Disclaimer: It's all JKR's.
A/N: Here's the second half, as promised. Another update on Monday. Thanks again for the continued support. I'm very pleasantly surprised by how easily this story seems to write itself. I should really thank the prompters at Potters Place for their excellent challenge idea.
VIVAASA
by: carpetfibers
One year, Day 144
The day is too bright, the sky too brittle for a day of mourning. She is two weeks and three days late, and she only blames herself. She watches the passing concrete walls of the Underground, graffiti littering the slabs. Professions of love, declarations of war, and phrases prophesying the end of it all. The man behind her stirs and his elbow finds her ribs. He does not apologize and she traces the window grime with a gloved finger. In her arms sit a bouquet of lilies, their fragrance bothering at her nose. The violets are out of season the florist told her.
She did not tell the florist how every year prior violets had been there. She did not tell the florist how just a year ago, she had stopped at that same shop and purchased a bundle. She did not tell the florist how just a year before, she had not been alone.
She trades the Underground for a pebbled road. She watches her shoes, sturdy brown ones that ignore the uneven earth and broken pavement, and wonders how a silence spent by oneself can feel so different from a silence shared between two. No hand to accidentally brush, no tall form to lean against or pretend confidence in. There is only the wool of her coat and the thick cotton of her gloves. She is missing him, even now, on a day when her thoughts ought to be elsewhere, and that recognition makes her angry.
Angry at him, angry at herself, but mostly, beneath it all, she is sad. She is bad at pretending; she acts out the ordinary, the mundane, each day, and each day, the medicine grows more bitter. There is less and less to claim as sugar, less and less to name as enjoyments. She hates her flat with its empty couch and solitary dishes. She still prepares a breakfast too large for one person, and each evening, she returns home, seeking out the scent of a waiting meal. Instead, there is only darkness and shadow, and she watches the evening sitcoms, her stomach empty and her lips unhappy.
She takes the second left, the broken road changing to a smaller walking path, the smudge of earth marking it from the colorless grasses that border the edges. The graveyard is as it ought to be: lifeless, monochrome, made up of an unending river of engraved stones and splashes of color dotting the left behind bouquets. She fades into the rows of markers, and when she finds her parents, the tombstone a solid piece of gray, she cries out.
The lilies land at her feet, the feeble white petals crushed beneath her knees as she drops to the ground. Every year before, the grave was bare but for the scarcest remains of her previous visit. There still rests the dust and dried carcass of her violets from before, and beside them, in vibrant hues still, rest another bouquet. Violets like before. Too happy and cheerful for a graveyard like before. Ostentatious, pretentious, and out of season, but they were her mother's favorites, and her parents' home was never without them.
"Bastard," she accuses the space where his shoes must have stood. Her voice is too happy for the word, and when her eyes water and she bows her head, it is not grief that swells in her chest.
End Day 144