Bleeding Heart | REMUS LUPIN

Chapter Twelve

Before Ivory awoke in the middle of the night, she had been having a pleasant sleep. There were no nightmares as were to be expected; instead, she couldn't even remember what she'd been dreaming of by the time she woke up. At first, as Ivory sat up in bed, she was completely disoriented. She didn't understand why it was so dark outside and quickly became confused as to why she didn't feel tired.

Then she remembered why she had gone to sleep so early. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes as her pupils adjusted to the darkness of the room. Knowing she had fallen asleep resting on Lily's shoulder, she glanced around the room in search of her. She was able to see that Lily, Alice and Marlene were fast asleep and let out a sigh of relief.

Though she dreaded having to explain everything to Alice and Marlene as she had done with Lily, she was grateful for the fact that she had some time alone whilst they were all asleep. She figured that Lily had certainly informed the other two of the news and hoped she wouldn't have to explain it all over again.

Ivory looked down at her bed, only to see that her blankets hadn't fallen on the floor in the middle of the night as they usually did due to all the tossing and turning. She must've slept like a rock.

Ivory swung her legs over the side of her bed. As she checked the time, she saw it was around half past three o'clock in the morning.

Almost robotically, as though in a trance, Ivory tiptoed over to her trunk. She opened it and knelt down beside it. On the very top, sitting on the rest of her clothes, were her pyjamas. She grabbed a pair, noting that she hadn't changed out of her clothes before she'd done to sleep.

She then began rummaging inside the trunk, searching for something in particular. Finally, she came across a small book that she had wrapped in her blouse. She unwrapped it and discarded the blouse back inside her trunk, running her hands over the book.

The rectangular notebook was small and burgundy in colour. On the top right corner of the notebook's cover, Ivory had magically engraved her name. In a neat, elegant scrawl, 'Ivory Perkins', the golden engraving in the topmost corner, was the only inch of the book that wasn't burgundy.

The auburn-haired girl couldn't even count how many notebooks she had gone through since her first year at Hogwarts. She had been writing for as long as she could remember and had kept each and every one of the notebooks she had used upーthey were all secretly stashed away at the bottom of her trunk. The earliest poems from when she was younger, of course, hadn't been as good. If she read the first few ones she had written, she would be cringing so badly that she'd have to slam the notebook shut.

The more recent poems, however, had improved drastically and were more than decent to Ivory, who was her own toughest critic. She would sometimes go through them and read poems she'd written, wondering how she had even come up with such beautiful words. But she was full of those words, and simply kept coming up with new ones to write down.

Her favourite time to write—the time she felt most inspired—was when she was feeling any extreme emotions.

Devastation was one of them.

Ivory groped her way through the darkness, book in hand, until her hands touched the wooden nightstand beside her bed. She ran her fingers over it until she found her wand.

"Lumos," she whispered quietly, causing the tip of the wand to illuminate the entire room.

She quickly doused the light in her shirt so that she could be sure not to wake any of the other girls up. She made her way back to her bed, careful not to trip over anything. As she threw her wand onto her bed, she squinted at the bright white light emanating from its tip. Ivory changed into her pyjamas quickly, shoving her clothing inside her trunk.

When she finally felt comfortable, the girl sat on her bed and picked up her notebook once again. It was locked, very much like a diary, but there was no key to open it. Since Ivory never wanted anyone read her writing, she had found a way to charm her notebook so that only she'd be able to open it. She pressed her palm into the cover for only a second before the book recognized its owner. It levitated into the air, hovering just above Ivory's lap. The lock clicked and the notebook opened slowly to her current page.

Her nimble fingers grasped her wand and held it over the book. Involuntarily, her hand ran over the blank page, smoothing it out. She reached out to her nightstand and opened a drawer, plucking a quill and an inkwell from inside it. She kept writing materials in her nightstand for nights like this one.

Ivory dipped the quill inside the inkwell and kept her hand poised over the parchment page. Suddenly, the words began flowing effortlessly, as if writing was as simple as breathing. The words were transmitted from her brain to her hand, and transcribed straight into the notebook. Her mind was working faster than her hand, causing her writing to be slightly messier than it normally was. The only sounds that could be heard throughout the dormitory were the scratching of quill on parchment and the steady breathing of three sleeping girls.

Ivory put her emotions into words, poured her heart out on paper. She sloped the letters with her feelings and strung phrases together by reaching deep inside her soul. She was breathing these beautiful words. The words filled her nostrils and lungs and even her veins. Her heart was pumping them instead of blood.

Perhaps the parchment was her skin and the quill was her pain, scratching deep into her skin in the hope of harming her beyond undoing.

Or perhaps the ink was her blood and her tears, which dripped slowly down her nose, were the ocean, washing everything away.

Nevertheless, the girl sat in complete darkness except for the white light from her wand that was much too bright anyway. The tears welling in her eyes blurred everything together in a beautifully tragic painting that showed wandlight breaking through immense obscurity.

There was nothing in the entire world except for Ivory and her notebook.