Dreamwalk Blue: The Solitude Sessions

Session 1: Kind of Blue

For me, I'm gonna end this misery
My man has left me
And I can't face the music
Without singin' the blues


Albus came back from Albania without Jack.

They brought him back alone and bleeding, half-conscious and hallucinating. He'd been in the caves under Fier for more than a month.

June hardly recognized him. He was clean-shaven and too thin. They'd cut his hair, shaved it close to the skull in uneven strokes. She could see each bone in his hand outlined sharply beneath the skin. She took his hand anyway, sitting next to him in his hospital room. His eyes fluttered under blue-tinged lids, darting back and forth in some sort of dream state.

"You're not here," he said to her the first time he opened his eyes. "I wish you wouldn't do this to me. It isn't fair."

When he lapsed back into sleep, she went and found a healer.

"He's seeing things."

"Yes, he is," the healer said, making a note on a list and not looking up at her, "and no surprise, with as much opium as he's ingested over the past few weeks. It'll be awhile before he's anything approaching lucid again."

He recovered more quickly than anticipated, though, just in time for Jack Seward's funeral. It probably wasn't a coincidence.

She held his trembling hand as they buried an empty casket. He was still sick from the opium, pale and constantly shaken with tremors, but he insisted on being at the graveside, standing there and bearing witness for Jack.

It didn't rain during the service, but it did later that afternoon. The rain pounded against the window of June's bedroom while Albus pulled at the fastenings on her dress. She knew they shouldn't, not so soon, but something in her couldn't refuse him. Afterward, he went out into the rain and walked for more than an hour alone.

It was the start of a pattern. He either clung to her or pushed her away, depending on his mood, and his moods changed sharply, suddenly. He was mercurial but never cruel, he never raised his voice, he never hurt her feelings -- not on purpose. He had the eyes of a man who'd seen war, but she wanted to shake him hard and remind him that she'd seen it too.

"It's not the same thing," he said, the one time she was brave enough to speak the words out loud.

It wasn't the same. But she'd bled and cried and lost as much as he had. It wasn't the same, but it was equal.

They went on that way, though. They tried to go on. They walked through their lives, holding onto one another, sitting across from each another at meals, one waiting for the other at cafes and on the corners of London streets.

It wasn't enough.

She realized it suddenly one day, kneeling in her parents' garden beside her mother, and let the seedling she'd been helping to plant fall to the dirt.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, Mother," she said, fighting a sudden urge to cry. "Everything is just fine."

But, of course, it wasn't.

Eventually, gently, she tried to let him go. He begged her not to, and she said that maybe they just both needed some time.

He slammed the door when he left. And when he left, she walked into her bedroom and got her suitcase down from the closet shelf.

She resigned her post at the Ministry and took off traveling. She was aimless at first, wandering through Portugal, Spain, the south of France. The continent hadn't yet recovered from the war, though she was surprised to find pockets of life and color and joy in unexpected places.

It gave her hope.

Hayden eventually caught up with her in Gibraltar. He was sitting at her regular table in the hotel dining room, looking very tanned and pleased with himself, with an open bottle of Bordeaux and a pair of wine glasses.

"I got tired of waiting," he said.

"You were waiting?"

He stood up and pulled out her chair for her. "Shocking, isn't it?"

He sat back down and poured her a glass of wine. "I ordered a bottle. I hope that's all right."

"As though I would pick a fight with you over your choice of wine..." June shook her head. "What are you doing here?"

"As I said, I was tired of waiting. Two days ago I was sitting all alone at my club, and I realized how very, very dull things have been without you. So I went to see your mother, found out where you were staying and made my way here. Voila." He spread his hands wide and smiled at her. "I love the hotel, by the way. Lots of local color."

"It's a British hotel. It's not as though I've wandered off into the wilds of Morocco."

"It's a British hotel, but it's also a Muggle one." He winked at her. "You've gone native."

"Like you've never." The truth was, she wanted to be as far away from home, and anyone she might know, as possible.

"Drink your wine." He nodded in the direction of her glass. "I want your opinion. I think it's a little too earthy to go with the Chateaubriand."

