She’s home, for lack of a better option. Molly Weasley and all of the sympathy in the world could not mend the crack in her soul. It had been easier, she reckoned, when Mad-Eye was running them ragged in the training fields or when they were hot on the trail of a known criminal. Somehow she felt better when the beat of her heart quickened, like it was being jumpstarted, and she could taste death on the air in front of them. It would be easy, she’d been told. No pain at all. Not that Nymphadora had ever put much thought into death or dying. It was a simply a thing that happened, there was no avoiding it. Moody had been sure to desensitize her very quickly. But as far as the twenty-three year old was concerned, she would continue to burn on in the night sky like a blaze of celestial light- death was not coming for her. Not yet.
But that didn’t mean she could ignore it. Death surrounded them, it enshrouded them all in thick, gauzy material that clung to your limbs like wet fabric. Despite the times, and despite being busy, the Auror made it a point to read the Prophet in the evenings (she ran often ran late in the mornings and didn’t bother with a subscription- why should she when she could knick it off of Alastor’s desk later in the afternoon?). She’d seen the name while she was shrugging into her beat-up motorcycle jacket- the one with the cracks in the leather at the elbows and the broken zipper, forcing it to hang open with its uneven flaps. Her hair hung round her ears in an uneven bob hairstyle, dingy brown like dirty dishwater and she hadn’t the energy or the want to change it. Each time she tried, or even though about it, she could hear Remus’s words echoing in her ears. You’re too young, I’m too dangerous. As if she didn’t face down danger and horrors worse than him every day of the week. It only made her angrier when he said it, as if he didn’t have faith in her competency as a witch. She knew deep down that he hadn’t meant it as such, but she held it in her heart like an insult, a tiny, fragile-shelled thing that if handled poorly could break open and spill out into her soul.
“Y’ still readin’ this?” she asked her mentor. He was hunched over his desk scrawling something with a fervor that most other people wouldn’t dare disturb, and when he looked up, mad eye swirling in its socket, she flinched. He growled something almost indiscernible but Nymphadora had long learned to translate the Head Auror’s dialogue. “Thanks,” she said darkly, swiping the paper from his desk and he returned to whatever it was he was doing, shaking his head vigorously (but not commenting) on her latent snark. He’d lifted a hand to shoo her violently away and she skittered out- the wing was already empty anyway.
She tromped through the melting snow toward the house- it was melting and absorbing the dirt and colors from the road while pale grass peeked through in the yards. It was that ugly part of winter where it wasn’t quite the wonderland that everyone sang about during the Yule holidays, but it wasn’t yet spring, either. In her opinion it was the longest part of the season, in between the holidays and the wonderful burst of life in the spring. The metamorphmagus stopped on the stoop, having passed through the wards without effort- they were designed to allow her in without any effort on her part. She could smell the sea in its proximity and heard the sound of water crashing against the rocks. It had comforted her as a girl, knowing that it was always there, tirelessly pushing and pulling against the land in a constant battle. She managed to make it inside without a sound- maybe those extra stealth and tracking classes had helped. The smell of cleaning materials was faint and nearly nonexistent, but Nymphadora could recognize (after years of living in the home) where it’d been scoured from top to bottom. She frowned. Up the stairs without tricking the creaky board in the stair third from the top and the Auror paused in the doorway of the study, noting how small and fragile Andromeda looked. Suddenly her own silly heartache didn’t seem so awful.
“Mum,” she said softly, her voice slightly hoarse from disuse.
