A/N: Written for the Houses Competition. This pairing is my guilty pleasure, so thanks to 2D and Alixx for bearing and beta-ing it. I love you gals insanely.
AU: Muggle!AU where they don't go to Hogwarts or any school together, they just happen to meet. Also, no Voldy.
House: Ravenclaw
Category: Drabble
Prompt: A spot under a tree by a lake.
Words: 249
When you are young, and I love you falls too easily off your lips (if someone asked you, you wouldn't be able to tell them what it means), you meet a girl - flower-pretty and thorn-sharp. She rolls her eyes and spits out insults instead of 'hello's and you spend a sun-kissed summer together, sitting underneath a willow tree by a lake.
Her name is Narcissa, and you should have been wise enough to know where this would end up. You carve your names into the tree and go skinny-dipping in the lake, and maybe that is exactly what love should be. She never says it back, only presses her rosebud mouth against the tan skin of your collarbone and traces her fingers over the freckles that sprinkle your body.
Summer ends sooner than you think it should, and the leaves won't stop falling like dying embers to the frost-covered ground. Now, your willow tree by the lake is dead and bare.
But then you meet another girl, fiery where Narcissa was cold, and she is passionate and warm, and simply touching her sparks a different kind of flame in your chest. Lily, her name is, and you'd do anything to see her smile. Sometimes you remember the willow tree by the lake, and you visit it, only once, just to scratch over the initials dug into the bark.
Narcissa + James, it says. Forever in love.
Really, you can't believe that you ever played that game of make-believe at all.