1. A Dream
George awoke with a start. His pajamas and pillow drenched by a cold sweat…
"Honey, you okay?" his Muggle wife Helen, sleeping beside him, asked.
"Yeah, fine, just a dream…" he lied. He was seriously freaked out. "I'm going for a glass of water, be right back."
It had seemed so real, so material, so existent. Odd.
He found a bottle of vodka on the kitchen table - a bunch of kids had spiked it with a levitating charm and used it to scare a couple of Muggles. He'd removed the charm after receiving it, but kept the vodka - it was good vodka - and poured a few sips into a tumbler. After draining it, he went for a walk in the crisp cold.
The dream that had awoken him, after which the details had been evanescent, had featured his brother, Fred, who'd been dead for twenty-two years now.
George couldn't help but strain his mind to try and remember what the dream had been about, even though it still cut like a blade to think about his brother, even after so long… It had been so realistic, as if whatever was happening in the dream were really happening, but for the life of him, he couldn't remember.
He went back to the house after a short while, once he'd given up on trying to remember the dream, and returned to bed.
_____________________________________________________________
The room in which he stood was dark, almost cold too, but not quite enough to chill him. He'd placed the coffin, open, in the center of the circle of bright blue Lapis Lazuli stones as the scrolls lain out before him instructed. Stepping away from the old Podium of Instruction, he began to chant, waving his wand in the intricate patterns he'd so diligently memorized. Before long, the magically restored corpse of his brother, Fred, began to shine with an ominous green light…
If the months of research he'd done and instruction he'd endured were right, this should be the removal of the spell that had killed him - the killing curse. True to form, the light centered to Fred's chest and then exploded outward, a beam that retreated through the ceiling and out of sight.
George continued the dark ritual, into the perfection of which he'd poured months of endless trouble and effort, and soon his brother's body started to regain its colour. Almost bursting with anticipatory excitement, George persisted with renewed vigor and even more practiced precision.
Suddenly, the corpse moved - a sharp, odd movement, almost too fast to have been noticed. Startled by the quick flinch the body had made, George almost lost his place completely, but his subconscious took over and he strove forward to complete the complex incantation. He'd lost everything to get here; he wasn't about to stuff it all up now. At the last line of his long, Byzantine spell, Fred began to breathe. Upon the final word, he sat up, looked around wildly.
They exchanged a short glance before the room exploded crimson around them.
_____________________________________________________________
George awoke once more, quickly grasping to remember what he could, the details of his dream still mostly evanescent, and wrote every detail he was able to clutch on a piece of lined Muggle paper with a Muggle ballpoint pen.
He knew, by what he'd been able to remember, what he must do…
What he'd seen hadn't been a dream at all, but rather: a vision.