Guiding Light || OC x Draco Malfoy

Chapter 23:

If there was anything around me, I couldn't see it. I tried to move my body, but it felt like it was stuck to fly paper and my skin burnt and stung more with every tug, as if it were going to rip off if I moved too much. That's how I felt right now; trapped with no way to save myself.

Vibrations echoed in my head, though I'm not sure where they came from. They had the low rumble and frequency of a voice, but there was no change to the pitch, just a constant, bone-rattling noise inside my head. Oddly, the impact of my body on the ground didn't hurt, or at least not that I can remember. There wasn't a solid line between dead and alive, everything kind of just didn't move anymore.

I wanted to say that I was dead; take the easy way out and call it early, but that simply wasn't true and I didn't want to give up and say that it was the case, because I felt like if I did concede to the title of not alive, my soul would follow suit and I would die for good

As time, if such a thing even effected this place, went on, the low mumbles of noise that my brain was able to perceive sharpened into legible sounds and even some voices. Specific tones and words traipsed into my head and triggered the most basic of thought processes that my otherwise petrified brain was able to understand.

I could feel my chest rising and falling, so I knew that at least some part of me was still breathing, but I couldn't feel any of the oxygen in my lungs, just the movements that were presumably brining it in. Faint noises of clicking and beeping were playing consistently, but the tones must not have been those that my mind could decipher, because all I was getting was the vibrations that pulsed in rhythmic patterns every few seconds.

Specific words caught in the webbing of my head and made equally as specific things rise to the surface. A tone used when saying mundane things, or little slurs of articulated words that the mouths of small children with missing teeth may have trouble making out. That same small child that smelled faintly of spearmint and lived vicariously through superhuman characters on-screen and in tiny panels in comic books, to be particular about it.

Faint noises that sounded occasionally and decimated everything around them, as if released in the midst of crushing silence. I understood that setup, in fact, I appeared to be suspended in some weird purgatory that was behaving not unlike the sonorous patterns that got picked up by my ears. I was living in pure silence in my head, and whatever remnants of the world I was laying in seemed to be no better.

"Dad, when is she gonna wake up?"

The now crystal-clear string of words sliced through my world like a laser on a diamond. It wasn't clean and easy like butter, it was jagged and almost forced. The noise echoed and amplified in horrible ways, but it made it through in the end. That voice, higher in pitch but still discernible as male, was familiar to at least some part of my brain, or at least one of the parts that were functioning right now.

I couldn't put a face or even a name to it, and it was eating away at me that this eerily familiar voice didn't have a label, but it still felt very comforting to know that there was a least one thing here that my brain could hold itself to and strive to hear again and pinpoint to one thing.

"I don't know, love. She got really hurt, so the nurses are making sure she heals while she's asleep. She's going to be in a lot of pain while she gets better, so it's best that she can't feel anything right now."

Now this voice, one that I also wasn't able to put a label on, made me want to cower. If I would have had even an ounce of control over my own body, shivers would have snaked their way up my entire body and left goosebumps all over my skin. Of course, I had absolutely no say in what my body did right now, so the haunting memories of this deeper, much more masculine voice, would just have to plague my head alone, rather than the entirety of my body.