So this is undeniably the strangest thing I've written in a good long while (not counting my Hedwig/Voldemort stint), but I kind of felt this urge to get back into writing and is part of a three/four-parter challenge I've set myself to get back into writing. The idea is that I choose a random quote, a random character, and 3 random words as prompts and then start writing :P. The inspiration words for this are scarf, cup and paranoia. And the quote I'll put below (I love the quote by the way).
So I've always wanted to write a story about an outsider to the magic world and I've also wanted to write a story for a long time about acceptance and that feeling of aloneness and the knowledge that you have no fucking clue what you are doing in this world (excuse the language :P) because these latter feelings are ones I've had in the past and still sometimes have and I think everybody does have them upon occasion, although how well I've captured them goodness knows :P. I felt like I needed a non-romance story to balance out my usual fluffiness too :D. So anyway, enjoy :D.
"You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes."
— A.A. Milne, 'Winnie-the-Pooh'
When he was little, Louis was terrified of the forest near his house. If he stood on tiptoe at his bedroom window, he would be able to see the hulking mass in the distance, long dark arms engulfing the horizon. He didn't know where the fear came from, but he always felt that there was something malicious waiting in that dark band of trees outside his window; paranoia enveloping him as he imagined nameless, faceless creatures creeping up to his house. In his nightmares, their arms were would engulf him and his family before swallowing them whole, just as the forest engulfed the horizon and swallowed the burning sun at dusk.
It wasn't until his eleventh birthday that he first ventured anywhere near it. Even years later, he could still remember the feeling of disappointment, of humiliation, of the plunging feeling of uncertainty that turned his stomach as nightfall came without The Letter. All his young life, it had been taken for granted that he would one day join his elder sisters at Hogwarts, and the week leading up to his birthday had been filled with intense excitement and sleepless nights as he dreamed of his future Sorting, the friends he would make in his House, the lessons... he dreamed of everything his sisters had chattered away about, and the idea that it would soon become a part of his world delighted him.
But as the sun sank lower and lower in the sky and still no letter came, no notification of his acceptance into Hogwarts, Louis began to worry. He could see the look his parents exchanged; that look - the one which told him everything he needed to know. They weren't surprised, they'd suspected all along. Even his sisters, on holiday from Hogwarts (a school that would always be a name to him, he now realised, and not a reality), seemed only mildly surprised. After all, Louis had never exhibited any signs of magic. None of his tantrums had ever resulted in turning his father's hair blue (something Dominique had done once), nor changed the time of the clocks in the house (a Victoire feat when she had been told it was time for her to go to bed). He had always put it down himself to the fact that he'd been a quiet child, more self-contained than his sisters and often somewhat more teary than argumentative.
And it was all too much. There was the sinking, disturbing feeling of being... different. Different in a way he'd never imagined he'd have to be. Different in a way that felt undeniably... bad. Louis felt that he was a good or an okay different in many not-so-very-important areas - his hair was a curly bright red as opposed to the straight hair of the rest of his family; he was the only one who liked Grandma Molly's treacle tart, and the only one who disliked Aunt Ginny's banoffee pie. He was the only one who was allergic to milk and who was addicted to baked beans. And all these little differences were nice because they made Louis feel undeniably Louis.
None of these differences made his parents look at each other in that horrible knowing way, or made his sisters bite their lips in an effort to not say anything that he could construe as hurtful. In many ways, the silence hurt him more.
"I'm a Squib?"
The words tumbled out, and he could feel the familiar build-up of tears in his eyes. His hand tightened around his favourite blue scarf, wound tightly around his neck to keep away the December chills. The soft woolly material gave way under his hand, and his fingers sank into the scarf, knuckles white from clenching.
In the soft sitting room light, Fleur's face contorted but no words came out. His mother's mouth open and then closed again, her eyes flickering to Bill and then back to Louis. "Louis..."
"You knew!" then a tear did slide down his cheek, resting on the tip of his nose before plummeting to the carpeted floor. His stomach was a swirl of feelings, feelings he couldn't even make out. Feelings he had never thought could coincide, could collide together. Humiliation and worry; loneliness and the need to be alone. As though he were in a dramatic scene from one of those Muggle films that his cousin Lily adored, Louis knocked over a cup of cocoa on the coffee table before running outside into the freezing cold air. He heard his father call his name, but Louis steadfastly ignored him. Instead he kept walking, the feeling of his boots thunking against the hard earth sending shudders up his legs.
He didn't stop until he was standing at the edge of the forest. He breathed out and his breath misted in the air, sinking into the trunk of a naked tree, its foliage stripped from it by the arrival of winter. It was only then that he seemed to realise how close he was to the forest he had been terrified of for so long.
He didn't know what surprised him more - the fact that he had come to the edge of the forest without realising it, or the fact that now that he was at the edge of the forest the familiar feeling of paranoia evaded him. Instead he saw before him only a refuge, a place that was as without wizarding magic as he was himself.
