Calm, Cool face of the river, Asked me for a kiss

[Keaira O'Connell]

((Alessandro first, and then we can go from there if anyone wants a piece of this.))

Her red lips curled up twitching more to the left than the right as she smiled, not really understanding why. She had been having moments like this for a while; random things brought a flicker of life to her features. But what was it this time, what was the trigger that enacted this response?

Ahh. Yes. Her eyes traveled off to the right, and there amongst the darkened area was another person. The distinct male figure had short dark hair, and dark eyes. He stood leaning against something, slouching ever so slightly so she knew when she approached him, she would not have to reach upward those three small inches to lay the softest kisses on his lips. His attire was much as she had come to expect it, a black pinstriped button down shirt was pressed and loosely buttoned, leaving more buttons open then closed, revealing the black undershirt her wore to match it. He paired the shirt with a pair of loosely fitting jeans, that at one point in time might have been new and pristine, but now they were worn, and had a tattered edge to them. He seemed to be waiting, his eyes traveled here and there, among the darkness, not settling on any one detail for long.

Looking upon him, Keaira felt a small flush creep into her cheeks. It was more and more common for such things to happen to her, and for a moment she wondered how she looked. A cursory glance showed her wearing a vivid dress, that buttoned up the front, the top few buttons were suspiciously opened. It seemed a fitting outfit, one that she was comfortable in, and could easily see herself wearing no matter what the evenings activity was.

In the short span of her quick musing, it seemed her presence had been detected. The boys’ eyes focused on her, and his lips twitched in a fashion mirroring her own. He pushed away from the wall, and strode silently to her. Without asking he wrapped his arms around her waist, and pulled her body close to his own. For what may have been moments, or hours, he held her. At first it was in silence, and yet soon he began to hum a low tune. It was a tune she had heard play over and over in her mind and in her ears. It was the most common tune that she would have her grandfathers flute play when she was meditating. She was aware that he had known the song, and yet it seemed odd that he would hum it to her.

A step backward, allowed her to look up at the young man whose arms were around her. His eyes were closed, as he hummed the tune, a sort of serene look was splayed across his face. Yet, things weren’t right. She wrapped her arms around his back, and pulled him closer, hoping to chase away the bad feeling that was welling up in her stomach. The action was never completed though. As her hand touched the back of his shirt, she noticed it felt damp. She brought her hand upward to glance over his shoulder at her palm. When the tips of her fingers were visible she sharply inhaled. The red smear that covered most of her hand was clearly no other substance than blood. His knees gave out, and slowly the man began to sink to the floor. Keaira wrapped her hands in to the fabric of his shirt, and slowly steadied him as he fell to the floor. Blood seemed to be flowing from somewhere near his heart, yet, as she pulled at the fabric that covered his upper body, she could not find a wound.

He seemed calm as his blood spilled out on to the floor, and yet Keaira was anything but calm. Her heart raced frantically as she glanced about the desolate area. “Help me, somebody, help…” She screamed the words out into the darkness, searching for something to aid her, and yet finding nothing. Everywhere she looked there was nothing, nothing but a darkness that consumed all. Tears had begun to find their way into her eyes, as she realized there was no one to help her, no way to save him. “No, no, no, no, no” She repeated the words over and over, as she tried to stop the precious liquid from seeping out of his body. Her hands pressed over his heart, willing the blood to stop.

Unfortunately that was not what happened. As she pressed down on to his chest, there was a tremor across the ground, and then he was falling. There was no logic to how he fell and she did not, just simply that he was falling. Her hands reached out to grasp at him, and only caught the air where he was. Her repeated mantra warped into an indecipherable cry of anguish, as she watched him fall further and further away. She couldn’t look away as she watched his body fall, and yet, as she watched it was like her eyes simply split their focus, and there was a double image, yet they weren’t the same. Alessandro and Zane’s bodies were superimposed upon each other, both falling at the same time, both dying at the same time.

The tears slid down her cheek and she screamed. Her heart and her soul felt as if they were being pulled apart, forcibly cast asunder by nothing man possessed. Then she was falling. Falling is peaceful, really. The wind was whipping through her short hair and catching the dress that was stained red with the blood of her love. Falling is peaceful, and free. It’s the sudden stop at the end that hurts. A stop that never came. The scenery faded and changed, warping to something else. But that was how things went most nights.

Keaira O’Connell lay in her bed, twisted around in a mass of sheets and pillows. Like many nights before, and many still to come, Keaira did not have a restfully nights sleep, and this particular one was not quite over. Although she did not wake up screaming at this point in the night, there was no telling when she would be forced into consciousness, and pulled from the nightmares that plagued her mind. Small gasps and whimpering of ‘No’ could be heard by anyone who was awake at this hour, within the same room. For this night that was no one. Her night terrors had driven many of her dorm mates to procure earplugs, or other such noise blocking devices to keep her screams from waking them up as well. Although, even with such measures taken, some nights she still woke those who were closest to her own bed. That in turn had driven many of her fellow female slithers in the fifth year to move their bed further away from her own, and had caused Keaira to cast a muffilato charm around her bed each night. For now however, everyone in the Slytherin fifth year female dorms slept, most, far more peacefully than Keaira.

[Alessandro Darko]

He did not sleep where he was.

