Nothing Gold Can Stay

Because people called her the quiet one. The shy one. The one who would be beautiful, you know, if she ever lifted her head up for people to see. The shorter one, the skinnier one. Not all-braun-no-brains, but all-beauty-still-plain. She hated being in the shadow of others, but you can't help who your family is. That's what she'd say. Every morning she'd get up, look in the mirror, and you can't help who your family is, you can't help who your family is, you can't help who your family is. Sometimes just once. Sometimes a few dozen. It depended. She already knew what her day would be like. She'd be the one to point out something really important in class, but nobody would hear her. Or listen. She'd expect three to seven students to request a message to be delivered to V (V for Vindictive, she liked to think, but she knew that was untrue because her sister was who she was, which made her anything but vindictive). And then from noon to nightfall jealousy would overcome her, and settle in and soak her skin for a while, and then she'd be all exhausted from the rage that she'd fall into an early but satisfying sleep.

Love was a word that caused her blood to boil, that one. It had started off when she was young, too young to know that love comes on so many levels of intensity, when she just thought it was a word that Grandma Weasley felt the need to use in every sentence. The uneasy feeling over the idea of love came when she was four or five and realized that oh, daddy loves me more than V or Lou and she thought, hmm, that's odd, and so she asked Daddy, "Who does Mommy love best?" And the moment that love became confusing to her was when Daddy said that no, Mommy, loves all of her children equally, and she knew that Daddy didn't, and Daddy knew that she knew that oh, Daddy picks favorites. Daddy's favorite was Dom. That was when the trouble began.

She realized why this was the moment she was sorted into the house of her ancestors, whereas her sister had been sorted into the house that would be loyal to her ancestors. She wasn't brave, or chivalrous. The hat thought she was brave because she was willing to take any kind of risk, no matter the consequences. But what the hat didn't know, and what her father understood, was that it wasn't courage that fueled her odysseys, but curiosity. That was why she was admired so much by her father, because she would be the one exploring giant caves and dragon lairs in the middle of nowhere. This was something she knew from a young age, and maybe, just maybe, it was part of the reason she was always so quiet. She already knew what would happen in the future, and the present had absolutely no effect on that, so why bother? It made so much sense to her.

Another reason why she hates herself so much for calling her elder sister vindictive. Because sure, she was the slightest bit prettier. And she got more O's than Dom did, but that was because Victoire applied herself to the maximum. Another thing that Dominique didn't do. She was jealous of Victoire because, by being sorted into Hufflepuff, she had already bashed everyone's expectations of her in, while Dom was still forced into living up to them. How lucky Louis was, off at Beaux. He was forgotten. Dom was forgotten too, but she had to watch herself be forgotten, while he was being noticed, actually noticed by the French. The pale, blonde, veela Weasleys melded in fantastically with the wide array of others; the brunettes, the gingers, the whites, the blacks, the straights, the homosexuals, the ones with a different surname. It wasn't the fact that she was different that cast her away from the others, because V and Lou fit in perfectly. Like missing jigsaw pieces. A puzzle with ten parts, no more no less (you know, save for the extra room for that Malfoy boy and the Scamander twins and that muggle musician that Albus ended up marrying). If anyone was going to be calling anybody vindictive, V could be calling her sister that. Daddy's little princess gets whatever she wants, she could think, Daddy's little princess isn't me. But Dom knew she didn't say that, not to herself, not to anyone. V was sweet, and caring, and kind, and always supportive, and Dominique had decided a long time ago that that was why her first crush married her sister.

And to be fair to Dominique, it wasn't just a crush. The girl had had serious feelings for the almost-Potter since the naïve age of nine, and had realized the true extent of these emotions by the age of thirteen. Her sister was seventeen and Dominique experienced her first boatload of jealousy (something, she was soon to discover, would be the ultimate word to define her) when V had that fling with the boy in her last year of Hogwarts. But Dom poked and prodded, (like the curious little rascal you are, her father might've said) until she realized that it was a nothing (Teddy's worth more than a nothing, she had wanted to sob, he's worth more than an everything) and that she still had a chance. It was when she was fifteen (and her sister was nineteen, and the bane-of-her-existence-light-of-her-life was twenty one) that things became serious between the two, just a few months after she had confessed (well, to herself, at least) how trulymadlydeeply she was in love with him. And so, grabbing onto what little Gryffindor (no, not bravery, but) brashness she could find, she divulged. She said it, and not even on his doorstep in the pouring rain at one thirty in the morning in a romantic outfit, slowly contracting hypothermia, either. One day he passed her in the kitchen of the burrow over Easter holidays and he waved and then she waved back and then she paused and said something like 'wait' or 'hold on a sec' and then said everything, everything that had been juggling across her mind for weeks and weeks and months and months, starting with "You know Professor Adelund? Yeah, he's really got a thing for bugging me," and ending with "... and it just hurts sometimes because I'm so, so in love with you. And so is she, and she deserves you more than anything, so please, don't mind me."

