Disclaimer: They belong to JKR, I'm only playing.
A/N: Please forget the existence of Voiceless and read this for itself. Different time, different story, therefore people behaving differently. Not much sunshine in the beginning but beginning's are like that. Things will get better, I promise. I also promise to update once a week. I foresee about 14-16 chapters, and have written 7 so far, with the rest planned out. Enjoy, and please give my beta miconic a big smacking kiss because she's the coolest and I put her through hell with the first drafts of this one. Still am.
And finally, Thank you for reading!
***
"'I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; 'and the moral of that is--"Be what you would seem to be"--or if you'd like it put more simply--"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."'
Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
--Prologue--
Even twilight fails to rescue the castle. The spires and turrets refuse the mercy of the soft light, and the trees snub the breeze. The stone walls stand darker than ever, the towers taller somehow and more severe than he remembers. Defiance radiates from the closed doors and windows. Someone's trying viciously to swallow down tears. Someone's trying to stand tall while inside the walls are crumbling, the bones giving way one by one.
It's not wise to linger here. Other skeletons will come to life, some other weeping.
Harry bypasses the front doors and ducks round to the south side. The last time he was here, he had left a window unlocked to the Great Hall, using an obscure spell he'd filched from one of Hermione's tomes. He's been praying that he got it right, that the spell wouldn't be over-written by one of Hogwarts' regular security spells. He pushes the window and it springs open with a creak. The blown glass pattern has snagged a bit of stray winter light like a spider web snatching a bright insect. Muttering to himself in relief, he hoists himself up over the windowsill and into the Great Hall.
From here, progress is slow.
Cobwebs hang from the ceiling like sails of a burnt ship. Darkness and dust have settled like sediment, thicker with every passing day when no candles are lit, no windows thrown open. Harry mutters a Lumos, trying not to hold his wand out like a sword. There are dark stains on the floor which he does not dare look too closely. The walls are scarred as if made of flesh, as if the very skin of the founders has been touched, slashed.
Suddenly the wand-light goes out. Swearing, he lights the wand again and holds it out. The marble staircase gleams on his left. The last two times he was here he had systematically covered all seven floors, the towers and the dungeons to no avail. Today is a desperate kind of day. He is hoping to find it blind, by chance, by luck. Not that he thinks he has any, but still. He begins to climb the stairs, his footsteps echoing.
*
Finally, hours later when there is nowhere else to search, no excuses to linger in rooms and passages he's already scoured many times over, he trudges up to the Astronomy Tower. The skylight above the spiralling staircase illuminates his climb but around him everything is dark. Harry remembers seeing a statue here long ago, to one side of the stairs, a broken statue with a missing leg and two faces staring in opposite directions. There is no sign of it now. The heavy brass brackets along the wall have not held light for months. The stairs seem unsupported, suspended in dark, a stairwell ascending to the night itself.
The door at the top of the stairs is unlocked, just as he'd left it the night before; a precaution against unreliable spellwork. He pushes at it and emerges into a night stitched together with feeble stars. A blast of chill air makes him draw a sharp breath and wrap his arms over his chest. The grounds are blessedly amorphous in the dark, hiding all fractures and wounds; the chimney devoid of smoke, the skeletal greenhouses, the vegetable patch finally conquered by the forest.
His thin shoulders hunched, he leans over the crenellated rampart, defiantly cradling his hunger as he stares carefully at nothing.
If it's not in the castle, where is it?
It was a foolish idea from the beginning, he knows that. But once, just once, to know how it would end, to know where to go, what to do. How different that would be from the bloody, straggling ends of the war he keeps fingering, hoping they'll show him a way out into life.
How Ron's blood was so awfully red, how Hermione didn't look him in the eye for weeks afterwards. How light remained in a familiar, cluttered cottage when life didn't. How sturdy stone walls that always offered protection suddenly turned on those they protected.
How Remus smiled the final time. How surprised the twins were, still grinning at each other, the final time. How Molly wept.
How hard it is to breathe when so many do not, to be alive when so many are not.
He's put an end to an era of terror, but where does it end for him?
The forest scrapes to and fro in the wind, treetops scratching at the dome of the sky like gaunt hands fumbling in an airless, lightless room. The moon lurches through a series of thick clouds, barely visible. He ought to return now. Hermione wakes up at the drop of a hat these days. In fact, he's certain she hardly sleeps through the night. Besides, the closer it came to dawn, the trickier Apparating became.
He pulls the door behind him and walks slowly down the stairs, scoffing at himself. He pulls both hands through his hair, screwing up his eyes and yawning. Points of luminosity dance in front of his eyes. He blinks to clear them. He's exhausted beyond telling. At the bottom of the stairs, he pauses, distracted. A few points of stabbing light still float at the edges of his vision and he blinks again rapidly. He opens his eyes again, straining to see through the murky glow of the skylight.
A silvery glint still remains on the edge of his left eye.
He whirls around, heart hammering, wand out and lit. Solid wall meets his eyes, overlaid with shadows of other walls and the stairs. In the open seam of a series of overlapping shadows, almost hidden by the stairwell, he spots something small, cylindrical and partly silver.
He strides over and picks up a scroll case, disappointment tempering his heartbeat. Disturbed dust wafts over him and he sneezes several times, his eyes watering. He stares at the case in puzzlement, blinking his runny eyes. It's carved of black wood with a silver handle and lid, the body carved with a simple design of entwining leaves. He tries to work the silver catch on its lid in vain. Then something else catches his eye behind the stairs.
Harry draws closer, absently pocketing the scroll case.
Then he stops breathing.
A swathe of cobwebs covers the once-sleek body and hangs down from the throttle and clutch levers like ribbons. The headlight is broken and a dent shows in the front fender. One of the wheels seems to host a nest of dust and other unidentifiable scraps. He reaches out a hand; his forefinger comes away padded thickly with dirt. A minute face peers out at him from the top of the bike. He reaches out and pulls at a small wooden bead, a pendant or talisman, attached to a long cord and twined snugly round the headlight. A small face, its features lost in the dark. He draws in air as if just remembering to breathe and is overcome promptly with a fit of coughing. The wand-light faltering, he sinks to the floor next to the bike.
How? When? How long? Who? And why now?
He whispers a spell, fingers hovering over the small mirror and speedometer. The grime disappears, the glass clears up. He feels so small, sprawled at the bottom of the staircase, the roof arching above and questions spiralling around. The walls seem to open endlessly and fall away; a crumbling, defeated gift box which nevertheless kept this hidden, almost intact, beneath layers of magic and time.
Hours later, a desolate door groans slowly shut behind a figure darting ahead into the sky.
--end prologue--