Disclaimer: All characters, settings and anything else recognizable from Harry Potter belong to JK Rowling, and we make no claim on her ideas.
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18. Barty Crouch
Rainbow: In The Attic.
There are colours in the dust…
Even when he looks back on it, the attic seems to him to be a place of safety and security. A place of mist and swirling clouds, of soft autumn colours, the brown wooden boards, the small window in the roof. Its safe here, although he knows he's trapped, trapped in his mind under the Imperio curse and trapped in his body in the room.
The sun streams down through the window, making a patch of the wooden floor suddenly golden. He closes his eyes and sees red and blue afterglow. The dust swirls slightly where his hand scuffs the boards.
It's a drowsy world, a swirling, swimming world, a world that lives in the time between sleeping and waking, the space inside a mirror.
Sometimes he thinks he can hear birdsong. Sometimes the sound of a dripping tap. Sometimes he can hear laughter from far away, or the hum of an aeroplane passing overhead.
But that might mean nothing, because he also hears Bellatrix's laugh and Lucius's drawl in the times when he's sleeping (or is he awake? Is the attic the place he goes when he's asleep?). He hears his father's voice, his mother sobbing, and all of the sounds float dreamily in his head, unconnected to the world above, the world around.
It's almost like living underwater, in a blue-green silence of a perfect globe. Stretched and distorted, the time flows lazily by, like treacle poured from a spoon.
The house-elf brings him some food. He doesn't always see it come in, but when he next looks there's a plate of leftovers and a cup of water, standing in the golden glow of the sunlight.
Clumsily, shakily he reaches out an arm to take it. It's like working through thick rubber gloves, in a world only vaguely connected to this one. He keeps waiting for himself to wake up.
And then there's another part of him suddenly. In the soft marshmallow heaven the curse creates there's a sharp bitter tang. The remains of his consciousness, fighting desperately, struggling to get out.
He shakes his head, not sure whether he's trying to get rid of the fluff or the painful attempts at freedom.
His arm gives a violent shudder, and the cup falls, the water arcs through the air and suddenly there's a soft hazy note of colour as, briefly, the light shines through the falling arc.
Then it's gone, and he's back in the cloudy haze, back in the dull attic room. The sun goes behind a cloud. He hears the drone of a lawnmower mingled with Regulus's excited chatter.
But somehow, he can still see the rainbow.
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