my skin and bones after running like a thousand stairs up (and sometimes down again because I was too upset to remember all of the moving stairs in the castle) to reach the Gryffindor common room.

As I finally entered, the loneliness of my dormitory during a feast in the Great Hall, where all my roommates were celebrating right now, felt relieving.

My eyes were closed, my face pressed into my pillow and I was counting my own heartbeat as I decided I would need something else to help me calm my mind down. And there was only one thing in the world I could think of that could possibly work after the shattering news I just had to hear.
I was still hiding my face under my pillow (from whom, myself?), but now I stretched out my hand to reach for something under the bed. And that something, I thought, was my only connection to reality right now.

These hard, but familiar lines of the object my fingers just touched were my way back to myself. My old self, that I hoped did not vanish even after what Dumbledore had told me a few minutes ago.

My fingers stroke fondly over the wooden corpus of the Ukulele. I timidly began to pull the strings, but I immediately felt stronger as the music began to flow through my veins, finally letting enough air in my lungs to breath and I felt a little more alive.

And so I sang myself to sleep, hoping to feel a little less empty when I woke up.
Even if I knew that everything I had ever thought or knew or felt until that day would be different by now on.

What is it like to be empty?
Full of only echoes
And my body caving in
A cathedral of arching ribs
Heaving out their broken hymns
- Julien Baker