#vulneraedit

           The war had ended and they were supposed to be safe.                                                  And Alice had allowed herself to be relieved,                                                  even if it made her feel sick to her stomach.                                                  The war had ended and they were safe and                                                  alive. She had kept her promises to Neville.            The war had ended and they were supposed to be safe, but they were not.

                                                ╰☆╮

Frank didn’t come home from work one day. She supposed, at first, that he was working extra hours — the office was hectic, after all, and there was too much work to be done. But then four hours had passed and her owls had gone unanswered ( and Frank always let her know when he had to work longer ) and she worried. She sent an owl to the office and they told her he had left hours ago.

With alarm bells ringing in her mind and her heart threatening to burst out of her chest, Alice forced herself not to scream or sob. She forced herself to be composed so she could apparate with Neville to Augusta Longbottom, explaining the situation with a trembling voice and darting eyes. Her mother-in-law promised to watch over her son and Alice started searching. She had let the office know that Frank hadn’t returned and trusted that they, too, were trying to find him. Alice was, however, set on doing this on her own, not being able to handle company when she was going mad with worry and sorrow.

There were still plenty of people out there who wanted Frank and her dead. This she knew. This she reminded herself of constantly, that there was a big chance that if she found her husband, that he’d be dead. It wasn’t as if she wanted to accept that, but over the past few years Alice had learned that it was better to prepare for the worst. She was certain of one thing, though: whatever the case, if she found whoever had done this, she would let them know what would happen if you messed with her family.

It had been almost twenty four hours when Alice, too, was taken. She gave everything she had, but her mind was a mess of worry and worst case scenarios, and as she was distracted with the thought of Frank, her duelling was not as well as it had been before. Just before the stupefy hit her, she saw one thing that made her heart skip a beat and her stomach fill with pure hate and fear ——- Rodolphus Lestrange.

                                                ╰☆╮

She woke up to Frank, battered and bloody and in clear pain, but breathing and in that moment that was enough to spread relief through her. The Aurors knew he was missing, they were looking for him —– as long as they could stay alive, they would be fine. She cried out his name, her head bursting with pain and her body tired, and he looked up.

                                Alice knew something was terribly wrong when he did.

It took multiple moments for her to realise what it was, sentences spilling over her lips and her voice desperate and longing for a hint of recognition. But he didn’t seem to know who she was, only seemed to be fearful of the place they were in and the blood staining his hands. He didn’t know who she was and Alice didn’t want to know why, only wanted to know if he ever would again.

                  “It’s me, it’s … it’s Alice. I drink too much coffee and work too hard and am too controlling, and you’re Frank and you tell me to stop when I need to stop and you married me and you’re Neville’s father, you’re Neville’s father, and —- Neville is waiting for us, Frank, and we’ll get out of here and PLEASE tell me you know who I am, PLEASE tell me you know who Neville is.”

But he didn’t know.

And Alice yelled at him, begging him to remember the day Neville was born, begging him to remember his first words and first steps, begging him to remember her, but he was gone and there was nothing she could do. All he did was ask her to please be a little more quiet, because his head hurt so badly.

                                     They had taken Frank from her, but he was still                                      there. They had taken a man filled with marvellous                                      ideas and good intentions and left a shell of a                                      human, a shadow of the person he had once been.                                      As Alice asked him to remember all their important                                      moments and the less important ones ( which, in a                                      way, were even more important ), she relived them,                                      only to be confronted with someone who had no                                      idea how much they meant. Frank was gone, and                                      she couldn’t explain why or how. And when she                                      stopped pleading she cried. And then, she yelled.

         “What have you done with him?                      Why is he like this?                                What do you want from us?”

                                               ╰☆╮

She didn’t know anything. She kept telling them, those familiar faces she had seen at school, but they wouldn’t listen, theywouldn’t listen. The fact that they didn’t use veritaserum made it very clear to Alice that they didn’t much care about finding out the truth. This was revenge. These were four people with no humanity left in them who wanted payback, and that made it even worse.

She grew accustomed to her own screams. Their voices, however, cut like daggers every time they spoke, so awfully familiar from their days in school.

                                   She had shared a classroom with three of them                                    for seven years. The other had been part of the                                     student body just like her, had walked the same                                    hallways as she had, had heard the same rumours                                    as she had.

Pain was something had gotten used to, something she had to get used to as both an Order member and an Auror. Still, there was pain and there was crucio, and the differences were great and ones Alice preferred not to think about, because her muscles and bones seemed to ache beyond belief and her thoughts were ones she could not control any more.

They were ripping Alice Shafiq apart, piece by piece, bit by bit, and she could not stop it, there was nothing she could do. She had always promised herself that no matter what happened, she would not allow the war to take away the things that made her her, and now that it was over and she had assumed that she was safe, she was realising that she was more fragile than she had thought herself. Seeing Frank that way, seeing her former fellow students that way and feeling true, harsh pain that way was making her personality seem like a thing made of fractured pieces ready to be smashed into even smaller ones.

                             And she did not stop them.

Alice’s fight was slowly ebbing away, leaving her body as more pain entered it. She was losing herself as she heard herself scream and she hated herself for it because she had been trained to be stronger than this. On another hand, however, she knew what her fate was. She was to end up like Frank: broken and completely unaware of who she was, someone having been ripped in tiny pieces just because she had stood for what she had believed.

                            Before, she would have gotten angry.                                                Now, she just wanted it to be over.

She wanted them to stop asking questions she did not know the answer to, she wanted them to stop using curses that lit her bones on fire and made every bit of her being hurt, she wanted them to leave her be or just finish her off, rather than continue this act of revenge she did not understand. She was done. She was tired. If this was all that was left, she’d rather die than continue to ache.