Disclaimer: do not own Harry Potter
Written for: LJ com writerverse
Prompt: "crack in the wall," 500+ words.
Sarah falls to her bed, so very exhausted after a too-long graveyard shift, sans dinner, and doesn't expect to wake until the late afternoon sun steals into her room and beats her conscious.
She doesn't make it that long.
His Nibs wakes her with the growl of a three headed beast, ears back and body low to wood paneling. She doesn't need to turn on the lamp, light enough pours through once-solid walls to see his posture. The room is lit, in its entirety, by a sun from the other side. A picturesque fairy land, with blue skies and fluffy clouds and rolling hills and tall field grasses, is creeping into her room blade by blade. It disappears, of course, as soon as she throws covers back with a quickness that has everything to do with fear.
His Nibs is hissing in a sudden dark she can't see through and the small round toggle of her bedside light goes click, click, click under frantic fingers. This is one of those horrific moments when she can feel her heart in her hands, where her body pulses at its too-fast beating. A moment where breathing is too loud and she can hear the fabric of her sheets as she shifts, fumbles really, to grasp the emergency just-in-case metal baton from her hay-days of ribbon-dancing. The baton Karen insisted she keep out and handy, because she remembered what it was like to live in the city alone.
Then something moves at the foot of her bed and she kicks her feet at the moving lump of discarded heirloom quilt in panic. The thump is muted, but the affronted woof comes just as her room is flooded with comfortable man-made light.
"Must you, my Lady?" Nimue the Otterhound asks, peering up at her from the floor; large eyes accusing Sarah of something quite dastardly.
"Oh," and her voice does not shake, "oh I'm so sorry, girl." When she lowers suddenly empty hands and drops her feet to the area-rug, Sarah is ready to write it all off as a nightmare.
She never had a cat, after all, and besides: walls were not doors and dogs did not talk. She doesn't know what to do about the fine patina of glitter. It catches in the stationary light, twinkling madly up at her. She tries to get rid of it, brushes and scrubs and brings out the Hover, but its will is stronger than even a combination of Pine-Sol and bleach.
She spends the next weeks in a fervent and highly caffeinated state of denial; carrying on as if everything is perfectly sane in her little world.
If she needs to constantly relocate her Mother's hand-me-down armoire before the disappearing wall, well, nobody but Nimue complains.
Then one night, in the snap of fall, she and Nimue are walking round the block.
"My Lady," Nimue does not call out to her, "this way!"
They find a kitten, a pathetic puff mewing for Sarah.
In a fit a pique, Sarah can do nothing but bring the attention starved bit of fluff home, cursing irresponsible owners, Nimue's noes, eyes, and inquisitiveness at the very same time she damns her own heart. She had sworn off cats, it had been a hard and fast rule that was serving her well, and this was going to put a damper on stress-free living.
Newt, Sarah takes the initiative and decides to name him over tuna, is a perfectly acceptable name. Any resemblances to the growling hissing feline of her dreams is easily ignored. She decides the two-toned eyes that aren't in the least familiar to be a common enough mutation for strays, and resolutely does not research the phenomenon.
Newt is innocent of her over-active imagination. He is just a kitten, after all: small and helpless.
He can't possibly stay that way.
"This is not going to end well," Nimue tries to convince her King.
"Be silent, Nanook" is what she gets in reply.