Garden at Giverny

by a true Elsewhere

[SSHP] You loved autumn. You loved the leaves, you love the wind, you loved everything that it was and is until it befuddled your mind completely.

Garden at Giverny
by a true Elsewhere

The wind picked up the leaflets that had detached themselves from the maple branches with a shudder of colors. Red, orange, yellow, hinted with brown and vibrant green floated like snow, blanketing the fields of grass in the yard, and defacing the orderly trim neatness of the cleanly cut and prim looking yard with the messy leaves.

You liked this season the most, you had told me once before, eyes gazing out the window. It was nature's way of painting the world, you explained to me, wistful at the scene before you, like what Monet attempted to capture over and over again in Giverny.

It was so very typical of you to imagine the world as a canvas to be painted on with smudges of oil and a thick brush. You were ever the hopeless romantic, viewing the world in through rose-tinted lenses, allowing them to filter out so much of the war, the deaths, the names, the faces. It was with those lenses that you were able to ignore the fact that you were seated dead center in this chaos between Light and Dark, clinging onto the sight of autumn leaves messing up the yard.

You clung onto it like it was your anchor throughout everything, your only means of coping.

It always hurt when I knew that I could never be that anchor that you needed.

***

He liked to play games with you, sick and twisted games in your head. Games that you never liked to tell me about, games that made your eyes haunted, your skin white, and your tears mindlessly flow as you howled in frustration, in desperation, in absolute agony.

He knew what buttons to push and what strings to pull. He knew exactly how to break you.

And he did. It was as if he no longer cared about capturing the world or forcing everyone down to his will. He was far more interested in watching your pieces clatter sporadically onto the ground when he dropped you, over and over again until you forgot which pieces of you belonged where.

It made me angry.

It made me envious.

***

You loved autumn. You loved the leaves and the wind and the way the world was painted by foliage. You loved magic, but for reasons entirely different from my own. I loved the way it made you feel, the way it shimmered out from some orb deep within my stomach before reaching my wand. You loved magic because of the way it made autumn exist every day in a year for you. You loved the way magic made it so autumn lingered around our home, the way it made the leaves color, fall, and die. You loved the way it made you think everything was timeless, that nothing ever changes. For autumn keep on existing in this glass orb you set up around yourself.

Sometimes you liked to think you were philosophical because autumn existed around you. As if there were some euphoria in the air during the season that made you become like Plato or Boethius, enabling you to contemplate worldly matters and the divine that started within the soul.

If I could be anything, you once told me, your emerald eyes sharp and thoughtful within this placebo-reality of autumn you had created for yourself, I would be the wind that moves the leaves into their place on the canvas.

I would only twist my lips up to a disdainful smile, tell you something stupid before watching you fall back into your fantasies.

***

I always felt like a housewife in the mornings, as the twilight slowly brought about the sun that lit the sky with a parade of colors before existing as a single bright wave of blue. I stood learning at the front door, half-sneering, but mostly frustrated as I watched as you departed from our home, a solemn expression on your face as you muttered your sentiments.

I would respond with something along the lines as don't act stupid. But you would only shrug slyly at that, as if there were a hidden joke to that I didn't know about because of the fact that I was not with you in the front lines.

I hated it. I hated how old you looked, the way your eyes had aged with a sense of dread of what you have seen. You were carefully clothed with dragon hide boots, a wand holster with the wand in accessible reach, as well as port keys leading to a dozen different places tucked away safely in your fire-resistant cloak.

I hated how I was left behind, out of all things, as you fought this war. You told me it was too risky for me to expose myself, even though I was working for the Light side. You told me that Voldemort had me blacklisted since he knew of my betrayal that lead to the fouled attempted to capture Diagon Alley two years ago. You told me that even if I did actively work for the Light side, that things were complicated. Many people in the Wizarding World were too put out with the insecurities and fear that they no longer was able to comprehend what I had did for them.

This is war, you said, replicating my sneer with much talent, nothing is rational. We know that it would be better if you were fighting amongst us but it's risky. You're pivotal to the war not for your ability to fight, but because of your skills.

