Regimentum ⪼ Sirius Black/OC

Mars gravior sub pace latet

Chapter Six | Mars gravior sub pace latet

[A harsher war lies hidden under peace]

"I told you to stay in the lobby," Sirius had angrily told her when he'd found her again, near the floo grates that line the lower halls of the Ministry. They had been emptied of people but for one or two coming and going, the room strangely silent as compared to the bustle when they had first arrived.

"And I've told you a hundred times not to order me around," had been Vivian's clipped response. The silence had transferred to her words, too, or rather her lack of them. She had known better than to tell Sirius in that moment that she'd run into his father. The knowledge would only justify him, make him think that he is right and that she ought to have listened and obeyed, like some doll left alone on a windowsill without a mind of her own, to be talked to but to never talk back. But she has renounced that life. She's made a conscious effort to distance herself from that sort of grooming. She is her own person, now. She has to be.

It's strange, to look back upon your life and to see things for how they really are. Instances that you had swept beneath the rug, before, because you thought they were normal. Like sitting around a breakfast table and listening to one of her father's lectures about the importance of their family name, the power it holds within society, the purity that gives it that power. Like being in a room of other powerful people and thinking that the way they were interacting – the barely contained insults, the quietly pretentious power plays – was completely normal. Like watching her own father lift a hand against her most precious possessions and burn them to a crisp in the center of her bedroom, all because she had done something wrong and she had forced his hand. These things that had not always been pleasant were just another aspect of her life. They weren't things to question or argue. They were merely the way things were, and that was that.

But distance shakes the foundations that had once been so strong. Hindsight turns her eyes to look at them in a different light. Experience extends a newfound truth that hadn't been there before, in all of those moments that had once seemed so normal. For though it hasn't been very long since Vivian had walked away from those things, this cottage and the man she now lives with have opened her eyes to what life and happiness ought to look like. And she knows, now, that happiness is found in the simple things, the unassuming things, the things that most people overlook because at first glance, they are too meek and too passive to be recognized.

There is a power in those things, though, even stronger than the last, only it isn't the same kind of power. Rather, it's the sort of power that comes to you unplanned and unprepared, and only because you aren't looking for it. It's like standing on a hilltop and looking down into a valley, seeing the shimmering mist that hangs just so above each blade of grass and sparkling with early morning dew. And, quite suddenly, a gust of wind catches you unawares and sweeps against you like a mounting wave, and you feel as if some inner part of you has shifted, and you are not exactly the same as you had been a second before. You're forced to close your eyes and tilt your head back because a portion of your soul commands it of you and requires fealty to this gust of wind. And when you open your eyes it's as if you're looking at a new world that you have never seen before, until your eyes adjust once more and you begin to recognize where you are and why you are here. And, unfortunately, the moment you recall these things is the moment the wind dies down and you return to being you, an earthly creature made of skin and blood. Your soul pulls back into your body and you feel the sting of your own flawed humanity. You forget what it had felt like a moment ago, when that humanity seemed to have transcended the limitations of flesh and sinew. That's often the way of it. It's the unimportant things that we always remember. The things that don't really matter.