A/N: Written for the Harry Potter Spells Competition (Reparo); the "Some Things are Better Left Incomplete: Competition (Eternity for _ and "mirror"); and the Snakes and Ladders Challenge. I am not JKR. The characters belong to her.
Godric Gryffindor would die an old man. This wasn't at all what he wanted.
Daring. Nerve. Chivalry. The things he looked for in the students he chose for his house. Brave like lions. He taught them to duel, to stand up to challengers, to look danger in the eye and laugh. He went on missions around the country and fought dragons and dueled strangers. And he lived to tell the tale. Could anyone have known that he wished to die in glory? To be remembered as a young man, the one they could depend on for protection - that was his dying wish. He had a dying wish at the age of thirty-five and yet here he was, more than twice that age, lying in a comfortable bed in his castle at Hogwarts, waiting to die in his sleep. It seemed like a cowardly way to die.
Salazar died in a run-in with a wizard from Arabia when he was forty. Helga died of a Muggle disease she caught when scouting for new students near Edinburgh. She was fifty-two. They say that Rowena died of an untreatable illness as well, but Godric knew better. She became ill three days after hearing of her daughter's death. She died of a broken heart within a week.
Godric should've followed.
His own heart was broken when Rowena died - the first to die, when Godric knew she was the best. When they were still young, when Helena was still a toddler, Godric had asked her to marry him. Rowena's first husband died in battle just weeks after his daughter was born, leaving Rowena a widow at the age of twenty-one. Godric's proposal followed at age twenty-five, when they had nearly finished the plans for Hogwarts.
Her excuse was Helena, but it wasn't much of an excuse. Surely a girl would be better off with two parents, and he was bound to be part of her life anyway. (Rowena didn't love him. It was as simple as that.) He never stopped loving her and never married. But he never again asked her to marry him. Godric wasn't sure if this was cowardice or courage. He wasn't sure he cared to find out.
Now here he was, nearing ninety. (And who lived to be ninety but a coward or a fool?) Grandchildren of his first Hogwarts students were teaching now, coming in to check on him every now and then, caring for him like the invalid he was. His quarters consisted of a simple room on the ground floor, no furniture but a bed and a darkly lit mirror. He wished they would take his blasted mirror away, let him die thinking that he was still young and fit and vibrant.
Exhausted, but with nothing wrong but old age, he pulled himself out of bed to look into the mirror. It was hard to see himself, sure, but he could still make out the graying hair of his beard, the bald head, age spots on the hollows of his cheek. He was thin, frail, ready to die. Living so long felt like penance or Purgatory. But as he looked into the glass, he remembered something from the old stone churches where he used to sit. "Videmus nuc per speculum in aenigmate..." Now we see through a glass, darkly...
Perhaps it had merely taken seventy-five years to heal his broken heart. It felt lighter, like the weight of his heartache was finally lifted from his aching bones. Soon he would be dead. Soon he would see Rowena again. Perhaps he would apologize. (The thought never occurred to him before, to apologize; only to be angry, or to show her what she was missing.) His breathing felt shallow, and he could feel his body giving up. He made his way back to the bed.
He lay back and closed his eyes, and his life flashed by in pictures. He was ready to move on, but the images kept coming. Meeting Salazar. Losing him. Helga and Rowena joining them. Plans for Hogwarts. Sharing meals. Laughing. Fighting. His first student. His first apprenticed professor. Losing Helga. Losing Rowena. Losing Helena. Losing everyone. It only took a few more minutes, but it felt like an eternity for the dying. Nearly ninety years of living, and soon it was over.
(...tunc autem facie ad faciem)
In the distance there was a light, and within it a silhouette. Rowena came towards him, smiling. He ran to her. He couldn't remember the last time he ran. They embraced and he kissed her cheek and he stood back for just a moment. Godric had been wrong, after all. Nothing was over. It was all just beginning.