Silhouettes

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Silhouettes

By Sam I Am

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I have never felt more alive as I do tonight. I can feel every blood cell squeezing into my heart, every thought whispering through my brain, every molecule of air filling my lungs... I have never felt so alive and it's all because of you.

I have been sat at this window all night, most of yesterday too. Now I look out at the wilderness that is my back garden, lit as the chilly November sun rises in its arc across the sky. My house is plunged in darkness; I haven't even lit the fire. Cold gloom surrounds me, but my body heat does not just seep away into the void. My heart continues beating, my muscles shivering, my whole body retaining a constant temperature.

I am alive and it's the worst feeling in the world.

Today's the day when dreaming ends. Every hope I held for my life ended in a terribly abrupt way within the past 24 hours. You taught me to hope for an existence that a werewolf never could've dreamed of. You told me that I deserved a good life, a happy life, no matter who I was. Then you shattered my optimistic world and left me in the wreckage.

I used to believe in love. I believed that love could conquer everything. That the inconceivably powerful love I held for my comrades, my friends, you... that that tremendous love would survive all obstacles.

You made me believe that you loved me.

I wonder if you've been designing this day all along. I wonder if this was how you wanted things to turn out. I think it hasn't turned out quite how you planned, but then again, I can't tell with you. I don't know you anymore and I wonder if I really knew you in the first place. I didn't know you would be capable of this... this horrific crime. But I do know that if what you did didn't turn out the way you wanted it to, it would probably be the first time one of your schemes wasn't perfect.

God, is this just a prank?! Another of your infallible practical jokes?! I desperately want you to burst through the door and laugh that deep barking laugh of yours, saying it was all made-up, a despicable hoax at my expense. I would tell you how much I hate you for making an awful joke out of something so terrible, but you'd realise I wasn't really that annoyed with you. Really, I'd just be relieved your deception wasn't real.

But that's not the person you are anymore. You've changed since school. Now you're nothing more than a silhouette of yourself. Pale, insubstantial and shadowy.

If I was to see you now, stood on the edge of the forest bordering my garden, you'd be no more real or distinct than the sheets of fog blurring everything through my window.

You became a completely different person, not like the boy I remember. The boy who used to act like an inquisitive puppy, constantly chasing his tail, although never wearing down any of that boundless energy. Even though you became so distant, so sober, I still loved you. You changed, but I didn't, I couldn't; I have always been hopelessly head-over-heels about you since those exciting years at school. Those glorious years when I finally found the place that a misfit like me could belong.

It wasn't Hogwarts; I realised that the school wasn't where I really belonged the day we left. My place was at your side in our group of loyal friends.

We had all planned to live together after school. Of course, in the end, you and I were the only ones who wanted to stick to this plan. The others wanted to share apartments with their girlfriends and I was so surprised you didn't. You said that, in a way, you were going to be sharing an apartment with the person you loved. You said that you'd felt that way for almost longer than I had. You said you loved me in a different way to our other two friends and I believed you.

But you were always a convincing liar, especially when you wanted to get someone into bed. And I was a fool to believe.

I feel a sigh escape me, warm breath coating the frosty glass before me in a dim film, a soft grey haze just like the mist whispering through the long brown grass outside.

I should've realised it was too good to be true. You actually settling down with someone was shocking enough. Let alone that that someone was me. I had so little to offer and you had so much that it just seemed impossible, especially due to my 'problem'. I'd never thought I'd find someone who would love me despite all that. In those naive blissful days, I was convinced that what we had was special.

But I am a creature of the Underworld, I can't afford to love. Love can so easily be turned against a person, let alone a person like me. I was so desperate to be wanted, to have someone who would stick by me that I let love control me, sway me, dull my perceptions. Because I loved you so blindly, they are dead...

For the first few years, our young passionate relationship made us inseparable, you and I. It was like a dream, like a romanticised novel of swashbuckling princes and unimaginable evil. We fought alongside each other, lived with each other, slept with each other...

We all became especially closer after leaving school even though the camaraderie and strong bonds in our friendship fell under strain. We were all moving on with our lives, but they were still so strongly entwined by affection and faithfulness that instead of falling apart, we all shared the weight together. We were like a snowball rolling down a hillside. No matter how much baggage we all picked up in those dark years of war, we just seemed to become more solid, more compact, more powerful.

