De Reir A Cheile A Thogtar No Caisleain

or

The Ice Cream Story

:Introduction:

(A very long time before our story, or really anything of very much interest, starts, we have to pause for a moment, because it won't really make much sense if you don't know that)

Something different happens.

Merope Gaunt cuts her foot on a stone. It's a small cut, but aggravating—on the side of her heel, just where her shoe doesn't cover, except when it does; when she takes a step wrong, she finds by ginger experiment, it rubs.

So she's sitting on a rock at the side of the road, silently blaming the sun for her problems, because it's the only thing around to listen, and it never takes any reprisal. It's quite nice today, in fact, and falls over her back and dark hair with a warm grace. She been wondering at that, because forgiveness is not something that she understands the worth of, yet she has found she wishes for it none the less, and these kinds of thoughts have lulled her into a quiet fondness for existence.

That is what shapes the state she is in when she hears a sound along the road—back, higher on the hill toward the house and above the village. And then, following the sound, comes a young man around the corner. He smiled when he sees her sitting on her stone, because it is a sunny day and he is a sunny man, with ruddy cheeks, long bones, and locks of not quite curling yellow hair. But she doesn't do much to respond and he frowns at that, looking at her with the earliest breath of worry. His course changes and then he lingers at the edge of the road, before her, inquiring what might be wrong.

"I have some bandage with me, I think," he says, when she cannot contrive to conceal her foot. "Or maybe…a handkerchief." He's kneeling down, looking at her lifted ankle, because he said he was going to be a doctor. She had been planning on doing it herself, eventually, before walking on, but he had offered in the manner of all capable people, who are not easily refused. She is not used to doing anything except deferring; she is good at going small.

"It's not bleeding," she tells him—partly trying, like usual, to make him go away, because he is helping her. "It just rubs."

"Well, that isn't good," the man says, as though this information is absolutely engrossing when he can see quite clearly how much blood there is or isn't, and what can only attempt to gloss over her awkwardness makes her flush. But his hands feel cool on her sole, and she was going into town to see Tom, and say—so, it will go better if she lets the young man wrap his handkerchief neat and tightly about her foot and ankles, and the little irritation leaves her alone.

"Are you alright?" the strange man asks, and then again, and she is crying. Not the obligatory tears that life beats out of her often enough. These come in a storm of the kind she hasn't weathered since she was a child, the kind that come without any acceptance, when you cannot bear thinking about the way of things any longer because it simply isn't fair. She thought that time had long since numbed that righteousness right out of her, after a thousand nights of tears that woke up to mornings just the same, the tears changing nothing. But that thought, this moment, wring the acceptance out of her and find the tears inside, because her life is a quilt made up of shabby patches and little irritations. Merope Gaunt knows, when it comes down to it, that she is not a very interesting character. Her life is made of pieces, but why, for once, can't she steal cloth from something good?

Because…

"I don't know," she says. "I'm pregnant."

The man looks at her. "Oh," he says.

"Oh," she says, because she had not intended to say that, or not to this man—she thinks of Tom, and her insides melt, but as always she isn't sure if, molten, she will ever reform.

"Are you married?" he asks, and she knows that he can see her finger, kneeling as he still beside her stone. He was about to put her foot down before she started crying, but he seems to have forgotten about it except for the unconscious pressure.

She hiccups "No," and shakes her head. She doesn't like the way he asks the obvious to get her talking. She doesn't much like talking. It feels strange.

She was heading into town today to find Tom and leave forever. In a few months- once she was certain—she was going to tell him about their baby. No need to overburden today with that information on top of so many weighty expectations placed there, already stretching things thin. After all, her magic was what had told her, as it was far to early for a normal girl to know; it would be a bit much for poor Tom, to give him magic and a baby to think over in one day.

She finds herself telling the strange man all this. Not the bit about magic, or even her fears for—of—Tom, but once she starts to describe her life and hope and family, she finds a great enough sea of words for all of them that those ones can be pushed aside.

"Then why are you crying?" the young man demands, looking up at her. It's quiet, polite, but it is a demand because no one asks her for these things about herself.

"Because I'm pregnant," she snaps at him. "My moods are…wandering." And it is true, actually. She knows she wouldn't be feeling this way if it weren't for her always dramatic mood swings. But somehow, sitting on the rock, she cannot decide whether she would prefer it if these things hadn't happened.

" Your hormones, yes," he says. "But more than that, what do you think it means?"

She raises an eyebrow, sniffles. "Means?"

"Just because there's a reason you feel terrible doesn't mean it mightn't say more about your life," he says. "Oh. Here, use my…never mind, I've rather used my handkerchief up for the day."

That makes her smile, just a little. "What do you think this says about my life, then?" she asks him.

He shrugs. "I don't know. This man of yours."

"Yes," she says.

"Would you tell me about him?" he asks her. So she does.

At the end he looks at her eyes. One of his thumbs is curved over her heel. "I see," he says.

"What?" she asks eagerly, because it's her Tom and she wants to know what this man she already thinks must do very in his life can tell her.

"It's just me," he tells her eyes. "You love the man. But it doesn't seem to me as though you like him very much."

A strand of hair falls into his eyes then, as he tips his face back to look at her, and the moment breaks as he bends his neck, muttering, and tucking the curl away. The sun lights up his hair like the grace of summer in the wheat fields, and Merope is caught just long enough that consideration slips in before her dreams can protest, and she thinks.

She thinks that he is right.

And because of the stones, the one that cut into her foot and the first one she saw to sit on and hope that foot would heal, and because of that hope and what it called from around the corner, that is the day that Merope Gaunt leaves forever, just as she planned.

It's the day that she walk off down the road with the man she had not expected, and three weeks before the day when she marries him, and eight months later she has a healthy son. It was not what she planned but, she finds, it is quite pleasant—somehow in all her dreaming she did not think of enjoying life with Tom. It never occurred to her to do so. But life with the man teaches her all about the things inside her she has never seen before.

The man, by the way, is named Charles, and he is quite happy too, if very surprised. He will remain that way through sixty years of marriage, eternally, pleasantly surprised by the memory of the day he walked around a corner and turned the next one with his future wife beside him. He is more surprised by this, in fact—as well as the sixty years afterward, in which she doesn't leave him—than he is to learn that she is a witch. He takes that quite well, really, and eventually becomes a magical-world businessman, because, as he comments, most wizards who are supposed to be good at it don't use magic all that often anyway.

They live in a nice house together.

And Merope decides not to name her child anything starting with an M. After a fierce debate with her new mother-in-law, in which she announces that she is never naming her son after anyone, ever, Charles pokes his head in and points out that he is, after all, his child too. So she decides that he can name him, which was not what he had intended, but he knows better than to argue.

So the little boy grows up, and shows no interest whatsoever in world domination except in business, which he inherits from his father, and Scrabble, which he is very, very good at.

Merope and her husband, and then her son, grow older and then grow old, and all around the planet wizarding life goes merrily, explosively on, and Lilly Potter plants cucumbers and tomatoes in the garden in Godric's Hollow year after year in the years that she has, now, and little Harry catches bugs—and tries to eat them sometimes—and no one in particular dies.

And things happen.

That's the good stuff. We're getting there.