- Chapter Eight -
"You're beautiful."
HOGWARTS, EVEN AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, WAS ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL.
Sebastian still remembered the first time he watched the peak of the castle appear from behind a hill, sailing across the lake on the first year boats. His wondrous expression had been cast with a dim orange glow, his mouth falling open as he gazed upon the impressive building that towered over the expanse of fields. So young and so naïve, foolishly excited for the future.
That morning, he had woken up early and had himself prepared immediately, had a healthy breakfast prepared by the house elves, bid his father goodbye at the door. Then, he, his mother and his four-year-old sister made their way to the train station where they had sent him off for the year. Back then, he had returned for Christmas, for Easter, for every half-term.
But every year since then, Hogwarts had seemed to get a little bit darker every time he arrived on the first of September. The architecture became a little bit less impressive, the friendships became a little bit less tight-knit, and Sebastian became a little bit less happy every year he returned to the magical school, knowing what happened behind the scenes.
Now, arriving at Hogwarts for the seventh time since had missed out on his last year at the school, the castle was the dimmest it had ever been. In Sebastian's eyes, the brick was black with decay and the sky was grey with terrible grief. And he felt sick. Not only because of the fact that Dumbledore had apparated them into the grounds, but also because he was standing in the building that had been the death of his sister.
There had been a common known rule that you couldn't apparate in or out of Hogwarts but Sebastian supposed that because it was Dumbledore, the rules didn't apply to him. Sebastian felt his stomach churn and gently closed his eyes as they entered Dumbledore's office, looking torn and confused all at the same time as he looked around the place.
"Hey, Fawkes..." Sebastian murmured at the sight of the phoenix that Dumbledore owned, bringing his hand up to lightly stroke at the red feathers. Fawkes blinked tearfully up at Sebastian, as though he knew, which it probably did. "Yeah, it's me, I'm back."
And then, in a flame of fire, Fawkes exploded as though Sebastian's words had been the fuse. Sebastian took his hand back calmly and simply smiled lightly at the new baby phoenix rising from the ashes, so innocent and so clueless - it made him wonder.
"He missed you." Dumbledore spoke, his voice commanding the room. As soon as they had entered, Dumbledore had swept over to glass cabinets full of memories that could be put in the Pensieve - Dumbledore looked like he was wondering something too.
But no one could ever tell what Albus Dumbledore was thinking. No one but one special person who was no longer with them anymore...but Sebastian didn't know.
"Okay." Sebastian clasped his hands together, pushing away any unwelcome thoughts as he traipsed over to Dumbledore who was picking vials from the cabinet carefully. "So talk. What are you gonna show me?"
Dumbledore picked one out slowly, eyeing it like he had seen it many times before. Again, he said nothing and Sebastian rolled his eyes as the elderly wizard walked over to a point in his office where a rather simple-looking stone basin sat with liquid in it that looked anything but simple.
Sebastian watched carefully, hands in his pockets as Dumbledore uncapped the first vial of white, glassy memory and poured it slowly into the water. It was quite viscous and slowly pooled into a blackness as soon as it broke the surface of the water, looking less like a memory and more like a sickness.
"This is where Elladora met Remus for the first time." Dumbledore explained and Sebastian protectively crossed his arms, he remembered Remus talking about how much he loved Elladora - it kicked some kind of brotherly instinct. "Please, Sebastian...it's not what you think."
Narrowing his eyes at the man before him, Sebastian poked his own cheek with his tongue and came to stand cautiously in front of the stone basin, looking down at the blackness spreading. He put his hands on the basin, the cool stone underneath his even colder palm. And just before he submerged his head, he took a large breath in.
And then he was falling.
Through an abyss of white, clouds of purity, until he landed and a scene materialised before him. A place that Sebastian had been before, but not frequently.
There was steel railings and he was on top of a circular tower, somehow surrounded by models of planets and telescopes that the Astronomy students used in their studies. For some reason, he was stood on the top of Hogwart's Astronomy Tower and the breeze from being so high was slapping his hair back away from his face, his wintry skin turning icy with the seconds.
It was late at night, the stars in the sky creating patterns and constellations that his ancestors and relatives had all been named after, decorating the sky like a destiny he couldn't get rid of. Always there, always watching everything from above - when Elladora and Sebastian's grandmother had died, she had told them to look for her in the stars. Elladora had taken the thought on board without hesitation, though Sebastian knew that he would never look at the sky and search for that old hag.
