Chapter Text
One need not be a chamber—to be haunted
Emily Dickinson
The fact that things can become more beautiful as they die is spellbinding.
To her, those first autumn months are always the worst because he goes back to school and doesn't return until Christmas. The manor is empty with its vast, endless halls and gloomy gardens. She has walked them all too many times.
Beauty is the last thing on her mind.
She spends her endless days in his bed staring at Aurora Borealis on the ceiling, green and blue from the tiny lights that illuminate the whole room. With no one to talk to, she thinks about her golden cage. There's a whole world outside the manor, one she only knows from his late-night stories; filled with people and wondrous things she will never see anymore.
But the only constant in her mind is him.
His huge dark eyes and ruffled chestnut hair that looks a bit golden in the sunlight, his long legs and ribs that stand out when it's cold on Christmas Eve, and he's naked in his bedroom, getting dressed, putting on layers after layers until she can't see his freckled skin anymore. There's decidedly less clothing in the spring when he comes home for Easter, all tall and handsome in his heavy boots and a long coat.
She thinks about his thick-rimmed reading specs and it makes her sad, because they remind her of his classes and his friends, people he falls in love with and those who inevitably fall for him, because how can you not?
They say love is a saviour, but her love kills her slowly, and it's ironic. How can you kill someone who is already dead?
So many years, but she still can't get used to the peculiar way her hands look almost pearlescent in the moonlight.
She expects him to tell her about the people he had met during his absence. Once, a long time ago, one of her fears was death, but when that lost its thrill, it got replaced by a fear of him being gloriously alive and not alone anymore, a luxury she cannot afford.
"You need someone," She tells him.
Find someone , she wants to scream, and expects him to agree with her.
"I'm in love with you," he says instead.
━━━━━━━━
To him, those first autumn months are the worst, because he goes back to school and misses her terribly. He is used to falling asleep to them talking, but now he lies awake in the dormitory, watching the sky go from black to grey, trying to revive the image of her in his mind.
They are together all summer, and he thinks he will never be happier than he is now, at eighteen. Age is a peculiar thing, though: he doesn’t feel the weight of it, he always forgets. Every day of his short life is shaped by the memory of her, anything else gets lost, drawn into the undertow of time. She is always wearing the same silk dress with a pattern that was once colourful; her iridescent locks are adorned with a white hairband, and he wants to take it off, take it all off, touch her hair, see the way it cascades down her bare chest.
His darkened eyes are imploring, studying her thin frame from the narrow shoulders and bare arms, her delicate wrists, down to her beautiful legs clad in white knee socks. She tells him to stop staring and leaves.
He doesn’t see her for the rest of the day and it’s torturous, unbearable, a waste of their precious time together. He’s wallowing in guilt, cursing his stupid feelings and the way the wolves of his want are circling the beat of his heart whenever he sees her. Still, that night she comes to his room in a silent attempt to make amends, and he is gazing at her with such infinite longing, ready to spring out of bed and fall to his knees, begging her for forgiveness.
"Rose?"
She looks up, her eyes warm.
“I'm sorry. For looking at you like that."
"Don't be ridiculous."
He wants to ask her how she died, but she’s incredibly stubborn and there’s virtually nothing he can do to draw it out of her. He never could.
━━━━━━━━
His first memory of her is incredibly vivid. He’s storming down the corridor on a Christmas Eve, dark eyes burning and hair in absolute disarray, enraged in the way only seven-year-old petulant children can be: unreasonably and unforgivingly.
An unfamiliar voice calls after him.
“I heard the way you spoke to your father downstairs. You were very rude.”
He turns around and sees her, leaning on the wall, arms crossed behind her back.
He freezes, mouth agape.
"Who are you?..."
"Rose. Nice to meet you."
He just stares, physically unable to drag his gaze away. She reminds him of one of those porcelain figurines that his mother used to collect when she was still alive, with their delicate, fragile limbs and pale orange fingernails, masterfully carved faces and dark, mesmerising eyes that seem to follow your every move around the room with that strange, eerie glow; a lively glimmer seeping from beneath their long black lashes.
"There's a dead rat at your feet," she mutters quickly, glancing down.
He follows her eyes all the way to his slippers, still dazed, but there's nothing there. When he looks up in annoyance, she's already gone, and he’s alone again.
Always alone.
The next day he goes searching for her, but to no avail. He feels miserable, lost.
He’s often sad, almost every day; the urge to destroy something is overwhelming him. His collection of glass centaurs didn’t survive the last time. He’s looking for her everywhere, but she seems to have disappeared and it makes him want to scream in frustration and anger.
She lets him find her a week later, on a New Year’s day. He thinks he sees her silhouette out of the window, and so he runs outside in the cold, barefoot, in nothing but his pyjamas. The garden is covered with snow, everything is so white his eyes hurt. He doesn’t notice her tall figure in the bright daylight at first.
