A/N: I dare say I'm several 100 types of nervous posting this. It seems a bit too flowery for me, what do you think? I'd have preferred to post it on lj first, but I have no idea where it belongs. Not darkones for certain.
The White Tomb
Many came to pass their time in the shade of the white tomb, and in all probability many will continue to…until the sweet pure marble of the prison has been eaten through with vines and the body that lays inside it, soulless, has ceased to exist beyond a crumbling of ashes…Until just a name and a saying remain.
The words were carved into the edge, just as she had known they would be. Her fingers meandered the loops and curves of the foreign, bitter tasting words.
She didn't know what the words meant; never having been particularly learned, not like Minerva nor particularly witty like Pernella…she was simply a mother.
The word had begun to define her, to create the person within the mass of skin and bones-raggedy old bones and loose wrinkled skin.
She had been beautiful once, she supposed, more out of the pure vitality of youth than of any real claim to good looks. But time had stolen that away just at it does everything.
Albus had been there for her when the pain came, once when she lost her child the first time. When Death himself came like a thief in the night, wearing a cloak of ebony feathers, to steal away her baby boy.
Then, the second time, when Death returned him with a faintly sardonic smile that spoke of betrayal, and a receipt written in indelible ink. By then she preferred to keep the memory of the man she had believed him to be, rather than the craven creature he truly was.
How one's ideology betrayed them, she had cried, rocking gently in front of the crackling fire, warming palms that refused to hold warmth, palms that preferred to cling to stark reality.
Back when the pain of his first loss had still been sharp and terrible she had sworn that she would have done anything to have him back.
Now she did. Tears curved their way down her wrinkled face, dropping onto the smooth surface of the tomb. With a plop they mingled with the cool spring rain, forming springs and rivers as they made their slow trickling way down the sides of the coffin to the already rain soaked grass below.
Her son was out there somewhere, beyond the reach of her red-rimmed old lady eyes, and beyond the reach of her withered limbs.
She longed to wash the mud off of him, as if scalding hot water could strip away darkness, removing the tarnishing of reality. Wanted to hold him, and sing to him, banishing the shadows of the dark to their eternal resting place underneath the bed.
She was not stupid, she knew that he supported Lord Voldemort, knew that this so called Lord had caused the deaths of enough of her former classmates to make an army. But she couldn't bring herself in her cracked old heart to care. Albus had understood that. For that she owed him more than he knew.
Clutching her hand knitted shawl closer to her, she pulled her hands slowly away from the etching in the marble, and got to her feet.
She turned her face to the sky, the droplets of rain cooling her face from where the burn of anguish had touched her with silent pitying fingers. The great shadow cast by the tomb had shielded her view of the sky while it had faded from a light blue to a murderous grey.
There would be a storm then, a storm to swirl away the grotesque shadows and frightening scents, a storm to give them back the sweet scent of the earth after the rain. When the flowers, their eternal thirst quenched, would bloom, beautiful and full.
The lady lowered herself slowly off the stone plinth with a creaking of her old knees. She nodded to the tomb, tucking a wayward spray of white hair behind her ears, ignoring the steady patter of rainfall on the ground.
Then, the red indian mud seeping through her shoes, Mrs. Pettigrew started up the long path back to the Castle.
Fin.