Roxanne Weasley never did trust many people. They always ended up deserting her like her mother did. She thinks that was why she stumbled into the park that day, tears streaming down her cheeks as she contemplated the thought of Dad and that woman from the Ministry getting married. Somehow she ended up in a flowery rosebush, the thorns tearing at her olive skin, blood the color of her hair dripping down her arms. She didn't care at that moment, though. She simply wanted to curl up in between the roses and the thorns and the leaves and cry until she couldn't cry anymore.
She doesn't know how long it was that she laid there, glistening tears streaming down her dirty cheeks, before a small beam of light was shed on her. She raised her tangled, knotted-hair head and looked up at the small boy who was peering into the rosebush, his dark eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
"Hi," he says simply, his voice laced with innocence only seven-year-olds like themselves could ever attempt to possess. His hand dives into her hiding place, a thorn embedding itself in his skin as he offers her help to escape from her sweet-smelling cave.
Without a second thought, she grabs his hand, and, Merlin, she thinks it's the smartest thing she's ever done in her entire life.
It's a few minutes later, after the blood's been wiped away from her soft skin, that they're sitting on a blue painted bench, just talking and licking ice cream cones his mother's bought for them. He tells her about his toys and his Muggle school, and in turn, she tells him about her family and her father's remarriage. Eventually, though, it begins getting dark and her father comes searching for her, yelling her name and she has to leave her newest friend, Henry Williams. Secretly, she thinks he looks like a dashing prince from the storybooks her mother used to read to her with his mysterious eyes, the color of freshly mowed grass, and his dark curls. And he thinks she looks like a coffee-skinned angel with an auburn halo.
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It's eight years later, and every once in awhile, they still meet up at the same park and sit on the same blue-painted bench, licking the same ice cream cones, but mainly they just spend time together at their houses, being best friends and things of the sort.
They'll never tell anyone, but she still thinks he looks like a prince and he still thinks she looks like an angel.
She's spiralling out of control, she is. She's that girl, the one with all of the boys dangling off of her little finger like there's no tomorrow, the one whose best friends are a bottle of Jack and lines of cocaine, the one whose stumbling home every night, drunk. And all the while, he's the star football player, the valedictorian, and the student body president. He's perfect, and she's quite the opposite, really. But still, an unlikely pair, they stick together through thick and thin.
He's there when she gets expelled from her "boarding school."
He's there when she gets hospitalized for accidentally overdosing.
And she's there when that Muggle girl, Victoria Prince, breaks his heart. She's there, picking up the pieces of his life when she couldn't do the same for herself, and he says it's like magic how she seems to make everything in his life better, her own personal brand of magic. Oh, if only he knew.
-:-
And as they leave their trouble teens, venturing into the dark unknown of vivacious adulthood, she can't stop Emily Harrison from crashing into his life like a hurricane, wrapping him around her finger until he's in too deep and he proposes.
Thrilled, the young twenty-year-old groom sends out invitations to his oldest best friend, begging her to be his unofficial best man. Roxanne politely declines, refusing to hurt herself beyond recognition by going to a wedding she didn't fully support, and takes off to Germany where he'd least expect to find her, curling up in a dirty hotel room and wasting away under the influence of large amounts of alcohol and drugs.
Too late, he realizes that he never really loved Emily. And so, he ditches her at the altar, running out of the chapel and towards the airport until he's got a stitch in his side that he can't get rid of, and he takes the first flight to Germany because he and Fred had always gotten on rather well and Fred had divulged where his sister was taking off to hours before the wedding had even begun.
The plane gets caught in a thunderstorm somewhere over Netherlands, resulting in a crashed plane that's so twisted you can't even call it a plane anymore and every single passenger and faculty member dead.
Roxanne doesn't even know until she finally musters the courage to return to Ottery St. Catchpole a few years later, a bright young German boy wrapped around her finger. She finds their old rosebush and curls up between the thorns and roses and leaves and just cries until she can't cry anymore.
Happy endings never did like Roxanne Weasley, but she doesn't think they could have had a happy ending, anyways, because she isn't a prim-and-proper princess fit for a grassy-eyed prince, she's a coffee-colored angel with an auburn halo.