“Happy New Year, Rose,” he whispers, coming a few feet behind her. He keeps his distance just in case.
“What year is it?”
Her question startles him, but he grins in delight, because he can speak with her properly now, after all these days of fruitless searching and worrying that he will never see her again. He tells her it’s 1978, finally: he turns eight in April and in a couple of years he is starting school. He won’t be alone anymore: loneliness is killing him, making him do awful things sometimes, like driving his father to an early grave.
He thinks she understands, his porcelain girl, and he steps closer.
Her silhouette begins to fade.
“Wait!” he lunges forward, as if to grab her by the hand. Rose turns to him slowly, carefully, a resigned expression on her pale face.
“Can you answer some of my questions?”
She bows her head slightly, almost imperceptibly, and he takes this as a yes.
His voice is shaky. "Can you come through? Fully, I mean. Can I touch you?"
"You can't," she says sternly, turning away. “Last question.”
It feels like ascending an icy hill with a sleigh in long, determined strides, falling, slipping on the way and finally making it to the very top before sliding down, down, down, without a second thought. Without fear.
“When did it happen?”
“Seven years ago.”
He feels his breath catch at the realisation. “1970? That’s the year I was born! In April!”
She knows. Now they have something in common.
The cold air envelops his fingers and toes and it feels like a billion tiny teeth are biting at his reddened skin. “Did it happen here? In the manor?”
She nods once.
“How?...” He’s pushing his luck, surely, because she might disappear any second now, and he will never see her again.
She doesn’t answer him.
━━━━━━━━
She can’t stay away from him forever.
The main reason is that he is, of course, a difficult, insufferable child.
He grows like a little weed and by the age of twelve he is the epitome of every emotion there is, a whirlwind of character traits: ten different people inside one pretty boy that will soon grow much taller than her.
Impatient and petulant, completely bonkers one moment and impossibly gentle the other. There’s so much fire in him, so many things he’s obsessed with at the same time; however, as soon as something new and more exciting comes around, the spell is broken and the vicious circle starts all over again.
She can’t help but wonder what he would be like when he grows up and falls in love. Would he be a casanova or more of a loyal companion to someone he will call the love of his life? Something is telling her it will be the former, but she secretly hopes for the latter.
It’s perfectly natural to be that way with no one to care about you, she thinks. His father, who goes by a name too well-known and too important to be disclosed, is a collector of rare magical artefacts, always away on archaeological trips or marinating at the Ministry: not a model parent, not by a long shot. His mother, Athalea, died when he was only two. Rose had never seen him mourn her; he had never asked any questions. His father got rid of all the pictures as if the woman never even existed. Whatever memories there once were of his mother, had been mercilessly destroyed.
"Aren't you curious?"
"About what?"
"Your mum."
"Nope."
With his endless, unquenchable thirst for knowledge, this is the only thing he takes absolutely no interest in. Sometimes it’s easier to forget things you never even remembered in the first place.
He wants to know everything about the world and science, and it thrills him as much as it angers him, because there is just so little time in a day to fit it all in. Innocence and ignorance about things can increase the pure enjoyment of them, and she muses about how things would all feel if we didn’t have the language or collective understanding of them.
━━━━━━━━
There's a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust.
“Do you ever feel like there’s a solar system under your skin?” he asks her once, as they both lie on the carpet in his room on a stormy night in early June. “Like all of your organs are suspended and doing strange things?”
He’s fourteen, just got home for the summer holidays and his latest obsession is astronomy. He spends hours searching for books in the library, before carrying them all into his den. His mild interest in Orion and various other constellations turns into a fascination with the Greek myths in a blink of an eye.
“Open the book and read your favourite passage to me,” she whispers.
“Artemis spent her days and nights hunting. She could love with the heat of a thousand fires, but she also could be cold and unforgiving. Her longing for solitude was fierce, and mortals stayed clear of her. No one wished to upset the Moon Goddess, and so in the silent forests she hunted.” he stops, craning his neck to look at her expectantly through his reading glasses.
“Go on.”
“One day Artemis was bathing in the sacred pool when a young man named Actaeon happened to walk past. He stood entranced, staring, unable to move, hardly able to breathe, disarmed by her beauty. Furious, she hurled a handful of water at him, and as the droplets touched his skin, he was transformed into a mighty stag. Then Artemis whistled for her hounds, and they raced toward her. Unaware this stag had once been young Actaeon, they tore him apart.” his voice is a mere whisper now. He glances at Rose, his gaze anxious and uncertain, before returning to the book.
