[open] water like a stone

[lumenrelegandus]

Who: Lupin (lumenrelegandus), Lust (sonvisage), Vanille (sugaryoptimist)?, anyone; multiple threads welcome!
When: Any time since the attack and rescue. This set-up is backdated.
Where: the Clinic
Format: Starting with paragraph 'cause I always do. From there, we can go to haiku…
What: Bedside visitations. I need some help getting him oot and aboot agin. Some of you were foolish enough

Comments

[lumenrelegandus]

[Did he move? Perhaps his eyes under his lids moved fast enough to minutely turn his head.

The main response is again on the forge.

[video] flicks on.

"-really, I've been here three minutes and you're the one breaking things?"

Unmistakable, the notorious phantom Dora Tonks, so very close to him, touching him, drawing still nearer, and he's in shocked apprehension, right up to the moment she drives in the knife.

He hit the floor, hand clasping automatically over the wound, but his eyes never left her: as laughing, bloody, Dora's heart-shaped face morphed into the skeletal features of Bellatrix Lestrange.

The image instantaneously flips.

Here's a scene Io's been shown before.

"What're you doing sitting alone in the dark in the middle of the night?"

He reaches for her hand to help her to her feet. She springs up, hair bursting behind her into long and tangled and black, and stabs him in the throat.

She straddles him on the sofa, eyes angry to cover their hurt-"You're the one who never lies, don't you dare lie"-but then the

[sonvisage]

[The images flicker past - they're horrifying only because they pertain to him, because he's in them. She's sure she wouldn't care if it were some stranger, or some casual acquaintance. (Wouldn't she?).

So she rises, crosses to him and boundaries be damned, sits beside him and lays a hand on his arm. Stares down into the pale shattered thing that has been taken from - the shell left behind when his mind is whoknowswhere.

Lets out a hiss and a whine as she sits, helpless and unable to answer for fear of something she can't even give words to. Fear. This is what he's making her feel now. She hates him a little for it and hates herself even more.]

Take it back.

[The idea that his memories had somehow been corrupted is repulsive to her. Beyond measure. She stares into his eyes however fixed they may be, and this time it's a plea.]

Take it back.

When one response fails, take five and call in morning…?

[lumenrelegandus]

[His eyes focus on her. Without difficulty, without adding injury, he sits right up. His arm slides forward under her hand 'til it's around her waist. He pulls them together. They kiss, or their faces touch, or each rests their head on the other's shoulder; and all phantoms must taken second place to what's physical and real right now, and that's enough to be all right. Unless- .

The woman with dark red hair and the deepest green eyes sits on the bed opposite Io. She reaches over, also to put her hand on Lupin's arm, and so doing, touching Io's. "You know too, don't you?" Lily said to her. .

From a shadowed corner of the room, unable to come closer, Dora stares at them both in grief-stricken frustration. As she catches Io's eye, she gestures and mouths urgently: 'Take it back!' .

The photograph on the table shivers into Mist, rising and coalesces into three life-size shadows. They join Io at every corner of the bed. "It's the one thing that can't get lost," says Hermione. "No matter how often you try," says Ron wrily. Harry takes