To my loyal readers—

This fiction has long rested on my "shelf" of unfinished pieces. I can tell you all with finality that this is the last chapter an installment of my favorite fanfiction piece, Nightmares in Daylight. Thank you all for beginning this with me six years ago. I love you all more than words can say. PinkTeaRose.

Chapter 24

When I was a little girl, my mother was golden, was magic. She could weave patterns in the stars and bring light to the darkest of spaces.

When I was a little girl, my mother loved my father with a love so strong you could hear it, see it.

The butterflies in the garden used to swirl about my head in dizzying patterns while mother's rose garden bloomed brightly against the pale sky. Dirt tracked up my legs as I dashed about madly, without a care, perhaps for the last time.

When I was a little girl. . .

Now, I am holding my brother's hand in a sterile hospital room. The noises as people walk past seem to bounce off the glass partition. My brother is not breathing on his own, a charm is pulsing through him, but I breathe in time with him just in case it were to stop working.

Can't believe he survived…

Pulse is barely there…

No idea how he's alive..

I did not want an explanation. I did not care that this was an anomaly. I just wanted my brother to stay alive.

Donal was dead—that's all we knew. But I could not bring myself to smile with the others at the news.

My sister is sitting with my mother, but I cannot bring myself to go into her room, despite the short distance down the hallway.

I did not want this life. I did not want this fight. Call me selfish, I want to go back to my garden.

Mother will be fine—she always is, always has been. Sure, the healers said that she might not walk without a cane anymore, but what's a limp when her son might never rise from this room again?

I shouldn't be mad at her, I know she has done what she had to do for us, for the students, hell, for the world, but where did I fit into that picture? When have I ever fit into that picture?

I am sitting at a crossroads, my mother ill, my brother dying, my sister further away than ever before—and it is silent and lonely.

I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders. The future seems too much, but the past is equally intolerable. The present is itchy and uncertain, and I fight the urge to apparate away. Percy does not need me, he may not even know I'm here, but he's perhaps the last piece of innocence I cannot bear to lose.

I think about that day, when I first went back to Hogwarts, how willing and ready I was to change, to be better, to try and be the daughter she didn't have in me. I remember taking her hand, so smooth and yet so worn from the years of work. I felt her love as it surged toward me, its warmth radiating outward, but what dark part of my spirit did it fail to reach?

Why, after what should have been a glorious day of victory, did the memories of my husband, my brother, run together into a burning, seething streak of pain that blinded my eyes, making me writhe with a pain so intense I couldn't ignore it even when I tried.

I wanted my mother to fix it, to turn back time—like I knew she could—and make sure none of this ever happened.

But she would say that that is not how things work and she would turn her head towards the sun, towards an eastern sky I didn't believe existed in the face of so much loss.

I wanted to believe, but I could not.

x x

Esmerele sat beside her mother, who was currently fighting sleep. The pain spells were working against her.

"Where are they?" she asked weakly for the second time this hour.

"She's with Perc,"

"And he's alive,"

"He's critical, Mum," she whispered.

Minerva shut her eyes. "Don't say. . ."

"It's true, Mum."

Esmerele looked away. She didn't want to hurt her mother like this. But she didn't want to give her false hope either, that might be cruelest.

A knock at the door, and Helena appeared. Her eyes were clouded with concern, with fear. Relief had not found her, either.

"Esmerele," Helena looked down. "I'm sorry,"

She shook her head in reply without looking back. "Not your fault."

"If only I'd. . . If only we'd. . ."

Another head shake. "Don't. Please, don't. It's over now. We just have to wait."

That was the part that was hardest, the unspoken silence. The waiting that they would all have to do, a waiting that comes in the dead of winter without any indication that spring might reappear. The freezing, artic air that sliced through faith and hope and left a bitter aftertaste one cannot get rid of or ignore. A grief and a quiet so profound that it reverberated through the marble halls and coated the white sheets.

Here again in the center of nothing, they wait.

Minerva gathered her things silently, choosing to pack them individually instead of all at once by magic. It was bittersweet. It was painful. And she wanted to feel every second of it.

It was not, as some may think, an easy choice to decide to go.

On the contrary, it was a day she did not think she would ever see—at least, not until they forced her home to die in peace.

But no, she was not dying. She had recovered well. Percival was even improving, though he could not walk on his own yet and had yet to regain his finer motor skills.

Tessa had turned silent and distant again. Her grief, Minerva suspected, was made worse by the totality of the fight rather that satiated. Winning the battle had cost more than anyone expected, and though the darker forces had seemed to recede back into the blackness, the McGonagall family continued to feel its reverberations daily.

For Tessa, it was a cold home absent her husband, whose closet remained full and untouched so she could breathe him in again. His pillow sat undisturbed on his side of the bed, even though it was her bed now.

Esmerele decided to stay with her mother and help look after Percival. She was quiet as usual, but displayed a tenderness that only accentuated the past instead of helping to erase it. Minerva saw her scars in her movements, saw the fragility that would not be erased except with time's long, laborious passing.

They had moved on, in their own way, perhaps more slowly than they'd like, but certainly at the speed they all had to take. A family built on secrets must face it eventually, even in the heart of the winter forest.

Minerva wrapped her hands around an old book and held it to her chest, now a stranger in a familiar office.

The faces on the walls turned away, lest the headmistress see their sorrowful tears. They knew it was time, but they did not want it to come, either.

It was fitting that the spring after the battle was the brightest ever, the flowers so full and round they seemed to have blood surging beneath the garish red blooms. They were a wild thing, untamed by the hand of nature or magic, but a hybrid running free and clouding the air with intoxicating perfume.

It was fitting, too, that the flowers in Tessa's garden also bloomed in all their might. She might have lain against the cold ground and doubted their return, but ah, there again they were, their blooms popping up against the pale green to defy all doubt.

As Minvera shut her suitcase. She turned and looked around one last time, whispering, "Until we meet again, I have always loved you."