Author's Note: clichéd, albeit irresistible. At least, I couldn't resist giving it a stab. Summer 1993, Godric's Hollow.
The organ music of the Sunday Mass could be heard all through the town, a familiar sound of happier times: those few moments of bliss before the storm that had maimed this place forever, beyond any repair...
So close, so close, the music was all around, ringing out with no visible effect on the Hound of Hell that stood in the shady corners of the ancient churchyard nearby. Any sweltering heat and green leaves of the sweet season were but a mockery; it may as well have been the bitter autumn night of twelve years ago for this wretched creature, tormented and sworn no longer to any mortal now, but to none less than the Devil himself.
Slowly, wickedly, the bear-sized, emaciated, icy-eyed dog slunk towards a relatively newer grave, a white grave with an old wreath of flowers; two names, two birth dates, the same date of death...
The last enemy to be conquered is Death.
The skeletal, pitch-dark ghost paused, as if every movement was pain beyond any understanding, then deliberately lay down tenderly beside the stone, nose pressed to smooth marble that was neither warm nor cold (they did not recognize him?), haunted eyes sliding shut.
Those days of attending mass were long gone, leaving him untouched and beyond redemption, beyond the reach of the kindly older couple that had welcomed him with open arms and shed tears for his wounds as if he were their own; beyond the reach of the jokes he used to crack about the priest who still droned on today, or about that naughty local girl that was always seated with her family on the other side of the sanctuary like a saint that she wasn't, the boy (his other half, the side that wasn't damned) that would laugh and add on with an infinitely funnier, wittier comment of his own.
The flames had died and left the skeleton of that shattered cottage where he had crashed in the middle of the night, where he would look up at James from his drunken haze on the couch, and his soul-twin's hazel eyes would understand before stitching his fragmented self back together with a joke and make it all okay again with his smile.
The flames had died and the world had quieted again, but he still saw smoke and empty eyes, unable to reconcile that with the vibrant young man who he loved more than anything, even life itself, and held his very humanity in the palm of his tanned, callused hand.
Was there anybody left to pull him out of his half-intentional self-destruction?
She was there, too, that red-haired beauty who had probably already crumbled to dust beside her beloved husband—the problem with Lilies was that they always withered at the end of their short season. God, he had loved her, her sparkling green eyes so full of fire and life, her soul that was so warm and open and just a bit rough around the edges, like a sister and a mother and a friend and everything else he longed for. He loved her even more so because it was she who had captured Prongs's heart, in a way that he could only dream of. She had known this, but never threw it in his face. No, she took away the pain of that loss and returned it with joy and a beautiful little Prongs II with her green eyes; the son he would never have...
And they were gone in this tainted town that had once been Home. The black dog lay silent in exhaustion of body and what little spirit he had left, pressed to the grave of the pure-hearted innocents until well after dark, but never once did a tear leave those stark eyes.
Because he belonged to the Devil and his mistress Revenge, now that his angels were slaughtered.
And anyway, everybody knew that dogs cannot cry.
Although nobody tells you this is only because they don't have tear ducts.