Mother
An abandoned house, Unknown
25th September 2003
Before I can do anything in response to the newcomer and my own current situation, the said newcomer – as huge and androgynous-looking as my current captor, but less bulky – moves a little, and I spy an odd glint in their eyes.
`Is that… water? Tears? But why?`
“Who are you?” I blurt out, squawking loudly despite my hurting throat; perhaps a tad ruder than I would usually say to someone on the verge of weeping, at that. And judging from the brief tightening of the arms holding me up and away from my captor, the said captor is displeased about it, too, though most likely for a different reason than me being an insensitive git. But it’s not really my fault if I get testy from being ambushed and held against my will by a total stranger in an alien land, is it?
I open my mouth again; to apologise, maybe, or to excuse my words, or both of them, or something else entirely. But then the look in the newcomer’s eyes registers in my mind, which is still muddled with disorientation after jack-knifing out of the peaceful droning of my captor, and my mouth falls shut with the click of teeth against teeth.
Raw grief.
Maybe I looked thus, when I realised that Sirius wouldn’t materialise at the other side of the Veil at the end of my fifth year, when the fact that Dumbledore was truly dead finally registered in my mind at the end of sixth year, when Hedwig died so senselessly before what should have been the start of my seventh year, when Dobby died while rescuing me and those with me from Malfoy Manor during that year, when I found that Remus and Tonks had died in the battle near the end of it. But somehow, this is… deeper.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper at last, lost in my own painful reminiscences, empathising all too poignantly.
And, just so, the tears glittering in those apple-green eyes slide down; silently at first, then accompanied by the increasingly loud sound of what could have been a dying animal, like Snape had let out when reporting the death of his old friend Lily.
I am too stunned to try for an escape, and strangely reluctant to do so, when my captor transfers my custody to the shaking arms of the clearly grieving newcomer.
And then my mind simply blanks out.
Wrapped close in the newcomer’s arms like this, with their body curled all round me as if shielding me from something harmful, with something else that feels suspiciously like their magic doing the same gesture to mine, with the wordless song echoing in my ears, is… is… is…!
I keen my own distress and grief, yearning for what might have been and what has never been, cut into ribbons by the realisation that I’m finally home.
I don’t know who the greiver is. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know how they’ve found me. All I know is that I am home. They are the cocoon and thus I am home.
My keening is echoed by a louder, much more mature voice that reverberates deeply in the jacket-clad chest I’m pressed against, and a name resounds in my mind with bittersweet joy, relief, and a plethora of other emotions, including – somehow – reverence, followed by the frantic babbling of a mother relieved to have found her child safe and sound in a war zone: `Loki. My Loki. My baby. I never thought – I daren’t hope – you are here – we are here – you are safe – it’s over – we are safe – my Loki – my baby, poor baby, my little one – Loí it’s Amma, it’s Amma, Amma’s here, at last – oh Ýmir tallasha – my child, my baby, my little Loí – Amma’s here – Amma won’t leave Loí again.`
They – she? – sound so much like Mrs. Weasley when she found her other children still alive, after finding Fred dead, at the end of the battle against Voldemort and his minions.
If only….