And you know what? He didn't. He didn't mind her heartbreak at all, he just went on with his life, became a Hogwarts Professor (thank the heavens, she'd dropped Potions already), and had two kids with her sister who she was forced to call her nephews. No, he took her advice. He didn't mind her.

So the heartbroken madwoman found solace the next year with a brunette boy who quickly became her best friend. Because he didn't even know who her sister was and couldn't give a damn about who were Harry Potter's children and who were just the cousins, and didn't care that she never even raised her hand in class, let alone socialized with people, because Mason was that sort of a guy (at least, when it came to Dom, he was; he'd be any kind of guy for her). And he would take her down to the kitchens and bake her things (cookies and brownies and birthday feasts on december and she'd tell him made up stories and make him guess which ones were real and which ones weren't. She fell in love with him when she realized that he would still make a concise, factually-based guess as to whether she was telling the truth, even when he knew that her stories were always figments of her imagination. They never got tired of each other.

And then everything got complicated because, if Dom had ever learned anything in life it was that nothing gold can stay, thank you Robert Frost, and however gold whatever it was they had was, she knew it couldn't stay. But boy, did she try. He had all of that shit going on, with his baby sister dying and his mother giving up and with his being all alone, save for her and all. And she had all that shit going on too, with Teddy getting married to V all too quickly and with her brother disappearing all of the sudden (because honestly, who takes a five month trip to the Philippines at the age of fifteen and doesn't tell a soul?) and with everything catching up with her so suddenly (that freight train of madness that was her life had finally come at a crossroads with her worried train of thought). And suddenly she was nothing, really nothing, and neither was he, Mason, who had stopped baking his cookies when Dom had stopped eating them. So then he was attempting suicide and so was she, but as they fell down that chasm of sincere emptiness, they caught each other. Which can be good in some ways and bad in others. Good, because both survived, and surviving is usually a good thing. But bad, because if you think about it, when two people are falling and they catch each other, sure, they've been caught, but the other person is falling also. So they don't really stop.

And somewhere in there, somewhere between those emotions like relief and exhaustion and exertion and confusion came that thing love, remember, that problem we have, the one obstacle that our marvelously adventurous heroine has yet to overcome? Love. It came back in the form of two masochistic yet magical teenagers living in suburban England. Of course. Two best friends, with only each other to count on. How could they not fall in love? They couldn't. The love stayed for much, much longer than either would care to admit. The two kids, whose short-lived relationship fell apart almost as soon as it had sprung from the ashes, would always hold some part of each other. It was fact, it was truth, it was law. Dom would never confess that she knew why everything between then had faltered and fallen apart so quickly; it was too complicated. Too much baggage, too must angst, too many conflicting emotions. If one was to describe love a single word, Dom knew it would have to be 'simple'.

And so everything with Mason ended (well, everything except her love for him, but never mind that) and a part of Dominique ended, too, even if she was only sixteen at this point. And then something fantastic happened, something outstanding and miraculous and it was everything she ever wanted. She finished her OWLs, she came home for summer holidays, and Louis mysteriously reappeared, back from Asia. The family was back to normal (except now there are two empty rooms, the guest one that Aunt Gabrielle comes to stay in and the one where V lived for the first eighteen years of her life, but, you know, Dom tries not to think about that) and everything is fine so her savior, her daddy dearest, comes up with an idea that might just be her salvation. The two, father and daughter, take a month-long trip to Eastern Germany. To visit the dragons. And it became Dominique's world. She became obsessed, infatuated, even, with the idea of being with the dragons her entire life. Her love for this, for this mystifying experience, and her love for her father, her messiah (and god bless him for being so good to her and bringing her here, to this wonderland, this heaven), would be the only things she would always be sure of in life.

Coming back home was like torture for her. Having already been guaranteed an internship working with the same Germans in the same field for the next summer, Dom wanted nothing more than to speed up time until she went back (of course, that was all she had ever wanted, to speed up time and skip it all). Which, for obvious reasons, was not an option. And it wasn't just the time in England that the girl dreaded, either, it was the agonizing thought of Hogwarts. Being a seventh year, she'd be obligated to be more social, something she was sure would break her (which it did happen to do; maybe clairvoyance was a skill of hers?). It would be mandatory (but not really, but really, if you were a Weasley) to attend parties, study sessions, Hogsmeade weekends, and, of course, the dreaded Quidditch game. It was James' final year as well, and he would most likely be going professional afterwards. With him, not to mention Fred and Hugo, backing up the red and gold team for yet another win, Dominique ended up dragging herself not only to every game, but also to a few practices. It started out reluctant, that she would have to really make herself get up and cross the grounds to the pitch. But then something changed, something so utterly horrific and excruciatingly repulsive and in all respects topsy-turvy, changed. It was then that everything became messy. It was during a Quidditch practice one day, and she looked up from The Great Gatsby (a reread) to watch the letters on the players' jerseys slur together as they whizzed on past her (but she made the names out anyway; all became one word to her) and she realized that her eyes weren't following all of the jerseys, no, just one, and oh god, just the first. It's when she realized that, yeah, eyes really are the windows to the soul, because god, she just can't stop staring at him. Except she isn't staring at him, not really, she's looking intently at him out of the corner of her eye all conspicuous-like, but she might as well be staring, the way her foot keeps tapping and her heart ba-dum-bum-bum's to the tune of that song that she really enjoyed listening to, but never remembered the name of.

