Winter
I don't own Harry Potter, nor am I receiving a profit from this story.
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The air was cold fire, raising hell as it whipped around the deserted graveyard road, unhindered in its fury. It drew the condensed clouds of moisture from Remus Lupin's shallow breathing, attacking the unsheltered man relentlessly as he continued his somewhat labored walking. The probing wind whipped across his face, his unprotected hands, numbing his nose and cracking his knuckles. It was a sensation that didn't bother Lupin; he was used to this sort of pain. In fact, Lupin could say that the frost was his soul, the wind his misery, consuming and attacking all in its path uncaringly. It had taken him so long to finally feel able to come here, and now, as he trudged closer to his destination, he could think of nothing he wished more than to leave. He had lived seven years in a place that reminded him of a hidden courage, but it had yet to surface. It was the memory of someone telling him that the bravery would be found when needed that kept him going, kept him walking. After all those years, it was the least to be done, but also the most difficult. They had delivered him from the horrors of a marred existence and sent him to the grave of lamentation again. He could remember his mother sitting at their worn little table, drinking something from a bottle, moaning that not one person had ever told her that life was so damn hard. Now he wanted to go to that woman and shake her and tell her that she had no idea. But that was impossible and unfeasible and irrational. And that wasn't why he was following a trail through the gaseous ice.
An invisible hand squeezed around his ribcage as he drew closer. In all those books he'd read, they'd never been able to describe this feeling. It was too strong for any combination of words, too terrible to be fully conveyed. He wondered if this was not unlike the curse of a Dementor, one fabled creature he'd never met but secretly felt some sort of connection to it. Dementors focus on pain and werewolves were pain. It made perfect sense in the skewed cycle of life, the kind they don't teach you in school. Life's tenacity seemed impossible to him now that he was dead to the world. Because his world was dead, destroyed in a suicide that had been the climax of a defining war. His heart was beating but felt nothing more than the gripping feeling of the deepest remorse known to mankind. To say he was in grief was the understatement of the century—no, the millennia—because it touched much deeper then that.
Nothing had come in preparation for this. And grief settled in him with many other things attached. He didn't just cry over it, he felt anger towards it, building, pulsing anger. How did they think they could just leave him like this, shattered on the ground? They'd told him—no, they'd promised to stay true to each other. And look where it landed them all. Their trust had been a conspiracy, their friendship a lie. They had agreed to stay together for life and now they were separated in death. He wanted to scream Look at us now! to the world and watch them laugh in his face, the horrible haunting laugh of having nothing worth surviving for. The kind of laugh that rattled the soul and permeated the mind, that echoed after it died through the air into the tense hearts of the observers.
And as that died out, helplessness would intensify. Someone, come to me! he would plead to the silence of his heart. Help me through this! But no one would answer because no one would want to help the poor, alone, snapped Remus Lupin. No, he was a werewolf, shouldn't he be used to this sort of thing by now? Stop it, you sound like a pathetic, raving child, have you no dignity? That was the cynicism of his rational brain, that hard, disapproving voice that sounded through his head falling on unhearing ears. Because no one cared anymore, and those who once had could not answer, as they were the cause of this anyway. They could only appear in his nightmares, sometimes different, always terrifying. They had been wraiths, white and airy, always just one breadth out of reach. Or they would come as accusing decomposing flesh, walking jerkily as they tried to make him pay for his inactions. Or skeletons, touching his unprotected skin with the piercing warm of their skinless digits. They were the things that attributed to his insomnia, his utter unwillingness to submit himself to the vulnerability of sleep.
He was almost there now, as his footfalls grew heavier, synchronized with his heart. His homage was late, and for one second he feared their wrath unreasonably, before assuring himself that they had been his friends! And if they were watching, wherever they may be, he somehow knew at that second that they weren't angry at all with him. But this feeling dwindled into the confines of skeptical second thoughts. In his wounded hands he held two of her namesake, waiting to adorn the plots that had been unearthed in an untimely fashion. Their marble gravestones jutted from the frozen ground, without embellishment. In his mind he thought it undeserving of them, the two martyrs who had died from tyranny and defiance. He, who had tried to divert the attention of a murderer and she, who had prostrated herself in front of the child that had come from them both. The child who had been a small miracle in their eyes and a bigger blessing later on, when they could no longer see through the tainted eyes of human-hood. To tell truth, he didn't know at that moment where their little, emerald-eyed boy was. The boy who had crumbled unintentionally the foundation of his life and left it in ruins.
And there they lay, underneath the pressing earth that had encased their coffins and closed them from the world, known only by two hunks of rock that stood on top of them. People could walk over their graves and not know they were standing on the example of greatness on earth. Death was the last adventure in one's life but death had its penalties. Those who had breathed their last breath may've entered the bliss of life after living, but they would slowly fade from memory and history, unknown and uncared for by everyone who still could say that the ability to draw air was still with them. Remus vowed to keep them alive in his heart, but could that be easier said than done?
He kneeled on their graves, feeling as though a part of him had been buried beneath the dirt as well. The irony of it all screamed at him. Funny to be paying a farewell to two friends on the day that they had been married just two years ago. He could still picture everything in his mind. A winter wedding had been her dream and the day dawned pristinely, a picture in a fairy-tale book. Fresh snow had coated the ground thickly, untouched. She had come down that aisle in that tiny church, glowing with a beauty that mesmerized everyone. Remus, who had been sandwiched between Peter and Sirius, had felt the swell of happiness in James as he watched her float towards him, clothed in flows of fabric so white it matched the graceful falling of flakes outside. It had been the day that everyone had pretended. Pretended that there was no immediate threat on anyone's life, that an evil wasn't slowly taking hold of everything in its path. It was a day that would not recognize a death that came prematurely, of an orphan who would never remember the love of a parent. Now it could be considered a sour joke, because everything that had been celebrated that day had culminated in this, something that had nothing to be thankful for. Two years ago, it would've been unthinkable to see Sirius as the cold-blooded traitor, and those three corpses cooling in a bitingly cruel autumn morning.
He could no longer hold everything in as he rewound to the unattainable joy his life had once contained. He collapsed, one cold, unspeakably lonely man, sobbing uncontrollably about the life of the ones he had loved and lost and yearned for with every fiber of his being. No magic could return them to him. So they, like him, were gone forever to the harshness of life itself.
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End
A/n: Completely off or completely on? How will I know if no one tells me?