Huffily Puffily || Golden Trio

Serpensortia || xliii

a/n; the image in the mirror ^^

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Lucy was no stranger to dreams.

At the orphanage, she despised them. Found them a waste of time. Dreams didn't get her anywhere— they didn't make the imagined family in her mind any more real. And so, she despised going to sleep. When she slept, she'd dream.

Then came her first year at Hogwarts. Her dreams changed form. Instead of gray buildings and humble families, she dreamed of dragons. Huge, burly beasts with fangs and claws and everything nice. She dreamed of Quirrell and what might happen if he found her secret.

After his death, she dreamed of Voldemort.

It didn't make any sense to her. She'd seen him face-to-face once. He was just some creep hellbent on killing her best friend.

She read about him and found out the horrible things he'd done. Killing hundreds of innocent muggles, and for what? The betterment of the wizarding world? Quirrell was a puppet of Lord Voldemort, and Lucy knew most of what he said were mere echoes of the things his master told him. For the greater good. Hah! Voldemort wanted power. He craved it, and he was willing to do anything to get it. He would use anyone, even a nervous professor like Quirrell.

He was a monster, inside and out.

And yet Lucy dreamed of him.

The most frustrating part was that... he was never evil in her dreams. While in her nightmares Quirrell burst into flames in the middle of the crowded King's Cross platform, Voldemort was merely a passing face in the background, always watching but never acting. 

It was infuriating.

When she met Tom, the nightmares stopped for a while. There was nothing but blackness, occasionally a flicker of green. She liked it.

But then, slowly, the nightmares began trickling back... and they were worse than ever. Nearly every one was the same.

A book sat in the center of a dimly lit room. She sat in front of it, trembling, knowing what was about to happen. And then the book would bleed; thick, black sludge would pour out of it, slowly filling up the room. Each second passed agonizingly slow. Around her, a high, distorted laugh rang through the small room and it would be the last thing she heard until the black sludge filled her lungs. Right as she was about to drown, she'd wake up the next morning, bone-tired.

There were a few exceptions to her dreams.

These were not any less horrifying.

In these scarce instances, they were different. There was the blackness of the sludge, and then flashes.

An explosion of feathers. Red hand-prints wiped on a white blouse. A low, hissing voice as soothing as the whispers of the wind. It wasn't the images that frightened Lucy, but rather the feeling that came with them.

The only way she could describe it was that she was ready to kill.

It was a terrifying sensation, to wake up feeling as though you had slaughtered a person in cold blood. And what's worse is that whenever she tried to think about it, think back on the previous night, her mind would come to a complete stop. She couldn't think about it. And so she would think about how she couldn't think about it.

Lucy dreaded going to sleep. She was at a complete loss of what to do. She couldn't not go to sleep. One way or another, she'd sleep every night without remembering falling asleep. Whether she was in the common room or her desk, she ended up at her bed.