"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts."
Films About GhostsChapter 19: So Sworn
She was standing, shivering, in a crowd of black-robed men. They were all armed with wands, and each and every wand was aimed at her heart. Ariane folded her arms over her chest and looked down at her bare feet in the snow. Her teeth were chattering, and her toes were blue with cold.
"How is it you live?" demanded a shrill voice that Ariane knew—and yet it was unfamiliar to her. "I killed you months ago."
Ariane didn't look up; she was too scared. She was even more afraid that she would lose control of her bladder before too long, and then they would mock her more than they already had.
"How does she live?" the voice demanded again, stalking closer to Ariane until she could see his feet, warmly booted, a foot away from her bare ones. "I do not understand it." A pair of hands reached out and seized her shoulders, and he tried to force her to look at him. Ariane closed her eyes and did what she'd been told to do: she reached out, grabbed the man by the ears, and jerked as hard as she could.
He roared in pain and struck out at her, sending her crashing to the ground with her right eye swelling swiftly closed. Ariane, both her eyes watering with pain and fear, crawled away through the snow, her thick skirts tangling around her legs and her bodice restricting her range of motion. Above her, a man stood with an axe.
She couldn't get away, the snow was too slippery. Her hands scrabbled against the slick ground, her fingernails filled with earth.
The axe came down with a sick and heavy thud onto the exposed back of her neck.
Ariane awoke panting, dripping with sweat, and distinctly unsettled. That was not the first time that night she'd dreamed of her own death in similar situations. Once the shrill-voiced man had killed her, another time Hermione had hexed her on accident, a third time she'd died by the hands of a hooded man who had choked her slowly to death on the frozen ground.
She went to the bathroom and splashed water on her face, trying not to think about her various gruesome and bloody deaths. Instead she thought about Mrs. Weasley's reaction when Ron had told her that Percy obviously fancied 'her' (he had avoided using Ariane's name—apparently it caused him some pain). Ariane had expected to be thrown out in the snow, perhaps stoned to death, maybe even locked in the cellar.
To Ron's and Ariane's surprise, Mrs. Weasley had hugged her warmly and congratulated her for 'taking the time to get to know the real Percy' while shooting a very dirty look at George, who had pantomimed vomiting into a Christmas stocking behind Percy's back. Ginny (who didn't seem to mind that her brother fancied one of her friends) explained this to Ariane in very frank terms.
"Mum thought he'd never get a girl 'cause he's such an arse," she told Ariane while tempting Rupert with a piece of tinsel. "But you don't seem to mind that."
Ariane hadn't been sure whether she should be offended or not. Even now, three days later, she wasn't sure. Harry and Ron were sure about two things: Ariane was far too young for Percy, and the fact that she'd gone after Ron's brother after he'd invited her over for Christmas was a crime of supreme severity. Ariane had pointed out more than once that she was seventeen and had been since October, and Percy had only just turned twenty that August. "I didn't even know you had a brother called Percy until you invited me," she snapped at Ron one particularly trying day, "and I'd appreciate it if you stopped blaming it on me. If anything, it's your fault."
That little statement had left Ron gaping and making incoherent noises for nearly five minutes. It had also made Harry stop talking to her entirely.
Ariane stared at the water swirling down the drain, making it's little clockwise path around the white basin, and wondered if Harry realized how much this hurt. Harry was probably the only person in the world who knew what it was like to not have complete and total control of your own thoughts. Sure, he was a bit superior and could be irritatingly smug sometimes, but altogether he was a nice person. Godric Gryffindor would have liked him a lot.
Salazar probably would have liked him too.
Ariane frowned into the empty basin. She hadn't thought it was possible for one person to display ambition and bravery in one mind. Well, sure, it was probably possible, just not probable. Not to mention that Harry was a Gryffindor darling, and hated the Slytherins with a passion. Well, hated Draco Malfoy with a passion. But was Draco even a Slytherin? If he had ambition, he hadn't shown it. He was shrewd, but not exceptionally so. Yet he was in Slytherin.
Did this Sorting Hat even know what it was supposed to be looking for?
