Chapter 21
It was cold.
The courtyard was frozen over, snow layering the green grass and the pine tress that lined the edges.
He could feel the water in his eyes freezing over and blinked to stop it.
He remembered this, remembered looking out of the castle’s windows and wondering just how it would feel. The cold. He wondered what it would be like to freeze.
The professors always made sure no one exited the castle’s warming charms when the temperatures got like this.
He remembered Percy warning the first years about it. He said that their area of Scotland reached as low as -6℃ every year.
He didn’t bother to rub his hands together. He knew it wouldn’t warm them, at most the temperature change would shock his system, and it would feel like he was burning.
His bare, pale skin almost matched the snow in color. He hadn’t seen the sun in decades.
He looked up. The sky was grey. Not in the cloudy grey, the one that meant pouring rain, or light mists. No. It was a warm grey. As if the sky was blocked out with smoke, and along with it the sun’s heat.
He met the women’s eyes again. Or what was left of them. Dark, foreboding chasms that he had burned into her skull. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to.
He blinked his eyes again to stop the freezing.
One time, he let them freeze completely. He knew his heart never froze, his brain either. What would be the point if he couldn’t feel it. So, he wondered, was seeing a part of this torture? Was seeing the Hogwarts grounds from his life before part of it?
It wasn’t.
Those eyes wouldn’t heal.
Alastair dug them out to let new one’s form.
He wondered if that’s what the woman felt when her eyes were burned out of her skull.
Those burns looked like they were third degree, so depending on if they were caused in Hell or not, it could have been. In Hell nerves are never destroyed.
The crunch of snow sounded behind him, then footsteps, closer and closer.
Alastair always wanted him to know he was coming.
“Harry?”
The gravel filled voice was almost monotone, just the slightest bit of concern edging into it.
He looked up and to the left and saw a man- no. He didn’t feel like a man. Energy seemed to rise and fall as it pretended to breath, faint like he was inches away from a hot stove.
He blinked his eyes again to stop the freezing.
“You’re the thing that saved me from Hell.”
In an instant the dream felt less real, the ice in his veins like a poor copy of the pain he remembered, Hogwarts looked like the cheap cutout his mind could vaguely remember of the castle, the sky lacking the truly suffocating feeling it had inspired in him.
The guilt in front of him was real.
He turned back to the woman, to Pamala Barnes.
“I told her not to look.”
“I know.”
Castiel wasn’t the one who took her eyes.
Snow began to fall.
“You have work to do.”
Snowflakes landed Pamela’s hair, brown hair turning white.
“I know.”
The snow didn’t melt on her. Like she was a realistic statue.
“I will come to you when you wake up.”
He watched the snow build up on Pamela, gradually burying her all that was left was white.