A Means of Survival – Chapter 22 – Pain

Go and read Disclaimer/Warnings if you have not done so already.

Chapter 22 – Pain

Ron hurt with a strange sort of desperation that he couldn’t possibly have tried to explain even if someone had cared to ask.

The lights were out, but he could still see around him. Presumably, better night vision was one of the unmentioned side effects of Fless.

His mouth tasted like the floor of an unwashed public lavatory, which would be a nauseating thought, if there was anything solid still in his stomach to bring up. He was pretty sure that someone had pissed in his mouth at some point, and even more worrisome, he remembered being insanely grateful for the presence of the warm acidic liquid running down his throat, washing away the taste of cum from his sore throat and mouth.

The strange desires that had permeated his brain for the past several hours were currently on a back burner in his brain, allowing him some brief peace of mind, not to mention partial clarity of thought.

The need for the drug and the sex itself wasn’t gone exactly, but in that moment, all he could feel was a very light tingle. Apparently he was in a waning stage following his last orgasmic high.

There were about a dozen passed out boys around him, but his brain would not let him think on why he knew them so very well. He just knew that they had something to do with the previous hours of driving need and desire that had clouded his mind and thoughts so very completely.

It still bothered him that he didn’t know where his pants were, but he now had a reason for why that bothered him so very greatly. His wand was—or had been—in the pants pocket of those pants. Plus, as he felt with a sick sort of dread sinking its way through his gut, that wand wasn’t even his. It was Hermione’s.

Oh no, what if she wanted to get it back at some point?

Sadly enough, it didn’t even occur to him that someone might have missed his presence as well. Rather, all he could think of was her anger at his running off with her wand. For the first time then, he looked around him and realized that there didn’t seem to be any doors in the room that they were in.

Beside him, Blaise grunted something about ‘leaving off the pickles,’ but otherwise, didn’t wake.

Ron was aware enough now to be disturbed by his desire to plunder Blaise’s arse, sans lube, given that he didn’t know where it was at that moment.

But there it was, just so perfect and—stop that—he commanded himself, trying to snap himself out of the idea. He thought of dead things, cold showers, Harry’s Uncle Vernon—Merlin, ugh—until the awful desire had vanished from the forefront of his mind.

Wearily, he tried standing up, only to realize that his body felt the same as when he had last suffered a very severe fever. He managed to get upright once, only to realize that the world had begun tilting madly around his head, forcing him to squat down in a low crouch with his head on the ground until the feeling passed.

What’s happening to me? He wondered to himself worriedly.

He had noticed that while many of the boys around them were bound with a chain to another boy, he and Blaise were still free—if there was such a term, he groused to himself, feeling the faint flickerings of hope at hearing his sarcasm reassert itself weakly in his head.

He decided that standing wasn’t really all that exciting a premise after all; crawling seemed much safer, really, now that he thought about it.

He moved across the room slowly, his joints protesting mightily at the slight movement, while his shins felt like they were crying. Actually, as he took the time to look, he realized with a start that the act of crawling even a few feet across the mattress-covered floor was enough to cause them to begin bleeding, if only ever so slightly.

Due to the blood and haze that his mind was still wrapped rather significantly in, he did not realize that the blood was coming from the many only half-healed wounds—some of them rather inflamed now—that were covering his body rather prolifically.

Thus, it made sense to him that he would be better off picking his way across the room like a monkey, as opposed to a child, on his feet and hands. Although that worked better, he was still unable to move farther than three or four feet without feeling the overwhelming need to stop and recover, lest he begin dry heaving, or simply pass out.

So he made his way over to the far wall like that slowly, before finally making it. He slumped against the wall’s flat surface with heavy sigh, which shortly turned into a gasp as his worn out nerve endings finally relayed the message to his brain that the wall was very cold.

Even though the cold of the wall was almost too much to be born, he still liked the feel of it against his aching body. It felt far more real than anything else that he had experienced thus far—that day?—since ending up in this place. For the first time, his mind felt as though it were actually making some headway through the pervasive fog that had been in place since he had last attended potions.

His face scrunched as he tried to remember what had happened that day; something out of the ordinary had happened, and he was pretty sure that he had been involved somehow. He was slowly inching his way down the wall now, likely leaving a blood trail as well, although the thought wasn’t important enough to actually occur to him.

Snape had been angry, he was pretty sure. But then again, that wasn’t particularly uncommon a sight, was it? He couldn’t be absolutely sure. His memories were beginning to muddle together, and thinking took energy that he simply did not have. He really didn’t actually have a plan. He just wanted to find his pants and Hermione’s wand. After that was a concept he couldn’t seem to put together in his ridiculously exhausted brain. In fact, he likely would have wandered around the room several times before collapsing completely if he had not run into a piece of furniture that he had never before noticed while in his previous fog.

It was wooden, if his fingertips still knew anything, and as he felt around the edges, he realized that it had shelves and likely was some kind of bookcase or storage area.

He peered into the space between the shelves and thought it a bit odd that the closed in space around him was all highlighted in a frighteningly pale green. He decided to ignore it, thinking that if they had put his clothes anywhere, this would probably have been it.

There were only three shelves, all easily reachable from his position on the floor, where he was resting on his knees. He reached his arms in, still blind to the trauma that was likely hindering a great deal of his movement, particularly in regards to his fine motor skills. He found a shirt that he didn’t recognize—and which smelled atrocious, so he tossed it to the side—followed shortly by a robe and some mismatched socks—those he took and put on, although it took him at least three tries per foot, even though he was sitting down. He went through the bottom two shelves fairly thoroughly, especially given his state.

