Holly Berries

They reach for my throat with bony grey fingers that rip out a tortured scream, the sheets tangling with my legs as I tumble ungracefully onto the floor. It seems I can hardly sleep anymore without the nightmares.

For the first time this week I am glad my roommates are gone, glad to be spared from their worried glances and smothering concern, grateful to nurse my bruised hip in private. My skin prickles at the sudden loss of the bed's warmth, the hairs on my arms and legs standing up with the cold.

A shiver runs down my spine as I untangle my sheets, pulling them around me like a cloak. It was cold in my dream too.

At night I can still hear the voices, calling me from beyond the veil. Their words are garbled, as if shouted through water or over a long, long distance and I find myself leaning toward them in response.

Sometimes I lean too far and they pull me with them, their faces angry and their fingers sharp, accusing. I wake up gasping or screaming, tears burning in my eyes.

Dressed in red striped pajamas, hair mussed from sleep, they always ask me if it's Voldemort as they peer, worried, at my face. I mumble something about tests tomorrow and pull the curtains shut. Buried in my thick red sheets I trace the gold trim until I can no longer keep my eyes open. I am becoming afraid to sleep.

Tonight I realize it's not even midnight as I struggle to stand, fumbling a hand for my glasses and snapping the world into focus. Garlands are draped around the room, garish in red and gold, reminding me that it's Christmas; still Christmas eve.

Everyone else is gone for the holidays - gone home - and I can't help but wonder if I would have spent Christmas with Sirius, if he hadn't died that is. I wonder what it would feel like to spend Christmas with a family who loves you, to spend Christmas in a home.

I don't think it's fair that everyone is taken away from me. I don't think it's fair that the boy-who-lived has to be the boy-who's-lonely, I don't think it's fair that I sit, shivering in a cold and empty Hogwarts on Christmas eve.

Even Malfoy went home for Christmas, and I find that this makes me angry - angry enough to knock a large collection of animated Quidditch statues onto the floor. A few of them shatter, the oddly shaped pieces flying as I watch with muted interest. I flick my wand to put them back together and realize that fixing them didn't feel nearly so good as breaking them. I break them again.

Tiny, twitching arms and legs crunch under my feet as I walk to my trunk. The hinges squeak a bit as I open the heavy lid and feel around to the bottom. My hand touches silk and I tug, my father's invisibility cloak a shiny ripple as it moves through the near darkness.

It feels strangely warm around my shoulders, the hood falling over my face and the hem lightly brushing the floor. I am little more than a breeze as I travel through the abandoned corridors hung with evergreen and lights.

My eyes catch the shine of a mirror and I turn to look through myself. In the quiet hours between evening and dawn it is all too easy to pretend I have never existed.

I let my thoughts run, realizing that if I never existed my parents would still be alive, Cedric would still be alive, Sirius would still be alive. If I never existed I wouldn't be the boy-who-lived-to-inevitibally-fail. I wouldn't be everyone's hopes, everyone's dreams, I wouldn't be their savior, their martyr.

Is it so bad to wish I was someone else? Anyone else? Is it so bad to wish that the prophecy was wrong? That I was someone who could fade away into blissful anonymity? Is it so bad to wish that the weight of this war wasn't silently, reverently, placed on my head like a barbed wire crown that I'm supposed to be proud of?

I'm not quite sure where I'm going as I wander through the silent halls. I'm not quite sure that it matters. I think that perhaps I just need to go somewhere instead of sitting here waiting for capricious fate to call. I think perhaps I just need to go anywhere.

I think Tahiti would be lovely for Christmas.

I find I have wandered, inexplicably, into the dungeons and paused in front of what I faintly remember from some foiled plot or another as the Slytheryn common room. I have a sudden urge to try and guess their password. Could it be 'Deatheater youth forever'? Or perhaps 'Die Mudblood Scum'. 'All I want for Christmas is Harry Potter 's Dead Body' has a rather nice ring to it too.

I walk on, still musing, wondering what the Slytheryns who hate me so much would have said if I had listened to the sorting hat, if I , the golden-fucking-boy extrodinaire, had sat one of the arrogant few. I wonder what would have been different; what corpses would still breathe and what living men would be dead.

I think of Cedric because he is the only real corpse I know and his frozen face is burned into my mind. I try to breathe the color back into his pale skin, to erase the fear and surprise that contorts his features and fills his eyes. Cedric was beautiful in life, but in death he is simply dead, and I find that nothing I can do will make him beautiful again. His eyes are so eternally cold.

Their frigid blue that bores into my skull reminds me of Malfoy, and I think that unlike Cedic, who was beautiful in life, Malfoy would be beautiful in death. More than beautiful, he would be stunning, exquisite, perfect. His pale skin, paler, his blue eyes, colder, and of course that mouth would be silent. No more Mudblood, Weasel, Potter, Potter, Potter - what perfection he could not quite reach with life he would find with death.

I wonder if someday I will kill him. Kill him like I imagine I will kill his father. Kill him like I imagine I will kill, as expected, each and every deatheater. Kill him to save the world in my barbed wire crown with the little children praising me like a god and cursing me like a man. Because I am neither - I am their boy-who-lived.

I wonder if someday he will kill me first.

I wonder if the world would hate me for it.

My feet have taken me back to the Gryffindor tower and I whisper the password on little more than an exhale of breath. I let my father's cloak slide down into a shimmering puddle of nothing with the still twitching broken quidditch stars on the dormitory floor. I will have time to find it later. I crawl into bed, pulling the covers up to my chin.

I search for the answers to all my questions in the patterns on the ceiling as I take off my glasses. I tell myself it wasn't supposed to be like this. I wasn't supposed to kill. I wasn't supposed to want to kill. And good and evil were supposed to be as clearly defined as red and green: Christmas colors. Lately they've been bleeding together.

I stare at the ceiling until my vision goes blurry and my eyes become heavy. I am both too tired to stay awake and too afraid to sleep - to sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub, for in that sleep what dreams may come. Is is wrong to be afraid to die, yet wish for it? Long for it? Dream it?

In the indistinguishable hours before morning I lay awake. Because even on Christmas eve I can not sleep.