Loss is the Color of My True Love's Eye by ProfPosky
Chapter Notes: Disclaimer: Jo owns the Potterverse and it's citizens. I've just got the Muggle.
I'd like to thank my mother for Beta-ing this. Which I suppose answers the perennial question, "What do your parents think about your fan-fic..."
She hadn’t tried to explain to anyone. Clearly, they were not inclined to believe her. And it was good to be at the Burrow, waiting for the wedding, if she had to be anywhere, if she had to keep smiling and pretending things were all right “ if she had to keep breathing at all.
The Burrow was chipped and scuffed by time, mellowed with age, slightly dusty in corners, a little stained along the flat surfaces. Nothing in the Burrow would have looked out of place on a vintage quilt “ not as a print, not as a shape, not as a sound. Nothing was bright and shiny as a new shoe button, as light off a mirror in the middle of the night, as a clean black limo.
At the Burrow, unless you snuck out to the broomshed and inspected Arthur’s little stash of Muggle rubbish, the second half of the twentieth century had never happened at all. So it could not have happened, this was just a movie, a movie set in Wartime Britain, about a girl from elsewhere who was an outsider and who did not know where her husband was. All the clothing was frumpy, all the food was filling, and all the people were tense, anxious, spouting off all the time, making noise, rushing about, doing with what they had the things they had to do, or doing without.
The Wedding was shaping up nicely. She kept forgetting why it was here, instead of in France. Everything was being washed, trimmed, or encouraged to grow; there was work enough to have kept her busy, if anyone would have let her do any of it, but at least it was not home, alone, in the big house, with the garden which had been ravaged. No one ever told her anything, not to her face, but to a witch and wizard they underestimated the keenness of her ears, and she heard a great deal. Being a Muggle makes me magicless, not deaf. They were afraid to tell her that her rosebushes, his rose bushes, were all burnt black by some hex, and that the soil itself might need replacing, but she had heard it all anyway, and had cried silently, out in the broom shed, sitting next to rusty Muggle trash, peering out a crack between the door and the jamb, hoping no one came by, since they would not ask her to help, but would probably want her to move, and she had no place else to go.
No, the Burrow was perfect, and on the day of the wedding, she stood, in the only robes she had, which were her husband’s transfigured by an impatient McGonagall to almost fit her, and her simple pearl earrings, her grandmother’s necklace, praying there would be no jet, no onyx, in a stickpin, a pendant, an earbob “ that there would be no musicians with shiny black guitars, no one dressed in a muggle suit with spit shined black wingtips, nothing of that glossy black finish which she was certain the sight of would open a vein in her somewhere which would bleed and bleed until there was nothing left...
Hair didn’t bother her, skin didn’t bother her, but she was avoiding looking people in the eye. There might be someone here who was related to him, all these people seemed to be related to each other, someone who had a similar eye…she had never flinched from looking anyone in the eye, but now, in fear of seeing a small, black pupil with a glint in it, a glint that she thought perhaps no one else ever saw, she was avoiding looking into faces.
Remus Lupin came over to her. They’re just as mad as the rest of us, wizards and witches. He’s the nicest person here, and because he’s got that werewolf thing going they shy away like he’s a leper. But lepers are people, werewolves are people, house elves are slightly strange little people, goblins are some sort of I haven’t quite figured out what little people, even Muggles like me are people. You’d think, with all the fear of Voldemort and what he could do to them that they’d take a moment to see what they do to us. No, kind Remus was there, a glass of punch in his hand, his wedding ring shining on his finger. He understands. When Tonks didn’t know him yet it was like this for him. Dear God protect Tonks.
“I thought you might like a drink,” he said, looking across at her. He was taller, and had to look down a bit. “Very sunny out here.” He looked away, then back at her. “My wedding was so small. The last wedding we were all at was yours. This must be very hard for you.”
She nodded, taking the glass, holding it carefully, the way she did most things, carefully, from a distance, feeling like she was deep, deep inside the shell of herself that other people saw. He coughed.
“No one wants to talk about it to you, do they? When we lost James, and Lily, and Sirius and Peter, no one would talk about it to me. It would have been easier if we could have brought him back…had a proper funeral… I think…”
“He’s not dead, Remus. He’s not gone.” She thought maybe he would understand. She thought, maybe, maybe he could believe in the magic beyond magic, in whatever was telling her that the fall, the fall so far, so long, through the dark, black night, with lights, perhaps, glinting out here and there at him as he fell like the light in his small black eye glinted out at her from the day she met him…
He looked down at her sadly. “They’re gone, Elizabeth. They’re all gone. James, and Lily, Sirius…Molly’s brothers, even Neville’s parents and Peter, in their own ways. All gone. And Mad-Eye is gone too. You didn’t see him fall. It was way too high for anyone to have lived, anyone. I don’t think Dumbledore could have done it, and lived, and he was far more powerful.”
“All this falling. All this falling in the dark, black night. McGonagall on the lawn last year to those Stunners, and Dumbledore off the tower, and Alastor, off his broom, all falling in the black of night. But McGonagall made it back from enough Stunners to kill her, why are you so certain Alastor can’t do the same? It’s not as if …”
She stopped, not meaning to be unkind, because Remus had gone looking for him and not found him, and she did not want to say what she felt. Your Order didn’t look all that hard, did you? There was a long way to look, it needed more than two people, but only two went. He could have been anywhere, you’d never have known. It was dark out, black, black in between the stars and the planets, black like his eye and you wouldn’t have seen, not if he was right next to you.
Remus Lupin was looking very very uncomfortable, and he wrinkled his face once before he went on. “I thought I ought to tell you, because people are discussing it and I didn’t want you to hear it randomly in the crowd. They seem to have found him. At any rate, Dolores Umbridge has his eye installed in her office door.”
Remus was still speaking, but the sound was gone. Alastor’s eye, his little black eye, dead, useless, even if he wasn’t dead, if they’d taken out his eye the eye was dead, stuck up like a trophy on a door? The barbarians! The utter barbarians! Like a corpse rotting at the crossroads, with the black birds picking at its eyes only you don’t need the black birds, do you, do you? It was rising to a crescendo within her but no one realized, Remus obviously couldn’t bear to look at her, or thought he was doing her a kindness by not looking at her; she fixed her attention back on him, anything to remove her mind from the vision of that eye, his eye, dead and lifeless and nailed to a door, or however she’d stuck it up there, and Elizabeth began to hear words again.
“…it’s still rotating and zooming around and she’s using it to spy on her own office employees. Arthur saw it when he was in there Friday. We think she called him in there on purpose.”
“The blue eye?” she said, feeling relief pour over her, “the magical blue eye he pops out and washes, that spins and spins and sees everything?”
He must have already mentioned this, because he caught himself in the act of opening his mouth and seemed to backpedal. “Yes. Did I not mention that? The blue eye.”
“That’s all right, then,” she said, standing there in her husband’s robes, still a bit too long, and very much too warm in the August daylight. “That’s…all right.”