one of those days when the hat doesn't help (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} carminablue) wrote,@ 2007-10-02 18:34:00 |
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| Entry tags: | hp fic, remus/sirius |
Okay. So I was going to post this in response to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
barefootboys prompt 1, but someone had already posted a similar idea and I didn't want to be redundant. At any rate, I still want to put this up because I rather like it, so there. There's a hint of R/S but it isn't very obvious at all. You don't really have to see it in a slashy way at all if you do not wish to.
He is making a calendar. There is nothing left for him to count down to, nothing left for him to wait for, but yet he counts the days, trying to find a pattern in the cold, trying to create order out of nothing. There is no day here, and there is no night, so he marks down the end of each day indiscriminately, counting the hours the way one would count stars.
Stars. He thinks he remembers what stars look like, and he thinks he remembers the moon. He tries not to think of the things he has lost. He isn’t even sure if any of it ever existed. He is sure, though, that it gives him hope. Hope is unwelcome to him. Hope takes the guilt away, and he knows he deserves every last drop of it.
A calendar, he realizes, brings sanity along with comfort. He wakes after a long morning-night, and makes a mark on the wall to mark another day or hour that has passed. It makes no difference to him how long it has been. There is nothing more for him to wait for.
After he marks the wall he reminds himself that he deserves freedom. This is not always enough. He finds he is forgetting what freedom is so the thought has little meaning for him now. He thinks freedom has something to do with the feeling of someone’s skin against his, and the sound of laughter and frantic whispers against his ear in the middle of the night. He thinks that freedom is the smell of someone’s mother’s perfect cooking, or the taste of a mug of hot chocolate after a particularly windy day. But soon even those thoughts, however vague, mean nothing to him. He cannot remember what laughter is, or how a whisper tickled his ears, or what cooking or hot chocolate were for. He cannot remember what any of it means. He tries to remember something else, anything else, in the hopes that it might help him remember freedom, but he is losing them too. He knows he should be angry. He knows that he should resent this place for taking his memories of freedom from him, but it is impossible to have emotion in this place. Emotion is lost the moment it is felt, sucked away by the cloaks that hover by his door.
He shivers, and an instant later, he forgets what cold is. He falls asleep, his eyes and brain numbed by the presence of nothing at all.
He opens his eyes, and makes another mark.
He does not remember that he has forgotten. He does not remember that there was anything left to forget.
But then he sees the moon.
Maybe, he thinks, it was all just a beautiful dream.
It is easier to believe it is a dream than to believe that somewhere someone is sitting in the moonlight, counting off the day-nights too. It is easier to dream than to know that he is not the only one who is truly alone.
