#d:jan1

For a moment, she thought of the color. A deep violet, cut through the middle with a thicker indigo, where the smoke was heavier, less permeable. It was a beautiful color for just a moment, the thick hue like something borne of velvet, or silk, sprinkled with stardust. Alice could hardly remember who it was on her arm for a moment, or the fact that she could feel James and Gideon at her right pulling away from the crowd. She could feel Bellatrix at her left, Alastor at her front; they all seemed far less disillusioned with the color than she. 

They had all managed to escape the first blast relatively unscathed; she had little time to think of the others, of hoping that perhaps they had gotten out in time. And she certainly hadn’t had time to stop and watch the other cloud. Maybe she should have; maybe then she would have known that the deepness of the color was not as inviting as she might have thought.

And then she felt it. 

The cloud touched her skin, and immediately it began to burn, pricking at her skin and coating her eyes; she could hear the scream emitting from her own throat before she could feel the rawness of her throat. And quite suddenly, she couldn’t see a thing; the air before her had turned from indigo to pure black, laced at the edges with screaming crimson-- was that blood? Was she seeing blood? The pain was intolerable; Alice lost her grip on Bellatrix’s arm as she felt bodies shuffle past her, around her, as if they, too, had lost their sense of direction. Her screams mingled with others as she clawed at her eyes, desperate to free them of the black shroud that had covered them. 

Her eyes were still burning-- like hot pokers in her skull, unwilling to be removed by any mortal hand-- and yet all she could pull her mind to focus on was what was locked away just three floors below. She’d seen the others paired with Healers before submitting to her own, submitting to the idea that she’d be stuck on this cot until someone was careless enough to let her slip away. She sat where she’d been designated to sit, neck craning and eyes burning for Dorcas, for Gideon-- for anyone who would understand her need to move and would not judge her for wanting to do it on her own terms. 

“Ouch,” Alice hissed, for the Healer-- whose name she could not recall-- had appeared quite suddenly at her side again, dabbing a healing serum on her cheeks, where her nails had left red gashes in the heat of the moments just following the serum’s release. The plump woman apologized endlessly, but Alice could not find it in herself to apologize. She was growing restless, and with restlessness came a loss of manners that she could hardly control-- or apologize for. 

But nevertheless, she slapped as pleasant a look onto her red face as she could manage, and looked up at the Healer. With supplicating voice, she muttered, “Could I trouble you for a glass of water?” She knew good and well that the scatterbrained woman would venture off as asked, and would not likely return any time soon. The chaos of the atrium, in which they were all stationed, was far too much for even the sharpest minds; the poor Healer would get lost in it without question. 

As soon as she was gone, Alice stood, a half-formed idea in her mind as she cast a glance around the room again; getting to anyone who could take on such an idea-- and who may even possess it for themselves-- would not be an easy task. She felt quite like a deer in the headlights, standing by her cot and feeling quite small, with burning eyes and fiery passions in the pit of her chest; one way or another, she needed to move. 

She’d been torn from them all and told to stay put; Alice did not like to be told to stay put, no matter the circumstances. No matter how horribly her eyes burned, or how hard it was to breathe, or how all she could see when she closed her eyes was Alastor- and Lily- and Remus- and- She hardly was brave enough to close her eyes, let alone allow herself to go to sleep, and so going home was a terrifying prospect, for she was putting herself far too close to her bed for comfort. 

Rubbing at her eyes with a clenched jaw and rigid fingers, Alice wandered around her flat, turning on every light, flipping on the radio, making the atmosphere as loud, and abrasive, and entirely not conducive to easy sleep. She stood in the middle of her kitchen, bouncing up and down a few times on the balls of her feet, humming along loudly to the pounding treble of the music blaring through the speakers in the next room. eyes pressed harshly over her eyes, rubbing and pressing and pushing at the violent nightmares behind her eyes, but they wouldn’t fucking leave her alone. 

No matter how loud the music was, how bright the lights were, how haphazardly and recklessly she pounded her feet into the tile of the kitchen, she couldn’t shake it. Alice felt as if she was falling apart, as if the nightmare was suddenly crashing down atop her now that she was alone, now that there were no Healers around her to tell her she was alive, and alright, and not insane. 

She began to sing along to the song on the radio, though she knew none of the words, her voice a loud, piercing, wordless yell, drowning out the ringing in her skull. Alice clapped her hands over her ears, sinking to the floor, her back thumping against the cabinet beneath the sink as she squeezed her eyes shut, praying that the roaring sound thumping behind her eyes and shaking her bones would offer her some sort of relief. It was painfully loud; she could almost feel her eyes beginning to bleed again, as they had at the Ministry, but for a blissful moment, she was numb. 

She awoke with a gasp of air, her eyes flying open and her back arching as Alice was wrenched from the dream. The space before her eyes was thick, black, burning; she could barely see a thing, save what was right before her. The scream that had ended the dream fizzled at the base of her throat, instead leaving her to roll onto her side with a cough and a gasp for air that hardly seemed to feel enough. Her eyes were burning, tearing at the skin of her face with acidic fingers; Alice pressed the heels of her hands over her eyes, crying out with a wince as the pressure only made it worse, though it did just a bit to clear her vision. 

It wasn’t until she removed her hands from her eyes that she saw Alastor beside her. Flat on his back, eyes closed and body still, she could barely make out the movement of breath in his chest. Alice scrambled forward on her hands and knees, throwing herself atop him and cupping his face with her hands, using all of her strength to see through the pain, the terror, that cut her vision with thick, waving lines. She ran her thumbs across his collarbones, holding his head steady as she searched his face. 

