Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
"Nothing gold can stay."
-Robert Frost
You make the same trip every year, always past the flowers and moments left in memory of others. You know the route by heart because you've traced it in dreams as well as nightmares. Left by the big oak, right by the misty pond, and a sharp dip underneath the weeping willow. This path is worn to tufts of grass from friends, acquaintances, and professors; most of all his parents, judging from the sturdy, sensible shoe steps they've left in the soft green earth, and you, with your less sensible though still serviceable dark heels that still match those black dress robes from Hogwarts.
You always bring something gold, because gold is his favorite color and metal is immutable like the memories you created together. Today it's a lily. Transfigured, of course, from the pale yellow (how appropriate, you think) blossoms purchased a Muggle shop right next to Diagon Alley. Professor McGonnagal, Circe bless her, would probably commend you for your wand work while simultaneously admonish you for your ill-founded use of that vaunted Ravenclaw logic.
Gold lilies. As if such an improbable combination existed in nature.
But you're a witch, aren't you? An ambitious one, or at least you used to be in your younger years, when everything seemed possible and the world still teeming with possibilities. Now you're someone who writes stories about heroes and villains for Muggles who call the fairytales you once lived "fiction."
(Does anything exist, really, or is everything transient mist? So many memories seem faded as well as jaded; dimmed, perhaps, by the days between this annual pilgrimage plus the steady thrum of your heart that you still swear beats for two.)
Your wand, still supple and unbroken, safely preserved in a so-called safe with numerous enchantments, preferring the solitude of darkness over the harshness of reality. You don't really need it, anyway, because you've lived up to your House's reputation for cleverness, though you've kept it all these years because it's a remnant of the life you used to live and the hopes you once shared.
He lived up to his House's reputation, too. That's why you always bring something in his color, to remember him as he was- a larger-than-life hero, the golden boy, and the one who inspires you to write. Fairytales don't exist for you anymore, except in the magic of words, but every story you write honors a little of his spirit and you think, as you place the flowers gently on the ground, that he knows and that's enough.