If We Can Turn Back Time

Chapter 12: Season

I wait by Hagrid's hut until sunset. My hands are red and cold from the freezing temperature dropping along with the sun. The bright ball of light drifts down below the frozen lake and I wonder how warm its water would be if it swallows the sun whole. I would love to be the lake so I can swallow the sun. I want to be warm inside for once. 

Before I can breathe hot air into my cupped hands, I feel a shiver down my back. As if a strange creature with icicles for fingers are running its finger down my bare spine. I shudder and gasp. I look upwards, I find a dementor, an actual dementor floating gracefully along the silver linings of the clouds. I stand up and my hands reach in my cloak pockets, trying to get its fingers on my wand. I grasp its handle and pull the slightly yielding wand. The dementor's black cloak is beautifully wrapped around its barely visible neck and limbs, sunken to its bone marrows. I consider dementors as beautiful guardians. They gargle and groan and drift over to me with its long fingers, and before they can kiss me, I whisper.

"Expecto patronum." 

A small, lonely robin flies out in a wispy mass of  a white and silver trail. But it doesn't get to the dementor in time. It flies back to me and explodes in small bits of stardust. 

I can feel my face losing color. My entire body turns rigid as I gasp and feel the dementor approach me. Tears well in my eyes and I feel the lump in my throat and my eyelids burning. If I'm going to die, its because I failed to think of the happiest moment in my life. Because my life is so filled with losses and goodbyes. 

When I was born, I knew something was wrong when I woke up with my mother and father screaming at each other, their screeches penetrating the silence. I knew I had to protect my brother at all costs. I knew he was going to be the only one who's going to stick by my side my whole life. His name was Cody. He was beautiful. He had strawberry blonde hair from my father. He looked a lot like Scorpius in fact. He was the smartest, the brightest of the family. When all I could was write stories he could memorize books and write next-level poetry. It was the day I found out that Cody had accidentally burned my finished story with his sudden burst of magic. I was so angry, when we went out I ignored him for the whole day. And that night when we crossed the road and I think Cody tripped I don't know what happened but I heard a thud I turned back on the striped crossroad Cody had fallen and a jeep was racing full speed to him and I couldn't even do anything but watch as Cody get hit by a fucking jeep with a drunk driver and I could have pushed him out but I didn't and I wanted to fucking die and Cody was bleeding and I didn't know any spells and I knew I was going to live with regrets I should have told him I loved you I should have forgave him and I should have saved him I should have died and I can never forget his bloody figure lying in the shadows and the drunk driver who drove away with broken bumpers...

When my parents filed a divorce against each other, I chose my mother. I chose her because father looked too much like Cody. And I lived my fucking life in this fucking trauma and I never got to be properly happy and a dementor is going to kill me because I wasn't happy. This was pathetic and so I couldn't help but cry. 

But when I wipe my eyes, my vision is all too clear. Too clear to see a dementor floating down to the ground with its entire body bending and losing its drifting, magical qualities and turning into a frail old man with a raggedy cloak draped around its limp body hastily. 

There was no patronus involved. The dementor just died. It just died on its own. With tears still streaming down my face, I begin my run towards Hogwarts. To the headmaster's office to tell McGonagall. 

Shit my tears are already freezing on my face.