A/N: Hey, my people! It's been a while, yeah? This is a long, deeply moving story about nothing particular. I just felt like writing it, so I wrote it. Also, I apologize for the cover. I had no idea what to make, and so I just plopped the title on some random image. Forgive me? I love you.
Also, the story is Dramione, by the way. If you didn't read who the main characters are. Their names are not mentioned even once throughout this entire story. It's part of the beauty of the plot. So yeah! My last Dramione was humor, I don't know how this one's going to go.
Read and review, please! Reviews make me happy:)
"It's all about the boy with hair the gold color of morning, and nothing about everything else."
She hated work.
There was something very different in mind when she pictured herself as an adult; probably a beautiful, influential witch in Wizarding society. She was not. She wore the same jeans, her hair was still an unmanageable tangle of curls, and she was still dreaming.
Funny thing about dreams, is that dreams should go somewhere. You were supposed to chase your dreams, and smile while you slept because the dreams took your hand and danced with you.
And when you live your dreams, you were supposed to feel an odd, lovely satisfaction. At least, that's what she thought, she didn't know. She had never felt it herself.
The thing was, she didn't want to chase her dreams. She wanted her dreams to chase her.
She wanted to run out into the world and throw her arms up in the rain and scream until her voice stumbled on the edge of a cliff on her vocal range and tipped off into outer space. There was something very freeing about thinking of an infinite field of wildflowers, and wearing a sundress in the springtime.
But she never knew those things.
So she wrote about them.
She wrote quite a bit. She had this pretty wooden chest in her room at the foot of her bed, almost filled to the brim with books. Books not printed, but books carefully, lovingly, handwritten with sweet little poems and stories and even silly day-to-day occurring instances that she found thought-provoking.
She wouldn't say she loved writing. She wouldn't say she loved anything at all, these days. She had forgotten love, because love had forgotten her.
Ron had broken up with her with a hasty apology, before running off with his perfect girlfriend to a perfect home somewhere in aristocratic London. Everyone tread on eggshells around her, allowing her to sulk alone in the living room. She could read, they insisted, as they toiled away in the yard. But when she allowed her cold fingers to pick up a book and turn the page, all she could hear was the sound of their laughter as they soaked themselves in each other. In love. A forgotten substance to her.
There was a certain art to it, she mused. Feeling alone. Alone was not the same thing as lonely. Alone was a feeling in which you feel rather sorry for yourself, but think highly of yourself because of it. Thinking you're stronger just because of the pain you feel every day. So much pain, that you soon become numb to it and feel nothing at all.
She thought she might resort to drinking. It'd make for a nice, bitter story. Drinking away her numbness until she began to feel something. But she found she hated drinking. If she did not know love, she knew hate.
There were many things she hated. Work, drinking, and spending time with her friends were just a few. The more time she spent with them, them and their worried, probing eyes, the more she wanted to drink, and she hated drinking.
She had just returned from a War Reunion. Why did they even conduct those? Why would anyone want to remember something so terrible?
She opened her newest journal, sunlight spilling from the windows to stain her paper. That was pretty, she thought. It'd make for a nice first sentence.
She wanted to write something deeply moving about death, but the more she thought about it, there was nothing deeply moving about it at all. And that frustrated her. Death was supposed to be a flightless bird that broke hearts and blinded eyes. Not something as ordinary as telephone poles off the coast of the sea.
She slammed the journal shut and got ready for work.
She sat opposite him, the boy who defected. Everybody hated him here. There was nothing they saw but the mark on his arm, that terrible writhing mark. She hated that mark too, but for some reason, she didn't hate him.
She stirred her coffee. Bitter, sugar-less coffee. Why did she even care about her sugar? She was a witch, they must've thought up something to counter that by now.
And yet, she allowed herself to think, he and her were so sickeningly intertwined together. He was hated for the same reason she was loved. For the marks on their arms.
She glanced at it. M-U-D-B-L-O-O-D. What any ugly word. She'd have liked to write S-A-D-I-S-T-I-C B-I-T-C-H on Bellatrix's arm. Not with a knife, of course. Or a wand. Maybe with Sharpie or something.
His was blacker than black, maybe even blacker than her disgusting coffee. It didn't matter much to her. She enjoyed black. Black was the color of the ink on her papers splayed with the gold light of morning. A good color. The color of harder choices, deeper pasts but also stronger facades.
That's what made her look at him. His hair was the color of the gold light on her pages, black was the color of the ink on his arm, and his eyes were the color of the atmosphere she locked herself in. His hands were the color of the key. White bone, inlayed with diamonds.
She watched as he coughed on the purposely badly-made coffee someone had brought him. She watched as he tried to open his letters, and when reading the comments of people everywhere telling him to go and kill himself, she watched him set fire to them and dump the ashes in the coffee. And then she watched him put his head in his hands and look across to the left of him at the bare, white wall. Starched white, like the color of his hands.
He didn't cry. He never cried. He really showed no sign that he felt anything at all.
Like her.
She wondered if she liked their similarities or not.
