darkness rises from the eastern valleys - G - gun
Title: Darkness Rises from the Eastern Valleys
Author: gunderpants
Rating: G
Word count: 1707 words, excluding quotes.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Walburga Black; Molly Weasley; Nymphadora Tonks; Luna Lovegood; Cho Chang; Mrs Cole.
Warnings: Gratuitous use of intertextual references. Complete reference list provided at end.
Prompt: #96: ...even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.--Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Disclaimer: JKR owns all this stuff. gehayi is made of kittens, rainbows and patience for running this fabulous ficathon.
Summary: Six women, a hundred deaths.
***
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less...
There were two little christening gowns in the chest and they'd never fit snugly around the tiny chest of a baby again.
She didn't sleep for the first week after that Snape boy came to tell her the news. Old cliches about mothers burying their children came to mind, but only faintly. Instead she folded, unfolded, refolded the little white gowns, and ignored the ghosts in the boys' room.
She wondered if she should contact Sirius. She didn't know what to say to him - by now, he'd know what happened to his brother. Whether he'd care about it was another matter altogether. He might be smarter now. He might know better. She hoped.
He would come to her instead, she told herself. No son would disrespect their mother like that. She raised her boys better than that. He would come around, and she would forgive him the cruel words and idiocy.
Any day. Until then, the christening gowns went up into the attic once again.
***
The sweeping gesture creates a fuss
It's only useful when receiving praise
Relieving no-ones pain
The house was unnaturally quiet without the thunderous sound of boys' footsteps up the stairs, down the hall, beating their rhythm on floorboards and carpet. Mama didn't take too well to the quiet any more. Papa didn't know how to talk to girls - not girls who were awkwardly filling into a plump, womanly shape but still had a child's voice and naivety.
Molly Prewett poured her grief into hours of baking and roasting and frying. She pushed the deaths aside as she laboured, that first Christmas without the boys, over the lunch. She knew she was putting on weight as she picked at the ingredients constantly; Mama made a comment about having to let the seam on her school robes out. Molly wished that her mother remembered what it was like growing up, as she dipped her finger into the brandy cream for the pudding and licked it off. Mama had come from a family of all-girls and never seemed to grasp the idea that her only daughter wasn't competing against her for anything. Against the boys, yes, but it was a feeble attempt that she'd given up so soon when she knew how hollow the words "we love you all the same" were.
It would be a small Christmas this year: none of the extended family felt comfortable imposing on the Prewett's grief, and they would just use the little round-table that the children had used in the past. She'd done her best to make it as cheery as possible: little sprigs of holly on the lace tablecloth, and she'd got down her mother's favourite gravy boat. There was no sense in cooking a whole turkey; just a chicken this year, killed in the back garden on an old blood-soaked block. She felt so odd swinging the axe down on its neck, and distracted herself by reciting the recipe for the stuffing over and over a hundred times until her mind went blank and the feathers fell to the ground.
She watched her father take the first bite and wrung her serviette in her hands; waited for one word to her, a nod, a smile, anything. He looked up to her mother, frowning instead; "chicken's a little dry."
She knew she'd never had the love that a son might get. She just wished that in the absence of the boys that they might pretend that she had it.
***
She feels it close now, the appointed season:
The invisible thread is broken as she flies;
Suddenly, without warning, without reason,
The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.
The first time she ever changed was behind the boys' toilets at Sandhurst Junior School, where all she wanted to do was turn into a little bird and fly away from them. Nothing happened but her hair turning a mottled shade of grey, but the older boy was scared away from her anyway. A magical person, like her mummy and daddy, came to her house that afternoon and sternly warned her parents about their daughter controlling her powers while she attended Muggle schools, but she couldn't help it, she didn't mean it. She never had to go back to Sandhurst after that day.
With every hour of sleep lost, her hands trembled and her eyesight faltered. Papers fell to the ground and she would bump into another stranger. Scrimgeour wasn't happy with her performance, but he wasn't going to give her time off. Not when the miasma swirled constantly around them. Not when the air cleared and the sick feeling of dread and loneliness stayed with her.
Sometimes she prayed for them to come, when it was her third night awake on the watch - with green-lit death or a rotting stench - for there was no reason for her to fear death: no loved one to mourn her passing and set her ashes on their mantle; no talent or intelligence or bravery or virtue; no distinguishing features or anything that someone - anyone - could love about her. Anything that might have endeared her had long since gone and she was left like a nightingale without its voice. She could die an only daughter from an unremarkable family and be buried in a cheap Ministry plot and disappear, and that would be entirely all right with her.
