Catharsis | James Sirius Potter

[ 01 ]

THERE WAS SOMETHING OFF ABOUT the scene, but she couldn't put her finger on it. In fact, maybe everything about it was subtly off. She recognised it, but she didn't, like a lost déjà vu. She knew she had already been there, and yet, she hadn't.

"Your turn!"

"Stewart, you gotta spin it!"

"This is gonna be gross—" Came the voice of her twin brother.

Paying little to no regard to him, she grabbed the bottle, ready to spin it, before another person interrupted her.

"Remember, Lucy. You can't back out! Gotta do what the bottle says!" Leilani Jessel giggled excitedly. "No exceptions. At all!"

"I got it." And amidst the cackling, everyone talking over one another, Lucy gave the bottle a swift spin.

The more the bottle spinned the blurrier, more wobbly the room got. She thought she was floating for a moment. To her, it didn't look like the bottle was slowing down. If anything, it seemed to go quicker and quicker by the second. Was no one else noticing?

She stared at the spinning bottle, her eyes wouldn't focus on anything but that. She was aware she was still in the room, knew the rest were there, but she could only see the damned green bottle, that had formerly contained anise.

Suddenly, as if it had fallen from the sky, and hit her hard in the head, Lucy knew who it was going to land in. She remembered. It had landed on James.

***

The sun peeked through the windows of the Gryffindor Tower on a chilly September evening, that warned the end of summer was upon the Hogwarts castle. However, the sun remained bright and warm, and once it hit Lucy's eyelids, through the little space between the curtains of the four poster, she knew there was no turning back.

"Bollocks," She muttered under her breath, pulling the covers up to cover her head. Her dream was long forgotten the moment she'd opened her eyes. There was nothing off, about anything, anymore. It had simply been another dreamless sleep.

"Finally," Melody commented when the curtains were parted. She might've been waiting there for a while, judging by her wearing already clean robes, and the combed down curly hair.

"Finally?" Lucy repeated, rubbing her eyes to help the blurry morning vision. "How long were you waiting?"

"A while. You sleep an awful lot. No need to dwell on how long I awaited," She shrugged languidly. It had to have been a while, certainly, for there was no one else in the dormitory but the two of them. "I considered waking you up earlier, then I reminded myself there was no point, you'd probably do it before Weasley and Potter, anyway."

It took a moment to make sense of her words– why would it matter if she woke up first, again? "Right! Do you know already? Who's captain?" Lucy asked urgently as soon as the context dawned upon her— that day, they'd figure out who made it to be the Captain of the Gryffindor Quiditch team.

"Pictured you would like to know first," Melody said, eyes following her companion to the dormitory's bathroom, where she stopped in front of the mirror. "They weren't there last time I went down. Well, Thomas was."