#dreadcember

Giyuu followed its path with bated breath. He shivered and tugged the covers over his shoulders. He brought his knees to his chest and curled toward the sunrise, waiting for the warmth to settle, but it never did.

He unfocused his eyes and watched the phantasmic shapes collapse into each other. They appeared nebulous at first. Slowly, they grew darker and rougher, sharper and louder. Eventually, he found himself staring at a distortion of serrated scars and purple specks. He stared and stared into the eyes that beckoned him with hated, disgust, desire, rapture, but never warmth. Sand scratched at his throat. He squeezed his eyes shut.

Giyuu knew the conditions of their so-called meetings. Sanemi was to never stay longer than he needed to, as if the implications carried a weight far greater than their sacrilegious partnership. Yet the Wind Hashira insisted.

“It’s better off this way,” he muttered as he fastened his belt.

Giyuu watched Sanemi’s silver strands glisten under the moonlight. He made no move to stop him from leaving but the willfulness in his voice betrayed him.

“I see.”

“Don’t forget who proposed this, Tomioka.” Sanemi’s back was turned to him, the expanse hiding flushed streaks underneath the haori.

Giyuu wished Sanemi forgot.

“How come it’s always at my place?”

Sanemi paused. He had one foot out the door. With a harsh chortle, he looked at Giyuu.

“Why would it be at my place?”

The door slid close. The wooden thud ricocheted off the walls of the room, landing in the hollows of Giyuu’s chest.

He splayed his hand across the empty space beside him. The cool night air was tinged with Sanemi’s scent.

Giyuu knew the conditions of their meetings because he was the one to suggest they established them in the first place. He thought it would prevent an unnecessary emotional entanglement. Damage control, essentially.

Yet the more they met, the more the lines blurred. He found himself contesting the very safeguards he imposed only to realize that they were useless.

Sanemi didn’t need them at all.

I heed the call even as my stomach knots and my breathing thins, even as reason tells me that this is idiocy. Treason. Suicide.

But what is left to lose?

My life is already lost. My love is already lost. I am already lost.

One last step, and I kneel when I reach the clearing. Before my body even knows what it's doing, my knees crack through the crust of snow, and the cold goes straight to the bone. This ache is nothing compared to what I've endured.

No matter the cost, I must answer his summons. This I cannot fail.

She would despise me for kneeling here. I cannot think of her now.

He comes without footsteps, as ever. The Dark Lord, my master, inhabiter of my body and mind.

I feel him before I see him, hear him before he speaks. His presence is memorised down to the quick of my soul.

“You came,” he says, as if he doubted it. As if he doesn't know I'll always be the one who comes when called. "You lived."

My head is bowed before him; there's been no command to lift it.

Do I deserve any better? I do not. I've failed my master, failed others before him.

But I know the Dark Lord is staring at me. The scars on the back of my head burn as if lit anew.

You lived, he's said.

After you came.

As if my obedience were the foregone conclusion rather than my survival.

It's correct, however. Obedience is the win condition, living is happenstance.

"Yes, Master." My voice is unsteady. Reedy. Quavering. He will hate that, he who knows my weakness better than I know it myself. "I felt…something."

"Did you now? And with no Mark upon you." The Dark Lord moves around me though I hear no footfalls. I can tell by the drift of his voice. "And you came to me all the same."

Something in my spine tightens, unbidden, as he passes. Every part of me trembles with fear and cold, no matter how I try to stop it.

I want to lift my head, to look into his eyes, but I dare not. This contemplative tone is not to be trusted, for it often precedes punishment.

"I followed you to my last breath, My Lord, to the edge of death," I whisper, as though death could undo the harm I've caused. "When I felt the pull, I came."

"Slowly," he says, still moving around me in a slow and ceaseless circle. "But you came."

There's a sense that he expects me to remain silent, though I can't say how.

Recall, perhaps, how it felt to have his mind inside me. To be known so intimately that even silence is a statement, like having a god inside the church of one's mind.

"However," he goes on, "you sought me of your own accord when the others would not. Only the most faithful of my servants would do that, but they're locked away in Azkaban." He moves again, closer to my ear this time. "You're a poor replacement for the faithful and the fallen, Quirinus Quirrell. Weak. Pathetic. Emotional. But you might be of some use in the meantime. Initiative is more valuable than cowardice."

"I don't know who the others are, Master, nor what they've done. I'm responsible only for myself."

"Responsible? A pity that you failed me time and again. You showed such promise too. Such aptitude. Responsibility means accepting punishment when it's due."

He laughs. It cuts with a deeper chill than the snow I'm on.

But something inside me stirs anyway. Aptitude. Promise. These are words I no longer associate with myself, yet the Dark Lord speaks them as if they're still truth.

