maple syrup | remus lupin [1]

epilogue

SHE HAD TO get rid of the silence. She couldn't stand it, the eerie and hollow nothingness that haunted her wherever she went. She wasn't used to it.

Claudia Maple was tired of silence and loneliness, for that was when she got to thinking.

And thinking was far too hurtful to be done, she believed. So, the girl voluntarily moved her way from one room into another, where she found a group of women waiting for her as if she was someone worth waiting for.

She had never felt that important in front of people like them. But, on this day, she was the most important girl in the room.

Maybe she even was the most important girl in the building.

Or maybe even in the country.

Scratch that, Claudia Maple was the most important girl in the world on that day.

Why?

Well, you'll be soon to know.

Sighing slightly to herself, Claudia walked closer to a woman with blonde hair and allowed her to help her with her corset.

Claudia had worn corsets before, and they'd always been a pain, but she had never ever had such a hard time breathing once wearing one.

Maybe that was because she could barely breathe at all anymore. Or, maybe, it was just because that woman with blonde hair wouldn't stop tightening the corset more and more as if she was trying to crush her ribs.

Eventually, Claudia was ready to be dressed. With her lips red, her hair up and done, her face white like the fairest of ladies and her eyes hollow and dead of all life and light, the girl got the assistance of all of the women in the room as she put on her dress.

A dress that was by everyone considered beautiful. But, according to Claudia, it was prison in fabric.

It was pure hell, that white dress.

The women left the room, and soon enough Claudia was alone again; staring at herself in the mirror.

She had done that many times, she realised. She had stared a little too much throughout her life. But that was what she did when she felt nothing.

And, for the record, Claudia hadn't felt a thing in what felt like her entire life.

She believed that she was still staring at herself in the mirror for at least thirty minutes after leaving it, but after a while, once people stared at her, the boy or man or whatever with dark hair in front of her pinched her slightly on her hand, and she realised that someone had asked her something, Claudia realised that she wasn't staring at herself.

But it felt as if she was. It felt as if she was merely a soul, who had left her body and was now watching that hollow shell live on outside of her.

Maybe she was now the bird sitting on that tree, watching it all. Or maybe she was the woman on that chair who was close to falling asleep. Or, possibly, that little toad a boy had accidentally lost and gotten a million scoldings for, for he was not supposed to be the owner of a toad in the first place.

The person in front of her and the other person next to her - an older man - gave her a questioning look, and she came back to reality for just a moment. She had been, somehow, saying the right things and repeating the right words for a while by now, but she stopped when the two most important ones were supposed to be uttered.

The words that mattered.

The person next to her repeated his words, and honestly Claudia had no idea what he had said until he finished his sentence.

"Do you promise to love him, comfort him, honor and keep him for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health and forsaking all others, be faithful only to him so long as you both shall live?"

Claudia stared at the older man next to her, and then she caught a glance of the boy or man or whatever that was in front of her as she thought about the possibilities of her leaving him there and never coming back.

But she couldn't.

She was chained there for the rest of her life; trapped in a marriage with someone who surely would only see her as a burden until the day she died.

I don't want this, Claudia thought, over and over again.

But she couldn't do anything.

But briefly, for just the blink of an eye as a pair of the warmest of brown eyes flashed before her in her mind, Claudia Maple suddenly smiled.

Faintly and weakly. But she still smiled.

And it was clear to her that everyone saw the tears she was shedding as she stared at the man next to her.

The people around them of course thought that she was smiling tears of joy due to the man or boy or whatever in front of her, but it was actually because of a certain boy with brown eyes who she knew she were to see again; one way or another.

Do it for him, she thought, and then she said the two little words that were to change everything.

"I do."