enigmatic || potter

1.07 | the teenage tragedy

the teenage tragedy //
September 30, 1993

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Alexa seemed to be constantly drained of energy. She tried to hide it from her friends, but she knew that as dumb as Dean and Seamus were sometimes, she couldn't get something like this past them. The girl rarely got a good night's sleep anymore; she would often wake up in the middle of the night, plagued with strange nightmares about rats and flashes of green light. On top of this, Alexa continued to have what she began to call "repetitive episodes", where she would see something and then it would happen in real life. Sometimes, she would dream of some random, extremely mundane, scenario, and then she would witness the same thing happen the next day. One time, a vision of Seamus's cauldron exploding flashed across her mind, only for it to actually happen several minutes later. If she wasn't so confused, the explosion would have been quite funny. Alexa would never admit this to anyone besides Percy, but the "visions" that she kept having were really starting to freak her out. She was worried that she would see something less mundane one day and be at a loss for what to do.

As September began to fade away, Alexa found herself spending more and more time outside of the castle. The girl fell into a routine after several weeks of classes; she would leave the castle twenty minutes before she was supposed to meet Malfoy and head down to the Black Lake, where she would sit and read until he arrived. Once he left, she would stay outside reading until she either got hungry or it got dark outside.

Between her schoolwork, spending time with her friends, keeping an eye on Ginny, tutoring Malfoy, and trying to figure out what's wrong with her, Alexa started to feel like she was stretched far too thin. She found herself starting to look forward to the time she got to herself sitting by the lake, which she never thought would happen. Alexa had always hated being outside: there were bugs, and strange noises, and animals, and more bugs.

For the first nine years of her life, she lived in London, where it was always loud and enclosed and fast-paced. When she moved to the Burrow, the girl suffered a culture shock because she was not used to how quiet and open it was. Alexa eventually got used to her new life, but she still had always hated being outdoors. She always felt more comfortable sitting on a windowsill overlooking a street with a book in her lap. She hated how the grass tickled her legs when she sat on it and how bugs had the tendency to fly in her ears and, on occasions, up her nose.

Now, however, she was perched comfortably under a tree, with her nose immersed into Treasure Island. Eventually, she realized that it would be imprudent to get too immersed in the story (because it would be rather disappointing if she reached an exciting part and then Malfoy arrived right at that moment). She reluctantly shut the book and opened up Divining Through History, an awfully boring book that Percy told her to read as part of their research. Alexa usually hated reading academic books; the girl preferred stories about action and adventure to books that looked like her classroom textbooks. She was never able to understand how Hermione got so engrossed in them. The writing of academic books was far too bland for Alexa's taste, but Hermione couldn't get enough of them.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Malfoy leaving the castle and heading towards her, so Alexa quickly tried to finish the section she was reading. Right before she closed the book, she stumbled across the term occulus temporis. Other than the Latin translation, "eye of time" there wasn't much more information. The term latched onto her mind though; something about it sparked her curiosity and she just couldn't seem to shake the feeling of unease. She bookmarked the page and made a note to herself to show it to Percy later.

"So, what are you reading?" Malfoy asked as he sat down next to her with his usual bag of treats in his hand.

Alexa snapped the book shut and shoved it into her bag quickly. "Nothing!" she exclaimed as Malfoy narrowed his eyes suspiciously.