Why didn't I realise a year ago that as we gathered more and more problems we were speeding up, moving faster and faster towards disintegration? If I had, I wonder if things would've been different. I wonder if I could've stopped you, if not from starting all this, at least from finishing it, shattering our close-knit circle of friends with blood.

But here we are and you and I are still bonded together. No longer because we are best friends, or because we are living together, or because we are lovers. But because now we are all that's left of what was once our tightly compacted snowball. We are the irregular clump of melting ice crystals in wintry sunlight, casting its incomplete shadow on the ground, no longer a perfect sphere, but ragged and broken.

Neither of us are whole anymore and yet we are still fused together tightly at the centre. We will remain that way as bit by bit we lose more and more of ourselves to the cruel sun, but in the core of the icy mass, we will always be interwoven... Till death do us part...

Now that seems like such a bitter sentence.

My body is so warm and full of life. Every cell working at a usual rate, every organ functioning properly... only the amount of adrenaline mingled with my hot blood seems strange. The adrenaline makes me feel more unbearably 'living' than ever. It's unbearable because I can still see those two cold dead bodies and that severed blood-stained finger lying in St. Mungo's Morgue, their life seeped away from their bodies like the heat that refuses to leave mine.

I press my own pale clean fingers to my bony wrist, searching out the blood vessel beneath the skin. And I feel that torturous pulse, every beat mocking my pain with its constancy.

Did you leave me alive on purpose? Through pity or cruelty? You know that I cannot kill myself; the beast within my mind won't allow it, despite its own suffering at the loss of its mate. You could've killed me though. A killing curse would've been simplest, but you didn't even bestow such a painless end on our inept friend and those helpless muggles in your mad massacre. Perhaps you could've killed me with a classic silver dagger through the heart if you really wanted to complete the analogy of stabbing me in the back. Then again knowing you, you probably would've invented a completely original way to commit murder.

It would've been so easy for you to apparate immediately after blowing up that London street, but instead, you just waited for the Aurors to arrive. You just waited... You didn't even try to find me and kill me, so I can only assume that that was not part of your strategy. Then again I doubt Voldemort's destruction was either.

Yes, you must've given me a spiteful reprieve. I guess that's why you were laughing when they took you in. You always laughed at your own jokes.

So many dead and yet I am left alive, a sole witness to what you've done. The only person in our world not out celebrating the destruction of Voldemort. Because those I loved are dead and you died along with them. You're dead to me leastways.

You are not the boy who defied his dark family to become a Gryffindor. You are not the boy who accepted me along with my curse without another word. You are not the boy who illegally became an animagus for me.

You are the man who ratted out his best friend's home, knowing you were sending him, his wife and his baby son, your godson, to their deaths. You are the man who blasted your other best friend from this life along with some innocent muggles, just because he stood up to you, just because for once he was foolish enough to not run and hide. You are the man who murdered that brilliant boy you once were, murdered the boy who I fell in love with.

I guess I should've realised sooner that blood really is thicker than water. I should've known that no matter which house you were sorted into, what friends you made, what you sacrificed for them, in the end, you would always be filled with dark blood. Black blood, so dark that it has reached a limit and could not become further steeped in wickedness if it tried.

I can't pinpoint the moment in time when you must have had your brilliant but dreadful idea. I didn't notice the usual signs. The glint of mischief and excitement in your grey eyes as you scribbled illegible notes onto a spare scrap of parchment. But, by the point you began this betrayal, I hadn't seen you do any of those things since our favourite stag's Stag Night.

But I do remember that gradually you began to push me away, ever since Dumbledore told the Order that there was a spy amongst us. I accepted your sudden need for distance, but I never expected it. Not from you. But the prejudice against people like me cannot be completely ignored by anyone.

I let you push me away; I let them push me away too. I realise now that it was all your doing. You must've warned them of your suspicions about my loyalty. I had been spending more time than usual with the other werewolves on Dumbledore's orders. With all the grace I could muster, I accepted that mistrust and wariness would always be my fate, even within such a devoted set of friend.

However, I refused to believe the rift would last forever. I figured that once the real spy was discovered, we could all go back to being best friends, no feelings of mistrust to tarnish our close family. I imagined I would reprimand you all for judging me to be a monster when you knew much better than to believe in such a stupid prejudice. They would all apologise for letting it come between us for the first time in our lives. And I would be able to come home to you again.

