The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part Two

Welcome to 19, You Old Bugger

Regulus woke with a scream, flinging himself up from what he thought was the ground but was really his mattress. He fell headlong out of his four poster and onto the floor of his room - his mind still half in dream, the floor was water - and he screamed all the louder, shaking and scrambling as his mind parted from the dream and re-paired with reality.

He was gasping, choking for air, tears filling his eyes as he came to, disoriented and clutching his chest. Looking around the room, his face twisted into a horrible grimacing frown, the sort of face an unhappy toddler would make, the guttural cries of a child breaking out of him as he rocked himself.

Kreacher appeared at his side. "Master Regulus! Master Regulus, Kreacher is here! Kreacher is here. Kreacher will make his Master safe..."

Regulus couldn't speak, he was too overwhelmed.

There was something dark breaking like waves in his chest, like a smoke or a liquid, like a memory that wasn't there, a gap where something terrible once had been. The feeling inside of him reminded him of the look of the puckered flesh on his wrist, the scars where his wand had seared the Mark from his skin, leaving behind exposed muscle that new skin had to grow over like a covering being stretched between the walls of burned flesh that formed around the edge of the wand's burning.

Something had been there, but it was taken away, and the remaining bit still bore the unintentional residue.

This dream - it was unintentional residue, too, just like the edges of the Dark Mark. He knew it. He could feel it. Because things like that, no matter how hard one works to take away, cannot fully be removed or hidden away. Despite all the work that might be done to force it from the surface, there's always some ickle little bit that gets through and lurks and waits to come up. Here, something lurked in Regulus, the edges of something which had been taken, something that, if found, would complete a puzzle...

Kreacher was petting Regulus's shorn head and his eyes were wide with concern. "Kreacher hates when Master is sad like this," the elf's voice was sad. "Every time Master dreams bad things and remembers the nightmare he has such sad times and Kreacher is here to comfort his Master and do as his Master wishes... Kreacher will care for Master if Master will only tell Kreacher what he must do..."

Regulus was hugging his knees... rocking... sobbing...

"It is most unfair, most unfair... Kreacher hates Master's pain, Kreacher hates Master's pain... Ohh if only Kreacher could take it from Master, Kreacher would... Kreacher would have the nightmare himself for Master so that Master did not have to, and he would not have to remember the nightmare."

Regulus could barely hear the elf, so caught up inside the cyclone of pain and darkness raging around him... he felt like he was seated in the eye of a terrible tornado, black and whirling around him... which was why he didn't comprehend it when Kreacher said, "Kreacher would have drank the nightmare in the cave for Master if Kreacher only could have done it..."

James couldn't stop thinking about his own dream. Every time his eyes landed on a clock, he paused, picturing that strange ocean shore, lined with thousands and thousands of clocks in every direction. He kept thinking, too, about that one watch - the watch he'd pulled from the water in the dream, the one that had given him so much panic as to scream at the sky before waking up. That watch was familiar. He'd seen it somewhere before. But where?

He stood now in the living room of the Potter cottage in Godric's Hollow, looping streamers over the mantel and he had taken pause at a golden clock Lily had put on the mantel, one she said reminded her of something, which had a pendulum which twisted clockwise, then counter-clockwise, clockwise, then counter-clockwise, like a hypnotic dancer.