Delicate | James Potter

2.11

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Alice always used to wonder what it would be like to break a bone. In primary school, her classmates would come in with casts on their arms or their legs and people would shower them with friendship. Each one would write their name on the cast in colourful pen, and sometimes doodle funny pictures or even little kind messages that made you feel loved. Alice never had many friends at primary school, they all thought her weird and peculiar. Many a night she'd stay up wondering just how painful it would be to break a bone, and whether it might just be worth it if it meant she could finally have some friends, if only for a week or so.

When she then broke her wrist playing Quidditch in her fourth year, the pain was not quite as bad as she'd expected. Perhaps it was because she'd spent so long imagining how awful it must be, or perhaps it was simply because Madam Pomfrey was able to grow it back overnight and have her good as new by morning. Either way, it wasn't all too bad. Overall, she'd had a rather painless life.

Until now.

This was a pain like no other, one Alice wouldn't have even been able to fathom before. The type that was so unimaginably excruciating it would be impossible to even picture. The type that made your skin buzz, your veins burn, your whole body writhe around in agony, and yet Alice felt like she couldn't move at all. She felt paralysed, like a million knives had just cut deep into her skin and if she were to move even an inch, her whole body would simply fall apart.

James was shouting. She could hear his panicked voice as he knelt down by her side, but the words all blurred together and what exactly he was saying she couldn't tell. His eyes were wide and afraid, his own face was still beat up and bloody. He was talking to her, then shouting to someone else, then his hand was pushing down on her shoulder and it hurt even more.

Alice cried out loudly, eyes watering as she struggled against the pain but it was impossibly difficult and something in her was begging just to give in to the light feeling that was edging its way closer. Her vision was hazy and the sky looked grey and there were black patches appearing all over it and it hurt to even breathe. It was too much, there was nothing but pain, she couldn't hold onto it. Her eyes shut.

"Shit, Winters, don't close your - shit." James was trying to put pressure on the wounds. It's what his mum had taught him to do after a Quidditch injury last summer, but there were so many, too many. There was so much blood, and it just kept coming, more and more until the grass around them had been stained a deep red. He looked over his shoulder. "What did you do?!"

Mulciber, still sporting a large set of antlers, had a look of horror to his eye. His face remained bland and unfeeling, but there was something about the way he had paused with his wand still out that suggested he himself didn't know what he'd done.

"WHAT DID YOU DO?!" James shouted. This time, Mulciber unfroze. He stared for a second at Alice, then at James, then he scurried away without even once looking back. "Coward."