The Ouroboros

ou · ro · bor · os (ôr'ə-bôr' əs) n.

The tail-biting snake, the eternal circle of disintegration and reintegration; it devours, fertilizes, begets, and slays itself, and brings itself to life again.

They say that in death all things become clear.

Such as the looking-glass stillness in Remus' eyes when they found him - or so they had told her - lying face up in the snow.

The winter sun glinting off a blanket of white on that Sunday morning, deceptively bright on a day that should have felt bleak if only in homage to the man they were burying.

They also say that violence is reserved for only the physically large and violent. If so, then violence should not have been begotten by the slight man whose only crime against the world was to have been bitten by another unfortunate, the cycle repeating itself into untraceable oblivion, lines crossed and snarled in the complexities of forgetting.

The long hours working together towards the Dark Lord's downfall had forced Remus and I to become...less antagonistic towards each other. After a fashion. Enough so that I did not feel the need to snipe at him as much as I felt he deserved.

Oddly enough, it was his death that brought us together, coming together in a violent conflagration of frottage and fucking.

After which, she left. As they always do. As they always have done.

In the quiet despair of the night, whenever it becomes dark enough, the dungeon chiaroscuro wraps me in its indiscriminate embrace. Only then with the firewhiskey flowing freely through my veins will I perhaps muster enough courage to actually think of her. To visualise what I can, or to the extent that I allow myself to the intricacies of what made her. Inside my mind, buried within its dark recesses, in the storehouse of memories best forgotten are images of her; arms splayed outward as she writhed beneath me, the sweat-slicked bow of her body stretched taut - the calm before the storm.

So, during those moments when I do try to remember, the images are presented as a warped daguerreotype portrait; sepia toned images bleeding together. Hazy, curling in on itself like the worn edges of a photograph. And these images in turn, are viewed as if through a thick layer of stained glass to which I press my face against to no effect. I suppose this is due to the fact that I am, in many ways, a victim of my own past, having conserved those recollections precisely as they were received. A triptych of time twisting, twining like so, that the images become lost within the garden of the hurricane's eye.

I am not attempting to describe to you the Hermione the world knows now, that is, Hermione as she exists today; a woman I do not know, a witch of incredible power and determination stalking back and forth in front of an apathetic Wizengamot, her words uttered in a voice of organised passion. To be more precise, I am talking about Hermione then; a person whose very essence has been distorted by my dreams, very much like the words obscured underneath the teardrops on a piece of parchment.

Thus, recalling her exactly is a struggle with my intractable brain. She is there, though. Someplace, drifting in through the synapses and spread over a barren landscape fraught with despair and speckled with the hope that she, for a time, brought.

And then she left. As she always did. As she always has done.

It seemed she loved me most when we were apart.

However, absence does not necessarily make the heart grow fonder. If anything, it only serves to fuel bitterness and imagined scenarios of abandonment by the absent party. I would see myself apart from my body through the eyes of a madman.

An excerpt, written in lust and frustration from one of those moments:

With each chime of the hour from the clock in the living room so does his imagined acrimony grow. He wants to hate her, forces himself to open his eyes to her so-called true character. But all he knows is her body above him, weight pushing down hard in an entirely pleasurable primal rhythm. The body of a lover. Her cologne, a common, unremarkable confection of mechanised mass chain-store production. He imagines he can still detect it in the spot where the collarbones meet at the hollow at the base of her throat where he knew she loved to be kissed.

In many ways, ours was not a love story.

And yet in many ways, it was.

Fin. Prologue of 13 chapters

"in the garden of the hurricane's eye" is John Ciardi's phrase and the title of one of his poems

Please R/R. I need to know what I am doing wrong and how I can correct it. This has not yet been beta-ed and English is not my first language. Any offer of beta-ing is welcomed. My e-mail address is on my profile.

Please, no flames. Remember, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. The story's continuity depends on you, dear reader.