Disclaimer: I don't own Any Harry Potter things, just the plot.
A/N: I know there are only hints of Harry Potter in here but the next Chapter will have more.
Prologue - Not all Dreams can't hurt you
Ella woke up with a start. Her eyes wide and sweat running down her face, she'd had another dream. This one was really weird, even weirder than usual and that's saying something. She sat up in bed, closing her eyes and tried to remember everything she could about it. She saw a graveyard, a weird mutilated man, a boy, and they were playing something akin to laser-quest, except where the lasers hit blew up. She also saw a whole lot of people, wearing what seemed to be Halloween costumes, in a circle around the boy and mutilated man. She didn't understand what this dream meant, but what did it matter, she would find out soon enough anyway.
She picked up her diary off of the bedside table and wrote down what she saw in story mode. Therefore if anyone – her parents – read it they would believe her if she told them she was just being creative. That's the strange thing about her parents, if you say you copied this down from a dream, she would get grounded. If she told them that she made it up, they would give her extra pocket money. She had long ago stopped trying to convince them that she saw things in her dreams sometimes that happened later in life, as they never ever believed her.
It started when she was six. She had had a dream that her fish was going to die. When she woke up her fish was already swimming the backstroke. She had cried for so long. Goldie (as she had adequately named her goldfish) had been with her as long as she could remember; she had been her good luck charm. Her brother, charming as he was, told her he could make a necklace out of Goldie if she wanted. It had only made her cry all the harder begging her Mum that they could bury Goldie in their backyard instead of flushing her down the toilet.
She had dreams every night, but by the time she reached the breakfast table she couldn't remember enough to tell her Mum or Dad anything about it. Most days she had completely forgotten that she'd even dreamed by that stage. It wasn't until her Grandmother came to stay with them that the dreams became prominent again for her to remember them. She had them every night until she had one grave enough four years after her first dream that she told someone what she saw.
"Mum!" She had screamed as she had bolted down the stairs, "I had a dream that Granny was going to die last night! Mum she got hit by a blue Nissan! And the driver just left her there! She just lay there on the street bleeding until she went so pale. No one helped her. I don't think anyone saw. " By this stage Ella was nearly hysterical. Her Grandmother had always been close to Ella, closer than she had been any of her other grandchildren, all 7 of them. Her Grandmother always gave her the impression that no matter what Ella did, she would be accepted by her Grandmother, something she never felt from her parents.
Her Mother had no idea how to take this news. She looked as distraught as Ella did; she was talking about her Mother's Mother after all. So her Dad took over.
"Ella!" He scolded, "Don't talk such rubbish. Can't you see how much this is upsetting your Mother? Go to you room, you're grounded!" He sent her up to her room and locked the door behind her as he, her brother, her Mother and her Grandmother all went out to Lunch. They didn't come back until much later.
Her Father was the first one in; he ran up the stairs, unlocked the door and slammed it open, pausing in the doorway to find where his daughter was. He found her on the floor writing in her journal, the one that she had kept to writing down her dreams in. Her parents knew, they often read it. He snatched it out if her hands, ripped the notebook from the cover, then ripped the pages to pieces until there were hardly any legible bits of paper left and then grabbed Ella by the hair and dragged her to the window seat of her room, shoving her face right up against the glass.
"ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?" He had screamed, as Ella looked at the scene below. A few lumps under a white sheet lay in the middle of the road, patches on it tainted red. Police officers and Ambulance workers filtered in and around the scene, but Ella didn't notice them for at that precise moment, her dreams broke through to her waking world. She saw what happened before her eyes.
Her Grandmother had walked with her family for five minutes before deciding that she was not up to going out for lunch, turning back towards the house. Her Grandmother had wandered the five-minute walk back to the house thinking the entire way. She looked thoughtful, looked both ways before crossing the road, stopping in the middle to look up at her Granddaughters window. She was so deep in thought that she didn't see or hear the car coming. She was dead before she hit the pavement.
Her Father had kept screaming at her throughout the ten-minute vision. She had managed to block most of it out so it just sounded like noise until his departing words reached her ears.
"IF IT WASN'T FOR YOU SHE WOULDN'T HAVE TURNED BACK!" He took a calming breath and then continued, "If it wasn't for you she would still be alive." He gave her a look that could've frozen over Hell before he walked out the door. Ella slumped off of the window seat and fell to the floor as the lock turned in the keyhole. She sat on the floor, curled up in the foetal position, tears streaming down her face as she rocked gently. The one person in her life, who she knew she could always trust, had just left it. The agony that accompanied that blow however was not passed to her alone, a lesson accompanied it. A lesson she would have to be taught twice.
They had moved out of that house soon after. Her Mother couldn't walk across that road anymore. If was difficult to get her out of the house, and once you had, back in. They moved from a lovely little hamlet in Northern England to a lovely village outside of London, about an hour on the train. They had stayed there for two years before they finally fit in and Ella started to make friends, having finally gotten over the fact that it was her entire fault. She didn't forget, she just learned to live with it.
As Ella learned to live with out her Grandmother, her dreams left her. They just stopped. She still dreamt, just none of her dreams came true, but she still recorded them for future reference, just in case. She made friends at school, something she had always found difficult in the past. People just never seemed to understand her for some reason. Always calling her a freak or worse. Now they called her an Emo bitch, because that's exactly what she has been for the past two and a half years.
