Summary: After that deplorable Stunning incident in OOTP, Kingsley sits at Minerva's bedside in St Mungo's, and dreams a fool's dream of her.
Disclaimer: All recognisable characters are the property of JK Rowling. No profit is being made from this work of fiction.
The Dreams of Sleeping Beauty
Day ticks into night and nothing changes.
There is no movement in the tiny room; no breeze to stir the gauzy curtain hung around her bed. No change, it seems, in the setting of the hands upon the dusty clock face in the corner, although he knows time must be passing, as he sits in his vigil.
There is no shift of light or sound or sign of life at all, except the tremulous rise and fall of her chest, so quiet and insubstantial that she could be asleep.
She is asleep, he supposes.
He tries to imagine her dreams; does she think of highland moors, of cold, of howling wind and ancient stone? The faces of children dancing in her quiet mind, those few hundred souls she cares so desperately for; and surely now they must be tucked safely into their beds, in dormitory rooms he can barely seem to remember, after so long a time.
Or, perhaps - and his foolish heart is treacherous and wickedly cruel to imagine it - she is far, far away, standing on a low plain of golden ground, a hand raised to shield her eyes as she stares out to a hazy horizon, under a blazing, scorching sun. He dreams her, and it is such seductive indulgence; dreams her standing beneath that sun, the very sun he has described to her in sweeping, fantastical words, beneath which he ran and laughed and lived, as a boy.
She would be beautiful, under that big sky, although the English in her would mutter darkly about the stickiness of the heat and the sheer determination of the mosquitoes in their hunt for flesh; still, she would be graceful and exotic and so very beautiful, he thinks, in the gold light he remembers.
It is such foolish fantasy, but still he imagines; the freckles that might appear along her shoulders and the nape of her neck, the way her hair might curl against the humidity, the smile that might shift across her face like daybreak, as she turns to him in wonder. He imagines, even though he knows full well how much it will hurt when he stops; when their bitter reality returns.
She has always loved his stories, or so she said, and he would revel in the telling of them to such a wondrous audience. The time he and his father saw the zebra run, a blur of shocking white and black, across the dry plains toward the river, as summer faded in the air all around. The day he climbed to the highest branch in the tallest tree in the widest field, to see if the blue line of the ocean would appear in the distance, like magic, through the heat haze. The hour he spent, for his eighth birthday, standing like a prince upon the Table top, the city stretched white and green and unknown, down to the water below him.
He would tell her the names of things; the places he has been, the birds and the animals and the ancient magic that runs in the rivers and the words and the blood of the people. He would talk, and she would listen, her eyes far away, searching for the history he spoke of, remembering for herself the memories he described, imagining his past in shining gold and green, beautiful and sun-drenched and oh, how he wished he could show her.
But there can be no desertion in the face of War, and so all he has ever had to give her are stories and dreams, but she has been happy to listen, it seems, always. He could whisper to her now, as she sleeps, but she might not even be dreaming of him at all, and that is a truth he could not bear. So he sits, holding her pale hand in his, waiting for the moment to come when her eyes will open, when she will see him, and smile, and tell him of her imaginings.
She sleeps, hair spread like a dark silk fan across the pillow, and he dreams, of her, somewhere more beautiful than here.