Eyes of Thunder
Part 1: Ottery St. Catchpole
By Nyx
A/N: This story is a crossover with "The House On Mango Street" vingette 'Minerva Writes Poems'. You don't have to have read "Mango Street" to understand it, though, and it's probably better if you haven't. There *are* some allusions to other fanfictions in this. See if you can catch them. As always, enjoy. This is my first attempt at writing a longer fanfiction; it's done in the style of a collection of vingettes.
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Good Daughter
I've always been stuck in the same place, the same little corner of Ottery St. Catchpole. The broken-down house at the end of E. Douglas is where I live: the Burrow, a "quaint" little ramshackle place that I tell people to go to when they want to visit. It's not my home, though: its chicken-scratched yard is nothing like the place I dream of. I cannot imagine spending the rest of my life with the pipes rattling in the attic and daily fixing something-or-other with a quick spell.
Temporary, I tell myself. Just until I get my own job and a nice flat in the city, just until I marry into money and can have that beautiful Victorian mansion with sweeping, sloping lawns and a house elf or two to take care of things. But I know how these things go.
The sorting hat said to me, what are you doing in your family? You know that you don't belong. You would really do better somewhere else - but since you'll be a misfit if you're anything but the tradition, I suppose it'll have to be GRYFFINDOR! I don't feel like a Gryffindor. What are you doing in your family, it asked, and before I could give it all sorts of answers. I'm drying the dishes. I'm de-gnoming the garden. I'm being a good daughter and getting a summer job and giving Mother the money that was mine, that I worked for myself. But I find that there isn't really anything to say.
What am I doing in my family? What am I doing in that broken-down house at the end of E. Douglas? I know I don't belong here. There must be some mistake.
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Miscalculation
It honestly really wasn't my fault when the beaker spilled over in Potions, really it wasn't. I was only handing it to Geneva and she was taking it, reaching out far too slowly and not quite grabbing in time to steady it.
Professor Snape whose hair is always greasy, like the chain on a bike, told me that I could stay afterwards and sort out the monkey hairs. Brown or black or white, the tiny strands blurred together and stuck in funny ways to my fingers. I pulled one of my own hairs out of my head and laid it next to the others on the paper that let me see the contrast. It was long and florid red and not like the rest at all, but I defiantly dropped it into the little pile of white hairs. No! Not like that! Professor Snape is very good at scolding me, very good at scolding the other Gryffindors. What would you do, Professor Snape, if I told you I wasn't a Gryffindor? Because right now I don't think I am. I'm a Hoopooakabra and a Queverene and a Malacroft, but not a Gryffindor or a Slytherin or any of the Hogwarts houses.
You are showing me something on the blackboard, but I don't understand it. Something about monkey hairs and what they're made of, something insanely advanced. I'm a fourth year, I'm not supposed to know this yet! But you knew this by your fourth year, didn't you? You write something, some algebra problem, and I see a mistake.
Professor, you've made a slight miscalculation, I say. You didn't round right. You use rounding and significant figures in magic and Muggle science, right?
All you can do is stare and sputter, snap at me and feel like an idiot. But I know why you made me stay after when Geneva spilled the beaker.
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Great Hall, After Dinner
Manta with the beautiful auburn hair, you looked at me yesterday. I always wanted that color hair - like my mother's, brownish to soften the red! of a Coke can that always contrasts with everything I stand against or look at and makes my face seem even paler. Your eyes are chocolatey brown, Manta - how did you get those eyes? They don't seem to fit with the rest of you at all.
After dinner the Great Hall is muddled and that is why I noticed you. You're a first-year, but you look so much braver and older and stronger than I do and I envy you for it. The fashionable green wraps you wear on your wrists tell me you're a Slytherin - is that why you carry yourself so proudly? You stood right next to me and turned your head to search for someone in the crowd, and that's when our eyes connected.
Don't you understand, Manta? If we could only trade places I would be so much happier. You are tall and slender and beautiful, even at eleven, and I still have the baby fat that won't ever go away and the dimples in my cheeks. You have new robes and new dresses and new books - don't you ever wish that you weren't so rich sometimes?
Manta, Manta, Manta. Wishing isn't helping but sometimes I've got to indulge, have that triple-decker ice cream sundae from Florean Fortescue's Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor. The Great Hall. After dinner. You made me feel so small, but so in awe. Manta.
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My Three Knuts
I'm the queen of the world! Anjy, you are irrepressible today and I know that I could be irrepressible if I tried. But I'm too tired to try. Today I feel like I have been living a thousand years, like I have been carrying the heaviest load up a hundred and fifty mountains. I don't even really know why.
My brother is Ron, at least the one who is closest to my age, and he is always trusting me. It's OK, she's my little sister, she knows when to keep her mouth shut. And I do know, some days. But other days I am as open and free as anything and as babbling as a stream, and the words just flow out of my mouth. But he still keeps trusting me. This time, he knows I will do better. And I will the next time, too, and the time after that. But he stopped trusting me today, and I saw him walking alone, talking to himself. Why did you stop trusting, Ron? What did I do, after all that time of trusting and telling and trusting again?
