Diamonds and Rust

"Our breath comes out white clouds

Mingles and hangs in the air

Speaking strictly for me

We both could have died

Then and there..."

-Diamonds and Rust, Joan Baez

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Living in the same place he once was feels like looking at a photograph, unable to recall whose face it is that stares back at you, though you swear you know. The more time passes, the more that feeling cements and lets his outline in my thoughts grow hazy, until he's nothing more than an idea. Like footprints left in sand, you remember that they were there even when the waves wash them away, but can't recall exactly how they meandered, or place your stride exactly over where theirs fell.

Once, that idea was simply a man. A man I knew, better perhaps than all the others, and loved. A man imperfect, damaged, a beautiful disaster trying vainly to reconstruct who he had once been without that delicate thread to tie it all together again. Emotions faded from his memory, until he had nothing but images and words to guide him back.

The more distance I put between myself and that night, the more I feel like I'm walking in his footsteps, chasing the same shadows. Of the world we once knew, I am the only one who remembers and survives, without the taint of a fall to darkness. I am the only one who can recall the way James would cry out in his sleep, or Sirius lie under the bed in the early summer to escape the heat. And only I know the nights I lay awake longing to join him, cocooned in my own sheets, face buried in my pillow.

And I recall, in the winter months, when the glow of youth was just beginning to dim, when we refused to let the real world cut in again. It vanished, in that perfect moment, and I thought I could die and not be unhappy, because he would of course die with me.

Neither of us died that day, of course. He left without taking me with him, and I couldn't follow after. I know I will, someday, perhaps soon, when my number is called, but until then I can only think of him. He fades into legend among those around us. They knew him, of course, worked alongside him, have memories of him, but the poetic way in which he fell makes him a tragic hero, a martyr. The world took him, while he knew he was innocent and it did not, and rather than fighting he left. He let all of us remember that there are things worth dying for, and that he did die for them, as we all may someday soon. For me, his best friend, lover, soulmate, and for Harry, who was and is like our son, he was willing to die. The four of us were one, and while half of ourselves fell away, our half stayed for James.

Without any of them, all I have left is a living reflection of James's ideals, and a photograph that can recall us. For Peter, I can summon only thoughts of who he might have been without Voldemort taking him from us. He is dead, in all real senses, and the version of him that lives today is only a mirage, a ghost seeking forgiveness but unable to have it. And of course, Lily, a bright spark in a dull world, my confidante and friend, the only person who completed James more than we could.

Every moment of our memories will eventually fade, except for that December memory, and the photograph someone took of us on that day. It sits on my nightstand, an instant frozen in time. Unlike all the other pictures I cherish, it cannot move, and that's what makes it perfect. All five of us are there, directly after graduation but before the wedding, posed together, forever the same.

Lily and James are centered, Lily laughing, hooking James around the neck with her scarf, pulling him in for a kiss. At the last moment, they both turn to look at the camera, faces flushed in the cold, holding one another. Shy Peter stands to their left, cringing from the flash, already showing signs that he might be fading. Gray dots his temples despite his young age, hands wringing, one glove off. He looks sad and frightened, as though he knows already that his true self is beginning to fade. To the right of James and Lily are Sirius and I, and it's this that pains me most of all. We stand at arms' length of one another, myself leaning backwards, Sirius bending forward as it to pull my back towards him. He grips my arm at the elbow, and I hold his the same way, grip loose enough to suggest we were in the midst of sliding. Our feet are arranged in a way that indicated we must have been dancing; I think I was trying to teach him swing. We both look up at the lens, expressions bright. I smile with faint mischief, despite a fresh scar down my cheek. Beret on my hair, I'm trying to seem cosmopolitan, quill behind my ear. Sirius is beckoning me with his other hand, eyes alight with the grin on his lips. His hair, just beginning to grow long, falls to his chin, tucked back. An earring hangs from his left lobe, a pearl drop, the gift I gave him as a joke but that he wore nonetheless. There's some measure of love in his gaze, though perhaps only I can see it there. Anyone who looked at it passing might miss it.

Our breath mists in the cool air, joined in the haze between us, the snow that's started to fall forming a light pattern in our hair. This moment is the one I will always think of him in, before reality and death could touch us, before betrayals and suspicious minds could drive us apart. Before we splintered, separated for long years, before his death after our reunion faded him into distant memory, he was only a young man, full of hope, faith, love. Before he could become a symbol of injustice, courage, strength, he was only a man. And he was always mine.

This picture, this moment, is the one tremulous instant I can find to summon up all the old emotions again. Out of all of them, I survive to keep it for all of us, able to look back. When I, too, die, it may be that it will pass out of thought and time, wither as the past does, though I don't quite believe it. If I leave it here, will someone find it in a hundred years and wonder? Will it fall to Harry if he lives, triumphs? Or will it fade like a dream, seeking a new heart to embed itself in?

This memory, just like Sirius himself, can bring me happiness and pain in the same breath, laughter and tears. They are, together, both forever and decay, diamonds and rust. There have never been truer words with which to speak the way I feel. Empty, and cold, at times, without the warmth of his presence to keep me from feeling aimless. Without him to set my course, I go everywhere at once, unable to control it. Without him, the world can be more hollow, more cruel, less worth belonging to.

And then, at other times, I swear I feel him near me, like a whisper that you know you should remember, but can't find the words. All you have is the flutter of something in the back of your mind, a soft murmur that you never decipher, the quiet flicker of hope pressed between your palms, soaking in as you open them.

And then I think of why I still haven't followed after him, taken my place by his side in whatever place he's escaped to. The moment when I would gladly have died alongside him, left the world in the fire of my life, has long since past. It remains captured, an emotion to look back on, take courage from when all grows dull in the absence of love. But ultimately, each of us died at a moment when it was right, and mine has yet to come.

Peter went first, spirit dying even in that photograph, when his tender heart could no longer cope with the darkness in the world. Lily and James died together, as it should have been, to give hope to a world that was losing all hope of redemption. And Sirius died to perpetuate that same salvation, keeping all they lived and dreamed for alive, though it may not always appear that way. I have yet to complete that circle, but I doubt it will come when that darkness finally falls, and I with it, to finish that simple ideal.

Until then, all I can do is light candles for each of them, and forgive them for leaving me to complete their task. They more than I knew that they were going when they exited the stage, and I intend to go only when the curtain falls, and my part is finished. I could do no less by them.

The transition from past to present is spotlight to ember, but all I can do is to take hold of that flame and lift it high. We were all the same, and I'm the last, a candle in the dark until light may come flooding back in.

Love is nothing and everything, all I am: Diamonds and rust.