Golden Sutures
Dorcas Meadowes believes in God, in heaven, in hope, in love, in balance; believes in a hundred tiny things that are like golden sutures on her war-broken heart. It makes it easier to live, that belief in beyond.
She believes in God. (She knows most of her kind don't, indeed, don't believe in anything beyond the end of their own wand; their own magic is all the god they need. Dorcas can't give herself that much credit; she's a mess behind her professional façade and if she didn't believe in something more competent than herself, she'd probably just kick it in and call it a life—that's what she tells people. Mostly though, she just thinks the world is too beautiful to be that empty; the world is a great song, perfectly written, and it is no lament.)
She believes in Heaven. (Well, mostly she believes in Fabian, because his absence is a bleeding wound slow to clot. And some days the only way she drags herself out of bed is the conviction that, when she sees him again, she'll have a more worthy story to tell than the kind she'd write wallowing in grief.)
She believes in hope. (That's all they have in this flagging cause, as Phoenixes fall and families break and the darkness creeps steadily in. She believes in Fred and George, in Percy and Bill and Charlie.)
She believes in love. (She has known so much, feels it still. From her mother's cool hands on her fevered forehead, to Fabian's callused palms everywhere, to Fred and George's sticky little fingers grasping for her earrings, she has been loved, is loved, will be loved. And love doesn't go anywhere—she fell once into despair, one cold February evening when the sky was grey as ash and just as ready to crumble down on top of her. And then Percy had climbed into her lap, there in the Burrow, a ratty story book in his hand. Read this one, please? he'd asked so politely. The book in his hands was not one of the three favorites, the ones he demanded nightly and never strayed from; scrawled inside the front cover in childlike handwriting was this is Fabian's not Gideon's. Dorcas didn't cry herself to sleep that night.)
She believes in balance. (The world will move on, thing will balance out, right will surge back until the wrong is small, and all will repeat again. There aren't any happy endings; this world doesn't deal in endings. Things will right themselves in the end; it will all turn out someday, and there will be beauty to find in the meantime.)
To believe makes it easier to live.
It makes it easier to die, too.
She goes serenely into the dark, for there is nothing there she fears.
