A/N: I do not own Harry Potter, nor do I intend on making any profit from this story. Also, I'm an American writer attempting to impersonate British slang. I'm not very good at it; please disregard anything that sounds a bit weird. Enjoy!
I take a deep breath and look around the flat. My flat. It's new and arranged and yet, not quite full. It has plenty of furniture and there's art spattering the walls. It has all of the essential cutlery and appliances, both Muggle and magical. But it still seems empty. It's still...lacking.
My mother left ten minutes ago and I sit in the silence on my new sofa and it feels odd. There must be something I've forgotten. There must be something that's missing. I pretend I don't know what it is and flick on the telly and mindlessly stare at it. It's a show about cooking and the 'magic' of garlic and if you add just a bit of salt, your creation will please your guests. And it's about how Ron loves garlic more than chocolate but nobody knows but me and his mum, who used to secretly feed him bread dipped in garlic butter before meals. And that if I just kept a bit of garlic in a jar in the kitchen he'll always wonder what I'm cooking for dinner. And how it was always so exciting because he made it that way.
And then I realize that I'm watching him in my mind and not on the telly and I shut it off. I slide my palms along the velvety fabric of the couch and silently thank my mum for stepping in just at the right moment. She's always tried to let me choose my own things. My own clothes and books. What color I wanted my room painted when we had the addition added to our home. But this last week she's been making my decisions for me. The decisions I wish I never had to make. Such as, do I keep the Chudley Cannons t-shirt that I slept in most nights because it's soft from so many washes? Do I put away the photographs from my childhood because he's in them? How do I organize my things so they don't remind me of the flat we shared before? She must have sensed my reluctance to be assertive because all day it was: "this couch should obviously go here under the window," and, "darling, if you insist on this many shelves, then you must devote a room to them, you can't just let them take over your entire flat!" And I let her because if she asked me what I wanted I would have told her that I don't care. To just put it anywhere it fits. To just get it over with.
My first night in the new flat I dreamt that I was running through a mansion, although I couldn't quite run fast enough. And something was chasing me up the endless flights of stairs and I knew that I wasn't going to make it much longer. It was an awful feeling, knowing that you'll be captured. I didn't dare look behind me because I knew that if I saw the monster, it would get me. Then I saw a door outlined in bright light and I knew I had to reach it and I tried to run faster and I finally got to the door and pulled on the doorknob and it gave a little as if someone was trying to hold it closed from the opposite side. It was in that moment that I knew that I had been tricked and my fate lay in the monster's hands. And it was in that moment that I realized I didn't care.