unspeakable | jegulus

(without love you are) nothing at all

chapter title: love is surrender by carpenters

cw: underage sex, mentions of past sexual abuse

Dandelion down drifted around his ankles like snow. It caught the air and stirred with each step he took and with each breath of wind. Cold, bright light shone in the distance as if from a spotlight. It was the only scrap of illumination. The sky was as black as night but there were no stars. Cloudcover, maybe. A new moon.

...James...

He turned toward the dark at his back.

Words came to him and stuck to his lips, but he didn't make a sound. He couldn't speak.

James, the voice called to him again. Some of the down flew up with a larger gust of wind and blew over him, catching in his hair. The whole world was black and white, and the blackness where the voice was calling him was absolute, and cold. The clean, white light of magic in the distance seemed more ominous to him than the dark, but every instinct in him drove him to walk toward it, not to the voice. Listen.

A song drifted from a distance, from the direction of the light. It was an old song, tinny and slow, weak and windblown–far away, too far to make out any words. James moved toward the song, hoping to hear enough to put a name to it, and the wind blew heavier, heavier, until the down was deep, all the way to his hips. James ran a hand over the top of it and picked up one of the white little bits of gossamer on the tip of his finger. Why dandelions?

Springtime. Snowmelt.

James took another step toward the white light.

Hope.

It turned crimson. The song drifting from a distance turned into sobbing, and screams.

James bolted upright, breathing hard. His face was wet. He scrubbed at his cheek in confusion, dazed with sleep. There was murky green light shining through the window of the slytherin dorms, light enough for James to get a sense of his surroundings and settle his pounding heart. He felt silly, sitting there with his head in his hands counting his breath. He felt weak. It wasn't even a proper nightmare. It was just... unsettling.

Regulus was asleep beside him, with his black hair wild around his face and his mouth open, dead to the world. Regulus sometimes seemed to be the lightest sleeper in the world, other times, like this morning, he seemed as if he might be the heaviest. How could he sleep so easily when he had so much darkness inside of him? The things that couldn't disturb Regulus, and why they couldn't disturb him, would forever be a mystery to James. He looked utterly peaceful. Did he ever dream? What did he dream about? Fire, probably. Light. Not darkness. His days were too full of darkness for his nights to be full of the same. It wouldn't be fair. Then again, was any aspect of Regulus' life fair? His nose twitched and furrowed in his sleep, and James stood over him for too long, measuring his breaths and the flutter of his eyelashes, staring at his slack lips. An angel. A devil. Only a boy. James pressed a ghost of a kiss into his cool cheekbone.

He snuck out of bed and dressed himself in his uniform, then went to the lake alone. The snow in every direction reminded him of his dream. The sky was cloudless and blue, and the frozen water was so thick with snow it didn't look like ice at all. It looked like the surface of the moon. A wasteland. James sat under the tree he'd sat under in October, when he was a different boy entirely, and rested his chin on his knees. He felt small today. Empty. Where am I?

His hands smelled like tobacco. Smoke and ink. He waited for the sun to finish rising alone, hiding from the windows. I'm going to go somewhere no one can find me, an old voice in the back of his mind whispered. I'm going to go there and drown. But even death had been taken from him, so he stared at the snow. Something moved. White fur, a dark red eye. Frozen. A rabbit, whispering over the snow, blending into it on quiet paws, gone again before James could even process what he was seeing.