Bring Me To Life : A Continuation
by I Got Tired of Waiting

Part II : Dearly Departed
Intermission Five : Part Of Me Is Fighting This, But Part Of Me Is Gone

WAKE UP.

He opened his eyes blearily. He was lying in a comfortable bed, but judging from the light level, it wasn't his room. It was too bright. Much too bright. He closed his eyes in discomfort wondering briefly why he was there, why he wasn't in his quarters. Noises from outside the room gave him his first clue; he was in the infirmary.

His head hurt. For the life of him, he couldn't remember why he was here, or why he felt so fuzzy, almost drugged, his dry, cottony mouth tasting like copper. Rummaging around in his memory, he drew a big zero. No, he didn't remember why he was here.

Or why he was awake for that matter. He was supposed to be sleeping, that much he knew. But something had awakened him. Or someone. He shrugged; he couldn't remember.

GET OUT OF BED.

All right. He slipped out of the bed, stood and looked around. He was alone. For some reason that was significant, but... He smiled; it was becoming a mantra. He couldn't remember. Deciding that not remembering didn't bother him all that much, he made his slow way to the door.

NOT THAT WAY. THE OTHER WAY.

Why not that way? He didn't know, but it seemed important.

THEY'LL WORRY IF YOU'RE GONE.

What? Oh, he'd need an effigy. Staring at the bed, he muttered a spell and there he was in the bed. Only it wasn't him, it was--him--or at least looked like him--in the bed. Somehow this was important, too.

USE THE FIREPLACE.

Oh, what a good idea. He wouldn't have to use the door, then. Walking to the fireplace, he grabbed a handful of the powder and tossed it into the fire burning in the grate. "Harry's Work Room," he said, stepping into the green flames.

Who's Harry?

The grates whizzed by, making him dizzy and, when they finally stopped flashing, he stumbled out into a study. A very tidy study. It somehow didn't feel right; it shouldn't be this neat. The room felt empty, scrubbed clean of the person who'd spent nearly twenty years of his working life here.

There was a huge work table in the centre, cleared of any current work, a large circle embedded in the top. A tall cabinet to the side had closed doors and there were several bookcases, empty, along the other wall.

MAKE OUR REMEMBRANCE.

Our? Who was us? Oh, well. He guessed he'd find that out when he made it. Whatever it was.

USE THE FILMS.

All right, he could do that. He went to the press on the wall to his right and, muttering a key spell, he opened the doors and saw hundreds of slender wooden boxes like books, each containing films he'd made over the years. It didn't bother him at all that they were still there; he didn't know it had been done on purpose, the memories contained therein a living record, a legacy left by the former occupant who no longer needed or wanted them.

Which one? His hands touched the spines of the first four rows. On the fifth, he found one that felt right. He took it out and placed it on the table.

GET THE BOOK.

Book, what book? There was no book in here.

He walked from the workroom to another beyond and found himself in an elegant room, the furniture old but lovingly maintained. Dark vibrant rugs were scattered about the floor, some Persian, one of soft tufted silk in front of the unlit fireplace. He shivered in the room's cold, feeling its emptiness as if it were unused for quite some time, its occupants long gone.

Next to the ancient couch facing the fireplace was a table. On it were two snifters and a half-empty decanter of brandy. The sight made him uneasy for a moment, like he was a trespasser and the owners of the room were going to be home soon. Between the couch and the other love seat sitting at right angles to it, he spied another table with a pile of brown paper. Drawn to it, he saw that there was heavy, leather-bound book in the middle of the wrappings. Old by the look of it, too. He picked it up, taking it back to his table in the other room.

MAKE IT NOW, YOU'VE NOT MUCH TIME.

He took the slim film out of its case. Muttering the activation spell, it unfolded and levitated in the air before his eyes, flat like a piece of paper on a desk. Its contents began to cycle, the three-dimensional images, viewed in miniature, sprang from its flat surface. Watching the action, he didn't know who the three people were, but he admired their skill; it was quite beautiful to behold.

Then the film finished, leaving a dormant platform in front of him awaiting his pleasure. He left it there, hanging in the air.

He opened the book he'd brought and flipped through the pictures. He wished he could remember who all the people were, but there were some provocative photos of two really...

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE TIME TO BE DISTRACTED. MAKE THE MEMORIES.

Distracted? By what? The photos? He wasn't distracted; he just liked them. Especially the last one. He must definitely use it. Perhaps at the end? Giving it some thought and drawing on knowledge he didn't consciously remember, he began to weave a spell which would allow him to merge the film he'd made with the photos.

