He was darkness.
He was death.
He was pain.
He was suffering.
He was a mystery. One she intended to solve.
"You wouldn't kill me, Tom." "Avada Kedavra!"
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Madam Pomfrey studied Arabella carefully. "And you're sure you can't remember dropping Jacob Summers here five nights ago?"
Arabella stared up at the older woman, frowning. "No, should I?"
Pomfrey busied herself with finishing up the brew for Arabella's pounding head and pressed the foaming goblet into Arabella's hand. "Drink." Pomfrey said.
The instant Arabella took a sip the thudding in her head began to slow and the ache started to disappear. "Did I bring in Jacob?" Arabella asked, "why?"
Pomfrey glanced at the vulnerable fifth year and wracked her mind for all the reasons she could think of that the girl would have lost all her memories. After a few seconds, Madam Pomfrey remembered that she had been missing for four days, the teachers had been talking about it in the staff room earlier. Ignoring Arabella's earlier question completely, Pomfrey sat on the edge of the girl's bed and placed her hands on top of the young girl's clasped ones. "What happened during the past four days, Miss Caerwyn?"
Red flooded Arabella's cheeks and she looked down, her neck burning. "I don't know," she admitted, "I just woke up in a room on the seventh floor and left. Jaelyn brought me here after that." Speaking about the moment only made Arabella question the room and her curious sleep more. She'd read stories about strange things happening in Hogwarts before but she never once thought something odd would happen to her.
Pomfrey's mind flooded with questions and she stood up suddenly, her face grim. "Oh dear," she said and walked briskly off, her long skirts flowing behind her. The matron entered her office and closed the door, leaving Arabella sitting alone with only the few other patients for company.
"Merlin's Beard," Arabella muttered, her eyes wide, staring at the space that Pomfrey had just vacated. Feeling defeated and exhausted, Arabella sunk deep into the comfort of the hospital bed and closed her eyes, willing everything to go back to the way it was before.
The bed next to her creaked and a boy turned over to face her. "Are you sure it was the seventh floor?"
Arabella squeaked and turned her head swiftly to find the owner of the voice. The boy in question was in hospital robes, a sign that he was in the Hospital Wing often. He had tousled dark brown hair and beautiful chocolate eyes. The curtains that would usually be closed around him were open, revealing his sickly figure under the sheets. Nevertheless, her reaction to his voice amused him and he was grinning. The smile lit up his pale face.
Arabella pushed hair back behind her hears and nodded softly, suddenly shy. The boy, whose name Arabella did not know shakily pushed himself up. "I was only asking," the boy said, "because, as far as I know, there is no bedroom on the seventh floor. It's all classrooms and empty rooms up there."
"What?" The words stung. Where on earth had Arabella woken up? Suddenly, everything about the room seemed odd. If there were no accommodation rooms on that floor, then why was the room elaborately set up as a bedroom? Arabella shook her head, "No, that's wrong. I was definitely in a bedroom."
The boy shrugged. "It must be new then. I haven't been out of the Hospital Wing for three years so I wouldn't know."
A few seconds passed before Arabella's eyes widened and her hands covered her mouth in shock. "What?"
The boy nodded and lay back down, grimacing. "It was my third year when I got the disease. It struck hard and fast-." but mid-sentence his words were cut off like someone had wrapped their fingers around his throat. His eyes started to water and he started to gurgle and something started beeping like an alarm. Madam Pomfrey rushed out of her office and to the side of the sick boy, pulling her wand out of a pocket in her skirt. Suddenly he started screaming and thrashing in his sheets. Pomfrey gasped and with a flick of her wand, the sterile curtains flew closed around his bed and all went deathly silent. Arabella watched on, quiet, stunned.
A few minutes passed and Madam Pomfrey emerged from the curtains, red-cheeked and breathless. "Is he okay?" Arabella asked, sympathetic for the boy's pain and situation.
"Mr. Luca will be fine in time, Miss. Caerwyn," said Madam Pomfrey. "Now lie down, Edmund would not want you to wake him up. He needs to rest. He's had too much excitement for today."
"Okay," she whispered softly and went further down into the warm sheets. But before Madam Pomfrey left the wing, Arabella suddenly sat up. "Why has he been in here for three years? Can't he go to Saint Mungos?" The sick boy's situation perplexed Arabella because if he was so sick, shouldn't he be in the intensive care unit at the best Wizarding Hospital there was? Why was he lying in a bed in a school's infirmary?
Pomfrey turned and looked at the innocent young girl, still too naive to know of how cruel the world could be. "Because everyone else is too scared to get close to him. I am the only one who would take him."
And when Madam Pomfrey left the large hospital wing, Arabella turned onto her side and stared at the closed curtains, thinking of the sick boy inside. She wondered what illness he had and why every healer in Britain was too scared to heal him.
And it was then that Arabella Caerwyn vowed that she would never let Edmund Luca be lonely ever again.
