cigarette daydream || james potter

FINAL

The village street was a freezing, suffocating vacuum of dead air, illuminated by a sodium streetlight that flickered and buzzed with a malignant, sputtering rhythm. Every breath Estella dragged into her battered chest felt like inhaling crushed glass, the raw lining of her throat burning with the metallic taste of hot blood. Her bruised ribs screamed in agony with every piston-like stride, a white-hot knife twisting deeper beneath her ribs with every pounding heartbeat. Behind her, the timber-frame house shrieked in its death throes—ancient oak beams splintering like dry bones and heavy masonry collapsing into a deafening roar of cascading stone.

Greyback was out.

She did not allow herself the luxury of looking back; turning around was a fatal hesitation, a fraction of a second that would let his jaws close over her spine. The damp cobblestones beneath her boots were slick with frost and grease, threatening to send her sprawling with every desperate leap. She didn't plot a route; she survived by pure, feral instinct, her mind stripping the winding village lanes down to raw geometry. Left led to the claustrophobic choke of the old row cottages and the dead-end churchyard; right led toward the arched stone bridge, the open river fields, and the shimmering, invisible thread of the cottage's anti-Apparition boundary.

*Right.*

She threw her weight into the turn, her boot skidding violently on a patch of black ice. Her shoulder slammed into a jagged brick wall with a sickening crunch that jarred her collarbone, a violent curse ripping through her clenched teeth. Before she could push off the masonry, a heavy, measured thud vibrated through the ground.

Slow. Deliberate. Inevitable.

Her head whipped around. Greyback strode casually out of the pulverized doorway of the cottage, shards of oak still clinging to his broad shoulders like splinters of bone. A thick cloud of white plaster dust swirled around his frame like funeral smoke. A jagged laceration split his cheek from jaw to lip where she had cracked him with the iron poker, black blood matting into the coarse bristles of his beard. His golden eyes locked onto hers with a sickening, predatory amusement.

"That's it," his voice cut through the freezing night, low, carrying with a supernatural resonance that made her skin crawl. "Keep running."

"Fuck off!" she spat over her shoulder, the defiance automatic, though her voice shook with a terror so profound it tasted like copper on her tongue.

She hurled herself down the narrowest alleyway she could find, a suffocating slot between two stone granaries designed to choke his massive bulk. The low-hanging wooden eaves caught her across the brow, but she ducked lower, listening to the catastrophic crunch of timber behind her as Greyback smashed through the overhang, his sheer mass forcing him sideways against the brickwork.

"Bit cramped, isn't it?" she snarled, flicking her wand backward without slowing.

*"Diffindo!"*

The old oak fence lining the alley exploded into razor-sharp splinters. Jagged boards cascaded across his path, but Greyback simply roared with irritation, tearing through the barrier like a paper wall, his claws shredding the remaining timber.

She burst back onto the main road, her lungs crying out for oxygen, her vision graying at the edges. But before she could clear the lane, a heavy, calloused hand clamped around the scruff of her coat like a steel vice.

Estella screamed, a high, piercing sound of absolute panic, and twisted violently. She drove her elbow backward into his chest; it was like slamming into an iron pillar.

"No!" she shrieked, kicking backward with the heel of her boot, connecting solidly with his shin. He snarled, his grip tightening until the fabric of her coat choked off her windpipe.She clawed desperately at his thick fingers, her nails tearing against his skin. "Let go of me!"