i. loss
The war was fought over immortality. Yet when it was over, the battlefield was strewn with the twisted, bone-pale corpses of mortals. In the end even the Dark Lord, with all his divine props and pretensions of eternal life, had been a mere mortal. They left him where he fell. In the tumultuous joy of their stolen victory and the pang of their losses, he lay forgotten. Their hatred had died with him, apathy blooming in its place like flowers sprouting from some dead thing.
When the survivors began collecting their dead, the bodies were placed along the edges of the hall first, a chasm of cold stone between the noble who had been proud to die and he who had been ashamed to die. Footsteps stepped around and over him. He lay alone in the middle of the Great Hall as the rigid husks of his victims orbited him, the gaping vacuum at the center of their lives and deaths.
Death had shrunken him like a seed and gnarled him like a root. And to Andromeda, that was what he was. He was the source of so much terror, so much death. She had always said that gardens grow in the shape of the care they receive. Even an overgrown tangle of weeds is a choice, the triumph of chaos and neglect over order and attention. And here amidst the crumbling, blood-strewn ruins of Hogwarts was the garden this man had chosen to grow with his seed of hatred.
Eventually the bodies of the victors crept too close to the body of the vanquished. The corridors outside the Great Hall were lined with more lifeless forms, but a haze of silence paralyzed the impromptu undertakers. They already trembled under the weight of carrying their friends; they would not carry him too. They stood and waited for an act of the gods that never came. Still the body remained.
In the end, Andromeda was the one who finally offered to tend to the body that had once been the Dark Lord. She moved it to a small sun-warmed alcove where she tended it with all the tenderness of hatred. She had always taught her daughter that dangerous things must be handled with care.
The rites were simple but more than he deserved. Two knuts over his eyes to pay his passage to the next place. A shroud thin and sheer as a spider's web, representing the gossamer veil that lay between this world and the next. His wand snapped and placed in his pocket, to be mended when he arrived in the next place. All the things she hadn't been able to do for Ted, his mortal body forever lost to her.
Andromeda buried him near the Black Lake, the soil dark and damp beneath her fingernails. With his face covered, he might have been Ted. She started weeping for her husband but by the time she finished, she wept for everyone, even him. Had it been worth it, this quest for this dark and dangerous and desperate thing? He should have known that in all the old stories, the gods long for the flush of humanity, the sweetness of vulnerability. He had it and squandered it. And here he was, in the ground just like the rest of the huddled masses he despised so much. Was it really so awful to die?
She wiped the soil smooth with her palms and summoned a carpet of clover and a sprinkling of wildflowers. By the time she was finished there was no trace that anyone had been there, above or below the earth.
The lake had the silence of a thousand small nature sounds, animals burrowing and leaves ruffling and the garrulous bubbling of the water. When she returned to the castle, Andromeda was enveloped in an unnatural human silence. Unsaid words and averted gazes pricked her like arrows. She knew, then.
Her daughter's body was among the last brought into the hall. She was laid mere feet away from where the Dark Lord took his last breath. Andromeda hated that the soil from his grave was still on her hands when she ran to her daughter.
She watched as the features Dora had chosen for herself in her final moments melted away and her daughter's face, which she had always imagined as an ever-changing lump of clay, transformed one last time as it was fired in the finality of death's kiln. Her hair faded from a deep burgundy with wine-dark flecks to its natural mousy brown hue. The sharp hawk's beak Dora had preferred since childhood reshaped itself into Andromeda's own small, nondescript nose. Prominent, dark brows paled and softened until the top half of her face belonged once again to her father. The fleshy lips twisted into a brazen grin which had always been all Dora's own. It was the first time Andromeda had seen her daughter's unaltered form in years. And now it would be the last.
Andromeda did not weep for her daughter. She could not. It cut deeper than tears, deeper even than pain. She felt nothing as she watched a yawning crevasse open where moments ago the Hogwarts stone had kissed the edges of Dora's body. The vines and soil of the next place rose up and engulfed the body, the last remnants of Andromeda's husband and child. The tendrils wrapped around Dora and wrested her from her mother's grasp, swallowing her beneath this mortal earth.
ii. search
Andromeda had to learn how to move through the world with a hole in her chest. Before, she had always felt a solidity within herself. She had often plucked at the thread that ran from beneath the earth, through her feet, out of the crown of her head and into the sky. Now when she reached for it, she felt only the wind whistling through the hollowness at her center, like a bird's bone.
To grieve was to be a child again. Andromeda learned to walk again. She had to move slowly, stopping frequently to allow the air to move through the new cavity in her chest without tearing through her like a wind-whipped tatter of rags. She learned to speak again. Her lungs had become tissue-thin and whispering stole her breath like shouting had done before. She learned to eat again. Small, infrequent meals of bland food eroded the edges of her hunger but never fully sated it. Feeling hungry was better than feeling nothing.
When she tried to feel pain it dropped out of the hole, leaking again and again through the hollowness inside of her. Andromeda yearned for the ache she had felt after Ted was taken from her. She had not wept since that day at the lake. Tears were a luxury.