And the not-trusting wasn't enough. His friends who smile and say, oh how cute little Ginny is, all know things about him that I don't. He doesn't tell me things anymore; he tells them, and they laugh and smile together, not knowing that I'm thinking and dreaming and wishing that they would let me in.
But Angie is still prancing about with the little tiara on her head, romping through the fourth-year dorm, and I don't want her to get outside. Anjy! You are the queen of the world, but queens of the world don't prance, and Anjy stops and flounces down onto the bed and crosses her legs like a little girl.
Why not? she asks. Why don't they? Queens of the world could do anything if they wanted to. Anjy is like that. One moment she is bouncing off the walls and the next she is calm and composed and asking the strangest questions. Anjy is always irrepressible. I don't know, I tell her, but have you ever seen Queen Elizabeth prance? And I've given my three Knuts and that's the end of that discussion.
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Vines
The sky is purple, splashed with stars in nonsensical patterns. It's not the way the sky is supposed to be. Or is it?
Sitting alone on the tiled rooftop of the Great Hall, I feel at peace. Happy. My house will have a tiled roof. Perhaps it will be a Mediterranean villa, with stucco walls and a brick patio and vines climbing up and over it. A vine's playground. There are no vines in this part of Hogwarts - the only ones that are allowed to cover the walls are in the old castle, the part that is half falling down. This year part of it fell, and we are forbidden from entering it - but I find it to be the most perfect part of the great rambling Hogwarts whole. The old castle, the castle that looked out on the forested lands when the Founders first found the spot for their school.
I can imagine the sight they must have seen as they flew on their homemade broomsticks towards their chosen place: the abandoned stones jutting upwards like a lone tooth in the great green gum of the earth, windows gaping, gardens overgrown, pigs and sheep running free through the forest. The turrets would have beseeched them to come, to make their home in this inhospitable place - to make it beautiful again, and lively. And they would have answered the call.
Right now with the purply sky and the dancing stars and the tiled roof smooth and slippery under me, I can be proud of what has happened. Hogwarts is huge, filled with laughter and love and life. And slowly, the vines tear down the old to make way for the new.
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Téa And Me
Téa has a brother who is younger than she is and he's an awful bore. Just like Percy. Of course Téa is just a year older than me so he's in my year - a Ravenclaw, always studying studying studying. He's never met a book he didn't like.
Téa is as exotic as the most beautiful jungle flower. She makes me feel like a dandelion in comparison - a dandelion or some other sort of weed. Something that would not be seen in any respectable garden. Manta is a lot like Téa, but she is younger and softer, less brazen. Téa's hair is raven-black and glossy, falling almost to the floor in beautiful waves; Manta's shyly peeks out of gauzy scarves or tightly bound buns, wispy and soft, curly.
It's funny how hair shows itself. Me, mine is bone-straight, but it's always clean and pristine. Téa's brother's is in tight little curls that grow close to his head, and he shaves them every Tuesday. His hair grows fast and by Friday they're there again, like little springs only recalcitrant. Anjy's is crazy like her - frizzy and wavy, forming a blond halo around her face. And Ron's is slicked down in a hairstyle that went out a few years ago.
I wouldn't want to be Téa, though, not for all the glorious long black hair in the world. Téa is a Hufflepuff with a secret, and she can never ever tell. I don't know what it is, but I see the shiner she has when she waits on Platform 9 3/4 with the rest of us. Who gave you that black eye, I wonder, as she chats with Padma Patil. Is that your secret?
But I'll never know. She is a Hufflepuff with a secret and she can never ever tell, not even when I see the pain on her face as she kisses her father goodbye and boards the Hogwarts Express.
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Sink or Swim
Sink or swim, Max the Brain told me. Sink or swim. That's the way life is. I'm gonna swim. What about you?
Swim, I told him. Swim like the fishes in the deep blue sea, and he laughed a little before explaining the rest of the transfiguration to me. He tutors me at lunchtime, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I fixed his dress robes for him to make them the right length again. Max is the only person at Hogwarts who is poorer than me, and he's an orphan without anything at all. He goes on charity and always has the oldest, most worn things.
In my mind I imagine telling him that I'm gonna sink. It's an option. After all, I've never swum a stroke so far.
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Purity Control
Virginia means pure, virgin, bla bla bla bla until Anjy winkingly puts a charm on my ears so they look like they've fallen off. Defense Against the Dark Arts sucks like a vacuum cleaner. And you! Professor Grolier turns on Anjy next, ignoring my charmed ears. Anjy is a made-up name, but it comes from Angela, which means angel...
According to Professor Grolier your name can be used against you. Mine could be used to make me boil myself to death or something, trying to be as clean and pure as I could possibly be - and Anjy's, well, they could make her jump off a building trying to fly like an angel.
