Fannishness

I was really planning on never writing fanfic ever again. Really. Didn’t work. Isn’t that strange? *snorts* Anyway, there’s this thing on lj which gives you 100 topics to write on. I’m going to try to write 100 drabbles. So, if I can go through with the whole thing, which is highly doubtful, I’ll have written 10000 words on HP and my sadly-thin Snapshots Universe will be a bit more padded-out. This is the first lot, not at all chronologically arranged. Do read. Pliss. And comment.


001
Beginnings

James was a week old, the first time they met, and, at four months, he wasn’t much older himself. Their mothers, Dorea, really, because he can’t imagine asking his mother anything, would insist that he had looked at James and smiled a pink, toothless smile. Lucius, who had been four and not overly interested in the petty concerns of tiny infants, would say that they’d behaved like the blobs of flesh they were and done exactly nothing. He thinks the latter is more likely. But he doesn’t remember a world where he hadn’t known James. Neither does he want to.


003
Ends

He dies in the stupidest way possible, baiting Bella.

He steps in through the front door of 12, Grimmauld Place, to the accompaniment of his mother’s shrieks.

He wades the last yard and collapses on the coarse sand.

His laughter changes into hysteria changes into sobs change into screams, the first day in his cell.

He gets there too late to see even their corpses.

He drinks himself into a stupor, but cannot stop hearing Regulus’ unuttered screams.

He is sorted into Gryffindor.

He curls closer into the curve of Lucius’ body, heedless of the pained hiss that escapes him.

011
Red

He hurts, blood-red threads woven everywhere they touched— jaw, throat, ribs, hips, thighs. He’s huddled on the floor, beribboned clothes scattered among blood, drying on the dust, gleaming dully in the twilight of his cage. It dries on him too, rust-coloured flakes parting, reluctantly, from the bruised flesh of his arms and legs; seeping, slowly, from inside him. He had been afraid of the Dementors, but they seem almost friendly, beckoning him from the gates of his cell, promising to lead him into grief and oblivion and madness and memories of Bella, sharp and subtle and always, always, blessedly alone.

012
Orange

“Have you told James yet?” He walked in unannounced and saw her sitting still, hand carefully folded over the not-yet bump on a still-flat stomach.

She looks up, eyes wide-open in fake-innocence. “Tell him what?” He stares until she drops her eyes to the orange she’s peeling. “Not yet. I wanted to be sure.”

“Be sure,” he says, voice harsh, feeling her nod, though his eyes are fixed on the half-peeled, misshapen fruit cradled in her fingers, and, on the table, not quite-touching her hand, a single spiral of glistening orange contrasting with her white hands and the dark wood.

014
Green

Twelve years since he’s seen a human face that didn’t belong to a torturer. Or a careless stranger, sparing a minute to pet a stray dog. And now, crouching in the soft darkness of the narrow alley, scented with strange, near-metallic smells, he feels his scarred heart breaking. The child before him, warily hunting for the invisible eyes devouring him, has a face he has not seen twenty years, has longed for twelve years. And he is happy, in his sorrow, that he cannot see in colour, because the green of the boy’s eyes, Lily’s eyes, would break him again.

018
Black

Pain and blood and lust and despair and a madman’s shrill laughter. And somewhere, in the next ward or the one below, the chill not-sound of some pathetic creature’s life disappearing down the gaping maw of one of these sightless monsters whose other self drifts across his vision, stops, the fifth time that night, to lean in, flesh-less face bowed against the bars, clamp cold claws ’round his emaciated wrists, flesh to rotting flesh, and devour, slow and savouring, more of his shattered sanity, as he wonders wildly how it would feel to steal a kiss from this most-relentless lover.

020
Colourless

The memories that came to him on the waves he swam to freedom were tinged with so many sorrows that he nearly drowned in them. They cut deep after the numbness of his cage, memories of all he had forgotten and now remembered, because, over all, overwhelming all, was the realisation that these memories that told him so much, were of things he could never regain. That had made him stop welcoming the deluge, and he wonders now, as Remus asks him a question he cannot answer, whether he is to blame for the blank, colourless patches in his memory.

021
Friends

He’s quite prepared to dislike her. She’s extremely pretty in a petite, elfin way that’s very different from the regal women he’s used to — something James clearly finds very attractive. She hasn’t the shared memories that make everything so much easier. She says the things and asks the questions nobody else would dream of. She expects them to make space for her in what has been a closely-guarded, and exclusively male, circle. She tries to bully him. She used to be friends with Snape. She’s James’ girlfriend.

