Chapter Three: Fleurs de Midi

Midday Flowers

The voices were angry. Very angry. They screamed and thrashed, pouring into the forefront of her mind from the very borders. Amandine could hardly gather her remaining wits to stumble off the stage. She could feel their rage—it pulsed through her own veins, hot and urgent. Animalistic.

Animalistic yet refined. No—just animalistic. Animal. The house of animals, they called. Amandine couldn't make out a single word, but like the rage, she felt the words as they coursed through her. The world receded into its tunnel, and she couldn't do a thing in response as a pair of hands shepherded her away from the platform. All the world was anymore was a cacophony of guiding hands and diaphanous whispers.

Burning yet utterly lightless. Burning. She'd be burning.

Something hot ran down her cheeks. She tasted it, too. Salty. There was shouting, shouting all around her, and color and light. Other parts of her body lit up with warmth, but even they were too disembodied to register. She was feeling through someone else's hands and hearing through someone else's ears.

But the voices were very much her own.

Someone called, "Helena Lovegood," from somewhere on the other end of the tunnel. In a brief moment of lucidity, Amandine found herself searching out something to grapple onto. Helena. But as soon as the lucidity had struck her, it faded away, leaving Amandine once again in the throes of revelation. About what, exactly, she wasn't sure, but she felt the revelation, nonetheless.

The one. The one. Yet, now, not her. You aren't.

Not what? Amandine stretched further into the recesses of her own mind in her quest for answers. For a revelation, it was shockingly unilluminating. Words, unintelligible and then, suddenly, not rushed around inside her: "She's having a fit. Don't let her choke. I'll get the nurse." She was a sun, a moon. But no, just the sun. Not a sun-child, but a sun. "Got something to put in her mouth?" Traitor, traitor. "Was she on medication?"

No. She wasn't on medication. She wasn't having a fit. The hands ushered her somewhere, anywhere, and suddenly, she felt a softness all around her. There was just softness and warmth, now.

Softness and warmth.

Somewhere along the way, consciousness escaped Amandine, and she slipped into the chaos. Her mind, still, was very much her own, but beyond that, she was nothing.

###

When Amandine awoke, it was silent. Not even the voices in her head had a word to say. She was in an empty room—that was fairly obvious. Beyond that, though, she had no idea where she was. She was lost again, and this time, no prefect was coming wandering in to save her. The room itself was stark, sterile, though filled with shelves and countless potions that glittered like potions as the lamplight struck them. Here, light was sparse, though, and beyond the flickering circle cast by the gas lamp on the bedside table, darkness consumed everything in its path.

The silence, like the darkness, was pressing. Last she could remember, her thoughts were the loudest she'd ever heard, and yet now, she'd never felt so empty. Had the madness left her?

Even as she pushed herself up to sitting, the voices kept quiet. Part of Amandine was relieved, but the more savvy bit of her couldn't help but worry over the sudden absence of calamity. She'd always heard the phrase, "calm before the storm," but only now did it start to register with her. Something was off. The voices, though trying, had at least had their air of normalcy. This was just… off.

Amandine tried to stand, but her legs wobbled enough beneath her already when her feet hit the ground. She sank back down in submission. There'd be no walking around for her. Not for awhile. A shame, too, after she'd just been sorted. Aube… it had to be a mistake. The clock had been on the verge of Crépuscule, Amandine could swear, but at the last moment, it had shifted, albeit just barely, to Aube. It was within the breadth of a mistake. A strong gust of wind could have pushed it.

Even if the headmistress herself brought every scrap of evidence in the world against this being a mistake, something about it just felt wrong. The voices had screamed at her, but in a sense, they'd been screaming for themselves, too. They'd wailed as though they'd lost someone—something—hope. Hope for what, Amandine couldn't tell. But there was something hopeless in their cries.

Grabbing the lantern, Amandine searched the room from her cot. The sheets were thin, the sort of sterile, standard-issue linens usually found in a school. Her best guess was that she was in an infirmary. The shelves surrounding her, though, crammed with everything from jewel-colored potions to cleaning supplies, reminded her of a closet. The light hit a wall before Amandine could extend her arm much further than halfway on either side. Forward, though, the room seemed to continue on for a ways. The path in that was clear and wide enough for two or three. If she couldn't walk, now, for whatever reason, she certainly hadn't made her way her by herself.

