Written for:
Quidditch League: Chaser 3: Write about someone who ignores an important warning { [quote] "I am in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things which I dare not confess to my own soul." - Bram Stoker, Dracula ; [theme] isolation ; [season] winter }
Hogwarts Assignment 7: Mythology task 7 - Write about receiving a warning in a dream
Spring Funfair: Cherry Blossoms: Yoshino Cherry - (trope) 5 plus 1
Spring Funfair: Paint a rainbow: Grey - starting a fire
i.
You startle awake the first time. Panting, ears buzzing, hands scrambling over your body as you search desperately for the warm stickiness oozing out of a hole in your chest. You expect pain.
You find nothing.
The cool air hits your sweaty skin instead, waking you, and it's all you can do to stare at your crumpled sheets as the memories of being chased, of being hunted race across your closed eyelids each time you blink.
Quickly, though, the images disappear. Your heart stops racing. You're alone in your room, like you have always been. There's no danger. The wards are still perfectly intact. The birds are beginning to chirp cheerfully.
A wave of your wand is all you need for your sheets to be dried and orderly enough for you to go back to sleep. Your pillow flies back to you from across the room, and everything is perfectly fine again.
It's just a dream, and like all dreams, when you wake again in the morning it's long forgotten.
ii.
Your mornings start with the sun.
It's one of the few moments of bliss you can enjoy – the glancing of rays over the treetops, and the gentle gold filtering through the swaying trees.
The bitingly cold winter wind rushes past you as you open the door. It will get colder only for a few more days, but it is still far colder than when you arrived.
The village at the foot of the mountains has been suffering for it, but they will never accept help from the likes of you.
You are unfamiliar to them, even after a year. Your mannerisms are too strange for them, but you force yourself to venture into the village for food when you require it. The mountains weren't good for farming – there were no swathes of even land, only ancient trees and immovable rock – and magic couldn't produce food.
This village is one of the few that doesn't appear to be too superstitious. They aren't particularly friendly but hadn't moved to chase you out for a full year, where the others only allow you a peaceful stay for a month or two.
You had arrived last winter, and the villagers had begrudgingly offered food and shelter for the few days it had taken you to find and set up a spot on the mountains. Your home was small but had quickly filled up with hanging herbs and potion ingredients you had found while foraging through the forest.
Living in this kind of peaceful harmony is all you have ever wanted. It is the reason you helped found Hogwarts.
It is the reason you have become so disappointed in Hogwarts, and all the politics that envelope the school.
Hogwarts is supposed to be home in a way nowhere else is willing to be. For anyone who requires it.
Not just those who fit in.
Not just those who want to be seen as doing the 'right' thing.
That's why you try to help the village without them asking.
It is all you can do to help the village in little ways that they wouldn't notice: a Restoration Charm on their dying crops, and a small ward similar to those in the Hogwarts Greenhouses once the crops have become healthy again.
You will recast them once winter gives way to spring. It is your repayment for their ambivalent kindness.
For allowing you the peace you had yearned for as a child struggling to survive.
iii.
You find yourself in the same dream a week later. Stabbed in the same way you have been every night for the last week, but somehow you've grown so accustomed to it that you don't even find yourself waking up.
The dream simply ends. You find yourself in the beginning of the dream again. Chased and hunted in the same way, but now you know you can't keep running.
You're not as young as you used to be.
Running always ends the same way. It doesn't matter which way you run, or where you hide, they always find you.
Instead, your wand is in your hand. Some strange determination and power fills you. It's reckless and brash, and very much like Godric.
You'll fight.
Perhaps you won't win, not the first time. Maybe not even the tenth or hundredth time.
You'll win eventually.
Maybe all this fighting and dying will stop then.
You dearly hope so.
iv.
You're abnormally hot when you wake up. The birds aren't chirping, and there's the distinct sense of unease lingering at the back of your mind.
The perspiration that drenches your clothing is not from your nightmares, you can tell that much.
Breathing is difficult, you realise.
Flames dancing across your ceiling meet your eyes when you hurry to open them. It's fortunate that your bed is as close to the ground as it is – you had contemplated making it slightly higher only a week ago – or you may have simply suffocated in your sleep.
For a moment, you wonder if you had forgotten to completely kill the fire last night.
The yells and cheers meet your ears over the roaring of the flames, and with grim realisation you know this is no immediate mistake on your part.
Perhaps you had grown too attached, too complacent, over the months, but you had never expected this.
You should have.
All people, mundane and magical alike, feared and loved in equal parts. Despite their inaction, you had done nothing to have them love you.
Nothing that they knew of, at least.
It's with bitter reluctance that you grab your locket and mutter a few words in Parseltongue, wand clutched tightly in your left hand.
You arrive at the frozen stream on the other side of the mountain a second later.
It will be better if they believe they have killed you.
They will have their peace, even if you never find the same.
v.
There is no longer anyone chasing you.
Each body fades as they are defeated. You stare around the now-familiar clearing, seeing nothing of what had haunted your dreams for months.
It is almost like the peaceful clearing you had woken up to for months with perfectly golden light flitting through the leaves.
You win.
But you're alone.
The birds are absolutely silent.
Utterly, painfully, alone.