#tngaprompt

024 - Dementors

Prompts are a good opportunity to explore your character’s mind. Feel free to use them in whatever way you desire. Use them as a springboard for writing self-paras, drabbles, poetry. Use them to spark conversations in character. 

There is no right or wrong way to respond to a prompt. Nothing is off-limits. Write about the past. Write about the future. Write whatever your heart desires.

James didn't see things, usually. Not the way Fred did. 

He'd never realized it before, but as he walked down this impossibly long hallway, his nostrils burning from the sterilizing charms that pulsed all around, he knew it was true. He was like a dog, he realized, distracted every minute by the new most exciting thing, and that came at the cost of being able to see things. How many times had Fred had to take what should have been obvious and spell it out for him? "Louis is sad today, James." "Something's wrong with Lorcan." "Does Molly seem more stressed out than usual to you?"

And the more he thought about it, the more angry he became with himself. He should have seen Albus struggling to find himself, should have seen that Lily was falling in love with the Starrise kid. For the love of Hedwig, Merlin rest her little feathered soul, James had lived with Fred for six years and still he never saw the way Fred was hiding himself away along with all of his books in the trunk beneath his bed. 

So now, James was going to make sure to see.

"Name?"

"Umm...Potter. J-james Sirius Potter." Did his voice have to tremble like that? He sent up a silent prayer of thanks to whichever Founder - probably Hufflepuff - had made sure that nobody else was around to hear that audible tremor at the sound of his own name. It wasn't that he was scared - Gryffindors didn't get scared, he thought, puffing his chest out - he had just never really liked hospitals, is all.

"Right this way, Mr. Potter." The Healer smiled at him kindly and led the way to a door down the hall. "Whenever you're ready."

And then he was alone again, with a suddenly stupid bouquet of Raspberry Rhododendruns and a door he'd never opened before, despite the promises he had made to Fred.

"Well, I'm here now, aren't I?" James whispered, and then pushed the door open and stepped into the darkened room. 

"Umm...Uncle George?" James said, and Merlin be damned if his voice didn't crack again. It was okay though, this time. This was Uncle George, his Uncle George, James's favorite person in the whole wide world, and if there's anyone he didn't mind looking a little less than Gryffindorish in front of, it was him.

"Jamie?" 

James' face broke out into a smile. "Yep, that's my name don't wear it out. Godric, Uncle George, why is it so dark in here?"

A long silence. "Just haven't gotten around to opening up the curtains yet, I guess." 

James hesitated for a second, and then strode across the room to yank the curtains apart. Sunlight flooded into the room like dawn breaking out after the winter solstice, bathing everything in white and gold and scattering rainbows around the room. "There," James said, grinning widely and spinning around to face his Uncle. "That's a lot better."

"...yeah. Yeah it is. How are you doing, Jamie?"

"Iiiiii'm great!" James said, bouncing into a chair by his Uncle's bed and setting the Rhododendruns in an empty vase on his bedside table, at which point the flowers all simultaneously stuck out their tongues and blew loud, wet raspberries, showering them both in nectar. Uncle George laughed, then. 

And James looked.

And there it was, so evident that he could kick himself for missing it all these years. That sadness lurking behind his eyes, the shadows that swirled around behind the brightness, and suddenly James couldn't tell if those lines on his Uncle's face were from laughing or frowning, and had they always been there? 

"I miss you," James said, finally. George stared at him for a second, smiling and looking like it cost him all the effort in the world. 

"I've missed you too, buddy," he said, finally, reaching out and taking James's hand. The silence stretched out again, heavy as one of the tapestries down in the dungeons. James felt stupid, and slow, but he couldn't figure out what to say. 

"Can I do anything?" he blurted out finally, and knew his cheeks were flushing pink. 

"What?"

"Umm...can I do anything? To help, I mean. I just...wanna help."

Uncle George stared for a minute. "Why don't you just tell me about school and stuff, Jamie?"

So he did. James launched into story after story, about school, and Albus, and Tucker, and girls and how confusing they were, and Quidditch, and how the Hufflepuffs had folded in on themselves, and how much he missed Freddie, and how worried he was for Lily, and how he had managed to conjure that cloud that snowed red and gold. He talked and talked and talked, talked until the sun set outside the window, and he didn't stop to really look again until it was done. 

And when he did, he was sure he saw a real smile on his Uncle's face as he drifted off to sleep. 

"But Rose, I don't mind it!" Hugo protested as the two siblings walked the halls together. As usual, Rose had an armful of books, even after Hugo took some from her to carry himself. 

Sandy toes and a moon-kissed evening.

Tucker glared down at the page and read the words again, the book of Emily Dickinson poems clutched tightly in his hands, as if he could pull some sort of sense from them by sheer force. Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, he read. Tucker thought that was total crap, an impossibly romantic notion garnished with pretty words and sentimental metaphors tied up like bows. Of course, that was how Tucker felt about most poetry, about the way people tried to hide the painful truths of life behind flowery language and nonsensical prose.

