Memory
A/N: Read and Review?
Memories are funny things.
Missing, vague, warped and unsure. Wavering, fluttering, scattered, flickering, uncertain, and positively maddening. Like a song you can't quite place, the stuttering of a broken record on its last spin, a telly's image that darts and flickers, your eyes moving too fast to see the picture, yet not quite fast enough.
His memories, he suspected, were more fickle than most. More temperamental. He would remember fondly one moment, looking upon the image of his lost lover with such profound longing and sadness that he could hardly breathe, when the next moment, he would return to find the memory gone. Vanished.
He would search throughout the catacombs of his mind; linger on the threshold of long-forgotten paths, searching for the inconsistent flicker of an only half-remembered memory. The memory of once having a memory. The thought of remembering fondly an experience. Sometimes he forgot. And sometimes, when he failed to remember, his mind fell victim to the damming labyrinth that was itself, searching within its confining walls for the whisper of a familiar touch.
He feared that if he put down the silvery whips of thoughts that were supposedly his memories into the pensieve, he would look upon nothing but blank, white pictures, shadows in the white hinting at former life.
It was in this theory that tempted him to do just that. So, with the pensieve so thoughtfully granted to him, he had extracted everything, to look upon it second hand, like a used book, perused by one before he himself took it up to read. Except him who read before he, was also, indeed, himself.
Maddening as his thoughts were, drifting lazily in his now-empty mind, they reminded him still that the pensieve held answers he so sorely sought. Things he continuously forgot to remember.
So, with an exhalation that belied his nerves, he plunged in.
White.
So stark and glaring, he felt purged and cleansed and raw and stung.
His memories…
Did he possess them in the first place?
For, if he remembered correctly—and, perhaps, that was the crux of it—if one put down his memories into the pensive, he would then be able to view them through the third-person observer.
Right?
So why, then, was all he viewed white?
Did this mean that, though he remembered remembering, he actually had no initial experiences of which to look back upon?
While soft, flitting touches, whispered words, fiery worlds, and eyes so green they could have been cut from stone haunted his mind like restless ghosts, here was the proof that they did not exist.
Here, before him, around him, inside him, was the proof that he held nothing of what he thought he had. Here was the proof that what he had treasured like sacred artifacts was, in reality, not. Not there, not here, surely. Not anywhere.
Echoes reached across the white expanse of oblivion, calling to him with the promised of those ever-fickle ghosts. Moving through his white memories, as he could, he attempted to follow the echo. However, as echoes are echoes, he was led to one corner of the white void, back to another. He found himself wondering how something that was so empty ever have walls on which to echo, but his concern was mainly placed in his frantic search for realization. For confirmation of his ghostly thoughts.
So he searched the white until finally a speck of red came to him. Reaching, he touched it. Surprised, he withdrew, and found the liquid red slipped down his finger, slowly, like he had been pricked by a needle. Like blood.
Red…
Then, the white was maroon, and he was drowning in it, suffocating in the acrid yet satisfying smell.
And then, in the sea he found himself, he ghosts discovered him, reached him, embraced him. At first he fell happily into the arms of his wraithlike lover, but soon he struggled to pull back, to pull away.
For the memories he had so greatly sought, and that which had sought him in turn, were ghosts and horrors indeed.
It was true that here he found his lost lover. It was true also that the boy was an exquisite piece of human being, perfect in quintessence and soul.
But the darker, shadowed parts of the wraith were also inescapably fact. The truth in the red he drowned in. the truth in the ever-present need to escape yet longing to embrace. The part of the whole of which he felt but did not understand until this precise moment.
He had loved his young man. He, also, had been the young mans slow, and painful, demise.
That of which haunts him became all too clear, his reasons for searching for and abating his memories. For both hiding from, and longing for the ghost-like apparitions that flitted from one corner of his shadowed mind to the other, as they called out for him and unanimity ran from his outstretched hand.
And in his detection of this wraith he drowned, clutching his unearthly lover, in his sea of blood.
A/N: okay that was sorta weird...let's pay the reasoning to the fact that's its Five am and I have yet to sleep. I seriously need to fix my schedule...and get my arse over to the library sometime soon.
So, if you couldn't tell; that was Snape, his lover was Harry, and I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with this. Tell me what you think?
Love,
Cozy