A/N: For Round 2 of the "Speed of Lightning" Competition on the HPFC.
asphodel
"I wish to see the King and Queen of the dead," you say, and your voice cuts harsh across water, raw and with that touch of a sneer you find it harder to eliminate every year.
The ferryman is tall and dark-haired, extremely handsome with some otherworldly beauty to his figure. The kind that cannot last more for than a season, perhaps—and though his eyes are a clear, cool gray of the precise shade of the calm waters of Styx below him, they flash crimson for a moment. A trick of the light, you tell yourself.
"This is the cost of the living to cross into the realm of the dead," he says, voice pleasant and amiable. A tiny twig of mistletoe coils around your wrist, snaking up your arm and down over your fingers. "Your fare."
"But I am not living," you say, and a shining golden coin drops from the palm of your hand, disloged there by the mistletoe. You frown. It drops into the still waters below the boat, and dead hands reach up to grasp at it, bewitched skulls gasping for air.
The ferryman laughs, and it is like the angry hiss of a disturbed snake. "There are those who have been waiting for quite a long time, Severus Snape."
Your lip curls. You step into the boat and speak nothing, and Tom Riddle's oar dips into the dead waters again.
The throne of the King of the Dead is styled after a great phoenix cast in gold—representing life, death, and rebirth. He himself is dressed in majestic robes of watered-down fire colours embroidered delicately in gold thread, his long, curled auburn hair glinting in the artificial light that he seems to radiate.
He is young, seventeen, eighteen perhaps, but you wouldn't be able to miss the bright, wise eyes of precise cerulean—even now, you feel as if he is looking straight through you.
The Queen—more of a consort, really—cradles Albus's hand, something delicate and affectionate, but really nothing more than a vice-like grip as if he might slip away at any moment.
The other man, his hair is a halo of spun gold curls, and though he cannot be more than fifteen or sixteen, there's a definite air of superiority to him, a haughtiness to his features, in how he contrasts to Albus's warmer, more honest presence. His powder-blue robes are heavy and fur-lined in the style of northern Germany, perhaps—and he looks like a picture you've seen in a history book once, though you can't place exactly where.
"After all this time?" Albus asks, and his half-moon spectacles slip down the bridge of his long, straight nose as he leans in from the throne, something like concern knitting his brows together, a tiny frown gracing thin lips.
Your throat is dry, and it feels too much like a slap in the face as you respond:
"Always."
The boy squeezes Albus's hand tighter, and speaks suddenly, pomegranate fruit cradled in his lap.
"You vill valk," he says, and though his voice is pretty and German, it is clearly an order. "You vill valk, out of zis place. And she vill follow. But you do not look back, or she vill be lost forever."
It's dreadfully similar to learning to walk again, and your heartbeat is a steady lament, Lily Lily Lily, though even if you strain your ears you cannot hear her behind you. The figures you pass walking through the fields do not catch her eye, as if she isn't really there.
You see, for lack of anything else: A tall ginger-haired man clutching at a severed ear. A great wolf and a witch whose hair colour shifts every second you look. A tiny boy with a camera hung around his neck. For an instance, you can almost see a messy-haired, handsome man with hazel eyes.
These are the seeds you have planted.
You take a step forward.
The problem is, you've spent your whole life looking back, and this all seems more than a little unfair (though you would be lying if anything has ever been fair in your life either).
You rest, for a minute or two, at the banks of the river Lethe, the river whose very name means oblivion. Forgetfulness. You dip your hands in the water and bring up a crystal handful, but it only slips through your fingers.
It would be the most wonderful thing, you think some days, to just be able to forget. And you're so, so thirsty—anything, you think, to distract from the task at hand.
You walk on.
But it gets lonely, sometimes.
And you turn, and—
"Look at me."
You gasp out loud, your vision filled with Lily's green eyes and something that might have been James Potter's face, two clean puncture wounds in your neck.
And with your dying breath-