Title: Ocean Jeers
School: Mahoutokoro
Theme: Neville is BWL AU
Main Prompt: Red [Colour]
Other Prompt: "You know, I didn't see that one coming!" he/she gasped. [Speech]
Year: Seventh (Part-Time)
A/N: I decided to switch the role of the chosen one's parents. After all, there are no happy endings in love and war.
1976
The tide was high, and the surf was heavy. I dived in and rode a couple of waves, but they had reached that stage of power in which you could feel the whole strength of the ocean pulling at your toes. The second wave, as it tore toward the coast with me in its tendrils, spewed me a little ahead of it, encroaching rapidly. Suddenly it was immeasurably bigger than I ever was, rushing me away from the control of gravity and taking control of me itself; the wave threw me down in a primitive plunge without a bottom, then there was a bottom, grinding sand, and I skidded onto the shore. The wave hesitated, balanced there, and then hissed back toward the deep water, its tentacles not quite interested enough in me to drag me with it.
I coughed, hacking up whatever it was that was in my mouth. "You know, I didn't see that one coming!" I gasped. James seemed to laugh at my expense.
I lifted myself up and made my way up on the beach and laid down, heaving heavy breathes that didn't quite settle right on my chest. James came, ceremoniously took my pulse, and then went back into the ocean. He stayed in for an hour or four, breaking off every few minutes to come back to me to jeer at the lazy doodles I made in the sand. I had to brush the top layer away in order to lie down on it, the sand as hot as the sweltering red sun, and Jame's progress across the beach had become a series of high, startled leaps.
The ocean, throwing up foaming sun-sprays across some nearby rocks, was winter cold. This kind of red sunshine and ocean, with the accumulating roar of the surf and the salty, adventurous, flirting wind from the sea, always intoxicated James. He was everywhere; he indulged himself within the red of his cheeks hugely, he laughed out loud at passing seagulls. And he did everything he could think of for me and my selfish, ulterior desires.
We were surrounded by people, their leers and glares fixed on him, and I turned to look myself to see why. His skin radiated a reddish-copper, like blood and red wine, his brown hair had been a little bleached by the sweltering sun, and I noticed that the tan made his eyes shine like a red-hot poker. "Everybody's staring at you," he suddenly said to me. "It's because of that tan you picked up this afternoon."
He yawned, then, and had leaned against my shoulder, his arms strewn restlessly across his mid-section. It was comforting, and I had wanted to card my fingers through his hair, but I wasn't ready to be so close. I wasn't ready, and neither was he, probably. "Show-off."
Enough broken rules were enough that night. Neither of us suggested going into any of the honky-tonks or beer gardens. Though we did, however, manage to convince a respectable-looking bar to slide a single glass of whiskey under the table and into our blistered, red palms. We settled along some sand dunes that night, under red and white dwarf stars, our minds in the dark, and our mouths in our asses.
"Sorry about, you know, dragging you here along with me at the point of a wand," James started, running a stick through the sand and along the bottom of the rocks. "You can't come to the beach alone. It's a place where teenagers would bring their best mates to play ball or whatever the muggles call it."
He hesitated, mouthing the next words as if he couldn't bear to say them aloud. "Which is what you are," and then there was silence on his dune.
It was a courageous thing to have said, exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at my parent's house would have been the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back, pulled at my chain and stopped me. Perhaps I had been halted by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.
I hadn't answered, but I did slide my hand into his, subtle and confident enough to not to let go. I had hoped it was enough to convey that I felt just as he did, but maybe a tad bit more.
1976
That next morning I saw dawn for the first time. It began not as the gorgeous fanfare over the ocean I had expected, but as a strange grey thing, like sunshine seen through burlap. I looked over to see if James was awake. He had still been asleep, although in the drained light he looked more dead than he did asleep — I could still make out the dull, red tan of his cheeks. The ocean looked dead too, dead grey waves hissing mordantly along the beach, which was grey and dead-looking itself. Nothing was pretty without the red of the sun, really.
I turned over on my side and had tried to sleep again but couldn't, and so I had laid on my back and looked up at the grey burlap sky. Very gradually, like one instrument after another being tentatively rehearsed, beacons of red and yellow began to pierce the sky. The ocean perked up a little from the reflection of those coloured reds in the sky. Bright high lights shone on the tips of waves, and beneath its grey surface, I could see lurking washed-out red — almost as red as James skin. The beach shed its deadness and became a spectral ashen-red, then more white than red, and finally, it was totally white and stainless, as pure as the shores of Eden.
James, still asleep on his dune of white and gold, twisted with the ebbing light, like a lion in a field of grain. I didn't contemplate that transformation for long. Inside my head, for as long as I could remember, there had always been a sense of time ticking steadily. I looked at the sky and the ocean and knew it was around six-thirty. The ride back to the Potter's would take three hours at least. I wanted more than anything for it to last as long as life.
James had woke up talking, sand-caked around the edges of his chapped lips. "I'm never sleeping on sand, again. I got it in places it should never be."
"Good morning to you, too, princess."
James ignored me, stretching his legs across mine. "What time is it, anyway?" He knew I was a walking clock.
"It's going on seven o'clock."
"There's time for just a short swim," and before I could have said anything, he was trotting down the beach, shedding clothes as he went, and into the ocean. He came back after a while full of red glow and energy and talk. I didn't have much to say. My misery had been too deep to speak any more. I was having trouble breathing, as though all the oxygen in the world had ceased to exist and left me to figure out a way around it. Amidst its devastation, my mind had flashed from thought to thought, despairingly in search of something left in which it could rely on. Not rely on absolutely, perhaps, that had been obliterated as a possibility, but just to rely on a little, some solace, something surviving in the ruins.
And I had found it. I found a single sustaining thought. The coy manner from the night before had been a screen, and I was playing right into his oblivious hands. He was my best mate, and I was his. I wanted more, and he didn't even know I thought about other things besides quidditch and pretty girls in tight-fitting skirts.
1993
James was dead now, too, but not like he was at the beach. He was as thin as a skeleton, and his red tan was washed-out and replaced by ashen flesh that clung to his bones like a limpid rag. Sometimes I found it hard to look at him, sometimes I discovered myself thoughtlessly slipping back into affection for him again. It was hard to remember a time when one summer day after another had broke with a cool effulgence over us, and there was a breath of widening life in the morning air — something hard to describe — an oxygen intoxicant, a shining northern paganism, some odor, some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back onto my bed on guard against it.
It was hard to remember in the heady and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because James had finally managed to lift his red and gold scarf from his neck because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.
No one cared enough to notice I only ever visited James, but no one had ever exercised any real discipline over us, to begin with, anyway, and I realized were on our own again. Just him and I, but it was always been just him and I.
At least, in my head, it was just him and I.
But, he had Lily, and she was red and everything sugar and spice.
James always did like the colour red.
I didn't want to tell him I thought otherwise.