Hollowed out. She was hollowed out and dry. Lean and limber, still flexible down to her toes. Smiling ruefully, wondering how her reflection remained so normal-looking and functional. Inside, she felt whole and yet empty at the same time. Whole because she knew who she was, who she had become, and had the correct view of her past, no longer sentimentalized by her stasis. She had moved past idealizing who she could have become had she never stopped, or seemed to stop becoming. But one can't control that, she thought to herself, shaking her head. She felt at the time that she needed to stop and change course. But she now knew that she didn't have to stop again. She had reached a point in herself where she knew how to keep functioning, keep pressing on fearlessly and heal herself at night, at home, where she could rest and think. Reaching out into the night, she saw her thoughts clearly. The ghost of Fred still lived within her. Sometimes she could not even see his face. That night she had gone to visit him at St. Mungo's, the lack of recognition in his eyes did not even register. The two of them had shared something that seemed to go beyond mere co-existence. She could feel him in every breath, every movement, and every twinge of her body. She felt Montague's attraction, she fell into his arms as easily as if she were in love with him, and yet she felt Fred in everything. How was it possible?
There had to be an explanation. He had to be living, somewhere, in some dimension that was not the one that she was living in. The feeling never let her rest, never let her forget that she felt like she was his. Years now since his absence, since she has ceased all practical thought about him, she would wake up in the morning, rising with Fred, and go to bed at night, and think of him before she slept. Previously she had thought of him as a ghost but since she had lived with Montague, she had realized this feeling had a different quality to it altogether. Perhaps he had felt it too, when she had grown tired of his passive antagonism and realized she couldn't shake her thoughts of Fred for long enough to believe that she could. So perhaps she couldn't stay. And something told her she would not necessarily be able to find Fred, either. They could run into each other if she solved the mystery of what happened that night, if she discovered the true course of events, and the other side of what she had seen.
He was out there, possibly waiting for her, possibly not. They would always have this psycho-spiritual connection, but for whatever reason were content to stay separated physically. She was attending to her life and presumed he was doing the same. She shook her head again at that thought. She had no idea what he was doing, but a good intuition that just doing her job would mix her up with Fred again. When Montague had told her that night that he had someone else, she felt immediately that she had to live alone again. One thing she had learned living an anonymous life in London is that all anybody was worth was what they were prepared to do in the next moment. That night her life had changed once again, and she had to get back on the trail as an Auror. This was her responsibility to herself and to make peace with her calling. She was good at this. Love was something that happened to her on the way. And she had not forgotten it, but knew it was not something she could expect to displace her work. She was needed. The answers would appear if she looked for them. She gazed out into the night again. Where was he? She shook her head a last time. As usual, she needed to be asking, where she, herself was. In the middle of a cold flat in central London, feeling the heat blow onto her face even as she shivered at her living room window. She dreaded the next day's work at the Ministry. She had a conference call with Harry (currently in Paris investigating the smuggling of addicting elixirs into tearoom parlors) in the morning. She was to give a full report to give on the status of the reopened case on the attack on Midnight Cove.
And so far, nine o'clock at night and she could not think of a thing to say in defence of two weeks of combing the case files and asking for the Ministry's best Aurors to give her their analysis. To be fair, Harry had also told her to return to the site of the attack as the first natural step. However, she had not admitted her private reluctance to return to Santo Amaro. Perhaps she'd crack and Harry would think she was not over grief after all. On every metric she had proven to be ahead of the curve for the class of Aurors she had started with. In consideration of her absence, this was somewhat miraculous, but short lived since Harry had been keen to test her weak point quickly. "Only thing is Ang, is that I have to clear this case first, and the only one who even knows where to start is you. The first step is to go back Santo Amaro and recreate the events of that night. I'm counting on you." Not a mention of how difficult it might be, her feelings about reliving the night she had lost Fred, nothing. Just get the job done. And in that moment, she had lost her good-natured playmate from Hogwarts and was facing her boss. Strange how she had even taken talking with Harry for granted, given he was one of the few people who could talk to her with any understanding as to what she had been through. Now she was back on the case, and it was business as usual. Simple as that.
She looked down into the swirls of steam emanating from her tea cup. The warmth reached her nose and she looked through the window again. It was best to remember she could live through whatever the day would bring, and not to ponder how it would go.