The Traitorous Heart
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I thought it would be like Azkaban. It's not, obviously. At least there I wasn't alone. I had the screams of my fellow prisoners, even the the silent dementors for company. And I could change.
I can't change
I cannot change.
Instead I watch, and I scream with a throat filled with dust. Moving through the reminders of my life; hazed through a gauze-thin veil.
I watch the boy make foolish mistakes, walking a path I know too well. He's arrogant in the way only youth can be, and he is not tempered by the prophecy of his death. He does not understand, yet.
There's Remus who drowns his sorrow in sin, breathing in the breath of another Black, as if we were interchangeable. She knows it, too. I can't bear to watch him, but sometimes I stand behind her when she's alone looking into her mirror and she pulls my face over hers like a mask. And then she cries, wearing my skin. She always changes back before Lupin returns and presents him with a face clear of grief.
Further on stands the traitor, the real one, now at his master's side; the simpering toady. I pass on.
And the other. How has he found more honour in his mean soul than I did? I'm from a noble and ancient house, whatever that's worth now, and he, he isn't. I feel childish just thinking it. I watch him with the pale boy, and he's still the acerbic little twit I remember from school, but there's a brokenness to him that's new. Sometimes, when I can't bear the remembrance of friendships lost, I lie next to him, separated only by the thin fabric of our worlds, and I time my heart to his, to his ragged staccato.
There's no death in death, only loneliness and silent watching.
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