𝐀 𝐆𝐈𝐑𝐋 𝐎𝐅 𝐑𝐈𝐃𝐃𝐋𝐄𝐒 | h. potter

12 | Cold Heart, Warm Hands

CHAPTER TWELVE: COLD HEART, WARM HANDS

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Maya awoke in the hospital wing feeling incredibly cold, a constant dull chill beneath her sternum no matter how much she subconsciously burrowed into the sheets of the bed. She opened her eyes to see Harry and Hermione at the side of the bed, and briefly wondered where Ron was when Hermione's eyes widened, a watery shine to them in the dim light of the room.

"You're awake! Merlin — we thought you had — that you'd —"

What they had thought Maya didn't get to find out — or, she did rather belatedly — she looked past the fingers trembling in Hermione's mouth to see Ron storming over towards her, mouth set in an angry line, blue eyes ablaze.

"What the hell happened? What did you do?" Ron's face was stark white, and it made his freckles stand out just as angrily as Ron had spat out his words through gritted teeth.

"Ron — wait a moment, she just woke up," tried Hermione in a pleading tone, moving to hold him back but he shook her off. "Give her some space."

Maya furrowed her eyebrows, pushing herself up. "What...?" The blanket fell off her shoulders. Her eyes drifted to the cluster of redheads surrounding one bed.

Ginny.

One look at her petrified form and it all came back to her — the diary — a basilisk — dark smoke — stone floor. The Weasley girl had an expression of sheer terror clouding her features, while her family looked on in despair.

This is my fault.

For a second everything was silent.

Ron roared, "What the hell did you do?!" Startled, Maya looked at him in shock. She must have said her thoughts aloud because suddenly his face contorted into fury and his eyes promised hell. "Percy said a Prefect found you on top of her, and she was holding onto you as if she was trying to get you off! What were you doing to Ginny?!"

She had given him a reason to accuse her, she realised belatedly. Not only had she come out of the bathroom unscathed, but she had fully taken the blame with those words and the consequences were rearing its ugly head towards her now. But that didn't mean she couldn't explain herself.

Shaking her head furiously, Maya opened her dry mouth to speak. "It's not what you think. You don't understand, I was trying to prot—!"

The words got stuck in her throat, a scratching, suffocating feeling crawling up her windpipe and winding around her vocal chords. She could vaguely hear Hermione panic and feel Harry's arms around her shoulders, barely noticed Ron break out of his furious accusatory stupor and look on with concern, but with every breath and every sound she made she felt the coil get tighter and then she couldn't feel, hear, or see anything but the pain. 

She scratched madly at her throat as hot tears tumbled down her cheeks, as the swirl of darkness choked her from the inside and she heard a slithery voice whisper, "Ah, ah! Not a word from you," before it wrapped around her heart and squeezed.

Maya collapsed on the bed, still clutching at her throat in a silent scream as her eyes rolled to the back of her head, and she slipped into unconsciousness once again.

***

It was cold where she was.

The first thing she noticed was the biting chill on her skin, the harsh stabs in her lungs and her desperate desire for warmth. The strange thing was that the coldness didn't seem to come from around her, but from her — it seeped out from her chest in tendrils and waves, like honey and like a rushing tap, like a blanket of constancy but always moving, always growing away from her and freezing everything it touched.