Lake in the Sky
Transfiguration fails her, and so she takes to painting, brushstrokes feeble like she's afraid she'll tear open the canvas if she starts to try at it. It's never happened this way before, and Rowena wonders if she should find her own total apathy worrisome or at the very least, disconcerting.
She's surprised, through the detached set of lenses she's crafted for herself as of late, how swiftly he's able to excise himself from the fortress, there beside her at breakfast one morning and his seat as good as carved out of the Great Hall the next. The Slytherins refuse to be divided in the face of his absence, and so, grudgingly, Helga takes them in, working double-time to offer lessons to both her students and his: her dedication to them would never waver, whatever she may believe of Salazar. Unbelievably, Godric's new Hat sorts the Gaunt bastard into Gryffindor, where he adopts a proud chin, set jaw, and refusal to heed the corridor whispers and not-unfounded accusations that his father refuses to claim him and left the school on his account. Her daughter announces a month into the school year that the pair has struck up a friendship, about which Rowena doesn't have the faintest idea how to feel.
Salazar is gone, the Room of Requirement still ringing with the words that sent him each time Rowena returns. With Godric and Helga he is through, understandably so, but it's different for Rowena, harder for Rowena. She's not like them; her principles don't color her loyalties, nor do her expectations of loyalty color her relationships. She is—painting. She is painting, but she can't make an impression, and the lines of the landscape blur and she can't stay inside them, clouds in the grass and lake in the sky and everywhere his outline, the horizon the shape of his jaw line and his breath rustling the leaves of the trees. She is painting, but she can't get the echoes out no matter how many times she reshapes the room, and he is gone and gone and gone and she burns all his letters but can't stop the owls coming.
He's not Helga, he's got a stronger sense of self-preservation than that, but neither has Salazar ever been one to abandon anything like he did Hogwarts. From the castle to the curriculum to the students both serve, they created this school together, took a dinner-table vision and gave shape to it, made it a legacy. They sat, she and Helga across from the boys, nineteen years old and the secrets in his eyes screaming to be seen and screaming that they can do anything, take the insurmountable and carry it out by the raw power of their wills. They had their wands to aid them, but it was still as though they placed every brick with bare, bleeding hands, and now he's ripped apart the reaping of their once-upon-a-time and left a void where three should make four.
Of all of them, Rowena stayed silent the longest that night and never raised her voice. If he had to go, then go, she told him, and he left and he is gone and she feels everything but nothing, nothing at all.