Thank you to everyone who has enjoyed this story, waited patiently for updates, favorited and followed, and took the time to leave comments and constructive feedback. As always, it's been a joy! This concludes the end of Vivicendium Season 1. The prologue of Season 2 will be posted next Sunday, and then we will resume weekly updates as we get into Vivian and Sirius's story post-Hogwarts. Season 2 will be posted under a new title, so make sure you all check my profile come Sunday to find it!

Epilogue

Number 12 Grimmauld Place is exactly as she remembers it to be: dark and sinister. As a young woman, Vivian had hated this place. Now, she hates it even more. The moment she slips into the house, the demons she had locked away come to rattle at their cages. She sees herself here in this corridor, pale and withdrawn; a shaky youth living beneath the watchful eye of its matriarch. The house had been at its zenith, then, but it seems to have fallen into a state of disrepair since last she was here. She thinks it strangely compelling, that the paper on the walls are peeling and the curtains are dingy and moth-eaten. Now, this house truly reflects the dismal qualities that Vivian has always likened it to, when she lived within these dour halls.

Despite it being many years since she had last stepped through this door, it feels like it was yesterday. A long corridor stretches from the front door. If she continues down it, she will pass a sitting room on the right and a linen cupboard on the left. A second door will open up to a dining room. To her immediate right lies the tapestry room. Orion would often take dinner guests into that room for drinks. Power plays had been a regularity; the better to show off the Black family's strong, pureblood heritage. A bitter, claustrophobic feeling captures Vivian at the thought, so she shoves it into one of the cages within her mind and locks it away.

It isn't as easy to lock away everything else, though. Memories burn behind her eyes, staggering her. She sees black hair and an iron gaze softened into a smile. She hears tentative murmurs exchanged in the study upstairs, pages being turned and quills scratching against parchment. Books littered around the library floor, stacked upon the mantlepiece, laying open on the upholstered chairs. Underlined words and excited voices as realizations are made; sharp shouts from the upper landing as Walburga snaps at them to keep it down.

Nasty woman. She hadn't much liked Vivian.

"Traitorous whore," she'd say. "First one son, now the next. After the family gold, if you ask me…"

Vivian's lip curls at the memory. She shakes off her traveling cloak and drops it onto the coat rack.

Yes, this place looks exactly the same. Still dark, still gloomy, and still depressing. The only thing that's changed is the thick amount of dust that seems to layer upon every surface. It's been years since Vivian had last been here, but she remembers it being much cleaner. Kreacher must have forgotten what a broom is. He's probably been too busy talking to Walburga's portrait on the landing upstairs to think about dusting. Even on a canvas, the woman is still a tyrant, and Kreacher still unnaturally attached to her.

Her memories of this place are still swirling potently through her mind's eye, but all of them come crashing to a sudden stop when she hears a bark of laughter from the rooms within. It's muffled and faint, but the moment she hears it, she falters just so, and has to lean against the table by the front door as it washes over her. Her heart, heavy as it is these days, shakes as if it has cast off its shroud of cold madness and has taken once more the illusion of fragility. All at once she is pale and withdrawn again; the shaky youth, grieving against her unforgivable fate.

She had expected this, of course. She is prepared for it. You see, there is nothing like the sting of lost love to sharpen the spirit. Nothing like grief, hard and cold, to force you from the idyllic realms of youth. The moment you acquaint yourself with the taste of it, what innocence you once possessed will never be quite the same. Innocence is a tarnished thing, now, if it does indeed exist at all within the skeletal remains of Vivian Blair's heart.

Dry and hollow, it is, burgeoning with vengeance.

She sets her shoulders back and composes her expression into supreme pureblood haughtiness. Memory is what this house is made of, but it is not what she is made of. She is not the Vivian Blair who had once walked these corridors. Perhaps she is not even Vivian Blair at all, but a ghost of herself come to haunt the rooms that once existed in her nightmares, before she cast those away, too.

She feels a bit like a ghost as she takes a step forward and listens as that harrowingly familiar laugh sounds once more. She never thought she would see him again, and yet Sirius is here, at the end of this corridor, so close that she need only walk the length of it and open the door…

Her fingertips alight over the doorknob of the sitting room, the linen cupboard, the dining room, as if she is afraid that she may stumble. She pauses before a dusty mirror, considers for a moment that perhaps she should turn to ensure that her haughty expression is still there, that she is still the version of herself that she has spent the last decade perfecting; a stronghold of intense winter, blurring over the pieces of herself that no longer exist. But when she turns her head, the dust is too thick, and the only thing she sees are the muddy brown eyes that stare back at her from the glass, condescending and arrogant, and so cold that they seem to know no warmth.

She reaches up to smooth down the elegantly twisted hair and hesitates for a moment on the slight creases near her eyes, which press into existence during rare smiles and elusive laughter. She is caught for several seconds upon an inexplicable wariness, which fills the bottommost corners of her so thoroughly that it seems to halt her breath. She doesn't often study herself quite as meticulously as she does now. Have those creases always been there? Has her hair always looked so flat and dull?

Before she can let her sudden apprehensiveness plague her further, Vivian shutters in a deep breath and turns away to look upon the door that now looms before her. Why should she worry about her appearance? She is not the girl she once was; not the person Sirius Black remembers. That girl is gone. She takes another breath, settles her shoulders back, and lifts her chin just so. No, she is not the Vivian Blair of times gone by. Change has had its reckoning upon her, as it does to all things living.

It is a strange thing, fate. So insensible; so unfeeling. Its broken pieces lend an illusion of logic, but at the end of the day, there is nothing rational about it. Vivian Blair has long since cast those illusions off.

She reaches forward to turn the doorknob, and silences her demons with a cold twist of her mouth.

These days, she makes her own fate.

THE END…for now