She shook her head to dispel the thoughts. There was a headache beginning behind her eyes, and she was very tired.
Ariane crept back into Ginny's room and eyed her rumpled bed with misgiving. She wanted no more dreams of her own death.
"You hear that?" she whispered at the ceiling as she lay back down. "No more of those dreams."
Whoever it was she'd been speaking to obliged.
The setting was the same: the edge of a wood in the dead of winter, the trees thick and bare and knotted. The snow was thick under her feet, and it was melting into the hem of her long skirt. Above her the sky was solid and gray with clouds that threatened more snow. About fifty feet from the edge of the wood a lake began, the rim of it a broad band of ice.
There were also differences:
Ariane was not among the hooded men this time. Her hands were tied firmly in front of her by a length of thin cord, and she stood with a few other similarly gagged and bound people. Her hair was mostly pulled back, instead of loose like before, and what little of it she could see had been dyed dark brown. The hooded men stood across from her, their faces still strangely concealed. She leaned to the side to see whom it was that stood among them in her place and was poked sharply in the side by the taller person next to her.
It was Percy, looking rumpled, pale, and smudged. One of the lenses of his glasses was cracked, and the other was half-gone. He had not been gagged, but that was because it looked as though he was having trouble thinking of two words to say. There was a thin trickle of blood running down the side of his face from a wound concealed under his hair.
Ariane made to touch his shoulder, to ask what had happened, but he shook his head very slightly from side to side. The shrill-voiced man pushed aside the hooded men and pulled the boy they had been concealing into the center of the clearing. Ariane gasped aloud.
It was Harry.
Like Percy, he looked worse for the wear. There was a nasty cut across the bridge of his nose and he was moving in an awkward way that suggested a sprained ankle or knee. Harry looked defiant, as he usually did, but he also looked scared. His eyes flicked to Ariane and then away very quickly, as though afraid of her. Or concealing her.
"Why aren't you dead?" the shrill-voiced man demanded of Harry. "I saw to it that you and that abomination of a girl would die in the same breath, so that my position here wouldn't be threatened."
"You only got it half-right," Harry said coolly, his voice steady.
"Did I?" the man purred. "Crucio."
Harry didn't scream at once, as the hooded men had obviously expected, but his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to his knees, his whole body twitching. His arms fought their bindings, and the cut on his nose and another across his shoulder began to bleed anew. The man frowned and made a gesture with his wand.
A low moan burst from Harry's throat; slowly growing louder until it was a howl as helpless as a newborn baby's. His whole body contorted in on itself, as though every muscle was trying to flex at once. He screamed again, and this time it was so awful that Ariane felt tears come to her eyes. The man smiled cruelly and began to make the gesture that had increased the pain before.
"Stop!" Ariane shrieked. She elbowed her way through the others and ran out into the clearing, coming to a sliding stop on her knees in front of Harry, who was still jerking in the snow. Hot tears were running down her face, and she couldn't wipe them away because her hands were still tied in front of her.
The shrill man's mouth formed a small o. He lifted his wand and Harry relaxed into the snow.
She made an effort to wipe her dripping nose, trying hard not to look up. Ariane realized that she'd been exceedingly stupid and just made Harry's suffering completely pointless, because all along he'd been trying to pretend she was dead.
A cold hand, colder than the snow and ice, seized her chin and turned her face to his.
Ariane tried to look away but couldn't. The man had a white-white face, red, slitted eyes, and dark hair that he had bound loosely away from his face. She swallowed hard.
"I killed you," he told her, and she shivered. "I swore it was so."
It was extremely stupid to point out that no, he hadn't killed Ariane after all, but it was what Harry did. The words were mostly slurred, but Ariane knew that the man understood because he stretched out his other white hand and struck Harry very hard across the face.
"Stop it!" she screamed at him, and stepped hard on his foot.
Luckily in this dream she had sturdy boots on. The man hissed with pain and backed away, getting ready to make a spell.
Then everything happened at once.
Somewhere, Salazar called her name as he ran towards her, black hair bound back and touched with gray at the temples. "Ariane?"
