"i clung to your hands so that something human might exist in the chaos"

[hélène cixous]

xxx

When he woke, it was night.

Mind a buzz, he sat upright instinctively, only to wince as his head throbbed heavily; squeezing his eyes shut and bringing a palm to his forehead. Recognizing the scent of lavender, fresh linen and the faint smell of medicine and potions, he sighed, bringing down his hand and resting it upon the mattress.

Opening his eyes, although the darkness and apparent lack of glasses did nothing to aid his sight, Harry, nevertheless, glanced over his surroundings; staring into blank spaces to try and make out shapes within the shadows—though to no avail, and yet in the dark, the looming, omnipresent dark, there was light.

To his left, specifically.

Turning its way, he eyed the towering arch of a window. Through the Hospital Wing being such a prevalent setting in his life, you could say, he'd grown to memorize the qualities of this place.

The broken-bone repairing potions were in the third drawer of the large chest of drawers in the back corner; Madame Pomfrey always kept her thermometer handy in her left chest pocket; there was a cracked tile a few beds away from himself that he and Ron definitely had no part in causing, and it definitely wasn't hidden beneath that massive floor vase by the doors, and the arched windows lined up to be perfectly centered behind each bedhead—and at night, their curtains were always closed. Always. Never in his sleepless nights in all three and a bit years he'd been at this school did he ever, ever, see one of the curtains open after dusk—and yet there it was, completely, unapologetically open over the nearest bed to his left.

That's when he saw her—well, mostly her hair, really, as her back was to him, and clearly she was lost in sleep and blanketed in a chiaroscuro; her breathing rhythmic, slower than his own, as he eyed the way the moonlight came in and shone over her dark, curly hair spread over her pillow, away from her face, as she lay beneath the sheets.

xxx