Tucker wouldn’t have been reading poetry in the middle of the night at all if it weren’t for his mother. It was her birthday and he missed her and every time he tried to close his eyes, he pictured her celebrating it alone in their tiny flat. He hoped she had at least gotten herself a cake. He had told her to, in his last letter to her, but he rather doubted that she did. It was hard to know which was easier—eating cake alone and singing “Happy Birthday” to yourself, or pretending like your birthday didn’t exist at all. It was too much and not enough. He was too much and not enough; too much a problem, a heartache, a source of stress, and not enough of a smiling joy, a bright success, a good son.

Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, he read again. As he stared down at the mocking words, Tucker felt that overwhelming, painful ache in his chest again, that too-tight, too-heavy constriction, the one that made him feel like he couldn’t breathe, like he might not ever breathe again. He choked on air, chest heaving as he gasped and stuttered and struggled to remember just what breathing was, and how you were supposed to do it. In, out. In, out. In, out. How could something so simple feel so impossibly complicated? He sucked in a sharp gasp of breath, forcing his lungs to expand as if he were kicking them open. The tears started down his cheeks then, tears of pain and panic, and he pushed the breath back out with a thin cry. And then it was several seconds of not-breathing, not-moving, before he could make his body suck in the next breath, his chest burning painfully from the effort and lack of oxygen. He opened his mouth, gulping at the air as if he wanted to drink it down, and feeling far too much like a fish caught on dry land. His lungs were far from full when he pushed the air back out again, and it took several agonizing minutes before he had established even some semblance of a rhythm again. He still had to think too much, had to focus too deliberately on the act of letting his lungs expand and collapse, had to work too hard to make the movements slow and steady. But he didn’t feel like he was suffocating anymore, like the air itself was what was poisoning him. He collapsed back on his bed, missing the pillows completely, as his chest rose and fell heavily.

Hope is the thing that dies, he thought.

And then he hated himself a little for his relentless cynicism.

His mother would have been disappointed, he knew. Disappointed and heartbroken, to realize that her son didn’t believe in the world that she saw—a world full of possibility and light and promise, where dreams glittered like stars you could reach out and pluck from the sky, and true love was something you could find in more than just the pages of a storybook. Tucker didn’t see that world. He never had, despite how desperately he had wanted to believe in its existence. But the truth wasn’t so bad, either, he tried to reason with himself. There was a cold sort of comfort to it. The world may be miserable and hard and rotten, but at least you knew where you stood, if only you could see it clearly. Rose-tinted glasses only hurt you in the long-run, blinding you to the inevitable punch in the gut when reality crashed through the smoke and mirrors of romance and dreams.

And yet, a small part of him clung to the hope that he was wrong; a tiny bubble of optimism that refused to disappear, no matter how hard he tried to squash it down. His hope didn’t have feathers, but it wasn’t dead, either. His hope floated along the winds of his soul, quiet and unassuming, and yet always visible against the dark night sky of his thoughts. His hope… was a balloon. It floated aimlessly through the labyrinth of clouds and constellations, soft and gentle as a whisper, and was unperturbed by the storm clouds of his mind. In many ways, that little balloon seemed braver than the rest of Tucker put together.

But it was still fragile, exceedingly so, and sometimes Tucker wondered what it would take to pop it. He had tried many times to pierce its skin, and send it fluttering, lifeless, back to the ground. What terrified him the most lately was that he thought he was getting close to succeeding. He had left his hiding places to gaze up at the sky, to search heavenward for a promise of better things to come, for the assurance of a wind that could carry the balloon forever. What he found instead was disappointment and silence, a world unhearing to his fervent prayer. For one bright, shining moment he thought he had found something, someone, to believe in, but he had clutched at it and come up empty, his fingers grasping at nothing more substantial than the air he couldn’t breathe.

  Mail came in at odd times throughout the day. A lot of the other students got letters and care packages from friends and family members right at midday, when they gathered in the Great Hall for lunch. A smaller, yet not insignificant delivery usually came through during supper. Lots of times the larger items would come in then, covered in the various colors of forgotten wrapping papers from the previous year’s holidays. Occasionally someone would get something genuinely interesting – an overly generous wad of cash for allowance, exotic gifts from places that couldn’t be phrased in the English tongue, one-of-a-kind family heirlooms of old. Your group of peers would gather round and stare in curiosity as you revealed whatever unique shipment had been brought to you, eyes brazen with your own brand of excitement and awe.