He was sweating lightly now, and the urge for getting another hit was beginning to make itself known. However, he was focused enough on finding his pants—and subsequently Hermione’s wand—that he could ignore it, for now.

He realized with a dreadful feeling, most likely tied into his need for the Fless, that his pants weren’t on the bottom two shelves, and he was going to have to pull himself up a bit farther to see into the top shelf.

He clambered his way up, standing in what could most closely be described as a hunched over position, much like the form that miners find themselves working in for several hours at a time.

Now upright, sweat dripping into his eyes, burning them slightly, he just reached in and grabbed things at random, with the vague hope of sorting through the pile when he was back on the ground once more.

There wasn’t anything left on the shelf, not that he could see at least. Wearily satisfied that he had completed his most recent objective, he sunk slowly on to his cracked and bleeding knees once more. He went through nearly the entire pile before finding a pair that he thought he recognized. The pants were a bit worn out, because they had previously been Percy’s.

Because the twins had a giant growth spurt last summer where they just passed right over my height, he thought to himself as his brain began wandering away once more.

Quickly, he pulled them on over his bare rump. He didn’t know where his underwear was, nor did he care. He now was wearing black school slacks over mismatched socks. With a literal jump, he reached into his pocket, his fingers searching blindly for the wand.

He had nearly pulled the pocket inside out before he realized that he was looking in the wrong pocket. He felt desperation beginning to fill him as he reached inside his other pocket.

Suddenly cool relief washed over him as his fingers grasped the smooth wood of the wand. It tingled its reception to him, obviously as glad as he was at being reunited.

Looking up, he noticed that the room was growing smaller by the minute as his need grew under his skin. He looked down and was surprised to see himself wearing pants.

These will get in the way of fucking, his brain gibbered at him idiotically.

He had to get them off. He had to—wait, where’s Blaise? His feverish mind was jumping around wildly now. He looked up towards where Blaise was lying, and walked directly there, completely oblivious to the blood squelching in his odd looking socks. Having made it there, miraculously without stepping on anyone, he looked down at the dark skinned boy with desire and almost love tinged in his brightly delirious eyes. He kneeled down beside him, ready to wake him up for more of what they both needed, when his eyes made contact with the cloth thing covering his lower half.

He looked down at them, his face scrunching up as he tried to determine their purpose for appearing on his body. Without thinking, he reached to unbutton the clasp on them, but stopped, completely dumbfounded at seeing a wand tightly clasped in his fingers.

The wand meant something. He thought that he had known that at one point, long ago. He scratched his face, leaving bloody smears wherever his fingertips had touched.

It’s not mine, he thought stupidly. The thought was an important one. His mother had gotten the message across to him more than once that stealing was very wrong, and should he ever find something of someone else’s, then he was to return it immediately.

But I don’t know who it belongs to! He thought wildly, wishing that she were there to help him.

Who’s she? He thought vaguely to himself after another moment of wide-eyed staring at the wand that was somehow still in his hand.

And then a minute later, he had a thought about how to fix the problem.

Hermione would know. Hermione would know. He continued repeating the thought in his head, as he staggered across the room, instinctively heading for the bathroom.

He looked over to the far wall, only to be met with the sight of a floo entrance in the badly lit, dingy excuse for a washroom. He walked in squishy socks across the dirty floor, leaving bloody sock prints behind him. In turn, his socks seemed to pick up some of the grime from the floor, actually giving him a bit of traction as he went. It certainly didn’t detract any from his tortured looking figure.

Absentmindedly, he reached for where the floo powder almost always was, grabbed some of the powder, which luckily was there, and threw it into the grate in front of him.

The greenish flames distracted him for nearly too long as he soon could not remember what he was doing, let alone where he was going.

Suddenly he saw that he was holding something in his hand and he looked down, promptly amazed to be holding such a pretty wand.

Hermione knows what to do. The thought came to him unbidden, and when he looked back at the green flames once more, he now had something to say to.

“Take me to where Hermione Granger is.” He said, half falling, half walking into the ubiquitous and familiar flames associated with traditional wizarding travel.

Although his request was less than a standard instruction, it still managed to work for the boy. Perhaps the floo itself took pity on the boy; perhaps the magic was able to recognize the absolute desperation that was running rampant through his mind and body as he made his request. All they knew afterwards, as they were slowly trying to make sense out of what had happened, was that although it had worked, it should not have.

Ron was belched out into a classroom that would have been familiar to him, only days before. Now however, he saw very little in front of him in his blind desire to find Hermione. He missed the look of absolute shock and horrified dismay over the state of his appearance, as well as his entrance, that suddenly appeared on every one of his classmate’s shocked faces. He didn’t hear Professor McGonagall’s voice proclaiming with obvious relief over his being alive.

Instead, he walked resolutely into the middle of the room, still leaving those same bloody footprints behind him—only now they were mixed with grime and soot—and turned towards a girl on the front row, a girl with large front teeth and bushy brown hair.

He turned his wildly distraught looking eyes onto her face and opened his cracked and openly bleeding lips, obviously preparing to speak, even as he swayed unsteadily before her.

“I need to find Hermione. Can you help me find her?” He croaked out roughly, oblivious to the bloody spit that had emerged at the corners of his mouth by the end of his two sentences. He continued to look at her, even as obvious confusion appeared on his face at her silence and closed eyes.

As for Ron, his eyes had already begun losing focus before her body ever hit the floor, unconscious from shock.