Little Bird

Chapter Sixty-One

Draco

            Around me, everything had been brought to a standstill.

            The breath was trapped in my throat and there was something painful swelling up inside my chest that I couldn't quite explain, and as I stared down at Eve's closed eyes and missing heartbeat, I suddenly wondered if this was what it felt like for the world to end. The hallway had disappeared around us as I gripped her limp shoulders tightly, saying in a voice quickly rising in panic, "Please look at me. Look at me."

            I had expected her eyes to open, but they didn't.

            "Wake up," I choked out, shaking her harder as my entire body started to tremble, "please wake up. Eve, baby, just wake up—"

            Someone's hand was on my shoulder, but now the panic had taken over and I was losing sense of all reason; my elbow automatically snapped backwards, cracking against the person's face in a blind rage as I shook Eve harder. "Don't touch me—wake up, please wake up—"

            There was a loud ringing in my ears and I couldn't blink, because I couldn't look away from Eve's closed eyelids and blood-stained cheeks. I was hyperventilating as I started to scream for her to just wake up and look at me, Potter and the others fading to nothing in the background as the world came crashing down around me. I gripped the front of her robes tight in my fists as I shook her, too panicked to realize that the parchment of the last letter I had sent her was brushing against the back of my knuckles.

            With Eve's body completely still beneath my hands, all I could hear was her voice from when she had quietly whispered to me just outside the doors of Hogwarts before I left her over a month ago. 'This is the last time you'll have to say goodbye. I promise.'

            I fell to pieces in the middle of the hallway, caked in soot from the smoke of the Room of Requirement and Eve's blood staining my hands. Another hand was reaching for my arm but I threw them off without turning around, unable to look away from Eve's pale skin and peaceful expression for even a second. I was screaming, shaking her as hard as I could and screaming; I couldn't hear myself, but I was begging over and over again, "Don't leave me."

            I couldn't be sure how much time had passed before I was hitting her chest, striking it with a fist so tightly clenched that my knuckles were white as snow—as though, lost in a panic, I had thought it would do something. The adrenaline was burning hot just underneath my skin as I blindly brought my fist down onto the space where her heart was hidden, the world falling into pieces around me.

            It happened in the same instant I struck her chest for the second time; something I would never, ever quite be able to explain. Under the impact of my hand, Eve's heart skipped back into motion, and she suddenly sucked in such a giant breath of air that her shoulder blades lifted off of the hallway floor. Coughing and choking like someone who had spent too long underwater, Eve's eyes opened and her pupils dilated as she struggled to sit up in a panic.

            I was reaching for her before I could even really understand what had happened, unable to breathe because of the lump in my throat as Eve asked in a tiny, broken voice, "What—what happened? Did—?"

            But the breath was nearly knocked out of her as I threw myself against her, my chin bumping her shoulder and my arms wrapping around her so tightly that I was sure it was painful. I held her as though I wasn't sure she was real, my breath coming out in short gasps as I choked out, "I—I thought...I thought you were gone—"