I went to the riverbed to wait for you to show up. you didn’t show up. I kept waiting.
Are you awake?
Chaos crawls out of an elevator shaft.
He can taste it; acrid and thick, clouding his lungs and clawing his throat. It crowds inside him like smoke and the world glows orange, sparks flutter through the air, propelled by the billowing clouds of ash and flame that had gutted the Minister’s mansion (how many?) months ago, he can hear the screaming and running and panic and —
It’s an ambush. His brain stutters to life and searing light arcs through the fog, slicing through the air next to him and leaving it buzzing. The fog is everywhere, in his eyes and in his lungs and whispering in his ears; glimpses of masks and faces dip in and out of it, he raises his wand but all he sees are shadows and smoke. Spells choke in his lungs — Aparecium — Stupefy — Incarcerous — lighting paths through the haze, but they disappear just as quickly, swallowed up by the fog again. His chest burns as he tries to cough it out again, to cover his protesting eyes.
There’s something seductive about the dark.
Gideon, are you—
— "This isn’t the time to take a nap, Gid.”
There’s dust in his eyes and his mouth and his lungs; every breath wheezes with it, with the staggering heat, with the whisper in the back of his head that tells him they’ll run out of air soon, that the rest of the ceiling will collapse. Fabian smiles serenely at him from the corner of his eye, a bloom of light from the tip of his wand jabbing towards Gideon’s nose.
He can feel the dirt beneath his fingernails, the sweat that beads on his skin, carving lines down the back of his neck and he remembers — he remembers a whisper of Lumos that collapsed the tunnel behind them, the Anti-Apparition jinx he hadn’t thought to look for. He remembers desperation and despair. They’re twenty years old and this was to be their tomb.
“You’re dead,” he accuses.
A fine stream of dirt filters down from the ceiling above, the groan of centuries old rock shifting beneath a tremendous weight and Fabian tilts his head, forehead furrowing in consideration before offering; “I know you are, but what am I?”
Rocks skitter across the ground, sand and silt pours through the cracks in the ceiling and Fabian’s wand raps once, twice, between his eyes before Gideon lunges, locking his fingers tight around the bones of Fabian’s wrist and wheezing with the effort. His lungs ache for air but he can’t bring himself to care. Fabian’s skin is cold to the touch, grey beneath the smears of dirt and the carved gash of his smile; his eyes are milky and faded as he tips forward, cranes his neck to speak into Gideon’s ear.
“Do you want to know a secret?”
Walls buckle against his spine as the world collapses around him, roaring in his ears and filling his lungs and his mouth and his nose as it presses him into the ground. He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t—
Wake up.
Heaving for breath, curled onto his side as he chokes up mouthfuls of dirt and dust until there’s air again, a moment of blissful relief from the aching in his lungs as his fingers rake through the dark. The ringing in his ears clears slowly, the tentative reach of his fingers finally making contact —
— Too close.
Confusion furrows his forehead and he eases onto his back, squinting into the dark that surrounds him but it’s absolute. His fingers fan out, palms pressed to the flat surface above — it rattles, groans, but doesn’t budge.
“This is what you want, isn’t it?”
The voice is mild, conversational and he turns his head to look for it but there’s nothing in the pitch black. He reaches out uneasily and fingers cage his wrist.
They’re cold as ice.
His voice is little more than a rasp, breaking the eerie quiet that’s descended between them, “This isn’t—”
“Real?” Fabian had always had a gift for making anything seem possible. “I’m as real as you are.”
There’s a soft, low whistle from next to him before the grip on his wrist slips away, replaced with the distinct sound of knuckles rapping against wood. “It gets awfully quiet down here.”
His spine crawls, the ghost of icy fingers lingering around his wrist and he knows now — the fabric beneath him is slippery and silken to the touch, the wood above smooth and polished. It’s dark and freezing and silent as the grave. “Why are you—”
Laughter echoes in the space that seems to grow smaller by the second, his elbows knocking into the sides of the coffin, knees bent and folded. “Here? Why do you think? I’m waiting for you.”
He wishes he could see something; that the breath that rattles against his ear sounded less like his brother’s.
“Do you want to know a secret?”
Gideon opens his mouth to reply but icy fingers have already closed tight around his throat and begun to squeeze. He chokes and gags, claws at the steely grip that refuses to be pried away and his feet kick out, thrashing and slamming his boots into the wood until he hears something crack.
Gideon.
There’s a spiderweb of cracks that spread out from a single point of impact; dark against the moonlit pane of glass. His breathing is ragged, laden with fear, but he muffles it against his arm, peering uneasily at the unshuttered window and into the night beyond. Gideon isn’t scared of the dark, he’s scared of what lives in it.
“I’m sorry about that,” Fabian offers, flicking his fingers absently in Gideon’s direction and small, trembling fingers lift tentatively to inspect the skin of his neck. Fabian looks paler like this, less real than before, leaning against the windowsill under the glow of the moon he looks more ghost than man. The cheshire smile carved wide across his lips doesn’t seem particularly apologetic.
