Dreaming is hell.
Scientifically, sleep is just a reprocessing of the day's thoughts, and past thoughts and memories. It is your subconscious’s organization of your brain. It is your mind's memory.
Sleep is supposed to be restful. A sanctuary.
Estella’s never was.
Estella woke up crying, muffling the sound with a pillow. She’d stopped screaming in her sleep years ago. At some point, her unconscious self started to put not waking everyone else around her over the sheer terror. It was certainly unhealthy, but Estella couldn’t bring herself to care.
She’d been running again, in those old woods. It was the same scene every time, without fail. No matter what, she always ended back up there. Running. Screaming. Bleeding. Dying. It was an endless cycle of the trauma that echoed in her, that she kept down until she slept, and no occupancy could prevent her from seeing his face, and hearing her screams- Estella shoved away the thoughts. No, she would not think of that. She couldn’t.
Sitting up in the small window seat she occupied as a bed most nights, she peaked through the curtains, peeking around the small room she shared with the other North American kids; 7 total. The room was made up in a variety of decoration, small details of personalization, messy from blankets to clothes on the floor, piled with shoes that were kicked off in exhaustion; bodies collapsed onto whatever bed they reached first. For the 7 of them, there were only 3 beds; two twin sized, and one full sized. Tonight, Estella could clearly see the outlines of her friends, crutched in whatever positions they deemed comfortable. The digital clock across the room glowed red, the numbers staring at her. 2:03 am. She’d been asleep for almost 8 hours, longer than she’d slept for in a while. Fucking nightmares.
Pushing the blanket off her, Estella crept across the room to the wardrobe and dug through quietly, pulling out fresh clothes and finding her boots in a kicked-to-the-side pile. She was careful to move around the creakiest floorboards. The last thing she needed was to wake one of her friends and have them question her; where she had been earlier, if she was ok. It felt like a stupid question; none of them were ok. Certainly not her. She knew they were just worried that they cared about her, but sometimes they could be suffocating in their love. She didn’t feel like she was worth all their trouble, sometimes. It was really depressing, at times, how low she felt, how much she questioned whether or not this was all worth it. She tried not to. Hopeless despair about the state of the world was unproductive, demoralizing, and unnecessary. But as she dug through clothes in the dark, she once again wondered before slipping into the bathroom. Was this all worth it?
She started the water, stripping off her day-old clothes, unbraiding her hair and brushing it out as steam filled the room before stepping into the hot water, letting it pound down on her. She showered hot, letting her skin turn red from the heat. So hot, when she stepped out from the spray, her skin tingled and buzzed with from her nerve’s confusion. Like she was trying to burn whatever darkness was inside her off her skin. Closing her eyes, Estella relished the warmth. So rarely was she warm anymore. She’d always run cold, but now, it was like she was just numb. She supposed it was her poor attempt at occlemacy, to keep herself sane. She recalled the days where she and her friends joked that they were never sane, that they were losing their minds and sleep deprived, and almost laughed. If 16-year old Estella could see her now. She’d be shocked on how true insanity felt, how it felt to truly run on 3 hours of sleep for days, weeks, months, without the convenience of sleeping for 12 hours on the weekend. Estella was mediocre at occlemacy, using it to keep the worst of her memories at bay, to keep the near-paralyzing fear from taking over, to keep herself moving and running and alive. She still couldn’t keep the monsters away at night, and they swarmed her mind, invading her dreams, haunting her, sinking their claws into her and showing her all her fears until she awoke, sweating and crying and sometimes puking, convinced that she was 10 again, trapped and terrified, all alone. She’d since learned to sleep on her side, arm under a pillow to jerk it over her mouth if she screamed, to muffle her sobs as she struggled to convince herself it wasn’t real, that it was over, she was safe. Or lately, safe enough. Estella slept in the window seat, curtains drawn shut, to allow the cool window to calm her, the moonlight or streetlights or stars to remind her of where she was. It was the only spot that wasn’t ever occupied with her strug-out friends, and she’d since claimed it. Her younger self would’ve been ecstatic at getting a window seat all to herself. She’d dreamed of one, of reading in one, looking out over the world around her. Hogwarts had had plenty of them, and she’d spent hours whenever she could in one, studying or reading or just existing. It was her safe space, even now, in the midst of war. It was the closet thing to comfort she could get.
