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...
"Yes, it's me! Oh no, we---I didn't want you to be caught!"
"Luna, can you help us get these ropes off?" Harry's voice spoke quickly, his steps louder with proximity.
Niamh didn't dare speak. Not now.
The state of her throat ensured that, anyway.
A blood-curdling scream above muted Luna's scratching search for a sharp nail.
Bellatrix's screeching taunt returned to Hermione's sobs, but before Niamh could make out everything, Ron smacked the gates. He rattled them, and Niamh imagined his fists white. "HERMIONE!!"
"Mr. Ollivander? Mr Ollivander?"
Niamh drooped her neck to the opposite side, trying to make out his sleeping form through her hooded eyelids. "Ollivand . . . Ollivander . . ." She rasped quietly. Her arm scarcely nudged his.
"Mr. Ollivander, have you got the nail? If you just move over a little bit . . . I think it was beside the water jug . . ."
"I'm going to ask you again! Where did you get this sword? Where?"
". . . Need to stay still . . ."
Knots scratched her ears, like dry cracked nails. Ron rattled the chains at the gate, and she marveled how the floor did not shatter beneath them.
"We found it---we found it---please!"
". . . Can't see!"
"Please!" A loud thud crashed above.
"My pocket, there's a deluminator---"
Niamh squeezed her eyes.
Though bright, white incandescence slipped through her weakened eyelids.
"Felicity?"
Fluttering her eyes open, she saw nothing but a dark silhouette in the light. Her eyes danced from North to South, West to East. The light rolled over the floors like heavenly, sharp rays, and the silhouette of a man held up the light in his hand.
The light brightened, and with it his silhouette's size. The famed curve of spectacles glinted a flash of green, then mirrored the blindness again.
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Niamh could only stare. Her consciousness had been floating between planes. But the light was such a strange, such a foreign matter to witness.
Her pupils felt exposed, felt slitted against such stimuli.
She reached out a finger to touch it. She frowned upon not seeing her shadow, wondering if her lips even moved. And that was when she realized her arm merely twitched. Though it felt far.
"Felicity?"
Dim contours of his face came into view. Most of the light blocked behind him now.
She could only stare. Her eyes wide in spite of her body. Like a ghost laying atop its open-eyed corpse.
But her brown, doe's eyes would never stop staring. The light was so ancient, so foreign.
Harry cloned into other silhouetted figures, some taller, some shorter. One shrunk into a strange-headed being, round and small . . . And a peer of Gryffindor . . .
"You are lying, filthy Mudblood . . ." Screams tore at her ears. ". . . vault at Gringotts! Tell the truth, tell the truth!"
Niamh held onto that light. She held on with her eyes, whilst oblivion enveloped the rest of her body, climbing up her neck.
"There's no way out . . ."
"She's unwell . . ." Luna's voice came nearer. Almost beside her.
In an instant, she found that silhouette. Matted hair, thinned form---she still made out the curls of Luna's. Unmistakably her, no matter the change inflicted upon them.
And with her eyes, as Harry peered into them, she flicked them towards Luna---every plea in her mind called to her---every paralyzed muscle burned at its confines.
Within seconds, that figure stepped before Harry's. All caution protected from his view, she began to twitch her lips. "Dob . . . Dob . . . Dobby," she rasped at last.
I cannot save him this time. You must enact the plan for me. For him.
Complex flashes of daggers, of careful verbal signals, of nauseating mists floated in her mind, willing to transfer it all to Luna, who in spite already knew from their notebook.
But she couldn't shake off the feeling that her tongue missed something---that now, like Mad-Eye, like Cedric---tragedy would ensue---and she'd wake up in more underworld than otherworld.
