HoH, Ravenclaw, Standard, Prompt: "Life is too unpredictable to plan.", WC: 1841
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She was breathing, still. Just about.
.
I, Hermione Granger, have always maintained that I am a planner. I am usually the first of my friends to reach out and make the distance between us known. It is me who chooses the time, the place, and me who alters the plans when something goes awry, even if it isn't my fault (which it usually isn't). Anyway, that's who I am - usually so collected, though perhaps calm is not the right word. More…. Erratically organised.
When I bump into Fred Weasley on the extremely busy Cambridge streets - somewhere near Fitzwilliam - I know that he is the opposite. While I am checking my phone for the next item on the list, he is hands-out-of-pocket, swinging his merry way into any pedestrian traffic that he might encounter, without a care in the world. He grabs me by the arms, hauls me out of the road, and grins at me. My phone is several feet away, knocked out of my hands, and my forehead is aching from the collision.
"Are you alright?" he asks, still smiling. I can't decide whether it's patronising or not. Maybe I like it. Either way, he is a stranger and his hands are wrapped around my wrists, which I cannot abide, no matter how lovely he might appear to be. I wrench myself from his grip and go towards my phone. "Sorry!"
My phone is cracked. Not a problem, because I'm not all that great with it. Just means I now have something else to do today.
"Did I do that?"
"Yes," I reply, more than a little frustrated.
"Can I do anything?" he asks. "I really am sorry. I could replace it? Or maybe we could start with a coffee?"
Subconsciously, I answer, "I don't drink coffee." Then I register what he has just said. "Also, no. Because you're a stranger and this -" I gesture between us, "is not happening. Sorry, pal, but I know how this world works."
"Wow." He's not laughing anymore. "Do you always speak to people like that?"
I'm already walking away.
Maybe I should feel bad for that first time. The first time you meet someone you love should be special and meaningful. You should remember the first time you looked at someone and noticed who they really were versus what the world saw them to be. When I met Fred, that just didn't happen. I wasn't expecting him - at least, that's what I tell myself. He wasn't in those plans that I thought I had for both the day and for my life in general. I was twenty-three years old, studying in Cambridge for a long-awaited Masters in linguistics (a minor setback at home made me stay an extra year). I hadn't dated much during university because I knew that I wanted to finish a Masters and then a doctorate before I got serious about life outside of studying. The plan was to go out into the world and meet someone in my preferred field - someone I would have an instant connection with and who would be my life partner.
Falling in love is like falling out of control. Your whole body reacts differently, and none of it makes sense. The world is warmer and brighter, and things are easier but so much more complicated. Your soul extends out to another person, and that person is a part of you just as much as you are a part of them. Their hands intertwined in yours, their heart reaching out to you and yours reaching back just as fervently. It's a series of chemical reactions that make it happen, so of course it's something that is rational. But it is also so far beyond irrational that it aches.
I didn't expect to fall in love with Fred Weasley. I didn't even expect to ever see him again after that first horrible encounter that we had on that busy street. But I did, as though fate expected that this was a choice I would eventually make, so why not make it sooner? As if, somehow, Fred was tying me to earth and reality in a way that numbers and study could not.
It was incomprehensible for me to lose control like that.
"You really don't remember me?" he asks, half an hour into a blind date. I frown, as if asking whether I should. "I saved you from being hit by a car and you were so hilariously rude to me. How come you're much nicer this time around?"
"Because you didn't pull me to you and ask me to date you," I say, laughing nervously. Because God forbid I act like a lunatic.
"I guess that's fair enough." He's looking around the coffee shop, distracted. "Let's go for a walk."
"You don't want to just sit and talk?" I ask. He grins in return, as though there is some secret that he is dying to share with me but can't do it quite yet because I'm not ready. It's infuriating, and yet I can't not like him. There's just something inexplicable about him that draws me to him. He is an unexpected entity, and surely this is not the right time in my life to have a boyfriend who could become my husband.