Numbly, Estella washed her hair, scrubbing harder than necessary, trying to wash the thoughts out. The result was a tangled mess of suds and her hands covered in pulled-out hair. Grumbling, she balled it up and moved on. Closing her eyes, she let the water wash over her, pouring down her face. She let herself fall into memories.
Amelie was laughing. The sun was shining through her red hair. Years later, her features seemed blurred, Estella’s mind never quite able to recall the structure of her face, the curve of her lips, the arch of her eyebrows. She knew her eyes though; a beautiful green-grey. They’d been so full of life and light and love until they weren’t. Until her blood had soaked her hair, staining redder than it had ever been. Until the features that had been burned into Estella’s memory were of her brutalized face, not her smile. She refused to look at photos to refresh her memory, refused to see her anywhere but her dreams. And those dreams…
She was running again. She was in a forest, her childhood laughs echoing like the gunshots heshot after her. There was red hair and red blood, sunshine and rough floorboards, daisy chains and rope. Blood was on her hands and her knees and she couldn’t tell if it was from falling off her bike or from a knife or falling. She saw that red hair in the dirt, body lifeless.
Amelie.
Estella blinked back the memories, tears rolling down her face before the water washed them away. She took a deep breath and counted to 10.
Eventually, she got out, drying herself off and wrapping hair in a towel. She redressed in fresh jeans and the first sweatshirt she had found, which turned out to actually be a sweater with a skeletal ribcage pattern on it. Probably either {} or {}’s. Estella brushed her hair out, struggling through the tangled waves, towel drying them to the best of her ability. It was long, falling down to her hips, so it took a while to detangle and smooth. She braided it methodically into two dutch braids that fell to her shoulder blades, to keep it back. The motion was soothing, familiar. Grabbing her old clothes, she slipped out of the bathroom. A quick glance at the clock told her it was 2:38am, and she dropped her dirties in the designated pile. Going back to her window seat, she grabbed fresh socks and her boots, and her bag, phone, and earbuds. Tugging on her shoes, knotting them tightly, she carefully made her way back across the room, slipping out of the room and into the hall.
Estella made her way through Grimmauld Place, aiming for the kitchen while she pushed her earbuds in, flipping through her playlists until she found the one she wanted. She did her best to avoid any hotspots. No one here ever slept much. ‘We’re all a bunch of traumatized insomniacs, after all,’ she thought to herself as she bumped around, looking for a suitable mug to make coffee. She sure as fuck wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon, so she might as well make coffee.
Finding the appropriate mug, she measured out coffee in the maker and waited impatiently for it to brew before remembering that food was probably important too. Rummaging around in the cupboards over the counter, having to stand on her toes to reach the higher shelf’s contents. She found a loaf of bread, and used magic to make herself some toast.
Sitting at the kitchen, chewing on her toast and eating it down with black coffee, Estella made her mental list.
- Review stores of potion ingredients.
- Possibly got foraging
- Check on healing potion stores
- Check on bandages
- Make more bandages
She definitely had more, but she cut the list at that. She would complete most or all of those things, then make another. This way, she wouldn’t get overwhelmed. Her mother had always stressed organization and compartmentalization. Estella always thought that if her mother had been a witch, she would’ve been an excellent occlemacist.
She needed to keep herself distracted. From the fear she felt, from the old, aching anger, from thinking too hard about the war, the battles she seemed to always be fighting, from the memory of Amelie. Taking a deep breath, finishing her coffee, Estella rose from the table and put her dishes in the sink.
Once again, she had work to do.