Death Eater Dreams

There is a window and there is not a window. There is dust which gleams. No shadows. Swallowed up somewhere in the dark places. (Everywhere.)

Pleasepleaseplease.

Whispers no one listens to. He hates the walls which are hard and his throat like sandpaper. Forgets how to scream. Hands torn up, scratching against cement and metal and the sharpness of the bars. He wishes his neck could fit between those bars. No. There is no wishing anymore.

December is bleeding into all the cracks. Cold cuts him to pieces. His hands, his heart, grow hard.

He plays Beethoven and Mozart on the piano. He doesn't move to do it. The piano is just a dead thing, stains him. Decays under his fingers, becomes dark matter. Is gone. Is gone. Is gone.

Don't think about what is gone. So he feels everything that still is. Runs his palms over those walls, delicately, careful, it's breakable, it's art. Every night, if it is night. He will pound them later with his fist because it is a routine. He is safe if he does it. It is not a dream. He wakes up happy sometimes. Soon he will lose that ability.

January forgets him there. He forgets himself and the words sitting broken in his lungs. Beauty. God. And Love. His mouth is a congealment of false hopes and blood. No need to open, anymore. Deadbolts, resistant to everything. And Alohamora comes away empty. He wipes the grease on his robes-like, but he would kill for grease and robes now.

In February he will be a skeleton lying tangled on stone. Now he is an angel drifting like a white ghost, with a softness which fades quietly among harsh angles and geometry. He is not sure whether in the blackness his eyes are still blue-gray which maybe doesn't exist at all. There are drifting echoes. He listens to them and finds it is his own breath, tries not to breathe, falls asleep instead. When he awakens he is blank.

It is not that he does not dream. He does, fills his eyelids with light and everything he wishes to forget.

September says I love you. Watches him sleep beside gods, finds something to live for. (He loses it in November.) His palms are soft and searching under whiteness of cotton, pressing into folds. He feels like laying here forever. Curled up invisible. Except for to him, his lips smiling across mirrors, into dreams.

James. Stay with me. Always.

There is a war outside but inside there is just heat. Just skin and hair and fingernails, entwined for something like an eternity. They hope for amnesia but do not want it. What they want is summed up in this barren room with the gray mattress. Expressed in the stains on the sheets.

Lucius doesn't remember. Doesn't remember October except that his hair grows long and in November when the snow falls his blood dries fast on the floor. He wakes up cold to a bleakness when James speaks and everything is frozen after that. Choked by ice. He never wants to wake up again.

Goodbye. (Softly.) I don't love you anymore.

Now there are red lights that consume him while he is gasping and out of reach. He doesn't think March will come, but it does. He hates what is inevitable. Wants to weep. The arms which coax him are not soft. He gags at the stink of vomit on his lips and the fingers which touch him now like caterpillars crawling through his bones.

He doesn't care much about the pain on his forearm. Isn't surprised at the mess of black, the crude skull. He feels ugly forever, everywhere, but he learns to forget the bruises on his knees and the feel of rough hands pulling at his skull. Now and then when he dreams James says, I lied to you, kisses quietly his eyelashes, saves him from this evil that leeches into his skin.

He doesn't know that James is already dead when he dreams,

I have loved you always.