Rating: PG for several expletives Status: Complete (narrative)
Fine.
Anger and a raging, scraping hurt gave Charlotte enough strength to launch her journal clear across the room, where its binding hit raw stone with a sharp crack, and it tumbled - pages first, into the corner. Her face felt hot, wet, and with an angry shove of her palm across the hollow of one cheek, she smeared tears across it. She wanted to be indifferent, but the treacherous lines of wet that refused to stop no matter how much she wiped belied whatever sense of control she wished she had. It wasn't like she had anyone to impress. The dementors loved it when they cried - if they were human she had no doubt they'd probably use tears to dirty their martinis - but it wasn't the dementors she couldn't break in front of, it was herself.
It was Snape and his stupid self-righteous, persistent bastardry. She didn't give two fucks how or why he tried to convince her life was worth living - but it was making it (the living) all the more difficult. A sense of fatalism kept her, in some ways, calm. It kept her sane (or some semblance of it) to accept her surroundings and persist on 'borrowed time.' Now she was being forced to swallow that her despair, her comfort, was selfishness. That she wasn't worth the time her family had put into her.
This renewed the anger, and with anger came more stupid, aggravating tears.
She wanted to rip into the window and scream FUCK so loud that her lungs burst and she could die despite him, to spite him. How dare he. How dare a death eater try and make her hope. "Fuck him." It didn't sound nearly as assertive as she wanted it to - simply wet and gravelled and, most of all, pathetic.
The wet ran even faster now, and she tilted her head back, heavenward; God wouldn't give her strength, but maybe it would catch her tears.
With closed eyes she considered his words again, hot currents of self-pity making it almost impossible to be rational, to be logical. Unhindered emotion was what came most naturally to Charlotte, but this kind of grief and hatred (outward or inward, she couldn't tell) felt foreign and horrible. Maybe she should just do it, then. If she believed she was going to die, why procrastinate. Why keep writing. Why.
Rocking forward, her hands slapped into the stone across her and she cried anew, harder, louder, every muscle screaming out against what she wanted to do; the body demanded survival, despite the ache, despite the self-pity, and turning toward the cell door, dragging herself inches forward, sobbing every inch of the way, was impossibly difficult. "Help me." Every syllable pathetic and she didn't even know who she was asking. God didn't come here, and he probably wouldn't help her commit suicide, anyway. No one would help her do this, and she felt another hot surge of anger toward Snape - for daring to make that very point.
And then the catalyst.
The smell of pain and distress had brought Them down from their usual haunts, and the hallways chilled as she stared and stared at the bars of her cell door. She could do it. Right now, she could do it. Pain seized her in the form of her family - freshest in her mind; rejection, scorn, death and death and death.
And in those tenuous, perfect seconds - during which she could have ended it all and saved herself the trouble of going on and Snape the trouble of bothering like a stupid nosy bastard with no business at all - she was afraid. Afraid to commit to this decision. Afraid to die by choice and not by happenstance.
It was in an act of cowardice - not nobility or self-preservation - that took Charlotte to her bed; and there she hid, wet and angry and afraid, and very much alive.