The wine, of course, was perfectly fine. But as she told him so, June realized how much she'd actually missed him.

*

There were white tigers in Metis' head and sharp-beaked blackbirds in her hair.

Tom saw snakes, though he shakily assured her that none of what they were seeing was actually real. It certainly felt real, but she believed simply because Tom said it was so. He also said that it would pass soon, and that things would be as they once were.

That last part she didn't believe, simply because she knew better.

She caught sight of herself in the mirror one muggy afternoon, rain threatening on the unfamiliar horizon. Her hair clung around her face in damp strands, her skin pale and her eyes wide and dark. She'd aged ten years, a hundred, a thousand. She didn't know herself anymore.

Night was full or terrors during those first few weeks. Birds tore at her flesh, her face, her belly, waking her from sleep in sobs and wails the pillow couldn't muffle.

"I'm going to die."

Tom held her head and said, "Not yet, and not like this."

They lived a long nightmare, shut away from the world. Even when the hallucinations began to ease, Metis still dreamed while waking. At first she'd seen birds and claws and spiders and things that lived beneath rocks. Now, instead, she saw memories -- and not all of them her own. People and places from the past, superimposed over the now, set in rhythm to the ticking of a clock.

She saw her mother with lines around her eyes and tears on her face. She saw her father, long-dead and looking just the way he had the last time Metis could remember him ever saying her name. She saw Professor Dumbledore, younger than she'd ever known him, not handsome exactly but good and strong and happy. A blonde girl with bobbed hair and a red scarf reached out to him with a smile and held his hand. She saw a dark-haired little boy and a man in an army uniform, one from the first war, from before she'd been born. She saw Jack Seward, attractive and smiling, shaking her hand for the first time. She saw Jack again later, on fire and trying not to scream.

She screamed then, waking Tom, and they lay together, shivering even though the room was hot.

Later, when they were better (though still not whole, and she wondered if they ever would be) it finally occurred to her to ask where they were.

"Istanbul," Tom said.

"What are we doing in Istanbul?"

His hair was damp and clean, and he was getting dressed for the first time in weeks.

"There's a man I want to meet."

*

The day after he realized June was gone, possibly for good this time, Albus went to Jack's grave, even though he knew Jack wasn't really there. Jack wasn't anywhere, his body burned to ash by Grindelwald, and just thinking about it made him want to slay that monster all over again. One death wasn't good enough to wipe Grindelwald from the face of the earth, to get his voice out of Albus' head.

You're already dead, all of you. You were born to die, you were born for this. You were born to play your part, and then time and destiny will have no further use for you.

He could still taste opium in the back of his throat, smoke and honey and the sweet decay of creeping death. The worst of the withdrawal had passed, and he hadn't been there that long in the first place, but he wasn't sure it would ever leave him. Not completely.

He was sure the dreams never would.

He dreamed more now than he ever had, more deeply, more vividly, more colorfully. He dreamed his own memories: sharp and bright moments from his youth, the dull and foggy fragments of the more recent past.

He kept dreaming one memory above all the others, clearer, closer, more painful. Jack standing in his office, his suit coat tossed over the back of a chair, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, his tie yanked distractedly to one side.

"See, I'd recommend we kill this guy before he tries to take over the world, but who's going to listen to me?"

"I will."

The moment of decision, the point of no return for the pair of them. Jack had laughed, slugged him on the shoulder and called him 'brother.' Even once things had gone to hell, Jack treated him like a brother, like a friend. All Albus had been able to give him in return had been hazy guesses, an old book, some suspect translations and a pair of treacherous traveling companions.

They'd done what they set out to do, all right. Too bad Albus had been so wrong - about everything.

*

They found the healer, Hekim, in a crowded marketplace, much like every other marketplace in the city.

Metis still felt unsteady on her feet, but Tom had regained his drive, his confidence, the color in his cheeks. He held her hand tightly as they walked through the streets, nearly dragging her from her feet in his haste.

