CONTROL | harry potter

ONE

Darkness.

Darkness and silence was what Cordelia Hale woke up to that day. She could feel a duvet tangled around her body and humidity in the air. She could feel silence clamping down on her lungs and making her feel like she was breathing through a layer of insulation, but when she touched her hands to her mouth, there was nothing there. She could feel the blackness of the air around her like a layer of black paint over a white sheet of paper.

She sat up, and the duvet cover fell to her hips. Instantly, she felt the dank air hit her bare chest, and knew she was not clothed. Cordelia didn't know how to feel about that. The feeling of loneliness was so strong she didn't think anyone was around to see her, and she felt so bare that it was a bit refreshing. She felt as if it was a kind of relief from the suffocating silence.

She slid out of the bed she had been sleeping in, letting the duvet fall to the smooth wooden floor. She stepped over it and let her arms out, feeling around for a light, a door, anything that might signal as to where she was. She walked forward and her hand came upon something cold.

A doorknob, she knew. Cold metal, the feel of it contrasting sharply with the stuffy air inside the room. She twisted the knob, her heart jumping to her throat with a sudden fear of what she might find beyond it.

- - -

Light.

Light was what Cordelia Hale found when she opened the door of the room she'd been in, out into the corridor. It washed over her like the sea did when you stepped into it. She squinted against it, throwing her arms out and embracing the sunlight the way you might embrace a long-lost friend.

She felt as if she hadn't seen light in the longest time. It was such a joy to be able to see her feet in front of her that her gaze darted around as she walked through the stone corridor. She drank in the muted colors around her that seemed neon and blazing to her deprived eyes. Gray stone all around her, almost silver from the light that spilled in through the great bay windows that lined the corridor.

Through them she saw a grand lawn, green and glorious, with the rising (or setting, she couldn't quite tell, but there was something about it that made her think of beginnings.) sun sweeping over it like a rug. There was a lake as well, a magnificent field of glass, and a line of trees, beyond which she couldn't make out from her position, but she wanted to be out there, lying among the blades of grass and breaking the peaceful glass of the lake.

The corridor reached an intersection, and Cordelia, instinctively, took the right one. She couldn't fathom why, but it was without hesitation that she did so.

As soon as she turned onto the right-side corridor, she felt a cold sensation spread over her like ice water being poured onto her body, but instead of the feeling starting at her head and ending at her toes, it started at her front side and ended at her backside, as if the water was going through her rather than over her.

Delia gasped and stopped dead, but there was no one and nothing in front of her that could have caused such a feeling.

"Who are you?"

Cordelia very nearly burst her lungs from the severity with which she gasped. She whirled around, her dark hair slicing through the air like a whip. It seemed as if it had been so horribly long since she'd heard a human voice.

But this hadn't been a human voice. It was wrong, just a tiny bit off, and Cordelia wasn't sure how she knew, but she could sense the surreality in the voice she heard, the way an echo was not an exact copy of the sound it was echoing. She knew this even before she looked at the source of it, and realized she could see right through the woman standing in front of her.