At least once a month since she was seven, Pandora had had the nightmare. Well, if you could even call it that. It wasn’t scary so much as unsettling.
Pandora was a corpse, at the bottom of a deep dark sea. But, no, this wasn’t the sea, it was surrounded by walls and caverns. Their hands were grey and mottled and they needn’t breathe. Pandora was no longer living - at least in the traditional way.
That was how it always started. The calm before the storm. The quiet and gentle waves lapping at shores far above her head, the currents stroking over them like a reassuring hand.
But there was blood, out there. She could smell it. And she must feed. Must feel the breath on those living lips as it retreated to the surface and they pulled the the flesh down, down, down.
So, quietly, she would find herself at the surface. It wouldn’t take long until it was time to charge. She wasn’t sure what triggered it. The wishy-washy dream logic left patches of blanks in her memory when it was over. But, inside her dream, Pandora understood, and although many of her similarly unliving siblings joined the crush, too, she was always the first to get her hands onto the boy’s raw, hot, living flesh.
Their chapped fingers dug into the boy’s pale but flushed skin, getting a grip no mortal would be able to prise open, never mind in this state. He would startle, short black hair flying up, but they always managed to drag him down. They always succeeded. There was no universe - at least in this dream - where he successfully escaped her. Dragging, piling on, down, down, down.
That dark head of hair would never be seen again, losing all resistance and surrendering to the cool water. It wrapped him up and held him, and she almost hoped he felt at peace in its arms. He would not join them in their greyed forms, she knew that, although not why. They almost missed him. Almost.
Pandora always woke in a sweat after the dream, as though the water tried to manifest itself into reality. It was confusing to them - they had never been afraid of the sea, or deep water, or death. They had never met a dark haired boy with skin the colour of starlight and eyes like the very sea itself. So maybe it was better that all of the details would blur out, and she would find herself mostly forgetting (although, never fully) about that form.
At eleven years old, Pandora Rosier was not to be fooled. Despite her parents, and to their great irritance, she always got what she wanted in the end. They were almost glad that she never wanted anything easy or trivial, because when their wishes came true, it was almost worrying. Almost as though she had not been speaking of what she desired but what was simply to be. And that was terrifying.
Especially in the power of a pre-teen.
But when she met the cold-eyed gaze of a dark haired child on her first day at Hogwarts, Pandora Rosier would speak into the universe something very important.
“You and I,” they said. “We will be firm friends, I can assure you that, Regulus.”