Colton didn’t receive mail. That’s not to say that he rarely had something show up – no; he never had a single note, package, gift, or so much as a postcard come for him. That’s because there wasn’t anyone to send him anything. Elva was the only connection he had outside of this damned school, and if she wanted to give him something, she would make him come to her – not out of rudeness, but because she wanted to gauge his reaction in person. The way a mother looks at her children unwrapping presents on Christmas morning. He’d never admit it, but he actually enjoyed it. She’d do this thing – it’d embarrass her if he ever pointed it out – whenever the surprise had come to a point of recognition where the look on her face was comparable to seeing her first grandchild born. In those moments, brief as they were, Colton allowed himself to feel what it may have been like to have a mother who was proud of him. After all, she only ever gave him anything if he did well on an exam or research paper. Which was quite often, not surprisingly. Oh, don’t take that as the attributed cockiness to the Slytherin house. He did well because of natural ability and hours of study, but that wasn’t what got him high marks. That look, the one that she gave him whenever she rewarded his progress, was why he worked so hard. The gifts didn’t matter; it was all to please her.

It should go without saying then that when he received a package in the mail, halfway through a mediocre dinner, he was unequivocally and in every sense of the word perplexed. Unmarked and coated in a less than pleasing brown paper, an elongated parcel lay before him. The arrival of such a thing put him so off balance that he didn’t even care to know what was inside. And had it not been for the incessant badgering of the surrounding Slytherin folk, he probably would never have opened it.

But he did. And he regretted it almost immediately. It was ironic that he hadn’t guessed the contents earlier considering the shape. An Oakshaft 79, one of the few remaining of its kind, was nestled in between extra protective wrappings. The writing on the handle alone wouldn’t have made him believe it to be true, but the papers that accompanied were what he knew to expect for antiques such as this. Mere seconds passed where he allowed his mind to wander, questioning who could have sent this to him – surely not Elva, as a gift of this magnitude was far beyond her hands of acquiring. This was the kind of broomstick that could only be seen in books and a few choice museums across the world. Hell, it was as nearly one-hundred fifty years old.

That was all before he noticed the cleverly hidden note amongst the paperwork, wax seal closing the flap with an elaborate ‘S’ at the center. He recognized the seal from his father’s office, that ‘S’ being the family marker for the Selwyn name.

But that meant…

He immediately pushed the broomstick away from his spot on the long table. It sickened him to touch it, even see it. His chest became tight, like the edge of someone’s palm was pressing directly on his sternum, crushing the inner sections of his lungs. All feeling of his legs was shed, and anger filled his head. The burning sensation, almost like a fever, was the only other aspect of himself that he was aware of. So, as children so often do when faced with such a threatening situation, he ran. Step after step continued to cause quakes in his chest, the pressure never relenting. Total awareness of his surroundings was surrendered to the purest form of rage and fear he had ever experienced. He couldn’t stop running, he wouldn’t. Somewhere had to be safe from them, somewhere they could never reach. Any who saw Colton in the halls that evening likely thought him possessed or mad. But he never saw them – he just ran.

Eventually he found himself by the lake, only the soft breeze with tinges of cool water droplets in it to witness that terror. He screamed a howl almost, breaking off as his voice box and lungs could no longer sustain the breath required. Falling to his knees, tears spattered the dirt beneath him. Each fingertip dug into the earth, searching for some anchor to grab hold of. Nothing could bring him back now. Bottled up for so long, it wasn’t rage that gripped him – it was fear. What could he do now? Everything he worked so hard to bury inside him after spending years trapped in a house – no, a prison – where the only truth was solitude and hatred, would it be undone? Where silence and self-reliance was once his torture, it had become his only way to cope. And to have that broken, right before him in just seconds was… it was like having his legs ripped out from underneath him. There was nothing more to tie him to the calm and collected nature he clung to.

As a mixture of dirt and grass grasped his left hand, he realized he had brought the note with him, still unopened. Closing his eyes and taking one last deep breath, he broke the wax seal and pulled out the one-sided card.

Two words were written on it. Two powerful, blazing words.

Somewhere, in a different life, Colton used to be afraid of his family.

They were cold, ruthless people who enjoyed the finer things in life, such as being richer than those pleb families, and stirring fear amongst anyone who didn’t believe in pureblood values.

Yes, of course he feared his family, since he had the Selwyn name passed down to him. What if he became just like them? It haunted him day and night, like he wore a mark upon his guise. But that was all before he could find himself, a man apart from a name. Leaving home was the best decision he ever made, as it gave him time to separate from his past. But his family’s obsession with power and climbing the ranks wasn’t something that could be so easily shed. Years of childhood in that house created a psychology, a sort of indoctrination that permeated every aspect of his being. Sometimes he had to question whether a value he held dear was actually his own or one that had been forced inside him.

Since he had not seen his family in quite some time, he no longer had to worry about their reach. He was the last child of a corrupt family, and the traditions of that line would die out without him to continue it. His parents would grow old and realize that spending all of their lives as instruments of fear would only backfire – they would die cold and alone. Colton had more than likely been disowned, but there was no doubt that the estate was to be left to him. The Selwyn family, like most rich fiends, had no love for other rich people. They were just more competitors on the way to the top.

So, some years down the line, he would receive an owl notifying him that his parents had passed away, and he would go to his old home for the last time. And he would burn it all to the ground. Karma is a bitch, he would say to himself.

They have many things; as is expected of the scions of power and wealth.