Mere minutes pass before the shrieking begins to subside, twice as long as it took for the cracks of disapparating witches and wizards to cease completely, but the boy knows it will take much longer for his mother’s fury to fade. He retreats to his room, patiently waiting for the heat of her anger to ebb. He hears the ache of the ancient floors, the night owls in the trees beyond the window, the rumble of a muggle car passing by. Only then does he begin to make his way back down the creaking stairs.
His mother sits, calm as the sea after a storm, sipping from a glass of dark red wine in her hand, the smell of something burning surrounding her, a manifestation of the anger that consumed her only an hour earlier.
He chuckles at his own joke while his mother remains passive. The coldness of his mother’s looks don’t mix with the smell of the smoke and, slowly, concern begins to creep into him.
His eyes fall on her wine free hand, loosely twirling her wand.
“Well then where is he?”
Walburga’s attention finally turns to her younger son.
“I don’t believe yourbrotherwill be coming back,” she said, contempt dripping from her lips.
“Why’d you say it like that?” he asked her.
A sudden realization rushes over him, and he sprints to the next room. He’s smelled that smoke before. A grand tapestry towers above him, full of the faces of his ancestors, scattered with scorch marks replacing those who had betrayed their pureblood ideals, but his eyes search for only one.
His mother is sat unmoving as he reenters the room.
As her footsteps fade, the smell of smoke dissipates into the air until there is no trace that anything out of the ordinary at all happened that night at Number 12 Grimmauld Place.
From an inner pocket of his robes, Moody pulled a very tattered old Wizarding photograph. “Original Order of the Phoenix,” growled Moody. “Found it last night …”
Harry took the photograph. A small crowd of people, some waving at him, others lifting their glasses, looked back up at him.
“That’s Marlene McKinnon, she was killed two weeks after this was taken, they got her whole family.”
“That’s Dorcas Meadowes, Voldemort killed her personally …”
“Sirius, when he still had short hair …”
“and … there you go, thought that would interest you!”
His mother and father were sitting on either side of a small, watery-eyed man Harry recognised at once as Wormtail.
He watched his parents beaming up at him…
…unaware that their lives, like so many of those around them, were drawing to a close.
(( OOC: So today was pretty exciting, as I got to go to the Warner Bros Harry Potter Studio Tour. But it was even MORE exciting for a certain other reason… which everyone had apparently been keeping from me… for MONTHS.
askwhathasthiscometo 