Hello there my darlings, this is just a quickie, a little snippet of a story that just marched into my head and refused to leave. It'll only be three chapters long, a mini ficlet if you will, as I have more than enough unfinished stories to be getting on with without starting anything fresh!
Anyway, here we go, all honours to JKR
(Warning for swearing and mentions of sex)
Love and hugs
A.A.A.
They're funny things - beginnings.
Where do they actually begin? At the moment of our births? The moment of our conception?
(Ew no, I am not thinking about that!)
Perhaps my beginning was the moment the Sorting Hat placed me in Gryffindor.
I suppose you can call beginnings flexible, you make them what you want.
(And don't get me started about endings, we'll be here all night!)
.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning...
Day One: Wednesday 18th November, 2031
Chapter One
Expectation
"So, when are you going to tell your Mum?"
"Tell Mum what?" I stalled, trying not to look guilty as I straightened a wayward curl of hair.
"That you lost your job. That you've had your house repossessed. That you're working in a seedy nightclub. Take your pick, there's plenty to go around." Al looked annoyingly virtuous as he listed my many failings, ticking them off, one by one, on his fingers.
"I told you, I'm only staying on the sofa until I can find a new roommate, and anyway, can you imagine if I told Mum the truth? She'd explode, then come back to make me clean up the mess."
It was true, Mum would be furious if she found out how far I'd fallen from grace. Which was why she was never going to find out.
It was nine am on a particularly gloomy Wednesday morning somewhere in the middle of November, and I had just finished scrubbing down the work surfaces in Al's kitchen when he stumped in, hair looking more like a bird's nest than ever, and managed to traverse the distance from the doorway to the coffee pot without putting on his glasses. Which doesn't sound that impressive until you realise that he's as blind as a bat without them. No, really. He spent most of his childhood running into lampposts. He's the only person I know who crashed into the wrong barrier at King's Cross.
He downed the coffee in a startlingly small amount of time, and extracted his glasses from the cutlery drawer, sliding the bent frames onto his crooked nose.
Then the inquisition had started.
"The thing is," he said, running a hand through his mop of hair and getting his fingers stuck, "it's not that I don't love having you here, and your OCD really makes a difference to the grime levels-"
I cast my eyes around the kitchen which, thanks to the liberal doses of Mr Mulpepper's Multipurpose Acid Cleaner (works on blood, bone and steel) that I had been injecting since six o'clock that morning, was sparkling in a way that disguised the fact that only the night before you hadn't been able to get out the door thanks to all the pizza boxes and empty beer crates.
"-but Scorpius's portkey gets in soon and he's asked if he can stay here for the time being."
I froze.
"Malfoy's back?" I stuttered.
Al nodded awkwardly, poking at the coffee maker to hide his own embarrassment.
"Yeah, look Rosie, I know you guys left things pretty badly, but he was my best mate all through Hogwarts and he's got nowhere else to go."
I could almost feel the bottom of my stomach falling out through the soles of my feet. Pretty badly had to be the understatement of the century.
"When's he back?" I asked, feigning indifferent as I picked up Al's coffee mug from where he'd dumped it on the draining board and began to run the hot tap.
"Friday."
Three days, I thought miserably. Three days to turn my entire life around.
The ironic thing was that a year ago, when we'd last seen each other, I'd had the perfect home, the perfect job, the perfect boyfriend, and I'd been bloody miserable. Now I was homeless, singing in a down-and-out club to make ends meet, and single as that one very lonely sock in the dryer.
Was I happy? I wasn't sure.
Three days. I could turn things around in three days.
...
Perhaps I should start at the beginning...
In true Weasley traditional fashion I was sorted into Gryffindor, a house with colours that clashed spectacularly with my then-carrot coloured hair. I coasted through my first six years, hanging mostly with the popular crowd because I could always get front row tickets to the league quidditch matches, and mostly ignoring my schoolwork which in any case was pretty easy.
Looking back, it was a wonder I didn't drive my poor parents insane. It wasn't that I disliked academia, or even quidditch for that matter. It was just that I liked my music more, kind of to the exclusion of everything else really. I ran the Hogwarts choir, sang in a band, and played three different instruments. I used to spend hours in the Muggle Studies rooms, stroking the ivories through jazz, blues, classical, muggle and wizarding music alike. Sometimes I even fell asleep there, head resting against the piano.
I had it all planned out. I would graduate Hogwarts and start a music career, perhaps as the front singer of an award winning wrock band, perhaps as a classical composer, perhaps as a jazz musician who would reinvent the genre. It was those dreams that got me through the classes that frankly bored me to tears.
And then, in my seventh year, he exploded into my life and everything turned upside-down.
Despite the new integration policies, I had had very little to do with Al's friend Scorpius, who mostly kept himself to himself. He was neither musical, or social, so I barely used to notice him. Add to the fact that, at least until that point, he had been freakishly small, awaiting the growth spurt that never seemed to arrive, and whenever we did happen to be in the same room I used to gaze over the top of his head.