A man separated himself from the crowd of hooded men and threw himself between the two teenagers and the man.
And Harry stood up, his wand held shakily in front of him.
Ariane was pushed to the ground by someone and got a face full of snow, only managing to look up after the man had shrieked his spell. She saw him draw his wand across the air in front of him viciously.
A spray of red, red blood hit Ariane in the face, and a dark-haired head hit the ground in front of her and rolled, it's body following slowly after.
Percy hadn't been asleep on the couch for more than an hour when he heard Ariane scream. He hadn't realized how fast he could move until then, up the stairs and through the door to see Ariane sitting bolt up in bed, her face white and stricken. She had mercifully not cried out again, but instead her whole body was shaking with hysterical, silent sobs and her eyes were so tightly closed it looked painful. Ginny and Hermione, apparently not much affected (or they had thought that the scream had been in their dreams) were only stirring on their beds.
He made his way across the crowded room and sat down at the foot of her bed. "Ariane," Percy whispered. She didn't move. He moved himself closer and, half-assured half-bewildered, pulled her next to him as though somehow he could take away whatever mental agony she suffered.
Ariane tried to push him away. "Get off," she muttered. "I don't want to give it to you."
"I don't care," Percy told her stoutly and held her tighter until she made a mildly irritated noise and leaned against him, her fragile frame shaking as though she'd been running hard for a long time. "What did you dream?" he asked, breathing in the light scent of her hair.
"Death," Ariane whispered. "My death, mostly." Her breath caught in her throat and she hiccupped. "You were there, sometimes. So were Harry and Hermione, and there were others." Percy saw her eyes widen, glassy in the dim room. "It was like different versions of one scene. Each time I did something different, and I always died anyway. Well, not the last—the last…" she broke off and shook her head, her eyes filling with tears and her shudders redoubling. Like a little girl, she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shirt, sobbing like her heart was broken.
Percy wasn't sure what to do. Tears he could handle after a fashion, hysterics—no. Nobody in his family was ever hysterical except his mother, and his father always managed those episodes. "It's all right," he soothed. "It was a dream."
This seemed to calm Ariane down—or at least make her think. He could feel her face pucker into a frown against the front of his shirt. "No," she said after a pause. "I don't think it was."
"What was it?" Percy asked, frowning himself. "A memory?"
"No," she muttered. "You were in it. And yet—it must have been, because Salazar was there too." Her voice strengthened with conviction. "It was as though I were seeing a memory I haven't had yet."
The business of time travel had always confused Percy horribly. "What? That's not possible—or it's a prediction."
"I don't really predict things," Ariane said thoughtfully. "I've never dreamed of anything but the past." She turned so that she could look up at him in the dark, the faint moonlight making her pewter hair glow. "What if I was seeing the past—but it was my future?"
Percy frowned harder, trying to imagine how this was even possible. "How can you see something you haven't done yet?" he asked crossly, rubbing his forehead.
"No idea," Ariane shrugged, the tremor almost gone from her voice. She wiped her wet face with the hem of her nightshirt, revealing for a moment a patch of white skin Percy had not yet seen. It was distracting. Then she let the hem drop and the collar slipped aside to reveal a shoulder and collarbone.
Right, that was more than distracting. That was just plain unfair.
Why did being a guy mean that he had to have the idiotic amount of hormones?
"Did I wake you up?" Ariane asked, pushing the nightshirt back up. Percy's eye followed her hand and she blushed in the dark, self-conscious of the way it slithered down again.
"Not really—well, yes, but it doesn't matter," he muttered. They paused for a second while Percy's brain chewed on two different things at once. One of his trains of thought was along the lines of how he wished Hermione and Ginny weren't sleeping in the same room with them. The second was the whole idea of knowing a future because it had happened before.
Of the two subjects, Percy liked the first vastly more than the second. At least it was something he understood. Mostly.
But the first subject was not something he really wanted to take the time to find a way to talk about, so he settled for saying: "That past-as-a-future thing couldn't be just an extreme case of déjà vu, could it?"
"Not unless you've met Salazar," Ariane replied. She snuggled against his shoulder, and abruptly, Percy knew exactly what Salazar Slytherin looked like.
It was hard to describe, other than the sudden knowledge that Salazar had been tall and thin, with long black hair and eyes the same velvety purple as Ariane's. Percy frowned, then realized that what had happened to everyone else around Ariane was happening to him: he was picking up snippets of her thoughts. Well, that wasn't what he wanted, her thoughts were hers. She could keep them. Percy made a mental resolution not to let it happen again.
"I don't want to go back to Hogwarts," Ariane whispered.
"Why not?"
"Well, you're not there, firstly, and I don't really like it there," she confessed. "Most of the people think I'm a weirdo, the Slytherins openly hate me, and the only Gryffindors that actually talk to me are Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny." She paused for thought. "And Neville, sometimes. When there's nobody else to talk to."
"To be honest with you, I wasn't a big fan of Hogwarts either," Percy told her. He'd never shared this thought with anyone. "I always felt like I was alone there, even though there were loads of other people."
"Exactly," Ariane murmured. She shifted and the bedsprings creaked. "I feel like something awful is going to happen, Percy."
He pushed her silver hair out of her face. "Nothing's going to happen," he told her seriously. "Not to you." Once again, his overtly practical inner self rolled its eyes as Percy leaned over and kissed her, letting himself get utterly lost in eyes the color of the sky just before dawn. When they broke apart, he promised, "As long as I'm here, I won't let anything happen to you."
"Don't promise that," Ariane whispered. "It's a promise that's too hard for anyone to keep."
"What would you like me to promise?" he asked, puzzled by her resolute rejection.
She thought, one of her hands winding in his hair. "Promise that no matter what, I'll never lose you again."
"Consider it so sworn," Percy replied, smiling despite himself.
Ariane smiled too. "In return, I promise that I'll never get hopelessly lost," she half-teased, "so that you don't have to break your promise."
"What?" Percy laughed. "Well, so long as we end up hopelessly lost in the same place."
"Does that make sense?"
"No, not really. Does it matter?"
"Er…no, I really don't think so."
After about ten minutes of entertaining themselves, Ariane pulled away. "We really ought to go downstairs," she whispered breathlessly. "Or something. Because if we wake Ginny up, that'll be twice I've wanted to burst into flames because of your family and you."
Percy had to concede that it was a fair point, as he'd felt much the same way when Ron had caught them. They crept out of the room (Hermione stirred when a floorboard creaked but only mumbled and rolled over) and went downstairs. Halfway down the last flight of stairs, they heard voices, strangely tense and frantic. They sounded as though they were coming from the kitchen.
Once again, Ariane's curiosity might have been her undoing, but luckily nobody was looking her way when she peered around the corner.
It was a silent and yet alarming scene, maybe more so because there was no noise except whispering. Bill was bent over something on the kitchen table, along with Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, Professor McGonagall, and, to Ariane's shock, Dumbledore, who out of all the people there looked the most troubled by the bloody bundle before him. Ariane leaned a little farther forward and Percy grabbed the back of her nightshirt, stopping her from revealing herself by falling over.
"When did you find her?" Dumbledore asked Bill, eyes very grave behind his oblong glasses. "And where?"
"Just past two thirty this morning," Bill replied, sounding as though he'd told this story at least twice. "She was at the edge of the wood, barely a mile away from here. It looked like she had dragged herself a good way before passing out." One of his long-fingered hands pushed his loose hair back, and the briefest patch of light illuminated a swollen, bruised face slashed with cuts and scratches. If there hadn't been a bit of bronze-colored hair that was still clean and blood-free, Ariane would never have known who it was.
"Professor Connor!" she whispered to Percy, who was leaning in above her. "She's been killed!"
"No, just beaten to a bloody pulp, or at least that's what it looks like," he replied softly.
"It's awful," Professor McGonagall barked, her normally brisk voice positively choking on emotion. "Albus, what could she have done?" She looked nearly as disheveled as Bill, her gray-streaked dark hair falling out of her normally tight bun and her robes were wrinkled and looked as though they'd been slept in.
