Well hi! I'm Rachel, and I'm pretty new to writing fanfiction, and especially a long one. Just stick with me here, hehe cx Okay. Here goes nothing.


When we were running, I couldn't have cared less about her. She was our sister's friend, probably simply out of pity. People liked her, people were friends with her. But we were running, and I thought that she would have only slowed us down. I thought we would never need anyone. I thought we were going to be fine, with just us and the shop. I thought that was all life was going to be, and I was fine with it.

Then you stopped running, and I started to go backwards. For three solid weeks, I wouldn't move off my bed. The first two days I cried for hours straight. Mostly, I would sleep. My dreams would be full of you and I, pulling our favorite pranks. We'd be running around the school, or running the shop. Just running again, me and you, like it was supposed to be. Sometimes I would dream of what would happen if you came back to life, not magically or anything, just back alive. And we would start running again.

That's how I spent most of those three solid weeks, running in the place just before the war, running in the pocket of time when I thought everything was absolutely perfect. Then mum decided she had had enough. Sure, she was broken down, too, but we all needed to recover and nobody knew it better than the women in the house. Mum and Ginny would work together to make me do things other than sit and dream and hope. They eventually had me return to the store, only two months after you were gone. It was like ripping off a band-aid, to say the least, except the scab under it came off along with the band-aid. It hurt, and it's going to take longer to heal now.

Soon, I had escaped the little pocket of time. I seemed to be moving forward, sprinting even. I would smile at customers and pull pranks and everyone would laugh at my antics. But then I would run backwards, into the times that we had shared, the things that we did. I would travel back to our first prank, before we could even hardly speak. I would run through memories more vivid than then earth after a good rain.

Once, exactly four months, two weeks, and six days after you died, I found one with her in it. I had probably been through it before, my subconscious playing it repeatedly, waiting for me to notice this tiny detail. Finally, I saw it. We were hanging mistletoe in inconvenient places around the school, setting the fairies out of their clear glass ornaments and stripping the lights of the trees, replacing them in the suits of armor as glowing eyes. Just as you had hung a strand of shedding garland, I saw in the corner of my mind's eyes a whip of blonde hair, a tiny giggle. She was standing behind me, muttering something about an infestation of nargles. I had paid her no mind then, and I hardly paid her mind now. But then I remembered your sigh and when I turned from my task of setting the tree toppers to explode in the middle of a class, I saw her lips pressed to yours and your eyes closed softly.

I sat straight up in my bed. More incidents came from the past, you and her, together. You had never confessed your love for her, and I was never paying attention to her, so I didn't know if these memories were simply figments of my imagination, but I had to know. I had to know if anyone missed you as much as I did. I had to find out if she had stopped running, so I made it my mission then and there to ask her as soon as I possibly could.


Well, that wasn't too bad, right? Let me know what you guys think, please! xoxo, Rachel