A/N - For the Fanfiction's Got Talent! Round One, with the prompts grave, tears, and black roses.
This is non-linear, js.
This is actually something I've been wanting to write for quite a while, but I doubt I gave it justice, this is un-beta'd shit, ngl. Also, Liam is an OC and Seamus Finnegan's son. I kind of love him even if his character is underdeveloped here and you lot are definitely going to see more of him! :)
I own nothing.
i can feel the color running
just a cigarette gone
no you couldn't be that far
i'm driving my car to where i hope you are
maybe i can talk you down
- Talk You Down, The Script
. . .
When she gets the call, she doesn't believe it at first. But then, she listens, listens to the almost hysterical edge to Rose's voice, listens carefully to the words that can't seem to stop repeating in her mind, and she gulps. Loudly.
"I'm on my way," is all she can manage to choke out and suddenly she is running, fumbling for her car keys and throwing her cell phone to the passenger seat floor.
. . .
They don't have an open burial and somehow, she is both grateful and resentful. She doesn't want to have to look down at his face and know that she hadn't been good enough, that she hadn't helped at all, no matter how hard she had tried. She does want to see his face one last time, she wants to lay a hand upon his cheek and remember the smiles and the laughs and not the yelling or the shouting and she wants to remember the good, not the bad, but she's sitting in an uncomfortable folding chair at his funeral and it somehow feels like there was never anything good at all.
Someone's placed black roses upon his grave and she wonders if they think it makes up for anything. She knows it doesn't and never will.
Liam grips her hand tightly, but her fingers are lip in his, she has no strength.
Funny, she thinks bitterly, all it took was her brother's death for him to finally put some kind of work into their relationship. But she doesn't mean it, she never means anything.
. . .
It's 3 AM when he calls her and, still shaking the sleep from her weary eyes, she doesn't hear to sadness in his voice at first.
"It's 3 in the morning, this better be good," Roxanne yawns out and she can hear her brother's low chuckle against the static of her shitty prepaid mobile. Rotating her shoulders and stretching her neck out like a cat, she settles back in her bed and waits for him to speak. She stares into the darkness for quite a while.
Finally, "Do you ever think that all of this… is pointless?"
"Sleeping? Not really."
Fred chuckles again and she can't help but smile, looking out the window of her bedroom at the rising sun against the slowly brightening sky. She takes in the silhouettes of pink and orange and yellow and the sky is like a pallet of colors that morning, more beautiful than anything she's ever seen in her entire life. Roxanne thinks that in that moment, if she had tried, if she had reached a hand out, she could have felt the sky upon her skin - but still she is in that dark bedroom, in her lonely queen sized bed and the only light coming from the window and the mobile phone's glare.
"Living in general, I mean."
She thinks for a few seconds, still watching the sun make its way from the horizon.
"Sometimes."
"I-I think about it," he stutters out. "All the time."
They don't speak at all after that and she falls asleep to the rising sun and the sound of his steady breathing.
. . .
She's taking the last drag of her fourth cigarette when he arrives, striding briskly into the St. Mungo's waiting room like he's a business man late for an important meeting, rather than trying to find out whether his best friend is dead.
The woman at the front desk splits her time between chewing loudly on her bubble gum and glaring at Roxanne who pays her no heed, only drops the cigarette butt and flattens it under the heel of her Doc Martins. When he crosses the room over to her, she's already got a new cigarette lit and ready at her lips and Liam doesn't bother saying, "I thought you quit smoking," because a situation like this would drive anyone to nicotine. Instead, he sinks to the floor beside her, leant up against the disturbingly white hospital walls as the other patrons shoot them looks. There's a huddle of redheads in the corner and they watch him with varying shades of blue and grey and brown eyes.
He doesn't watch them, he watches her; the smoke that ribbons out from her pursed pink lips, the slouch of her shoulders, the exhaustion plain upon her face. There are tears in her eyes that she refuses to let fall and he thinks, maybe, he could love this girl. He grabs one chocolate-colored hand in his own milk white and pulls her to the ground beside him.
