The Emerald Riddle

It was green. Always. A neon glow around him, lighting behind his eyes, across his skin. It made the grass flicker like fire.

-They didn't eat death, as the screams suggested, they spread it around like a deadly disease.-

Green fire. Always. And along with the light came the terror.

It was like every other time. The night of a very strange, holed day. Kilts and ponchos and a man wearing a woman's dressing gown. Everybody was talking about some snitch or a baffle or other. But it was like a dream, something you know took place but can't quite remember. And at the end, night came, not with darkness, but with light. Flame, green and sickly.

First he had thought it was burglars, or the police, but then he remembers the laughs. Amused, merciless, ice laughs that made something trail down his spine.

The children

But it was too late. Always. Always too late to save little Miranda from the masks. No-face people with one long, unnaturally straight finger pointing outwards, as if accusing him for some terrible crime.

-Quidditch! A moving photograph, a creature with big, floppy ears and a man with sightless eyes. A skull, a snake, a crime-

His wife's scream echoed around the cottage, piercing Michael Roberts right through the skull, the heart, as terror rose up like bile along side a shout

The children!

And the night was suffocating. Green and in flames. And there was laughter, before the screams. He could feel his fingers slowly breaking, then his toes, and through the pain he thought

The children the children!

But Miranda's head flopped from side to side, her short hair limp. Pointing to the ground. Her little brother cried and cried and cried while their mother scream and shouted, trying to cover herself with the nightgown that fell past her head.

But he could not move.

He remember seeing the stars, through the laughter and the screams and Marian's limp little head

-Daddy read me a story pleeeaaasse? One glass of milk, juts one Daddy, Mommy won't mind. Just one more…-

smile. Just one more smile, baby girl wake up-

And the pain. But then the green- real green, like stars through chloroplast, lit the night.

-A skull and a snake and a-

He always wakes up screaming because he doesn't want to remember the crack he heard when they fell to the ground and his wife's twisted leg and Miranda's cold, lifeless, unseeing eyes staring at him. At his, Alw-

"Hunny! Michael are you- wake up darling!" Sweating on the bed sheet, hoarse breaths, rasping against his chapped lips.

"Miranda Miranda wake up…" He whispers. And he looks up to see a pair of broken eyes and he forgets his dream, just like that, but he wishes the feeling of pure, unadulterated fear would leave him as well.

Miranda had fallen down the stairs in the cottage that summer. Peter had survived- the mourning. Yes they had all survived- the mourning.

Almost.

"Sshh, it's ok. We're ok. It's ok. Miranda is in a better place…"

His wife's arms around-

Tell me a story Daddy, just one more- the screams came after the laughter- floppy, sightless eyes

Him. Peter leans against the hallway wall, another sleepless night, then, a sixteen year old boy with a sister he doesn't (quite) remember.

All he can, though, is that she had green eyes, even if the photographs tell him she had grey.

Wake up, baby girl, the snitch was caught and he won't be eating more death or spreading more lies.

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A/N

The Roberts family is the one which got levitated in the Quidditch World Cup in book 4. It does us good to remember the extras, because we would probably be one of them.

Disclaimer: I own nothing which is not mine.