When the people who brought her to the infirmary would be returning was beyond her, however.

With nothing else left to do, Amandine ticked her way through a quick checklist in her head. Shoes? No—though a quick scan with the lantern revealed they'd been tucked away next to the wall with her jacket. Her shirt was still intact and no dirtier than it had been during the ceremony. She still had both her socks, which was saying something, since she'd lost one at the airport that summer.

As usual, her hair felt like a mess.

After a few minutes of running off every possible object that could have anything to do with her own person, Amandine gave up and let the silence overtake her once again.

Only through that silence were the voices able to penetrate. They gave Amandine a jump; at first, she clutched her head, willing them to go away, but after a few moments, she realized they were human. That, and she recognized one.

Amandine could already feel her ears turning red. Florian. Of course. Now that that moron of a clock had sorted her into Aube, he was one of her prefects. Who he was talking to, though, was beyond her. The voice was female but utterly unrecognizable.

There was a knock at the door. Amandine wasn't entirely sure where that door was. Regardless, she called back, "Go ahead." She was decent, and, in all honesty, she couldn't wait to leave the room.

The door cracked open, and light flooded in from the end of the hallway.

"This is the room, right?" said the girl. She had something of an accent, too—was that a theme among the prefects? There was Florian, the Canadian, and then there was the African girl. She was nearly Florian's height and perhaps more muscular than he was, though her shoulders seemed so delicately fae. A frenzy of dark curls struggled free from the bun that restrained them. "I think this is a storage closet."

Florian's silhouette shrugged. "Still. This is was the room number professor Helson gave me."

"You know, you don't always have to do what you're told. You could just use your own brain. Independence is a virtue, too." The girl pulled her wand out. "I get your point, though. Might as well give it a look through. But I swear, if we don't find anything, and you go hunting down more closets, I might think you were up to something."

Amandine couldn't quite tell in the darkness—the two were no more than silhouettes—but it seemed as though the girl was smirking. A moment of silence passed between them, and Florian turned away. "Stop. There could be a kid in here."

The girl prefect laughed. "I'm joking. Don't be so," she threw her hands in the air, searching for the right word. She didn't find it. "You don't have to be so serious."

Yeah. Right here, thought Amandine. She was tempted to raise her hand and capture the prefects' attention, but she couldn't muster the courage to do it. Somehow, she felt guilty, as though she was eavesdropping. To an extent, she was, though, to her defense, there was no walking away from this. Literally. She sat up and peered around the shelves to get a clearer glimpse of the prefects. They stood in the doorway, Florian with a handful of papers in crumpled in his hand.

The girl raised her wand. Florian held a hand out to stop her.

"Not in here," he said. The girl raised her eyebrows at him, but he only gestured to the ceiling in response. Amandine glanced upwards. Something—a ward, a seal, something round and complex chalked on the ceiling in white—hung over their heads. "Unless you want the magic sucked out of you."

The girl shook her head. "Alright, alright. But I don't have a flashlight."

That was alright. Amandine'd had enough of sitting around and listening to the two talk about her. She pulled the lantern from its home on the table beside her cot and raised it to eye level. Held far forward enough, the light flickered its way down the hallway just far enough to illuminate the pair as the girl elbowed Florian in the side.

"I see it," he said absently, squinting into the darkness. He called out to her, albeit softly, from the end of the hallway. "You alright?"

Amandine nodded; though, realizing there was a chance they couldn't see her, she soon spoke up. "I'm fine," she replied. It was something of a lie, but it wasn't a black one. She didn't feel the worst. Her head still pounded, but she had enough wits about her to function.

On hearing the voice, Florian leaned forward. "Is that—" his eyes widened in recognition. "Daria," he whispered to the girl. "That's not the Elaeric kid." The other prefect cast a glance over to Amandine, though Amandine herself wasn't sure why.

"Isn't it?" she asked.

"She's as brown-haired as they come. And besides," he said, the slightest of smiles creeping into his tone, "I met her on the way to the sorting ceremony. She seemed fine on the way, though." His eyes tipped back to the top of his head as he strained to remember something.