Routine. Everything was routine.
Wake up. Open journal. Write nothing. Go to work. Go home. Open journal. Write something. Go to bed.
Repeat.
If there was nothing so deep about death, then why did she so deeply yearn for it?
There was a writing magazine sitting on her desk, dusty from her own ignorance and burning hatred for it's ugly cover. She approached almost carefully, as a cat approaches a dog, and slowly flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for.
WRITING CONTEST! ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A WAY TO GET YOUR WRITING NOTICED? THEN ENTER OUR SHORT STORY CONTEST! BEST PIECE OF WRITING WILL BE POSTED ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE DAILY PROPHET! MUST BE UNDER 6000 WORDS.
She looked at it for another moment, wondering what it'd be like to see her writing on the front page of the Prophet, and then slammed the magazine shut. She tore the page out and flung it into her fireplace, breathing heavily.
She was selfish. She was the only who would read her writing, she was the only who'd ever understand everything she went through, then, now, and seemingly forever.
It didn't matter. She went to bed, and she purposely wrote nothing in her journal. To break the routine. To break anything.
"You're lowering the entire tone of the office."
Her boss was a plump man that did nothing but drink good coffee and sit in his rolling chair. She wished she had a rolling chair.
"You're bringing down your team. You'll ruin it for the rest of us."
Bringing down your team bringing down your team bringing down your team—
She wanted very badly to quit, but for some reason, she couldn't. All she'd do would bring down her team even farther. She was a failure.
She put her head in her hands and looked at the blank wall, trying very hard to see why exactly he did it.
She didn't know why. It did nothing to quiet the screaming inside her ears.
It was a cold afternoon when he approached her with a cup of coffee. The first approach.
"I don't think you're bringing down the team." was what he said. And it was simple, and it made sense.
She didn't want to thank him, because she didn't know what for. So she took the coffee, and sipped. It was sugary. It was delicious.
And just the fact that she drank it, was thank-you enough.
She chewed on a lump of salad. Limp, tasteless salad.
Watching her weight. What a joke. She was slowly starving herself of any goodness in the art that was living. The art she wrote about in her journal but never felt in real life.
She was so afraid of the fat beneath her chin, on her abdomen, on her arms, on her thighs. There were many things she was afraid of after the war, but this was the worst.
She looked in the mirror and saw the unkempt hair, the pallid skin, the dead eyes. She looked at her chewed fingernails and unflattering clothing, and then the salad and her nose. She saw the fat everywhere, so much she couldn't get away from it. She saw it all, and knew she was ugly.
And she thought about him, and his mark and how people hated him for it. She hated him for it, simply because she did not hate him. And she wanted to.
She thought about how she was not alone anymore, but lonely, and how nothing else mattered in the world except not being lonely anymore, but there was nothing she could do.
So for the first time, she put her head in her hands, stared at the blank wall in her kitchen, and started to cry.
Her hair was thoroughly brushed. It fell down her back in an array of chocolate-colored curls.
She had washed and moisturized and her skin looked like pearl. She applied a small amount of makeup, and even put on a pretty blouse and skirt.
There was only one person in the entire world that she wanted to look pretty for, and he wasn't Ron.
And when she came into the office that morning and sat across from him, he gave her a very small smile, and she decided to smile back.
They were sitting in front of a huge willow tree.
She didn't know how they got to the park behind her house, but they did.
"Do you ever think about the war?" his voice was clipped. She liked his voice.
"All the time." she replied, and flicked at a dandelion. "Wish for something."
He glanced at the wildflower, and plucked it out of the grass. "One of these is prettier than a dozen roses," he announced, after careful examination.
"Why is that?" she asked him curiously, slipping off her shoes to bury her toes in the summer grass.
"Think about a rose." he said, leaning backwards to put his arms behind his head. "Beautiful, but when you reach out to take it, it pricks you with thorns. Some people don't think that dandelions are beautiful too, but while roses hold thorns, dandelions hold wishes. A million wishes; far more precious than a mile of roses." He looked at her, and smiled.
There was something very pretty in his smile, like Peter Pan's kiss, and she wanted it. Wanted it more than anything she had ever wanted in her life.
So she leaned down, and she took it.
She was sitting in front of her window, like she had done so many times, with a journal lying open in her lap. Gold light rested on the pages like drops of rain. It was a routine she had forgotten.
Calligraphy was the art of beautiful writing. Was writing beautiful when the handwriting was messy? She thought so. There was so much more to writing than pretty letters and nice fonts.
She wanted to write something deep about love, but she found there was so much depth it was impossible to write about, but only to feel.
But she wanted to write something, so she picked up her pen.
And in long, curving letters, in her own calligraphy, she wrote:
He makes me beautiful.
"Write something," he said simply, handing her a piece of rough paper and a quill.
She arched an eyebrow. "Like what?"
"Anything." he replied, leaning forward comfortably. "You're a writer, aren't you?"
She took the quill from him and poised it over the paper, thinking.
"Life is beautiful." she wrote finally, and handed it back to him.
And it was enough.