In the beginning, there had been people. They fluttered around her, brought her food, cried the tears that she could not. Molly Weasley was a constant presence. She assembled a legion of grieving widows and mothers who met at the Burrow for tea and sympathy. At first Andromeda went because it was something to do, but she found the other women's grasping, outlandish grief overwhelming. They sobbed and screamed and raged and beat their breasts and pulled their hair. Andromeda cloaked herself in silence and busied herself with making tea and doing the washing up. When the other women's tear-stricken eyes met her dry ones, accusations roiled in the space between them. Eventually she stopped going. Eventually she stopped fumbling for excuses.
Some people's company trespassed less on Andromeda's patience. In the beginning, when she still lived in the same spring Dora had died in, she spent more time at Shell Cottage than anywhere else. Bill and Fleur were the sort of people who gave comfort without taking or expecting anything in exchange, not even conversation. Andromeda often saw Harry there, and she wondered if he came for the same reasons she did. He would not meet her eye, but she often felt his gaze upon her, a flicker of attention grazing the edge of her consciousness.
One day he pulled her aside and said he was sorry. He felt responsible for Dora's death, all of their deaths. He asked for her forgiveness. Andromeda asked him why he should be sorry for giving their deaths meaning.
When the year of the battle died and a new one dawned, Andromeda withdrew further. The more time that passed, the less Andromeda could bear the thought of new memories crowding the corner of her mind where Ted and Dora still lived on.
Most of the time she stayed home, where she could grieve quietly without judgment. Andromeda could go hours without moving, days without speaking. And it suited her. She spent most of her waking hours sitting and staring into the middle distance, searching her memory for any forgotten small tenderness, quirk, or joke. Constantly weaving and unweaving the threads of her memory as she waited for the reunion which was more longed for than promised. Sometimes she allowed food to nourish her. Sometimes she allowed sleep to claim her. Sometimes she put on their clothes and enveloped herself in their scents and the tiny particles of them lingering on her skin.
Andromeda never looked in the mirror anymore, not even when she draped herself in their things. She looked too much like the sister she had lost, first all those years ago and then again on the day she had lost everything else. When Andromeda was still drowning in her battle wounds, she had barely absorbed the fact of Bellatrix's death, much less the mixture of sorrow, anger, and vindication it stirred in her. It took a long time, after she lost count of the number of days since the battle, before she allowed herself to grieve her sister, too.
Outside the grime-splattered windows, Andromeda's garden grew wild. Dora had always quipped that her mother tended the garden more attentively than she did her own daughter. Yet it had only taken a few months, the blink of an immortal's eye, before all traces of her care and devotion were wiped from the surface of the earth. The raised beds that had given the family seasons of vegetables lay fallow for the first time in years. The thoughtful patterns of her flowers and bushes were still just barely apparent, delineated faintly beneath the tangle of weeds that had strangled the last living thing in Andromeda's care.
Sometimes she went outside and stood in the garden, breathing in the musky aroma of the soil. Occasionally she saw an intrepid flower struggling to grow amidst the smothering underbrush. She always put them out of their misery with the heel of her boot; she couldn't bear for anything beautiful and fragile to grow in her garden when Dora would never grow old again.
Andromeda realized she had been wrong. Neglected gardens were not a choice. They were a necessity.
iii. ascent
One day Harry appeared on Andromeda's doorstep. He wore care and wrinkles beyond his years. She could not discern if it was the weight of the war, or merely the weight of time that had passed without her noticing. She could not remember if it had been months or years since she last saw him at Shell Cottage.
She offered him tea. He refused, but offered her a proposition in exchange. He produced a small bundle from his pocket and a list of conditions. She must not tell anyone what he was lending her. She must not attempt to undo what had already come to pass. She must give it back when he knocked on her door the next morning. As long as Andromeda upheld her end of the bargain, he would return every year on this very day and give her the same gift.
After he left, Andromeda stood alone in her parlor clutching the rough stone. She closed her eyes and turned it over three times in her palm. When she opened her eyes, Dora was there. She looked pale and there was a rush of cold air where there had once been warm flesh, but it was Dora all the same, and Andromeda clung to her even though her skin became gooseflesh and her frame trembled with shivers.
"Are you safe? Are you happy? Is Daddy there?" The mother summoned a storm of questions that pelted her daughter like rain. This newer, quieter Dora shook off her mother's questions, allowing them to glance off her with mere nods or shrugs in response. Some she did not answer at all.
"You don't have to tell me anything about what it's like, but please just tell me you're happy."
Dora shrugged again.
"It doesn't work like that there. You aren't happy, but you also aren't unhappy. You just are."
Andromeda nodded. When Dora changed the subject, she allowed her daughter to steer the conversation to calmer waters, away from the skerries and whirlpools that threatened to consume Andromeda and lure her into breaking her promise to Harry. Dora asked after some friends still on the living side of the veil, and then they reminisced together over the memories Andromeda had been hoarding like gems. There was affectionate bickering and long-forgotten jokes that had aged like fine wine and cheese in the fullness of time and absence. They received joy from each other, and gave it.
After several hours, Dora's gaze was drawn out the window to the abandoned garden, her mother's second child lying in an open grave, dead as her first. Her heart was saddened to see her mother so focused on dying rather than living.
