Ordinary
By Librasmile
923 words
Logline: There comes a time when everyone has to face the question ofwhat's more important? Making the smart choice or your OWN choice? Lily's time is now and timing is everything…
Author's Notes: Yes, I suck cause I still haven't updated my longer stories. But this came to me and I thought I'd dash it off and post it. It's yet another installment in what's turning out to be one long story arc that begins with For the Price of My Familiar and ends with Well Done My Good and Faithful Servant for now. This story comes after As Pretty Does. So the sequence now appears to be: For the Price, As Pretty Does, Ordinary, The Healer's Apprentice, Confessions of a Cornwall Grad, and Well Done, My Good and Faithful Servant.
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and the related characters are all the property of JK Rowling, Scholastic Books, Bloomsbury, Warner Brothers, you get the picture. I make no money from this story.
Ordinary.
That was how her sister looked and that was what her sister had wanted to be: an ordinary-looking woman with a tidy little house, and a neatly trimmed garden on a smooth, straight street with neighbors just like herself.
Ordinary…
But SHE wasn't ordinary. Not in the odd things she made happen – always accidental, never deliberate no matter what her sister claimed – and only occasionally regretted. Nor did she look it. She had their great-grandmother's scandalous beauty. The flaming hair and eyes so green they set relatives and jilted swains to whispering with the jealousy and envy their vivid color symbolized. She'd made things happen too – always an accident, never deliberate, no matter what her neighbors and later her doctors claimed. They didn't believe her ancestor then any more than her own sister believed her now. They'd locked the woman up and threatened to leave her there unless she behaved, towed the line, became ordinary. And she had done it, her mother – for she'd been her mother's grandmother – would say proudly. While no one ever seemed to comment on how dull the green in her great grandmother's eyes had become.
No more laughing emerald, no more sharp green. Merely hazel.
Ordinary.
For herself, she'd rather die.
Anything BUT ordinary. THAT was what she wanted.
But what kind of ordinary?
She'd thought that question had been answered when she'd gotten her letter, when she'd agreed to go to the school.
But even there, she'd discovered there were different levels of ordinary. Because she was just one among many and Muggleborn at that. And Muggleborn was maybe worse than ordinary. Neither praiseworthy, nor notorious. Neither tragic, nor auspicious. Merely mediocre. Ordinary.
And she could stand to be anything but ordinary.
So she'd thought.
Oh she'd sweated hard to stand out without seeming to try. She'd excelled at charms. She'd shone in potions. She'd charmed her teachers. She'd been granted membership into the exclusive Slug Club. She'd even been made head girl. But none of it could erase the ignominy – no, the merciless mediocrity of being Muggleborn.
And she could stand to be anything but ordinary.
So she'd thought.
She COULD have done more. That WERE options she could have taken. There were rules she could have spurned. There were taboos she could have broken.
But when it came right down to it, when she'd had to choose…
On the one hand there had been the school's star – all sunlight and sociability, popularity and privilege, everything they'd said she should have wanted. She'd seen his type early on in family photos, hovering in the background at some long-gone Gilded Age soiree reeking of flash, flirtation and fun. She'd seen the type repeated more sedately in the photos – what in Merlin's name had made her family take and keep those pictures anyway? – illustrating the superior expressions and self-satisfied bearing of the doctors who'd made her behave. Which one's proposal had her great-grandmother turned down? She can't remember and her mother would never tell.
Would it have made a difference?
There was nothing forbidden about him. Nothing feral. Nothing forcing open doors to the hidden places within herself, the places she'd rather not know. The ones that seemed to lurk behind the dull green of her great-grandmother's eyes. He was a dream come true, this privileged, pampered, princeling.
But, and this was the other hand, when held against the living gaze of soul-piercing black eyes – ordinary.
There were no such things as black-colored eyes, irises technically. Not for humans. And she knew his eyes weren't really black. Just the deepest, darkest brown eyes she'd ever seen, so much so they might as well have been black. And everyone kept telling her that the color declared everything there was to say about him, his manners, his morals, his soul. He was the school's scapegoat, her friends would say, so what more was there to know?
No one had ever seemed to notice that dark eyes could be seductive, hinting of secrets meant just for you, sending out a silent beckoning that wrapped itself around you, slithered under your skin and threatened to pull you under. No one had ever seemed to notice how darkness could be as open and exposed as sunlight, could convey a depthless stream of want and need that could drown you – but wouldn't, if you knew how to navigate it.
And sometimes she'd tell herself she could. They had been friends before this, before school, so she should have been able. Sometimes she'd tell herself that if she could just find the right point of entry at the water's edge, if she could just catch the right current and swim for all she was worth, she could safely plumb the depths.
But why do that when you could stay safely on the shore?
They'd never warned her of the dangers of wanting to be pulled under. No. They'd only ever pointed out the merits of staying safe and laughing on the sunlit shore with her princeling versus the danger of wading into the murky depths and never coming back up. And no offered any assurances that might wade in after her if she sank…
So she'd made the smart choice. She'd settled for ordinary.
Ordinary and safe.
That's what she'd chosen.
It had been best for everyone.
Those were her last thoughts in the suspended moment after she felt the green fire cauterize the connection between body and soul and she passed through the veil followed by the dying echoes of a baby's cries.
~Fin~