“Its time,” Michael said quietly to Oz. He opened the bag and drew out a tiny silver basin. One of Kate’s pensieves. Michael resized it, scooped water out of the lake, and rested the basin on rubble of the tomb. “You really didn’t need to blow it up, did you? Dumbledore deserved far better from you than that.” He looked at Oz. “Put it in the basin,” he said. It was not a request.
The figure hesitated. The memory was too painful. Not one he ever had wanted anyone to see. The memory never left his mind. He had replayed it over and over and over until he had every detail permanently etched in front of his eyes. Every sound indelible in his brain. He wasn’t giving it over. He fully intended to take the horror of it, and the horror it inflicted upon him to his grave. And, by his estimation, that might well be tonight. He hadn’t been threatening Thaor. He saw it an equal possibility that the one who might not survive might well be himself.
Michael walked over to Oz and saw the deep dark brewings in Oz’s eyes. “You give that thought to me, or I swear to God, I will take every thought in your head until I find it,” Michael was completely serious. He wasn’t letting this get out of control any more than it already was. He watched the figure hesitate a moment longer, and then in surrender, he drew the thought forth. It was a foul, wretched, deformed thread, unlike any other thought Michael had ever seen. He watched it drop into the basin where a hideous gray-green swirl seemed to fog over with black before clearing to a memory.
The night had been dark, and the men had simply gone to the Leaky for some fish and chips and a pint. A simple time for a bit of laughter, a break in the pressure. They were leaving the pub and going through a side alley when the assault had come.
Wand fire. Nonstop, rapidfire blasts out of the pitch black. Chaos had broken out. The memory slowed to slow motion. His friends had attempted to surround him, protect him. But the wand fire had cast a light on the face of the assassin. It was Thaor’s enraged face. The blast that left the wand hadn’t been right when it left the wand. The words of the spell had been irrevocably garbled in Thaor’s insanity and rage, unintelligible. The light hadn’t formed into a straight green line. It was vicious, and bitter green, and jagged like the blade of a saw in a sawmill. And as it flew, a hideous serpentine black mist had swirled around the green jagged line and had become embraced and entangled with it. It was unlike anything he had ever seen or ever wanted to see again. It had had the same harrowing sawblade buzzing sound as it flew and struck Robert directly and squarely in the chest.
He had fallen in slow motion, as the evil had flooded through him like a toxin, and as the twisted energies raced through his system, he had seen that the spell, although miscast in itself, had been cast by a cursed mind. And in Thaor’s insane rage, he had not known that the curse could be contagious in the right conditions. Transferrable. And now, after becoming intimately bonded with the bungled spell, it had formed a new thing and had wrapped back upon itself in a hideously toxic metamorphosis before entering the Gryffindor’s own white magic systems.
The pain to his every system had been intolerable. He had nearly died of the attack on the brick pavement of the alley. He had heard his friends racing to save his life and to fight off Thaor. He felt the damage being done internally and was helpless to stop it. The indescribable, continuous torture in every corner of his body and mind had not stopped. It had left him mute and trapped within himself, with virtually no control of his emotions. And worse, yet, he knew it was contagious to anyone who did energy work of any kind. Seers, Healers,…and that was everyone he loved.
He didn’t dare touch them in any manner. If he did, he would transfer this new evil to them. No, he had to carry this alone. He had spent all his time looking for a cure, a release. But he had found none. He was losing hope. He was not seeing any way to rid himself of it. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to live with it one more day. Not one more day of not being able to hold his daughter or his grandkids, of not being able to touch his wife’s hand, or kiss her lips, or not being able to even speak to read a bedtime story to his grandkids. Or—in being afraid he might hurt them again to ward them off if they dared to try to touch him. He had bruised his own child repeatedly for it, and hadn’t been able to stop himself.
No, this was no way to live, and he loathed it. And as much as he blamed Thaor, he didn’t believe Thaor deserved to see this much of his private, eternal hell.
by 