"For one of the Elaerics, I don't think I'd question their putting her underneath an Absorption Ward, but," Daria stepped toward Amandine, "Who are you?"

"Amandine Bellerose," admitted Amandine.

"Never heard of her. Must have been one Hell of a fit you had, huh?"

Amandine shrugged and glanced back at Florian. She could feel a touch of heat pulse through her cheeks. Next thing she knew, she'd end up burning off her eyebrows in front of that guy. He was like her bad luck charm. First, there had been her rolling in her own idiocy on the way to the ceremony, and now, there was…this. And even she didn't know what this was.

Florian's eyes had focused again, though they'd flickered up to the ward on the ceiling. "They threw her in here, for whatever reason. I don't know. But they must know what they're doing, to put her in here and not in the infirmary. It's anything but full." He waved the papers, both at Daria and at Amandine. "Let's just get this over with. We don't need to go toying around with motivations."

"You're no fun," Daria whined.

Ignoring her, Florian beckoned for the lantern. Amandine obliged, and he squinted to make out the words in the soft light. "Professor Helson sent us to check you over before tonight," he said. Amandine didn't know who Professor Helson was, but she assumed he was someone important. Silently, she repeated the name to herself. Might as well commit it to memory.

Florian paused. In the silence, Amandine wondered if she was supposed to say something. They spent another few wordless seconds staring at the papers and the wall, respectively, before Amandine finally opened her mouth to speak.

"Tonight? What's tonight?"

Florian shook his head. "Nothing. It's nothing." Of course, even Florian, the glowing blond with a politician's grin, couldn't keep the Band-Aid tone from his voice. Daria rolled her eyes from her haunt against the wall. "There are, ah, traditional beginning-of-year activities the first night, and Professor Helson wanted to make sure you were in sound enough health to…join."

Daria sighed. "If you're going to do such a terrible job of covering it up, you might as well just tell the kid."

Florian made a face at her.

"Anyway. It's just a health check. I'll just ask you a few questions, and after that, you have permission to leave," he continued. His finger slid to the first question on the list. "Do you now, or have you ever, experienced regular fits, seizures, or losses of consciousness as a result of any diagnosed magical condition?"

Amandine's ears burned red. The questions were awfully personal. As far as she knew, she hadn't, and she said so.

"Do you now, or have you ever, experienced regular fits, seizures, or losses of consciousness as a result of any diagnosed non-magical condition?"

Again, Amandine replied with a "no." She was healthy enough. Didn't the school have her medical forms, anyway? She'd gone to the doctor's just the month before, and all he'd remarked on was that she was still so short. As of now, her ego was a bit bruised, and her head hurt a little, but otherwise, she was fine.

Well, that, and the fact that she wasn't sure she could keep her balance if she tried to walk. But that was just the headache. She was sure she'd be fine. It would only cause the school trouble if she were anything but healthy, and causing trouble in the infancy of her life as a student would only make things worse. The questions ambled on, and they'd tapered off by the time she'd given everything from her current physical status to a shallow medical history to this pair of strangers. How was her breathing? Fine, evidently. Heart rate? Daria took Amandine's pulse when she shied away from Florian. She knew how to do it herself, but evidently, the prefects didn't trust her. That wasn't what they said outright, but Amandine caught it in bits and pieces in the way Daria scrutinized her after every answer.

After a few minutes, thankfully, they'd run out of questions. Daria turned to leave, ever the ice sculpture with her businesslike gait and tense posture. Florian flashed a small smile before he, too, turned back down the hall. Amandine couldn't help but notice that the smile wasn't quite as cloying as the last. As much as she appreciated that, though, she was just glad he was gone.

That was too personal. Entirely too personal. There hadn't needed to be two prefects coming to check up on her—no, not even one. Still, Amandine couldn't shake the feeling of something being off. Aside from the voices, and, then, the lack thereof, and the fact that she'd been sorted into Aube, and the fact that she'd been shoved in a storage closet after evidently having passed out…

Was it even ethical for those two to have asked her all those questions? But, then again, she'd answered them freely enough. Amandine had to admit she didn't know much about ethics.

All she was was a silly little first-year. One who'd passed out after getting sorted, at that.

