Despite its dazzling brilliance, the sun bestows no welcoming warmth on passersby that day. It is high, high up, centered in a way so unusual and unrealistic that she knows something had to have pleased Apollo very greatly. There isn't a cloud in sight in the huge sky, so blue it is almost purple if one stares long enough.
The joke must have been at the expense of Poseidon, she reflects, looking at the roiling grey waves buffeted by the breeze. Too strong for a breeze, but not strong enough to be considered a wind. A middling wind, then, a little too young to be in its prime, an adolescent wind, yet carrying the rich tang of ocean salt on the air.
It means a spar, then, between two humans, a favorite of Apollo's and a favorite of Poseidon's. And Apollo's had triumphed. As if answering her unspoken question of whom, something draws her to look to the left. Up ahead in the middle distance is a grassy holm with a jagged cliff edge. A lone, dark figure stands on the edge, so close to the drop it makes her wonder. She glances at the sun and the water again before deciding it is high time for a walk.
The soaked sand squishes between her toes and plasters itself to the soles of her feet, begging her not to leave it with every step she takes, trying to pull her back under. The freezing ocean, cold in a way that burns, swirls around her ankles and back again, as wave after wave crashes on the shore, loudly enough to dispel the thoughts from one's head. There is no doubt that Poseidon is annoyed.
The coarse grass crumples and pokes underfoot as she makes her way up the knoll. The crashing waves are more distant here, sounding like a memory more than anything else. The wind is fiercer. She mentally apologizes to it for not seeing its power before and congratulates it on its liveliness.
It dances and twirls gaily around them, sending his black cloak fluttering, and disturbing the precise strands of his light hair. An air of tension crackles through the air around him, making the wind less twirly as it makes its cautious way around him before dancing off over the sea once more. The wildly fluttering cloak does nothing to conceal the hunch of his shoulders and the fists stuffed deep in his pockets. Thoroughly Muggled, not a hint of pureblood etiquette or ancestry about him – except for the dangerous snap of the air around his left arm, the dark possibilities tinting the present and the past, and the way he instinctively holds that arm as close to his body as possible as though to hide it.
She steps forward then, and he turns to look at her.
She feels sadness as she meets his gaze, not the kind of sadness that leaves one sobbing and gasping for breath, but a quiet kind of soft melancholy frayed at the edges as hope flutters through his eyes, swift and fleeting as a butterfly, before the sheen of disappointment settles once more.
He turns back to his position overlooking he sea and she remains slightly behind him, remembering the storminess of his grey eyes and how they match the sea. Poseidon's favorite, indeed.
The sea is multifaceted and double-edged, she says to him. It cannot assuage his fears. It is too much like him. He will see nothing but a reflection of who he is and was.
Is and was, he repeats slowly, a hidden rough edge under the smoothness of his tongue that catches on each and every one of his words, like a burr catches a fox's fur.
And then, choking on something dangerously close to remorse, he pushes the words out of his throat and into the unsettled air – I truly have no hope – where the wind pulls them apart and scatters them in the corners of the world before he has a chance to catch them, with his deft Seeker's hands, and hide them down again where the light of day will never see them.
After a moment's silence, she answers only that saying thoughts aloud does not make them so. She knows that he already knows that.
As if this is all he needs to hear, he spins on his heel and faces her, the greyness of his eyes pinning her and making her feel as though she is floating in a raincloud, a double-edged silver knife at her throat. She pushes down the memories that threaten to escape her, a burning in her eyes and a lump in her throat and the shuddering of her heart.
You think I have hope, he is saying to her as she pulls herself back to reality. She feels as though he would be shaking her if his manners permitted him.
She forces her eyes to look past him, out to the troubled sea, as she says reflectively that all but one deed can be undone. If even the Horcruxes had the possibility of being undone, then there is hope for even the most uncertain of humans.
She makes eye contact with him again, then, and the blazing need in his eyes pulls at her heartstrings in a way that the memories didn't.
Hermione, he breathes the name as though it were the balm to all his problems and the violence to his heart.
Hermione, the cry is ripped from his throat not of his accord as her presence appears outside the distant cottage and he is gone, a flurry of footsteps and the crinkling of grass and the fierce caress of the air.
Her job done, she closes her eyes and lies down on the knoll to make friends with the wind. The sun shines brighter than ever, and she permits herself a small smile at her success.