Dean Thomas - 2
Post-war guilt was something Dean Thomas was highly educated on.
Not through textbook means, of course, but from first-hand experience. He should have been better. Faster. Maybe if he was, he could have saved Colin's life. More lives; maybe the graveyard they had to make specifically for war victims wouldn't exist. Every night, just like a clockwork, he saw the flash of blonde and green that haunted him in his dreams, the flashbulb of the camera going off.
Flash.
Someone falls, and Dean's not fast enough.
Flash.
It's his sister this time, and she can't do anything, she's five, for Merlin's sake, why are they doing this to her?
Flash.
Seamus, screaming and twisting and begging and pleading, but the Crucio falls from the Death Eater's lips so easily.
Flash.
The bulb burns out – burned too quickly, too brightly – and now he's in the dark. Surrounding by a mass of nothing, such a big mass of nothing that he's being crushed underneath the weight of it. Apathy is something he can't remember not having. The lazy feeling, the wanting to sleep all day and never come out of that cocoon of blankets he's made.
Dean spots a stain on the corner of one of them, and instantly goes back to a time where they all sat in the boys' dormitory, laughing. Seamus' butterbeer sloshed over the rim of the cup, and they were too entertained in whatever it was they were talking about that neither of them even noticed.
He noticed now. Oh, did he ever.
He tosses and he turns but the guilt just continues to build, starting in his heart and building up to his throat and his lungs, and it's choking him. He can't breathe, not really.
They – everyone else, really – paint such a lovely picture, he thinks, of returning to a "normal life" once the war is over. Warm butterbeers and Quidditch in the garden and home-cooked meals and a simple life, and his whole body has been wired for adrenaline so long (it's in his veins) he can't shake it off anymore. The running, the hiding, the fighting back – his hand twitches, searching for his wand. It's under his pillow every night – when hadn't it? His fingers fasten around the cool wood, and he's tapping his foot. He can't stay still – not now, not then, not ever.
The sitting, the staring, the smiling – it kills him, it really does. They pretend they haven't seen the torture, the murder – they pretend some of it hasn't happened to them first-hand – and he wonders, honest to Merlin, how you erase that from your own mind.
Maybe he wasn't Gryffindor enough to put on his brave face, like his mother would say, and smile and laugh and give presentations on how wonderful a friend Colin Creevey was.
Or maybe he's too much of a Gryffindor. He's too brave to lie to himself.
a/n - wordcount 501. For the Hogwarts Winter Games, Represent that Character, and Write a Million Words.