Music and Colour.
Author's note: This is a Black Family Tree challenge that I picked up from the Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges Forum (HPFC). Enjoy and please take the time to leave a review.
Disclaimer: JK Rowling owns all.
Daylight streams from the half-curtained window, sunlight falling like feathers onto the bed where Marius lies. He sees only a shift in shades of grey, his eyes blinking into a world devoid of colour.
There is a piece missing in his soul, a fist-shaped hole, wide and gaping somewhere inside of him, to the left of his kidney, off-center and askew.
(His mother says this missing piece makes him a non-wizard, a nothing)
He concentrates on a children's book on his bedside table, his brain pleading to make it move. His eyelids flick a beat, and he forces them to stay open, straining an ocular nerve in the corner of his deep grey eyes. Little beads of sweat gather near his hairline, beginning to run like a small river down his sloping cheekbones. He clenches and unclenches his fingers in the tangled bedclothes.
The book does not move. Innate and unanimated it lies there mocking him, taunting him for the emptiness within him.
(His father says this is his last chance)
There is a record player in the corner of his bedroom; a record has been spinning for days. It reminds him of the ballerina in his sister's box that twirls and twirls without sound. The little pin on the end of the arm pivots back and forth across the surface of the record and Marius hears no sounds.
Music and Colour. Light and Sound.
His father marches him to the top of the rookery, the Black lands spread out in daylight (or darkness) before him.
"All you need is a good push, Son." (His father says this for his own piece of mind) "A good push and before you hit the ground your magic will save you."
He shakes and wails, his eyes out of focus, his ears out of the spectrum. He peers over the balustrade, his knuckles turning white as they grip onto the wrought iron rail.
"Please Father, I don't think I can."
"I don't think it is a matter of 'can' or 'can't, Son." His father snarls the words, his shame and disgust for his third child rising up his vocal chords and escaping in a rasp out of cracked aristocratic lips.
Marius' final plea is made wind-born as his father lets go of the lace around his son's collar and he tumbles off the balustrade and into the air. Like the sunlight he dances like a feather through the sky, a darker shade of grey than the age-old bricks of the mansion behind him. He screams and screams hoping it will save him, for no magic appears as the missing piece inside him.
Empty and isolated like music and colour, his body is a wasteland where no magic grows.
His legs crumble beneath him as he hits the pavement many miles below, his head opening to reveal a river of deep crimson blood. His eyes flicker through white to black before they close in desperation.
While he is lying forlorn and hollow his father blasts his picture from the family tree, there is no colour or music, only emptiness before him.