But that summer he'd grown at least a foot and a half and I'd finally stopped growing, and it was as though he was everywhere.
It was that year that I realised that he wasn't quiet because he was socially inept, or because he was introverted in any way. No, it was because his uncle was a lord, and his family had gold in a vault dating back to the twelfth century, and because his eleventh birthday present had been his own personal lawyer.
Coming from a family like mine, one where money was always on the tight side and my bedroom was a converted airing cupboard, it seemed difficult to understand how we ended up in bed together. We simply ran in different spheres of life.
Those months were magic, no pun intended. But as with all things, it had to end. One furious argument too many and suddenly he receded back into his world of dinners with the Minister of Magic and diamond chandeliers lighting breakfast. I thought I was over it. I couldn't be with someone who thought champagne was budget anyway.
Fast forward two years and I was in bed with him again. I was working in the clerical job Mum had got me at the Ministry and I was bored to tears. That night, drunk as a skunk in springtime, I'd just found out that I'd been promoted to Chief Undersecretary to the Under Secretary of the Secretary of the Minister of Foreign Relations in the Department of Magical Cooperation and was drinking at a seedy club in London to try and console myself when I bumped into him, a leggy blond with another leggy blond on his arm.
We'd ended up drinking the best part of three bottles of tequila and drunkenly making out in the bathroom, before ending up back at my flat where we didn't even make it to the bedroom, sprawling out across the kitchen table.
What followed was, predictably, a completely fatalistic relationship that I never could really put a label on. He'd take a phone call when we were in bed together, I'd let him see me with another boy. He'd pull back at the slightest inclination that I might want more. Which I didn't. Well, not really.
Another night, another argument. Perhaps that was always going to be the way with us. I quit my increasingly soul destroying job at the ministry to sing in a band that had one hit album, then crashed back down into obscurity. He became a junior partner in his family's firm. The only contact we had in the next eighteen months was when I saw his marriage was announced in the Daily Prophet.
The day of the wedding, he turned up at my flat, looking for a place to stay and it struck me that, for all his connections and mountains of gold, the young Malfoy heir was lonely. We decided over a bottle of firewhiskey that we were going to give being roommates a go.
There were rules of course, no sex being at the very top of the list. We managed longer than I would have supposed but eventually we both caved and it was like seeing in technicolour again, like it had been in Hogwarts. He tugged me into his glistening world of elegant dinners and fancy cocktail restaurants. I picked up a taste for dry martinis and caviar, called everyone darling so I didn't have to remember names, and air kissed everyone so as not to smudge my two-hundred galleon-a-stick lipstick.
It was an odd life, insubstantial and dreamlike. And when we inevitably ended things about six months later, I felt like those months had been nothing more than a fairytale. I grounded myself by immersing myself in the newly emerging reawakening of the art deco movement, smoking thin French cigarettes, and ironing my hair into glossy ribbons. I wore lipstick like slashes of blood and dressed entirely in black and stiletto heels, emphasising my pale skin and sharp cheekbones with powder and rogue.
By the time I turned twenty-three I hadn't seen him in almost two whole years and I was seeing someone else when he turned up at a concert I was playing in. He didn't beg which in any case I wouldn't have wanted. But he kissed the inside of my wrist in a way that always made my toes curl and asked me to go to New York with him. I agree, and we left that night, leaving behind my perfect boyfriend and the second ministry job Mum had managed to get for me, sneaking out of the flat I had shared with my boyfriend, hand in hand and clutching our suitcases.
New York was incredible, a fantasy landscape of buildings that scraped the stars and wild parties. I loved the fast pace, the jazz scene, the intoxicating magic of the city that never sleeps.
What can I say? Another night, another argument and I stormed out in a furious rage. I paced the streets of New York for hours before my rage finally evaporated enough for my brain to kick in and the guilt to bubble up. When I got back to our apartment it was dark, the windows glaring. I found Scorpius on the sofa, an empty bottle in hand staring at the wall across from him with a blank kind of hopelessness. I joined him on the sofa and pulled a bottle of Vodka from the drinks cupboard, extracting out two tumblers.
That night, when we finally fell back on the pillows, panting in exhausted silence, he whispered something to me that the buzzing in my ears made it hard to hear. His lips brushed my neck, then he rolled over, his back to me.
I lay there for what felt like hours, listening to the sound of his breathing. Then I leant over and kissed his jaw line, just once before climbing out of bed and gathering my belongings.
I left New York that night and that was the last time I saw him.
I found a job as a nightclub singer in a little place in the centre of London and moved in with a friend until she got married a few months ago. Then I moved in with Al.
...
Three days. I could get my life together in three days.
How hard could it be?
Reviews make my day!
Love and hugs
A.A.A.