She wished for the tiny lifespan of a bird who lived and loved by nature's rhythms, and died evoking neither grief nor malice.
***
This woman. I did not know this woman. I cannot accurately describe her attributes, nor do justice to her dimensions.
They say of motherless girls that the image that lingers of their mother is determined by the age when they lost her. Younger girls remember a fairy princess who bandaged the wings of butterflies, whereas older girls could remember the odd cross word or wide breadth of hips - and still love and miss them no less.
She was nine when her mother died and she remembered someone so great that magic could burst from her very skin without the use of a wand or the utterance of a spell - from whom light seemed to emanate in the darkest times and whose mere presence comforted her to no end. She was only a skinny, awkward little girl, and she wanted to be as calm and gracious and whimsical as this woman who only formed the faintest outline on the horizon behind her.
She wasn't supposed to look under daddy's bed - it wasn't polite, there were things that a single father would rather keep from his young child's line of sight - but she found the Pensieve under there one day. The mist that swirled had particles of dust, as if one had not found anything worth remembering in a long time.
One cannot expect restraint and propriety from a preternaturally inquisitive child.
She ventured down the rabbit hole and came back with something taken from her; she lay on the grass under the trees for days trying to reconcile the wonderful woman in her memory with the ambitious, short-sighted woman with impatience to spare and a short fuse to boot.
In the end the fairy princess won out. It was better to believe in dreams than to lose yourself to the truth.
***
The place looked like a tiny churchyard in a children's country where there had only been one death. Or a green fair field, with one little garden bed.
She was too little to remember her Nai Nai dying. One day she was there, and then the next morning her parents were packing up Nai Nai's room and speaking in a language they'd never used with her.
It never really affected her at all, save for feeling a chill whenever she walked past the empty bedroom where the door was always locked. Her parents said Nai Nai was old and she wasn't in pain, and that everyone died when it was their turn. She could be happy with death like that. It could come as a blessing rather than a curse and one day she hoped - nay, expected - that everyone in her life would die old and quietly like Nai Nai.
She wasn't invited to Cedric's funeral; his family assumed she was too young to have formed any bond, or too young to understand what had happened to him. But she couldn't be reasoned with or consoled as easily as she was at the age of six, because he was a child and she was only a year younger than he was, and nobody killed children, and who would do such a thing, and she couldn't possibly be safe or all right again now.
When she returned home, Nai Nai's old room disturbed her more than ever, and it wasn't long before she started turning her light on when she went to sleep again.
***
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
Many Londoners were lost to influenza the year that baby was born, though not as many as there had been right after the war. Doreen Cole chalked the death of the skinny little girl who died in childbirth up to another victory for the disease, and arranged as swiftly as she could for the hospital to pick up her body. She knew it would be a wait: ambulances would be in short supply on New Year's eve, and it was a colder year than most. She personally had shooed off transients shielding from the cold on the steps of the orphanage who were found frozen to death the following morning, and
Another death. Another cold, unremarkable death on a cold, unremarkable day marking the end of a cold, unremarkable year.
The baby had barely made a sound since its first breathless scream for attention; as if somehow, it knew that it would be ignored, and there was no point in raising a fuss over the matter. It was a cold little baby; no matter how many blankets the girls wrapped around him, his skin was still icy and clammy, and a horrible shade of blue. She'd seen little ones who'd failed to thrive before and he looked worse than them; she knew that by the end of the night he'd slip away into oblivion even more quietly than his mother had done. There would be nobody to mark his passing, nobody to carry him in a casket or lay him into the ground. There would be a tiny set of bones in a tiny grave with no footprints trod into the earth to say that any corner of the world would miss him.
She picked up the bundle of blankets, rocking it softly, and sat back against the cold stone of the orphanage walls to wait until the coroner came to collect the girl and her baby.
After the first death, there is no other.
****
****
Credits
Walburga Black: Donne, J (1624) "Meditation XVII"
Molly Weasley: Fanning, B (2005) "Songbird" from Tea and Sympathy.
Luna Lovegood: Kushner, K (1993) "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches". Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" is alluded to as well.
Nymphadora Tonks: Hope, AD (1972) "Death of the Bird". There is some inspiration from Hermione's speech in "A Winter's Tale", though obliquely. The title of this fic and the final paragraph in Tonks' chapter echo the final stanza of Hope's poem:
And darkness rises from the eastern valleys,
And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath;
And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice,
Receives the tiny burden of her death.
Cho Chang: Turner, E (1894) "Seven Little Australians"
Merope Gaunt: Thomas, D (1946) "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London".
