soil erosion by Verity
"The river - I remember this like a picture - the river was the upper twist of a written question mark.
"I know now it takes many many years to write a river, a twist of water asking a question." - Carl Sandburg, River Moons
"I'm sick and tired of all of this," she told her professor.
She was standing at the shelves, aligning all the neat little bottles, making sure they were neatly in alphabetical order. It pleased her to keep them so. She knew that they would be in chaotic disorder (to all minds but his) by the next day; but this did not bother her.
It was simpler for them to invent routine tasks that organized their shared lab hours and filled up the empty hours that stretched forth as their potions brewed than it might have been to speak. She did not like to speak to him. She preferred not to ponder whether he might like to speak to her.
All of the Advanced Potions students had extra lab hours they worked, in search of a cure for the myriad magical injuries and curses that were so easily obtained on the battlefield.
(She could not feel the slick glass of a beaker against a finger without tasting the dead boy's lips against hers. She could not sniff the air above the cauldron without remembering the way he had looked at her, as if she were the most precious thing in the world.)
But she worked the hardest.
"I'm sick and tired of all of this," she told her professor. "We're not really doing anything, are we?"
"It makes it seem as if we... could be more useful," he answered her. And that was all he ever said to her.
When he was killed (of course he was, a double agent, such an easy target from the other end when they found out), the Headmaster offered her her former professor's post, and she accepted.
She watched her thin red hair dry out, her skin pale as she gave up the sun to bend over the cauldron, her fingers hold the the beakers steadily as she swished the ingredients. Ultimately, everyone died, she thought- but as long as people remembered you...
He had made people remember him. But she was just a ghost, an echo - a girl who had fallen in love with a boy destined for death, she herself destined for erasure. She watched acid corrode the tabletops in the classroom, slowly but surely, and felt herself fading.