Quick little ficlet I wrote in about 5mins just now while waiting for my lunch to finish cooking. I quite like it, let me know if I'm alone in this judgement!
Disclaimer: As much as I'd love to say I own Harry Potter (since it would make me unbelievably rich for a start) I'm afraid that I don't.
They say that every bride is beautiful on her wedding day.
This always confused me, as a child, and even into my teenage years. I would look at some of the…ahem, less pleasant looking girls in my classes and think, 'No.' How could pale Eryn Smith with her lanky brown hair and lifeless grey eyes ever be beautiful? How could anyone ever call Jenny Rankly anything other than 'buck-toothed weirdo?' It just didn't make sense to me. I didn't understand how somehow putting on a long white dress could make someone beautiful. I couldn't fathom how a piece of material could alter the appearance of someone so much that they seemed almost to become someone else.
Most of all, I felt pity. Pity for all those men who married these women, looking so perfect on their wedding day, only to get them home and ask themselves through the bottom of their empty goblet of drowned sorrows, what in Merlin's name they had been thinking. Of course, I hadn't factored in the fact that all these newly shackled husbands had of course seen their new brides before the big day, but even so - surely a glimpse of Paradise, seen for a day then forever denied you, was a cruel torture?
This, of course, was all when I was younger. More naïve. Before That Day.
Lily Evans was always an extremely pretty girl. It didn't matter what she did. What she wore. How she acted. She was always striking. Her long mane of red hair cascaded down her back like a shower of gold-spun fire. It used to make me ache with longing to run my calloused fingers through it, feel the strands slip through them like the finest silk. When she parted her rosebud lips to smile, it would creep right up to the corners of her eyes, and her soul seemed to dance in the emerald flecked green of her eyes.
I watched her grow for seven years at school. I watched her robes fill out as she became a woman and her beauty flourished. I bore witness to every eruption of rage, every nuance of her happiness, and at times I would cradle every tear she shed in the curve of my heart and ache for her.
Lily Evans was not beautiful on her wedding day. She was radiant. She looked so angelic that every heart in the church there began to ache. And the day that she didn't become Lily Black, I finally felt my heart break.