I should know better.

Heat skids across the back of my skull before I feel the spell itself, a pressure like fingers forcing their way beneath the bone. Light explodes behind my eyes. My mouth opens but emits only a silent scream, hot tears prickle my eyes.

The world narrows to a point of white pain and the memory of him inside me returns so cleanly that for a moment I cannot tell past from present.

My hands fly to the snow before I can stop them moving. The cold bites into the burns on my palms, and still the pain in my head eclipses it.

Once, as a boy, I electrocuted myself by accident. I lost all feeling in my fingers and the arm that made contact with the wall outlet ached for hours all the way to the shoulder. My chest felt heavy and congested all day. This is only a whisper of that pain.

“Be still,” the Dark Lord says.

It is not a command, almost an amused observation.

I force my elbows to lock so I do not fall flat. My breath shudders in and out. A thin string of saliva touches the snow before I can swallow it back. Shame rises behind the pain, as sharp as the spell itself.

“This is all you can manage now,” he says, circling again. “A single touch and you fold.”

“I am sorry, Master.”

“You are sorry every time. Yet you fail spectacularly and repeatedly.”

His voice lowers until it is almost thoughtful.

“But you returned.”

The pressure inside my skull tightens once more. Not a full assault, not enough to tear a scream from me, only enough to remind me what he did to me and what he still can do. My arms tremble. I cling to the ground until my fingernails scrape the ice, an ignoble ruin, lying face-first in the snow.

At last the pain loosens. I suck in a breath that does not quite reach my lungs.

“Look at me,” he says.

My head lifts before I decide to lift it. This, too, is memory. This, too, is obedience.

He leans down, meeting my eyes, and studies me with an interest that is worse than hatred. Hatred would mean he feels something. This is curiosity. This is appraisal.

Voldemort's eyes, scarlet and terrible in the dying light, rest upon the long scar the left side of my face, where the boy's finger dug in. The pink and knotted flesh burns beneath his gaze.

The Dark Lord stands closer than ever before in a body of his own. The space between is like an invisible wire, thinner than the veil between thought and touch.

“This is the part,” he says, brushing spindly fingers through the air near the back of my head, “where I would mark a servant. But that assumes loyalty.”

“I am loyal,” I whisper.

“No.” His voice softens. It is worse than shouting could ever be. “You are devoted. It is not the same.”

He steps behind me. A cold fingertip traces the ridge of my scar, the place where he once lived. The touch does not hurt, not the way the spell hurt, but something inside me flinches all the same. There are wounds older than scars.

“You carry my scar already,” he murmurs. “That is your brand. You do not need another.”

For a moment, I do not breathe. He withdraws his hand and I feel the loss of it as sharply as the pain before.

“Rise, Quirinus Quirrell.”

Somehow, I rise to my feet on legs that feel like seaweed. Snow falls from my robes, the world wavering at its edges.

“You live because you crawled back to me,” he says. “Do not mistake that for mercy.”

I bow my head low. “Yes, Master.”

He considers me the way a scientist considers a fragile specimen that has survived the wrong experiment.

“You thought you had nothing left to lose,” he says. “But you do. You always do.”

He leans forward just enough that his voice rests against my ear like a blade.

“I can take back the life you begged for, but I prefer a servant who knows he is breakable. And you? You've already been broken once before. That makes for a fragile weapon, but jagged edges do the most damage."

My breath fogs in the cold, heart pounding once, twice, a furious flutter against my ribs. For a moment, the world turns grey and swims, as though I may faint, but somehow I hold on.

“Serve me well, be useful in your ruin,” he says, “and you may keep just enough of yourself to kneel again.”

And that is the moment that breaks me.

Not the spell, not the pain.

The promise of being allowed to kneel again.

It's not much, that promise, but it's better than being relegated to a draughty corner of the castle like a filthy secret. Never spoken of, only whispered about.

Desire wears a thousand masks, and not all desire is created equal.

I am unclean, and have known many shades of it in my thirty years; sex, hunger, greed, ambition.

Night settled quickly over Ravenscroft House, swallowing the last threads of dusk until the moors outside dissolved into a single, seamless darkness. In her room, Lilith lay beneath the heavy quilt, eyes wide open, listening to the strange ways silence moved through the manor: how it crept, how it sighed, how it seemed to rearrange itself in the corners.

She was tired. Bone tired. And yet sleep would not reach her.

She turned onto her side and watched the faint halo of the single candle on the nightstand, the only warm thing in the entire room. Its light trembled, soft and uncertain, as though struggling to remain alive in a place that preferred the dark. It offered a fragile circle of light, quivering faintly as though unsure whether it belonged in this place at all. Its glow softened the sharp edges of the furniture but could not chase away the sense that the walls watched her as intently as she watched them.