But she still stared at him, no matter how stomach-churning it was, because, come on, guys, let's face it, it's so fucking wrong.

And she stared at him as the two of them walked back to the castle together, stared at him as he saluted his goodbye and walked up to the boys' dorm, stared at him the next day and the next and the next after that, stared at him in Arithmancy and Defense Against the Dark Arts (his patronus was a Thycaline, a Tasmanian Tiger, and how interesting was that, because hers was a Dire Wolf, and both were extinct, and who would have guessed?), and she could do more than stare at him in History of Magic because nobody payed attention, anyway, and none of his friends were in the class with them, and none of her friends were in the class with them (because, if you recall, she had none), and so he would scoot on over to her and they'd play Would You Rather? or Twenty Questions, or another equally uninteresting game. You know, because all she really did during all of her other (and much less eventful, seeing as how he wasn't there) classes was daydream about how she wished he'd say, would you rather me ask you out now, or tonight with a box of chocolate and roses after dinner? or your twenty questions are up, Dominique, the answer was I love you, or, you know, something equivalent, both cheesy and satisfying, and then they'd never let the other forget the tacky lines he'd used when professing his love. And there was always that thing he did, he'd always done, since they were kids, where he seemed to receive the telepathic message that she abhorred the fact that everyone with an ounce of Weasley in them felt the need to call her Dommie, when really, she'd tried to explain on numerous occasions there was no need, anything else was just fine. But the boy with the raven hair and the dark eyes got it, he got the message, he got her. He got her, and that is why it took so bloody long for her to notice. For her to notice something so incomparably ghastly, so shockingly vile, so fiendish, so hellish, so fucking weird. But eventually, she did notice, and in the most gruesome way possible, it took her breath away.

He was staring back.

It was kind of surprising that her reaction to this wasn't something she'd ever do. She, in her mind, at least, had pulled a Louis. She'd gone in the steps of her baby brother, and done something he would've. It gave her a bit of perspective, and for this, she was glad. She may have been doing something awful. She may have been severing the ties of everything she had. She took his arm, when he was walking alone in the hallway past the library, where she'd been on the lookout, she'd caught up to him in the Defense corridor (and, sighing, she was reminded of their patronuses, the ones that were almost-matching-but-not-quite-except-impossible-in-any-way-shape-or-form) and took his arm, his elbow, in particular, and pushed him pacifistically but forcefully into a classroom, one that was new and that neither had ever experienced before, one that was virgin to their heartbreakingly similar patronuses. He wasn't surprised. He wasn't confused, or angry (although it looked like he'd been wandering aimlessly, without the intention of actually going anywhere, so why would he be angry?), or even the least bit startled. He was just there, and it made Dom instantly content to recall the fact that he was so constant, and that was something she needed so undeniably, so desperately.

"You've been staring at me," she commented in a low voice, to which he reacted by shaking his head, no. Her mind barely processed this as it was clouded with regret, regret for putting all this distance between them. But it's not like she ever could have possibly done this otherwise, anyway, so she didn't really know why it bothered her so much. Remember that she knew James was in Gryffindor for his bravery, his gallantry, his inner, untamed lion, while she was just an inquisitive, raw child with a hunger for everything. She felt condescended to already, even though he had yet to open his mouth.

After a moment's unsure hesitation, a sly smirk appeared on his face (making her shudder because she knew it all too well, and that shouldn't be the case), and he finally answered her. "Oh, no, Dominique, you don't get to turn this on me. I haven't been staring at you. I've been staring back at you."

So he'd noticed. Hmm. What an interesting change of events. Dom started to feel a bit queasy, especially after he'd said her name, Dominique, in that way of his. She was, after acting a bit sociopathic for a year or two, quite foreign to something as casual as conversation, but, thankfully, with him (hercousinhercousinhercousin her cousin, for christ's sake, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time ) it flowed at least semi-ordinarily. It still took some effort on her part, so here she was, stuck, thinking desperately of what to say next, before she realized that the answer was staring her in the face. What was there to say next but, "Why?" But, of course, this wasn't just a simple, "Why?" because she was her and he was him and they were them and she mentally cursed herself for asking such a broad question. Why were you staring at me? Why was I staring at you? Could these questions possibly, oh no, oh, god, no, have the same answer?

