A/N: I have recently taken up a Harry/Ron 50 word prompt table at the LiveJournal community, 100quills. The prompt for this story was "Butterfly", hence the title. This is story 2 from the prompt table, which may be found in its entirety, if you go to my profile and follow the link to my website; that will take you to my LJ profile page. From there, you can access all of my LJ memories. Here, I'll just post each story individually since each is a one-shot. Stories may not be posted in numerical order, but I promise that EVERY story will eventually be posted. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoy this little scribble. :)

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Butterfly

Rating: PG

For the 100quills, 50.4 prompts table (story 2)

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Harry and I, together, can outshine the Monarch Butterfly. It sounds pretentious, but we're stunning, really.

Monarch Butterflies are black and orange.

Well, what are the two most obvious colors on Harry and me? Just look at Harry's unruly black hair and my vivid orange hair (everybody calls it ginger just to be polite, but I know it's really orange).

You might think the colors would clash (orange doesn't go with anything), but they don't because black matches anything it chooses.

I just got lucky that Harry chose me.

A Monarch Butterfly starts off as a wriggling little caterpillar; content to just eat and crawl along his way, trying to stay out of trouble and avoid his enemies. Harry and I weren't good caterpillars. We were always in far too much trouble, and more often than not, we were forced to engage our enemy in open combat.

We weren't good caterpillars.

The next stage in the Butterfly's development is to form a cocoon. Harry and I were very good at that. After spending nearly two years hunting down the Horcruxes, fighting in a war that we were too young to be involved with anyway (let alone be at the head of), and finally taking down Voldemort, we were only too happy to cocoon ourselves in our small, shared flat.

Several of our friends and family tried to pry open our cocoon; tried to make us come out of our flat and face the world. I know they all meant well, but they just didn't understand.

The development of a creature such as the Monarch Butterfly is beautiful, but fragile and complicated. If we'd had only one misstep, if one of us had lost our coloring in anyway, our wings would have crumbled, shattered under their own weight, and we would have both died.

But the cocoon we built was strong and we survived the morphing process. Our colors blended and balanced, and when we emerged, Harry and I were weary and weak, but so very beautiful.

We slowly, surely, opened and stretched our wet wings into a small patch of sunshine. After a bit of flexing, of getting used to our new form and having the world get used to us, we realized that our wings could rival the brilliance found in the holiness of a church's stained glass.

Our wings could keep the rhythm of beating hearts.

When Harry and I make love, our wings wrap around each other, almost as if we are forming another protective cocoon, and his black and my orange glow effervescent, like the first dawn the Gods ever saw fit to bestow upon the Earth. When we thrust and our wings beat, it's like the stirrings of the first wind that will eventually be felt around the world to rustle the trees and swirl hurricanes.

And we balance with more symmetry, more perfection, than the Monarch's wings could ever hope for.