TriNymphs - Chapter Fourteen - insomnia (Disclaimer on my profile)
Chelsea stepped through a ring of fire into the living room of an Upper East Side apartment in the middle of hell.
"Hey there kid!" Dominic greeted her.
"Happy early Christmas," she grinned. She was too used to being called 'kid' to care.
"Back at ch'ya," they exchanged presents. Chelsea got Dominic and huge bag of honeydukes candy. He had the most severe sweet tooth out of anyone she had met before; unfortunately, there weren't many -if any- sweet shops in that particular ring of hell.
He got her a book; normally she didn't like to read. But it was stuffed full of different spells for fire nymphs. Both Vampira and Dracula were out of town, so Chelsea had to wait to give them their presents. Her and Dominic hung out a couple of hours, then Chelsea had to get back to Hogwarts quickly before one of the other girls woke up and noticed she wasn't there.
She made a portal back to her bed in the common room, making sure not to set the curtains around her bed on fire.
She immediately fell asleep; across the room, Alex was sleeping soundly, having finally relaxed when no floating head showed up on the wall for months. However, eight floors up, Lyssa was not sleeping as soundly as her two sisters.
Ever since Halloween, she had been having the same nightmare every night. Sleep deprivation was making her grumpy and irritable. These days there was a fifty-fifty chance of her going off on anyone who talked to her, if not more. It was quite a change from her normal personality that rarely got mad at anyone. No matter the circumstances.
They all woke up the next morning and went straight for the presents. Chelsea and Alex pounced on theirs, scaring the other Slytherins. Lyssa yawned and started opening hers unenthusiastically, while the other two Gryffindor girls squeed and compared presents.
They went down to the common room, which they had almost completely to themselves. All of the Weasleys were there, but other than that the common room was deserted. Lyssa sat in the corner and pretended to be reading the issue of the Daily Prophet that had been left on the table.
Katie had gone home for the holidays, and Lyssa wasn't friends with any of the Weasleys. But she had been growing more and more sullen and spending more and more time just by herself. Even if Katie or one of her other friends had been there she would still be alone, where she was now.
She got tired of the celebrating and went outside to sit by the lake. She was buried in layers against the stinging cold of December.
After Chelsea and Alex went down to breakfast and noticed Lyssas absence, they went down to the lake with as many muffins as they could carry. "If she wants to sit alone in the middle of the bloody winter and freeze to death, that's not our problem," Alex started complaining the moment the frigid air hit her.
"We're going to keep her company and find out why she's so damn grumpy lately. If you have a problem with it, you can just go sit alone inside," Holly had gone home for the holidays, and the other Slytherin girls were too snobby for anyone else's taste.
"Fine," Alex grumbled as they trudged through the snow to Lyssa, then forcibly made herself look concerned about her when they finally got there. Lyssa did not put up with attitude these days.
"Are you okay?" Chelsea asked, sitting down.
Lyssa grunted out a yes. When her two sisters continued to stare at her she continued, "Haven't been getting any rest."
"For two months," Chelsea asked, surprised, after she quickly traced the grumpy Lyssa back to around Halloween. She nodded.
"How do you not sleep for two months?" Alex asked, amazed.
"I have been sleeping. Been having nightmares every night, when I wake up I'm just as tired."
"That's it," Alex blurted out, "Nightmares?" the other two glared at her.
"I think there are things you can do to not have dreams, like meditation or something... Why didn't you say anything," Chelsea was attempting to be helpful.
"No one asked."
The Christmas feast was uneventful; everyone sat at one table, except for the teachers who remained at their own. There were only about twenty students still at the school.
Lyssa was falling asleep on the table, head slightly falling into her mashed potatoes. For once she didn't have nightmares.
No one bothered to wake her up, especially with her two sisters sitting on either side of her silently beating on anyone who tried. Alex was sick of being told off by Lyssa and figured she might lighten up again once she got some sleep.
The next day Chelsea went and perused the library, in search of a book on meditation for her sister. The books were invariably focused towards magical subjects. She had to tell Lyssa the bad news that there was nothing she could currently do to get some damnable sleep.
This was not good, because at the moment she was snapping at anyone who dared speak to her and rapidly losing weight from stress and night sweats from her nightmares.
The months went past and Lyssa started to look skeletal. She was failing all her classes, even the ones she had previously been the best student in. Her friends distanced themselves from her; she was pretty much left completely alone except for her sisters. Even they left her when the quidditch games were being played.
