a/n: I dunno, maybe it's the fact that we're doing horror stories in my short story class, but this chapter turned out not only extremely short but also kinda creepy, imo. I've been looking forward to writing this part for a while.
Dear Diary,
I am not feeling well. I'm not feeling well because I remember him.
He handed me the scraps and I made little people out of them and he said "beautiful" and we played with them, made up stories about them and their secret lives. Then I put my hand in his and we went walking on the beach by the waves, playfully skipping in and out of them. I filled a bucket with sand for our sandcastle while he dug the moat. I looked into his eyes and found that they were mine too. I told him how I never wanted to grow up, and he told me I didn't have to. I wasn't sure what he meant by that then, but it didn't matter because maybe we could eat out on the beach today and we would only eat pie. Because the manwas gone, and he wouldn't know. I wished he wouldn't come back.
We looked up at the sunset. There were pockets of orange and pink, with red spilling out from them. I looked at him and knew he wished he could draw it. "Beautiful," he said.
The sky was bleeding.
Vanessa Reid yawned as she got up from her desk. She frowned at her diary, lying open in front of her. She hadn't noticed writing half of it.
It was 2:00 in the morning, yet she couldn't sleep.
Tossing some of her dark brown curls over her shoulder, she flinched at a small sound coming from downstairs.
Just the cat.
Why was she being so jumpy of late? Or, abandoning jumpy, 'disturbed of the mind' would do. Without thinking, Vanessa fingered the wand that lay close by, resting on her small dresser. When she realized what she was doing, she drew her hand away with an indignant little sound.
Really, what had gotten into her?
Twenty-four years old, and her mind had picked now to start freaking out at random, and—her eyes passed over the open diary—bringing up memories from the past which she really should have forgotten. Which really shouldn't matter. She had to go to work bright and early tomorrow, and the job of a Gringott's curse breaker was certainly not easy. If she didn't get her sleep, how was she going to function?
But that wasn't what was really bothering her, and Vanessa knew it.
As if controlled by some other force, her eyes strayed to the diary again.
That's over with.
Getting up, she walked over to it and shut it with a little more force than was necessary. Then, on second thought, she went as far as to remove the first row of books on her bookcase of staggering size (mostly romance novels which she wouldn't have admitted to reading for anything) and stuck the diary in the back in a punishing manner, before putting the first row of books up again so as to fully obscure the stupid thing.
Now let's try this again, Vanessa thought, for seemingly the fourth time that night.
Walking slowly over to her bed, she sank down upon it with a sigh, stifling another yawn. Turning her face away from the bookcase, she waited as her eyes finally grew too heavy to maintain their constant vigil.
It was a half hour later that Vanessa Reid fell asleep.
And it was two hours later that she was found sprawled in the snow at the bottom of her front steps, dead.