Dorcas had dreamt of the fusfium puffing away and woke up tense. She dreamt that it puffed five times and understood that she was processing someone else's death. She had no reason to believe that she wouldn't meet hers in much the same way since she couldn't place what it meant but mostly that it was the life she had chosen. Aurors never grow old. When it would happen, what would there be to think in those moments? When the time came, she had been distracted, imagine that. She decided that day, of all days that she wouldn't swim. She would just sit by the water. And if she could regret anything after the fact, which she could not, she might have regretted that. She would regret, if she came back as a ghost, and she didn't, that she had not spent part of her last day on earth swimming and yet she didn't regret it or couldn't or wouldn't have or she would have understood. She was by the water and that would be enough. She was always close to the water and had been since she moved to the little cottage. For so long, she hadn't known but she knew now. She breathed in the cool air. She let the salty fogginess settle on her skin and felt at home or that she was going home or that she had been home all along. She made her way back to the cottage.

Her patronus always drifted behind her and far above her. That is something that she would not have regretted. On that day something made her look up as it glided through the quietness of the slow breathing tress. Trees she had moved herself. Once she got the hang of it, she had been able to clear the path of trees from the cottage to the sea. The trees would contract and bundle up their roots and "walk" themselves into a space, pressing themselves against other trees and in their tree minds, though Dorcas couldn't understand it, they wondered why they had grown separate from each other anyway. Now that they were grown and tall, it felt nice to hold their tree root hands with other tree root hands, to be so close, to lean on another and also stand alone. Dorcas had taught Lupin something like this. The same set of spells that would build the ring where he an Sirius would meet but she didn't know that. She would never see it but Lupin would eventually see this path. He would understand the magic that had made it. He would understand the witch who had made it and when he became older, he would collapse on the floor in tears at the memory out of nowhere at the simplest thought of something he remembered. He would be married then. He had a child that he left and came back to. It might have been a picture on a book. It's not important now. He thought he was dying too but then lots of people thought that and he always had. But now, it was only Dorcas and the pinprick of her patronus up in the sky which she let herself stare at just a small blaze of white against the milky grey of the sky. She watched it stream behind her like a kite and make a straight course towards the cottage. Never dipping or swerving or wavering.

Dorcas shoulders ached and her legs felt tense. She had a childlike urge to run. She wanted to race her patronus but knew through instinct that it wouldn't outfly her ability to walk, though she did in her confusion wonder why, how, after all these years she hadn't done this sooner. Just watch it. She had taken for granted that if she needed it, it would swoop down and move whatever it was out of the way. In fact, she hadn't known she could produce a corporeal patronus until someone had noticed. Lydia, probably. Was she still in training then? She couldn't remember. She just called and knew it was to do its job if she, for some reason couldn't do hers.

Dorcas stepped over branches and stones without looking at the ground. She had gone this way so many times now. It might have saved her life if she had. No, it wouldn't have. The exercise in looking up with her brows knit in the middle of her forehead, her lips turned upwards in a soft smile was a welcome distraction, a last curiosity to enjoy and while she did, she saw her patronus grow larger in the sky, it flew closer to her towards the ground. She could now perceive its wingspan. Her jaw relaxed and her lips parted slightly. Dorcas had been told that her patronus might be a pelican. Everyone knew of course that it was a bird, and Dorcas knew, through some instinct or by assumption, that it was a seabird but this was not a pelican. It was much too large, it flew far too high.

She came out to the clearing and watched the bird alight on the cottage almost as tall as the walls were high. It disappeared before it settled itself on the roof. She saw with her own eyes that it was an albatross. She knew in that moment, with a rush of peace and gratitude that she finally saw her patronus, her grand, glowing, graceful seabird guardian, that she was finally going to die.