Who: Julien Dorny & OPEN When: Wednesday after dinner What: Accident! Where: The Infirmary Rating: PG - non-graphic mention of injuries
Julien's chronic frequent headaches had worsened until they were now a constant low-grade buzz of pain that seeped through into everything he did. He'd found that anything reflective seemed to trigger both more pain and irritating fleeting visions, snatches of sound and sight that he couldn't decipher as they came and went so fast. He avoided the bathoom mirror in the mornings and had taken to skipping meals in the Hall, asking the House Elves to bring him something when he remembered to.
Much of his time was being spent in the library under towers of books as he struggled to keep up with his classwork, next years work and try and find a way to hone or remove the distracting visions and hopefully the debilitating headaches with them. He'd been unsuccesful and had started looking at Italian texts with the best translation spells he had.
He'd started substituting Daydream Charms for sleep, having classes during the day then his own studying in the evenings, he had no other chance to fit them in, not if he wanted to keep eating. He hadn't really thought too much of it - it was the same thing basically, right? And he could go three or four in a row and that was enough sleep, ish, for his body to not break down on, not when there was so much he needed to read and remember and research.
He'd been a hermit lately and he only ever saw anyone else in class anymore, even then he was always distracted by work. The few times he surfaced from his work to check out what was going on in the world caused discoveries that he didn't like the look off and which ocassionally triggered yet more Sights that he had no control over so he'd eventually given that up too.
He finally left the library before eight only because he'd been caught eating (it was lunch) and had been told to leave. He hadn't even made a token protest because, actually, he might like a lie-down right now. His headache was threatening to become a migraine, pounding at his temples, burning sleep-deprived eyes and turning his half-empty stomach.
His hands full of books and his vision spotty as the pain crescendoed, he had no way of stopping himself as he stumbled at the top of a moving staircase and proceeded to fall halfway down it - the staircase's movement sideways had him tipping over the edge, avoiding plummeting to his death only because the staircase below was moving too, catching him with only a relatively short fall. He landed with a crunch, books spilling everywhere, tumbling off bannisters to land harmlessly on ground level and emphasising how lucky he'd been not to go over himself.
He wasn't dead but he'd broken bones, damaged things inside him and struggled to breathe. In a way it was a blessing that the last thing he remembered was the excrutiating pain of his head and a sensation of falling forwards before waking up, sore but healing and out of danger, in the Infirmary.