Prisoners of Azkaban, Probationary Diaries August 2009, Prisoners #19-09-1979 and #09-01-1960
oooOooo
August 2, 2009
When I saw you, I knew my messages hadn't reached you. The humiliation, the pain, the blood, the sores—all in vain.
They Charmed off your hair.
Well.
That was to be expected.
They put you in those ridiculous Muggle things you used to wear. You look lost in them now. Like a child in the clothes of her mother.
You hesitated towards me, arms half-raised, hands almost reaching.
I expected you to babble (a deluge of your dear, excited burbling: "You're not dead, you're not dead!"). And tears, yes, of course I expected tears. Hysterical tears or quiet, desperate, blissful tears. Tears to kiss away with a grand gesture, whispering against your sweet lips, your soft cheeks, that I didn't die, that I didn't die, not in 1980, not in 1998.
That I will not—that I cannot die as long as you shall live .
But you did not cry.
You let your arms sink down.
You stood very still and looked at me.
Your eyes, your mind, an open book.
(Never mind what I told Potter; I could always see what you were thinking. Maybe because you never bothered to hide it—not when you wished for my approval as a child, not when you wanted my attention as a teenager, not when you offered your heart to me as an—before you ever had the chance to become an adult.)
But today you looked at me a woman grown.
A woman broken.
And you said, in a voice so hesitant and husky it couldn't possibly be yours (I wouldn't have recognised your voice without you standing before me, a misbegotten sparrow instead of Gryffindor's most unruly lioness), you said:
"Your name is in the square below the window."
"—the middle square, four out of seven—"
I saw the square.
There were ninety-one squares in your cell. Ninety of them the rough granite of Azkaban bedrock. One of them smooth and soft, from eleven long years of caresses.
Foolish, foolish girl.
"Your name," I said, "is everywhere."
And that is true; it seems to be my one weakness that while I cannot be courageous for myself, I can carry a torch for others to my death and beyond. First Lily, then Albus; now you.
We stared at each other.
"What now?" you asked.
Vehemently, I flung the Portkey into the grey-black floods of the North Sea.
"We fly," I announced.
Finally the grand gesture I'd planned for (eleven years, too many months, weeks and days to contemplate).
Like all my grand gestures, it failed.
That it wasn't fatal I have to thank you for. You, and your fear of flying.
And Fate, of course, who's still not done with me.
(…or you, it seems, my poor little lynx.)
And the lighthouse keeper of Bound Skerry, who found us when we fell from the sky on Grunay, an uninhabited island in the Out Skerries group, the easternmost part of Shetland.
Nominally, at least, of Scotland.
…of home.
oooOooo
A/N: Many thanks to Aranel Took and Mia Madwyn for beta-reading.