It's going to be a long day.
. . .
They're walking away from the graveyard, their hands intertwined between them. They're not in love, Roxanne knows, but they could be.
And he had hoped so, hadn't he? Hadn't Fred badgered them on and on about getting together, been overjoyed when finally, Liam had given in and asked her out, wasn't it Fred who remembered their anniversaries better than they themselves did? She tightens her grip on Liam's hand and decides that if there's anything she could do now, now that Freddie is gone, buried six feet under the earth, it's this.
. . .
The drive to St. Mungo's is unbearable and she asks herself for what seems like the millionth time why she hadn't simply apparated, but it seems like the gentle rocking of the car soothes her frayed nerves somewhat. Only somewhat – her breath is still shallow and her eyes too wet and everything still feels like a little too much.
She doesn't speed or drive recklessly, but the world around her seems technicolor, then black and white, then nothing all together; she's driving on autopilot as her whole world crashes around her. As she lifts a hand to turn up the AC - the heat of the summer swelter building droplets of sweat on the back of her neck, gathering there like tiny rivulets before sliding down her once crisp, but now crumpled blouse - her hand grazes the stereo and music blares in her ears.
"If I die young bury me in satin, lay me down on a bed of ro-,"
She cuts the music before the singer can carry out the rest of her lyrics, resisting the urge to cover her ears or ball up in a corner and sob or crash the car and die in a fiery inferno of flames and regrets.
Roxanne cranks up the AC and drives.
. . .
Fred's diagnosed with depression only three months after he turns 15. She holds his hand during the doctor's meeting and glares at anyone who looks at him funny at school and he jokes a lot about how he's the one who's supposed to protect her, not the other way around. None of the other Weasley-Potters will even look at them and they are left on their own little island with sad smiles from Lysander and Lorcan and the occasional letter from Teddy or their mother, because god forbid they mar the flawless family name, right? They had always stood out from the rest of the family, with their chocolate skin and black hair and dazzling white teeth, but now, now they were blotches, mistakes upon the canvas of their perfect family portrait.
The odd ones out.
Liam is the only one to stick by them, and she thinks, maybe, that's why she says yes.
He asks her on a date the last week of April when the rain has finally begun to let up and the sun is beginning to shine out from the gloom and there will always be nothing more beautiful than a rising sun, so she says, "Yes, yes, a million times, yes!" even if she doesn't like him that much (He's got really nice hair and a sexy Irish accent from his dad, so she likes him well enough). He doesn't like her that much either, but he likes the way her laugh sounds and she's got these really long legs that seem to go on for miles, so he's not complaining either.
Fred's overjoyed, of course, because he's been wishing for this for the past three years and it took them until their seventh for it to finally happen and he's so euphoric that he doesn't tell them that he's stopped taking his pills again like he had sworn to himself he would. As he claps Liam on the shoulder, a promise inside of him breaks.
. . .
The healer that comes out of the hospital room nearly two hours after Liam arrives says a lot of things, mostly technical terms about the amount of melatonin that had entered Freddie's bloodstream through the entire bottle of sleeping pills he had downed at once on the second Monday of October and how his body had shut down and words upon words that Roxanne did not want to hear, because all that mattered were her last words, five simple words that couldn't stop repeating in her mind.
"I'm sorry, but he's dead."
"I'm sorry, but he's dead."
"I'msorrybuthe'sdead."
I'msorrybuthe'sdead
Roxanne thinks maybe five words are too much and her mind picks one word to reiterate again and again.
Dead. Dead. Dead. DeadDeadDead.
She thinks she might've screamed if the noise in her head wouldn't have deafened the sound.
. . .
She marries Liam in a quiet ceremony by the ocean and they name their first child Fred III, and hey, third time's the charm, right? She takes her baby boy to his grave to see the sun rise one morning and still, there is no more beautiful sight, except perhaps, the bouncing bundle of life in her arms, squirming and ready for a new day.
. . .
Fin.
Please don't favorite without reviewing. :)
Always,
Summer