Fic: Your Little Head
Reveals are up in this year's small collection of spooky stories at RS Fireside Tales. I can take the blame for this far from pleasant little thing.
Title: Your Little Head
Author: paulamcg
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Rating: G
Word Count: 970
Summary: Come down, sit down by the hearth when trapped inside...
Notes: This was written for RS Fireside Tales. Thank you for the beta, justtoarguewithyou!
Read here on AO3
or right here:
Your Little Head
Master - no son of hers, she swore, but still... Master's come back. And brought along all manner of scum: Mudbloods and thieves, blood traitors and werewolves. But today, once again, Master's alone, or... No, not quite.
See the heads mounted on the wall! Shrunken, they remain and follow your every step as you descend. Come...
Come down with me! Down here... Sit down by the hearth. It's grown cold, and that is right.
You come for no fireside tale, just for a little heart to heart. No? Some elves know what's in their Masters' hearts. You say my Mistress had no heart. In that case how could you either... But let's hear what's left of the mind you once had.
Drink what's left of the Firewhiskey!
And here we go... back where the air's frigid - back to the bare cell where you became trapped inside another one, too: inside your desolate head.
There is some warmth, for sure. Right here: a breath on your fingers, another breath, and the next one in a rhythm you claim as yours. Your breathing you hug close and won't let them take away.
You've huddled in the corner right under the small horizontal slit high in the stone wall, and pulled the blanket over your head, too. It is not unbearably cold. The well-regulated conditions ensure that the prisoners' bodies stay alive.
And you're not losing the whole of your mind. This blanket brings to mind another one, and you can keep that one, too.
It's Moony's blanket. The werewolf's, you mean. Having come to visit him in the dingy room, the crappiest one, the last one as far as you remember, you've wrapped the blanket around yourself as you're sitting on his mattress.
The patch of winter sunlight has crept aside from this spot where you found him holding a thick tome on his lap. The ancient leather-bound volume is still a clear image - if not more: solid, too heavy just as it was when it was held by his hands. That was when he picked it up again after... After you'd fumbled with the knot in the shoelace used as a belt, and...
Here there's a slice of him left. Depicted together with the book: a thin wrist poking out of the worn cuff of the jumper, and one of the scars you'll always blame yourself for.
There are the worse ones, too, of course. The first ones, among them the fatal bite scar - they will remain. No matter how many Dementors invade your head or for how long, the torment he's suffered never fades.
And among what they force you to go through again and again, more vivid than anything ever lived are the nightmares you invented when he refused to share his. The monster mauling the five-year-old: clawing the small chest, and sinking fangs into the shoulder, next to the frail collarbone... leaving the child in risk of doing the same to others, and condemned to tearing at his own skin month after month, year after year until... and again whenever you failed, and now... You failed to save him.
This is how the werewolf Marauder stays with you even after you've lost all sight of... Prongs? The blood traitor, you mean. The golden boy, he must have always been a happy sight. You turned him into a feast for Dementors. And your godson: still stored in your head, you've got only the trembling toddler with a gash across the forehead and eyes squeezed shut. But you won't forget that you are the monster who deprived him of parents.
That's the most persistent thought. The clearest one, and also convoluted enough to occupy your head. Terrible enough to obscure the detailed images of horror which would drive you utterly insane.
You almost don't mind the Dementors, do you? Welcome them into your mind to help you dwell on your remorse!
Stick your head out from under the blankets of questionable mercy and of defective memories. To better sense on your face the chill of these guards' approach, you need to... No jerk of head now manages to move the matted hair, and you catch a sight of a skeletal hand pushing it from your eyes.
Now the foul gaolers surround you, and your breathing remains only as pain inside. Like ice, cold and clear is your innocence of what you've been accused of. Bitter the truth of how, in any case, you betrayed... First your brother - young Master, you mean - and finally those you chose instead. Betrayed them all by foolishly trusting the weakest among them... the rat!
An animal! You all turned into animals. You thought you were so clever to learn it. But you change too easily, painlessly, and you didn't save anyone. Except yourself.
Transforming into a mangy mutt, you confuse the Dementors. They leave you alone often enough, and a part of your mind, too, stays alive - keen enough to be aware that you keep losing the best parts.
You fear that one day the images of scars, too, will have been wiped away and you'll remember only the wounds and barely whose they were.
Moonshine leaks in through the slit in the wall and agitates the dog. You change back, and in the cruel light there's blood spilling across the empty canvas of your mind. The ice-clear persuasion of your guilt is completed by a portent of the inevitable end: a lone werewolf will bleed... has bled to death.
His life is done. His past gone along with your mind. You alone continue to breathe.
Now a mutt trying to hide under a chair by the cold hearth. Do you remember getting out, and finding him alive? Still, in your damaged little head he keeps bleeding and dying, and there's no space for past or future.