Virginia is my name, but only because it was given to me. My name is really Ginny, I think, because if you call me Virginia I won't answer to it. Unless you are Professor Grolier. VIR-gin-i-ah, she shouts, enunciating each sound until the name is almost unrecognizable. You are dis-tra-c-ted to-DAY. I consider talking back and acting sassy. No, Professor, I don't seem to be dis-tra-c-ted, I'm distracted though, is it the same thing? But I don't dare, because Professor Grolier hates people who talk back to her.
It's interesting how something that's pure like Virginia can be boiled down to nothing more than
vir
gin
ia
vir
gin
Gin.
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Stood on the Shoulders
They want me to see far, to see into the future. Come on, the tall one says, the one with greasy salt-and-pepper hair that makes me think of cheap all-night diners. You're just being difficult.
Yeah, the short one takes up the cry, just difficult. You know, people have been seeing the future since the dawn of time. Bird entrails and all that.
But I don't want to pick through the future and the past. It's hard enough knowing I could. Professor Trelawney must have found these two, told them that I just needed a good scare to look forward and be the greatest Seer of all time. Greatest Seer. Ha. She acts like she's so good, acts so proud of her accomplishments. But the timeline of the world is laid out before me like a map, or could be.
What lies ahead are things that are too horrible. I don't want to think about them right now.
Sorry, I reply to them, smiling innocently. It's like there's a block. Something stopping me from seeing it. It wasn't there this morning but this morning I wasn't looking, so come back in two weeks and maybe by then it'll be gone? Total bullshit, I know it and they know it, but they don't dare put me in a worse mood than I'm already in.
Stick in the mud.
Obstructing the Ministry.
We can make you tell us, you know, they remind me. But I'm already slipping out the door. They can't make me tell them, because if they did it would be classified as distracting a seer, something that can result in untrue predictions. Never mind that I'm not the traditional kind of seer.
If I have seen far, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.
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Or Not
One, two, three, four! From the window I can hear first-years playing in the snow. Five! Six! They're playing snow hide-and-seek, seeing who can hide themselves the best under snowdrifts without using magic. Their toes are kept warm by magic, and they happily toss the powder around. Seven, eight, nine, ten! The voices drift up to my ears.
I don't recognize anyone, and I remember how I looked up to the big sixth and seventh years when I was a first year. They probably know me. But I'm hidden up in the Gryffindor dorm like Rapunzel, locked away from the snow and the sleet and the crisp winter air. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen...
They'll never find me, because I'm not part of their game. Never. Not up here, not in my cozy corner. I'm smiling for some strange reason, and I sit on my bed with its eiderdown comforter wrapped around me. Nyah, nyah, you'll never guess where I'm hiding!
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Ready or not. Here they come.
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Daniel 8:17
I didn't want to talk about it this morning. I still don't. Geneva and Anjy woke me up by setting off a Filibuster's No-Heat, Wet-Start firework in front of my face; I blinked and started to cry. They didn't understand why, and I was perfectly happy not explaining to them - so they climbed back into their own beds, puzzled.
But I knew why I was so upset. I knew my own mind. I knew that I had dreamed of the endtime, and I knew that the prophecy would be filled. It would be. It was told to me, in the dream; told to me by the haughty voice that I knew but could not place, the voice that became strangely soft towards the end. Bright nights and dark days, Light skies and black ways, Glory and justice one and the same, Heavens open with a piercing rain, The lightning hearkens to its kin, Every country purged of sin, Yet somehow they will go on, Fighting, fighting till the break of dawn. I was frightened by it, and that's why I cried at Anjy and Geneva.
::a sulfuric smell bites sharply at my nose; the dust is up again and I cover my face with a handkerchief to keep it off:: I am remembering again, and I shut my eyes and pull the covers over my head. I'm safe, I've had my hot cocoa and brushed my teeth and the curtains are pulled on the canopy bed. It's just me. Prophecy comes from within and I know I'll be shaking and sweating by the time I awaken.
::the eyes of thunder, they hover, they blink, they're clouding my vision:: What is happening? What is going on? I close my eyes and the visions come back to me. The nightmares come back. I'm afraid... and I am angry.
I used to be such a little person. The youngest in a family of eight. Remarkable only because I know Harry Potter. Now I'm a big person, the Ministry of Magic has caught on, and I can see from one end of history to the other.
But being a big person isn't all it's cracked up to be, and neither is the endtime.
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finis part 1
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Index of vingettes in part 1:
Good Daughter
Miscalculation
Great Hall, After Dinner
My Three Knuts
Vines
Téa and Me
Sink or Swim
Purity Control
Stood on the Shoulders
Or Not
Daniel 8:17
A/N: This is my first truly long fic. Please review! It would really help a poor vingette writer to get better at long fics.
The prophecy Ginny has:
Bright nights and dark days
Light skies and black ways
Glory and justice one and the same
Heavens open with a piercing rain
The lightning hearkens to its kin
Every country purged of sin
Yet somehow they will go on
Fighting, fighting till the break of dawn.
~Nyx~
The blabbing, gaudy and remorseful day
Has sunk into the bosom of the sea
-Shakespeare
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