“The story of Actaeon's death travelled everywhere, but one famous hunter, Orion, did not care. He was unafraid of anyone or anything, and besides, he could not resist the lure of these woods. The goddess turned on Orion, but when she saw how strong and brave and quick and beautiful he was, she was dazzled. Before long they were hunting together, challenging each other to races and archery contests. At night they sat by a fire and told each other stories, and their laughter filled the forest. Soon they were fast friends.”
“When Orion died, Artemis took his body in her silver moon chariot and placed him in the sky as a tribute to their friendship.” Rose recites for him, her eyes unseeing and distant.
“I’m your Orion,” he says quietly and lowers his head, hiding behind the book, desperately trying to blink away the strange, unfamiliar mist in his eyes.
__________
The sweetness is gone, replaced by a particular kind of wickedness and a reckless, angular beauty that can be unveiled only in adolescence.
At eighteen he invites his school friends over to the manor for Easter holidays and they get drunk as a bunch of boiled owls. Rose sees him kiss some girl in the corridor where they had first met so many years ago, and there’s a bolt of searing pain somewhere low in her chest, vaguely reminiscent of the one she had felt on the day of her death. One thing is certain at that moment: it feels so wrong to be alone, when her heart is a catacomb and she feels like an invisible insect on the wilderness floor, stuck in the jungle of her own blood, veins all tied into knots, and there’s virtually nothing she can do now to escape the tangle of her racing thoughts.
After all, it's only natural, she reasons. She's nineteen and still remembers the quaking want that used to take over her sometimes, an itch to touch and to be touched, a feeling so intense, so complex in its simplicity, nearly impossible to control. He must find someone eventually, it's inevitable.
He finds her in his room five and a half hours later. She watches with bated breath as he stumbles in; tall, ruffled and still very much inebriated, both hands gripping the door frame on either side, knuckles so white she wants to look away.
“I'm so bloody hungry I could roast my cheeks and eat them from the inside," He mutters, taking off his blazer and throwing it on the floor. "Rose! You’re here. Waiting for me! Oh Rose. I’ve got your name stuck in my teeth. I try to speak of anything else, but I can’t…” he trails off, approaching her. “Come here. Lie down,” he gestures in the general direction of the bed. “Lie down next to me, Rose. Please.”
Her eyes follow his every move as he unbuttons his white oxford and crawls into the bed. She wonders if he stops there or decides to take it all off.
“No dreams for me tonight, Rose. Dreams are bloody vile. They make me sick, they do. The other night I dreamt you picked me up and tossed me onto the bed. I curled up facing the wall, then you climbed in to get warm. And your skin, Rose… your skin was cold but I liked the way it felt. Even though you didn't mean anything by it. I was downstairs just now, with all those bores, and there was something I wanted to tell you; It was so funny you'd kill yourself laughing, but then I realised you weren’t there.” He turns to her, dark eyes unfocused. “I said kill , didn't I? Well, I didn't mean it like that. Please, forgive me." He starts loosening his tie, but stops halfway. " Wait! There's more. In that dream, there was an apple on the window sill, right there. I took my bite, and you took yours til we got to the core and swallowed the seeds. What d’you think it means, Rose? Tell me. Oh, but this is torturous,” he suddenly groans, rolling onto his back. “Everything hurts. Is alcohol lethal? Imagine if it was, what a pathetic way to die and end up where you are, Rose. I thought about it, not gonna lie. But I refuse to give up so easily. We're still so young, you and I, so much to see, so much touching to do, so many kisses… Oh, it's like my brain is on some weird, mushy fire. Like wool gone through the wash.”
She lunges towards him in an instant and it’s purely instinctual, the way she wants to comfort him with her touch, bury her fingers in his hair, tangled and wild.
He turns to face her with a sly grin. “I wish I could feel your hands on my body, Rose. I just… I often think how nice, how bloody good it would feel - you on my body. Or even better. My body on you."
Her eyes flick to the exposed skin of his torso. He doesn't notice.
"Impossible, that. When I free you, and I will, mark my words, we'll go to the mountains by the lake, we'll undress…We'll swim and we'll swim until the sun settles to sleep. Each night I just lay here analysing all I have or haven’t done. Now I know. Skinny dipping, with you. In the mountains!" The blissful expression on his face changes to some kind of unfamiliar, crushing sadness, and something inside her breaks.
"Please, I’m on my knees, I’m praying, find me, Rose. I wandered off, look where it got me. It got me nowhere.”
He lets out a shuddering breath and closes his eyes. Rose studies his peaceful face in the faint lamp light: from the dark strands of hair and his pale damp forehead to the arc of his dark eyebrows and delicate lashes, his nose, past the smattering of freckles and finally settling on the soft curve of his lips. She wants to trace her finger over them and then dip it in his mouth, hot and wet, caress his teeth until they surrender and let her slide closer to his tongue, feel it move against her finger, sucking on it sweetly as a shiver runs through his body.
