Misery - 3/5 for the Five Drabbles Competition at HPFC.
The ceiling was white. So was the other man's hair. The person in the funny reflective glass looked old and tired, though familiar. Everything was white. She had candies in her pockets that she sucked on to pass the time.
Alice's flashes of reality blinded her, catching her unexpectedly between blinks sometimes. They told her that Augusta was unhappy - she only ever visited with Neville, as far as Alice could know. She always looked so tired, but cared for Neville very strongly.
The window was a funny spot to sit.
The trained auror inside of her always tried to assess the situation, but the clarity was always gone just as quickly as it came.
She sat and waited forever, it seemed, though she never knew what exactly she waited for.
Neville always changed. Those bright moments of consciousness caught her by surprise when she saw his height, his growth, his life warp before her eyes. Everything was sudden, time jumped ahead months at a time in the space of the briefest breath - or so it seemed.
Then she blinked, and she savoured her husband's tight grip. Any moment she didn't commit to memory and treasure would be lost forever when insanity pulled back over her mind.
Alice blinked again.
Once, she sat and held hands with the strange man in her room. An unnameable feeling rose inside of her, but Alice remembered pain and quiet - not happiness. It was rather chilly. She left the old man and wandered back to the soft bed. For some reason, the one on the right seemed to be hers. She didn't know how she knew that.
Neville was miserable.
Every time she saw her son hunched over his father, tears clinging to the tip of his nose, she ached. He cried silently, though his shoulders shook violently. Alice clung to her memories of Frank, wondering if he knew who she was anymore.
In those infinitesimal moments, she loved her family fiercely. She wished they could once again be young and free.
Then it was snatched away once again.
A boy came in to visit. She had to check that it wasn't the same man playing a trick on her, because this new one was also very familiar. She had to give him something, when she saw something dark and sad in his eyes.
She pressed a candy wrapper into his outstretched hand, which waited as though it was a ritual, not something she was doing for the first time. She thought that was rather strange.
It didn't make any sense when his face got wet, so she closed her eyes and he disappeared.