Ultimate Chocolate Frog Challenge: Porteus Knatchbull - Psychiatric Hospital AU
Gringotts Prompts Bank: "All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair." - Mitch Albom [10 point bonus]
September Event at Fanfiction Writing Month: Pansy Parkinson
Words: 885
Broken Glass
"It was once said that all parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."
She heard their words, but they made no sense to her. They were too long, the sentences too convoluted. She heard glass and crack, and thought they must be bad words. She smiled at the man in the white coat, hoping it offered him comfort. Maybe he broke a mirror.
Mirrors couldn't be fixed, once broken. She knew that.
They told her off last time she broke a mirror. They took her mirror away. She was sad about that. She liked to look at herself and make faces. But the pieces of broken glass were fun to play with. Their tiny reflective surfaces meant she didn't have to look at her whole face. She could look just at the blue in her eyes, speckled with green. She could look at her teeth, big and white when she pulled her lips back. She watched her lips form the word pretty and thought it was funny.
But all of a sudden, there were the ladies that sang songs to her when she asked nicely, only they weren't singing. They were frowning, looking at her hands. She wanted to know what was special about her hands, so she looked, too. They were covered in a red water, and so was the floor. She didn't understand where it had come from. It hadn't been there before. The ladies started shouting, forcing her to stand, and she began to panic. She must have done it. She must have made the red. She didn't know what she had done.
They took the red and the glass, and they didn't bring her a new mirror like last time.
But that was a few days ago. The man's words made her think of her mother. She didn't know why. She banished the thought as soon as it appeared, the image of a stern blonde woman scolding a girl for spilling some soup on a pretty dress. She was a bad woman. She didn't like to think about her.
She realised the picture was fuzzy around the edges, like there was a salt film between her and her mother. She smiled at that. Maybe it meant the memories were going away.
There were other memories she wanted to get rid of, too. Maybe all her memories would go, and she would be left with the garden at her new home, and the pretty flowers. That would be nice.
Her new home was nice, too. She liked the people that came to give her little sweets that made her sleep. She liked the tea trolley that visited at the same time every day. They had activities, too, like painting, which she liked best. She liked colours. She didn't want to make pictures, she found it too difficult to make the lines straight anyway. She liked to play with the colours, splashing and drawing so they all muddled together in the middle. They put one of her paintings up on the wall.
"Pansy, you have a visitor today," the woman said. She frowned. Was Pansy her name? It must have been. Visitor… she knew that word, that meant someone was coming. No one came to see her. She wondered who it was.
They brought her to the visiting room a while later - she wasn't sure how long it took. They said he was waiting for her. She walked through the door they held open, and there was a man there, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Just like her. She smiled. She liked things that looked familiar.
But who was he? Did she know him? Should she remember?
"Hi, Pansy," he said, looking at her with a strange expression. It was like he was waiting.
"Hello," she said.
"Do you… do you remember me?" he asked.
She thought about it. He did look like someone she knew, but he was different. Was he older? Maybe. He had a leather jacket on that she thought looked nice, but it wasn't right for him.
"You… I… school!" she said, pleased with herself for knowing something. She knew him from somewhere. She remembered.
"Yes!" he smiled back. "Do you know my name?" he asked.
She didn't like him. He asked difficult questions. He confused her. She began to shake her head, backing away. She wanted to tell him to stop it, but her mouth wouldn't work. It was shaking. Her hands were shaking. She was shaking.
"Shh, shh. It's okay. I'm Draco. Draco Malfoy," he told her. She began to calm down. She did know that name, but the name didn't match the face. The name belonged to a boy, not a man. It belonged to a friend, not a stranger.
As soon as she calmed down, she began to panic again.
"No. No!" she shouted. "Not him! Not him!"
She ran to the door, but her hands could not work the handle. They shook too much to press it down. The ladies ran to her as her eyes grew clouded, and strong arms caught her as she fell to the floor. She hoped it was not the man.