Haunted

For Safari (wouldtheywriteasongforyou)

Inspired by coeur de mort (Story ID: 10114052/3)


Can't bReathe whenever yOu're gOne

can't turn bacK now

(i'm hauntED)


You were dead before you had the chance to take your first breath, Victoire Weasley. I am the monster that lurks within your mind. I am the shadow that follows you everywhere you go, and I am the nightmare that plagues your every waking thought. I have stolen your soul once, and I can do it again.

I am your Dementor.

He watches her grow up from afar - only watches, never approaches, never touches. She changes from a cold infant to a smouldering youth to a blazing beauty, and he stands, motionless, as she draws looped hearts on her skin with her fingertips and smiles, smiles, smiles.

He's the only one who can smell death rolling off her hair like fog.

That's all she is, after all: death, wrapped up in a body with a heartbeat. Nineteen years ago he'd reached through the darkness and tugged at her helpless little soul, beckoned to it with one finger, promised it rest and peace for the price of just one kiss - and just as the soul was reaching back to him, the girl's father had come in and pushed him away.

So now he watches her, this girl who glows white-hot against the dullness of the rest of the world, and he counts all the ways she is different. She's vacant, for one, and her family thinks it's because she's a daydreamer, but he knows her mind is lined not with girlish fantasies but with shadows, with murkiness. She prefers to be alone so she can ponder cruelty and coldness - and he's the only one who seems to notice the way that sunny smile dies before it reaches her interior. She's got her head in the clouds, the world says fondly, except no, she hasn't, she's got her head shrouded in the Veil, submerged beneath the iciness of the North Sea.

(A soul that has felt the touch of a Dementor never quite forgets the darkness, does it.)

He watches her grow, and he watches her change, and he watches her quietly wonder why she doesn't mind having nightmares. Her soul isn't set quite right within her rib cage - it leans just a little to the left, lying exactly where he'd left it when it had slipped through his fingers nineteen years ago - and he can sense the way it's struggling to right itself. It's futile. Souls cannot move on their own. Even the strongest ones are too weak for that.

Sometimes he catches himself aching to reach out and nudge the soul back into alignment.

But he doesn't. He isn't supposed to touch her. He isn't even supposed to watch her, not like this, not like some sick perversion of a guardian angel. He is supposed to roam with the other Dementors, not linger behind The One That Got Away. He is supposed to find the prettiest and shiniest souls and offer them a kiss - except that she is the shiniest soul he's ever come across, even if the smell of death is clinging to her. She is the colour of a Patronus and she burns like one, too, but he doesn't know how to look away.

(It only seems fitting, doesn't it, that he is the darkness in her soul and she is the brightness in his own vital force.)

So he watches her - not out of bitterness, but because he cannot help it.

And the simple truth is that Victoire Weasley haunts her Dementor every bit as much as he haunts her.


Beta'd by the lovely Taylor (Semblance of Sanity)