AN: Prompts will be displayed at the bottom to avoid them potentially giving away things.
your number's up (or is it?)
AlwaysPadfoot
Daphne finds herself smiling softly under the autumnal sun as Jack squeals with delight.
The new kite they've brought with them soars high into the air and ripples in the wind. Her little boy grips the plastic handle with both hands. He buries his feet into the sandy beach so he doesn't get pulled over and looks back at her with a face of pure joy.
"Look, Mummy! Look how high it is!"
She nods and smiles wide to reassure him that she sees. Jack giggles and lets himself become wrapped up in the kite, running it back and forth across the beach. Kite-flying has become his favourite hobby since she told him he is still a bit too young to be flying a broom. Explaining to him, however, that he shouldn't tell his daddy about the kites without running down her word counter had been no easy feat. Lewis Rowle is still a firm believer in distancing themselves from the Muggle world; he wouldn't like that she brings their son here, to a nearby Muggle beach.
What he didn't know, however, was fair game.
Besides, Daphne likes the sea breeze and sense of normalcy that comes from being around other parents playing with their children. Wiggling her toes in the sand, she watches Jack carefully, whilst reminiscing. She can barely believe he's six now; it feels as though just yesterday she happily wasted precious words to sing him lullabies when he couldn't sleep.
She misses that. But every day since she'd turned of age, the counter of her wrist had been ticking down. She turns over her hand and looks at the numbers.
1738.
It still seems like such a big number. But when you start bringing more numbers in, the big '1738' gets harrowingly small. That is only four years and nine months of saying one word a day. Beyond that, there are three words in a short introduction, five words in the comfort of 'it's going to be okay' that sometimes Daphne needs to tell herself. There are one-hundred-and-one words in the lullaby she used to sing to Jack. When the average woman gets through twenty-thousand words a day, just one-thousand-seven-hundred-and-eight is nothing at all in comparison.
Without her soulmate, Daphne knows that count will never recharge. She guesses she's just one of those people who lives an average life in a loveless marriage — after all, not everyone meets their soulmate. She has no hope of that ever happening. It's too late for her.
Being a dutiful wife and having the craving to keep her son in some semblance of a functional family, this is the way it has to remain.
"Mum! Mum, come and help me with the kite." Jack's voice breaks her out of her cycle of depressing thoughts as he waves her over. "I want to pull it down."
Together they reel the kite back in and fold it safely away. Jack makes sure it's safe from the wind, especially since the last kite blew away by accident when she wasn't concentrating. Daphne still remembers how much her son cried when she confessed that she'd let it fly away. She gives him an apple to eat and they spend the next hour building sandcastles. Jack insists that the castle must have a moat before they leave. Checking her watch, she reluctantly lets him dig a moat and soaks up the last bit of sun.
They walk hand in hand along the beach. Daphne ends up carrying both pairs of shoes somehow and Jack talks about how he wants to build a sandcastle so big he could sit inside. She laughs and lifts him up to sit on her shoulders. He points and laughs and tells bad jokes from a book he'd gotten for his birthday. These are the moments she lives for; the reason why she preserves her words so diligently.
Without the marriage she loathes and the non-existent soulmate, she wouldn't have Jack.
She can't stand the thought of a world without her son.
They collect firewood on the way home. Jack returns to the ground and fills his arms so full that he leaves a trail of sticks behind him as they fall off. He doesn't even notice which makes Daphne smile. She listens to him hum to himself as they walk the final stretch of beach before they head up to the house that stood solitary behind a low fence painted cinnamon brown. The light was on in the front room.
"Daddy's home!" Jack races up to the house, arms filled with firewood, and Daphne inhales deeply as she trails behind him.
She makes sure the gate bolt is pushed across, otherwise it slams in the night and wakes her up, before heading up to the front door which is now wide open. Picking up dropped twigs, Daphne tidies behind her son and finds him showing Lewis the pile of firewood, shouting 'look, look'.
"Yes, yes, very good, son," Lewis says, although Daphne knows he's not particularly interested in the pile of sticks. "Have you done your reading yet today?"
Jack shakes his head. "No, not yet."
"Well, you better go do it whilst your mother makes dinner," Lewis responds, before looking up at Daphne through slightly narrowed eyes. "You're making dinner now, aren't you honey?"
She nods begrudgingly, ruffles Jack's hair as he passes and retreats to the kitchen before her husband can lecture her for late dinner and letting Jack have fun. Lewis always wears long-sleeved shirts, but Daphne suspects he does so to hide the fact that his word counter recharges. Honestly, she's glad he does — it saves her the trauma or knowing for sure that he is cheating on her.
Later that night, she goes to put Jack to sleep. He's sat up, reading a fiction book that he's so engrossed in that he doesn't realise she's in the room until shes by the bed.
"Let me just finish this chapter," he begs, his blue eyes wide and pleading. "Please?"
