Where: Holly Cottage When: mid-February, post-census announcement Who: @rcmus
Godric’s Hollow is the emptiness a warzone leaves behind. Brittle and holding its breath. Now, it’s a refugee camp, full of squatters too afraid to look head-on at the carcasses that once were homes. Some of the Order, he gathers, are afraid to live in the houses themselves, most of which are still perfectly intact. But as far as Amos can figure, the houses weren’t where the massacre happened. No, that’s the streets. The streets are dusty but Amos can imagine, with a depressing lack of difficulty, the innocents pulled from their homes, shoved to their knees, the blood that ran through the grass because Death Eaters don’t start and end with the Killing Curse, they like to see evidence of the pain they’re causing.
Or so he’s heard.
But there’s evidence of other things, too: the planters left neglected, the neatly cordoned off gardens in front of cottage entrances, all overgrown and destroyed, here and there a swollen rosebush or a rogue field of flowers stretching across two lots. Amos is usually a tended-garden type, what with his greenhouse and potted plants, but he’s learning to appreciate how nature runs wild when left to its own devices.
That said, he’s offered to tame some of the more unruly areas, and Holly Cottage--which is what he’s heard Lily Potter refer to it as, when he spoke to her last--is covered in ivy, ironically, and left alone it’ll go wild and start taking apart the stones. So he’s there, with his sleeves rolled up and his mouth occupied with clippers, because for some reason he’s opted to use his fingers rather than the tools on this particular bunch. It’s not easier this way, just more satisfying, and he hopes it’s less noisy to the inhabitants, if anyone’s home.
