Of Dreams And Death

Of Dreams And Death

by Weaver

Am I living a dream now, or do I sleep still?

High above me, my godson swoops and soars through the rain, like an angel, like a devil, like lightning flashing through the clouds. I can barely make him out from here, but I can see the way he sits, the way he leans forward, flicking his wet hair away from his newly water-repulsing glasses, energy and speed in every line of him.

I can see his father in him.

And suddenly I'm thirteen again, bouncing up and down on my seat, urgent with the fervour that only teenage sport fans can have. The rain is a problem, hindering his game. Prongs treats it the way he treats all obstacles, by facing it head on and forcing his way through. He's an angel, right enough, his red cloak spread on the wind behind him, fire in his eyes and heart, dropping towards the earth like Azrael, like Lucifer, unstoppable and terrifying. I pity the opposing team.

The Hufflepuff Seeker is a tall boy I don't recognise. (I thought the Hufflepuff Seeker was pretty Jenny Sanders?) Prongs is flying circles around him, despite the powerful wind that threatens to knock the lighter boy off course. He's buffeted and thrown about, while the Hufflepuff is steadier and straight, but Prongs has ten times the skill of the other boy, and he's winning the eternal Seeker race for supremacy.

He turns his head to look straight at me, and through the rain I make out the fierce delight he always took in flight, a tension that runs through his whole body, and his irritation with the rain that's still blurring the field despite the spell on his glasses. I want to yell for him with all my heart - yet I can't. Something's wrong with this - I can't call out, I can't cheer Gryffindor on. Something's wrong...

A wave of cold air sweeps across me. Prongs looks at me again, horrified, and then he turns to stare at the ground beneath him. He pales, and his green eyes are stark and horrified in his face. (Green? Prongs always had peat-brown eyes, not green.) And then his hands, so firm and sure a minute ago, slip a fraction of an inch - and a little more - and then he's falling, all his grace lost in an instant, nothing more than a crumpled heap of flesh and bone plummeting towards the earth. His cloak no longer looks like wings, but instead a stream of blood following him down, spilled across the air.

The cold is more intense now. Prongs hits the ground hard, eyes closed, a trickle of blood running from his temple. And it's not the Quidditch pitch he's on, but a battleground - rubble rains down around him, pieces of the house he loved so well, dying with him. A roof support beam crashes down on his legs with a horrifying crunch and a weak spurt of blood. A brick avoids crushing his skull by inches.

I'm at the edge of the house. I'm too far away. I can't get there ... can't save him... there is another flash of green light from the standing half of the house, and Lily's screaming stops suddenly. Silence crashes in on me, on the neighbourhood, a silence so complete I can't hear my heart beating.

I don't know if my heart is beating.

And then I'm there, beside him, and the house is gone, and James gone with it, and I turn away - I can't bear to see him like this, so quiet and still, so utterly unlike the quicksilver James I know. Lily is just a yard away, lying still. She isn't shattered like James; she's peaceful, porcelain, perfect. Utterly motionless. Desperate, I scramble to find her pulse, although one glance at those calm green eyes and I know it's no use... I know that she's dead.

And now it's Fin I'm seeing, Fin my own love, perfect, undamaged, beautiful, stretched out on a slab in a cold, dark, Muggle morgue, staring endlessly into the heavens she was sent from. She's beautiful, my Fin, beautiful and frightening, like the midday sun, so fierce you can't even look at her, and so bright she warms the whole world. But now you can't see her darkness, or her light, only an empty husk that once held her spirit. She looks happier now than I have ever seen her before.

And the sky's cracking open, silver light running down the inside of my aching skull and forcing my eyes open and my clenched teeth apart, and I'm back under the benches at the top of the Quidditch pitch. It's Harry, not James, who's being carried inside. Albus Dumbledore, grey-haired and worn, is sending the Dementors away. Some of the icy fear drains away from my bones, some of the chill from my heart.

Not all. Not all, for I know that this dream is still real, and all because of one man. And it will haunt me every day of my life unless I track the traitor down. And then maybe, when I kill him, I can sleep peacefully again.