All right, so this is all about Lucy Weasley. I was just going to make it a one-shot, but… it got a bit out of control. So it'll just be Lucy's story, in a multi-chapter fic instead. Enjoy!

Audrey Weasley was a Muggle. Thus, she could not use magic. She couldn't participate in Quidditch or any other game that wizards played for recreation. So she had different hobbies. Like gardening. Audrey had the best garden in the entire Weasley family, and she didn't even use magic to create or maintain it.

Lucy grew up with this garden quite literally in her front yard. So is it really any coincidence that she came to love the flowers too?

Little Lucy, with yellow-blond hair and sapphire eyes, had spent every day in the garden since before she could walk. While her father was at work in the Ministry, her mother would work in the garden with Lucy next to her and Molly sitting primly close by, but not close enough to actually touch the soil (she hated getting dirty). Lucy could hold a trowel before she could speak and things went on from there. By the age of six she was watering the plants and sometimes helping with the potting.

Audrey was overjoyed at the chance to share her passion with her daughter. She taught Lucy as much as she could over the next two years.

But when Lucy was eight her mother got sick. It was cancer. A Muggle disease. Percy took Audrey to St. Mungo's but the Healers had no idea how to treat the sickness. They had no experience with it, and had never tried to cure it because it was, after all, a Muggle illness. Witches and wizards didn't get cancer. So Audrey was discharged from St. Mungo's and checked into a Muggle hospital. By then, though, it was too late. Audrey was dead by the time Lucy turned nine.

Percy threw himself even harder into his work. He had already been gone quite often but now he would be away by six thirty or seven in the morning and not back until nine at night. Molly was at Hogwarts. A nanny was hired to take care of Lucy. This woman, Mrs. Pecker, was in her early fifties with gray-streaked cinnamon hair. She fed Lucy three times a day and made sure she was clean and healthy, but that was pretty much all. The rest of the time Mrs. Pecker put her glasses on her beaked nose and read romance novels.

And Lucy? Well, she spent her time in the garden. It made her feel less lonely. With her mother, father, and sister all gone from her life most of the time, she had no one to talk to. So she conversed with her flowers. They all had personalities. The climbing roses were prideful and supercilious. They lifted their petals and only condescended to answer her in snooty, snobbish tones. The marigolds were cheerful and optimistic, but sometimes their constant happiness only saddened Lucy more. Tulips were fickle, feminine, and giggly. Lilies were bubbly and merry, dahlias graceful and soft-spoken, forget-me-nots melancholy and moody, daisies childish, mums stoic and proper. Really, daffodils made the best conversation with their quiet, pensive, but still somehow optimistic advice.

It was always a bit of a struggle to get her flowers, because her father couldn't stand to take her out. It would remind him too much of her mother. She had to beg Mrs. Pecker for weeks on end before the nanny would agree to take her to the nursery. She saved up all her allowance and birthday money for those few occasions, buying seeds as often as she could because they were so much cheaper than the already germinated plants.

Lucy spent the two and a half years after her mother's death in this manner.

Springs meant that her daffodils would finally grow—they were bulbs, so she planted them in autumn and they germinated once the weather got warm again. This time of year was always happy for Lucy. She could plant as many flowers as she wanted as the earth warmed again.

Summer was the best time of year. This was when Molly finally came home and Lucy had someone to talk to. Sometimes. Molly had a lot of friends, so she went out a lot, to their houses. The cousins sometimes visited Lucy and sometimes she visited them, but somehow she just didn't feel comfortable talking to most of them. Generally she just escaped outside and hid in the gardens. This was when the brightest, showiest flowers bloomed. She did like them, but she couldn't help but miss her daffodils. They wilted as soon as the temperature rose, remaining dormant until next spring.

In autumn she planted her mums and everyone else left again. She spent more and more time in the garden, knowing that soon winter would come and she would be confined indoors with no flowers. Her father didn't allow potted plants in the house. If the flowers were in the garden he could ignore them. But indoors was off-limits.

Winter was the worst. Lucy had no plants to talk to, nothing to take her mind off the loneliness. She tried to occupy herself by studying or reading or anything, really, but it wasn't the same. Her birthday came and went in February. She received clothes, books, and money from her family. The clothes were all frill, girly dresses that she would never wear for fear of soiling them. The books were stories and novels that she would try to read. But she just wasn't interested in them like she would have been in a gardening manual. The money she saved for the spring when she would buy her flowers, soil, and mulch.

Then, the summer of 2018, she prepared to go to Hogwarts. She received her letter in July and went school shopping in early August. She had finished One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, the Herbology text, before September even came.

On August 31, she said goodbye to her garden, knowing no one would care for it while she was gone and that it would probably be full of weeds and half-dead when she got back. All of her plants gave their farewells in their own way.

Marigolds: "Hogwarts'll be a blast! Good luck!"

Tulips: "Make sure you pick up a nice boy."

Roses: "Yes, well, it's not as if we need you. Go off to school."

Daisies: "Don't leave us! We'll miss you too much!"

Lilies: "You'll do great! See you next summer!"

And, in her mind, the dormant daffodils wished her well, too, saying, "It'll be fine, Lucy. You'll have the opportunity to make lots of new friends. And Hogwarts has gardens, too. Don't miss us too much. We'll always be here, waiting for you to come back."

Then it was late, and Mrs. Pecker was calling her in to go to sleep.

Love it? Hate it? Tell me. Please review! I'll be eternally grateful.