Novus Orbis | Fred Weasley x Insert | ON HIATUS

Chapter 31 - Suffocation

The stony gray of the walls looms above her once more, empty portrait frames crowding her blurring vision and warping around her in a dizzying maze. The carpet beneath her is not still as she walks, for her every step sends it pushed into a state of rumpledness one way or another. There is a cold breeze issuing from the windows to her right, where the glass stands no more, fallen both outside down below and inside beneath the sills. She reaches the end of the hall where a heavy and open door awaits, its hinges rusted and old and creaking as it sways, the wood stained with time.

Y/n's fingers brush along it as she moves forward, the familiar shouting coming again from down one way in the larger room she stands in, and then another. Her mind is a daze, her consciousness faintly aware of where she is, of the matter of this vision, and of the fact that it is a vision. A nightmare.

She thinks to yell but makes no move to discover if she is able to or not, her will not that of her own in this state. Her clothes smell of him, a comfort, she knows, as she puts her hand into her right pocket to search for her wand that isn't there. She is in Hogwarts, she knows this, but not Hogwarts as she knows it.

Defenceless she finds herself, she steps through the empty doorways to find the source of the noises that ring in her ears and cause painful pangs to course through her mind. Through a hall, she sees a boy in a yellow-and-black shroud of cloth, face cold and eyes open, with a name she cannot place. His pupils follow her as she stalks slowly across the room, not able to look away, and not able to move any faster.

Opening the last door, she is met with a sight: the ground beneath her drops abruptly and opens down into something like the Great Hall. The door she stands in appears to be in the middle of the wall, no stairs down nor ladder, and for her momentum she nearly stumbles and falls to what certainly and rationally would be her demise.

Tables are strewn and broken across the room, their benches accompanying, fire all around, the smoke curling up to her nose but not suffocating her or really smelling of anything at all. Her senses are strange and not normal, her vision focused one moment and unfocused the next. Her heart pounds in her chest, the need to put her hand to her breast to feel it made obsolete. Tapestries are aflame on the wall, torn, scattered, some come clattering down even as she watches there. The noises are muted, and she can't quite pay due attention to most any of these things.

Below her, people run around from place to place with no evident purpose, other individuals lay dead or alive on the hard ground, trampled by running feet. Flashes of all colours fly about, from wand to wand, blasting, sparking, like firework shows they go in their blinding cacophony.

And there he is–fighting a cloaked figure, with robes of ink and a face hidden beneath in shadow. His reddened cheeks pant out cold white puffs of air, his hair a short, rough cut that she's never seen. His brother is nowhere to be seen, another familiar figure at his side with a wand. Laughter–laughter rings out painfully loud, and more clear than any of the other noises, causing Y/n's hands to itch to fly up and cover her ears. But they don't, and she is forced to listen to the sounds like nails on a chalkboard, what once she was sure was something she could never be rid of. And then the shadowed figure raises his hand, and a flash of green comes like a spark at him and hits him in the chest.

-

She awakes with a start and a yell, jumping so violently that she hits her head hard against the wood of her four-poster. Heavy breathing of her own making is in her ears, her chest heaving in her peripheral vision, sweat slick and uncomfortable on her neck and her arms and making her itch. Angelina is at her side in only a moment, bent by the side of her bed and her face blurry in Y/n's vision. Her mouth moves, and Y/n can't make out what she's saying, the sounds not yet in her ears.