xxv. nightmare

(wooo, it's been awhile!)

The crack of your Apparation is drowned out by the sound of waves breaking against the coast. Wind whips your uncut hair and rain washes the three days' worth of sadness from it that had appeared while you wouldn't leave your bed.

It's been four days since you've last seen his face.

It's dark, but you know this place well in a bone-chilling way, as though you had visited it in a nightmare that had been all you ever dreamed. It's only when you feel the sand seep between your toes that you realize you are without shoes, but that doesn't matter anymore, nothing matters.

You move forward towards the place where he once sat grinning while young Bill questioned him with childish curiosity and he was happy. Regulus may have feared the water and disliked the ocean, but he was happy here and that's why you chose this place. You could've gone to the stretch of grass in Paris or that park by your flat in which you two spent hours, even to the streets of Hogsmeade where he had first kissed you, but you didn't because the smile that had graced his lips here was far beyond anything you ever witnessed in those other locations.

Regulus was happy here.

You drop to your knees in the water-soaked sand; the flannel pajamas that have grown too big for you over the past few days dampen instantly. Your hands claw into the earth; crushed sandcastles squish between fingers and scrape your skin raw, but you keep digging. The hole isn't that deep because it doesn't need to be (you don't have his body, after all), but by the time you're done, you can hardly feel your fingers, though you can see them shake as if you were standing in an earthquake.

You reach inside the inner pocket of the coat he forgot at your house during that summer and pull out a photograph. You watch as rain drops and tears drip down onto the Polaroid of Regulus sleeping in your bed. The water discolors and blurs the image, but he still looks peaceful and that's what you wished for while choosing the picture - you wanted him at peace in his grave.

The photo sways slowly into the hole, landing on the ground without a sound and you wonder if that's how he died, without a sound. Was he scared? Was it what he wanted? Why wouldn't he let you save him? You wish that burying this Polaroid would bring those answers to you, but you know it won't, you know you'll never know.

You push the sand back in its rightful place, smoothing the top so it almost looks as though it had never been disturbed, as though it doesn't hold the secret of death within it. You trail your pointer finger over it, tracing a simple heart.

"Goodbye, my love."