"Grow your garden again. For me."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"I can't pretend it's just like old times, like everything is normal. Besides, growing things is for the hopeful. I can't do it anymore. You wouldn't understand."
"There's this thing they say in the next place. It's sort of about death, but also about life. It goes: we humans endure the gifts the gods give us, even when we are grieving over what has to be."
"If something has to be endured, it's not a gift. Pain, suffering, losing you and Daddy, wandering the earth alone for the rest of my life, those are gifts from the gods? You'll forgive me if I don't accept them gratefully."
"You always told me that gardens take the shape of the care they receive. It's the same with gifts. If you're determined to let them die, they will."
"Well, the garden's too far gone now, it would be too much work. And I haven't got any seeds, anyway," Andromeda let go of Dora for the first time and turned away from her daughter. The wind whispered in the weeds of the garden.
"Just think about it, will you?" Dora reached for her, a small blood-colored jewel in her palm. Andromeda took it and saw it was a seed.
"I'll plant just this one...But only so I can feel close to you." It was a half-truth. Andromeda did not want to plunge her daughter's final gift deep within the dark, uncaring earth that had claimed her on that final day. But seeds were meant to be planted. Letting it wither and die would be as unthinkable as throwing it away.
"Oh, Mummy," her daughter knelt before her and rested her head on Andromeda's chest. She cupped her hands inside the cavern that had opened inside Andromeda the last time she had seen her daughter.
"Please don't leave me," Andromeda murmured into the death-chilled hair of the child who had once burst alive and warm and screaming from her womb. She ran her hands over cheeks that would never flush with the vivid tinge of life-giving blood again.
"I never did."
Andromeda felt the salty prick of tears, the first she had cried since she had mustered the compassion to mourn the Dark Lord. It felt like a lifetime ago, and now she was wracked with centuries of sobs. When she awoke to her senses, her daughter was gone and the hole gnawing at her core was smaller, a bruise instead of a gaping wound.
She walked into the godforsaken patch of mud and brambles that had once been her garden as the sun was using its final moments to paint the sky. When Andromeda dug a small hollow in the ground for her daughter's gift, she cried out. The last time she had had soil under her fingernails, she had been burying a murderer. The last time she had seen a hole in the ground, her daughter's body had been slowly drawn into it, dirt engulfing her hands, eyes, and finally her mouth with that last defiant smile.
Andromeda pressed the seed to her lips once before enveloping it in the cool embrace of the earth. When the last remnant of her daughter was obscured from her sight forever, the tears came easily this time, and she watered her daughter's gift with them. And just like that, the overgrown yard became a garden once more.
When Harry returned the next day to collect the stone, Andromeda asked for his help in the garden. Together they uprooted the weeds, tilled the soil, and sowed the gifts of the gods. She worked in the garden every day after that, blessing the earth upon which her daughter had walked for a quarter century. She endured the gift she had been given, which was the beauty of something that had come to an end.
Andromeda learned the lesson of her daughter's words when the first flowers she nursed in her revived garden slowly withered and died in the late autumn frosts. When the end was imminent, she clipped a few, dried them, and pressed them for safekeeping. But she saw that it was not the same. No withered, artificial half-life could compare to the fresh, ephemeral beauty of the flowers on the leaves where they could be kissed by the dew and warmed by the sun and, yes, even suffocated by the snow when the time came. The price you pay for the gift is that it must end. You can grieve that it must come to an end but that does not make it any less beautiful while you have it, or any less of a gift when it's gone.
One day there was a disturbance in the dirt. It was in the patch of soil where Andromeda had laid Dora's seed to rest. Nothing had sprouted since, but she still watered it every day and kept the rest of the bed empty out of a grasping, desperate hope. When she stooped on her knees beside the bed, she heard a wail. A small, writhing hand emerged from the ground. Then a pair of arms emerged, followed by a pair of dark eyes, a mouth contorted in a prodigious shriek, and a baby burst alive and warm and screaming from the soil. He had Andromeda's nondescript nose, and Ted's mild brow, and Dora's full lips. Andromeda named him Teddy, after his grandfather.
From that day forward, Andromeda tended her garden and her grandson more tenderly than her grief. She realized that immortality was within the grasp of even mere mortals. The Dark Lord had erred when he tried to kill and conquer his way to eternity, for death will never give birth to everlasting life. We live on through the things that give us life, and the things to which we give life. Our children and our gardens. The things we care for. The shape of our care remains even when all other traces of us are wiped away, long after our bones are reclaimed by the earth.
AN: This is my magical realism take on the Demeter and Persephone myth. It's structured in three parts that mirror the Eleusinian Mysteries, ancient rites and ceremonies celebrating the story of Demeter and Persephone: loss, search, and ascent.
Written for crowsb4bros's Spice Up the Archives challenge on HP Fan Fic Talk!
The following quotes were taken from Gregory Nagy's translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: "They received joy from each other, and gave it." "We humans endure the gifts the gods give us, even when we are grieving over what has to be."
I really enjoyed writing this and am really proud of it, I hope you enjoy it too! Kudos and comments very much appreciated as always. :)