Grandloves//Tomarry

21

The war has truly come, no matter how much Lyra wants to pretend it was all just a very bad dream.

With Voldemort's existence finally revealed to the wizarding world at large, it appears that everyone has worked their way into a frenzy of irrational fear. Or at least, irrational to her. It is very hard to feel afraid of the man who made love to her just last night. To think of anything else aside from his wonderful mouth, his hands as they teased her again and again into oblivion, and—when she shyly asked it of him—the way it felt to feel him inside her, so completely and irrevocably consuming her that she didn't know where she ended and where he began.

It was all too easy to drift away with the warm, languid summer months.

There were some days where she didn't even feel like moving from his bed, reading as she catnaps in an opulent slice of sunshine, sometimes not even bothering with clothes. It could get a bit boring, occasionally, but it was always well worth it when he returned, to see his eyes darken in desire, an intense fervor besieging him at the thought of her waiting for him all day, naked and willing in his bed.

She wrote to Lavender, Hermione, Parvati and Ginny; escaped into the yard with Nagini wrapped around her shoulders, exploring the forestry behind the manor; attempted knitting once again, if only for the idea of the dark lord wearing an unfortunate and lop-sided scarf. She takes more pictures with the camera Hermione got her; shots of the overgrown garden; Nagini in the fields of wheat; the forest stream behind the manor. Flowers on her bedside table, the fine layer of dust on the striped couch in Riddle Manor's unused tea room—she keeps them all in a little photo album, silently admitting she can see Hermione's point. They won't win any awards, that's for sure, but they're her photos all the same. Her memories. She didn't think about schoolwork or the upcoming semester, of last semester, of the fiasco at the Ministry, and most especially about the prophecy. For the most part, she liked to pretend it didn't even exist.

But as the summer progressed, it was getting harder and harder to ignore the rest of the world.

The dark lord disappeared for hours on end, returning to the manor at sporadic times in the evening. Some days she avoided his presence entirely, dark magic clinging to him as some kind of poisonous miasma. Other times she refused to let it deter her, pulling him out of whatever blackness has ensnared him and back into her. But she doesn't know where she goes. She doesn't know what goes on in the bowels of the mansion.

Nor does she want to.