fragiles, by verity

Dear Marian, Ginny begins the letter, I am sorry to hear of your cold...

When they are together they are a seamless twist of freckled limbs and silken hair. Sometimes they like to pretend that they are sisters. Ginny's hair is autumn leaves in November; Susan's is a fine liquor gleaming amber in the dim lamplight. Their skin, under the veneer of the sun's kisses, is the thin translucent porcelain of ivory bone china. Susan is all curves, hourglass hips and pendulous breasts; Ginny is sleek sliding lines of classical elegance and sinuous form.

They teach at the new Hogwarts in the daylight hours, the two youngest teachers. Not that their seniors are so very much older. Their shared freckles in hidden hollows of elbows and ankles veiled by billowing robes and an affection of distance. Susan replaces Professor Sprout in the greenhouse, her green thumb calm and efficient where her predecessor's was enthusiastic and eccentric. Ginny takes the place that so many have vacated before; Defense Against the Dark Arts. However, disregarding the ineffable precedent, she stays.

Dear Marian, the sun is beginning to show herself again, shyly as if she is rather ashamed of her absence during these past stormy days... Ginny has a hundred letters here, or perhaps a thousand, or any other number singular enough to be committed to memory, solitary and vast. They always begin the same way, and end the same way as well; with love, your mother Virginia.

Susan leaves a cup of tea by her elbow. "Thank you," Ginny murmurs, dipping her pen gingerly into her brass inkwell, listening to the soft teardrops of rain that are beginning to fall outside their window.

Ginny writes a letter every day; she always has, and perhaps always will. Meanwhile, Susan waters the plants lovingly and liesurely, smiling at them with maternal pride. In the daylight hours, they are bold and brilliant with their mother's love as they crawl over mantel and windowsill, and in some cases, walls. Everyone has their own way of relaxing, Ginny writies in graceful, damply looping, India-inked script to Marian. Sometimes I wonder what yours is, and whether you flush with pleasure the way your father does whenever anyone admires your talent.

The plants bow sleepily now, as the sun has completed its setting; Susan lights a fire in the grate, feeding the reluctant flames yesterday's newspaper amidst the firewood, and the rain begins to beat harder against the panes of glass.

I am sure that you will have wonderful marks in Defense, Marian. I am not so skilled as good at intuiting, but your father has always been the quickest, the swiftest of wizards in a duel. It is innate gift as much as training, you know.

"Ginny?" Susan's voice is sharp, as deceptive as anything about her is.

"What?" Ginny looks up from her parchment, and the fresh writing begins to dry, its slick glistening absorbing into the page and leaving the words matte and unvarnished. "Is everything all right?"

"There's been a call from the Headmaster. A disturbance in the greenhouses. I'll be back, I hope, before you go to bed-"

"Take an umbrella."

"Of course." Susan comes over to the desk and kisses Ginny softly on the lips before she goes out the door.

It was raining like this the night she lost Marian, Ginny remembers, her quill stilled momentarily. Always the letters. A thousand letters forming a bridge between loss and might-have-beens, and still she pauses and quakes before the truth and desolation, still she hesitates. She had been two months pregnant; no one had known - she was still a child, for God's sake, some part of her rages, how could Harry have let her -

But he had. Ginny still feels, seven years later, at twenty-four, the hungry weight of his kisses. It had been perhaps the only time anyone had allowed him to grieve. She had cried out, with the pain and loss of a million things she could not give name to. And she had embraced him gently, as a mother might have, and stroked his hair when he wept. The next morning, he had vanished.

Dear Marian, she always begins, such reliable and innocent words, to anyone who did not know that a single utterance of them was only one helpless stitch in a thousand hungry and gaping wounds- Dear Harry, she might as well say, Allow me to sing this requiem for all I have ever lost.

Her quill scratchs idly at the parchment now, looping scrawls of ink forming words Ginny will not later recall having written, like those words scrawled on the wall in blood, when she was but a small girl bedazzled and stunned by the wicked of the world.

She is sharpening this quill when Susan comes in, hair damp and face haggard even beneath the forgiving flames of the lamps in their rooms.

"You look like death," says Ginny, not unkindly.

"Harry's dead," Susan answers, her voice rough and uneven. "He hung himself in one of the greenhouses - I didn't see myself - the vines -"

Sweet lovely vines like the ones on their walls forming a noose around his neck-

Ginny's hand slips; the knife nicks the tip of her thumb. A scarlet seal on Marian's letter, like the one every word to her dead daughter leaves on her heart.

"Darling-" Susan says, moving out a hand to restrain her, but Ginny is too quick, too many years of practiced and necessary swiftness; she takes the letters from their chest and heaps them upon the fire, watches the crisp parchment burning, the seals melting, garnet wax the color of blood, dripping and smouldering and flaming into ash.

When they are together they are a seamless twist of freckled limbs and silken hair. Sometimes they like to pretend that they are sisters. So like each other in the veil of darkness; their slender frames shudder beneath the weight of the burdens they bear, and tremble in the delirious anticipation of release.