Word count: 900
Written for:
QLFC Round 1 - SEEKER: Write about your chosen Death Eater visiting or being visited by someone
Hogwarts Muggle Studies assignment - Write about someone who is a creator, preserver, or destroyer. For extra credit, write about someone who embodies all three traits.
Chocolate Frog Card Club - Someone is extremely emotional and distressed in your story
Evening
She plants them in the evening, when the soil is cool but soft enough to let a spade cut through.
She grasps a divided carton of six, dealing quick raps to the undersides of each section until the root clusters can be extracted safely. One at a time, she lifts them and deposits them in the soil, patting down earth on all sides, feeling the veins of the leaves between her fingers. Placing one plant in the ground, she feels something alive, something that squirms away from her touch. She recoils, then leans forward to examine it with glee. It is a garden worm, and she longs to tear it apart; it is so helpless and she so much stronger. But she has been told that these creatures help the plants, so she reluctantly drops it into the earth again.
It is frustrating work to keep these flimsy plants alive and unbroken. Her hands, once porcelain and spotless, are now coated in a fine layer of dirt. She wishes to be away from the humid air and the hum of insects that come out in the night. But her gaze returns to the flower petals; they are crimson red, and her heart sings with pleasure.
Red is Bella's favorite color; red is the color of blood and flowers and everything she likes.
She leaves her manor to water them every day, and although they are planted deep in the grounds, she walks to them to keep her secret hers. The hem of her dress trails through the mud, but she doesn't mind, because the dress is black and her other dresses are black too, and after all, the servants will wash her clothes off matter their condition. There is only the discomfort of walking in mud that makes a squelching noise with every step. She wishes it would be silent.
It would be only fair. She is made to be silent, told so by her tutors and her mother and father, and her sisters too. Andromeda is bossy, the meddling sister who gets in her way and must always know why, and how, and then what. Narcissa is little better; she lives only to fawn over boys and do what she is told, finding ways to be the best even if they are not to be compared. Her sisters are distant, though she spends every waking moment with them, so she she takes comfort in herself. She preserves the peace, although inside she is enraged. And she plants her flowers in the distant south garden, and looks after them in the evenings with unusual care, because evening is best for tending to flowers. The poor common boy in the market told her so.
He told her too that the blue bells would look lovely with her black curls, and so she bought flowers of flaming red to spite him.
Then her father comes home, and he is flanked by two. There is a boy with black hair like hers, and a boy with blond, and is repulsed by their stupid bows and shirt collars. They sit on either side of her on the stiff sofa in the sitting room, so close she can't breath for fear of touching one. She doesn't want to touch them; they're gross.
"I'm delighted to meet you," says one. "Rabastan."
She says nothing, just glaring at him.
"This is Bella," her mother and father say in chorus. "Bella, talk to your beau."
She refuses, and even after they drag her into the kitchen, wailing and screaming, she will say nothing to the boy she has only just laid eyes on, but must marry one day. Marriage seems terrible, if mother and father are any indication. It is two people lying together, sleeping on their backs stoic and unmoving. And married people have children. She hates this most of all. Children with their messy hands, their yelling and mocking, their ugly grins. She knows she is a child, but puts it out of her mind. She is a Black; she is treated like an adult and that is proper.
She escapes from that house, escaping the boy and her parents and her sisters who sit there prim and proper. She runs to the safety of her flowers, tucked in the corner of the garden in the evening. But she stares at the sunlight striking the trees, the birds fluttering from branch to branch and leaving in fear when she walks by.
How dare they; how dare the sun shine when it should be setting.
She stares at the red blossoms, sweet-smelling and flawless. And without any pause, she rips each out of the ground, shredding every petals into little pieces under her feet. She slips on the mud, falling down in the muck that has formed with the morning dew, screaming at her flowers that dare to mock her. Her hand finds her cheek and she pauses; she is crying.
This surprises her for only a moment. Then she is busy again, trampling the results of her weeks of her tending until not a stem of green remains. At last, tired out from her toil, she collapses to the ground. Her mother and father appear, walking dignified with Narcissa at their backs, and she hides her face even as the butler drags her away, back to the manor.
They cannot steal her pride from her.