The Realm of Eternal Fire was ever-burning, a wasteland of just flames for miles and miles around. The time he had spent there seemed like years already, but in actuality it had only been about a week or so. The Divine Flame seldom spoke to him, and when it did, it always left him guessing, and wondering what it meant by its little cryptic messages. It had told him once before, well, more like insinuated that he would be returning back to his realm, the land of the living in due time. But how much time had to pass? It did seem like years, but at the same time he was able to catch glimpses of the real world through the fire, though in an odd manner, and he knew it couldn't have been years, for Caitlin was still at Hogwarts when he saw her and she looked just as she did before his departure.

The solitude was enough to drive anybody insane. Being made completely of flames, and heat energy, he allowed his body to meld with the flames around him and let himself fall into a sort of stasis that he called "sleep". It was all he could do, for he feared if he wandered the desolate ruins of whatever world this had once been, he would lose himself completely. So he stopped. Stopped altogether, and just let himself be.

A flare of flames caught his attention in his close proximity. His "eyes" darted to the disturbance quickly, discerning the churning of flickering fire. It looked as if it was becoming a whirlpool, a maelstrom of flame growing bigger and bigger. It's eye, or epicenter, began to reveal something ever-so-slowly that was shockingly uncharacteristic of the realm of fire. It was a stony floored dormitory that was not on fire. He jumped from his position, regaining the form of his body, well, a memory of it at least, and drew himself toward the swirling flames.

The image that he saw through the whorl stopped him in his tracks. It was Keaira in her bed, obviously being plagued by a nightmare. As he drew near, he could feel the significant change in temperature as the whorl of flames grew bigger and allowed him to pass through. He couldn't believe it. Was he back now? Looking down at his hands, he came to realize that he was indeed not back as he still was comprised of fire.

As he stood at the foot of her bed, he watched her for a moment, feeling extreme remorse well up in his being. All of the happy memories they shared together passed through his mind like a slide-show on fast forward. Bringing a hand up to clutch one of the bed posts on his right, he rested there wishing so hard that he could return to the way things were before he got completely wrapped up in this Shadow Wars mess. The days where things were as simple as helping Wysteria evade Peeves in the fifth floor corridor, or playing practical jokes on Keaira by the Juniper tree. There was no more laughter in his life, only sorrow.

An eerie, fiery glow emanated from him, casting a warm glow on everyone and everything in the room. Hopefully his presence wouldn't disturb any of the sleeping girls in the Slytherin dorm. He let his hand drop from the bed post, not noticing that he had left a subtle, palm-shaped scorch mark upon it, and took a step back.

[red]I've got to let go...[/red] He thought as he remembered the words of the Divine Flame. [red]"Goodbye...Alecto... Keaira... Alya... O'Connell..."[/red] It was a whisper that when said left a haunting echo through the room.

And then, just as suddenly as the whole arrangement happened, he found himself flickering in and out of sight, and then finally, he was gone. The portal that could be viewed from the dorm into the realm of fire closed up quickly with a small >poof< and the smell of burning permeated the dorm.

[Keaira O'Connell]

Her dreams continued to be restless, the darkness that surrounded her body swirled and transformed into a new terrain, and she continued onward, traveling from place to place chasing after something she could never catch, and watching the things she desired most in life being torn from her grasp. It seemed like forever that she moved from one scenario to another in which she was haunted by the losses of her past and the predicted losses of her future. All the while she suffered through a repeated scream of her name, one that she last heard through the mind of Alessandro before he fell from the tower to his death. It was at the pinnacle of one of these screams that escaped Alessandro’s lips while he burst into flames that slowly consumed him before her eyes, that Keaira jerked her body so violently that with a scream she came tumbling out of her bed.

Her sheets were wrapped around her body in a way that to her seemed to be attacking her, and she struggled for a short amount of time to release herself from them. For a little while she was disorientated, even after freeing herself from the blankets, and in the wake of her most recently dream, she found that her lithe frame was trembling of its own accord, and her breathing was more than a little labored. A small hiccupping like noise emanated from her as she gathered the blankets around her body, and stood up. Within a few seconds she would be back in her bed, trying at a second attempt to sleeping that night, or at least she would have, if she didn’t look up and onto the fiery form of Alessandro.

The sight of him standing there, composed of fire, nearly made her cry out again, as she stumbled backward and nearly tripped over her blankets. Her arms flew out to regain her steps, and landed on the drawer of her dresser, spilling it to the ground. Its contents were few but all of them were now on the floor. The way she stumbled had her still landing on the bed, simply in a more awkward position than she had originally intended. Instead of attempting to return to sleep, Keaira pulled her legs upon to the bed and watched him for a few seconds. He was just standing there, a part of her nightmares brought to life, and then he said something.

"Goodbye...Alecto... Keaira... Alya... O'Connell..."

Her brain was still fogged from the tormented sleep, and yet she realized that this fiery Alessandro from her dreams had just whispered his goodbye to her. Her mind, as fuzzy as it was, began giving justification to this vision, and Keaira’s mind reasoned that this was just an extension of her dream, a way of giving her the chance to have a small amount of closure; of course her thoughts on this were nowhere as clearly defined, that was the general idea of them. Tears began to run down her cheek and the small sobs and sniffles she had grew a touch louder. Each night she was plagued by one thing or another, this was just an addition to her demons. As she allowed her sobs to grow in volume, she noticed the way Alessandro’s figured flickered, and began to disappear, and in the few seconds he was still visible through Keaira’s voiced croaked out a small reply to his.

“Goodbye, Alessandro… Orion... Darko…”

After her words were whispered out, Keaira pulled her legs up to her chest wrapping her right arm around them, while her left moved up to the tangled mess that was her hair. She clenched her fist into the damp and limp strands that lay freely around her face, and Keaira began to sob louder than she was before.