The Keepers' Evil

Diary Four: I knew instantly that what I was doing was right

Song- Claude's girl: Marika Hackman

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The notion of home was one that seemed to escape me, the exact definition of it, that was. At four, I would have said that my brother was what made our home home, so perhaps he was what was home to me then. At fifteen, Hogwarts was undoubtedly home, although the strange circumstances in which I had arrived there had not made me popular and I had lacked in social friendships, the walls of the castle and its unspoken mysteries hugged me tighter than voices could. And then the hospital had been a home, one that had been surrounded by hurt and caressed with the delicately painful hands of war, but home would always be held by my father.

Once I had broken from the morally contractual obligation that came with participating within a war, I had found my way back home, home to the sleepy town of Feldcroft that had lined cottages around its rims and toppled flowers to keep the children company around the grass beneath the soles of my shoes. The hills waved small blades of grass in the wind to greet me back as I found the familiar forgotten in the crooked stone steps to my house, the house where small mellow bulbs of yellow light hushed the cold into warmth from the windows, and the smell of dusted memories caught me in the sudden unfamiliarity.

It was as though nobody lived within the house, that it was simply a shell of walls and windows and a fire that had become grey flecks of ash that had once burned a bright flame. The floorboards now creaked where they had not before, each lining of wood puffing with a burst of dust, the walls dewed with an unkept moisture to the air that one would expect from an abandoned building.

The candles that lined the walls for light had been dried in a bend that suggested that darkness had become normal, that they had not flickered a flame in a time too long. The beds had remained as formal as I had left them, my brother's remaining untouched from when he had still been here to flame the fire, and the small kettle that had been atop the stove held water stains that I was sure were the same ones that I had noticed before I had left. Everything was the same but decayed with time, except one chair that was pulled slightly out of place, the one that held the empty body of my father.

"Father! How I have missed you! How are you?" Silence greeted me as I had expected, but it was not what I had wanted. Perhaps I had been too naive to believe that time would have granted me the voice of my lost father, that becoming a stranger to his own body would not become his reality. His eyes did not look up to greet me, the soulless grief that remained in his body had stolen those too. Though he did not sound, nor look, nor smile, I knew that my arms around his shoulders provided a comfort that he could not speak, and I would continue to embrace the piece of him that I hoped would one day find me again.

As my hands tapped along his shoulders, the ones that I had clambered onto when I had been just a small child, and my cheek held to his neck in the foolish hope that his giant hands would hold the back of my head as he had done when I was little, the imagination of such a beautiful memory was all I could keep within me as I was met with empty arms and a quietude that disrupted the smile that I had held in the excitement that had been hopeful that time had truly healed. But perhaps such a notion did not exist in this reality, maybe it was not supposed to materialise until I made it so.

If time could not heal, magic would.

"I know that you hurt deep inside, father, but I have found a way to help like I told you that I would all those years ago. Hogwarts did not provide the answers that I needed, the professors did not assist me in the ways that I had wanted, but I found the answers, I found them for you."