A/N: Thanks again for the care and support!
Disclaimer: It's all JKR's anyway. Like you didn't know.
VIVAASA
by: carpetfibers
Day 127
A hesitant frost dusts the ground. His breath billows, lithesome and wistful, as he stands and watches her grieve. The nameplate is a simple affair, two names ordain it, bound by a gold curlicue. She asked him that morning, before the sky was light, if he would come to meet her parents. He expected tea and awkward conversation, not mourning violets and frozen dew.
"It was a car accident, two years ago," she tells him. Her voice remains steady, a soft hymn. "Dad never drove, really, but it was raining that morning and they didn't like to use the floo. The tire hit a frozen patch, the car skid, and if it weren't for being a witch, I would have died just as crumpled and broken as they did." She lifts her hand toward the gray horizon, her fingers spread. "This intangible, this magic in me- it protected me but not them. I wonder why that is. . ."
"It's not something you could control," he answers her unasked question.
"I know." She kneels, placing the fistful of violets on the grave. "I know, but knowing something and feeling something- they are two very different things. The car accident, my parents' death, and me with only a scratch on my elbow: none of it was my fault, and yet, I still have regrets."
She wears her hair loose, and the frigid wind dislikes its happenstance. Her cheeks, dusted with sun and warmth from the summer, appear sallow and uncolored. Black is not her color, he decides; the clothes envelope her in their muted darkness, and she seems too small, too fragile for his liking. He prefers her in the morning brightness, diffident and cheerful. He knows his place then; he knows his situation and hers, and there is no frayed grey to confuse and impede.
"I might have had more time with them, if I hadn't wanted to be a witch so very much." She does not cry, and yet her words and lips weep. "If not for being a witch, we might never have been on the road that day. I had wanted to surprise them, you see- I wanted to show off a bit." She shrugs, a self-mocking gesture and again, her hand reaches for the sky. "The recovery efforts were going so well, and I wanted them to see that, to see the amount of work we had completed in such a small amount of time. I wanted them to stop worrying about me all the time."
The violets, resting near her feet, stir in the undertow of the wind. Their slow decay is evident already, in the browning of the stems and wilting of the petals. He watches them die, not daring his eyes to venture near her own. "You shouldn't blame yourself," he says, feeling the cliché of his words and disliking their stiffness in his mouth.
"This is my penance." She steps back from the grave and the violets scatter. "They were happy, my parents, as Muggles. I think they would want me to be, too."
He understands her meaning, even without understanding her motivations. He has never known a life without magic; even in the present, with its ability vanished from his fingertips and his blood, he still lives as if he were a wizard. He does not know of any other sort of way to live. He might wake without a wand, and sleep without the thread of a charm, but there in his thoughts, his first language and breath, are all things magical. He cannot imagine any other way to exist than to be as he is. Even wandless and stripped of his ability, he is a wizard. And she-
"You're still a witch," he tells her.
"Being a witch has never made me terribly happy." She turns, the movements stilted and stifled. Her brown eyes are too large, too unguarded, and he makes the mistake of looking back.
"Then are you happy now?" he asks and carefully, he brings her cheek to his chest. She shudders there, a soft tremor of chilled skin and naked bleakness. Her fingers clutch at his sleeves, and when she answers, the words are clouded with tears.
"I don't know."
Distantly, he is aware of his grip growing tighter around her middle and a dampness near his heart. She is silent throughout, and he cannot remember when he was last warmer.
End Day 127