Disclaimer: None of this belongs to me.
VIVAASA
by: carpetfibers
One year, Day 322
She sits cross-legged, notes and books spread around her in a half circle of order and preparation. Her finals begin in the morning, a handful of hours away, and she has not her normal faith in her abilities. Time has slipped from her, disappearing in patches and stretches of the doldrums and the humdrums. Three times she had found herself near Diagon, her feet having taken her there unknowingly. Her purposeful amnesia of habits and practices from her school years have crept up slowly, reminding her of their continued existence. Too many times she has reached for her absent wand, and she can find no one to blame for the self-treachery.
And even now, buried in the mental dust of study and review, her hand draws and her mouth speaks in blatant betrayal. "Accio bo-"
When she weeps seconds later, it is not from the pain of a blow to her shoulder. It's a wretched self-inflicted misery that grips her; it's a stubbornly avoided anger that strikes her. She made her choice- she made her decision. She lived for ten years of her life as her parents had, dependent upon the frailties of physical limitations to survive. Her parents had lived even longer, as had much of the world, in seeming happiness without ever touching a wand or casting a spell. Surely, that contentedness they had, she can have it too.
But magic is a drug, a bittersweet addiction that she's too weak to win against. She remembers all too clearly the completeness it gives her, the strum of life and joy and glorious abandon that fills her blood when the string of energy escapes from her.
The walls accuse her silent distress with unrepentant reminders. The portrait of her parents stares down at her prone form, their bodies unmoving in their captured smiles. There is no essence caught in their photograph, no small semblance of life beyond that stilled moment of time. There are only their frozen smiles and the memories she carries of them. Her mother loved sweets and yet never cooked them; her father practiced calligraphy and yet his blots were terrible. Every Christmas Eve, they shared a bottle of white wine and let her sip from their glasses. Her mother hated umbrellas but loved galoshes; her father built ship models and made her a kite for her fourth birthday from tissue paper and balsa wood. They always arrived two hours early on the days she returned from school, their eager, expectant faces the first things she saw when alighting from the train.
She misses her parents; she misses the existence of them, the dependability of them- she misses the assurance of having family and the love that came with it.
She misses her parents, but, she realizes now, with her wand held too tightly in her hand, the polished surface ingrained against her skin, that she misses magic more. She misses being a witch more, and she can't run from it. Not anymore.
"Accio book," she whispers, and the surge of joy is inescapable.
End Day 322