Halflife

{Four thousand, five hundred and sixty two days}

It's a very long, ugly Monday, beginning what augurs to be a very long, ugly week. She's almost thirteen, almost; her birthday comes with the weekend and she's aching for it. Thirteen, finally. And somehow that seems just ever so much older, so much more mature than twelve, just because there's that –teen in it. There must be something that comes with that suffix, and she is desperately hoping it's grace. Every day she waits, waking up and hoping she won't trip out of bed, that the night will have endowed her with her mother's soft-footed elegance. It certainly wasn't today; she bollixed up a potion because her hand got twitchy and knocked a bowl of mushy peas onto Evan Carstairs' lap. She clambers into bed without dragging a brush through her hair.

Nymphadora's mother is a princess, all grace and beautiful angles. And, more often than she likes to admit, Nymphadora wants to shed her ugly, clumsy duckling feathers and grow out the hair that she keeps short because she can't help but mangle it. She wants to be a swan. She could put on a hundred beautiful faces, mirror her mother in a thousand physical ways, but there isn't a single spell she knows that could make even the most careless movement of her hand so controlled and graceful. Andromeda moves like ink in water and Nymphadora feels like her every motion is a slog through ankle deep mud.

Nymphadora chalks her mother's grace up to maturity—Andromeda is thirty-three, that's ancient.

She has years to learn grace.

{Six thousand, five hundred and seventy one days}

Sirius throws a huge graduation party in his new flat, and doesn't remember much about anything until he wakes up still drunk around four in the morning on the bare mattress, the sole piece of furniture in the place, to find the place empty but for Mary MacDonald, who is diligently tidying the disaster.

He tries to pull some clumsy, inebriated moves on her, because losing his virginity seems like a fabulous idea and Mary is the closest thing to a girlfriend he's ever had—the girl who he can kiss every once in a while, who endures his jokes without getting upset, who understands she'll never come first. She very gently turns him away, helping him back to the bare mattress and pulling a pillow and blanket from somewhere.

Sirius is nothing if not persistent and he pushes his luck. No, she says firmly. That's giving you my heart.

You mean you haven't already? he asks smartly, trying to wrap his tongue around the words right.

There's such sober patience in her eyes that he finds he can't look into them anymore. He turns his face away and she kisses him on the temple before she sets back to cleaning. You've never asked for it, Sirius. I don't think you know how.

{Three thousand, six hundred and sixty five days}

It's a rainy day in April and, as he herds the gnome into the house with his shoe, Fred reckons he's got maybe ten minutes before he and George (who, in this rare and particular case, is innocently and ignorantly reading a comic book upstairs) get chased out into the rain a scant few inches ahead of his mother's ancient, heavy old broomstick.

It's more like five, but George catches the brunt of the broomstick, having been completely unprepared for Molly bursting into their room in a rage, the gnome struggling futilely in her hand. Fred had been anticipating it, prepped to run.

Molly shrieks about abysmal behavior from the doorway and George grumbles about giving some warning next time, rubbing his bottom dramatically. Fred waves merrily back at his mother, the beatific grin on his face refusing to melt away with the downpour.

Fred takes a dive into a promising looking mud puddle and flings a handful at George, who's still a bit sore about getting pulled from his comic book four pages from the end to get walloped by a broomstick and chased out into the rain. Good behavior is for grown ups, he figures, not eleven year olds.

And Fred never wants to grow up.

{Three thousand, nine hundred and sixty seven}

It's nearing one in the morning, but she can't stop reading her Potions book. Every time she thinks to stop, makes to close the cover and put it away, some little bit of sentence on the opposite page catches her attention and she's just lost to it.

She's still getting used to this, to this magic. It still feels strange to say, and she thinks it must advertise her origins so plainly, that hesitation. She can pick the other ones out, the ones who walk through the castle in utter and unashamed awe.

Sev manages to contain most of it, but even he can't smother all of his excitement. They partnered in their Potions earlier in the morning, the first time they'd actually been allowed to brew anything, and they'd both been very quietly, subtly giddy over getting their hands dirty.

It's the dream Sev had cultivated during those afternoons hanging around the playground, it's better.

Across the room, Mary MacDonald's bedhangings are bleeding light from the cracks and, every once in a while, the rustle of new crisp pages, the crack of a breaking book spine. Another Muggleborn girl, likewise thirsty for the impossibilities explained in their schoolbooks.

Lily grins, finally shutting the book that will, after all, be there tomorrow. And the next day. And the next, for the rest of her life. She's been waiting to wake up since that day Sev called her a witch. Maybe it isn't until right now that she realizes she never has to. This is her world, too, forever, for all that she wasn't born into it. It's hers now, always. Always.

It's a pretty wonderful world; magic and a friend to hold her hand through it all.

{Six thousand, nine hundred and fifty one days}

It's the day after the full moon and he spends it lazing around his mother's house. He feels exhausted and ill, drained from the transformation and from feeling particularly sorry for himself, chained up in the cellar instead of running free with his friends.

It strikes him, in a very strange, sudden flash, how much love costs. He's looking at his mother across the table as she sips her afternoon tea and the cost of loving him is written in the slight lines on her otherwise pretty face. The recently widowed mother of a werewolf—he can read the weariness and grief in the weighted curve of her neck over the battered kitchen table.

It strikes him then, how much loving him costs her, because she is thirty-nine years old and far too young and beautiful to be tied down to this shabby little house, this shabby werewolf son. He hates how she never seems to see that, hates that when she looks at him her eyes are impossibly bright, filled with warmth and love and acceptance. He hates how unselfish she is.

She would be better off without him, he very quietly thinks. He's one of the weights around her neck and he wishes he had the strength to take it from her. But he is far too selfish; too needy to walk away from his mother, too weak to break her heart and leave her better off.

Silvia gets up to wash out her teacup and kisses the crown of his head as she passes on her way to the sink and he swears he'll never let another woman tear herself down like this for him.

{Six thousand, nine hundred and seventy five days}

He leaves white roses for Rose Evans, because she never had anything but a kind word and a gentle hand for an unlovely little boy from the wrong end of town. He leaves them because Lily can't, and that's mostly his fault. He drops the roses on the grass-covered grave and goes, sick with the thought of the green eyes Rose shared with her daughter rotting in the ground.

He kills James Potter's cousin that night and he wishes she looked more like James, wishes her eyes were that hatefully familiar hazel; it would make it easier to glory in the way the light is wiped out of them.

But her eyes are just blue, her hair just brown, and when he looks at her there, dead and abandoned on the ground next to her husband and teenage children, he can't remember that rage that fueled the spell.

Again, he thinks of Lily, of her eyes filmed over with disgust and shame could she see him now. And, just for a hateful flash, he thinks of those green eyes, rotting dead in the ground and thinks of relief. He hates himself for the thought, for wishing ruin on the only girl he'll ever love. He hates more that ruin would not stop her eyes from haunting him.