“Alastor?” she muttered, her voice thick with tears that she had no intention of controlling, “Alastor, please wake up.” With one hand she shook his shoulder, her breathing growing more and more frantic by the moment, for the reality of his stillness was growing all too much to bear. Gently- or, perhaps not gently enough- she shook his shoulders, tears beginning to streak her cheeks as his head flopped from side to side, like a rag doll. She could hear movement from nearby in the hall; was it James? Or Gideon? But she thought not to look away from Alastor, who was still, and silent, and looked more dead and more like he had in her dream than she’d ever imagined him to look. 

“Please wake up,” her voice was thick with tears now, breaking on every other syllable as the choking threat of a sob closed in a fist around her throat, “Please, please, wake up.” Logically, she should have known that he wasn’t dead; she could feel his breath below where she’d draped herself over his lifeless body. But all she could see was the sight of his face a deathly still, eyes wide and unseeing, jaw wrenched open in a silent, permanent scream that she could never quiet; in her mind, Alastor Moody had left her. “Alastor, wake up!” she sobbed, the tears flowing freely now as she shook him. Alice grabbed his face again, hands squeezing his cheeks, willing him to just open his eyes- and see her. 

It started as a question. A simple utterance of her name with just the slightest upward inflection, as if the speaker was unsure if her name was an undeniable truth. 

     “Alice?”

It came from the trees that surrounded her, flitted through the whispers in the rustling leaves, as if the wind itself was calling her name. She couldn’t quite make out the voice; it was too quiet, too timid. Alice turned in a circle, feet making patterns beneath her on the damp ground. For a moment, she believed that it wasn’t even real. A sigh escaped her, dissipating in the air in a breath of fog. The voice had just been a figment of her imagination, much like it had proved to be over the past months. It wasn’t real; it wasn’t- 

And then there was a scream. 

Piercing, close, shattering the air around her, it was all too real to ignore. It was real, and it was familiar- frighteningly so. The breath was knocked from her as she froze, eyes widening and cheeks draining of all color. She stopped, she waited, she listened. 

        Another scream, then, “Alice, help! Help me!” 

“Frank!” she cried her throat raw and her voice infuriatingly quiet, no matter how desperately she tried to throw her voice, “Frank!” His screams punctuated each step she took as she hurtled forward into the darkness of the trees, branches whipping at her face and vines seeming to lurch up from the ground and wrap around her ankles, slowing her down as she went. She called out to him, but the sound of his voice covered her own, rendered it obsolete in the thick air. She couldn’t reach him; his voice was everywhere, filling her head, filling the air. 

          And then it changed. “Please! Alice, please! Help me! Alice! Alice, help!” 

It was Remus’s voice now, coming from just where she’d run from. Alice skidded to a halt, losing her footing and falling onto her back as the ground seemed to shift beneath her. “Remus?” she craned her neck as his screams, freshly replacing Frank’s without missing a beat, pierced her ears. It was painful; her first inclination was to cover her ears. But she stood, gritting her teeth against the pain, for Remus needed her. 

“I’m coming!” she cried, scrambling forward through a web of vines as Remus’s screams formed her name again, “Remus, hang on! Remus!” 

She plunged forward, eyes searching the darkness, then the sky, which was muddled by clouds and a smattering of jagged branches that looked far too much like crooked fingers to truly be a product of nature. Remus didn’t seem to be growing any closer as she ran, the trees reaching out with spindly fingers to cut at her cheeks and her arms and legs. It wasn’t until the pain of her ankle twisting in a root just to the side of the path slowed her down did she realize that the voice had changed again. 

It was a chorus of voices this time, all female, all crying and wailing as if she wasn’t trying so desperately to get to them. Lily, Mary, Dorcas, Amelia, pleading for Alice to find them, to help them, when she couldn’t even find Frank to begin with. 

“Where are you?” she cried, crawling forward and pulling herself to her feet with a shaking hand on a steady branch, “Lily! Amelia! M-” 

And then the screams went quiet again, leaving her with nothing but the sound of her own voice and the feeling of sweat dripping down her spine in intrusive beads. Alice stood, knees bent and back hunched, poised to spring into action should she need to. But the silence was more of a deafening roar than the screams had been; for a moment, she was convinced that she had simply gone deaf from the strain of it all. 

But then, just to prove her wrong once more, a single voice, this one just as distinct as any of the others, but perhaps just a merciful fraction clearer, rang out from behind her, from whence she had come. 

               “Alice, help me! Help! Please! Alice, please!” 

It wasn’t like him to plead for help; she should have known that something was wrong right away, but her body reacted before her mind could. Stumbling over herself, she turned and threw her weight forward, ramming into tree trunks and tripping over entangling roots as her throat rubber bloodily raw from the screaming of his name. “Alastor!” she shrieked, tears streaking her grimy cheeks, both from the pain of running, of being pulled, of screaming herself silent, and from the knowledge that she couldn’t fucking find him. “Alastor!” she wailed again, hitting away branches as she ran with bloodied fingers, cut to the bone. 

               “Alice, where are you? Please, Alice! Help me!” 

And then her feet dropped from under her, and she was falling, falling away from the screams, away from the thick air, and down into the cool darkness of the ground below her. But she didn’t want to escape; she wanted to keep running, to find Alastor, and Frank, and Remus, and the others. She reached up as she fell, hands clawing at the air, at the quickly disappearing light of the sky above. But then her back made contact with something hard and soft all at once, and with a crunch she came to a stop. 

Her head whipped to the side, and her screams loosed from her throat before she had time to hear them. At her side was Alastor, his eyes staring but never seeing, his jaw wrenched open and to the side at a ghastly angle. Below her was Frank, on her other shoulder was Remus- and Lily- and Dorcas, Mary, Amelia, Emmeline. But her eyes remained locked on Alastor, for his face was close, and pale, and angry in it stillness.