build me up buttercup [s.black]

[5] Hospital

"Ash!"

Aisling felt someone shaking her hard, and heard what sounded like drumming on the other side of the door.

"Ash wake up! You've overslept!"

"Cantvoverslept." Aisling mumbled into her sheets. "Zasaturday."

"You have the Quidditch match today you idiot, get up!"

Aisling opened her bleary eyes and blinked a few times, the silhouette of Lily came into focus. With a sickening jolt she realised that there was not in fact anybody drumming on the door, it was rain hammering down on the window next to her bed. Great, what a day for a Quidditch match. She thought to herself, looking at her watch. Oh my god, the match! It started in ten minutes.

Aisling hurriedly pulled on her scarlet Quidditch robes and grabbed her broom before hurtling down onto the pitch where her team were waiting for her looking like drowned (and very pissed off) rats.

"Sorry- I- over- slept." She panted, clutching a stitch in her side.

"Well, at least you're here now." Replied Benjamin Davies, the team captain. "Now, the weather isn't ideal obviously."

James snorted derisively. Ben chose to ignore him.

"But we have a great team. And I know that if we just stick to the tactics that we discussed in training and nobody throws in any surprises," he made the tiniest pause and glanced quickly over to James, "we should stand a very good chance of winning the match."

The team made their way onto the pitch, each footstep making a horrible squelching noise as they did so. Aisling could faintly make out the yellow robes of the Hufflepuff team also coming towards the middle of the pitch. The two captains shook hands and both teams mounted their brooms. Once the balls were released, Aisling kicked off from the ground and sped towards the hoops at the other end of the pitch.

Once there, she tried to keep an eye out for the quaffle heading her way, but she might as well have tried to count the drops of rain flying past her eyes. She couldn't even see two feet in front of her face. She changed tactics and instead tried to listen for the commentary. But this was equally as useless, she couldn't hear a thing over the howling of the wind. She stayed hovering in front of the three hoops for what must have been at least twenty minutes. At least the fact that the quaffle hadn't come this way yet was a good sign. Unless it had and she had missed it completely. She cringed thinking about how stupid she would look just hovering there as Hufflepuff scored goals and she didn't even notice.

Another ten minutes passed and Aisling was now desperate for any excuse to move around or do something. The rain had crept through every nook and cranny in her quidditch robes, her collar, her sleeves, even the button holes on her cloak; and she was now soaked through. She hovered for another five minutes, shivering uncontrollably and covered head to toe in goosebumps. The tendrils of hair which always managed to escape from her ponytail were stuck to her face and neck, creating their own mini waterfalls of icy cold water trickling in through her collar. She longed to brush the hair off her face or rub the rainwater out of her eyes, but her hands felt as if they were frozen solid to her broomstick and she thought it would be unwise to move them unless absolutely necessary. But, just as this thought occurred to her ,she saw a dark dot zooming towards her. She narrowed her eyes and leaned forward trying to make out what it was, and then she realised. It was the quaffle! She painfully flexed her fingers and swung one arm up to catch the red ball.

But wait, that ball wasn't red. Oh no, she realised too late as the iron bludger hurtling towards her hit her square in the jaw and she felt her vision getting darker and blotchier as she swayed and fell sideways off her broom and tumbled towards the ground. She stayed awake just long enough to make out the horrified faces of her classmates screaming as she fell the fifty feet onto the sodden grass of the Quidditch pitch.

***

She could hear voices.

Aisling opened one eye and peered around her, it wasn't that she had only meant to open one eye though. It seemed like her left eye had been glued shut. She raised a hand and tentatively touched the eye which wouldn't open. As soon as her fingers grazed the skin pain shot through her eye and up into her forehead. It was so painful that tears started to form in the eye that she could actually see out of, blurring her vision.

"Yeah I wouldn't do that if I were you."

Aisling jumped and moved her head round to see who had spoken. A boy stood by the side of her hospital bed, smirking at her and running one hand through his long black hair. She tried to open her mouth to tell him to leave, possibly in a less polite way, but found that her mouth also seemed to be stuck together. Actually it wasn't that her lips wouldn't open, she realised, it more felt like her jaw itself was being held shut with an invisible strap.

"Yeah, Pomfrey said you might have some problems opening your mouth for a while." Sirius smiled wider, his teeth glinting white. "The bludger smashed your jaw up pretty bad, obviously Pomfrey fixed the bones in about thirty seconds but she can't do anything about the bruising so the left side of your face will be a bit stiff for a bit."

Just then, Aisling caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror opposite her bed and for a second she thought she might throw up. The right side of her face looked mainly unscathed, but the left side was a very different story. Almost all the skin was covered with mottled green and purple bruising, and her eye was no more than a bulbous dark purple and black mess.

"Fortunately I still think you're a fox."

Aisling automatically rolled her eyes and cringed at the pain coursing up the left side of her face as she did so.

"And look on the bright side," Sirius said, "we won the match. Hundred and seventy to nothing."

Relief swept through Aisling's entire body, thank god they hadn't lost the game because she couldn't tell the difference between a quaffle and a flipping bludger.

"Thought that might cheer you up." The boy grinned. "Cockerill caught the snitch just before you got taken out by that bludger."

There it was, that tone of voice which made him sound like he found the entire situation just slightly amusing. Anger boiled up in Aisling's stomach and she reached over to her wand.

"Flagrate." She muttered with some difficulty.

As she moved her wand through the air, bright red and gold words formed in front of her.

Get out

Any observer with two working eyes would have sworn they saw Sirius Black's face fall for just a second before he regained his composure, his handsome features settling into their usual disinterested expression.

"Right well, see you around then." He said before padding out of the hospital wing.

Aisling lay on her right side in an attempt to get comfortable. When she turned over, she saw a vase of purple hyacinths on her bedside table. Attached to the stalk of one of the flowers was a note in untidy scribble.

Sorry x