I'm not afraid of ghosts.
Mothers always soothe their panicked child in the middle of the night with a hand on their fevered brow and the words, "They aren't real, darling. They can't hurt you, because they aren't real."
That's what most mothers tell their children. Most mothers don't throw dark looks in your direction over dinner, muttering in that special cold voice they keep frozen especially for you. Most mothers don't spend every breath trying to force you to see the error of your ways and embrace a life that makes you physically sick even to contemplate joining it.
Not my mother.
She wasn't there for me when, as a child, I would wake from nightmares, twisting the sheets sodden with terror-sweat between long pale fingers, the scream dying in my throat before it could reach my lips.
She wasn't there for me when I left for my new life aged eleven, when I started at school. I made my own way to the train station; the sole morsel of advice my mother had ever gifted me tucked high in my cheek like a boiled sweet, where I sifted it with my tongue.
"You are a pure blood. Do not disgrace the house of your ancestors, the blood of your family, with your filth. Be who you were born to be. You cannot escape your roots; embrace them."
I turned these words around in my mouth, feeling the shape of them, hard and unchangeable, and I spat them out. I became who I was born to be, who I knew I was born to be, and in so doing I severed all family ties.
I am not afraid of ghosts.
The corridors of Hogwarts are brimming with them, the translucent forms drifting through paintings and walls, unbound by the shackles of physicality. None of them intended harm to anyone, be they living or dead. I had no reason to fear them.
In those days, the dead held no terror for me.
Not so now.
The faces of the dead visit me in the night. They pervade my dreams, prising me from the sleep that no longer refreshes me. In dreams they are always at the blurry edges, insinuating themselves, tarnishing the happy images I relive with the bad memories of their demise. I cannot escape them.
They don't say a word. They don't need to. They turn accusing eyes, eyes full of sadness and betrayal, to me, filling my vision with their regret. They smile reassuringly at me, but I can see the smiles rotting off their skeletal faces. They open their mouths to speak but the rancid words slide off their blackened tongues, poisoning the air, restricting my breathing, so that when I try to cry for help the words shrivel on my lips.
I am not afraid of ghosts.
It's the faces of the friends I killed that visit me in the darkest parts of the night.
This is meant to be Sirius' POV with his guilt for 'betraying' Lily and James, but now that I've read it back it sounds a little like Peter too. Like it? Dislike it? Let me know.