Disclaimer : All characters and ideas from the book belong to J. K. Rowling.

Chapter 6 : Floating Visions

Beni opened her eyes slowly, sitting up. She didn't know where she was or what had happened to her. The last thing that she remembered was water, lots of water, consuming her - overtaking her…

It was only when she looked down and she the two deep, brown gashes on her arm showing through white bandages that she remembered what had happened. She cast her eyes downwards. It seemed like some kind of a crime for her to look up, she felt as if she didn't deserve to.

She looked at her legs, blue and bruised from suffocation and her pathetic attempts to escape the hell she had bought upon herself. She stood up and looked around the room. It was drab and plain, a small desk in the corner, a tiny black wardrobe, a Nundu skin on the floor…she whipped around, disbelieving. The bed she had been lying on was a couch. What was she doing here again? She scowled. She didn't want to be here, in this room that hid so many hopeless memories.

She pulled on her cloak which she conveniently found on the end of the couch and stormed down the stairs, into the office and straight towards the door.

"Beni!" a surprised voice said from behind her. She whipped around. She knew that voice, and she told herself that she hated it.

There he was, sitting at the high backed chair to his desk, looking frustrated.

"What?" she growled at him. Her tone must have been harsher than he had expected, because for a few seconds he looked offended and awkward.

"I just…wondered…how you were doing?" he asked nervously.

She glanced questioningly at the cuts, burns, bruises and feral colouring of her skin, and the various other injuries she had acquired the day before. She thought the answer to his question was obvious to anyone, so she gave him the filthiest look she could twist her face into and stalked out of the room, leaving him staring after her back once again, soundlessly mouthing lost words.

She went to the dungeon where she kept her crystal ball, locked the door again behind herself and took the haunted black ball of it's fancy, antique, golden stand. She hadn't seen in what seemed like ages. She sat cross-legged on the cold, stone floor and placed the ball in front of her.

She looked as deep as she could into the crystal, but for once she didn't see anything. Only one image began to play across the dark surface. She watched intently as it replayed Severus breaking through the onerously locked door or the women's bathroom, his cloak swishing around him, his face set in utter determination and anxiety, the atmosphere surrounding him distinct with a sudden force of power that radiated from him. He strode straight to the porcelain bathtub at the end of the room and threw the wooden board off with an immense strength that Beni would never dreamed that Severus possessed. The board flew through the air and hit the wall behind with a splintering crash, and Severus pulled Beni up, out of the water and into his arms, her face resting on his shoulder, fast, sharp, hoarse breaths suddenly coming from her frozen, shaking body.

Beni stood up, grabbed her wand and blasted the crystal ball into trillions of tiny pieces of glass, which defied gravity and kept flying through the air as if she were in space. She conjured herself a chair and sat down to think, tiny pieces of glass floating through the air, a perfect mirror of her feral temper.

So Severus had saved her. That explained why she had ended up in his bedroom again. Great, and she'd been such a bitch to him that morning. But then he'd been a dumb ass, "How was she doing?" How the fuck did he think she'd be doing? She sighed. She should probably go and apologise and then…thank him. She cringed. Thankyou's and sorry's were like goodbye's…all so bloody hard to say.

She slammed the door shut and stormed back into his office. He was still sitting at his desk, looking even more frustrated about whatever he was working on, such a great time to interrupt him. He looked up in surprise as she entered the office.

"Sorry. And thankyou." She said loudly and abruptly. Before he could start to speak, she whipped around, he robes swishing much the way his did, and she stalked away quickly, this time leaving him smiling after her back and shaking his head.

He got up and walked after her, grabbing her shoulder and spinning her around to face him. He couldn't think of anything to say to her so he led her to the dungeon where they used to sit together. He walked in and found the room filled with bits of flying black glass. He glanced at Beni, realising that she must have done this, and waved his wand, the pieces of glass falling to the floor.

He crossed to the room and flopped down into the chair, looking up to find the pieces of glass in the air again. Beni stood leaning against the opposite wall, twirling her wand in her fingers, staring at the doorway looking distant. Severus waved his wand and no sooner had the glass hit the ground than it flew up in the air again. He glared at Beni, who was no longer looking distant but smirking evilly and mischievously, still staring at the door.

