Phillipa was gone now. Dorcas felt very much alone and had not anticipated how sick she would feel. She had watched a lot of people die in her time. A lot some the direct cause of… that did not matter. Phillipa had been sent away and now, all of it, everything, she felt at once. Dorcas had the strange sensation that she had turned around and someone had thrown the entire weight of the war at her and her reflexive action was to hold her arms out even as she knew it would snap her in half, would kill her. All those people- She understood how serious it was but she hadn't felt it. She had had someone to normalize and even everything out, she couldn't talk about the details but there was her old self, her old life, a tether to who she had been and therefore was and now she knew she was in for it. All of that gone with the whooshing sound followed by the pop of someone traveling by portkey. Now she could feel what it was doing to everyone around her even as she stumbled down the street which was quiet thankfully, mercifully. With every step she could feel the weight of everything get heavier even as the load remained the same. The energy required to move it all, to keep them all safe, all the time as best as she personally could. She had the strange sensation too that she could hear everyone in their home breathing. That as she passed a house she could hear everyone's individual breath and that winded her, from the outside looking at her she appeared as she did a woman going somewhere. She remained as composed as ever but even she walked faster than usual, she had no where to go.

She accelerated her pace until she nearly skipped and then you would have seen that this woman needed to get where she was going or she was going to die right there mid-prance. If you were close enough, you would have seen her sweat and what exactly was she looking for? Was she being chased, who was chasing her? And oh, God. What's wrong with her? She wasn't crying in the familiar sense of the word, her eyes were full of tears, her face was covered in tears, and her hand over her heart. She was going to die. Dorcas could hear the breathing in the houses and her own breath and felt like she sat in the mouth of an enormous city-sized animal, warm and damp and alive. All of that training, all of those fights and the many more she had assumed would come would be for nothing. The thing that killed her would be saying goodbye to Phillipa. Fitting, she found it. There was a space between two homes where this neighborhood used to have gardens, before they started fitting houses in between the spaces of other houses. It was insignificant but so were the insides of the new constructions. Compared to the houses it sat next to it looked like it had been made a clearing instead of the clearing it naturally was and so small scraps found its way into this space. She exchanged one hand for the one over her heart trying to keep whatever was falling out of her soul in. She steadied herself against the bricking that separated the space before taking out her wand and tapping it against the wall and throwing a spell above her head moving her arm in one fluid motion above her. The air rippled and a small, gentle wave of air flowed above her head. The natural conclusion of that gesture ended with her letting go of her wand and it landing a short distance in front of her hand and her body falling, collapsing a little bit behind it.

Dorca woke up what felt like days later which had in fact only been a few short hours, if that. Panicking she found herself reach for her pockets. There it was on the ground where it had remained, she reached for her wand remembering how and why she was there. She rolled over enough to tuck it back into her jacket without bothering to check the defenses she had set up or establish new ones. The weight now sat on her back and she found it difficult and pointless to move. What did it matter now? When had it ever mattered? She had failed in stopping everything up to this point and most likely would continue to fail. She had not considered what it would mean for her to lose certain things and now they were lost anyway even if she had. She could not have fought harder, the Order could not have fought harder, Lord Voldemort could not have been less cruel, and if it had worked then it might be another her in a different time or place doing the same thing at that very moment. Defeated. But she did not consider any of this once she could feel her wand against her ribcage as uncomfortable as it was, and almost without changing her body position from how she laid when she collapsed, she moved her left arm slightly under her head to shield her face against the grass and weeds blinked at the wall in front of her ignoring the tears streaming down her face and, closing her eyes, she decided to die but, instead just fell back asleep.

***

In the house to the right of this little field lived a couple. One of that couple was out on business and that left the bed deliciously wide and cozy. They loved each other yet when he woke up to go to the bathroom, he recognized in a sleepy way, for all that love that people, including his wife, should have the good fortune of sleeping alone in a big bed knowing that someone somewhere still loves them. At the very moment hundreds of miles away, the woman this man married woke up instinctively realized he wasn't there to wake her up at this very time, stretched like a big cat and fell back to sleep smiling. The man in his half sleep went to the window drawn as he was like all life to the light and looked out onto what could have been a garden below and smarted. The small space, littered with scraps of paper and overgrown slightly with weeds and native soft grass was still dark. The day had not made it to the spot yet even as the sun was still sliding up higher into the sky. It was if the whole lot was still in darkness, still stuck in the night and, it too, was waking up. He did not communicate it to himself but he perceived a strange sensation that it was also underwater. That he was staring at the bottom of the dark lot submersed in an exceptionally clear pool of water. He went to the bathroom as if nothing odd had happened. "Still tired", he thought to himself as awake as he was. When he returned he went back to the window and looked at the lot again. He breathed a sigh of relief. This time the space appeared as it always had when he woke up, that he really must have slept so well that he had imagined it. A nervousness, a tenseness that he didn't realize was building up in his body evaporated with the sigh. The sun was even higher and the day about to start but he could manage an hour more of sleep. So odd how quickly the day started. How fast the sun could move so you barely noticed it rising or setting. He got back in bed. Chuckling to himself at how silly he was to have even imagined such a thing. He managed to get back to sleep and would be greeted by the movement of the neighborhood but found that the bed was suddenly too big for him to enjoy. He would not have noticed a well dressed woman with her hands shoved deep into her pockets making her way to no place in particular because the window did not face that direction. He would not have thought the two in any way related: the lot at night in the day and the woman. Why would they have been related at all? He had merely imagined the former after all.