Call Me Pretty

Chapter Three | Falling Down

“Yeah!” she shouted back “Just…just jumped a bit to much.”

Felicity went back to screaming, and Dom shook her dizziness off and continued to cheer, though her head still spun. As she and Felicity stood on the benches, hollering as Ben made another save, Dom felt the world whirl.

All control she had over her body vanished, and suddenly everything went black. There was complete silence, utter darkness and air rushing past-and then nothing. For those moments air brushed her skin like silk, her body was completely weightless and there was nothing, nothing but the feeling of falling.

            Rain beat against the windows of the hospital wing, grey light filtering through and falling across Dom’s pale, freckled face. Bill Weasley sat at his daughter’s bedside, holding her hand gently in his.

It scared him how frail it was, the way her freckles stood out against her pale skin-it was as if she were a bird, with hollow bones. He didn’t want her to fly off.

Dom stirred lightly, eyes fluttering open and a slight sigh slipping past her chapped and pale lips. Her blue eyes, so pale-Victoire once matched them to a colour chart and said they were somewhere between ‘Sistine blue’ and ‘cool vista’. Bill knew Dom hated how pale they were, but Bill loved that they shared these traits; he was no doubt his daughter, right down to way her upper lip had a small indent in the centre, as if a faerie had pressed it’s finger there the day she as born.

“Daddy?” Dom’s voice was weak as her fingers twitched, feeling the calluses of her fathers fingers. She turned her head to the side so she could look at him, though her eyes were blank-she didn’t seem very surprised, or scared.

“Hey there Dot,” he whispered, calling Dom by her old nickname; he hadn’t done so in years.

“Who won?” she asked jokingly, smiling at him.

Bill shrugged “You’ll have to ask someone else, honey, I have no idea.”

Turning her head back so she could see the ceiling, Dom’s eyes fluttered closed again and she sighed “I hope we won, or Ben will be in a funk for days.”

Frowning, Bill squeezed his daughters hand as he looked her over-why wasn’t she asking questions? Why could he see how bony her shoulders were, the frail outline of her legs beneath the sheet? She was so thin. “Dominique, you fainted.”

“So?” she breathed, eyes still closed.

“So, people don’t just faint honey. You’re mother and I are very worried.” Bill couldn’t help but picture Fleur’s pale face when they got the owl informing them Dominique had fallen out of the Quidditch stands, luckily caught by a player.

“I’m fine.”

Obviously she would say that, but Dom didn’t look fine. Bill knew his daughter; she was feisty and stubborn, and she didn’t just faint “Dominique-”