Ginny lead me up the stairs at a snails pace. All the while she was insisting fervently, time and time again, that one did not sit out their seventeenth birthday for cramps.
In my defense they weren't 'just cramps'. There was a serrated knife planted in my side and the higher we climbed the deeper it twisted. Ginny was tugging me, dragging me down the hall -blindfolded- toward some predetermined end.
Until she stopped. Her hand wiggled free of mine and her heat moved farther along the echoing hall in either direction. Her footsteps seemed to bounce along the domed halls.
"Ginny get back here or I'm taking off the blind-" her hand slipped within mine again leaving 'fold' to die on my lips. My feet moved of my own accord, while I focused on something a little more pressing; the knife in my abdomen.
She pulled the strip of cloth from my eyes in that moment, revealing a room decorated in silver and violet. Even the cake had suffered their good intentions and I couldn't love anything more.
"Happy Birthday!" Ron pulled the string on a confetti canon and Harry struck up the choir.
"Happy birthday to YOU!" The test of the room exploded with the words, merry faces surrounded me but their words began to spin together like cotton candy and my feet were no longer balancing on solid ground.
The last I remembered Dean's brown skin swam into my vision and then...nothing.
****
Hospital cots were uncomfortable.
My body -despite the many aches and pains that plagued me previously- was springy and new. Whatever Madam Pomfrey pumped me full of was working.
She sat in her chair, laboring over a text that looked to be -conservatively- a hundred years old. It should have been a crime to disturb a woman in that deep, but as it stood I had my own book reading to do.
"Madame Pomfrey," the poor woman started so violently that her cup went crashing to the ground.
She'd hear none of my hundred apologies as she cleared the mess.
"Are you feeling any better?" Her gaze was assessing even as she waited for my answer. Whatever she'd been reading had her on edge and I couldn't help wondering why.
"Fine, thanks," I stretched big, feeling out my body for the first time since the incident. Her gaze flitted to the space beside me despite the cot being hidden behind a white curtain. "I think I was doing more than was healthy."'I admitted slowly. If I were to be honest my sleep had been disturbed every night a week prior by the colors; silver -or platinum- twisting and melting through the red and black. "I've been having these dreams..." I was hesitant to go into depth, but did at her insisting.
"It's hard to explain." I warned her, "it's so bright and it eats everything."
"I nearly thought you were talking about Weasley," the curtain beside my own cot wrenched itself open, "but then I remembered you said it was bright." Malfoy hoisted himself up, making himself an unwanted addition to the conversation. So I was colored surprised when 'Sod Off' turned into, "well what do you think it means then?"
His pale eyebrow shot into his platinum hairline as he fumbled for an answer.
"Like I'd waste my time on a mudblood," Madame Pomfrey was quick to admonish him, but he continued on as if she hadn't spoken, "if that's even what you are." Too much of me recoiled and crumbled at the derogatory term, but the rest of me was hanging on his every offensive word.
"What are you trying to say?"
But that was all he'd deemed me worthy of. He rolled onto his side and yanked the curtain closed behind him. It didn't take a social expert to know we'd both been dismissed.
She released me moments later, nearly shooting me out the doors and past her desk. Especially past her desk. So now I was left with more questions and less answers.
Grand.