And then it hit her. The so-called "beginning-of-year activities," as Florian had put it. Her mother hadn't said a word about that. They'd bought her wand and her robes and her uniform, and they'd piled up the textbooks in the little river-carts hovering about in the waterways between the endless aisles at Babette's Bookshop, and she'd shared stories of her own first day, but the one thing her mother had left out was mention of any sort of ritual.

She guessed they hadn't been talking about the feast.

Confined to a bed, Amandine wasn't going to get anywhere, literally or with regards to her own ignorance. Her own words still spun in her head, but there were no voices. Though the silence was almost stranger than the chatter, at this point, she considered just falling asleep. They'd said she'd been free to leave, but by no means was she obligated to do that, if she was going to twist their words. She wasn't sure she'd be able to walk in the first place.

As she laid her head back, Amandine couldn't stave off the anxiety taking root in her fingertips. It was an itching, first; for what, she wasn't sure. Her fingers needed to do something, and, soon enough, her whole hands ached to be free. In the course of five minutes, she'd departed from content enough to bored out of her mind. She wasn't sure when she'd begun examining the patterns in the floor, but it was sign enough that she needed up.

She swung her legs over the bed and had to catch herself before she tumbled out. There was something very, very long with her balance. Amandine's ears began to ring again, and for a moment, a burst of fear slid through her veins—the voices were back. After a few moments of sitting still, it faded.

She'd have to take it slowly. Walk up the gradual incline.

Amandine sucked in a breath through her teeth.

Alright. She'd stand up. Like some sort of invalid, she'd do her best.

She had to scoot to the very edge of the cot to plant the first foot on the ground. The motion itself didn't set her ears ringing—a good sign. But she could feel the blood pulsing through her head harder and harder every time she moved. To put it frankly, it felt like someone was sucking her brains out through her nose. Not the most pleasant of feelings, but at least it didn't hurt. Brains didn't in themselves feel pain, so it was, as she thought, an especially apt metaphor. A smarmy burst of glee filled her.

Yeah. Her head was okay. She could do this. The other foot found its way to the ground, and Amandine inched her way to standing. The headache didn't recede, but it didn't get that much worse. Delicately, the way she set down a glass at a silent dinner table, she lifted her hands from the cot. She could stand. That was a start.

First, Amandine stepped to the other side of the closet the short way. She wobbled a little, had to stop, recollected herself, and continued on. The headache became less and less of an issue. Thankfully, it seemed, it wasn't a permanent issue—though why she'd thought it might be after that invasive line of questioning was a mystery to Amandine. She padded to the wall and slipped back into her shoes, slinging her jacket over her shoulder as she made her way to the door. Before heading out into the hallway, or whoever it was that led to the storage closet she'd occupied, she put it back on. She smoothed the blue frock over and picked at the collar of her shirt.

Here she was, perhaps minutes—or maybe hours, she hadn't asked—after collapsing when the voices gave her a good drubbing over the head. And she was just getting right back into the thrust of things. She was pretty sure that wasn't natural. But, then, what part of it was? She couldn't count the voices as something normal, either.

Speaking of voices.

The moment Amandine opened the door, the whispers began to leak in. They weren't normal voices. They were back, and they slipped in through her ears like snakes to occupy the dark recesses in her head she'd once thought sacred. Amandine jumped back, nearly losing her balance in the effort. Slamming the door shut, she leaned her forehead against the wall. Everything went silent again.

Was she hiding from them? In a closet? She didn't know who'd brought her here, but it had to be more than a coincidence. The voices had nearly burst her brain, and now, here she was, recovering safe and sound. So be it in a dark closet, she was safe from the voices.

And that meant somebody must know.

Of course, finding out also meant leaving from her haven, and that meant throwing herself back for the voices to eat her alive. Lovely. A lovely set of options.

The pros? Well. There were all too many things she still didn't know—the first-day rituals, for example, or that professor that had stuck her in there. The not knowing gnawed at Amandine's insides almost as much as the voices had.

The cons, of course, were the voices, which threatened to give her a brain haemorrhage.

Amandine huffed to herself, pacing back and forth as she ran through her options in her head. Really, there was only one.

Amandine opened the door, and the voices flooded in once again. God damn, she had things to do.