Hekim's shop was behind green and gold hangings, an oil lamp flickering against one wall. Tiny bottles lined another. A tapestry depicting a goddess with the face of a woman and the tail of a snake hung across the back of the shop.

"Shahmeran the snake, the goddess of wisdom and keeper of secrets," Hekim said when he caught her staring. "It was said once that to eat of her flesh meant eternal life and the cure of all ills."

"But not anymore?" Tom asked, with the slightest raise of one eyebrow.

"Some still believe it, but there are far fewer than there used to be. Possibly because Shahmeran herself hasn't been seen in a millennia or so..."

"If she ever existed..." Tom said, trailing off expectantly.

"Are you expecting proof?" Hekim said. "Then perhaps you already know what you're going to find here."

He walked over to a large basket and pulled open the lid.

"Nagas," he said, nodding sagely. "These are Shahmeran's children, or so the legend goes. Feed them, teach them and they will grow large and intelligent. They are quite valuable. Their milk is useful in a wide variety of poisons or restoratives -- depending on your wishes."

Tom reached into the basket, speaking softly to the snakes until one approached his outstretched hand.

"How much is she?"

Hekim offered a price, and Tom barely haggled before handing over his money.

"But this isn't what you were looking for," Metis said.

He let the tiny snake curl around his wrist.

"No, but it's a start."

*

"This is your idea of a holiday?"

"You said you wanted to wander off into the wilds of Morocco."

June pushed her hat up off her face so she could glare at Hayden more effectively. "I said absolutely no such thing."

"You did. Over dinner, in the dining room at The Rock. Despite the Bordeaux, I remember it quite clearly."

They were south of Marrakech and it was well past midday, the sun very high and hot above them, and Hayden had just given their guide an extra forty dirham to lead them out further into the sand dunes where he wanted to spend the night.

"It will be gorgeous. We'll sleep under the stars."

"With the snakes and the scorpions."

"Oh, I doubt they haves those here." A pause. "Do you think they have those here?"

"I never in a million years would have imagined this," June said. Behind her, one of the camels snorted as though in agreement. "You said, 'Travel with me, darling. Won't it be fun?' And I, stupidly perhaps, took you for the sort of man for whom traveling meant five-star hotels, room service and port on the veranda after supper."

"That is how I like to travel, six days out of seven. But today, my darling, we're going to have an adventure."

"I don't think I want an adventure."

He looked up at her, surprised. "You ran off into the middle of a war, but you're afraid to spend the night with me on a sand dune?"

June pushed the brim of her hat back into place in defeat. "In the war, I had a gun."

"And we do now, as well. I have my father's old Webley. It's probably rusted through, and I've no idea whether it could actually kill anybody anymore, but it's probably enough to make your garden variety desert brigand think twice. And if we find ourselves in truly life-threatening danger, we can always just curse whatever it is into oblivion."

"Assuming you can still shoot straight with a wand. When was the last time you actually had to cast a spell for yourself?"

"Oh, shut up and get on your camel," he said, good-naturedly.

*

The summer went slowly.

Albus burned his nose out on the river and wrote a well-received paper on the transfiguration of milk bottles into magnifying glasses. His hands shook less and he put weight back on. His hair grew back and he let it curl around his collar. He could have charmed it, made it grow more quickly, but instead he let it come back in its own time. Most days he didn't even think about Fier or the darkness under its streets. He stopped craving smoke and sleep, he stopped waking up with a start, he stopped expecting to see Jack around every corner.

He still walked around with a dull ache in his chest, though.

He'd failed. He'd failed Jack, he'd failed himself. He'd even failed Tom. He wasn't sure what had happened to Tom or Metis, after. All he'd been told was that they hadn't been found alongside him, though that's where they ought to have been. He knew in his gut that they were still alive.

All those concerns were secondary, though, just pressure on a wound that was already deep.

He missed June so acutely it felt dying a little bit, piece by piece, every day. After awhile, that dull ache turned into a kind of dull rage that settled behind his temples.

He wrote her letters that he never sent. He imagined what he would say to her when (if) she came back. He imagined her sailing in the Mediterranean or on some island in the South Pacific. In his head she was always smiling, suntanned and happier without him.

