Chapter Text
With every day the school year creeps closer, and her parents deny the girl anything but to be homeschooled, the bitterness festers in her and the desire grows from a spark into a raging fire, which burns and aches and tugs at her and one night she wakes up, kneeling on the floor in her sister’s room with no memory as to how she got there, her hair sticking to her sweaty forehead and her gaze is hazy, but the hands lifting a loose floorboard are steady. This room was searched back when her sister disappeared, before it became the altar to an undead girl, and yet the young girl knows that what she is uncovering now has stayed hidden all this time. Her heart is thudding as it surges through her, the hatred towards her sister for being gone and leaving her stuck in this gilded cage, where her sister still manages to keep her secrets hidden so many years later.
Blind with rage, the girl takes her treasure, slips the floorboard back in place and returns to her own room, the only place in this house where time continued to move forward when her sister disappeared. She is shaking, her thoughts echoing again and again the same old question she has been asking the wind blowing through the attic and the water coming from the tap and the dust in the deserted potions lab and never once dared asking her parents, where are you?, and she thinks of the last place her sister had been reported to be seen, far and away, full of freedom and answers, and it tastes sweet like an overripe fruit as she mumbles its name.
The girl falls asleep still clutching the dark red stone she took from her sister’s room, and she dreams of the school she longs for, only it looks like a garden, like paradise, and she realises she cannot stay alive in her cage back home knowing a place like this could exist. She wanders along a river with water so clear she can see silver beetles crawling along the bottom, which look up at her with dark glittering eyes inviting her to come closer, so she steps into the water, feels its steady stream cool her hot skin as she walks in further and further until it folds around her and into her and fills her lungs so she can finally breathe. The girl walks out on the other side of the river to see beneath a tree a person standing, back turned to her and dark hair like ink staining the blue sky. Harry, she thinks, the name unpracticed and foreign, but the person turning around is not Harry, though he looks like her, like an old photograph bleached by age or the memory of a sister who disappeared before there was any memory to be formed.
Addy, he says, and his smile is handsome as his head tilts, eyes cast in shadows, and the girl cannot help but smile back. You want to go to AIM.
Yes, she does not say, only because the stranger did not ask, but he hears her answer nonetheless, and he grows serious and somber, his eyes coming into view as he looks up and stretches to pluck an apple from the tree he’s standing under.
Let us make a deal, Addy.
He offers her the apple, and the girl realises they are the same shade of red, his eyes and the apple, but by then her hand has already closed around the fruit and lifted it to her mouth. It is overripe and sweet, and she realises how thirsty she has been as the juice runs down her throat and her chin. The stranger watches her as his mouth widens into a smile to show sharp teeth, and when he holds out his hand to shake hers, he does not recoil at the stickiness of her juice-stained palm.
My name is Dom.