Suddenly, she heard a faint creak, somewhere beyond her door.

Lilith’s breath caught.

Footsteps followed. Slow, deliberate, unhurried.

Not the brisk pace of the servant who had shown her here. These were measured, heavy in a way that suggested neither age nor weakness… but weight. The weight of someone accustomed to walking alone in the dark.

She sat up, the quilt pooling around her waist.

The footsteps approached.

The candle’s flame steadied at first. Then, without warning, it shivered. Bent sideways. Strained toward the door.

Lilith stared, pulse hammering.

No windows were open, so the draft made no sense. The room had been sealed tight from the moment she entered it. The flame flickered again, sharper this time, as if tugged by an unseen breath. The footsteps stopped. Right outside her door.

Lilith pressed a hand to her mouth to keep from making a sound.

No knock came.

No voice called her name.

Whoever - or whatever - stood there lingered in complete, watchful silence.

Her heartbeat thundered in her ears.

Seconds stretched into something slower, thicker, almost unreal.

Then, at last… the steps moved on.

Retreating.

Softening.

Fading down the corridor until only the restless hush of the manor remained.

The candle straightened.

Lilith exhaled shakily, her shoulders slumping with the release of tension she hadn’t realized she was holding. She told herself it was only nerves; her imagination, sharpened by grief and displacement. This was a strange house, in a strange land, and the mind often ran wild when given too much darkness. Yes, it had to be a trick of her mind, unsettled by arrival, conjuring phantoms where none existed.

She had known fear before, in houses emptied of servants, in nights when creditors pounded at doors. She understood what her mind could invent to protect her from truths too heavy to bear.

Still…

The flame flickered once more, an almost playful tremor. She watched it warily.

A whisper of memory rose unbidden: again, her mother’s voice calling her Lily, my little flower, soft as a lullaby. She closed her eyes, wishing she could bury her face in that remembered perfume of lilies - her mother’s perfume wrapping her in warmth and safety - instead of breathing the cold air of this strange room. But the scent would not come. Ravenscroft House smelled only of stone and old whispers.

She watched the flame one last time . It gave a tiny tremor.

Almost like a warning.

Almost like a greeting.

Eventually, sleep crept over her in hesitant waves. The candle burned low, its light no match for the vastness of the room.

Somewhere beyond her walls, wood settled with a sigh. A distant door clicked shut. A draft curled through a corridor that should have been still. And deep in the quiet heart of the manor, something shifted, too subtle to name, too old to explain… as if the house itself had drawn a long, deliberate breath.

Thanks for reading~

A lonely room shouldn’t echo, he thought. But it did now. He crossed the floor slowly, his sandals whispering on the stone. On the bed, the blanket was still rumpled from that morning — the morning the messengers had come, the morning Marbod had been told he was leaving Rome to “lead his people.” The morning Flavus had smiled like a good Roman soldier while swallowing something sharp enough to cut him.

He sat on the edge of the bed. It dipped, just slightly, as if remembering a weight that was no longer there. Marbod had hated Rome. But he had loved him. Somehow, that made everything worse. Flavus picked up the bracelet Marbod used to wear — nothing more than braided leather, simple, stubborn, exactly like him. He ran his thumb over it, feeling the familiar roughness. It warmed under his touch.

“You didn’t even want to go,” he murmured into the empty air. His voice sounded wrong too, swallowed by silence instead of challenged by Marbod’s laughter or his grumbled “stop complaining.”

He let himself fall back on the bed, staring at the ceiling that suddenly seemed too high, too pale, too cold. His own breathing sounded foreign.

He had watched Marbod leave the city gates. Watched him walk with that heavy, reluctant stride. Watched him disappear beyond the arch as if Rome — as if Flavus — had already forgotten him. But Flavus hadn’t. He wouldn’t. The bracelet tightened slightly in his hand. Or maybe it was just his fingers. He shut his eyes. He could almost feel Marbod here — the warmth beside him, the smell of smoke and pine that clung to him even in Rome, the way he always took up more space than the bed allowed. A soft ache filled his chest. Like something misplaced and not yet found. Flavus opened his eyes again. The room hadn’t changed. But everything inside it had.

He whispered, so softly the walls barely heard it:

“I hope you find the place that feels like home. And I hope you come back to the one that feels like mine.”

Outside, Rome buzzed as always — full, loud, alive.

Here, in this small room, in this pocket of quiet too still, something was missing. Something was off. Flavus stayed there a long time, holding the bracelet, letting the loneliness settle gently around him like a thin layer of dust.