aqua-myosotis:

Library

Written for the @wolfstarmicrofic prompt ‘Library.’
TW for memory loss

He walked in.  And he took Remus’ breath away. Dark hair, surely woven from the black heavens, fine strands of spacetime and starlight, porcelain skin, the silk of white rose petals and piercing grey eyes, the flight of the dove in the cloud-filtered storm light.

Remus doesn’t recognise him, doesn’t recognise anyone. 

Amnesia, they told him, when he woke, his head thickly bandaged and his body strapped to a small hospital bed, the silver buckles blistering a brand into his skin.

He was scared of people now, scared of people who he was told loved him, unable to deal with the intensity of their emotions.  Most of the time he felt lost with not a single place feeling like home, not a voice to cradle his mind in familiar sounds, or a set of warm hands he would let hold his own.   

He has a sense of the memories, he is aware when he is forgetting, when there is something close yet hidden, but he cannot in those moment fathom what they could be.  It’s as if he were following a bread crumb trail and it ends, sudden.  So he stops too.

But this man, with the dark hair and the porcelain skin and the grey, grey eyes, he makes Remus want to remember.

‘Hi.’ The man says softly, as he approaches Remus’ bedside and sits down on the straight backed chair.

Remus smiles but doesn’t say anything.  He glances at him, anxious for recognition, cataloguing through the library of glossy images as they pass through his fingers, distorted and discoloured.

Brave.

Impatient.

Passionate.

Reckless.

Arrogant.

Benevolent.

Friend.

Brother.

Lover.

And then, with one hand pulling him back and the other pushing him forward, a memory comes flooding in. A Word.  Always as words. Stark and jarring and burning.

Betrayer.