antebellum [t. riddle]

lxxii

march 1945

dream or real?

despite tom's adherence to holding rational thought above all else, he still maintained magic as being the untouchable standard for explanation. as a child, he did not have the information available to ascertain his powers as any form of magic, so that part of him had always existed outside of any kind of reason.

as he grew older, and he started to be introduced to the fundamentals of magic, he soon realized that the threshold for the unexplainable had not changed, only merely shifted.

muggles used science to understand the world around them, but there were still certain phenomena that could not be explained by those means. the same thing went for certain kinds of magic.

tom could easily explain why certain arithmantic formulas produced certain answers, or why specific potions ingredients produced specific physical effects, but he could not explain why he could see sicaria in his dreams or why he could feel her pain and her magic even when he was not conscious.

he couldn't explain those— but when he was a child, he also couldn't explain why he could talk to snakes. but he could. despite the fact that he could not explain these occurrences, they most certainly did occur.

so he believed in the power of dreams, which is what terrified him so deeply.

if they were real, then when did they happen? minutes ago? hours? was it happening now, as he was contemplating? had it happened yet?

only flashes of action and feelings of spells were there, but he could feel her killing curses. or at least he believed he could feel them.

he started to doubt. to question— could his mind have created such terrifying visions of his greatest fear (her, in a situation where he was not there to defend her) as some sort of stress response?

dream or real?

he closed his eyes and tuned into his sense of her and felt magical and physical exhaustion. point for real.

he pressed his wand to the mark on his arm and waited five minutes. no response. point for dream. but then he retracted, because she never responded to his summons regardless of the situation.

"lumos," he mumbled, looking around the room for any damage caused by potential accidental magic done in his sleep, which was usually indicative of a dream. he saw nothing but shadows and stillness. point for real.

despite this, he was still not convinced entirely that what he'd dreamt was real, and he did not know what he'd do if it was.

so, just for an hour or so, he hesitated. only because he was lost and so very far out of his depth. he had never in his life felt more hopeless than he did when thinking about sicaria, because nothing he'd ever experienced had been so far out of his control. no matter if he determined the situation to be real or his own dream, there was almost nothing he could do for her now. she existed on a plane that was not parallel to his; they grew closer, they intersected, and now they were moving farther apart.

for a moment, it felt almost like she was pulling his magic through the bond, calling on the reservoir of power that pooled in the space between the two of them. and then her heartrate spiked again, and it truly sent him into a panic.

he went into rosier's room first.

"conjure your patronus and ask her if she— ask if she is unharmed."

"hmm?" adonis groaned, trying to clear his mind of sleep while also assessing riddle's stern tone. "what's happened?"

"now, rosier. do as i say."