Summertime is here again, I'm not thinking of the friends I'll leave behind
*The stones themselves are disconcerting enough - a stretched beach of sharp, jutting angles that border an invisible sea. There’s no water for miles, only hills and swaying grass and a far-flung muggle village, its electric lights and sounds failing to breach the distance. Only a very select, unlucky few have ever seen the sad little house or the peculiarity that fans out below it - it’s a place that lives mostly in stories and hearsay, in rumor and scandal. For every Black that has died bundled in blankets by the fire, or gone quietly senile behind the dark windows, there have been those who’ve been found on the rocks. Madness or cabin fever or simply some deep-seated urge having stirred them, sent them wailing out into the chill and the twilight, running and tumbling down the knoll until they had reached that strange, definitive edge and tripped over it, clumsy in death. At least, those were the stories, the only sensible explanation for when the old, ailing and diseased were found, reduced to nothing but torn clothes and skin.
He has come to this house, they know, for the same reason his uncles and aunts and great-grandparents had. The same reason that perhaps, one day, his mother and father will. The house has a task and a purpose, it is an efficient entity, a series of walls and floors and ceilings meant to confine and conceal and facilitate the same processes they devour. He has come here to die. They know this all without being told, reading the bursts of emotion wrapped around every unhinged shingle and creaking step.
The stones are not really enough though. The memory of the place - the flavor - those strange silent, secret moments shared only once and with no one - are too weak. Tiny echoes that bring a swill of taste and no substance. So it would be very easy, even justified, to reach further, across the rocky un-shore, through glass and bedding. It would be easy to feast on what little remains of Regulus Black.
Something stops them.
It’s strange. They have no concept of challenge, or the virtue of resisting temptation. They are quite beyond the small sentimentality that governs human beings. They know only need and they know only hunger. They also know that they were promised more. More than simply a regular soul, weakened by stress and horror and now creeping madness.*
He has come to this house, they know, for the same reason his uncles and aunts and great-grandparents had. The same reason that perhaps, one day, his mother and father will. The house has a task and a purpose, it is an efficient entity, a series of walls and floors and ceilings meant to confine and conceal and facilitate the same processes they devour. He has come here to die. They know this all without being told, reading the bursts of emotion wrapped around every unhinged shingle and creaking step.
The stones are not really enough though. The memory of the place - the flavor - those strange silent, secret moments shared only once and with no one - are too weak. Tiny echoes that bring a swill of taste and no substance. So it would be very easy, even justified, to reach further, across the rocky un-shore, through glass and bedding. It would be easy to feast on what little remains of Regulus Black.
Something stops them.
It’s strange. They have no concept of challenge, or the virtue of resisting temptation. They are quite beyond the small sentimentality that governs human beings. They know only need and they know only hunger. They also know that they were promised more. More than simply a regular soul, weakened by stress and horror and now creeping madness.*