As he worked, he vaguely remembered he was the one who'd perfected the technique of the moving pictures, not flat Wizarding photos, but real cinema... like he'd seen as a child, only solid somehow. He barely recalled how he'd learned to capture his memories and the memories of others in the films, not just the events themselves, but also a way to include himself in them as if viewed by a third party; it had been fairly easy to do once he'd learned how to view himself dispassionately through the eyes of another.

The film was just another form of the Pensieve... an amusement to while the time as he waited. He didn't need the copious notes he'd left, nor the instructions he'd left on every box to do what he'd been asked. First the picture, then the action, then the memories... weave them all together. Time after time he repeated this litany as one by one, the photos were added, augmented by his memories. After an indeterminate time, he stepped back from his work, satisfied.

He took the resultant film and, casting one last spell, it transformed until it looked like an ordinary rolled parchment scroll. He sealed the free edge to the body with the glyph of a long snarling snake, its open mouth exposing wicked fangs, wrapped around the muscular body of a roaring lion crouched ready to spring, its bared teeth snapping. The two glaring faces touched and faced outward--the snake on top, the lion's underneath--as if readying to fight an unseen enemy.

It's done. Now what?

TAKE IT TO THE OFFICE.

Oh. He took the roll of parchment and went back into the elegant living room and, passing through it, he entered another room through an ornate door that wasn't there if you weren't looking for it. Only one other person had access to it.

The huge room didn't feel right, although he couldn't say why. Perhaps something missing? He shrugged. It was unimportant.

Walking past the empty shelves, hundreds of shelves, all once carrying... books, there used to be thousands of books here... he wondered why they'd all disappeared. Past the lone writing desk in the centre, right up to the fireplace along one wall, two battered wing chairs with waiting poufs were comfortably arranged to receive the weary bodies of the two who used this room more than any other. Like the living room, it was cold, the fire unlit. He shivered at the eerie feeling of the room.

The hearth. That was where he was going. Inlaid into the deep stone hearth, just past the poufs, was a circle of lighter stone just large enough for his feet. He stepped into the circle facing the room and could feel the tingle of the magic contained within. The entire room was visible from where he stood, all the recesses, all the nooks and crannies; there'd been a reason for that, but he couldn't recall what it was. He just knew he had to leave--soon.

Visualising where he wanted to go, he disappeared from the room--

--and entered another with trinkets and magical devices cluttered everywhere. An Orrery. Made of precious metals and stones, its huge sun glowed in the candlelight. And a desk. Large and imposing... entwined snakes ran up the sides of the legs, turning to form the apron running around all four sides.

There was a man at the desk, his back to him. His lean frame was bent over some task, something he was writing, the quill coming back at regular intervals to dip into the ink. He stopped for a moment and rubbed the back of his neck, then resumed his writing. His wavy red hair, peppered with grey, sported a small balding spot in the back. The traditional robes he wore were a deep blue edged in green. Bright robes. The wrong robes.

The wrong man; he shouldn't be here, but Harry couldn't bring himself to find out who he was. Instead, he silently turned in place and spied the old credenza off to the side, its inlaid top the only empty thing in the room. That was wrong, too. It should be piled with rolls of parchment.

LEAVE IT WHERE HE'LL FIND IT.

Who will find it? The man at the desk?

Noiselessly, he glided to the credenza and placed the parchment carefully down on the empty top. It looked lonely. He gazed longingly at it before turning back to enter the circle on the floor he'd just left. He felt like he was leaving something important behind, and for a second he hesitated, wanting to snatch it back.

GO BACK TO BED. YOUR TASK IS FINISHED.

Sighing deeply, he visualised where he needed to be and disappeared from the room--

--and was back in the infirmary, back at the fireplace he'd left hours before. He saw himself sleeping peacefully and, with a sweep of his hand, the effigy disappeared. Hearing voices approach the room, he climbed back into the bed and pulled the covers over him. Swimming in the vortex pulling him down, he resumed his drugged sleep as if he'd never been away.

Colin sat at the desk in the headmaster's office, feeling very uncomfortable. For one, the chair was wrong. It had been made for a different man whose very essence was buried in the seat almost as much as the imprint left by his buttocks. He'd expected difficulties filling Severus' 'shoes', but this...?

The second was the desk itself. While he admired the style, finding the Slytherin snakes clever and appropriate, the shallow groove worn into the top from over a century of the same man writing here at the same place was wrong for the way he wrote, the angle lower. Severus had obviously been left-handed like him, but wrote with his hand on the bottom, not at the top of the lettering the way Colin did. It was very different and his arm kept sliding into the groove every time he reached the end of a line.

Of course, he could fix all these things with a simple spell, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. It wouldn't be right somehow. So he left it as it was and coped. He was good at coping.