Louis wriggled his fingers, blowing warm air onto them. He reached out and touched the bark of the nearest tree. It was rough to his fingers, but the cold had numbed much of the feeling in them and so it felt as though it wasn't really him that was touching the tree but rather an echo of him. Another deep breath in and out, his eyes watching but not seeing as the warm air fogged into a formless white mass in front of him before dissipating altogether.
There was some comfort in the fact that his feeling of being alone made sense out here. Back at his house, it hadn't made sense to him, it had confused him. To be alone surrounded by his family was a strange, surreal feeling and the sheer senselessness of it aggravated Louis. Yet out here, even though he could see the twinkling lights of his house in the distance, feeling alone was an emotion that fit. He was alone. Things still fitted into place when he was here. He could pretend that he was just the same as everybody else, and there was nobody that could say otherwise.
After that, and over the next few years, his visit to the forest became a regular occurrence. Adjusting to the realisation that he wasn't, and would never be, magic was a necessary adaptation. His parents contacted various people and eventually arranged for him to be sent to a school in France. The school apparently specialised in helping people like him cope - although the term 'people like him' made Louis feel almost as though he had some kind of mental illness or disease rather than acknowledging the simple fact that what he didn't have was something that billions of others on the planet also didn't have. He was in the majority, and his common sense told him that, but at that point in time he rarely felt like he was.
Louis hated his school in France. It was a pretty place, clean off-white walls and neatly trimmed hedges and rosebushes. Most importantly, it was easy to be there and he never felt excluded in it. For the first time since he had discovered he was a Squib, he was accepted for who he was - at least on the surface-level - and there were many others like him everywhere else in the small school. So, no, he didn't hate the people or the place inasmuch as he hated the attitude towards Squibs. Everything they were taught aimed at helping them to adjust to wizarding society, to the lifestyle of a wizard living without magic. They were encouraged to refer to themselves not as 'Squibs' but as 'wizards' and 'witches' who were simply unlucky enough to be born without magic. It seemed silly to him that they were encouraged to use those terms, because, as far as Louis was concerned, none of them were witches and wizards. Witches and wizards had magic, used magic, went to magic school, took OWLs and NEWTS. Wizards were Aurors and Healers and Professors and Unspeakables. They didn't go to a silly Squib school that tried to convince its students they were just magic-less wizards.
He left the school when he was sixteen, disillusioned with the wizarding world and every inch the sulking teenage boy. It had taken him a long time to understand it - because nobody dared say it to him - but he didn't have a place here, in this world of magic and wands and Crumple-Horned Snorkacks. Not the place that his family had. He had been waiting for some unspoken gesture that would show him the way, waiting for somebody to come to him and tell him his place in the world. It was a bitter pill to swallow when he realised that he would wait all his life if he clung onto that belief.
Strangely enough, after acknowledging that, everything became easier. He convinced his parents to let him finish school at a Muggle school; something that he was both terrified of and excited to do. He knew he would have a hard time, he knew that his upbringing was wildly different to that of any Muggles, but at the same time he would finally be not different in a way that Louis craved.
It was difficult, but difficult in a way that he could manage. Difficult in that he was still different, but at least he was accepted in a way that he knew he wouldn't have been in the wizarding world. Difficult in that he had to invent lies to tell his friends about where he'd come from and what his parents did and where his sisters had gone to school. The first term he was there, he failed tests because he had never heard of anything in Muggle history or certain concepts in Muggle mathematics that his classmates were all familiar with. He had to learn to use a computer, to use a printer, to write with a pencil and pen instead of a quill. People laughed at him for doing things differently sometimes, for referring to GCSEs and A-levels as 'OWLs and NEWTs' (he learnt pretty quickly not to do that), for not knowing any of the current Muggle music or Muggle movies.
It was a slow process, and there was a part of him that knew that even as he could never fully fit into the wizarding world so too could he never fully fit into the Muggle world. He was destined to always have a foot in each, tied to one by his wizarding family and friends and the other by his Muggle friends. Louis eventually discovered that that was okay, too. His family and friends loved him for who he was, and he ought to start doing the same. Once he started doing that, the cautiousness that his family had treated with him for so long began to dissipate, like breath in the cold air.
Even years later, he remembered the day he came back home after graduating from his Muggle school and remembered the way his family had sat around the dinner table and congratulated him. He remembered the smile on his mother's face and the hearty laugh his father gave when Victoire made a sharp comment on Dominique's flamboyant hairstyle, and the sparkle of the champagne glasses on the table as the candle-light reflected off them. Most vividly of all, he remembered walking to the edge of the forest later that night and watching his breath mist in the air in front of him, dissipating as it hit the rough bark of the tree as it had done so many years before.
And he remembered the sound of running footsteps as Victoire and Dominique caught up with him, and the slower, steadier pace of their parents' footsteps not far behind them. Louis smiled slightly as his family followed him past the edge of the forest and went inside it, listening to them laugh and chatter about the upcoming Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa Weasley's place. He turned his head back just in time to see the lights of his house in the distance disappear as the forest's dark arms engulfed them.