Minutes pass and when she thinks he has finally fallen asleep, he starts humming a melody she instantly recognizes.
“ Now let me hold your hand, I wanna hold your hand…And when I touch you, I feel happy inside. It's such a feeling that, my love, I can't hide… ”
“I was at their gig once, you know,” Rose cuts in, her voice unnaturally bright in the dark room, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
“Who? The Beatles?” he props himself up on his elbow to get a better look at her face.
“Exactly. The Fab Four.” She can feel his curious gaze on her now. "My first proper concert. Didn't expect it to be my last."
She glances in his direction and freezes.
His eyes are dark and intense, all cloudiness gone from them.
“When was that?” He inquires, voice deceptively calm and steady. She knows him well enough to understand where he’s going with this.
“Not telling you. You're still drunk. Won't remember anyway.”
“Drunk! Look at me, Rose. Sober as a chief warlock. Tell me. Name the date. That’s all I ask.”
She sighs. “The performance was on the 30th of January, back in 1969. Rooftop, snow flurries. It was great.”
“Screw that blasted performance. I need to know when you-know-what happened.”
“I-know-what what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Rose,” he growls.
“It’s not going to change anything.”
“It is. I have a plan.”
“Of course you do.”
“You don’t believe me? Then how about this?” He fumbles for a moment and pulls out a pendant on a long chain out of his trouser pocket.
Rose sits up on the bed, squinting at the item, before giving him a sardonic smile.
"A time-turner! From you! What a surprise, my friend, you shouldn't have. My, this one is bronze, I don't have it in this colour. Will it go with my dress, though? Did you know they can only let you travel no more than 5 hours back in time? You can use it to go back and kiss that pipsqueak nymphet more thoroughly once again. Besides, I still have the one you gave me for Christmas a few years ago. It made for a really pretty festive decoration."
"This one can rewind years , Rose."
"That's impossible."
He immediately straightens up, running a hand through his hair.
"Not for someone as irresistible as me. That pipsqueak nymphet , as you so eloquently put it, is the daughter of the best collector of magical artefacts in the world. My dear father is a snotty amateur in comparison. And by the way, it's grammatically incorrect, Rose. One can either be a pipsqueak or a nymphet…"
She raises her hand to silence him.
"So, you're trying to tell me that you snaked your way into that poor girl's heart, seduced her and made her steal from her own father?"
"Told you, I'm brilliant! And irresistible, that's me."
She doesn't listen to him, lost in thought, gaze fixed on the pendant in his hand, as her white fingers glide over the delicate hourglass.
"Back in the sixties we used to use the five-hour ones. Every dog had it. I don't even remember how many I owned. Lost them all the time."
He arches a brow.
"I heard that the sixties were wild, but this? What's next? Selling guns like, I don't know, brooms or vacuum cleaners?"
"Time-turners back then were harmless," Rose explains with a shrug. "Although, once you put one on, you should protect it like the apple of your eye."
"What happens if you lose it? Or, someone steals it, for example?"
His question is innocent, but suddenly there's a line between her eyebrows, and he wants to smooth it out, like clay. She glances at him warily, as if unsure whether or not to tell him something.
"You have to co-exist with your past self. I had never experienced it personally, but I heard horrible stories of people who had. It's rare, though. Like I said, it was mostly harmless. But this…" Rose is studying the pendant, noting tiny little levers and winders. "It's more complex, too. Regular time-turners create a closed time-loop. You will inevitably meet yourself at the end. If this one rewinds years, as you say, you will need years to get back and close the loop."
"This one doesn't create loops. That's the point! The time-turners in your day were rubbish. What's the point of time-travel if all you essentially end up doing is following yourself around and reliving the past again and again? This one is unique, because I can just set the coordinates, Rose."
"This is insane. A time loop helps you make sure the timeline remains intact. Whereas this thing," she motions at the timepiece in his hand. "This will surely create a paradox."
"It won't. I promise."
"How can you promise something you know nothing about? You have never travelled in time before!"
"Rose, I promise you, because it's in my hands, and I am not just anyone," He retorts indignantly, shoving the chain back into his pocket. "I have already made my decision. You can't dissuade me."
"Promise me one more thing then."
"Anything."
"You will wait until graduation. Three months. Just three months or else you'll be expelled, humiliated and taken to court for using magic outside school. And you'll never see this thing again if anything goes wrong."
"But Rose..."
"And it will inevitably go wrong, trust me."
"Rose!"
"Promise me. Now."
"Fine! I promise."
"Swear on your life."
They just stare at each other, two pairs of dark, troubled eyes, before he finally breaks the silence.
"I swear."