Private message to Antonin Dolohov

[alt_sinistra]

I'm still angry at you. I suspect you're still quite angry at me.

But I also can't forget how much you did for me. A year ago today, and the months after. When I couldn't do for myself. Couldn't think. Couldn't anything.

I can't forget that it was choices you made that ended up saving my life. Choices you made that ended up saving other lives. Even while other choices you made

Well. You know me. I will be fair, to the furthest reaches I have in me. I wish

I thank you - again, always - for the choices that turned out well. And I wish so many things were different.

I keep looking at the ones who are alive because of you, and being glad, even while I think of all the ones who aren't.

(That there is a Linus who is now discovering Muggle poetry is perhaps something of a trial at times, but decidedly preferable to a Linus who would have charged into a fight he could never survive for the glory of it.)

I miss you

Comments

[alt_antonin]

We are all what our choices have made us, for all that certain choices have narrowed down the chance for future choice until it is no choice at all. Anger is counterproductive when one has so much one must do.

And -- as I suspect I know what has prompted you to write today, and that it is the same thing that had me planning to write you tonight -- you ought to know that I've said what I can remember of the панvхида for him today. (Unfortunately, my prayer-books in my quarters at Hogwarts, and so I could not say it straight through, but I have done what I could.) May his name be written for a thousand years; may his souls be blessed upon their journey; may he rest in peace.

[alt_sinistra]

You must miss your books very much I wonder if

Thank you, Tosha. For remembering. For your prayers.

You are right about anger. Mostly I am too busy to be angry.

Someone asked me today about a complicated thing, and if it would not be better to do it with more sleep, and I pointed out that I have not slept well for a year, and do not expect it to change any time soon, and I might as well learn to do complicated things as I am now.

Which is to say, when I am exceptionally tired, I am sometimes angry, but sometimes other things. Guilty. Jealous. Aching.

The thing that's hardest right now is not having people I can talk to who remember him as a complicated person. Or, for that matter, understand you as a complicated person.

And the part where - the part where if he hadn't died a year ago, I keep having flashes of moments, not quite dreams, of all the places he'd have died in the past month, if he weren't already dead. Complicated is not the word.

Sorry. I am about to go drown my sorrows in a suitably proportionate amount of decent brandy, such as will allow me to go back to being a diligent and appropriate sort of badger tomorrow, not given so much to flights of what-ifs, or at least not talking about them.

[alt_antonin]

We've had our conversations on grieving, and on faith, and on the individual nature of healing and recovery, but if you are left with no one else with whom to speak, I can certainly give you the speech again.

Despite her faith in the world hereafter, my mother mourned my father until the day she died, some thirty years after him. I do not remind you of this to make you feel as though matters are hopeless, or that you are doomed to mourn for the remainder of your days, but to remind you that grief is complex, shifting, and personal. It will change. You will never be without it, but some pieces of it will deepend while others fade; grief is a living thing, as are memories and remembrances, and it will grow and change with you until you find a new stability, for all that it will be a stability shaped and informed by it.

If you are in need of someone with whom to talk, you may always write to me.

[alt_sinistra]

Oh, Toshenka.

You are right. (You are often right, really. It is one of your qualities that is both charming and frustrating.)

It shifts and changes, and I have some sense of the patterns now, and that helps. I think that was the thing that was hardest all this year, not having any idea what to expect (and you know me, how badly I manage things I have not prepared for. For all I went into loving and marrying Raz knowing he did not have a safe life, the specifics make more of a difference than I'd charted in advance.)

It is not so much I need the speech, I think, but to know that there is space where I can say "I miss him" and have it not be immensely complicated. Only a little complicated. (There is no place in the world without complicated, these days, is there?)

I woke up this morning from a dream of a half dozen bits of memory and conversation. About the patronus charm, and the memories Raz used his last year or two, and the conversation with you about casting it, and all.

It was not a big deeply meaningful dream, I am not at all sure I could trust one of those. But it was comforting. Only it made me realise, you must miss Fridays, as they were, as I miss both Fridays and Saturdays now.

I should have asked. How are you? (And I do not mean 'what is keeping you so busy', because I no more expect you to tell me that than I will tell you, but the other things.) I saw that Lucius wrote you, and I hope that helped, a little.

[alt_antonin]

I am right, except, apparently, when I am very wrong. I've spent more time feeling like a fool this past month than I have these ten years and gone.

I miss Raz, too. And yes, I do miss our Fridays, and have for quite some time. And while we are at it, I miss my office, and I miss my quarters, and I miss my books, and I miss the portrait of Elisabeth Emory and her colourful commentary on anything and everything, and I miss teaching, and I miss the children, even the ones I am dreadfully angry at, and I miss Cairo and New Orleans and Paris and New York. And I have run out of coffee.

None of that, however, can be helped. Choices, as I said. I made my choices long enough ago that I cannot choose otherwise now, and for all I must be grateful to you lot for ridding us all of a monster, I cannot allow that gratitude to sway me from my path.

It was you -- well, your lot -- who broke Lyoushka out of Azkaban, was it not? It must have been Draco; knowing he is alive makes much come clear. I suppose I must be grateful to you for that, as well.