I hated you for that. I hated how you successfully cut me out of this war that I had been fighting in before your birth. I hate how you found a way to protect me when I was unable to protect you. I hated it, absolutely loathed it, but I listened to you anyway. I stayed here, making potions from the time you left to the time you came back, ruggedly heartbroken and half destroyed from the visions that you have seen throughout the day and the wounds that had been inflicted upon you from curses and hexes. I would force the Drought of the Living Dead down your throat and watch you slump in my arms like a rag doll before I tossed you onto your bed and made more potions until I was supervising ten caldrons at once, frustrated at you.

It would be hours after that before you stirred from the slumber my potion had induced you into. But even with such a strong sleeping drought you still had nightmares. Intense nightmares that made you thrash and scream and cry.

And sometimes, I cried too.

For reasons entirely different.

***

You said autumn was a message of hope. Hidden in the leaflets, through the intricacy of cells bonded together to create matter and creases to which the leaf possesses lived a message. Nature had left a message to the world and yourself through the foliage.

You told me of the message one breezy afternoon, as you lazed by the window, staring at the oil painting with a wistful smile. You spoke of how nature told you about living and about dying. You told me that even in death, there lay beauty, and through this beauty, there is so much life that it contradicts the gloomy exterior of what was.

You said autumn and nature allowed you to understand that death was beautiful, and through this beauty there was nothing to fear of such a fate.

And you were right.

Your death was beautiful, just like you said it would be.

***

It was a dagger, they told me later, a beautiful one, like night and coffee sporting a scent of mint and lime leaves. A true work of art, sharpened magnificently, curved slightly at the end, sitting in a deathly poison for a hundred years until the metal absorbed every last drop from the vat it was submerged within. The dagger was a real masterpiece: delicate, sensitive, and absolutely, positively deadly.

You didn't have a wound when you portkeyed home that day. You sported a smile, blood caking the train of your cape and your left boot. Your skin was pale, like clean snow on the cedars, with a splash of fading pink at your cheeks. Your emerald green eyes sparkled with a vicinity and comprehension of the world that was beyond humanly possible as you allowed me to pull you into my arms, stealing some of the cold that vibrated from your frail body.

Autumn, your voice was a mere husky whisper, came for me.

They tell me later on that the poison brings about the worst pain that it was unimaginable. They tell me of an instance that one man in the fifteenth century died from screaming before he died from the poison of the dagger.

I wonder if you felt any of that pain. I never once felt you tense up and let loose to the agony that may be sweeping your innards, tearing each cell inside of you into pieces. Sometimes, when I look back, I couldn't help but think you were happy.

I think, you said again as you pulled me out into the garden, where the leaves painted our yard with their color and the breeze embraced you, if I could be anything… I would be the wind that moves the leaves into their place on the canvas…I would be the wind the caresses your cheek, entwining with the air that you breath until I am a part of you.

And the leaves fell, red, orange, brown, green, yellow, scattering around you, like a whisper. The wind ruffled your never-will-stay-down hair and your face with a sort of understanding.

We shared a kissed, sweet and simple before autumn transformed itself to winter.

***

The war continues but it no longer involves me.

It has been days, weeks, and months that have gone by. Strange blurs that flutter away, I have lost count of the days that have stood up and walked right by me since the parting of you.

But then again, that doesn't involve me either.

Instead, I just push myself into my work, things I did before I got involved in this war… things I did before I got involved with you. I do my research, reading through books, writing in journals, hypothesizing possibilities in variations of potions.

It's… nice.

Sometimes, I got outside of the house and notice that it's still autumn. The blankets of foliage continue to pile themselves into my yard like elongated paint strokes. I would stand there, in the center of the field where you once laid, and look at the scene around me.

I stand there and contemplate beauty, love, life, and death only to find myself losing it all to tears when I feel the wind brush against my cheek.

***

You loved autumn.

You loved the leaves, you love the wind, you loved everything that it was and is until it befuddled your mind completely.

But you loved it; even during the times you could not understand it.

I loved you the way that you loved autumn.

I loved you even during the times I swore I hated you, the time I cursed your name and being, or swore that I would never love a fool like you.

And sometimes, when I feel the wind picking up and surrounding me with its arms; I know you feel the same.

***

Thank you to Draegyn, for editing my story and to Ekaterinn who ended up inspiring to actually want to write it.