A smoldering summer wave had rolled across Scotland, leaving the late September afternoons muggy. The sort of thick heat that crumpled up the lungs.
It was a strange fever: creeping up to even the crisp Northern highlands and sending the rugged groundskeeper into a tizzy as he desperately attempted to pluck the pumpkins from a scorched demise.
They were the kinds of afternoons lost amongst identical others. Recurring over until the days were fuzzy and indistinguishable. Afternoons in which time didn't seem to matter so, for the years rolled out before the children much the very same.
Eternal present.
It could have been any one of those afternoons that everything changed, yet it was surely the last.
Harry Potter was lounging down by the Black lake- as were, it would seem, the entire school population- his toes dipped into the shallows and a book propped up across his knees. It was a thick tombe on the uses of transitional metals in potions, still resolutely sitting on page 1: What are transitional metals?
"Come for a swim, will you?"
The boy glanced up, smiling slightly against the sun. Ron's hair seemed ablaze in the bronze light.
"I'm reading," he stated in that dry sort of manner that made it blatantly obvious he was doing nothing of the sort.
"Oh," Ron said, eyes flickering down to the pages. "Still?"
Harry snorted, letting his head loll back against the grass and his eyelids flutter closed.
"I don't know why you do it," Ron continued, flopping down into the gap between him and Ginny, nudging at her shoulder to make room. "He would give his left kidney for you."
"Maybe he is trying to actually educate himself, Ronald. Wouldn't do you harm either," Hermione sniped, but without inflection.
He shrugged up at the sky, "Gotta keep up appearances, huh?" He resolutely ignored the sharp collision of Hermione's fist against his forearm. "Anyway, pisses off Snape to no end."
3 heads rose in unison to the lone figure. He hovered at the castle door, huddled up in the shadows with his chin tilted up into the air and beady eyes darting around the grounds. Searching.
He squinted in the harsh sun.
A fair afternoon it was- clear and bright and warm- but the worst often were.
The storm would rage in the days to come, washing tendrils of crimson down the seams of the flagstones. Fat, beady drops of water would collide with the stone nooks, creeping to that very spot where Severus Snape now stood, though they would only find absence.
In the days to come, you could perhaps catch the soft squelch of hooves picking their way through the muddied grass banks as the Thestrals claimed the empty grounds their own.
In the days to come, if you were to clamber up the creaking drain pipes and heave yourself up onto the second floor window ledge, you may catch a whisper of human life. The robe tale of a man whisking through the corridors: fine, dragon-hide boots clipping out his rapid pulse as he ran.
But more likely than not, you would not hear anything but the shrill scream of the gale.
"Well, while you lot ogle Snape, I'm going to go for a swim. It's bloody boiling," Ginny said, carefully extracting herself from her spot nestled between Luna's spread legs and picking herself up gracefully.
Harry perked up, neck eagerly snapping back to his best friend's sister, "Sounds refreshing, mind if I join?"
The book thumped forgotten down onto the grass. Joined shortly after by a rumpled shirt and shorts.
"I asked him first," Ron pouted.
"I know," Hermione responded, scooping up the book and dipping down her head to inspect the spine.
"But oh no- he won't go swimming with his best mate" he continued, mindlessly plucking up the t-shirt and roughly gathering it up, before making for the shorts as well. "-too good for me. Boy-Who-Bloody-Lived, conceited asshole-"
"Ginny has really blossomed this past year, hasn't she?" Luna cut in dreamily.
Ron firmly placed down the neat stack of clothes before begrudgingly muttering a tense response, "He bloody well thinks so, doesn't he?"