metanoia

Chapter Four

     "Letti! Where are you?" A young Alex screamed over an ear-splitting crash of lightning, looking around her frantically as she tried to find her best friend.

A huge storm was brewing off the coast and Alex's parents didn't want Lisette to walk home in the rain, so they sent their twins to go find their best friend thinking she'd be close. Alex full force sprinted ahead of her brother, her feet slipping in the puddles that blanket the ground, wanting to find her soon because they'd ended up walking all the way to her house and her aunt said that she hadn't even made it home yet.

"Lisette Cordelia Lightwood, where are you?!" Alex screamed with fearful tears running down her face, mixing with the downpour of the rain that had her drenched completely.

To her left, Alex saw movement in the tall grass of the meadow. Crouching down low to look in the grass, she saw a bloody human body. She ran to the body, finding that it was Lisette lying unconscious with two long slices trailing down her back, blood seeping through her shirt. With her heart in her stomach Alex, mustering all the strength she had in her small twelve year old arms, pulled her friend's limp body into her arms as a wolf howled not that far off in the distance. Wolves don't live around these beaches, so the eerie sound terrified the girl as she began to carry her friend to her brother as another howl rang out before a clap of thunder.

With the booming sound of the crashing thunder Alex awoke with a start, breathing heavily. The dreams she'd been having as of late have become more frequent, vivid and eerily familiar, so she decided that she would soon make time to talk to Headmaster Dumbledore about them and see what he had to say about them.

Alex leaves her shared room at 6 am after being awake for nearing three hours, nearly tripping over the ginger cat that curled up at the foot of her bed, as the other four girls groggily began getting ready for their first day of their 6th year at Hogwarts. As Alex fixed another hair tie onto her side braid, she literally ran into a hard chest at the foot of the stairs. Gideon smiled down at his friend's out of character clumsiness, wondering how she was holding up now that they were finally back. Alex was smiling up at her friends, seemingly un-prank related, happy for the first time in over 3 years.

"What's with you today, Xander? Since when do you smile?" Fabian laughs, following her out of the Common Room and down to the Great Hall for breakfast.

"Sorry for running into you, Gid. I'm dandy, Fab. And I smile, but oftentimes it's easily mistaken for my scowl so I can understand the confusion. I'm starved, I hope they've bacon," Alex chuckles, plopping down onto the bench across from them at the Gryffindor Table.

They all eye the large pile of bacon sitting in the center of the long wooden table and viciously scraped the meat onto their plates. The trio ate as if it was the first meal they had eaten in weeks, not stopping for more than a second to breathe. The fresh off the griddle bacon was not an amenity that Letti and Alex had back home, to be honest neither have actually lived with their families in Marseille, France in 4 years.

"Woah slow down you three, you'll choke," Frank Longbottom advises, witnessing his three classmates collectively eat a pound of bacon in less than thirty seconds of sitting down.

Alex rolls her eyes at his comment, folding two more pieces of the crispy breakfast meat into her mouth, "Oh, shove off Longbottom and let me enjoy my bacon."

Frank raises his hands in surrender, smiling as he takes a bite of his own bacon, "Yes ma'am."

"You gonna go out for the team again this year, Frankie? We need a Keeper now that Wood's gone," Gideon struggles to ask through the several pieces of bacon he'd just finished shovelling into his mouth.