Reverie

Amaranth

Story Summary:
The air is thick with the dreams of dreamers, Hogwarts students past and present. In the darkest part of the night, guards are let down, truths are faced and sweet denial is bliss. Desperation, fear, hate, lust, love and what might have been are rampant at the midnight hour.

Chapter 01

Posted:
05/06/2006
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313


A cruel November wind pounds against the great stonewalls of Hogwarts. Icy drafts seep through the unplottable walls and whistle against the time-aged pane glass windows. The night sky is dark, the moon and stars victim to the cloud that veils them.

On the surrounding grounds the womping willow sways its powerful boughs to a tune it alone hears on the wind. It feels the joy and loss that has been felt on the earth it grows in, the laughter, anger, love and tears shed in all its years of existence. Above everything, its roots and core violently protective of the secret it covers as memories of a dog, deer, wolf and rat cling to its weathered bark.

Far from Hogwarts, Remus Lupin feels its force tugging at him, even in sleep. In his dreams he hears the thundering footsteps of a deer's gait, the soft pad of a shiny black dog and the scratching of a treacherous rat. Instinctively he reaches for the warm body beside him in the narrow bed. Tonks lies in her lover's arms. She does not sleep. His crushed spirit and broken soul are too heartbreaking to turn from. He cries out to his two dead best friends, and clutches her like a drowning man at a straw. All night she watches him, the troubles, fear and loneliness he hides from her in waking life, revealed in the deepest part of the night. She presses her body against his, longing to ease his pain, knowing she cannot. By morning dark rings mar the milky skin beneath her eyes.

Peter Pettigrew sleeps the slumber of the damned. He feels the hatred of Harry Potter and his former friend Remus Lupin like icy blades against his skin. The faces of James and Lily Potter haunt him and the wrath of Sirius Black chills him from beyond the grave. With one eye and ear always open, sleep is never respite and the snakelike eyes he has pledged himself to seem to see even into his dreams. In his stolen snatches of sleep Peter dreams of his Hogwarts days, in the golden hue of memory Remus, James, Sirius and he lie beside the lake their heads and hearts filled with dreams of the future. His silver arm twitches beneath his head, and so, his penance. The golden light fades and as the dream Peter asks his friends, 'what will you lot do when school's finished' the trio stand and face him.

'I'll be murdered, with my wife, trying to protect our son. And in those last few moments I'll hate you with the intensity I'll love my family'. James.

'I'll serve your sentence, and not a day will pass where I won't wish you dead'. Sirius.

'I'll watch you die, and think death too good for you.' Remus. Harry. James. Lily. Sirius.

In his dreams the sins Peter Pettigrew has committed in life catch up with him until the harsh kick of a leather boot draws him from slumber, reminding him just how long ago his Hogwarts days were.

A potions classroom is cloaked in darkness. Glass jars filled with unsavoury ingredients line the walls. Light, from a small flickering candle in a far corner, casts flickering shadows and the jars glow eerily down at the room's sole occupant. A boy who knows he should not be there. The boy shifts nervously and pulls his cloak tighter around his body. Beside him on a battered desk lie an assortment of potions ingredients in time worn phials. A small cauldron simmers over a smaller flame, changing colour as each ingredient falls into the swirling liquid.

Time, ever fickle, seems to slow or stop in the room. Or perhaps, to have never began. The patterns that repeat themselves to exhaustion, merge as one. Converging at this crucial point. The cloak the boy draws around himself is two cloaks, of different cut. One expensive fabric, delicate stitching and a golden clasp. The second, or the first, more drab and worn. Two desperate men from two different times unknowingly and unwittingly united in their desperation. Unaware of all that separates and binds them, one leading, the other following, oblivious.

Their movements so akin that, had the decades that separated them slipped away, had the veil of time that hung so thinly between them dropped, they would have been indistinguishable. Yet, as they simultaneously reach across their cauldrons the sickly glow of the concocting potion illuminates their features. Two extremes are exposed in the sickly glow. Smooth silver blonde strands of hair mock those of greasy black and grey eyes juxtapose pools of darkness. And, bringing the two together as kin, the look of desperation they share. An unquenchable and insatiable need burning brightly in eyes of black and grey. A hunger that cannot be satisfied, even as an auburn strand is added with a final flourish to the steaming brew.

Inside the thick strong walls, serving, throughout its eons of existence, as fortress, prison and haven to many, the rest of Hogwarts sleeps. The dreams of dreamers sailing through the heavy air, as they had done for centuries, as far back as the beginning of time.

Ron Weasley lays upon a canopied bed, dreaming of castles in the sky and a princess that will never be his, held captive by an evil curse. Hermione Granger shares his dream. She sits bound to a chair in a high tower, waiting for a red headed knight to save her. Thorns grow thick and fast, impenetrable to the frantic knight's desperate struggle. The princess sees his vain attempts; she longs to tell him there is a secret path, free from thorn, curse and dragon. Her fruitless cries fall upon deaf ears. He cannot hear her. He is ignoring her, she thinks, too stubborn, and too proud, to listen to her advice. The thorns pierce his skin, temper lost he swings madly at the wall of vines, all sense of reason gone in his desperation to reach his princess. Frustration mounts, thorns grow twice as fast as he can scythe them. In the real world, in another canopied bed, Neville Longbottom knocks a book from his nightstand, clumsy even in sleep. The noise stirs Ron Wealsey, and he falls out of dream, remembering nothing but anger and frustration at his bushy haired friend.

