Dreaming of Freedom

by chiva1989

This is a little story a friend of mine and I wrote many years ago, It is mostly AU and the main character... I won't tell you about her. Enjoy the ride, it won't be too long, just about 10 chapters.

1. Waking Up

Dull brown eyes, so dark as to be nearly indistinguishable from the pupil, slowly blink open while taking care to not stare directly into the artificial light source on the ceiling. You are slowly gaining awareness of your surroundings and a nearly silent sight escapes your parched lips. You are still a prisoner in this unholy facility of metal and pain. Like every day you take stock of your surroundings, although nothing has changed since you arrived here. Carefully you move your body to a sitting position, absently noting the pain in your back and limbs, an ever present burning sensation which only intensifies with every movement. Your sight is met by shiny metal walls on all sides. Your cell is not bigger than a closet with barely enough room to fit a ratty blanket and a hole titled waste disposal.

You wrinkle your nose at the smell of what is supposed to be your toilet on your left and move your sight elsewhere. The walls and the roof of you cell are still immaculately clean but sterile all the same. To your right the ventilation shaft is still working, it being the only thing that creates the tiniest amount of noises within your cell, besides yourself of course. The first few days in this place you would have sworn that you could hear dull voices through the ventilation but by now you belief it only to be oxygen that is pumped into your prison cell.

Your sight is suddenly blocked by a few red tresses of hair that fall into your face. You lift up a bony, pale hand up to remove the oily hair from your sight but even such an action takes you a while to accomplish, exhaustion seemingly being your only constant companion at this point. You have no idea what you are even doing here, one day everything was fine, you were a student at Durmstrang, a 4th year to be precise, lauded as one of the most talented witches of your age and one day you wake up in this cell. You have no idea what happened to you but on that first day you woke up naked and in pain, your most precious possession, a dragon heartstring wand, holly and 7 inches, nowhere to be seen. You still remember the dull pain in your head on that day, a pain that should only worsen over time, the meager meals that were somehow provided through a sealed flap in the wall not helping in the least.

With great effort you pull yourself back to the present, lingering on the past has never helped you, why would it now? It has already been at least a year if not more since that fateful day and you have no hope left to ever leave your cell. Listlessly you grab the meager food ration that was provided to you but you only stare at it with unseeing eyes. The question whether it is even worth it to cling to life invades your mind like an insidiously whispering snake. If live is consists solely out of pain and there is no hope why keep on existing at all?

With a silent scream and more strength then you believed yourself capable of at this point you grab the mug of water and throw it at the wall. It clatters to the ground the metallic surface not even dented and your water now spreads out over the floor.

Why did this have to happen? Who is holding you here? What is going to happen to you? Will you just die here without ever knowing why? It feels like you air around you is getting colder and you start shivering slightly. The water on the floor now has taken over a good part of the floor and with a good bit of fascination you can see the water freezing over. Dull brown eyes stare at a bony, pale face. You look more like a holocaust victim at this point than a human being. Your hair resembles a wild, bunched up rats nest and the former glossy redness has dulled a good amount. Your eyes once alive and sparkling are now nothing more than a dead abyss, sucking all the warmth of the world in. Your face, once marked by light freckles is now so pale one might mistake you for a ghost, the freckles now looking more like a rash than anything else. Your body, once young and fit now resembles ruins far more than a human body.

You keep looking into the icy surfaces, lost in thought and slowly breathing out vapor. The walls of your cell have started to freeze over too and you didn't even take any special note of it. You are however forcibly brought back to reality once you hear a voice whispering softly into your ear "Arianna." The last thing you see is a shockingly steely, grey eye, watching you from within the confines of the ice.