Rain. Thundering, stormy rain. The night was threateningly black, hardly dissipated in areas by dim streetlights. The hot, heavy breath of the Earth stifled the air, the forceful rain pounded the pavements, pouring in freezing sheets that evaporated the moment they hit the furnace-like roads. The entrance of St Mungo's was quiet, deceptively so. At the witching hour of midnight, Nature was in turmoil, but the Wizarding world was silent. Or maybe only the surface was calm, the interior brimming with things that were best left unsaid, deeds better left undone.
In that tempestuous night, through the glass display of a dilapidated brick-work building, the hidden entrance of the most famous Wizarding Hospital, a figure darted out. It was a mere silhouette in the darkest of nights, a figure which ran and ran on the slippery pavements like the very hounds of the Devil were after him, then twisted in mid-air and disappeared with a pop.
Albus didn't know where he was. He didn't care. All he knew was that, wherever, wherever he had Apparated, it was far away from the hospital. And it was still raining. The rain, hot and cold, merciless, beat down on his arms like a frenzied sprite, poured down his sleeves, drenched his socks, scoured his face. Salty trails, running down his cheeks mingled with the rain and flowed freely. Albus lifted up his face to the heavens, willing the dirt, the grime, the sickness to be scoured away by the purifying acid, the rain. But it was no use. The nausea twisted and curled in his stomach like a furious Basilisk, and Albus could hold it in no longer. His dark hair whipped in the rain as he fell to his knees and retched, black bile clawing up his throat and forced to the ground. He vomited till the pain receded, till the nausea stopped, till the world stopped spinning wildly before him. But the images were burned on the back of his eyelids, and try as he would, the fresh waves of sickness and nausea hit him again, and again, till his stomach cried in protest, till the vomit was food no more, but pure water and bile.
His knees were digging painfully into the stone pavement, his hands in a claw-like grip. The world was a mere blur. The stench burning his throat and nostrils was intolerable. His ears could hear nothing, not footsteps, not words, not voices. His limbs were shaking. But Albus stayed, kneeling, in the pouring rain. It wasn't that he didn't want to get up. It was more of how he couldn't. Not anymore. Never again.