He learned to hate her a little bit, that vision of her he carried around in his head.

She was in his dreams -- in those sharp, bright dreams of his childhood, and in the sunlit, breezy dreams of his adolescence. After awhile the younger her was the only version of her he could bear to think about : lazy, long-limbed, all of fourteen, waiting for him in a hammock behind her parents cottage at the shore.

She'd been his friend then, only and always his friend, and he found he missed that more than anything.

*

There were poppy fields outside Kabul, acres of them stretching away into the distance. Metis wanted to lay down in the Technicolor red flowers and sleep without dreaming.

Her dreams were quieter since Albania, though, and she was grateful for that.

Other things were quieter, too, and she wasn't quite sure what to make of it. She and Tom stayed in a small but elegant hotel in the city. The magical district was mostly hidden away behind the crumbling walls of Kabul's back alleys, though in a place like this barriers between magical and mundane were less distinct.

She watched Tom during those long days in Kabul, nearly always bent over books or lost in silent reflection. He spent his afternoons in coffeehouses, speaking with learned men. He spent his evenings in study, or discussion, or experimenting with charms and potions.

"Talk to me," Metis said one night, their room lit only by oil lamps, the shadows flickering strangely across Tom's books and parchment scrolls.

"What about?" He didn't look up from his writing.

"Nothing. Anything. Talk to me like you used to."

"We're not the same as we were then."

And that was what Metis feared.

"I don't know if I can do this, then," she said. "If we're not the same anymore, I don't know if I can be what you need me to be."

"That isn't true," he said, but without the passion he might once have shown for her.

Without him -- if he didn't love her anymore (if he never had) -- what was she? What was even the point of her?

Despite this, Metis' days were not entirely empty. She made friends, after a manner, with the wives and mistresses of the men Tom knew. Most of them were shallow, silly women, talented only in the arts of gossip and the passing of time.

Afareen, on the other hand, was a seer, the wife of some minor official in the wizard hierarchy. She took a liking to Metis. At least, Metis thought it was a liking. With Afareen it was sometimes hard to tell.

"You aren't stupid," Afareen said. "Not like so many English girls I've seen."

It was afternoon -- sometime in late August, Metis thought, but time had ceased to move in ordinary ways for her. They were sitting in the walled garden behind Afareen's husband's house.

A servant brought out a tray of mint tea, and Metis said, "Thank you, I think."

"I only bring it up, because it makes me wonder." They paused, and Afareen poured tea for them both. She took a long drink and then smiled. "It makes me wonder what an intelligent girl like you is doing with that boy."

"Tom?"

"No, the other boy you trail after like a lost kitten." She paused. "He's certainly handsome and ambitious, and possessing some not inconsiderable charm... but you can do better."

"Better?" Metis echoed.

"He doesn't love you the way he ought. I don't think he really loves anyone but himself."

"I've known him since I was a child," Metis said, ignoring the small, doubting voice in her head that had been growing louder of late. "He's the only one I've ever wanted."

Afareen smiled, revealing a row of sharp, white teeth. "Well, there's your first problem-"

"I don't think you understand-"

"Oh, I understand. Better than you do, probably. He certainly has the best of all worlds with you, doesn't he? Unquestioning devotion in all he does, and all he asks you to do. But what do you get in return?"

"I've never asked for anything in return."

"Maybe you ought to." Afareen put down her teacup. "And if he doesn't give you something, if he isn't willing to give you what you want, then you'll know. Then you'll be able to decide what it is you want."

"I already know what I want."

"Things change," she said. "Things change and everything has its time. Did you think you would be a child forever? Did you think that he would?"

"I didn't think-" Metis began.

"I can teach you to be yourself, to be your own woman, if you'll let me. You can't continue to rely on him."

Metis stared into her cup, at the dregs and leaves, but didn't respond.

"It's time to grow up."

*

Late summer found them in Alsace-Lorraine, because Hayden said he had a sudden passion for the Riesling. That particular day found them sitting on the terrace of Domaine Amie, with one bottle of Riesling open between them and another in reserve on ice.

