Severus stood a few paces before her. His eyes were on the ruined cauldron.
"Tell me," his voice shook, and tears formed in his eyes, "why do you wear flowers in your hair?"
He kept looking to his cauldron.
"I don't understand."
"How does such a sim...
Tosses and turns plagued this doomed night. Doomed because, at 2am even the wisest of Ravenclaws replayed missed concepts in their head; spells not quite perfected. In mere hours the O.W.L.s lurked, and therein lurked dependent futures.
Felicity rolled to her side, and lit up her wand faintly beneath the covers. 2:22am. And yet, O.W.L.s never crossed her mind since she hit pillow hours ago.
That same aura returned. The same one the night before the Triwizard Tournament. Before Cedric's last day on Earth.
Magic pulsed through her veins like a stimulative potion. A magic, foreseeing an event. An event greater than O.W.L.s.
She nestled deeper into her mattress.
Sleep.
Legs stretched and retracted.
Sleep.
And so the magic pulsed on. To be exhausted, to be sleepy as death itself, and yet her mind, clean and clear, worked evermore.
Niamh.
Somewhere in the midst of a great pandemic, on a summer's night, Niamh manifested by the second. Affirmations, translated by quantum leaps into a tingling, stemming from Felicity's heart center.
Niamh must yearn an escape to try thus hard. For Felicity's mind ached for slumber, and yet Niamh persisted.
You must take a break, Felicity told herself. Her mind overloaded with futuristic images of Hogwarts and its physical conditions. Of celebration and mourning, of brave friends and conflicted foes. Take a break.
And so Felicity consulted Occlumency that night. And although sleep swept her clean in minutes, if she were awake, she could not have loved Severus more.
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Felicity scribbled away hard as soon as she read it.
She glanced up at the ticking clock, mentally digesting the time left on their History of Magic exam. Umbridge stood beneath it, hands clasped in a diplomatic fashion. She surveyed the fifth years in their intense exertion.
