Author's Note: A warning that this is a side fic to "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" and one of those ones that would be really damn confusing if you haven't read any of it. Seriously, this one isn't even Harry Potter anymore, it's one of those ones.

"Nothing exists. All is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you…. And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought."

Mark Twain

A Place Without Time, Without Location, and Without Memory

"We've been here before, haven't we?"

It was not important how they got there, or where they even were, only that they had been here before in one form or another. Or, perhaps more truly, in no form at all.

It was not darkness that surrounded them, but, instead a pure absence of light. It was an absence of light, sound, thought, and imagination. There was no twilight in this place just as there was no dawn and no dusk.

Only the infinite expanse of nothingness spreading out in every direction.

And they had all been here before.

"I never liked this place," she said, and it was as true now as it had been then, before time and gods had ever existed.

He did not respond, but that was in his nature, she was and had always been the aberration in this and any other world. She was the worlds and their suns, after all, those that were both brave and new as well as weary beyond recognition. In her the seeds of her thoughts had once been the seeds of everything.

Words, ideas, had always belonged to her.

After all, she was everything, and everything that was not something was part of the nothing that was everything else. And in the absence of thought, the absence of moons, suns, stars, and gods there were no words.

Only borrowed mimicry from time to time.

So, he did not give her words.

"Even before there were things to like and dislike," she said, "Even before the godhead split, I never liked this place."

It had felt then and felt now like a kind of itch, a subtle irritation just under he skin, dull enough not to be pain but noticeable enough to be beyond toleration. That itch had grown into matter and then in turn had expanded into light and everything else.

The strange glittering dream she called reality.

And it had been such a wonderous, heartbreaking, thing.

"You'd think that the absence of everything would make it seem natural," there were, after all, no norms in this place. There was a homogeny, an infinite expanse of sameness, nothingness as it were in every conceivable dimension and direction. And yet, for all that reality was a strange, spontaneous, ever changing heterogenous mix that clashed and clanged against its inner workings it had glittered and glowed in the infinite dark.

This strange, impossible, miraculous thing that she had formed simply by finding the ability to form anything at all.

Because once, when there had been nothing, there was the idea.

"You'd think a lot of things," she responded to herself, "And yet there is something reprehensible in this place. Not simply because it is nothing but because it strips the potential of everything. This is the death beyond all death, the great obliteration of all the worlds and all their wonders. This is the place beyond both the beginning and the end, and I loved the dream."

"I know you think I'm a fool," if, that was, he was capable of the heresy of thought, "I know you find it unnatural. But I would rather have that world, any world, for all its flaws and failures than this."

She would have words.

She would have the suns, the moons, the stars and the cosmos expanding outwards forever. Even if it was only a dream, only her dream that might at any moment collapse in on itself in a puff of smoke, she would have it.

And, as the pale human bastardized personification of nothing he had fashioned himself into, he turned to her and said, "Then I'll keep waiting."

Author's Note: Written for the 4400th review of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" by Lunaliceazrael who asked for a fic based on the Mark Twain quote at the top and filled with PKD inspired goodness. Unfortunately, that leads to the land of spoilers or at the very least a detour into the strange enigmatic world of Rabbit's cryptic nonsense. Oooooooooooh.

Thanks for reading, reviews are greatly appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter