"If dreams are like movies, memories are films about ghosts."
Films About GhostsChapter 23: What's Left
"Why did you do that?" Percy shouted. "Why'd you hurt her?"
"It didn't hurt her, Percy," Dumbledore said soothingly as he lowered the pale shell to the ground. "Ariane isn't at home right now, and the only way to get the attention of the shell of her that's left is through physical means."
"But why?"
"Because she's not lost yet," Dumbledore replied triumphantly. We can find her soul."
"No we can't," Harry burst out. "I saw the Dementor Kiss her!"
"She knows its not gone, even if she doesn't know anything else," the Headmaster replied patiently.
Not gone. Percy looked down at her face; still and shrunken within her white hair, and at her half-closed gray eyes. He would very much like to see those eyes returned to their natural violet, and to see that flossy white hair become silver and shiny again. Most of all, he wanted her to look at him as she had in that memory-vision, as though he was the cause of all her happiness. "What are we waiting for?" he demanded softly. "How do we find it?"
"Quickly," Dumbledore said, turning to Hermione and Ron, who were looking shell-shocked down at Ariane. "You two should go to St. Mungos at once," he told them, pulling a pocket watch out of his robes and peering at it. "Actually, do you mind if I send you to St. Mungos five minutes ago? I really think Ron should be looked at as soon as possible." He laid the pocket watch on the ground and pointed his wand at it; it glowed and then lay still, looking ordinary. "The Portkey should take you both to the main entrance of St. Mungos. Please warn the head Healer that there will be many, many more victims coming in."
"Thank you, sir," Hermione said, picking up the watch. She and Ron vanished with a whoosh of air.
"Where should we look?" Harry asked. His skin was a pale, claylike gray; as though he were about to be sick. "Is it just lying around somewhere?"
"We should hope so," Dumbledore replied briskly, scanning the area. "Souls cannot be taken far from their body without a lot of effort, but lost souls have ways of finding new…new homes. And then they are disastrously hard to dislodge."
Ellen was seven years old. She was on her way to visit her grandparents, who lived in London, and she didn't know what all the hubbub was around the train station. Ellen supposed that all train stations were like this—after all, she'd never been her before. The people lying on the ground were a bit alarming, but she gave them a wide berth and tried to keep a hold on her doll and her suitcase.
"Grandma? Pawpaw?" she called over and over again, scanning the coats of the people around her. Grandma wore a no-nonsense black wool coat that smelt of chocolate-covered cherries and a peculiar perfume that nobody really liked; Pawpaw wore a faded green army coat and nearly always had candy in his pockets.
Then Ellen saw something that drove all thoughts of her grandparents from her mind. It was something like a marble, but larger, like the rubber bouncing ball she'd gotten at the dentist's office. Somehow it seemed to glow, not with the cheap greenish glow of a toy, but an iridescent glow, like an entire rainbow at once. Ellen put her suitcase down and walked a bit closer, still clutching her doll to her side. Crouching, Ellen peered at it as though she were examining an insect.
It was beautiful.
She stretched out a hand and touched it.
Percy heard a child cry out and saw a blonde girl with blue ribbons in her hair yank her hand away from something as though she'd been burned. He saw the soul and started towards it. It had not occurred to him that the soul could be lying there where anyone could touch it. It was very, very important, Percy thought, that nobody be allowed to take this soul but Ariane.
The brightly colored ball pulsed as Percy came near it, its many lights shifting and whirling in an excited way. He bent down and reached for it cautiously. "I think I've found it!" he called over his shoulder. "Harry? Headmaster?"
"Don't touch it!" Dumbledore called urgently, but it was too late. Percy's fingers had closed around it, and his mind exploded in a thousand directions.
Voices screamed from his past, her past, blasting all his rational though to nothing more than a mote of fear. He wasn't aware of the skin on his hands peeling off, scalded by the raw mind-energy that Percy held in the palm of his hand. Stars collapsed and blobs of marmalade danced in his vision as voices he had forgotten and voices he had never heard poured into his ears without making a sound.
"Don't you dare use that tone of voice with me young man—"
"I built this with my own two hands, and isn't it fine?"
"You've been made Head Boy, just like Bill."
"Bravery? Well that rules you out—"
"—hasn't been seen out of the lake, could be dead—"
"What's her name?"
"Isn't it nice that you're following in his footsteps?"
"Caelestis."
Suddenly Percy found himself again, that mix of hope and frustration and love crouching terrified away from this soul that blazed like a sun in his palm. He could feel his hands burning. He could hear voices around him, worried voices. There was smoke somewhere and it was smudging his glasses.
And Ariane was inside his head.
This wasn't Ariane as she lay yards away, pale and unresponsive. Nor was it the Ariane he had met at Christmas, blushing and shy, in borrowed clothes. This wasn't even the Ariane he'd caught a glimpse of in a memory, innocent and happy. It was an Ariane that had no trace of the physical world on her. The sight—or rather, the image inside his mind—was like staring into the sun. It was viewing the past/present/future of one person in a single instant. It was horrible and glorious.
She stood straight, her head up, with her silver hair falling in loose rounds to her elbows. The dress she wore was white, and her skin was browner than he'd seen it. Her eyes seemed more direct, as though she could finally see the world clearly after years asleep. She had folded her arms across her stomach, which seemed much rounder than it was now. Percy tried to understand it and failed.
"Percy," Ariane said, and her voice was the most beautiful thing he'd ever heard.
"Ariane, why do you look like that? Are you pregnant? I don't understand—"
"Don't worry, this isn't how I am now," Ariane told him. "I've got it straightened out. Put me back in my body, please." Her eyes danced inside his head, violet flecked with darkest blue and white. "Don't worry. I love you."
Moving his feet took so much effort that Percy was soaked in sweat after a few steps. His hands felt as though he were pushing them against jagged glass. He couldn't see very well but somehow he wasn't tripping—he was aware that his eyes were watering like mad, and there were tears running down his face from pain or effort or both.
And there was Ariane, white-haired and ghostly, her lips parted slightly in surprise, her no-color gray eyes unfocused.
Percy had never read any books on the soul; he didn't know what he should do. He knew what needed to be done, though, so he put his lacerated, bloody hands down to her face and let that multicolored globe of soul fall between those colorless lips. As soon as it left his fingers he felt the pain in his hands increase tenfold, but he ignored it and bent down and kissed her, breathing out as though he could refill her rasping lungs.
Ariane gasped, her eyes flying wide open as she burst into color. Her face took on a healthy pink tinge; her hair went it's usual silver sheen, and her eyes blossomed purple. For a moment she was terribly certain she was in a tomb—naked and forgotten, isolated from the passage of the world—but then she looked and saw that she was in the world.
The world was amazing, full of colors and sounds and smells, some good, some bad. Her brain took them in and put them with names, a lighting-fast catalogue of red/rotting/sunlight/death/breathe/tall/shadow/chatter (and on and on and on). Out of all these colors and shapes and smells she found Percy, crouched above her with a horribly uncertain look on his face, his hands dripping blood. She was transfixed by the kinks of his dark copper hair, mesmerized by his eyes and his spiral galaxy of freckles that lay across his long nose and up those sharp cheekbones. His pupils were mere pinpricks, as though he'd been staring into a bright light, and around his pupils his eyes were the colors of sapphires, blending seamlessly into a leaf-green rim that ended with the bloodshot whites of his eyes.
"I thought I'd never see you again," Ariane exhaled, using his borrowed breath. And, with no more ado, she reached up and kissed him as hard as she could. When they stopped for air, she whispered, "Percy, I've gotten it right."
"What do you mean?" he asked. Percy looked tortured, his skin gray with exhaustion. Even as she watched his eyelids flickered; saw sea-green eyes rimmed with red.
They were so entangled that when she spoke her lips brushed his ear and he could feel her voice where it began in her diaphragm.
"I've had the right dream. Everything's sorted out. I know when to go."
"Will you die?" Percy asked. His eyes were drooping closed, he rested his forehead on her stomach, and Ariane wished it were a softer pillow for him as she sat up and let him lie down. She felt as though she could run across the country at a sprint, as though she could solve any problem, as though she could ask him to marry her. Ariane was certain that that was what she wanted now.
"Neither of us will die," she promised him, and with that he went to sleep, his hands leaving bloody marks as they released her arms, tumbling to the concrete.
Ariane looked up for the first time and saw a little girl with wisps of blonde hair tied with blue ribbons. Her brown eyes seemed overlarge in her round face, and there was something within them that suggested a knowledge no child should have. "Is your name Ellen?" she asked the girl.
"You're Ariane," Ellen lisped confidently. "You were inside my head."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be."
"It's all right. Do you love him?" she asked, looking down at Percy. "He looks like Mommy does when she's sick in the mornings."
"I'm sure that isn't the problem," Ariane said, choking back a laugh. Laughter was not the right noise for the platform, not when she was surrounded by death. "Have you found your grandparents?"
Ellen looked back at an elderly couple who were watching her closely. "I wanted to say hello before I went to their house," she informed the older girl who'd accidentally shared her mind, if only for the briefest of instants. "Face to face."
"It was nice meeting you," Ariane said politely. Ellen smiled, a gap-toothed grin, then took her grandmother's hand and left the platform. The silver-haired girl turned and saw Dumbledore, his kind old face slouching into tired wrinkles. He watched Ellen leave too, his blue eyes unreadable. "Will she be all right, Professor?" Ariane asked. She felt exhausted all of a sudden, much too tired to feel surprise or fear or shock. "I didn't hurt her, did I?"
"She will never be ordinary, but no, I don't think you hurt her." Dumbledore cleared his throat and looked down at Percy, asleep in Ariane's lap. "You two should be at home as soon as possible. I don't feel I need to tell you that you've undergone a great ordeal."
"Oh, I know all about that," Ariane yawned, her eyelids drooping. "But I've got to tell you about—"
"Another time, my dear. I will be here to hear it when you wake up."
"But Professor—"
"Sleep first, Ariane."
She dreamt of the sea.
"Salazar, why do waves come?"
"They are pulled here." Salazar was young, perhaps fourteen, his face still a bit rounded with baby fat, his dark hair short and unruly. He looked at the sea, and how the sun sank into it. "It looks like a bloody eye rolling back into the skull of the sea."
"I don't like it either," Ariane agreed, standing at the edge of the water and letting the waves suck the sand out from under her feet. "I miss mother, Salazar. I miss her very much."
"So do I. I wish she hadn't been murdered." His face, lit with the warm light from the sinking sun, was startlingly distant. "I wish there was a way to bring her back."
"But the dead are at peace," Ariane said, shocked. "Helga told me so."
Salazar shrugged and sneered a bit. "She'd like to think so, considering all the family she's sent to the grave." He wrapped his arms tight around himself. "To me, death is a darkness. And when you are dead, you become part of the darkness, and you never step into the world of light again."
Ariane frowned, trying to understand this and keep her balance as the ebb tide ate her footing. "So is night a little death?" she asked.
Her brother smiled at her. "Night is a small death of the world, just as sleeping is a small death for us."
"Death is a sleep from which we cannot wake, then?"
"Yes. Well, sometimes. Sometimes we can wake from a deep sleep."
"But not from death."
Salazar looked as though he'd like to challenge her again, but he was fourteen and fighting with his seven-year-old sister was beneath him. "No, no one has ever woken from death."
"I should like to," Ariane told him cheerfully. "I would tell everyone what Death is like, and nobody would be afraid of dying anymore!" Her unspoken sentence rang in the air between them: "You wouldn't be afraid of dying anymore."
"Don't you dare wish to die," he snarled, catching her around the shoulders.
"Salazar!" she said, surprised. "I wouldn't wish it!" He took a long look into her eyes, the same shade as his, but radiant with innocence and purity. "I love you."
"And I love you."
They sat in silence, listening to the waves come in.
"Salazar, are the waves pulled here or pushed here?" Ariane asked him. He kissed her silver head and said nothing.
"You didn't answer my question," she murmured, and woke up to Harry's bright green stare. "Oh, damnation."
"You didn't ask me a question," Harry pointed out. He looked much better than when she'd last seen him, as though he'd washed and brushed his hair at the least. His eyes looked haunted—but then, she amended, Harry always had a haunted, seen-too-much look about him. "Dumbledore says you know when to go."
Ariane ran her tongue over her teeth to give herself time before answering and nearly gagged at the repulsive furry coating they seemed to have developed. "Look, I'm not discussing this with you—or anyone else for that matter—until I've had a shower and gotten some clean clothes." She sat up and found herself in the Hospital Wing, wearing her own pajamas and feeling like she'd slept for a thousand years. "What day is it?"
"Two days after," Harry told her.
"Where's Percy?"
"At the Ministry, helping sort out all this mess. He says he'll write as often as he can."
"Is everyone else…?" her words trailed off into space at the implications.
"Everybody's okay. I mean, Tonks isn't, and a few people from Gryffindor aren't…" he swallowed. It looked painful; his throat bobbed and he blinked a little more than he usually did. "I don't really want to talk about it."
"Okay," she agreed. "Actually, I'm glad you're here. If you can stick around until after I get cleaned up, I was wondering if you'd like to go on a sort of mission with me." Ariane felt strangely calm and centered, which probably had something to do with her soul being stripped from her body and stuffed back in rather haphazardly. It was as though Salazar had rearranged her the first time, by drawing her slowly back into life like gold metal through a form, and the Dementor had rearranged her again by ripping out her soul—and then Percy had dropped it back into her, a stone into a still pool. When the ripples had settled, she was as calm as she had been when she was empty, but she was herself again.
She was more than herself again. Before Ariane had been split in two: her child-self that Salazar had shot, and her teenage-adult-self who had awoken in a tomb. Now she was one person with many, many experiences. One person who could survey her past with serenity, knowing that what as past was past.
Though the present was managing to unsettle her again.
Harry gave her a curious look and Ariane felt him try to probe her thoughts. This time, instead of shoving him out, she deliberately let him see where she meant to go. His eyes bugged out. "You want to go to the Chamber of Secrets?" he demanded, his voice quietly incredulous. Ariane blessed him for having the good sense not to shout.
She beamed at him. "You'll find out why later," she teased. "But let's just say this: I know why Salazar named it 'Secrets'."
Author's Note: Yes, this is an update. Yes, it did take FOREVER to write. This is because of school, and because I've had the nastiest case of writer's block I've ever had. For weeks I would open this thing, stare at it, change one word, and close it again (or just close it). Review, please. I hope this is worth the wait (and if it isn't, the next chapter's already in the works).