A/N: This is for the challenge at the SU forum. Thanks, TML, for coming up with it! Since I'm currently obsessed with the Black Sisters, this will be from one of their perspectives. Can you figure it out before I reveal it? (I have no doubt in my mind that it you will easily do it…) The end is rather…meh…Sorry it's dreadfully short!
Disclaimer: If I owned this stuff, I would have had Percy end up with Penelope and had Audrey jump off a cliff. Yeah. I don't, naturally…but I can dream!
She blinks rapidly and holds a handkerchief to her face. Her eyes are red-rimmed and ridiculously puffy, to such an extent that she was almost unrecognizable. She holds a baby on her lap. He looks wonderingly about him, confused as to why this woman is crying so hard.
She is, obviously, attending a funeral. She sobs quietly into her handkerchief and looks up again. Standing in front of her is the one and only Harry Potter, who is crying a little bit himself, finishing his heart-breaking speech.
"They were great people, they really were. And I know that they'd have done it again if given the chance to re-do it. That really takes a lot of courage. But they gave their lives to make this a better world. We will all miss them, but we will remember them forever. And maybe our wounds will heal, with time. We love you two."
With that, he places a wreath of deep pink roses on the two joined-together graves. She knows what deep pink roses symbolize, and so does he, apparently. Respect. Gratitude.
"Ma'am, would you like me to take him?" asks Harry after the ceremony has ended. She smiles at him gratefully.
"I cannot thank you enough," she says, handing him the boy. But he knows her meaning goes beyond that. She is thanking him for the memorial, for the roses, for the speech.
And so she Apparates to an empty house, still crying and shaking. She lies down in bed; hoping sleep will wash it all away.
Twenty-five years later, she is sobbing again. It is the anniversary of their service, and she is crying for them. They will never see him, as he stands there, up at the end of the aisle, worry and pure love showing on his face as his fiancé floats down to him, tears showing on her face.
She is also crying for him. They were not here to see his wedding. They weren't there when he went off to Hogwarts. They didn't read his first owl home. They didn't watch him proudly as he accepted his OWLs and later, his NEWTs. They were not there on his graduation day. They were not there when he finished Auror training, or when he proposed to the woman in front of him. They missed so much, and he must have felt it.
And she knows he will visit them after the wedding. She thinks perhaps they will meet. But first she must visit her husband. Her dear, darling husband, taken from her after he'd already gone.
Then she'd see them. She'd sit on her daughter's grave; she'd stroke the name. She'd conjure flowers. They would be deep burgundy—her daughter was-is- so beautiful.
Afterwards, she'd see her son. She'd go to his grave, smiling, tears in her eyes. She'd softly place purple-and-black roses on the cold stone. And then she'd sit down and tell them everything.
"He's married now, you know. He's grown up so beautifully. He…" and then her voice would break, and she'd begin to cry, because she shouldn't be telling them that. They should know. They should be alive.
But no. Nymphadora and Remus Lupin are gone forever.
How he looks like her…she reflects. On her wedding day, she looked just the same…
Harry was wrong all those years ago, she reflects. Time cannot heal her wounds.
But for now, Andromeda Tonks watches as her grandson lives out the happiest moment of his young life. As Victoire Weasley says, "I do," she cannot help but stifle a sob.
They are not here to see this.
And they never will be.