The Last Lieutenant

Vance

The sun is too bright.

It's the first thing that she thinks, that makes her feel like this isn't quite real, but Audra can't bring herself to focus on that when she's so happy. She's running through the cornfield behind the Weasley's house, the stalks brushing her shoulders and the wind catching at her hair when she runs, chasing down the flashes of her friends that she manages to see- Emmeline's blonde hair glinting in the sunlight, the hem of Clary's long skirt whipping out of sight, a trail of candy wrappers falling from George's pocket and one lone glimpse of Fred's trainer as he runs away from her. Their laughter floats through the air to her, and the wind seems to whisper to her- come to me, come to me, a little further.

Audra bursts through the edge of the field, tumbling out into the open ground, but something is wrong- her friends are not here, just Vance, standing on the edge of a cliff and facing away from her. It's strange, and she has the feeling that she has been here before, but she doesn't stop to think about, just grips her wand and moves over to him, because Vance is her brother, and he'll protect her. That's what he does.

"Vance?" She reaches out to touch him, but he's cold, so cold, and when he turns around he is not beautiful like she remembers: he is skeletal, with hands ripped free of flesh and tipped with blood stained bones for fingers, face half stripped of skin and already rotting away, a hole in his cheek that a maggot is poking it's way through. Audra hears someone screaming, and never stops to consider that it might be her. "Vance!"

He's dressed like he was buried, because she remembers that part now, but she can't remember why, just that the suit cost a fortune and her Great Aunt Marjorie thought it was a shame to spend all that money on a dead boy. "Don't you remember, little sister?" He brings one finger to trace her cheek, and the bone scraps against her skin, cutting her face open, new blood mixing with the old. "This was you. This was all you."

Vance reaches out, gentle at first, and Audra is stumbling, falling down into darkness, tumbling back, back, back- until she finds herself sitting upright in bed, sweat plastering her shirt of her chest and legs tangled in the sheets. There's an outline of a figure in the side of her room, and for a second she's confused enough to think that someone had come to check on her, but then she notices the hunched shoulders and heavy breathing and scowls. "Worm tail." There's enough anger in her voice to make him flinch away, even if he just saw her terrified out of her mind a few seconds ago. "What are you doing in here?"

"Nothing, miss." He bows and grovels, reminding her of a distorted version of a house elf. "Just checking on you, miss."

Audra snarls, grabbing her wand and lashing out at him before climbing out of bed, because that's what she does now, makes other people hurt. She makes her way through the dark house and out into the kitchen, where Snape was bent over a cauldron. He doesn't move from what he's doing, just arches an eye brow at her. "Peter was in my room again."

She sounds like a whiny teenager complaining to her father, but she can't help herself. Audra had moved into Snape's house at the edge of the muggle town at beginning of the summer, back when she started to realize that Stanton manor had become too empty, too cold, too something for her to stay there. It's always dark, thanks to the heavy curtains and the haze of smoke coming from the cauldron and the countryside's prevalence for rain, but Audra doesn't mind. Even candlelight is too bright for her these days.

"I don't know why he does that." Snape says, in a way that makes her think that he knows full well why does it and just doesn't want to scare her, even if Audra had already gotten the idea anyways. He's sort of half in love with her, in a terribly creepy way. "I'll talk to him tomorrow." Audra was still standing there, so he finally pushed his potion away. "Is there something else?"