And he needed to finish this. There wasn't much time left till he would need to use it; he wanted it done and in his head before he was called upon to recite the words he was forming on the parchment. There would be time enough, after everything was all said and done, for him to remove the all furniture and replace it with his own.

Remove everything, the clutter of the years, all of it to be turned over to Remus, the historian. Harry had already made it clear in one moment of lucidity that he didn't want anything from this room, that it rightly belonged to the community and that Colin was welcome to take what he wanted and give the rest to Remus for safekeeping. Colin certainly didn't want the reminders around, the things so personal, he would be almost glad to remove the detritus of another lifetime.

Colin glanced up at the Orrery, glittering in the candlelight, silent for now. Except that. That I keep. It has always been here for as long as anyone can remember. The legacy of the headmasters before him and filled with the wisdom of his predecessors, its accuracy approached uncanny. Woven into the power of the Earth Stone itself by Severus, it presented an intimidating inheritance.

Shaking off the odd sense of time, Colin resumed writing the Memorial Service speech he was expected to make when a soft waft of cold air brushed gently across the back of his neck. He straightened from his task, rubbing the stiffness away; he didn't look behind him.

Draughty old castle, he thought, I must get the house-elves up here to seal the cracks.

Strangely uneasy, he went back to his task. After writing a few more lines, his arm sliding into the groove with each one, he heard a deep, lonely sigh and then another breath of cold air on his neck. Springing from the chair and whirling around, he confronted--

--nothing. For an infinitesimal instant, he'd thought he'd seen someone, the ghostly image of a lone person. No one was there. He shook off the frisson of otherworldliness, shaking his head at his fancies. Stupid castle really had me going there for a minute. Must be one of the ghosts, maybe Peeves.

As he was about to return to the desk, almost convinced he'd imagined it, he found his attention drawn to the credenza behind the desk sporting a lone roll of parchment. Where the hell did that come from? he asked himself, knowing he'd personally cleared it of the mounds of Severus' papers and notes; they now resided in his private study awaiting his leisure to read them. Thinking of the last few minutes, he startled, realising someone had been in the room; he'd not been imagining things. More curious than alarmed, he closed the distance to the credenza and examined the parchment closely without touching it.

The glyph in the seal rocked him a bit. He'd never seen it before, but it was clear who it belonged to--Severus and Harry. Harry has been here, how I don't know, but... here it is. Picking it up, he closely examined the seal, the fierceness of the snake and lion speaking volumes to him about the nature of the men it represented. This must be their private seal, their bond seal, the seal of their power. He'd never seen it before.

What shook him wasn't the intimacy of the glyph; he'd seen others far more graphic, but their seal was almost identical to his and Dana's. While Severus and Harry's avatars were crouching and looking forward, statant, his and Dana's was regardant; her snarling lion seated on its haunches looked over its shoulder, his hissing snake, ready to strike, entwined sinuously around the lion's body. The serpent's head, resting on the mighty leonine shoulder, looked in the same direction, ready to do battle with some unseen enemy.

Floored, he understood.

Theirs--looking forward and building their future, the two of them fiercely created a legacy by facing and vanquishing their enemies. Ours--looking back at what was past built, we watch our backs, protecting and nurturing the legacy we've received from theirs. Gods, how fitting. How did they foresee this as well? How did they know what we would be? How did we?

His eyes travelled back to the Orrery in awe. He remembered when they'd created their seal, pouring their bond into it, mystified as to why the final form felt so right even though it wasn't something they willingly chose.

He started to put the dormant parchment back down, willing himself to look at it another time--he had so much work to finish--when the words opposite the seal caught his eye.

For Remus and Arabella Lupin and Their Designated Heirs:
Our Memories
To open, break the seal by means of Aperio.
To close, repair the seal by means of Signum.

Their Last Statement.

Colin's hands shook with the leashed power the scroll contained within. It wasn't his to open and he hastily placed it back on the Credenza knowing he shouldn't touch it again.

Considering a moment, he turned back to the desk, his eye catching his own parchment waiting for him to finish. He knew it for a wasted effort, the words he needed were now cleanly burned into his mind, their essence expressed in a roll of parchment not his own.

Moving to the fireplace, he threw in a handful of the Floo powder, saying, "Remus Lupin." He waited a few moments for Remus to answer the compulsion, hoping he wasn't catching him at a bad time. Remus' head and shoulders appeared in the green fire.

"Hullo Colin, what can I--"

"Remus, at your earliest convenience," Colin interrupted smoothly, "I need you to come to the headmaster's office. I have something of yours."

Remus eyed him a moment. "Certainly, Headmaster. I'm on my way."

Colin nodded and Remus' head disappeared, the fire once again burning brightly.

Returning to his desk, he picked up his parchment, balled it up in his fists and, with deadly accuracy, threw it into the flames.

TBC