Dumbledore hesitated. "While Angharad was lucid, she seemed to think that Lucius found out some of her family connections as well as the fact that she apparently attacked him in the woods."
"What?" Mrs. Weasley burst out. "Had she run mad?"
"No, she was protecting your son," Dumbledore said heavily, "And did so very well. Lucius Malfoy is a madman now, though he was before now—at least before he had some restraint." He cast a significant look at Professor McGonagall. "It seems that your brother-in-law revealed to a certain Narcissa Malfoy that Angharad was his daughter."
Professor McGonagall swore viciously. "How dare he?" she snapped, her face going quite red. "After all he put his own daughter through, how could he betray her position to the Death Eaters?"
"He has joined the Death Eaters, and thus met Angharad working for Lucius when she had last told him that she was working for me. Patrick Connor may be many undesirable things, but he isn't stupid." Dumbledore's gaze was flinty, and Ariane hoped that Patrick Connor knew what was coming. She hoped he was wetting himself right now, because if he wasn't he was a fool indeed.
Professor McGonagall began to make a violent gesture, then stopped herself, pulled herself to her full height, and murmured icily, "I assume that my niece was being punished more for double-crossing than for the attack on Malfoy."
Ah, there's the resemblance, Ariane thought to herself. That steel, except in Professor it's turned about to be almost vengeful in a controlled way, and in Professor McGonagall it stands for nothing but right.
Angharad Connor stirred on the table, one of her hands lifting weakly to make a familiar dismissive gesture. Ariane nearly gagged—all her fingers were bent crookedly at places no joints were, her thumb was completely gone, and her palm was bent backwards as though it had been molded against the corner of a box.
"Someone is coming to aid her, Dumbledore?" Mr. Weasley said, entering the conversation for the first time. "A Healer?"
"Smethwick," Dumbledore named the Healer, "But he cannot leave St. Mungos unobtrusively until four o'clock."
"That's over an hour!" McGonagall burst out, and then caught herself again. "Is there anything I can do?"
Dumbledore laid a hand on her shoulder. "Wait, Minerva. I have something I must tell you. Something I must tell you all."
Mr. Weasley and Bill went and pulled up chairs for Mrs. Weasley and Professor McGonagall, then got chairs for themselves and Dumbledore. Bill passed so close to Ariane that she could have touched him, but so far she and Percy had remained unnoticed. Ariane was vastly curious about this disturbing and altogether unforeseen situation unfolding in front of her and strained to listen as Dumbledore began to talk.
"What I'm about to tell you must remain absolutely secret," he began, looking each person in the eyes gravely. "It is a confusing and long story, but if you'll have the patience I'll do my best to lay it all out here." Dumbledore laid his hands on either side of Professor Connor's battered and bloody head. "It is a story that our Angharad may have bought with her life." Professor McGonagall shifted but said nothing.
Percy and Ariane exchanged glances. What about Voldemort could possibly be so secret that he was willing to brutally kill someone who uncovered it.
Unconsciously, Ariane looked back at the winding staircase. At the top of those stairs was a boy who had brought Voldemort to the edge of death and could do it again. Just beneath the attic, there was a boy Voldemort would stop at nothing to kill. She shivered.
Author's Note:
This chapter was delayed by many things, the first and foremost being that the heat to my house is rather patchy and my computer is in an icy room, and I have mild arthritis in my hands, wrists, and fingers (runs in the family). I just can't type when it's cold. Thankfully my lovely brother got the idea to cut the fingertips off a pair of old gloves and now I can type without taking four double-strength aspirin first.
Devilshoes: Gah! would be my noise of mild disgust and exasperation, and it's used entirely incorrectly in my A/N in chapter 9. It's interchangeable with 'gads' or 'argh' or as my father says, 'gahdeffindam'tall' (I try to avoid that one because I don't have his accent). Also, you can review as much as you want, b/c a lot of people don't give me feedback and the only way for me to become a better writer is if people point out stuff I'm doing wrong. Well, I suppose I'd notice eventually, but it's so much easier when people read and say 'hey, this part here—it's awful' so that I don't have to seek it out.
Review!