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Josephine jolts awake, her gasp echoing through the room.
Her breaths come in quick, shallow bursts, as if her lungs refuse to fill completely.
Her hand instinctively goes to her chest, attempting to will her racing heart into calmness.
But her efforts are futile, and a growing sense of urgency gnaws at her. She needs to leave, to be anywhere but here.
She hastily throws on a sweater over her disheveled clothes and shoves her boots on. Then bolts out of her room, through the common area, and into the corridor beyond.
Her throat feels dry, a stark contrast to the sweat on her brow.
It strikes her as odd how, in moments like these, insignificant details seize her attention.
Like the chipped nail polish on her fingers.
It's something she has never bothered about before, but now it consumes her thoughts. When did she let her nails deteriorate like this?
Usually, she takes great pride in their appearance, even if she can't resist picking at them.
She goes behind a tapestry in one of the many halls of Hogwarts and goes into the secret passageway.
Her mind circles back to the nightmare that has roused her. It's a bizarre dream, a hazy enigma of images and emotions.
She recalls two figures – a man and a woman, seemingly blissful until their world plunged into chaos.
Their screams for mercy haunt her, their desperate pleas to spare an unknown "her."
Josephine has no inkling as to the identities of those individuals.
What confuses her even more is the decimated house in the dream, the very one she had glimpsed in Dumbledore's memories.Could it be that Dumbledore had known them? Her thoughts whirl as she absentmindedly brushes a strand of hair from her face.
The echoes of those agonized cries reverberate in her mind.
Dream or not, the intensity of love and desperation for that unseen girl leaves a somber imprint on her heart.
Josie wanders through the passageway without purpose until she finds herself facing another door. It leads to the hidden passage she had used days ago when she met with Tom Riddle.
The moon is not full tonight, so the shack remains deserted. She might as well go there.
With a creaking door, she is greeted by a biting gust of cold air that sends a shiver down her spine. Her sweater, she soon realizes, offers little protection against the chill.
As she walks through the snow on the way to the shrieking shack, she shivers once again. She is shaky. Her hands would not stop shaking.
