Title: Death Visits
Summary: Based on real life events that won't stop puttering around my head today, though I don't know what purpose they think they're serving. It didn't come out quite like I hoped it would… but it'll do.
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters. They'd be far more deviant if I did. ;)
I opened my eyes slowly against the weight pressing them down. The world was blurred around me, everything soft edged and bleeding into the item next to it and I knew my glasses were missing. My name rode a whisper on the wind and, with effort, I turned my head to the side.
They were saying things, words that should have been important, that I should have tried to concentrate on; their litanies became inconsequential under the presence lurking on the other side of a thin strip of fabric.
"Who's over there?" I whispered, the air raking roughly over my vocal chords, straining my abilities and cracking my voice even as such a soft tone.
"Over where?"
"The other side of the curtain?" I managed. There was a nervous shuffling of feet.
"He's a driver of one of the Knight Buses. Harry, we were so worried about you! What were you thinking-"
"What's wrong with him?" Her rant ran off mid-stream. Confusion swept across her brow in a wrinkling of her forehead, she was close enough that I could read and identify the emotion easily enough. Still her answer, the information, slid past like a droplet of water on a duck's back. It didn't matter. It wasn't my main concern.
"He had a heart attack. He's old, Harry, even for a wizard, but the Healers said he'll be fine."
She drew in a breath to pick her rant up from where I had butchered it short but my own drawn breath, rasping and weak as the air rattled through my overly dry lips stopped her once more. I shook my head carefully, the moment seeming foreign while I floated in my body, half detached from reality.
"He's going to die. I can feel it. Death is waiting over there, he's here, he's come to take someone with him because he can't claim me yet," I licked at my lips but there was no more moisture on my tongue than there was upon my mouth. "Again. He can't take me, again."
"Harry, no. the Healers said…"
Her reassurance fell upon the dead and the sleeping as I slipped back into darkness. There was no pain, no confusion, no pressing hands or presence of Death. He was an overwhelming force, when he wanted to be. Ever since the Battle of Hogwarts he had courted me, teased me, sent me flowers, and made promises with a slight of hand that both intrigued and terrified me.
That he be in St. Mungo's, in the same holding cubical of their emergency ward, as I came as no surprise. Too many times had he been in the same place as I was; I think he played to his own amusement to show up, shoulder brushing past my own with the tenderness shared only by lovers, a simple reminder than he was there, was waiting, was testing me and the luck the sustained my life.
It was a game I was too tired to play today, but the expressions upon my friends' faces when I woke again weren't something I was looking forward to. So, for now, the darkness is a refugee and when I resurface perhaps I'll find myself removed from Death and the dead, perhaps the pain will have faded, or I'll be in my own bed, held captive of odd dreams once more.
Whatever the outcome, I've slipped passed the end once more. The adventure I'm on is still all consuming and until it expires that next adventure will just have to wait, no matter how many invitations I receive to start in on it early. My time here isn't ready to end and neither am I.