Dark Synesthesia ͛

━━ volume four; kaleidoscopic bruises

'Sweet the sin, bitter the taste in my mouth
I see seven towers, but I only see one way out
You gotta cry without weeping,
talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice
She walks through the streets
With her eyes painted red
Under a black belly of cloud in the rain'

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'In through a doorway
She brings me white golden pearls
Stolen from the sea
She is ragin', she is ragin'
And the storm blows up in her eyes
She will suffer the needle chill
She's running to stand still'

Harry laughed again because he knew it would incense him, the pain building in his head so badly he thought his skull might burst.
Lord Voldemort waved his empty hand from behind the one-eared goblin and withdrew it quickly as he sent another jet of green light flying at him.

Harry had not even opened his mouth to resist.
His mind was blank — wand pointing uselessly at the floor, the image all too familiar to that fated night in Godric's Hollow... And then Harry's scar burst open.
He knew he was dead, it was pain beyond imagining, pain past endurance—

He was gone from the hall, he was locked in the coils of a creature with red eyes, so tightly bound that Harry did not know where his body ended and the creatures began. They were fused, bound by pain, and there was no escape.

And when the creature spoke, it used Harry's mouth, so that in his agony he felt his jaw move...
"Kill me now, Dumbledore... "

Blinded and dying, every part of him screaming for release, Harry felt the creature use him again...
"If death is nothing, Dumbledore, kill the boy... "

Let the pain stop, Harry thought desperately,
"Let him kill us... End it, Dumbledore... Death is nothing compared to this... "

And I'll see my sister again...
Harry's heart filled with emotion as the creature's coils loosened and the pain was gone.

Voices were echoing through the hall, more than there should have been...

Harry wouldn't be surprised if this silence was the end of him. He looked out the window to be faced with a cool line of pale green along the horizon: Dawn was approaching.

The silence and the stillness was broken only by the occasional grunt or snuffle of a sleeping portrait. If his surroundings could have reflected the feelings inside him, the pictures would have been screaming in pain. He walked around the quiet, beautiful office, breathing quickly, trying not to think.

But he could not shake the perpetual guilt that resided in his very bones; filling the whole of Harry's chest like some monstrous, weighty parasite that writhed and squirmed.
It was his fault Hera had died; all his fault.
If he had only opened his mind to the possibility that Voldemort was, as Hermione had said, banking on Harry's love of playing the hero...

There was a terrible hollow inside him, a dark hole where Hera had been, where she'd vanished. He did not want to have to be alone with that great, silent space, he could not stand it —