May 10, 2011 Prompt: Fiery-orange hair
VI. Dreaming
Luna.
It had been days since he had seen her. Days he had spent, in bed with nothing to do but sleep, and think. And what was there to think of, but his life? A life he felt should already be over.
He actually started longing for Luna, and her batty presence, that made him forget everything. It was this thought that made him grimace and his stomach to tighten and twist unpleasantly.
It seemed to him, like he actually needed Luna. He couldn't remember the last time he'd ever felt that he needed someone.
Had it been Dumbledore? He wasn't particularly sure. The man had guided him... but in the last couple years, Severus had despised him for it. He didn't like the way Dumbledore used him as a puppet, how he had manipulated him.
Dumbledore had once told him, that he thought sometimes that they sorted too soon. Severus had took that to mean that the man had felt that Severus ought to have been a Gryffindor. However, now he rather felt Dumbledore should have been in Slytherin. He was as manipulative, if not more so, than the Dark Lord.
No, Severus had not needed Dumbledore. The only time he'd ever needed the man, was when he first went to him, thinking that the man could save Lily. And he had failed him in that, hadn't he?
Before Dumbledore, was Lily. He'd needed her in a way that he'd never needed anyone else, not his parents and certainly not any of the other people that surrounded him. However, had that been real need?
Severus didn't think that was worth figuring out. He didn't want to think about Lily. Anymore than he wanted to consider Luna, and how she may possibly have somehow become indispensable to him. After all, needing someone only meant future disappointment, didn't it? In the end, the people he'd felt he needed failed him, and left him breathless and insuperably broke.
When he started to dream about her, he thought he was in trouble. He always woke with a sick feeling afterward. Not so much because of Luna, but because he dreamt of seeing her snogging someone. Someone who he couldn't see, but for the back of their shaggy head. Fiery-orange hair, to him it seemed. Maybe it was the obscure lighting.
Severus really tried not to think of the dreams, not knowing or wanting to know, what they could possibly mean. However, there wasn't much else did he did delight in thinking in.
They did give him a Daily Prophet almost Daily to entertain him, but he didn't delight in reading that anymore than anything else. The world still seemed to not have settled down. Luna was correct in saying there was a lot of repairing and healing for their world to do. As it was, he was made aware of the intense reconstructing that Hogwarts was undergoing.
Along with that, there was a long accounts of the battle, and the deaths that occurred during it. The Ministry, was struggling to right the wrongs of the last year, and give reparation to those who's lives had been most affected, the muggle-borns. Though, Severus wasn't sure how one went about doing such a thing.
As for the Death Eaters, many had been rounded up, and were in the process of being tried. Severus had been unpleasantly shocked when he'd read this his own trial had been carried out during his absence, and that he was let off being charged at all, thanks to Potter who had declared in his defense.
Luna hadn't been kidding when she said that Potter carried a lot of influence these days. Severus had wondered how long that would last. He assumed not very long, people had relatively short memories.
However, no matter how many Daily Prophets and ignored memories of his past, Severus mind always found its way back to Luna Lovegood.
TBC...
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