Hello there!

Thanks for clicking on the story, it means a lot to me. As you may have guessed, I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, and in particular I have a weakness for the Marauders era. As such, I will take any recommendations that you may have. :)

This is the short prologue of Sunshine. The rest of the chapters will be much longer than this. I had considered combining it with the first chapter, but I thought that it ended better on its own. I hope that you enjoy my story, and please feel free to ask me any queries or questions you may have!

Disclaimer: In a startling twist of events, I did not write the Harry Potter series. Thus, I own nothing. Sue me for the £3.43 that's in my purse – it'll cost you more in legal fees.

Prologue: Sunshine

She saw spangling sunshine. It hopped back and forth, shifting and changing. Afraid to settle; to stagnate. Phosphorescent light in an uneasy quickstep, aimless and spontaneous with an unwillingness to commit.

However, it was not the sunshine that graced her. Its lustrous burn was well worth the warmth that would envelop her as she met its gaze. Her parents told her to never look directly at the sun, but she couldn't resist sometimes taking a peek. The hairs on her arms would stand on end as she stared down the blinding star. She imagined Helios, or Apollo or Ra looking back, their brilliant glare dizzying and empowering her at the same time. Her eyes left with a dappled glow and her body filled with newfound potential. She could take on the sun.

It was more like looking at a cheap lightbulb. Glistering and artificial, a light that ambushed the bundles of nerves resting behind her eyes, aggressing each one with its bleached blaze. She was left with white spots that rehoused themselves in her line of vision, fizzing back and forth in front of her pupils like a cracked can. She tried to concentrate on one place, to focus her eyes, but her head lulled, neck struggling with its weight.

"How did you get into my vault?" The voice was foggy. Muffled with cotton-wool ears and the sound of her own beating heart. "Did the dirty little goblin in the cellar help you?"

Her reply seemed to be in slow motion. She felt as if she were wading through marshland, each syllable a struggle. Her tongue was heavy, teeth clashing together as she spoke, words slurring like a drunk. For the first time in her life, her mouth worked entirely separately to her brain. She couldn't find a semblance of sense within her that wasn't sloshing back and forth like a child in a stream. Her lips were on autopilot, moving aimlessly of their own accord and she had no idea what she'd said but it couldn't have been pleasing.

The stinging chill of a knife bit at her forearm. Raw with cold, but no longer painful. Her mind seemed indifferent to her body, removed and remote. She had surpassed pain and instead was numb and misty. With wide and unclear eyes, she watched with faint concentration as the blade traced her skin, decorating milk white with crude red lesions. Slowly, slowly, letters appeared. Blood oozing from her pale forearm like a particularly indulgent slug, trailing across pallid skin with an almost cautious permeance. The blood mingled with the remnants of grime, shifting from startling scarlet to murky claret.

MUDBLOOD

"Lying, filthy…"

She could take on the sun.

With her muddy, dirty, filthy blood. Blood that deserved to spill. Blood that wasn't fit for any purpose but to splatter the ground they walked on; to sink into the soil and fester with the worms and mites that lived there. A curious discrimination.

Her blood could take on the sun.

The blood that muggle parents gave her. Parents that were warm and loving; that tucked her into pale yellow bedcovers each night with an out of key rendition of their song. Despite her being long past the age for lullabies.

'You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…'*

Her parents that were somewhere in Australia now, where it was hot and sticky, and the sunshine blazed all day long. Two senior dentists under the name of Monica and Wendell Wilkins. A pair that were pleasant and kind, but careful, who would never glance too long at the sky for fear it would blind them. Thoughtful folk with sunny temperaments, ones that had always wanted a child, but who fate had never seen fit to shine a light on.

'You make me happy, when skies are grey…'

Her filthy, powerful blood was all she had left of them. That, and a faint echo of a lullaby that told her she was the light in their lives.

Hermione's head drooped. She was wrapped in a pulpy mesh of pressure and temperature. Time and pain seemed transient as her head burnt and throbbed. It was though the soft mass of her jumbled brain was pushing against her skull, pressing against cartilage and bone in one uncontained surge of force, seeking release from its fleshly prison. She tried to groan, but no noise escaped her. Instead, a gurgle of blood, thick and sticky with the phlegm that lined her throat, dribbled down her lips; a parasite's cocktail.

'You'll never know dear, how much I love you…'

She couldn't choke. No feeble coughs or gasping breaths. No spluttering, crying eyes and heaving lungs. She was stuck in the sinking mud, slow and heavy. Eyelids clinging to blank and unseeing eyes. Her mouth crippled; cracked lips parted and unmoving. The tang of wet iron soaked each tastebud and a viscous red treacle clung to her tongue, pouring into each slit and cavity it could find, filling her up from the inside as she sat silently. Her limbs were slack, limp and hanging from the trunk of her body like broken branches.

Hermione's eyes fluttered from open to closed, closed to open. Lashes wilting like daisies in the heat. It wouldn't be long now. Lines were blurring, shapes were merging. Each figure a flower in the forest, a mass of colour and indistinction from green to blue to black to purple and red. Cruel eyes muddied from sharp steel to a blur of soft, distorted grey before fading into nothing. Faceless, formless.

Leaving just Hermione and the sunshine.

As she rested against the cold marble of Malfoy manor, bleeding against the tiles, Hermione thought that she heard her parents' tuneless voices singing to her one last time.

'So please don't take my sunshine away.'

She smiled.

*You Are My Sunshine is a song that's origins are unknown, but was popularised by Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell in 1939.