fic: belong (hp; nymphadora tonks, lupin/tonks)

[builtofsorrow]

title: Belong
pairing: Lupin/Tonks
rating: G
words: <400
notes: Originally posted to rt_challenge    for the January ficathon; inspired by this prompt (which, incidentally, is a photo I took in Gdansk on New Year's Day 2006).

It is wet and cold, and the wind is almost vindictively whipping chunks of her mousy brown hair across her face. In her mind, she can hear her mum scolding her for being out on a beach. “No living soul belongs outside on a day like this!” She nearly laughs, but laughter doesn’t seem to belong (laughter is not solitary).

Snow does not belong on a beach either, she thinks. The mix of snow and sand seems a sort-of sacrilege: the memories and feelings both invoke are too conflicting to be combined.

One is young and playful and warm and very nearly carefree: laughter crashing over upon laughter. Moments of seriousness, yes, when necessary – just serious enough to make one aware of the danger it holds, the threat it poses. Overall, for her, the ocean's shore, so far removed from the open sea, is a place for Summertime, too-bright colours, sunshine glinting blindingly off the water, the surrounding life and shouts of others, and sandcastle-daydreams.

The other is fragile and old and chilling. Its childhood never lasts for long: its playfulness is rather short-lived. It isn’t that there aren’t snowball wars, forts, and snow families – but mostly, snow means Winter, dead things, curling up under blankets with books and cocoa, and maybe-loneliness.

She is no longer quite certain – walking slowly backward: leaving careful prints of her boot in the snow-sand: watching, entranced, as the snow melts and soaks into the sand – what (or whom) she is thinking about anymore, but it’s not as simple as the strange juxtaposition of seasons.

And she thinks, bending down to trace a numb finger in the fine layer of snow, that these kinds of painfully beautiful contradictions are what she craves in her life: or, at the very least, there is this one contradiction that she wants, needs.

She has created a small pile of snow now, carefully separated from the sand on which it has fallen. Standing, gazing down at it, she lifts her boot and steps upon it firmly, deliberately, moving her foot back and forth until the snow has melted entirely into the sand.

“You belong here,” she whispers fiercely. “You belong.”