Entry tags:

character: lily evans, character: remus lupin, character: sirius black, fic, fic: harry potter, fic: harry potter: scarvesnhats

Beyond The World
Gen, I think.
PG-13, 450 words, character death.
Summary: On graves & life & death & hope.
Notes: And so ends another months of wonderful prompts and wonderful fic, taking me on a full year's cycle of these things. Ending on a very sad note, but considering the date I didn't have all that much choice in the matter.

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies.
Nor can spirits ever be divided,
that love and live in the same divine principle,
the root and record of their friendship.

-William Penn

Remus visits every year. Sometimes in rage, sometimes in despair, but most often in veneration and acceptance. He used to go alone, a solitary pilgrimage. Now, he is accompanied by others, an unspoken rota of people, determined that no Order member should be left alone. Some years, there are people Remus does not know, who also wish to pay homage. Remus sees the same grief in their faces, markers of other graves. They understand one another.

When Remus is an old man, he will visit here still - Godric’s Hollow: tourist attraction, where callow youths re-enact in pantomime the events that Remus tries never to imagine before continuing their Halloween rounds. He will glare at them, and they will give him space in grudging respect.

He will recast the spells over their tomb – now ornate, and with a new addition, in posthumous acknowledgment of a life destroyed by grievous miscarriage of justice. Remus will repeat their names SiriusJamesLily running together in lyric until the stars soar high in the heavens and this burial ground is no longer for the living to tread.

And when he dies, Harry will carve a new name into the stone that rises in memoriam, next to Sirius’ handsome epitaph, and he will be alongside the ones he loves again.

For Remus will walk in green fields, and Sirius will laugh and ask him what on earth took him so long, and Remus will merely reply that he always kept them waiting.

---

It was a rare and strange day that Sirius went without memory of their deaths shooting through him. The Dementors stayed too long for their influence to fully leave.

It was a worse day when the other memories came, memories of carelessness and euphoria, and somehow they were so sharp and vivid that Sirius forgot they were no longer real. It was the worst of days when Sirius came back to his cold reality and Remus was not there.

But there was hope, a whisper of another place. A world that made sense. A world that had James in it.

---

He was here. The house was beginning to disintegrate, a final desperate rebellion. Lily ran, ran but He moved fast and slick as poison now.

‘Stand aside!’

And just below her screams, hope started to form. They would not die for nothing. Not Harry.

Lord Voldemort looked straight at her, smiling death, and now Lily was suddenly, shiningly not afraid. All her love welled up in her blood. Not Harry.

Life rushed from her body, but the magic stayed behind.

Not Harry.

---

James stood on the shores of the sea, the wind messing up his hair. He smiled, and Lily felt seventeen again.

‘All right, Evans?’