An old hag that used to sing a lullaby, a dark and miserable lullaby she thought would comfort a young girl. The tune was so familiar and so harshly carved into his brain that Sebastian could almost hear it as he stood atop of the tower, confused about the situation he had been submerged head first into.
"Hush little baby, don't you cry, grandma's going to be there when you die..."
The voice inside of his head was soft, feminine and not one he had heard before, but one that sounded the slightest bit familiar. And it didn't take long for Sebastian to realise that this sickening tune was not in his head at all, but being sung by somebody within the memory, on the other side of the large steel planet he was stood behind.
A feeling more dreadful than the one he had when falling into the abyss of the memory washed over him as his feet slowly began to traipse around to where the tune was coming from. There were only three people who had ever lived to hear that song. One of them was dead, one of them was him and the other...was a girl who had died too soon.
"Whether it's when you're big or small," The voice echoed across the astronomy tower like it was a siren from a mermaid within the bottom of the Black Lake, luring him softly around the edge of the tower until the wind hit him with more force. "Just one move will end it all..."
If his life was an opera, the crescendo would've swelled to a peak as Sebastian stepped around the large steel planet and lay his eyes upon the purpose of the memory that Dumbledore had sent him into. Upon the steel railing of the Astronomy Tower, cowering between two large pillars, stood a girl, her feet perched lightly upon the metal bar meant to protect people from falling off of the edge.
Only her back was in view. But Sebastian knew exactly who it was.
A small body swept in black Hogwarts robes, almost blending into the funereal night sky, clung onto a pillar by her side. Pale and frail hands securing themselves to the stone with bitten down nails upon the fingers out of anxiety, out of habit, out of nervousness. Long tresses of hair the colour of cocoa slapped backwards, billowing with the wind - the exact same colour as Sebastian's hair.
It revealed the side of the girl's face. No longer an infant, not yet a woman. Just a girl. Sebastian stepped closer, his eyes trailing across the side of her face that was visible to him, the paleness of the skin along with the red cheeks that had been bitten with the breeze. The tears in her eyes, glinting like the brightest star in the sky as she stared out at the Scottish mountains past the Black Lake.
A view almost as beautiful as the young girl balancing on the railing of the Tower. Sebastian felt his own tears in his eyes matching hers, his own lips parted in bewildered amazement of the view before him, just as hers were parted in anticipation. Elladora Hargreaves, grown up and gorgeous.
"You're beautiful." Sebastian said to her, almost thinking she would respond. That she would acknowledge him and that they would embrace after all those years of loneliness she must've felt. But she was only a memory, and she did not look at him.
Instead, she lifted one of her feet off of the banister and looked out at the view again, a small gasp coming from both her and Sebastian. He wished he could materialise into the memory, grab her arm and pull her back from such a decision. Yet he couldn't, but that didn't stop him from running up to her side and looking up at her as her grip on the pillar loosened just a little.
"Please, don't." Sebastian whispered to her, reaching up for her arm but his hand passed through her as though she were a cloud of fog on a cold November morning. Elladora loosened her grip even more and Sebastian found himself panicked. "Stop!"
For a moment, as Elladora flinched and hugged the pillar with all of her might, putting her foot back on the banister, Sebastian thought that he had managed to speak to her through death and from the future. But then he realised that his voice had mingled with somebody else's, a voice a little more high-pitched than his as he whirled around in surprise and almost offence that somebody had intruded.
"Go away!" Elladora screamed, the sound embedding in Sebastian's ears forever as he turned around to face the person who had called out into the memory. "Go away!"
It was a boy. With shaggy hair that draped a little onto his forehead, he looked a little bit scruffy. Much scruffier than the regular pureblood Hogwarts student anyway. The hair was light-brown and Sebastian had a little trouble deciphering the exact shade as the boy conversed with Elladora but Sebastian paid barely any attention to him.
The first thing that Sebastian had noticed about this boy was the fact that he was tall, taller than Sebastian by at least two inches and the boy from the future tried not to let his ego be bruised as he regarded the boy before him curiously. He looked distressed, his eyebrows pulled into a scrunched expression of fear, the scars on his face folding into a similar terror.
Scars...scruffy...light brown hair...Sebastian knew exactly who this was.
