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Reducio

Summer Of 2023

Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience.
Dying remains taboo.
We don’t talk about dying; we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as natural and everyday as birth.
The images and knowledge we have of it are medicalized or euphemistic.

All of the beauty, grace, and candour of death visible in classical painting and literature are gone. So too is the representation of our very creatureliness that we die not so much as personalities but as simply breathing bodies.
Death is written into our biology—all biology.
It is such a strange world we live in where one of the two most certain things that will happen to us—birth and death—is almost entirely erased by our culture.
It is as though the image of dying is not something we should see, or even want to see. But death can be beautiful.

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Niamh Beithir, nee Willow, a hogwarts graduate from the house of Ravenclaw, prised for their intelligence and apt for learning, later went on to become an unspeakable, having excelled in the subject of Defence against the dark arts during the time of her education. She wanted to make a change in the world.

She had been everything to Qrow.
She had quit her job to raise them, despite her own ambitions, to make sure that they didn’t face the same neglect that she did as a child.

Apparently she used to say that if she were to die, she would die fighting.
She had counted on it.
The idea of cheating death felt pointless; everybody dies eventually.
Her body was ripping itself apart from the inside.
She knew it immediately: she was dying.

Qrowley had been sitting beside her.
She wanted to burn their face into her mind.
They were her greatest creation and she wanted to remember.

Dimly she registered yelling, and suddenly, her boys were also in view.
For such a sweet woman, she had grown up the middle child in a household with many siblings and far too little money and love to go around. Regardless of the cruelty of her father and the ignorance of her mother towards this, she was always caring with a sweet demeanour and enough love to spare to anyone.
She had fallen in love with her two best friends, one of whom she was arranged to marry the summer after her final year of Hogwarts; however this arrangement did nothing to stop her from opening her heart to her other friend too, and later after the three of them had settled down, she opened her heart to her only child.

Qrow was looking straight into her eyes.
They were so full of life, so full of hope.
She was glad that the last thing she saw would be those eyes.
The people that had loved her, the people she trusted the most.
Those eyes…
''... thank you.''

There was no panic in her voice.
She calmly accepted everything with the grace of a woman who had died a thousand times and lived a thousand more.
This life.
This life had been good.

Power and will were quickly abandoning her body, she closed his eyes, her breathing gradually getting slower and slower...

''Mammy…?'' Qrow called out quietly, the child's hand clutched tightly in hers as the last breath slipped from her.
Gone.
They knew Niamh had passed.
Their mother.
The first person Qrow had ever seen.

She had been there through everything and some small disgusting and ugly part, hidden deep within the child, felt guilty for not appreciating her enough for everything she had done; now, it was too late to tell her how much they loved her and how thankful they were for everything she had done.

''She thanked me? She said 'thank you','' whispered Qrowley in confusion, looking up at their fathers.
Why?
It was an odd thing to do.
After all, who could answer a question meant for a dead woman?

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The funeral had been a small and simple service.
They decided to bury her beneath a willow tree by the lake.
She had always liked the view, occasionally getting up early enough to sit and watch the sunrise come up over the water.
Not many attended the funeral; family and close, trusted friends only, though the wake itself was much larger.
She would have liked it.
A small morning and a large party.
A small sea of black stood in front of her coffin as it began to rain.
Qrow Beithir did not cry; she wouldn't have wanted them to.
To be sad that their mother was no longer suffering in life would be selfish, and the child had been raised better than that.
Death was not the end.
That’s what she taught them.
Instead, she had believed that death was beautiful; it was a new beginning to a new life.
It was something to celebrate.
Oscar Wilde had said that death was beautiful.
‘...to lie in the soft brown earth, with the grass waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is’
She had thought him to be brilliant.

A Mother, a wife and a friend.
Not even as the rain poured on; Qrow Beithir did not cry.

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The family learned how to survive without her. They couldn’t quite live just yet, but they were surviving and that was better than nothing.
It was unfortunate; she had known that she wasn't going to last much longer.
Hephaestus was always deeply affected by death. His father had left when he was a child and the idea of being abandoned again by someone he loved was terrifying.
The only person who could console him – and always did – was Niamh herself, her stubbornness, a stolen envelope, a few sentences … and he was back to normal.
Not this time.

Daemon on the other hand had always avoided his feelings, much too awkward when it comes to emotions, and yet still so sensitive. He was so strong and stubborn at first glance, but deep down was a man that had just lost a piece of his own heart.
Niamh had always been so good at getting him to open up.
The child had bleached the front part of their hair so that they always resembled their mother. At first they had just settled for changing it with their ability, however it didn’t feel right, knowing that they would revert back to normal when they slept, and so in the end they had settled for bleaching their hair.
Still, the pair were trying desperately to keep things the same, but it did little to ease the uncomfortable numbness that had built up in Qrows chest. The lack of feeling only faded the night when the child had overheard their fathers near silent gasps for breath as he cried on the floor of their kitchen; he hadn’t seen them. Daemon Beithir's stoney exterior had finally cracked and it was only then that the cold empty numbness that had filled them up since the day of the funeral finally dissipated, replaced with the drowning coldness of sorrow.
From then on, they wore a mask. Their mothers death was not only affecting them, and it was selfish to close themselves off from people that needed the comfort, especially those such as their own dads who had known her for so much longer.
Qrow wasn’t sure when they began to throw themselves into their school work; but some days they went without basic necessities for hours before they remembered that they actually had to get up and take care of themself. Still, the distraction was what they needed to carry on.

Everything had been willed to them.
She had known she didn’t have long left, and the fact that she hadn’t told them, warned them at least…

Everything remained in the attic; her boxes of belongings remained out of sight yet never out of mind.
The idea of going through it all when the wound was still so fresh…

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