Dreams
Dreams were always a strange concept for Regulus. Your body is asleep, so you are left on mercy to your own mind. Regulus dreams a lot. Some of the dreams are strange, and some of them are boring. He doesn’t remember most of them. But some of them are scary. It feels like reality. Like the scenarios, your mind creates are real. Pandora says they are echoes, memories of other lives. Of different lifetimes and universes, you lived or will live through.
Regulus is the person who bases his view of a world on facts and proven points. He never believed in ghosts or magic, let alone other lives. But something about this dream feels different. The worse thing is that it accrues quite often. Regulus remembers having this exact dream since he was a child. He dreams it all year round but the most vivid is during January.
He feels hands tightly wrapping around his body, clawing on his skin. He is always fighting them to survive, but he loses every time. He can clearly picture the pale bony fingers with long nails digging into his skin leaving red lines all over him. He remembers to a vivid detail a silver locket with a snake engraving on it.
He always wakes up cold, so cold with regrets and apologies on his lips without knowing the reason for it. His chest hurts and for a few seconds, it seems like he can’t breathe, like he will never breathe air again. His forearm hurts on the exact spot he has his birthmark.
On those nights he seeks the safety of James’ arms. He buries himself into the embrace of the other boy. Blankets were never able to chase away the coldness in him. But James does. Regulus clings to the warmth of the sleeping boy he loves, breathing him in. He is never able to fall asleep after this dream afraid it will come back. So, he spends the rest of the night listening to the other boy’s heartbeat as a reassurance that it’s just a dream.
Pandoras’ words echo through his mind these nights and he thanks everything real and unreal that even if she was right, his life is here in their warm home and not in a cold cave with dark water so deep you can't see the bottom.