Thicker than Water (Marauders Era)

10 March, 1983 - Try

Despite Lavinia's continued, though now only occasional wishes that it wouldn't, life went despite the world having gone to hell. She kept going to work and she kept buying groceries and cooking and everything was... normal. Normal and simple and so different than it had been during the war and the whole time, Lavinia felt anything but normal. Because normal felt wrong.

She spent her days tiptoeing around the hole in her chest, keeping to the outskirts of the void and doing her best to pretend that she was getting better, that the soothing of the edges of her pain was the same thing as moving on. That the pit in her soul wasn't exactly the same size as it had been in those first awful days.

And she was good at it. She was good at falling into a routine and pretending to everyone - even herself - that she was okay. She was good at avoiding the things that reminded her that she wasn't. That she might never be.

At least, she was during the day. Her nights were a different story, too often interrupted by nightmares that echoed her grief and her guilt. But she and she alone knew about those too frequent times that she jerked from sleep in the wee hours with cold sweat on her body and dead eyes staring at her from the holes in her heart.

She didn't tell anyone about them. She didn't want to make them fret because she knew they already did plenty of that and their fearful gazes were hardly better than the condemning stares of her beloved dead. And since her days were getting better... no one seemed to suspect a thing. Slowly, oh so slowly, the worry in her friends' faces ebbed and slowly, oh so slowly, the grief in Remus's eyes blurred.

And life went on.

She and Remus kept living together, mostly at Lavinia's point blank insistence any time Remus tried to argue. Every month, she made him his potion. And every month his eyes told her everything she needed to know about the words that got stuck in his throat, about the gratitude that was too much to put into speech. And each month, they survived. They survived the full moon and they survived the grief. And every month, Lavinia watched her friend get a little bit better, his gaze a little clearer and a little brighter, something in the darkness was lifting.

Of course, some days were better than others and that was true for both of the residents of the little house by the sea. Some days Lavinia's head was still and silent and she went about the motions of her day robotically, doing things because she had to, even if she could find no motivation. Some days, she spent hours standing on the cliffs overlooking the sea, watching people down on the beaches who giggled and played and wondering if she would ever be able to laugh so freely again. Some days it took every ounce of her self control not to jump off those cliffs and pray she drowned in the waves below.

But other days, she felt almost normal, so long as she ignored the hole in her chest. Some days, ignoring the ache was easy. Some days she could smile with Miriam and almost almost laugh at the other woman's constant offers to set her up with some cute friend or at her ravings about her girlfriend who, to hear Miriam tell it, was the most beautiful, intelligent, wonderful woman on the planet. Some days Lavinia came home to the smell of Remus's cooking and smiled simply to know that her friend was there and her friend had had a good enough day to cook. Some days, she fooled herself into thinking she was happy.

And slowly, painfully slowly, those days became more frequent, until Lavinia could almost forget that she had never dealt with the void in her chest, until she could almost forget that the ache wasn't gone, that her grief was a force of nature that she had done no more than contain. That she had never weathered the storm, but instead kept beating it back, pretending it didn't still loom on the horizon.

And so life went on.

It was on one of those good days about a year and half after everything went to hell that Lavinia came home from work and put on music for the first time since Sirius had left. It didn't occur to her until later that it had been so long, but the reality was that playing music had hurt. Just looking at the turntable and the collection beneath it had hurt. After all, those records were Sirius's, each one too tangled in memories of how the world had been before. Of what he had loved and what she had lost.