The Sorcerer
Prologue
...to sleep, perchance, to dream...
By Dixi Nihil
Author's Notes: if any There are allusions to Hamlet in this fic. You don't necessarily have to be familiar with the whole play, just familiar to the idea of death and suicide. Also, this doesn't bash or bastardize Percy in any way.
Credits: The scenario is from the Fic Carnival featuring Oliver/Percy slash by the POWSN yahoo!group. Booth: Ghost Ride. Scenario #9: "How can death be sleep when life is but a dream?" ~John Keats
This fic is based on charaters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books, and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. A disclaimer is applied to Shakespeare's Hamlet as well.
The Sorcerer
Prologue
...to sleep, perchance, to dream...
By Dixi Nihil
He was cold.
How could life become any simpler than to feel nothing but the coldness that surrounds your very being and sweeps inside your soul? How could life be simpler than death? It simply couldn’t because the life he had left was too much for him. Too complicated. But even when he was alive, when blood was still running through his veins, he still felt the coldness of life and of the people around him. And he could no longer feel.
He was so very, very cold.
In his life he was too good. His obsession and success with following the rules of his household, the rules of his school, the Ministry, and the general wizarding society led him to his downfall. He fell, and fell hard. His will to bring and contribute to peace transformed into a fascination with authority and power. That fascination turned into lust, and that lust couldn’t be satiated with anything unless…
He never knew when he would be satisfied. He only knew that he went too far. His family would never really know what became of him, and why his ambitions led him astray and contributed to his blindess and narrow-minded beliefs. In his opinion, his death improved the situation with his family. He never belonged, not really. It was better this way because this was the way it was supposed to be. Or so he told himself.
He often found himself dreaming dreams. But then, what else could anyone dream, if not dreams? Nightmares, perhaps. But what are the use of those if their only purpose was to torture the soul and warp the mind? He remembers his old nightmares and the way they led him further and further into his already-crowded mind and into his weak and cold heart. He remembers how scared he was when he woke up. He often thought that he tasted death in those hellish dreams.
How wrong he was because when he died, the pain overwhelmed him. Like fire, it consumed him and burned him a thousand times more than the power of the Dark Mark could ever hope to achieve. It burned and cleansed him and purified him until he could feel…
(And that was it. Even in death he could feel.)
…and he welcomed the darkness, anticipating the coldness and hoping for the eternal numbness of his mind and senses. The darkness came as well as the cold, but never in a million years did he expect to dream. And hope. He never knew that hope was still inside him, but he still doesn’t know what it is that he hopes for. But he still has his dreams, and what beautiful dreams they are. He dreams of his secret friends which were nothing but figments of his imagination, of Voldemort's demise at the age of 5 and seeing the Burrow for the first time. He dreams of Hogwarts and beautiful brown eyes, of bringing his family out of poverty and finding the love stored for him in their hearts. He even goes as far as to dream about love, spending a lifetime with *him,* his special secret, seeing those beautiful brown eyes one more time.
"Oliver..."