Minerva McGonagall laments the loss of Albus Dumbledore in her dreams. Nightmares plague her as the image of the dead professor hovers beneath her weary eyes. Unable to speak she cries out to him silently in the darkness. A threatening shadow hovers behind him, the black eyes she has seen so often peering over a brewing potion, circle the ageing professor. In vain she tries to warn him. The dream Dumbledore looks away from her and turns his back, something he had never done in life, and the twinkling of his eye that had so characterised his being seemed somehow dulled. His absence when she awakes more penetrating than his presence had ever been.

High in Gryffindor tower a sheet of crimson hair spills over onto a woolen blanket. Despite the frigid air the girl's cheeks glow and her dark lashes flutter as if she watches dancing figures behind her lidded eyes. The girl both is and isn't Ginny Weasley. Image super imposed upon image. Her hair both curly and straight, her features shifting, freckles realigning. Only the Gods, ghosts and true seers see what is there. Two girls lie, decades apart in this same bed, both beautiful and both good. The silvery threads of time between them are thick and binding, connecting the two sisters of the heart fated never to meet, doomed to remain unaware of all that connects them. Their dreams fill the night air, heroes, love and freedom dancing through their minds, misty with sleep. And at the centre of everything a dark haired boy, his hair messy, muscles taught and eyes always turned away. Neither is aware that a strand of their hair has been taken, thieved in a boy's moment of mad desperation. Far from where they lie, beneath dirt and stone, a single hair is added to an illicit potion. Heroes, love and freedom fade into dust and the dark haired boy is replaced. A boy who bears the stain of evil enters the girls' open minds. In their dreams the boy whispers in their ears, his voice chilling and enticing, but when his hands touch their bodies Ginny Weasley and Lilly Evans awake to find that it is their own fingertips that have caused the sweat to bead on their foreheads, their pulse to quicken and desire to throb through their veins. And the image, unbidden, of a boy forbidden hovers behind their eyes.

The midnight hour strikes as Draco Malfoy stands in shadow. Waiting. The air is thick with magic as he pulls the stopper from a time worn phial and pours it sordid contents down his reluctant throat. A girl approaches him and though he grimaces, and his skin repels at her touch, he pulls her close. His teeth graze her throat and his hands bruise her skin. Unceremoniously he ravages her. Self-loathing, sickened and hard. Hating her, hating himself, even as she bucks against him and cries out his name. As he strides out the school's heavy gates, he knows the fruitlessness of his actions. Again, he has been trying to quench his insatiable thirst with seawater.

A blonde boy skirts the Forbidden Forest's edges, as he passes a thatched hut it occupants stir as one, feeling his menace, protective of their protector. Hagrid lies inside the hut, beneath a patchwork quilt, unaware of the respect he commands. As the creatures of the forest return to slumber and prowl, he falls into dream. Hagrid dreams of a man he towers over and is dwarfed by. The man sits on his shoulder at a table they share with an olive skinned woman, a dragon, an arachnid and a silvery bearded man. Feeling the warmth of the firewhisky they have consumed, Hagrid is momentarily content, forgetting, for now, the threat of the man who was once called Riddle.

Harry Potter dreams in black and white. He is always running, wand outstretched, his best friends on either side. Vengeance lends him speed. For his parents, for Cedric, for Sirius, for Dumbledore and for himself he leaves behind him the girl he cannot love, intent on pursuing the man he cannot forgive.

Close by sleeps another boy. Unaware that a mere twist of fate is all that separates him from Harry Potter. Neville Longbottem does not recall his dreams, but in the deepest part of the night, they play out showing a world that could have been. At times he bears a lightening bolt-shaped scar upon his forehead and speaks in a strange to tongue to a slippery reptile. Sometimes he is not his shy, clumsy self; he is respected, loved, famous. St. Mungos trips are replaced with graveside visits. In other scenes, he himself does not exist, the world is dark and afraid. A prophecy he knows nothing about has been fulfilled and while he does not live another survives.

Luna Lovegood sobs and sings herself to sleep. Not far from her, Cho Chang wonders what she should've changed. High in Gryffindor tower Dean Thomas detangles himself from a pretty girls' sheets and makes his way back to his own bed, oblivious of the dorm mate who watches him, angry and resentful, through lowered lashes. Pansy Parkinson examines the dark bruises that taint her pallid skin, her beady eyes narrowing at her reflection that still breathes erratically and feels her skittish pulse beating in her ears as she lowers herself into her bed.

As dawn approaches the dreamers slowly pull themselves from slumber. The invisible bonds between sleep and dream star to fray. As eyes of blue, brown, green and grey blink back the light of day the connection fades, images forgotten.

As Hogwarts wakes, the exiled Draco Malfoy withdraws a second phial from his deep pocket, and swallows the potion for a dreamless sleep, aching for the few hours of respite it provides.