freckles || {Sirius Black} #Wattys2018

Fifteen | The Mirror of a Sister's Eyes

Ivy Peterson sat in an archway carved out of stone, overlooking the icy grounds of Hogwarts as a freezing wind blew her loose hair around her face. In her lap was a sketchbook, the exquisitely drawn pencil lines illustrating the hills before her. Ivy's hazel eyes were darting between her creation and the scene she was taking it from, darkness hovering in the depths of her irises, despite the focus in them.

A new gust of wind gathered and rolled past Ivy, sending goosebumps up her arms. The girl was wearing a cloak and a scarf over her uniform, but the cold was a powerful force in mid-winter at Hogwarts. Despite this, Ivy was paying very little attention to the discomfort she was experiencing. Her entire body felt numb to the world, but it was not from the frozen stone against her body, nor the stinging air that bit away at her exposed hands, neck, and face. Ivy Peterson had been numb since she saw the light drain from her little sister's cerulean irises.

Even as the sky grew more dim, Ivy did not stop recreating the image of the snow-covered hills. Her grip was unusually tense on her pencil, which was the only outward sign that there was a hurricane of torment raging in her heart.

As she continued to draw, Ivy noticed two figures disrupting the serenity of the silent hills, their path leaving a trail of footprints in the snow. The two moved quickly, the bitter forces of nature ushering them closer and closer to the castle, where warm air and hot cider could be found to cure any chill. Once the pair disappeared from sight, Ivy attempted to continue her sketch, but all concentration she had focused on the sorrow within her had been lost, her mind being disrupted like the snow the two had trod through. 

For a few moments, Ivy watched her breath cloud in the air, not able to focus on much else. The sinking feeling that pressed in on her chest at almost every waking moment returned, the protection that her art had granted her gone. The loneliness and the hopelessness and the shame lurked beneath Ivy's skin once more, taking corporeal form in her shaking hands.

Ivy tried her hardest to banish her demons from her mind, at least for a few moments, but her actions were useless. Instead, the girl, her expression still as cold as the air around her, focused on calming her quivering hands.

Until, suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Ivy caught sight of flame-red hair, styled into a braid far too familiar.

Ivy's first thought was to run or hide. Anything to avoid the great well of hurt that was her older sister. Rosemary, Ivy's greatest weakness. Rosemary, who was all soft words and loving glances and home. Rosemary, whom Ivy could not stand looking in the eyes, for beneath her chocolate irises was a world of raw pain that she concealed so well. And Ivy knew that if she spoke to Rosemary, they would both fall apart.

Before Ivy could make one move to flee, however, Rosemary's gaze fell on her.

Both girls stopped breathing.

The smile that had graced Rosemary's face fell like a feather in the wind, the corners of her lips slowly turning downwards. Ivy's hands began shaking once more. To conceal her trembling, the hazel-eyed girl curled her hands into fists and attempted to cover them with her sleeves.

"Ivy." Rosemary exhaled, the word a whisper. Her cheeks were flushed, but not due to the cold.

The younger girl lowered her eyes, much too afraid to look at her sister and see the agony that she heard in Rosemary's voice. Much too afraid to look at her sister, for she had the red hair of her mother and the soft eyes of her father and the thin lips of Linnea and the cheekbones of Olive. Much too afraid to speak to her sister, for she had experienced the same ordeal as her, and she knew the pain that it had caused, which made everything much worse.

"Go away." Ivy muttered, gathering her art supplies as her fear told her to run. Ivy glanced up for a split second after she spoke, catching the hurt that flashed across Rosemary's face for a flicker of a moment. But instead of backing away, which the younger girl had hoped for her sister to do, Rosemary drew nearer and nearer to Ivy, her right hand extended forwards.

"Ivy, I've - I've missed you." Rosemary's voice quivered in time with her outstretched hand.

While panic gripped her heart with its forceful grasp, Ivy shrunk away from Rosemary's awaiting fingers, ducking down to crawl out of the archway and begin stalking towards the inside of the castle.

Rosemary looked stunned for a moment, tears welling in her eyes, until she began to pursue Ivy.

"Don't just walk away from me, please-" Rosemary began as she caught up to Ivy, placing a hand on her sister's shoulder.

"Get away from me." Ivy snarled, shoving Rosemary with as much force as she could muster. Rosemary stumbled backwards for a step, trying to regain her footing, but she eventually twisted and fell to the stone pathway, disrupting the dusting of snow.

The courtyard was eerily silent.

Ivy glanced down at the hand she had used to push Rosemary, absently wondering if it she truly had done what she had done.

For a moment, everything went numb.

"I... I'm sorry." Rosemary gasped, her words heavily apologetic and filled with brokenness. She gingerly lifted the hand she had fallen on, wincing as she panted. Rosemary's expression almost made Ivy's chest snap in half.

"Ivy, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." The words came out as sobs, filled to the brim with overpowering amounts of love and despair. "Please, please, don't leave me too!"

Rosemary's concluding words pushed Ivy to do the one thing she knew that she should not do.

Ivy looked into Rosemary's eyes.

They were so uncharacteristically dim, the golden fragments within the irises barely glinting. Ivy barely recognized them.

But within them, Ivy could see herself. They were like mirrors, showing everything that Ivy was and wasn't. Rosemary's eyes had always been a place of refuge for Ivy, but now they presented her own suffering in a painting much too vivid for her to endure.

"I love you." Rosemary whispered, the words as light as a feather on the wind. Ivy found herself wishing that Rosemary had screamed the sentence, making it full of anger and disappointment. But the three words were the opposite. They were hopeful and caring, holding the memory of what the two sisters had been before Christmas Eve. What they had lost, but what could be found once more.

Ivy turned away from Rosemary, incapable of gazing into the mirror of her sister's eyes any longer.

"I... I can't-" Ivy didn't mean for her words to cut off, nor did she mean for them to sound as virulent as they did.

A wail escaped Rosemary's lips.

And Ivy walked away, finding what they had lost to be too much for her to handle.