Pink Oxford and Red Irish Hair

She's sitting at the dusty old piano when he comes. She doesn't play—always wanted to but never found the time; and she adds this to her list of regrets.

"Emmeline," he says calmly, hand blackened and the twinkle gone from his eyes, and she knows, somehow, this is the end.

"Professor." Those days are gone when he'd smile and say she's graduated: he's never looked an Albus, yet she always felt inclined to give a Professor more respect than a Dumbledore. And Emmeline looks through his dull eyes today and knows he is not fit to be her teacher.

He walks around a little in the room she's locked shut, and he looks down upon her as she runs a hand across the keys. Two cluttered notes ring out, a B and C, and a layer of dust collects on her fingers to show for it long after the sound's rung out. He smiles with a question in no longer piercing blue; she smiles back.

They say that she's gone mad this summer, she hears: from Order witch to recluse—and maybe they're right. There's a nagging voice inside her saying there's something off about his being here with dull eyes and black hand in a room so heavily guarded, but all she can do is wait and nod politely and tug at a wrinkle in her too-small shirt.

It's pink Oxford University, clashing horribly with red Irish hair. She remembers having worn it when she got her Hogwarts letter, remembers never having thrown it away; it collected dust for years first in her trunk, then her closet (and doesn't everything in life these days seem dusty, like she's drowning at the fingertips).

"Emmeline, you're dying." Beat. "You and Amelia Bones, for the greater good. I've given Snape the order from my portrait."

She glances up and sees his red Irish hair turned grey, sees the elder woman dying in a room locked from the inside; sees she's been reliving this over and over, and they say that I've gone mad this summer, she thinks.