"My name is Remus John Lupin," Remus Lupin from the memory spoke, rushed and hurried as he stared worriedly at Elladora on the banister, a hand outstretched as though he could grab her if she decided to fall. "I was born on the 10th of March 1960, I'm a half-blood, my wand is made out of cypress wood, unicorn hair and it's 10 and a quarter inches. And I'm a..."
Sebastian furrowed his eyebrows, staring at this jittered and scared version of the sobbing man he had met at the grave. He looked in between Remus and his sister over and over again, distinctly remembered Remus' comments about them being lovers...they couldn't have looked further from that the current situation.
"I'm a werewolf." Remus finished his sentence for Elladora and Sebastian stepped back from the memory version of Remus, his face contorting into an expression mixed with shock and almost disgust as he said so.
"I know." Elladora sniffed and her tone held no prejudice. Sebastian looked at her, his eyebrows scrunched in even more confusion. "Why else would you get sick every full moon? And why else would the others turn themselves into Animagi unless they needed to help you with your monthly transformations?"
"Oh- so, you know...about that, okay then." Remus stammered, but seemed to try and recover from his shock of her knowledge very quickly. Sebastian regarded his sister with admiration, her knowledge unparalleled. "So, now you know me. All you need to do, is take my hand."
"Why?"
"Because I don't want you to give up, there's so much left for you." Remus told her, his hand still outstretched and his dark brown eyes pleading. Begging for her not to jump, to not give up because there was so much left for her and it would kill him to admit it but part of Sebastian thought that maybe Remus was right. "So much that you will accomplish, I promise."
"There's nothing left for me." Elladora shook her head, her nervous sweat making strand of hair stick to her face and Sebastian looked down at the floor. He couldn't bear to hear any more of it. He couldn't bare to revisit the feelings he had once had.
"I disagree." Remus told her, stretching his hand out a little bit more and Sebastian watched as Elladora's eyes stared at it for a long while. She looked conflicted and a little bit fragile, angry and then calmer, confused and then a little bit more confused. Matching all of Remus' emotions.
Before she took his hand.
Sebastian watched carefully as Elladora let go of the pillar beside her and dropped her feet onto the ground, stumbling back into Remus with a terrified look on her face as though the banister had persuaded her up there itself. Remus carefully grasped her arms and pulled her back from the edge slowly, also looking absolutely terrified.
Immediately, Sebastian came to stand in front of the pair, getting a full view of Elladora's face from the front. A little bit of her looked like their mother and he was sure that if he looked close enough, she would see their father too. But the majority of time he spent looking at her felt like he was looking in the mirror, his face but with a much softer jawline. But apart from that, she looked like nobody else, except for herself.
Someone that Sebastian had never met. Damaged. Broken. There was nothing in her eyes except dark brown irises that stared off at the distance, at Sebastian, but he couldn't see himself reflected in her eyes. In their eyes. If he could run forward and take her into his embrace, rest his forehead against hers and hold her like she was a delicate glass, he would and he would never let go.
Elladora moved and for a moment, Sebastian opened his arms, expecting her to run into them. But she didn't. Her body turned so that he faced her back, her black robes and also Remus, who stared forward at him in shock, but like Elladora, could not see him. Elladora was...hugging him and he looked positively undone with bewilderment.
"Thank you." Elladora whispered to Remus and Sebastian walked around so he faced the two of them sideways, seeing her pull away slowly from the boy and gaze up at him, expressionless like nothing had just happened. "I mean it, thank you."
"No problem." Remus said back to her, his voice low and quiet as his hands still held onto her arms like she would slip away from him. Immediately, from this moment, Sebastian watched care and protectiveness blossom within Remus and a guilt blossomed within him for how he had treated such a hero.
For a pausing moment, Elladora and Remus stared at each other. Emotion passed between them like an acrobat on tightropes that tethered the two of them to one another even in their first meeting and Sebastian watched on the side lines, a frown on his face at the comparison between the girl with no emotion at all and the boy who looked absolutely terrified in front of her - he could see the connection and it had been a total of two seconds.
Sebastian felt physically sick. He couldn't tell whether it was the image before him or the fact that seconds later, he yanked his head from the Pensieve, gasping as his face broke the surface and he gripped the stone basin with white knuckles.
Dumbledore's presence loomed behind him, watching his reaction and Sebastian wiped a hand around his face, shaking his head before he turned to look back at the elderly wizard, looking just a little bit destroyed but he scowled a little and ran a hand through his hair, sniffling with a shake of his head.
"Show me more."
•*•*•*•*•*•
A/N: Sebastian <3