HA 8g: Grief

HIM AGAIN: Chapter 8: Beyond All Stretches - Grief

“Snape killed Dumbledore,” said Harry. His green eyes were wide, his face ashen, shock and anger infused every line of his face.

The truth.

A chair was being pushed under her but inside she was still falling. Albus, with his clear blue eyes. Albus with his love of all, with all his qualities that would have not been out of place in a saint. Albus, humming as he walked around the castle, sucking on a sherbert lemon.

Gone.

She had a most peculiar urge to laugh - the concept was absurd, stupid, something the Weasley twins had cooked up! Instead she was talking - Merlin knew what about, something irrelevant and foolish… Life without Albus was looming before her, wreathed in misery…

He had been there for her, always. She had not been there for him.

“This is all my fault,” she said, with utter conviction.

But nothing sunk in until the night afterwards, after Fawkes’s song had confirmed the undisputable fact of events. The photo on the staff room wall pasted itself before her eyes: Albus and herself eternally dancing at the Yule ball. From her window she could see the Astronomy tower, pointing upwards like an accusatory finger. Her first ecstasy of grief was silent, tearless.

In all the commotion, Filch was too distracted to enquire as to why all the surfaces on the Transfiguration office corridor were smashed.