Roses and Riots | f. weasley

Chapter 54: Ghost Town

That Halloween, Emilia cautiously Apparated to Godric's Hollow. She walked down the cold street, past the town's chapel to the graveyard. She knew this was a trip she needed to take alone, despite offers from Fred, George and Remus of keeping her company.

The time had come for her to face her past, and it was something she had to do by herself.

It didn't take long before she found what she'd been looking for in the small graveyard.

She found the white headstone of her parents' grave, and stood looking at it for a long while. She'd never seen it before, she'd never been ready. But it was the night of their fifteenth anniversary, and she felt it was time.

She had brought flowers with her, a bunch of red roses, and she put them down in front of the headstone, on them she had attached a note, which only said, 'love always, your Petal.'

Wherever they were, they'd know.

Emilia held her locket between her thumb and forefinger, allowing herself to cry for their loss. A lot of time had passed since she'd lost them, and she could talk about them without crying, but the ache never went away, she'd just learned to live with it.

"I wish you were here, I wish you could tell me what to do," she whispered into the chilly autumn night. "There's going to be a war, I know it, I just don't know when. It could be this month, next year, or even a couple of years from now. But it's coming and I..."

She cleared her throat as emotion made her voice catch, "I can't lose anyone else I love. I won't survive it."

Her words hung in the air around her and her shoulders sagged under the weight of them. She took a minute before gathering herself and straightening up, eyes focused once again on the white headstone.

She pressed her fingers to her mouth before touching them to the headstone, "I love you, Mum and Dad. And I miss you. So, so much."

After another long moment, she left the graveyard, walking down the street to the ruined house around the corner. The Potter house in Godric's Hollow had remained untouched to this day, because it was feared that the site was cursed, that it still held an element of dark magic within its ruined walls.

Emilia, however, only saw it as the ruins of her early childhood, and as she stood in front of it, fifteen years to the night everything had changed, an uncomfortable chill ran through her, though she doubted that it was the cool breeze that had made her skin prickle.

What had made her feel uneasy was the feeling she didn't quite remember everything from that fateful night, and despite asking Dumbledore about it after the battle in the Department of Mysteries, and despite him reassuring her that he'd returned all of her memories, she couldn't stop the seeds of doubt that were still growing in her mind.

She knew she should trust his word, but there was something else there that was trying to come to the surface of her memory as she looked up at the charred remains of her childhood home, and it was like a word on the tip of her tongue that she couldn't quite think of. There, but out of reach.

Emilia wondered if she was fooling herself, maybe trying to grasp onto memories with her parents that didn't exist, just so there was more of them in her mind.

She reached up to hold her locket in her fingers once again, and she opened it, looking at the photograph of the happy young family inside. She wondered if she was subconsciously trying to cling to the past, trying to pretend that she was still that little girl in the photograph, somewhere deep down.

But she knew she wasn't. She'd seen too much evil, felt too much grief to ever know the innocence of her childhood again, and after the man who took it all away from her told her she should be dead, she knew that the weight she carried in her chest might never go away.