Author: gunderpants
Rating: G
Word count: 1707 words, excluding quotes.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Walburga Black; Molly Weasley; Nymphadora Tonks; Luna Lovegood; Cho Chang; Mrs Cole.
Warnings: Gratuitous use of intertextual references. Complete reference list provided at end.
Prompt: #96: ...even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.--Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Disclaimer: JKR owns all this stuff. gehayi is made of kittens, rainbows and patience for running this fabulous ficathon.
Summary: Six women, a hundred deaths.
***
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less...
There were two little christening gowns in the chest and they'd never fit snugly around the tiny chest of a baby again.
She didn't sleep for the first week after that Snape boy came to tell her the news. Old cliches about mothers burying their children came to mind, but only faintly. Instead she folded, unfolded, refolded the little white gowns, and ignored the ghosts in the boys' room.
She wondered if she should contact Sirius. She didn't know what to say to him - by now, he'd know what happened to his brother. Whether he'd care about it was another matter altogether. He might be smarter now. He might know better. She hoped.
He would come to her instead, she told herself. No son would disrespect their mother like that. She raised her boys better than that. He would come around, and she would forgive him the cruel words and idiocy.
Any day. Until then, the christening gowns went up into the attic once again.
***
The sweeping gesture creates a fuss
It's only useful when receiving praise
Relieving no-ones pain
The house was unnaturally quiet without the thunderous sound of boys' footsteps up the stairs, down the hall, beating their rhythm on floorboards and carpet. Mama didn't take too well to the quiet any more. Papa didn't know how to talk to girls - not girls who were awkwardly filling into a plump, womanly shape but still had a child's voice and naivety.
Molly Prewett poured her grief into hours of baking and roasting and frying. She pushed the deaths aside as she laboured, that first Christmas without the boys, over the lunch. She knew she was putting on weight as she picked at the ingredients constantly; Mama made a comment about having to let the seam on her school robes out. Molly wished that her mother remembered what it was like growing up, as she dipped her finger into the brandy cream for the pudding and licked it off. Mama had come from a family of all-girls and never seemed to grasp the idea that her only daughter wasn't competing against her for anything. Against the boys, yes, but it was a feeble attempt that she'd given up so soon when she knew how hollow the words "we love you all the same" were.
It would be a small Christmas this year: none of the extended family felt comfortable imposing on the Prewett's grief, and they would just use the little round-table that the children had used in the past. She'd done her best to make it as cheery as possible: little sprigs of holly on the lace tablecloth, and she'd got down her mother's favourite gravy boat. There was no sense in cooking a whole turkey; just a chicken this year, killed in the back garden on an old blood-soaked block. She felt so odd swinging the axe down on its neck, and distracted herself by reciting the recipe for the stuffing over and over a hundred times until her mind went blank and the feathers fell to the ground.
She watched her father take the first bite and wrung her serviette in her hands; waited for one word to her, a nod, a smile, anything. He looked up to her mother, frowning instead; "chicken's a little dry."
She knew she'd never had the love that a son might get. She just wished that in the absence of the boys that they might pretend that she had it.
***
She feels it close now, the appointed season:
The invisible thread is broken as she flies;
Suddenly, without warning, without reason,
The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.
The first time she ever changed was behind the boys' toilets at Sandhurst Junior School, where all she wanted to do was turn into a little bird and fly away from them. Nothing happened but her hair turning a mottled shade of grey, but the older boy was scared away from her anyway. A magical person, like her mummy and daddy, came to her house that afternoon and sternly warned her parents about their daughter controlling her powers while she attended Muggle schools, but she couldn't help it, she didn't mean it. She never had to go back to Sandhurst after that day.
With every hour of sleep lost, her hands trembled and her eyesight faltered. Papers fell to the ground and she would bump into another stranger. Scrimgeour wasn't happy with her performance, but he wasn't going to give her time off. Not when the miasma swirled constantly around them. Not when the air cleared and the sick feeling of dread and loneliness stayed with her.
Sometimes she prayed for them to come, when it was her third night awake on the watch - with green-lit death or a rotting stench - for there was no reason for her to fear death: no loved one to mourn her passing and set her ashes on their mantle; no talent or intelligence or bravery or virtue; no distinguishing features or anything that someone - anyone - could love about her. Anything that might have endeared her had long since gone and she was left like a nightingale without its voice. She could die an only daughter from an unremarkable family and be buried in a cheap Ministry plot and disappear, and that would be entirely all right with her.
