"In The Dark"
by Christine Anderson
aka Lilly Malfoy

He knows he's dreaming. Knowing that doesn't help.

It rarely does.

He's cold. So cold he can't remember warmth, so cold he wonders if the chill will ever leave him. And it doesn't matter much, really- He knows by now that he's not getting out of here, not alive. He's lain here shivering for so long- Days, at least. Weeks? Probably months. He shivers in his sleep, when he sleeps.

Mostly he can't tell anymore, the difference between sleep and waking. If that difference exists.

He stares into the dark for hours, desperately seeking any sign of light. He no longer expects to find one, now.

He can't stop looking, anyway.

Just like he can't stop reaching, trying to break the spells that hold him here, though he knows they are too strong and he is too weak. He can't stop trying to win free, even knowing he can't do it.

These futile struggles are all he can manage, and though they exhaust him to no good end, he can't stop trying. It is simple desperation, of course; the fallen climber grasping at the rock as it crumbles to dust, digging his fingers into earth that breaks away in his hands...

Sometimes he is so cold he can't even feel himself breathing.

Sometimes he remembers those moments and thinks that he was lucky then, because the pain is so bad, and it only fades when the cold seeps into his bones.

But it's more than this. It's more than the cold, the pain, the isolation. These alone would be enough, but there is more.

He is trapped alone in the dark, in a place where no one will ever look for him, where no one will ever find him. They aren't looking, and they won't. No one knows he is missing, because there is a man out there wearing his face like a bloody cloak, and playing his role so well that no one will ever suspect him- until it's too bloody damned late. (And thanks in greater part than he'd like to admit, to Moody himself- all of the things he couldn't keep himself from telling the bastard, for the compulsion spells he couldn't fight and couldn't break.)

Sometimes he only lies there and weeps, because he can still do that, and at least it's something. At least it reminds him, for better or worse, that he is still alive.

That it isn't over yet.

Some days he finds hope in this. More often, though, he despairs for it.

One thing he knows beyond doubt. He has never been, will never be, more alone.