However, I'm still here. In this rickety shack that I could hardly call a home. I've been staying here since Harry's first birthday. That was three months ago. I left you all more willingly than I ever imagined I could. Dumbledore wanted me to go underground on a more permanent basis, to try and be a voice of reason for bloodthirsty werewolves or so I thought...

Of course, I never realised that there was a reason that that old lycanthropy prejudice had come back to haunt me once again. I didn't know then that you were fuelling that prejudice amongst the Order and amongst our friends. I was your cover-up. Dumbledore probably sent me on that mission because he didn't want me around to hear where our friends would next be moved to. He didn't want to give me the opportunity to betray their hiding place, whether I truly was the spy or not. People were watching my every move, whilst you got away with murder... quite literally.

People say: Things are not always as they seem.

Things are exactly as they seem. I realise that now. You were pushing me away and I should've realised that it wasn't because you believed I was the spy. You schemed to put me out of the picture because I was the only one who could've seen what you were doing. You made sure that people would be concentrating on me so that you could become the secret-keeper without anyone questioning your strange behaviour over those last few months.

No one suspected you. The incredibly loyal, brave, loving godfather of Harry Potter. They believed as I did that you were courageously and willingly putting your life on the line for your friends. You'd done it many times before to great effect.

Before today I never would've thought you capable of such horrific deceit. How long has this been your plan?! The Dark Lord did not know of the prophecy while we were at school or in fact until after the wedding. As I said before, the last time I remember you plotting in your familiar brilliant way was for the Stag Night. How long after that did Voldemort pull you into his service? How long were you and your master secretly plotting their deaths? What did he offer you that your truest friends, the man who loved you, could not?

I suppose it was the best day of his life when he realised you were perfectly placed to give him at least one of the possible 'Chosen One's.

But you didn't plan on his destruction. Love really conquered your Dark Lord. But as far as I know, the sacrifice our friends made for their special child was the last act of Love on this planet. Love has wilted as November has drawn in its bitter first days and it will never exist again, not to me anyway.

I'm now alone in this world. I still have friends, comrades, people whose trust in me has been renewed after recent events. I still have Harry although I may never see him again. He will never fully know what you have done. He will not have to suffer as I will. Harry will always have people who love him, appreciate him, support him.

But you took the people that should always have been here to love, appreciate and support me. You took them from Harry, me... and yourself.

You have a different group of friends now and most of them will be keeping you company with their screams in Azkaban. You destroyed your real friends. You took them from yourself too, although I guess that doesn't really matter to you anymore. You probably never really loved any of us anyway.

I press my scarred cheek to the smooth screen as I feel my body trembling with hateful energy. I refuse to cry. As of yet, I have not given you the satisfaction of breaking me.

I hate you with every fibre in my body. I hate you so much I want to scream, smash up my pitiful excuse for a house, go to Azkaban and kill you even if it means a life sentence there. At least that place is better than here. There the Dementors can make you forget all the happiness you've ever felt, make you lose your mind, make you forget that you're alive. I wish for nothing more than that.

I hate you for getting the easy punishment when you were the one that should suffer.

So much hate for one person. It doesn't seem possible, especially not from me, but then again, love and hate are one and the same, only separated by technicalities. And I love you more than I've ever loved anyone. So I hate you with the same force. That is how it works.

How can I be capable of such vicious hatred?! I have never felt hate in my life, not truly. But now it consumes me, fills me with a dark dense desire to kill that not even the wolf has ever stirred up within me.

And yet, I have an inexpressible amount of gratitude within me for what you've done. I desperately needed this day, this day of realisation and acceptance.

I lift myself from where I've been perched on the windowsill for so long. My bones are aching and stiff and I finally notice just how icy the thick air surrounding me is. I step towards the silhouettes of my few shabby pieces of furniture within the shadowy depths of the cottage, away from the cold light of daybreak.

I used to believe in love. I believed that love could conquer everything. That the inconceivably powerful love I held for my comrades, my friends, you... that that tremendous love would survive all obstacles...

So thank you, Sirius. Thank you for curing me of my ridiculous obsession with love.

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Just a quick one-shot for the Moulin Rouge Quote Challenge "Thank you for curing me of my ridiculous obsession with love." It took it a bit further by including a few other quotes from the film in there too. This piece just seemed to fit and I've always loved the film 'Moulin Rouge'. Besides, I had a slight bout of writer's block in my other Remus/Sirius fic and needed something to loosen me up a bit!

Anyway, hope you enjoyed! Please, pretty please, read and review! Sam x