Prompt: Footsteps
Warning: Implied character death

It wasn't until weeks later that Severus found the footsteps.

How was it, he wondered, as he stared at the dried-out mud of the garden, that just the sight of the imprints between the rows of vegetables had the power to make his throat constrict in a spasm of grief?

The yellow blossoms were gone, and in their place were tiny green buds that promised succulent red tomatoes; Severus was determined he'd leave them to rot on the vine. He wasn't the one who'd planted them in the first place.

Harry had been the one to insist: There's something so…satisfying, don't you think? Picking it while it's still warm, washing off the dirt, then slicing and salting it. And that first bite—when the juice runs down your chin…and you know you've created something good.

Of course Severus had pointed out that Harry wouldn't be creating anything, just planting a seed and harvesting its fruit; all the hard work was done by forces beyond his influence. Harry had smiled, and told him, "Technically true, but just you wait. You'll change your tune."

Shucking his shoes and socks off, Severus stared at the footprints. Definitely Harry's, whose foot had been a good two sizes smaller. He stepped closer and ran his toe over the sharp rim of the nearest footprint, before finally sliding his entire foot into the inch-deep impression. Not too long ago, Harry had stood here.

Closing his eyes, Severus thought for a moment of how it was the negative spaces that hurt the most: the indentation in a pillow, the sag of the settee where someone had sat, the empty chair across the table, the cold left side of his bed. All reminders that someone who'd once been there had gone….

Of course, the positive reminders hurt as well. Harry's things were everywhere, spread throughout their house over the space of a decade. Severus was convinced that they would grow roots to the spots where they stood and not easily be removed. God only knew he'd tried, but for the most part, Harry's teacup still sat in the strainer, his boots at the foot of the bed, and the picture of the two of them that hung in the foyer… Severus supposed it'd stay there, as permanent a fixture as Mrs. Black's portrait at Grimmauld, although in this case, no spell held it there, only Severus' morbid paralysis.

The straw in the mud pricked at his bare feet, making him look down, and he was suddenly overwhelmed again by a sense of loss and despair so acute that he knew he'd die from it.

If only he could…

"So like you, Potter, to be the one to go first and leave me with your bloody vegetables," he muttered as he took a step backwards.

As he turned to walk up to the house, the first shudder of thunder in the distance made him pause. He looked back to the footsteps, knowing they'd be gone when he next came. Nature would water and fill them, swelling the sod to obliterate the arch of the foot…the crookedness of the toes.

One less negative space to deal with.

But what about the most critical negative space of all? he wondered. That shriveled-up thing in my chest that insists on still beating? Would nature and time take care of that one as well, re-expand what had seized and stalled and died in that singular moment of awful awareness? Harry had been gone in the wink of an eye, no chance of a last good bye, or an even rarer, final 'I love you.'

Severus was no longer certain of anything, except that he wasn't ready to give up any space that represented Harry, negative or not. Somehow, he wanted these other parts of Harry to linger and leave…less quickly.

Footsteps in the garden…fossils of a foot he'd not see again. But the imprints in his heart and mind were indelible ones, like it or not.