"Dates are meant to be explorations, and I find it easier being more adventurous," Fred answers with a pompous tone to his voice - I know that he is mimicking and is not really like this. "Walking is more fun than sitting, and we've been sitting a while. Maybe we will find something more fun to do once we have been walking a while too."
I slap him on the arm at that, but he merely laughs.
Fred is adventure trapped inside a person. It takes a walk and an endless conversation to unlock even just a part of his marvellous personality. He doesn't plan so much. Instead, he says this phrase to me several times a day,
"Life is too unpredictable to plan."
I tell him that he's ridiculous and that the two are mutually exclusive. The predictability of life and the essence of planning are not inherently linked. There will always be some setbacks, but it doesn't mean that they cannot be planned around. There is a way around everything. There are plans to get around plans. On this level, Fred and I fundamentally disagree. And yet, as I said, we fell in love. Quite ludicrously, I might add.
One might call it unexpected. But surely it was some level of higher planning that led fate to us? Or does that sound even more insane than the idea that none of us have any control over what our lives might become at any given point?
I know which situation I would rather have.
"I love you, Hermione Granger," he tells me, down on one knee in the middle of Jesus Green, two glorious years after our catastrophic first meeting. I reply that I love him too. "Now that that's out of the way, please, will you marry me and make me the happiest man to ever live?"
"Yes," I breathe into the windless silence. Nature roars around us, and onlookers cheer in delight at the scene unfolding before them, like rubber-neckers watching a car crash in action, unable to stop the trauma and unable to halt what might come next. Instead of worrying too much - in my head I am already planning ahead, thinking backwards and forwards at the same time - I kiss the unexpected love of my life and embrace the possibility of changing my life's course for someone more perfect than who I could have planned or hoped for.
An academic, a linguist; maybe I was supposed to marry someone who was also invested in the intellectual in the same way. Fred was brilliant. He and his brother were genius comedians and ran a joke shop on Mill Road. It was more successful than could have been imagined. But then again, I guess that's his prerogative, to expect more than what life should have to offer. To not plan, to be unpredictable, because life is certainly not going to adhere to the plans you even intend to make.
Like the plan I made to fit into the wedding dress I bought.
I had been roughly a size ten the majority of my adult life, and now something was wrong. I hadn't changed diet, and I hadn't changed my routine all that much, determined to fit into the one dress that I was supposed to fit into on this one day.
Pregnant. Severely unexpected.
"We can go through with the wedding anyway, can't we?" Fred asks, taking my hand at the dinner table where I tell him. "It's all arranged now, and it was bloody expensive." I smile at this, tears in my eyes.
I didn't plan to be pregnant for my own wedding. I didn't plan for this, any of it. It could have gone better, it should have gone better. Why didn't it go better?
"You can't plan life, Hermione," he continues.
"It's too unpredictable," I repeat his mantra and he smiles back. "I love you."
"I love you too. And this baby, who is going to be more awesome than an awesome sauce sundae."
I was prepared to love the child. After all, it was in my eventual plans to be married and to have kids. It was in the plans, so it must be alright for me to have those things just a little sooner than I might have initially expected. Right? And I had Fred, who was the most wonderfully unexpected nugget of love and life that any person can hope for. My life was so much more than the plans I had made for it to be, and I was just about ready to have my peace with it. At twenty-five years old, I had the contentment I hoped for much later in life.
Plans cannot be made as a contingency for the unpredictable.
This was my thought as I looked up, crossing the road towards home, and the collision appeared to happen around me. Blue lights, red vision, and scarring and fracturing both inside me and in the world surrounding me. It had careened towards me, like Death itself. The car was a Ford, I think. It left an imprint of its damage on my body.
.
She was breathing, still. Just about. Machines beeped, though they were near-useless. Her body was broken, her mind was barely able to keep the pain at bay from the shock that was powering through her entire system. It conjured up images of a life that should have been had. A beautiful child, a loving husband; something so far from the eviscerated reality that life had presented to her instead.
That was what he imagined, anyway. The doctors had told him that there was nothing left of her except the memory of life in her heart.
Beside her bedside a red-headed man wept into the abyss of life.
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