The fall
The walk was long and strenuous, and he thought his legs would give out from under him at least four times. He trudges miserably along, knees shaking from fear or exhaustion, maybe both, wishing more than anything for his love to be there.
She would always distract him, when he was sad or hurt. The amount of times she's talked nonstop for hours over him in the hospital wing, him curled up in the plush mattress, the slightly decayed feathers spilling out of numerous small tears and holes, as she sat on an uncomfortably stiff plastic chair that was always somehow just slightly too small, whispering countless fantastical stories to him as he cried in pain from whatever injury he had somehow attained.
He closes his eyes, in a vain attempt to block out the thirst, hunger, pain and longing, a hazy picture of her rosy, grinning face in his mind. He was too focused on picturing her to see the gnarled, falling-apart root of some tree that was sticking out the ground. He stumbles over the wood and goes flying, landing with one of his cheeks embedded in cold mud that seeped down his neck and into his eyes.
Through the hazy film of tears and salty, grit-filled mud, he sees a flash of deep emerald light so bright it's painfull. and a sharp, strangled scream, followed by the all too familiar cackle of Bellatrix. The witch that tortured his parents far past insanity.
The screams of his parents mingle in his memory with the screams of whoever took the brunt of the spell, until he can't tell which is which, it's just screams.
No. Not bellatix. Not again.