"Leave it." Severus snapped at her, the glass falling to the floor once more. She glared at him and turned to face him, her smirk now twisted into a look of distaste. She sighed and raised her eyebrows at him questioningly, trying to prompt him. He must have brought her here for a reason, and she wished he just get it over and done with, she'd rather not be here at all.

"What were you trying to do yesterday?" he asked her angrily.

"Is that rhetorical?" she asked him back.

"No."

"Well, what did it look like I was trying to do, Severus?" she said sarcastically.

"Why?" he asked, suddenly becoming a master of one word sentences.

"Give me one reason I should keep living."

"There are lots of reasons."

"Name one." she said sourly, sure that he would be lost for words, and her point would be proven.

"Although the people that you loved the most are dead, their expectations are not." he quipped bitterly. He stood up, waved his wand and the tiny pieces of glass on the floor flew back into the familiar smooth, sphere shape, and he left the room. This time it was Beni who was left standing stupidly, staring after him.

"Severus!" she called after him, beginning to run towards him. He turned around slowly and she flew into his arms, he stumbled backwards and almost fell over in shock. He hugged her back.

"Thankyou." she whispered into his ear. It wasn't a passionate or romantic hug, just a friendly hug, and it said all the thankyou's and sorry's that Beni needed it to.

* * * * *

They sat together again on the dungeon floor, Beni's newly reconstructed crystal ball in front of them both. It was one of those times when they just sat the talking, the crystal between them forgotten. He told her about his time at Hogwarts, and she found it was not dissimilar from her own. She laughed at the way he told her things, she loved his sarcasm and his bitterness, and he didn't mind.

He left a while later to teach a class, leaving Beni alone. She felt the crystal calling her, so before it could make her do something crazy and embarrassing, she looked down at it, staring into the depths of it's empty darkness, feeling her weight lighten and the familiar, strange, mystic feeling come over her.

Beni saw a girl. The girl was walking barefoot in the snow. In a big, open field of snow. Thick pine trees surrounded the field, and rocks were scattered across it, half hidden in the snow. The girl was young, she looked as though she had just turned fourteen. She was tall, with pale white skin. She had long, brunette hair with a faint wave through it. A fringe covered the left side of her face, falling into one of her eyes, which were blue, with yellow around the pupil. Light freckles covered the lower half of her face. Long, green earrings hung from her ears, brushing her shoulders. She wore a loose fitted green dress, which moved around her in the harsh, cold wind. The girl kept walking, but didn't seem to be getting anywhere. Through the girls eyes, Beni glanced at a rock on her right, and suddenly the rock dimmed, and a pair of eyes opened suddenly where the rock had been seconds before.

Beni jumped violently, cutting the vision short. Freaky things like that often happened to Beni Montano. That was not a normal vision. It was more like a dream than a vision. She had a strange feeling to accompany the confusion the vision had brought. It was a feeling of anticipation, anxiety and doom, and most prominently, awareness.

Beni sat thinking about the vision all night. Who was the girl? Did she even mean anything? What was with the snowy field, and the trees? And the rock? That had really freaked her out, the way it had suddenly faded and those eyes had opened on it so quickly. They had scared her so much, just the abrupt unexpectedness of them. She hadn't even seen what the eyes looked like, not the shape, the colour - nothing. But they still freaked her out - severely. The eyes and the girls bare feet in the snow were the two most distinct things in the entire vision, and they stayed with Beni, haunting her, until her next vision.

For some reason she didn't tell anyone about it. She was trying to forget it herself, but she couldn't. She didn't even tell Severus, although she knew he could tell that something was different about her.

Beni returned to classes after that, and most everything went back to normal. Teachers pretended that she did not exist to be more than an irritating shadow, the other students still laughed at her from behind her back, but most of them were scared of her, or just couldn't be bothered anymore. Even Draco Malfoy had quit his little games and returned to tormenting Potter. For that, Beni was grateful.

But the vision didn't leave her. It never changed. It tortured her and haunted her. No matter how hard she tried to forget it, to push it aside, it would never rest. Maybe she had to understand what it meant, what it was trying to tell her. And that was as impossible of ridding her tormented mind of the vision itself.