Harry in Greendale//h.s au

Chapter Five

Winter

I walked down the dimly lit hall: fingers gliding effortlessly over every bump and groove hidden underneath the green painted wall as tired eyes focussed on the pristine floor and the broken youth trapped within it.

Her eyes were dark and dull; hair bland and stringy; heart throbbing behind a barred cage.

That wasn't me. It couldn't be. Wasn't youth supposed to beautiful?

The halls were unusually calm. No screams could be heard behind thick doors. No other lost souls wandered around, trying to find their bodies. In their beds they laid, thinking, feeling, dying, anything but sleeping. We slept during the day with our eyes wide open. And during the night our eyes were closed but our minds had just woken.

It had to be early in the morning—three, maybe even four. The asylum was never this silent during the day.

The lights flickered and left me in temporary bursts of darkness.

I was supposed to be strapped in to the bed, thick leather digging into the little skin I had left covering my bones. But even though I was let out of the room which caused the world to spin around me and made me wish for a morbidly disastrous demise, they still had a tight grip around me.

My whole life was a never ending circle. I walked. And walked. And walked. But never did I stray from the same path.

"Winter?"

I was glad for the distraction. My thoughts had once been a place for solace. It was my own little world away from reality, and in it I could be as beautiful as I wanted, and kind and delicate. But now it was a cause of pain and misery. It was a reminder of how far I had changed from the young and innocent girl I once was.

I looked up from the dreariness which surrounded me, and into the home I had created within the welcoming smile of Mark.

In the beauty of the day I remained fierce and insusceptible to the monsters lurking within the tragically white building. But in the dark of the night—my aching body wrapped up in sheets as my mind unloaded all of the pain and torture it had experienced onto my breaking heart—all of my fears and demons crawled from underneath my bed and straight to my head.

I never understood how when the night fell we were able to see everything the day tried to hide.

"Oh," I said, "Mark it was so horrible."

His hand brushed against the thick skin I had grown on my cheek. All the harsh words I had been told over the years never broke me. When they told me I was useless, and pathetic, and a disgusting mongrel, I laughed it off. And when I shed a layer of my heart it went straight to my cheeks. Smiling cost a lot, especially when you had nothing left to smile about.

"What did they do to you?" The pads of his fingers traced across my forehead. I shivered underneath his touch. "You can't let them do this to you, Winter. It's not fair. You're too good for this."

My memory of what went down behind the closed door was vague.

I could remember a loud, boisterous laugh which haunted my ears and clogged my arteries. But I couldn't see what was going on. My eyelids had refused to open, and maybe it was for the best. I suppose with all the loud banging of objects, and the sound of rotating metal, not seeing was a blessing.

I laughed, pushing away the warmth of his touch. "I'm fine. Nothing bad happened."

"Winter," he said, eyebrows furrowed and voice soft yet stern, "you have a black eye, for God's sake. There's stitches running across your forehead."