Chasing You (Viktor Krum X Reader)

Chapter 17: I Receive Some Interesting Correspondence

Chapter 17: I Receive Some Interesting Correspondence

The job topic is quickly and promptly dropped, washed away from the board with a few crocodile tears. As soon as I confess how I blame the beginning of the end all on myself, my dad forgets all about my unemployment.

All the better.

I'm kneading a ball of dough about the size of my head as Nat sips on wine across the kitchen island. She's reading some muggle magazine about celebrities and their scandals. I watch her closely as I work the dough, my eyes trained on her face.

"You're overworking it," she says, not looking up.

"Huh?"

"You're overworking the dough. The scones are going to come out tough," she says. "Add in your blueberries and stop mixing."

I wrinkle my nose at her and dump blueberries on top of the dough, folding them into the mixture. The flour on my hands isn't doing the trick anymore, and the dough begins to cling to my fingers. I hate the feeling. Like my hands are being suffocated. Buried alive.

"It's sticking because you overworked the dough," Nat says.

"I know, I know," I say and abandon the lump of unbaked scone before me to scrape dough from between my fingers.

"Want me to finish them off?" I ask.

"No, I can finish them," I say snippily, but I'm getting overwhelmed as I stare at the mess in front of me and feel my hands being coated in dough that feels like mud, that feels like

matted grass on lumpy dirt, and

I'm laying on my back when I stop rolling, covered in dead grass and dirt and a little bit of blood, and

"Harry, are you okay?" I ask and struggle to stand, my knees shaking under the weight of my body, and

I'm exhausted, and

a graveyard, and

moss is draped over headstones in thick blankets and the graves are crumbling from exposure to the elements, eroding from years of being forgotten and untended, and—

I'm blinking back tears as I try to scrape the dough from my fingers. I have to move them. I have to run my hand over my wound, but my hands are dirty, but I have to know. I have to know if my arm is fully here or if some of it is somewhere else, and I can feel it. I can feel my skin tearing. I can feel the blood on my shirt. I think it's bleeding. I think it hurts. I place my hand on top of the healing wound, and—

I take a deep breath.

My arm is whole and intact, and the wound is nothing more than a slight itch.

"Hon," Nat says, and she's right behind me, setting a hand on my back. I flinch and blink away tears, but the traitorous little things roll down my cheeks despite my efforts at concealment. "God, honey, what's wrong?"

And I don't answer because how do I tell her it's everything? That no moment is immune to these memories that are eating me alive. I don't know how to keep myself in the present because my mind is stuck somewhere on the past, reliving these experiences I just want to forget. How do I tell her that the feeling of dough on my hands reminds me of mud in a graveyard, and then suddenly, I'm there again, and I'm bleeding, and everything hurts, and I can't find Harry? How can I explain this?

How can I tell her that sometimes I don't know where I am? How, sometimes, the memories are so real, I think that they're happening? How can I tell her that the pain is seared into my memory so vividly that my brain can't help but to remember it?