She wished for the tiny lifespan of a bird who lived and loved by nature's rhythms, and died evoking neither grief nor malice.
***
This woman. I did not know this woman. I cannot accurately describe her attributes, nor do justice to her dimensions.
They say of motherless girls that the image that lingers of their mother is determined by the age when they lost her. Younger girls remember a fairy princess who bandaged the wings of butterflies, whereas older girls could remember the odd cross word or wide breadth of hips - and still love and miss them no less.
She was nine when her mother died and she remembered someone so great that magic could burst from her very skin without the use of a wand or the utterance of a spell - from whom light seemed to emanate in the darkest times and whose mere presence comforted her to no end. She was only a skinny, awkward little girl, and she wanted to be as calm and gracious and whimsical as this woman who only formed the faintest outline on the horizon behind her.
She wasn't supposed to look under daddy's bed - it wasn't polite, there were things that a single father would rather keep from his young child's line of sight - but she found the Pensieve under there one day. The mist that swirled had particles of dust, as if one had not found anything worth remembering in a long time.
One cannot expect restraint and propriety from a preternaturally inquisitive child.
She ventured down the rabbit hole and came back with something taken from her; she lay on the grass under the trees for days trying to reconcile the wonderful woman in her memory with the ambitious, short-sighted woman with impatience to spare and a short fuse to boot.
In the end the fairy princess won out. It was better to believe in dreams than to lose yourself to the truth.
***
The place looked like a tiny churchyard in a children's country where there had only been one death. Or a green fair field, with one little garden bed.
She was too little to remember her Nai Nai dying. One day she was there, and then the next morning her parents were packing up Nai Nai's room and speaking in a language they'd never used with her.
It never really affected her at all, save for feeling a chill whenever she walked past the empty bedroom where the door was always locked. Her parents said Nai Nai was old and she wasn't in pain, and that everyone died when it was their turn. She could be happy with death like that. It could come as a blessing rather than a curse and one day she hoped - nay, expected - that everyone in her life would die old and quietly like Nai Nai.
She wasn't invited to Cedric's funeral; his family assumed she was too young to have formed any bond, or too young to understand what had happened to him. But she couldn't be reasoned with or consoled as easily as she was at the age of six, because he was a child and she was only a year younger than he was, and nobody killed children, and who would do such a thing, and she couldn't possibly be safe or all right again now.
When she returned home, Nai Nai's old room disturbed her more than ever, and it wasn't long before she started turning her light on when she went to sleep again.
***
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
Many Londoners were lost to influenza the year that baby was born, though not as many as there had been right after the war. Doreen Cole chalked the death of the skinny little girl who died in childbirth up to another victory for the disease, and arranged as swiftly as she could for the hospital to pick up her body. She knew it would be a wait: ambulances would be in short supply on New Year's eve, and it was a colder year than most. She personally had shooed off transients shielding from the cold on the steps of the orphanage who were found frozen to death the following morning, and
Another death. Another cold, unremarkable death on a cold, unremarkable day marking the end of a cold, unremarkable year.
The baby had barely made a sound since its first breathless scream for attention; as if somehow, it knew that it would be ignored, and there was no point in raising a fuss over the matter. It was a cold little baby; no matter how many blankets the girls wrapped around him, his skin was still icy and clammy, and a horrible shade of blue. She'd seen little ones who'd failed to thrive before and he looked worse than them; she knew that by the end of the night he'd slip away into oblivion even more quietly than his mother had done. There would be nobody to mark his passing, nobody to carry him in a casket or lay him into the ground. There would be a tiny set of bones in a tiny grave with no footprints trod into the earth to say that any corner of the world would miss him.
She picked up the bundle of blankets, rocking it softly, and sat back against the cold stone of the orphanage walls to wait until the coroner came to collect the girl and her baby.
After the first death, there is no other.
****
****
Credits
Walburga Black: Donne, J (1624) "Meditation XVII"
Molly Weasley: Fanning, B (2005) "Songbird" from Tea and Sympathy.
Luna Lovegood: Kushner, K (1993) "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches". Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" is alluded to as well.
Nymphadora Tonks: Hope, AD (1972) "Death of the Bird". There is some inspiration from Hermione's speech in "A Winter's Tale", though obliquely. The title of this fic and the final paragraph in Tonks' chapter echo the final stanza of Hope's poem:
And darkness rises from the eastern valleys,
And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath;
And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice,
Receives the tiny burden of her death.
Cho Chang: Turner, E (1894) "Seven Little Australians"
Merope Gaunt: Thomas, D (1946) "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London".