TW for this chapter- Self harm & starvation
Song of the chapter: Love like this (acoustic)- Kodaline
From that time on I seemed to see my life in chapters, as if I were a character in a murder mystery. From the moment I was attacked in The Three Broomsticks to the moment I woke up, still submerged in black matter and writhing in pain.
Darkness was inevitable, un-escapable and everywhere, as was pain.
In the first few days I called out for Draco and threw myself against the bars of my cell. Screaming until my throat was ripped raw and hoarse. His name sounded guttural, even animal, on the tip of my tongue always.
Nobody ever came to me. After two days the only pain I could feel was the one in my stomach and heart. Blinding, searing pain like someone had burned me from the inside out.
On the fifth day of this insufferable hunger and thirst I knew you could see my bones. It wasn't possible they weren't showing through my itchy skin already. I pulled the bottom of my shirt off to look at my stomach and sure enough I'd lost enough weight you could see every tiny bone inside of my broken body.
I knew that the average person lasted about 8-21 days without food and water. I could only hope I'd die soon, not drag it out.
I put two fingers to my wrist, feeling my heartbeat. It was almost gone, slow, irregular, hard to find.
On the eighth day every part of my body was screaming. I couldn't hear, couldn't see, everything was blurry or spinning in a dizzy disarray, my toes were blue, either from starvation or the cold, and my hands shook terribly.
How I ever made it through that day I don't know.
The next day was worse.
Not pain-wise, but hope-wise.
This type of darkness was more than a matter of lighting. It was every moment pressed like a tattoo into my skin. Every passing second shoved down my throat until I suffocated. My eyes being blind to everything around me was only a part of the darkness. A tiny tiny part. It was words filling the space like air does, words of death. It was matter filling the cracks in the walls. It was the oxygen exploding into shattered pieces and cutting me. How someone could survive in the dark was unknown.
I hadn't moved out of my spot on the floor since day four so there I sat in complete silence.
Ten days.
Ten whole days before my body began to truly fail.
My body temperature dropped so much I could even tell the stone floor was warmer than my skin. My knees, hands and feet were blue and bruised, one of signs your body is giving up.
I wished I could write Draco another letter, one explaining my death and how, in life, I'd loved him endlessly.
But no that wouldn't do.
On the eleventh day, it must've been morning, I don't think I would have lasted into the night of the eleventh day, someone came to my prison, wherever that was, with a tray of something.
It was cold and disgusting, my body repelled it so they forced something else into me with a tube. My strength was hardly replenished but my heartbeat was stronger and I could feel things again.
The person didn't talk, or touch me with bare skin, only shoved a needle into my arm and left me to shiver again.
Twelve days.
Thirteen.
The stuff they brought me had helped but I was still dying.
Dying. Dying. Dying. Dead.
Dead?
Not yet. I wished my body would finally fail, let me leave this place.
Day fourteen I was hysterical. I decided there was nothing else.
I took the needle that had been in my arm once upon a time and held it to my wrist. I was going to end this. End everything.
I prepared myself to make the cut, knowing that the immense weight would lift as my blood left my body. But the needle lifted from my hand and my body collapsed out of its sitting position.
The lighting didn't change but I knew I had passed out.
When I opened my eyes again I opened them to the light. I was blinded by it. It screamed out at me from everywhere, beams and threads of golden sunlight as if reflecting off a golden blade. It looked like peace, like tranquility in the midst of a battlefield. My eyes watered and pained me but I didn't care.
It looked like peace until my eyes adjusted and I saw that this light was not, in fact, the last light, the one at the end of the tunnel.
It was fake light. Light that wasn't really there at all. Where there was? I don't know. All I know is I opened my eyes in a room filled with people.
"Great," I muttered to myself.
Wait.
I could talk? I could move my arms? I was alive if not living.
I tried sitting up but my head pounded like hell and every muscle screamed at me to stop. A groan escaped my lips and so I took in the room while laying down.
People stood on the edges of one half of the room. I lay on a metal table in the other half of the room. A piece of immaculately cleaned glass separated the two sides, providing me some "protection."
The room was pure black and empty other than the table on which I rested. What was going on.
"Hey!" I screamed. Maybe these people could help me.
None of them moved, none of them spoke. I was still utterly alone.
Tears finally came, clouding my vision. It was a miracle that I hadn't cried up until that point and a huge disappointment that I chose this moment to let out my emotions.
After minutes of silence someone spoke.
"Shall we meet our prisoner?"
I shivered, they were going to kill me, I knew it.
A few people filed into the room and one of them walked to me immediately. Her hair was violently curly and the darkest shade of black I'd ever seen a person have. Her eyes were the same black color and her smile was cruel.
"Belatrix," I greeted. Her's was a face I knew well. Neville had told me all about her.
"Oh!" she gasped, amused. "The girly knows my name!"
A few of the men around us laughed.
"Care to tell us yours? We all know it of course but it seemed like good manners to allow you to tell us yourself."
I considered telling her my name was Angel but the thought of her calling me what Draco used to felt like a stab to the stomach.
"Evangeline," I muttered.
"What a pretty name that is!" she said in a high pitched, teasing voice. "You'll let me call you Eve though won't you? So much easier."
It was not a question. I did not have a choice.
I didn't have a choice.
I never had a choice.
I was always pegged as a target, always in danger.
Rage boiled my blood but what could I do? I was powerless against these people.
But then I spotted Belatrix's wand neatly tucked into a fold of her black skirt and a plan formed in my mind. It was a horrible one, with so many flaws I couldn't count them all.
In no more than a second I'd convinced myself of this stupid plan and made the first move to start it.
Idiotic.
I lunged forward off of the table, ignoring every possible pain in my body, and grabbed Belatrix's wand. I managed that part easily. Then, with an empowered look on my face I spun around and yelled as loud as I possibly could.
"ADVADA KEDAVRA!"
Three of them, dead. Belatrix laughing maniacally at me from the same place she'd been standing in since her entry into the room.
"You're a feisty little one aren't you," she said. "And now a murderer! I can see why the Dark Lord wants you on our side."
An image of Dumbledore speaking to Draco and me in his office at the start of term, before Draco and I had fallen into this dangerous game.
"Ms. Grey has a strong sense of... individualism, shall we say. Her mind works in curious ways and does not wish to choose one way of living or thinking. Therefore she moves from house to house. Lord Voldemort has followers. Countless followers but most of them come from your own house, Slytherin, therefore they all have the same values and thought processes. Ms. Grey, being from all the houses, somewhat contradicts what most wizards, Voldemort included, believe to be the structure of our society. She could either be a massive help to Lord Voldemort should she choose or she could aid the opposite side of this 'war' and help Mr. Potter. I suspect Lord Voldemort will be trying to make Ms. Grey join him and if she does not, I believe he would willingly kill her."
That's what he had said.
Fine, let him kill me. I wouldn't join them.
"I'd rather die than join you," I snarled.
"Have it your way," she laughed, and pressed one of her long fingernails to the tattoo on her arm, calling the Dark Lord to our place here.