"Why what?" he questioned, and he looked like he was joking but he was definitely not and he knew that she knew that he wouldn't joke bout this, because this was fucking serious, whatever it was. And he saw her ghost of a sigh, her whisper of exasperation, and he knew, he knew that he'd gotten his cousin (which was gross if you thought about it a little bit, gross if you thought about it too much, and beautiful if you thought about it just the right amount) stuck between a rock and a hard place.

She thought about what she was asking, because it may be her only shot, before giving her strategically schemed answer. "Why do you think I was staring at you?"

There was no veritaserum present in either one's system, but both knew that neither would lie. It wasn't the time for lies. It's the time for truth, the boy vehemently thought, but all that circled the blonde's mind was that it's the time for pain.

"I think you were staring at me, Dominique, because something intrigued you," he said, and she unconsciously closed her eyes as his voice carried on. "Something interested you, something sparked your curiosity. I know how curious you can get, love. And then, with the courage only a Gryffindor could show -" and however irrevocably mad it was, this was one of those moments where her heart skipped a beat and she felt like she's sucked a lifetime's supply of helium "- you continued to stare, and you dug down deep, and you got into my skin and walked around in my shoes for a while. And, of course, I noticed immediately."

"Immediately?" The word was out of her mouth before her thought process passed from one neuron to the other. Immediately. What a particular word to use. He wouldn't have noticed immediately, she mused in her thoughts, he couldn't have. Unless -

"Oh, come on, Dominique," he said, and his voice was tired and exasperated and demanding and all of the above. And it killed her when he spoke. "I always notice you. How could I possibly not?"

She knew it wasn't a lie, it couldn't be, but she wanted it to be oh, so badly. Because this was the point of no return. Because this was where it all culminated, her being the family favorite, her two brushes with not-really-love-but-still-definitely-love. Because she needed to say something, say something now, before all that was left of her was ash and confetti on the floor upon which he stood. Because people called her the quiet one.

"James, I think I'm in love with you."

The first thought that flitted across her static mind was ew and the second was fuck.

"Sorry," she felt complied to say. She didn't realize her eyes were squeezed tight, as if she had something stuck in them. She relaxed her features, going for a calm and casual affect that wasn't fooling anyone, including James. She didn't have anything to think about now, no Professor Adelund to bring up, no dragons soaring through her thoughts, not even a glimpse of her Dire Wolf, his Thycaline, how they made so much sense together but didn't really work, but it somehow happened anyway. She just waited, waited,waited for what felt like eons but was really only a few milliseconds, if even. Then she opened her eyes, lest her cowardice show, because, let's remember it's James we're talking about here.

"So indecisive," he scolded playfully, once eye contact is made, and she was understandably baffled. He was smirking. Smirking! "You think you love me." And then he did something like that, something so unexpected and brash, he threw it out in the open just like that, like she didn't just open up her soul to him, but she guessed that was part of the reason that he drew her in so much, that they were such opposites and so similar, and she needed some more of those what-the-fuck moments in her life. "Hey, Dominique -" and the name sounded so funny making its way off his tongue because one the one hand, he's the only one who will ever have to call her that, but on the other, he's such a whatever type of guy that the regal name sounded so misplaced coming from James "- guess what?"

And she answered with, "What?"

And he replied with, "I know I'm in love with you." And yeah, she felt that nauseating pang of regret for saying the wrong thing, but she couldn't blame herself for lacking social skills. But they were a team now, she had decided, or maybe he had, and so he made up for her faults. "And I know you're in love with me, too."

And the grin he gave her was so blindingly white, so astonishingly wide, so unquestionably gleeful, so James, that she lunged. And it was a kind of awkward lunge because she tripped a bit over his shoe, which was closer to her than she'd originally anticipated, and she kind of knocked him over but he steadied them both as their bodies collided and they kissed. She tasted of the stars and the sky and the heavens to him, and he tasted of the future and the mountains and the dragons to her. The wolf and the tiger, the ones who sort-of-maybe-kind-of-not-really fit together, both had tear-streaked faces. The tears were not of relief and hope, as expected, but of anxiety, of guilt, of truth and pain (which might as well be the same thing).

Then leaf subsides to leaf,

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

A/N: This is the first I've posted in a while (did I really delete everything else? Oops!) and I'm extremely proud of it. This is my first time writing some of these characters so any type of review would be really great. Does this work for you guys? Does this pairing kind of freak you out? Are we into incest/cousincest/whatever, or not? Thoughts, ideas, suggestions? Review or shoot me a pm, or such. I need some commentary! ~Bills