Lyssa didn't want to go to the pitch were everyone was being all cheerful, so she stayed inside the school. Chelsea, being the die-hard quidditch fan that she was, went to the game then had the post-game discussion with Katie. At that point in time, Alex was just sticking with Lyssa because Chelsea was making her feel awful about it whenever she tried to join the rest of the school in shunning her.
It was the final game of the year and would determine the winner of the school quidditch cup. It was Slytherin against Ravenclaw ("Told you the Gryffindor team wouldn't make it," scoffed Chelsea to Katie) ("Only because Fern what's-her-face messed everyone up, if we had just one other player we'd school you noobs" Katie snapped back.). When the school got back inside, the two sisters went to find Lyssa in the library, after the post-game discussion of course.
They didn't find her in the library or when they looked around the school. She usually kept to the library because people didn't talk as much in there anyway. When they couldn't find her they figured she had gone to her dorm early to try and get some actual sleep.
When they didn't see her at all the next day they knew that something was off.
Chelsea went up to Katie Bell and asked, "Have you seen Lyssa in your dorm the last two days?"
Katie thought for a minute, "No, actually."
Alex and Chelsea went to Dumbledore and told him, they couldn't find Lyssa anywhere. No one had seen her since before the quidditch game. Lyssa had disappeared from Hogwarts.
Lyssa was standing in her dream, facing a woman who was dressed like the typical Grecian goddess. She had blue eyes with a greenish tint; they stood out from her tanned face. She was standing in front of a fountain of a fae-looking woman crying.
Like always, the woman handed her a green leather bound book with an upside down triangle (representing the element water) on it. The water from the fountain turrets up, does a few circles around in the sky, then dives at Lyssa. Like a vulture.
The woman stands there, looking at her harshly. But this time she speaks, "Fight back!" her voice sounds impatient and harsh, then the water hits her and the dream starts all over again. This time she doesn't speak, but stares at her with growing disdain.
Lyssa finally woke up, having gotten no rest whatsoever. She was in complete darkness, then a man entered the small rectangular room with a lit candle, and she could see. See the dingy, stained, stone walls. There was a leak in the ceiling spilling drops of water onto her bare foot. She was on a metal operating table, restrained. She saw the chains connected to the walls, and had a panic attack when she realised she was in an old dungeon. She screamed, the man smiled, no one could hear her.
Alex and Chelsea walked towards the forbidden forest, preparing themselves to be attacked. Obviously they would've liked to avoid that situation, but they were preparing for it. They were looking for somewhere they could go and not be seen from the school, the forbidden forest seemed like the perfect place.
Until they remembered that there were apparently werewolves and the centaurs didn't exactly welcome people into their forest either.
They had had to wait outside, hiding, until everyone else went inside and to bed, and they couldn't be seen sneaking across the grounds. While they were waiting, they had been discussing the same thing over and over; the conversation was starting to loop. "But it had to be someone in Hogwarts who took her!" Chelsea was exasperated.
"How do you know she was even taken, maybe she just left."
"No student could leave the grounds without being noticed by someone!"
"Both of us have! And no teacher would take her!"
"Well we can both portal!"
"She could have gotten her powers!" they hissed back and forth at each other, working things out.
They were walking along the forest, jumping out of their skins whenever they heard the littlest noise. They were not following a path, encase Hagrid happened to be perusing the forest in the middle of the night.
The trees were getting bigger and closer together as they got farther into the forest. In some places it wasn't possible to walk through patches of the trees because they were too close. Several times the two sisters had to loop around humongous patches of trees because they found themselves surrounded.
Going into the forest, their goal had been to find a spot sufficiently out of view of the school so Chelsea could make a portal to Vampira, who could help them find Lyssa. They figured they would have to go pretty far in to make sure no one would see fire in the forest in the pitch black night.
Now, the goal was to find a clearing with trees far enough away from them that they wouldn't be in danger of setting anything on fire. Neither one of them thought to turn back and find a spot where the trees grew farther apart. At the moment they were just two scared little first year girls.
Going into the forest, they had been scared out of their minds of finding werewolves or the centaurs or some other type of non-human being that would resent them encroaching on their territory.
They finally found a clearing and gratefully stumbled into it. But what they had never expected was to find themselves surrounded by giant man-eating spiders. They had stumbled into Aragogs nest and were too frozen with fear to get out.