Diary of an Onlooker
Prompt : strawberry
Word count : 304.
The night before the battle which would seal the fate of the wizarding world, the young leading players of the Light side ate vanilla ice cream.
Sat around an old table, in a location which I am still not at liberty to divulge, a redhead and a brunette waited impatiently. They faced a door which, at around eight that evening, finally opened silently to reveal four pale teenage boys, one of whom carried a plastic Muggle shopping bag. The tallest boy, Neville Longbottom, withdrew a container from the bag and slid it across the table until a hand shot out and it was stopped by the brunette. Her reflexes were unusually sharp then, after three years of bitter fighting and heavy losses.
Popping open the lid, Hermione peered inside the container and frowned.
"Vanilla?"
"It was all they had," a second redhead explained.
"But it was my turn to choose. You should have gone somewhere else," she pointed out calmly.
No-one felt the need to highlight how dangerous it was for the boys to go anywhere at all. Instead, the only blond of the group replied "We'll have strawberry next time, Granger."
I cannot know for sure, but I suspect (and my suspicions are usually correct) that when Draco Malfoy was cornered by three Death Eaters during the Final Battle, he was not thinking that he had to survive because he wanted to reach twenty-one, or because he had not made a will, or because he needed to care of his mother, or even because he'd promised Ron that he'd protect Pansy.
I suspect he thought that he couldn't die just then, because he needed to hang around to buy Hermione Granger some strawberry ice cream.
Which he did - in extremely large quantities, in fact, when they served it at their wedding reception.
A/N : A very random, strange little thing, but I like it :D And do check out The Butterbeer Club forum, if you haven't already.