The Second Chance

Drifting...

On and on, through this peaceful, ethereal darkness you drift, weightless and calm. You no longer see anything around you; instead you sense your surroundings, a soft fog of serenity. You feel no heat nor cold, perceive no light nor dark, experience no emotion. Everything is silent, and yet you hear neither silence nor sound. But you do not panic. You do nothing. You are not self-aware. Your mind is blank, and still, as if it were no longer there; something clockwork that has finally run down, an empty house with the lights turned off. Your mind does nothing. But, if anything could be seen in it, if you could feel an emotion, it is contentment. You are content to be drifting.

You have no notion of the passage of time, so you could not possibly know how long you have remained in this state until now. You have no notion that there even is a now. You make no attempt to understand this. You are unaware of the entire concept. All there is, is peace. Nothing more. Just pure, carefree, comforting, beautiful peace.

But.

If you can be said to be aware of your situation -

Something is wrong.

Something tiny; a mere molecule in a galaxy that is out of place and doesn't fit, a note one semitone too high in an orchestra.

Something little, but nevertheless there, like a splinter of wood missing from a forest.

Something small, but it has been nagging away at you for, if you can still experience time, a while. You don't know what it is. And yet, you seem to understand that it should not be there. Something has gone wrong with this beautiful peace around you. It is stirring you. You should not be able to understand this, you should not be able to understand at all. You should not be able to think. Your mind should not be operating. You feel that you know this, even without being told, and there are two more problems; knowing and being told - interaction. You were floating without the burdens of your mind, but now it is going wrong...

You float. You drift. You stir.

You are starting to feel the very beginning pricklings of fear. Or not fear, as such, more - worry. Just the very beginnings of, faint and barely there. But you cannot fathom why. It is like a deep, innate instinct, gnawing away at you. You should be floating, unaware, uncaring, feeling nothing. No thoughts, no sounds, tastes, smells. Nothing. But you are being stirred from this. You do not want to be.

You begin to feel foreboding, and the start of panic, now. You are feeling emotions, are aware that there is a now, and that sense of foreboding is becoming stronger. You stir fretfully. Something is going to happen. Something you are not going to like, something harsh and alien and strange, something wrong. You want to float again, carefree and safe, because what if - terror floods your being - what if you suddenly remember something? You have no inkling as to why the thought frightens you so. You have no memories, and yet you are suddenly praying, pleading that you might remain that way -

"Was little Myrtle off to fight the Mudblood killer - "

You scream.

You scream and scream and scream, a tongueless, inhuman, terrifying sound, desperately trying to force away the voice bouncing in your consciousness, trying to fight away the tsunami of horrific emotions filling your whole being. You have no need of breath, and so you do not stop to draw any. You just scream -

"Was she going to be the saviour of the school - "

Screaming, you begin to twist and thrash, frantically trying to fight off the force that is torturing you. You writhe recklessly, your entire being becoming a convoluted helix of burning, horrifying hatred and misery and anguish and despair and pain, but it won't go away-

"One look at your ugly little face with those glasses, Myrtle - "

Your entire self, whatever you now are, whatever now remains of you, rises up and screams, crying, howling, shrieking and screaming at the pain. You shriek your pleas to the surrounding darkness, once so beautiful, and now cruel and spiteful and evil. You beg for it to end, to go back to that calm serenity you existed in before, for the agony to go away, the agony of existing. You have become just a misshapen mass of agony...

Light...

You flail blindly towards it, not knowing what it could be. The darkness is evil, you know that now, just like the world was, just like that bitch was. You feel the pain inside you spreading, growing, stretching out to fill every molecule of your being, but even more so the anger and the hatred. The hatred fills you, burns you, consumes your pleading side. It envelopes you, swallows you whole. You no longer want the darkness. You want the light, oh yes, you want life, you want her life. You want to make hers the sheer, unadulterated Hell that yours was, and you can. You want to go back to the world where you were given nothing but pain, and anguish, and you want to give it back -

You feel that force behind you bunching up, tensing ready, and suddenly you are propelled forwards, a dizzying, terrifying speed that would have made your eyes water had you had any, straight towards the light. The rage is brimming inside you, radiating from you in billowing clouds of fury and malice and spite, all aimed at her. She destroyed you. You welcomed death because of her, because of all that pain, because of the odious abhorrent world she forced you into, and you will have your vengeance...

You feel your being contracting once again, taking on a form, and the hatred floods it from fingertip to seething fingertip, head to toe. It is the form your scarred mind remembers you having, the fat cheeks, the spots, the hateful glasses, the ugly face. But you no longer care, not right now. Let you look like you did; all the better. Let her remember you in exact detail, you, the girl she drove to the grip of death, let her tear herself up with guilt and torment. To your reckoning, she did drive you to death. You were running from her when you died, and she will pay for your murder. So what if you do look as you did? You no longer care. You just want her, you just want the light -

And then, suddenly you are wrenched into the light. You are back in the cubicle that was your refuge. Back in the world that hated you. Back in the world she still haunts.

But it is your world now.

And you intend to let her know.