So, naturally, within weeks of her engagement to James, he falls for her.

022
Enemies

He had been eight, the first time. Eight and broken— used in a way he, even precocious, had never thought possible. But what he remembers best about that night, and the ones that followed, are the arms, themselves shaking, that held him, and the voice, itself hoarse with held-in cries, that comforted him. Lucius kept him sane, though not safe. And he can see, behind the anonymous mask, the eyes of the man who kissed him, slow and sad and careful, two nights ago. He aims, instead, at a different man. One Death-Eater is, after all, as good as another.

023
Lovers

She’s young. Younger than he had been, in that other life. Young enough that he lets himself be needed by her— lets her bring him out of his almost-entirely-mad stupor. Young enough, poor half-broken child, to cry in wracking sobs, every night, for the lover who betrayed her, the judge who sentenced her, the violated innocence that gets chipped away, every night, a little more. Trusting enough, still, damn her naïveté, that she tells all her stories to a cracked, disembodied voice that offers hoarse words of empathy. Young enough, unattainable enough, that he falls helplessly in love with her.

024
Family

His parents are both Blacks. His father’s mother was a McMillan; his mother’s mother a Crabbe. He has an aunt who is a Rosier, an uncle who is a Prewett. His cousins’ marriages have left him connected to the Lestranges and Malfoys. His connections to the Crouches and Longbottoms have suffered over time, unlike that with the Potters. A bit more distant are the Blacks’ connections to other pureblood families, most notably the Bulstrodes and the Yaxleys. No mention is made of the Weasleys or, gods forbid, Andromeda and Alphard Black. They are all his blood, his clan, his enemies.

025
Strangers

Remus John Lupin was born on 7th March 1960. Moony was born six years later. Remus likes (liked) pranks as much as they did; he just needed to be wheedled first. Every full moon left Remus with gouges down his left side and a growing apprehension that one day Moony would prove too strong for Padfoot and Prongs to control. Remus had lied about having a steady job, the first year out of Hogwarts, because he hates anyone looking after him.

He knows half-a-thousand trivial things about Remus, which nobody else does. But he doesn’t know the man embracing him.

026
Teammates

He hates sitting still, safe, hidden, while others risk their lives. But… if he were out there, he’d be working with those others. And he knows that the part of him that revels in solitude while the rest of him rebels against it, the part that kept him alive and almost-sane through twelve years of Azkaban, would never buckle down and work in tandem with someone. He’s had family and friends and lovers and enemies, all with easily-interchangeable masks, but never a teammate, never anyone he worked with because the higher-ups ordered it, no ties between them. He never will.

027
Parents

He is thirty-four years old. He has never been in love with a woman. He has never been married. At seventeen, he had decided to never father a child — had not wanted to find out whether he was as bad a parent as his own. He had expected to feel affection for the boy, nothing more. This pull that feels more animal than human in its terrifyingly bloodthirsty possessiveness leaves him more winded than a punch to the gut. Leaves him scrambling for words. He has stumbled upon fatherhood, seventeen years after deciding against it. And that changes everything else.

028
Children

Molly wants Bill to cut his hair. She wants Charlie to come back to England. She wishes Percy would patch up things with Arthur. She is disappointed in the twins because they waste their brains on pranks instead of studying. She is scared because Ron does everything Harry does, and that, inevitably, leads to trouble. Ginny…he’s not quite sure what she wants from her only daughter, really. They all chafe against her maternal restraints, the younger ones, closest bound, most. He finds himself occasionally wishing to tell them how lucky they are to be thought of as children, not pawns.

029
Birth

Harry is born at midnight, on the last day of July, born as the seventh month dies. Another hour, is all he can think when they hear the baby cry, another minute and the prophecy wouldn’t have applied to him — it would have been August and they would all have been safe. The Healers allow them into the room they’ve been waiting outside for hours, the entire day, and all he can think, as Lily smiles up at James, as James holds his son, as they give him the boy, is that this child will spell death for his parents.

030
Death

His brother died sixteen years ago. Perhaps this very moment, sixteen years ago, his brother was breathing his last. And he had not known. Sixteen years ago, in November, he had been drowning in cheap alcohol and cheaper skin. Perhaps his brother had died while he was fucking a nameless whore in a filthy alley. Regulus had died, eighteen and vulnerable, at Bellatrix’s practised hands, for a cause he did not support and a brother who had abandoned him. And he does not know, even now, when or how the boy they all called weak met his mutely valiant death.