Dance of the Shadows

Dance of the Shadows

The shadows they do dance as if they own the world

They plague, they destroy, they walk without fear.

Nothing can stand up to them, everything crumbles before them.

Their dance does poison even the strongest loves.

~~~~

He watched the drip hovering on the ledge before falling slowly and gracefully to bounce off the concrete floor in front of him, smashing from its fluid state into a collection of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, scattered, without form. Like his thoughts.

They came in dribs and drabs, some screaming of children here, some Peter in the alley there, and lots and lots of James, Lily and Remus, always seeming to return to those hurt amber eyes the day he told him about the Willow. Always those eyes.

He tried to fight and he had some success, but sometimes all he could do was give in, if only for a second. Fighting all the time was much too hard. He had never been strong, never. Never the strong one people thought he was. Only one person has seen that.

He didn't know how long his time had passed like this; hours, days, years even. He had tried to keep count at the beginning but now it had all run together, one long emotional rollercoaster, one that had no mercy, never ended and which kept you screaming forever.

He felt their presence outside, their presence in his head, shadows that loomed dark and foreboding through his conscious thought like a plague. He wondered, if he truly gave in, not just for a minute but for all time, whether they would go. He doubted it. He would just no longer be able to feel them there, winding their ethereal fingers through his head, invading, destroying and poisoning. It would be a freedom of sorts, freedom from perceiving their dark trail. He understood why people let go, but he couldn't, and wouldn't, he needed to suffer, and what he was feeling now would never be enough. The thought of real freedom, of leaving this pit, was one that was also there, but one buried so deep down that more often than not he hardly perceived it.

There were bright spots, if one could call them that. He had come to see the different shades of darkness, for it was not all the same. Some times were worse than others. At the moment it was a less dark shade, he could still form coherent thoughts, he couldn't hear his screams. Things had seemed to stop in this place of despair, if only for a moment.

A moment was all he wanted.

He hid things, if one could hide their memories. There were some he would never let them have and he had locked them away subconsciously, only ever letting them flick across his brain on one of the lighter times and only daring to think more about them at the very light moments. There had been very few of those. He could count them on the fingers of one of his now gnarled hands.

He sat himself straight up against the stone wall, liking the solidity against his back, sitting cross-legged, and put his head back and closed his eyes. Only a moment.

He found it, one of the ones he would never let go. It was a simple memory, but one which meant all the more to him just because of one man's presence in it. He remembered how the soft brown hair had always fallen over his pale face and how he had always reached up with one of those supremely perfect hands to brush it back. He remembered the feel of those same hands against his cheek, and how as they cupped his face they had stroked the under-side of his chin. He remembered how he used to smile, that fucking gorgeous smile, and how a raised eyebrow always accompanied it, arched to perfection. He remembered the lips and how they would caress his skin and how it would feel to lie in his arms, nestled against his chest, breathing in that maddening scent. It was paradise.

His thoughts turned to the eyes, truly windows into a beautiful soul, but it was there that he stopped. He felt them again, the dark menace slowly spreading, invading. He hid it away quickly but they latched upon that last image and started to replay those same eyes layered with pain, disbelief and heartbreak.

He was once again engulfed in shadow, one that was not to let go of him for days.

~~~~~~

He awoke suddenly, the sheets twisted around him and his body covered in sweat. He knew what he had dreamed, he no longer denied what it was, and it was un-mistakeable. It had been four years of his life. Four un-parallelled years of his life. One did not simply forget.

It angered him that he still dreamed of it, that it still gave him a tingle of pleasure before he realised what it was. That truly debauched smile and those divine lips, they plagued him. He knew what he felt but would not, could not, acknowledge it. To admit that he still loved him? Insane.

He only dreamed of him occasionally. At odd moments, making no sense except perhaps to the Dementors of Azkaban, though he was never to know that. They came un-announced, gatecrashers in his dream world, toying with his thoughts.

They were a mixture of light and dark. The moment itself was light, almost, but that which followed was of the inkiest black. The light almost comforted him, embraced him and told him that things would be all right in the end, but it was always fleeting, quickly snatched away like a mother who has suddenly noticed the dangerous implement her small child is holding in his hands.

For Remus Lupin also felt the shadows, and the shades of darkness which they brought. The shadows that plagued the two unjustly divided and tormented lovers.

The small instances of light splattered against a dark foreboding emotional canvas... like the stars.

~~~~

And the shadows danced on.