She made friends with a girl called Lucy, a girl who was similar to herself. They both had problems making friends, they both disliked their Fathers and both their Fathers disliked them. They had become close over a year and were rarely seen without the other by their side. The only difference between them was that Lucy did Gymnastics after school every Wednesday. Sometimes there were competitions on Saturday mornings; Ella always went to cheer Lucy on, always.
They were watching a particularly important competition one Saturday, so important that Lucy and the other competitors from their school had been given the week off to practice their routines in the gym, to make sure that one of them won the cup. Ella was in the front row as usual excited and nervous for her friend at the same time, as usual. Except this time she had this feeling. A feeling that something bad was about to happen, a feeling she had felt once before – long ago – but she couldn't place it.
A girl from another school by, the name of Amelia Frost, went through her routine and during her cartwheel over the beam slipped and fell off. She didn't score very well. Next was Lucy she went through her routine doing amazingly complex looking – but probably very simple – flips. By the time she got to the beam it looked as though she would win hands down, she did her handless cartwheel on the beam. Except like the Amelia her feet slipped off of the beam. Unlike Amelia, unfortunately, Lucy did not have any support of the beam. Her feet went flying in the air, she twisted to try and land on her hands (as they teach you to do to minimise you injuries) and landed on her nose instead. Everyone in the gym hear the crack, between the quiet of the gym and the volume of the crack it is unsure which was of an astonishing level, maybe even both.
Lucy did not survive. The bone in her nose that broke shot up in to her brain. It was discovered that the beam had been greased. It was never discovered who did it. That day Ella learnt a new lesson of always trust your instincts as well as have her original lesson cemented in her mind of never get close to people, as when they die – and they will die – it's too painful to bear. Two lessons that she kept very close to her heart from that day forth.
Her Parents, although not happy about the decision Ella made, they supported it. Ella told her parents she couldn't go back school, she would go back to a school to that just not Alsford Comprehensive. So the family packed up and moved again. This time they moved in to London itself, to try and block out the memories of both of their past tragedies.
They moved to the best place they could afford, a lovely modern townhouse on Grimwauld Place. The Street actually looked pleasant, they did wonder why it was so inexpensive, but didn't question the price, as they actually really liked the house. The house had a strange effect on Ella. She was never sure if it was the symbolic value of the move to the house, or the actual house itself that affected her more. Her dreams returned with full force; every one of them coming true or happening as she dreamt them. It usually was the most important thing that was happening at the time the dreams occurred that mainlined them.
Recently she had a lot of dreams about wizards, witches, magic, people in Halloween costumes, giant hedge mazes and, most recently, deformed babies that turned in to mutilated men. There were times she woke up screaming, as her perspective in the dream was rarely the same twice. She had died in her dreams countless times. However it had never been her actual body that was killed, just the body she seemed to be possessing at the time.
There was one thing that she found odd though. She had been in that house for nearly two years, her sixteenth birthday in just 4 months time, the 31st of October to be exact, but she had never, ever seen anything out of the ordinary in Grimwauld place until halfway through June. These people in cloaks started walking in and out of one of the houses. Ella never got a look at which one because the house was on the same row as hers. She had a fair idea though somewhere around ten to fifteen.
The school was out, she had had exams and the teachers had let them off for the summer holidays early because some asswipe had tried to burn the school down when they had finished their G.C.S.E.s. So Ella sat in the Window seat of her room, one of the reasons she liked it so much because it reminded her of the fond memories of her Grandmother, without the guilt and grief. It was then that she started to notice these people dressed as if it was Halloween, like the people in her dreams, except they weren't wearing masks.
She watched them for roughly a week, she would have went in to the centre but none of her other mates were off for the holidays yet, before her curiosity burst from its banks. She had to see what was going on. Her dreams were driving her crazy. After another 3 days of watching these people in their get-ups enter a house she acted. Ella, being the logical girl that she is, decided to bring some essential things with her. She grabbed the backpack that she usually used for school, emptied it, and started putting things in to it that she felt she might need if she got stuck inside the house as when she's in anywhere in her house for more than an hour at a time she gets a headache, some colours are just too God-damn bright!
She put in her dream journal, or course, along with her notebook filled with interpretations of dreams and a pen. After the necessities were in she grabbed a pair of jeans, folded them, and placed them carefully under her books, then she managed to find, after rummaging for ages through her drawers, to find her denim mini. She had long ago discovered that if you were running way from someone it helped if you had something you could change about your appearance, or maybe cops were just really really stupid.
She had already gotten a shower this morning but had planned on going back to bed, hence the pyjamas. So she tugged on some pink fishnet tights, to go under her jeans to make her outfit-change-rouse so much more believable, pulled on her jeans over the top, putting a corset on instead of a bra, as it was far more comfortable (and fashionable) than a sports bra, pulling on a Black T-Shirt on over the top with paint splattered on it. Instead of wearing her beloved boots – like she wishes she could – she stuffed her feet in to her black skate shoes, laced up with one black lace and one black and red today, instead of the usual all black. She would finish the look off later with her black trench coat, hoping that they would notice that it wasn't a robe until later, if at all.
She was trying to decide whether or not to put makeup or not, before deciding that she would take it with her and apply it somewhere later before returning home, hoping that if anyone saw her they wouldn't notice her as the person who was snooping earlier. She had learned a while ago that in London you don't snoop unless you have some sort of death wish. She bounced down the stairs, backpack in had, before grabbing both her purse (full of money thanks to her Father's wallet) and her mobile (in case she couldn't make it home tonight) before donning her coat and walking out the door to try and find out if her recent dreams were coming true after all.