May
By Oscura
Warning – femmeslash, unrequited.
Disclaimer – I do not own or make any profit from these characters. The quotation belongs to the estate of Philip Larkin.
"Spring, of all seasons, most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter…"
For the first twelve and a half years of your life you were anaemic, all your skin wilting defiantly inwards, eyes drifting closed every hour. Persistently your mind folded into sleep. Parvati is so slow! people would say, is there something (voices lowered) wrong with her? You didn't understand why you were the only person to feel so strange, so apart, so tired and so divorced from the world.
Last summer your mother took you to a doctor, and now you take little tablets of iron every morning; the whole world seems changed, a grey veil of sleep has fallen away and the colours are brighter. Is it the iron, bracing you up, filling your blood and pushing your eyes open? Or just the strangeness of this nearly-thirteen time, every meal tastes different, your mouth can detect such nuances of flavour previously unknown. Music makes you hot all over.
It is a cold winter, a fear-spiced winter (your flesh buzzes with sensation. What a strange word that is – flesh. So thick and wet when your mouth tries to form it). When the year turns you start noticing a girl, a Ravenclaw with streams of fair hair down her back, a Sixth Year.
The spring opens with slow budding of trees and the buds breaking open, pale grass creeping over the earth and silvery morning skies, and storms; you watch for her in the Great Hall at meals. In odd moments you say her name in your head (not, for some reason, out loud), practising different intonations (it is like her: Clearwater. You dream of a white river and a moon, and you wake up shivering, and wet all over with sweat). Slowly you let the name run over your mental tongue, it is a long drink,
c l e a r w a t e r
And a question – Clearwater? – who is she? You know she likes iced pumpkin juice and light, fresh meals; she likes wearing her hair loose – there is a great deal more that you don't know at all.
She is four years your senior, and you've seen her holding hands with Percy Weasley. The first time you saw this, the was a ridiculous urge in you, a wanting to cry that left you breathless. Nobody noticed, so it must have been less obvious than it felt to you.
At night you brush your hair for a long time, two hundred strokes, it gleams over you shoulders. You put lip-gloss on and look in the mirror at your shiny wet mouth, put your finger on it. You borrow a book from one of the Third Years, and try to read your own tea-leaves but nothing makes sense. (Too young, too young – these words haunt you.) The trees around the castle are cloaked in blossom, you sit underneath them to study sometimes, and it's like being in a scented white tent made of silk, all the little flowers quivering in the low winds. You have little breasts that ache in the evenings, and sometimes your eyes fill suddenly with tears.
Your mother used to talk to you about mythology, English stories, Greek ones and Indian ones, in her deep voice as she bathed you in the twilight and put you to bed, a double bed where you and Padma slept entwined like two young trees. So you know that Penelope waited on the green island for Odysseus to return, weaving and unravelling her bright threads. As children, you were always Odysseus (the dominant twin, you think it's called), dressed in shiny armour to dash in and rescue Padma-Penelope from the wicked suitors, take her in your arms and claim her as bride and wife.
You dream that you are a young knight, your black hair bound at your narrow neck, clothed in mail wrought of silver, releasing her (the fair, fair lady) from the castle and riding away, swift under the blossoming trees, the petals raining down into pale clouds, and your black charger parting them.
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