They were, needless to say, somewhat pleasantly drunk.

"Perhaps," June said, "it was a bad idea to sit in the sun all morning, drinking wine on an empty stomach."

"Nonsense," Hayden replied. "That nice fellow over there," he waved at one of the vineyard workers, "assured me that this is how the locals start every day."

"I think he was having you on."

"Nice excuse, though, wasn't it?"

"Pardon," someone said from behind them.

June put a hand up to shade her eyes. It was the vineyard owner's wife, holding a small basket of fruit and cheese, and looking supremely amused.

"Hello, then," Hayden said, turning the full force of his smile on her.

She shook her head, smiling back, handed him the basket and said, "Tu vraiment devrais manger."

Somewhat perplexed, Hayden accepted the food. "All right then."

She cocked her head and looked at him for another moment, before adding, "Et tu es ridiculement beau, particulièrement pour un Anglais."

"I have no idea what that was about," he said as soon as she was gone, "but I'm famished, so I guess it's good luck."

"I think she was flirting with you," June said.

Hayden folded back the blue cloth covering the basket. "Oh, that's just how the French are. They always seem like they're flirting with everyone." He paused. "Would it bother you, though, if she were?"

"If I took it into my head to be jealous of every woman -- or man, for that matter -- who flirted with you, I'd never do anything but."

"Men don't flirt with me." He sliced open a bright green apple. "Much."

"That fellow in Paris was absolutely smitten with you."

"And I only had eyes for you, much to his dismay."

"The tango was a bit much. Did you have to rub it in?"

"Maybe I just wanted to tango?" He poured another glass for each of them. "Plus, I do like having people look at me, sex notwithstanding."

"Oh, I know. You're quite conspicuous."

"Admit it. It's one of the things you like best about me. I never let things get boring." He finished cutting the apple into equal halves.

"You are one of my favorite people in the whole world, though I'm not sure I'd say that's the reason..."

"Marry me," he said suddenly, handing her the apple.

"What?"

"I think," he said, looking at her so seriously that it was almost comical, "that you ought to marry me."

She took the fruit from him, but said nothing.

"I realize that I'm drunk and a fool, but I'd still like an answer."

"No."

"Not that answer. Try again."

"Hayden-" She knew she ought to be very distressed by this turn of events. But, frankly, it wasn't entirely unexpected -- and, also, she was just a bit drunk.

"I think I'll just keep asking until I get the answer I want," Hayden said, musing to himself. He turned back to face her. "You've no objection to my proposing to you several times a week, do you?"

In spite of herself, June laughed. "If I did, would that stop you?"

He smiled crookedly. It was a smile that had conquered debutantes, wealthy dowagers and other men's wives. "Not a bit. You know how I am once I've set my mind that I want something."

"I am intimately familiar with your whims and follies, yes."

"I'd hardly call wanting to marry you a folly," he said, and then fell silent.

She was looking out across the valley, when Hayden spoke again, his voice suddenly very close and very soft in her ear, "I don't suppose you'd reconsider? Marrying me? It is the season for it after all."

"It is, isn't it?" June said, the afternoon around them warm and clear. "But I can't, Hayden."

"Pity. I can't help thinking you would make a lovely bride."

"What's brought this all on?"

He shrugged, hands in his pockets and shoulders slouched. "I simply can't think of anyone I'd rather marry."

"Well-" That was not the answered she'd expected. "That's lovely, Hayden. I can't tell you what that means to me."

"But the answer is still no?"

"Still no."

"Well, I suppose I should wait a bit before I ask again. How's Tuesday for you?

She smiled. "I never have quite gotten the hang of Tuesdays."

"Ah, so there's every chance that I'll catch you off-balance. Excellent."

He smiled at her again -- his real smile, the genuine one only a few people in the world got to see. June always considered herself very lucky to catch a glimpse of it.

"Shall we go home?" he asked, reaching a hand out to her. She took it.

"Yes. I think it's probably time that we went back."