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| title: Les Oiseaux date: semptember 4, 2002 Author's note: How do I explain the writing thing below? I bought a CD of 43 "classic French love songs" and though I know underneath all the fancy French they are really singing stuff like, "I love you, fuck me with your beret!" it still makes me feel really demented. Yeah, demented. Anyway. It's not a fic, mind you. It started off as a visual concept. Some of my fics that never get written down do. Most of these are of the grand sweeping scale that have to be visualized that my writing cannot possibly express. So I wrote it to exorcise some of these scenes in my head. Uh. Then it mutated. It has no ending nor logic nor plot. So: You really don't want to take a trip through my head. Think of the Lake as Spirited Away's landscapes. I would want to make a film or something out of these things, except I am crap at technical and have no money. * First Years dying, one by one. The first night, when a Ravenclaw called Melina Crew falls asleep face-first in her minestrone soup and doesn’t wake up, a voice is heard. It’s singing something foreign, that the Professor of Ancient Runes is appointed to decipher. The second one dies the next, and then another voice joins the first. Professor Sinistra finds a pattern that only predicts the mass and velocity at which the deaths will increase (which is a lot, and doesn’t really help anyway). By the time the final First Year kicks the bucket in the communal showers, cracking his head open like a ripe tomato against the tiles, the Professor of Runes stands triumphant in his office. He’s found what they’ve been singing, he says, he’s found it. Eureka. All that. What are they singing? asks Dumbledore, because by now everybody is driven half mad with fear and terror by the singing. Can’t you hear? cries the Professor. Can’t you hear? And now all of a sudden it becomes apparent how little sleep the Professor has been getting, how little he’s been eating, and how pale he’s been becoming. It’s too late to pull him back when the Professor smiles and makes a running jump out his window and plummets out of the tower. The next day, mists arrive. They cloak the Lake. Harry wakes up with his nostrils choking on it. It feels like cold hands. Soon nobody can see what lies beyond Hogwarts and the Forbidden Forest. Harry has been dreaming of normal things. He’s relieved. He sits in the Great Hall and eats breakfast and doesn’t notice the empty seats, because his dreams are of piazzas and cobblestone streets and sunlit windows and of small birds gently singing. There’s their song in his dreams (it’s a different one). He starts humming it. Somebody joins in. It’s Draco. They stare at each other. The mist drags somebody off to eat. Harry dreams of Draco in those streets tonight, hotel rooms with iron wrought beds and white linen. He feels guilty in the morning, for some reason. It feels like an affair. Draco doesn’t look at him at all that day. Little figures start to crowd the misty surface of the Lake. Dark dots. Little silhouettes. At night they twist and turn and become nothing more than dark gathered from shadows, whorled into people-looking shapes. In the daytime the mist dissipates and they wear plaid, checkers, gingham, corduroy, little sunhats and sailor suits and have freckles. They eat ice creams. They still stand, waving to those on the banks. Come on, they say. Come on in. The water’s great. A week later, in front of a horrified crowd, a Slytherin boy splashes in. Luisa, he shouts, Luisa. I knew you weren’t really dead. I knew they were lying. The one with the pink ribbons in her hair laughs brightly, cheerfully, sunny strawberry blond hair shaking out in curls, opens her arms to say hello to her brother. The boys swims out to get to her. Once the boy reaches her, he stands on the water surface and hugs her tightly, and doesn’t move for a long time. Then he drops like a stone into the water. Mass hysteria. The figures disappear, sated. The Lake seems to grow. The next day, the Forbidden Forest is gone. Completely swallowed up. No more Whomping Willow either, no more dark menacing trees, only endless expanse of glittering water, kissed by the sun. Harry’s beginning to wonder if there’s any world left at all, and can feel glad for it. No more Dudley. No more Dursleys. No more Voldemort, maybe. No more nuclear power plants. No more cities. No more London. No more MacDonald’s. Only the winding streets in his head and Draco’s shining laughter. Dumbledore sends an owl out, and gives it instructions to have the first person it sees write on the scroll it carries. The owl doesn’t come back. Maybe it’s been eaten, suggests McGonagall. Everything seems to be eaten nowadays. The water level of the Lake, having seemingly spread around the world and back, can only rise now. The banks of the Lake are all swallowed up now. Students skim stones. Classes are cancelled. Food is conjured up. Everything seems to come from a picnic, an extended picnic, a dream of a little child on a rainy day, thinking of lazy sun and the beach. Hogwarts begins to have trickles of water break in, past the stone walls. The Potions Dungeon is slowly flooded, and Snape successfully evacuates everything out, mostly by ordering people around. I want my mother, says Hermione, sounding like a little girl. Is she alive. Do you think? But no, Hermione, the days are long and rocked in a gentle cradle of sun and water and blue skies stretching forever. There are no more animals, Hermione, not any more. Only birds, singing from secret nesting holes in the walls. No, Hermione, not even your parents can survive a flood like this. Put your head back Hermione, and go to sleep. It. Will. All. Be. Fine in the morning. Hermione is the first one who doesn’t wake up. Afterwards, nobody goes to sleep. Everybody stays awake, staying in big groups in their Common Rooms, watching out for each other, hitting whoever dozes off or begins to yawn. Safety in groups. You need sleep, orders Dumbledore. Otherwise you will only be more susceptible. Ron builds a raft out of the driftwood that washes onto the steps of Hogwarts. He sits in it, still tethered to Hogwarts, and says to Harry, I wonder if I can set sail. I always wanted to, you know. Go on a big adventure and see the world. There is no world left, replies Harry dreamily, softly, twining a lock of Ron’s red hair around his finger. They look at each other for a minute or two. Ron salutes him. Let’s set sail, he says. I’ve always wanted to do something crazy. Harry lets go of Ron’s hair, and their lips brush (accidentally or not), and Ron’s boat sails away, bobbing on the surface, into the blue forever. Ron waves to Harry until he’s out of sight, beyond the line of the featureless curving horizon. Where did Weasley go? asks Draco, late that night, as students wander the corridors unsupervised. The Professors can’t be bothered to cut off points now. Off to find Hermione, says Harry, and looks at Draco. And thinks of: Streets. Cafes. Cups of coffee. Hair. Mouth, tinged pink like strawberries and plums and skin like cream and breath like the cloud off a cup of tea. He leans forward and kisses Draco. Draco takes a step back, then winds an arm around Harry’s waist and kisses back. Nobody really cares, not the students watching idly, because to some extent or the other, they know they’re all going to pass away quietly in their sleep, so they might as well do whatever they want. Having unprotected sex. Kissing your worst enemy. Flushing the toilet and not washing your hands. Staying up late. Eating only dessert and not enough vegetables. It’s not as if the Professors care, murmurs Harry later on, when he’s sitting cross-legged on Draco’s bed, slipping the boy’s shirt off his shoulders. They know it too. We all die. Happens sooner or later, replies Draco, and slowly kisses Harry. A bird sings, somewhere, the last remaining one. |
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