Somehow beneath the covers of his bed he feels safer. He eyes his twin warily from beneath the cocoon of blankets.
“It was a joke,” Fabian admonishes him with a dismissive flutter of fingers at his side and Gideon glimpses bone. A trick of the eye. “I’ve been waiting for months, you can forgive a little—”
A vague throttling motion with his fingers drew a scowl to Gideon’s lips, the immediacy of fear and raw nerves retreating in the face of the more pressing concern of his brother being a giant twat. “Why am I—”
“It’s always about you,” Fabian intoned mockingly, waving for Gideon to continue but immediately interrupting the moment it looks like he might take him up on it, “Here? That’s the problem, Gid, you never ask the right questions.”
There’s an inflection to the words that makes him nervous, fingers curling into the covers convulsively and he tries to look away but the faded quidditch posters tacked to his walls seem to glaze over. The glass shatters behind Fabian, bloodied fingers curling around the window sill and he sighs, inspecting his nails as if the development is greatly inconveniencing him.
“You could at least make them scary,” he pointed out grimly as a hand curled tight around his throat, the shadow over his shoulder blocking out the light from the window. Gideon’s already throwing off the covers, stumbling towards the two figures that were twice his size when he hears the snap.
Fabian crumples like a rag doll and the world collapses around him, his knees buckle and the room melts as a blood-smeared hand covers half his face, smothering his screams and hissing in his ear, “I’ll tell you a secret if you show me where your daddy is.”
Nails dig into his jaw and the soft skin of his throat and he wants to speak but he can see Fabian lying, unmoving, two feet away and he already knows what’s coming as the shadow behind him sighs and his hands twist—
He’s falling—
—and falling—
—and falling.
Wake up!
There’s mud in his mouth. He grimaces, slowly pushing himself up off the charred ground, spitting grass from his lips and rubbing the splatter from his eyes. He hadn’t realised anyone had gotten so close to them during the battle, but now in the aftermath everything seems so still. Someone is sobbing nearby and his heart drops, eyes fixed on the figure in the distance. “Bean?”
His head turns slowly, glancing upwards for the hand that was surely waiting to pull him up again, to laugh at his graceful finish to an exhausting (exhilarating) confrontation. His head is still reeling with questions about the mysterious, second set of masked figures who’d stormed the battlefield and it takes a moment to register that he’s staring at empty air.
“Fabian?”
He pushes slowly up to his knees, ignoring the dampness that’s seeping in through the knees of his trousers and craning his neck around to search for his wayward brother but there’s only a crumpled, graceless pile of limbs on the ground. He crawls, across grass and mud and wooden floorboards that creaked if you didn’t know where to step and hard cobblestones that were just starting to turn to ice, reaching out to gently push at the figure’s shoulder as his stomach churned with dread.
“Molly?”
What’s left of her face is streaked with ash, hair charred by the flames and the skin of her arms is cracked and blackened. Ash and sparks drift around him, embers glowing orange as he chokes back a sob that turns to a wail in his throat, his fingers clenching tight enough for his fingernails to dig into the soft flesh of his palms as his eyes burn.
It didn’t happen this way. She got out of the Minister’s Mansion, she wasn’t injured, she was—
Still there. The smoke catching in the back of his throat, ash drifting from the ruins of the building around him like snow and it’s so quiet, too small to be the Minister’s Mansion, the remains of a hideously orange shag rug that Fabian had never stopped giving her stick for beneath his knees.
Someone’s crying.
Staggering slowly to his feet he stares at the smouldering ruins of the Burrow, eyes averted from the body that lies at his feet.
“You could have saved her you know,” Fabian points out, falling into step behind him, “I thought you’d be clever enough to figure it out but that’s Ravenclaws for you, I suppose.”
He taps at the back of Gideon’s head and he swats him away, fingers trembling at his side as he trudges through the smouldering remains of his sisters home. “Don’t start,” he warns, turning his head to glare and finding that same, milky stare loitering over his shoulder.
“It’s only just beginning, Gid,” he replies, rubbing at the sickly angle of his neck with a distinctly disgruntled expression. “You need to find—”
The crying grows louder, a wailing that overpowers his brother’s voice in his ear and he starts to run, stumbling and tripping over charred bones and toy broomsticks, his father’s favourite chair, the smashed remains of his mother’s scrying mirror but the sobbing only grows louder. “Where?” he snarls, turning on his heel so suddenly that Fabian almost slams into him. “Why won’t you just tell me?”
“It’s your nightmare, you twat,” Fabian replies indignantly, brushing aside an old musty coat to reveal the tiny sobbing figure huddled there. “If you’re going to be like that you may as well wake up.”
There’s a sudden, violent shove and the last thing he remembers before he hits the ground is the casual salute and the broad, gaping smile as Fabian says, “See you soon.”