Title: Your Little Head
Author: paulamcg
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Rating: G
Word Count: 970
Summary: Come down, sit down by the hearth when trapped inside...
Notes: This was written for RS Fireside Tales. Thank you for the beta, justtoarguewithyou!
Read here on AO3
or right here:
Your Little Head
Master - no son of hers, she swore, but still... Master's come back. And brought along all manner of scum: Mudbloods and thieves, blood traitors and werewolves. But today, once again, Master's alone, or... No, not quite.
See the heads mounted on the wall! Shrunken, they remain and follow your every step as you descend. Come...
Come down with me! Down here... Sit down by the hearth. It's grown cold, and that is right.
You come for no fireside tale, just for a little heart to heart. No? Some elves know what's in their Masters' hearts. You say my Mistress had no heart. In that case how could you either... But let's hear what's left of the mind you once had.
Drink what's left of the Firewhiskey!
And here we go... back where the air's frigid - back to the bare cell where you became trapped inside another one, too: inside your desolate head.
There is some warmth, for sure. Right here: a breath on your fingers, another breath, and the next one in a rhythm you claim as yours. Your breathing you hug close and won't let them take away.
You've huddled in the corner right under the small horizontal slit high in the stone wall, and pulled the blanket over your head, too. It is not unbearably cold. The well-regulated conditions ensure that the prisoners' bodies stay alive.
And you're not losing the whole of your mind. This blanket brings to mind another one, and you can keep that one, too.
It's Moony's blanket. The werewolf's, you mean. Having come to visit him in the dingy room, the crappiest one, the last one as far as you remember, you've wrapped the blanket around yourself as you're sitting on his mattress.
The patch of winter sunlight has crept aside from this spot where you found him holding a thick tome on his lap. The ancient leather-bound volume is still a clear image - if not more: solid, too heavy just as it was when it was held by his hands. That was when he picked it up again after... After you'd fumbled with the knot in the shoelace used as a belt, and...
Here there's a slice of him left. Depicted together with the book: a thin wrist poking out of the worn cuff of the jumper, and one of the scars you'll always blame yourself for.
There are the worse ones, too, of course. The first ones, among them the fatal bite scar - they will remain. No matter how many Dementors invade your head or for how long, the torment he's suffered never fades.
And among what they force you to go through again and again, more vivid than anything ever lived are the nightmares you invented when he refused to share his. The monster mauling the five-year-old: clawing the small chest, and sinking fangs into the shoulder, next to the frail collarbone... leaving the child in risk of doing the same to others, and condemned to tearing at his own skin month after month, year after year until... and again whenever you failed, and now... You failed to save him.
This is how the werewolf Marauder stays with you even after you've lost all sight of... Prongs? The blood traitor, you mean. The golden boy, he must have always been a happy sight. You turned him into a feast for Dementors. And your godson: still stored in your head, you've got only the trembling toddler with a gash across the forehead and eyes squeezed shut. But you won't forget that you are the monster who deprived him of parents.
That's the most persistent thought. The clearest one, and also convoluted enough to occupy your head. Terrible enough to obscure the detailed images of horror which would drive you utterly insane.
You almost don't mind the Dementors, do you? Welcome them into your mind to help you dwell on your remorse!
Stick your head out from under the blankets of questionable mercy and of defective memories. To better sense on your face the chill of these guards' approach, you need to... No jerk of head now manages to move the matted hair, and you catch a sight of a skeletal hand pushing it from your eyes.
Now the foul gaolers surround you, and your breathing remains only as pain inside. Like ice, cold and clear is your innocence of what you've been accused of. Bitter the truth of how, in any case, you betrayed... First your brother - young Master, you mean - and finally those you chose instead. Betrayed them all by foolishly trusting the weakest among them... the rat!
An animal! You all turned into animals. You thought you were so clever to learn it. But you change too easily, painlessly, and you didn't save anyone. Except yourself.
Transforming into a mangy mutt, you confuse the Dementors. They leave you alone often enough, and a part of your mind, too, stays alive - keen enough to be aware that you keep losing the best parts.
You fear that one day the images of scars, too, will have been wiped away and you'll remember only the wounds and barely whose they were.
Moonshine leaks in through the slit in the wall and agitates the dog. You change back, and in the cruel light there's blood spilling across the empty canvas of your mind. The ice-clear persuasion of your guilt is completed by a portent of the inevitable end: a lone werewolf will bleed... has bled to death.
His life is done. His past gone along with your mind. You alone continue to breathe.
Now a mutt trying to hide under a chair by the cold hearth. Do you remember getting out, and finding him alive? Still, in your damaged little head he keeps bleeding and dying, and there's no space for past or future.