Daphne furrows her eyebrows and purses her lips but then nods with a smile.
"Yes! Thank you, Mummy."
She gestures for him to move over and sits beside him in bed, watching him read. He leans into her as he does and she strokes his hair gently. When he finishes his chapter, he snaps the book shut and turns and hugs her tightly.
"I love you lots," he tells her, voice muffled against her chest.
"I love you too," Daphne whispers.
He looks at her, beaming. The counter on her wrist spins down by four, but that doesn't matter because the way Jack's eyes light up when she speaks is reward enough.
"I love it when you talk to me, Mum."
Her heart aches. She forces herself to smile and push back his hair before she tucks him in. Turning on his dragon night light, the room is bathed in purple light and Daphne leans down and kisses Hack on the forehead gently.
"Night."
She closes the door behind her and leaves Jack to sleep with tears in her eyes.
The next day she takes Jack back to the beach. She doesn't particularly care that Lewis hates him having more fun over doing educational things because she knows that children are supposed to enjoy themselves. And quite frankly, she doesn't care much for Lewis' tips on parenting. Just seeing the way that Jack thrives outside the house is enough to make Daphne risk pissing her husband off.
It's the little things that count.
Today, Daphne buys him a bucket and spade, and they find a spot where Jack can search for sea glass and rocks that he thought were pretty. She alternates between watching him climb over the rocks and reading a book on the sand.
He fills the bucket up with hundreds of rocks and heaves it back to where Daphne sat just as a blue ball rolls to her feet.
Both she and Jack look up for the owner and see a boy around Jack's age with a mop of ginger hair running towards them. Her son picks up the ball just as the boy reaches then and holds it out.
"Thank you," the boy says, taking it from Jack and hovering by them hesitantly. "Do you want to play?"
"Oh, yeah," Jack replies before turning to Daphne hopefully. "Can I play, Mum?"
She nods and she watches closely as the two find a spare bit of sand and kick the ball back and forth to one another. Daphne is a little nervous about letting Jack play with a Muggle boy; she isn't sure whether letting him make friends is a good idea when Lewis doesn't like Muggles. She bites her lip and debates how to deal with that eventuality.
"Daph? Daphne Greengrass?"
Daphne turns to find someone stood beside her. She looks up to see a woman with her red hair tied up in a bun looking curiously at her. There's something familiar about her, something about her freckles and soft brown eyes that Daphne recognises. And then it clicks, it's Susan Bones. They had gone to Hogwarts together, even become friends in their N.E.W.T years.
"It is you, isn't it?" Susan asks.
Daphne opens her mouth and then closes it again, before nodding. She watches Susan's expression turn to one of confusion. As an answer, Daphne stretches out her arm and reveals her number — 1734.
"Ah, I see," Susan says softly, sitting beside Daphne in the sand.
The red-head rolls up her own sleeve and reveals her own number, a little over nine-thousand. That strikes Daphne as surprisingly low for someone who's probably found her soulmate.
"Is that your son?" Susan asks.
Daphne hums and nods.
"He's a cutie," Susan says. "That's my son he's playing with, Kai. He's just turned seven."
Daphne looks at her in surprised that Susan had a son just a few months older than her. It's an odd coincidence. She guesses at least she doesn't have to worry about the boy being a Muggle.
"Jack," Daphne says, wasting a word to tell Susan his name.
They both watch her number tick down by one and Susan exhales softly, before nudging Daphne with her shoulder, their elbows knocking together. She looks up and the two woman meet one another's gaze.
"You'll find them one day," Susan says.
Daphne smiles and then shakes her head sadly. She knows she won't. They both look back down at her extended arm and in unison, they gasp.
"What the fuck."
Daphne lets the words escape her mouth and watches, her eyes wide, as one million turns to 999,997.
They're soulmates.
Comps and Prompts
Romance Awareness: Day 8 - You have a limited number of words, and you can only recharge when you're with your soulmate (when you use up your word count, you die)
IHC: 445. Word - Ripple (A very small wave)
365: 358. Word - Precious
SC — Days of the Year — September 16 2018 - Collect Rocks Day: Write about someone with an unusual hobby
SC — Summer Prompts — (object) Sandcastle
SC — Colour Prompts — (colour) cinnamon
SC — Elemental Challenge — (object) Firewood
SC — Shay's Musical Challenge — 12. Newsies: Write about finding a better life
WC — Character Appreciation — 16. (dialogue) "Let me just finish this chapter."
WC — Disney Challenge — S3. Let's Go Fly A Kite: Write about kite flying.
WC — Cookie's Crafty Corner — Dishcloth: Write from the perspective of a housewife.
WC — Book Club — Janine: (word) confess, (trait) submissive, (word) trauma
WC — Showtime — 6. I am here for you - (word) lullaby
WC — Amber's Attic — T3. Unicorn: Write about innocence. (5 bonus points)
WC — CYB — W1. Accident
WC — Ami's Audio Admirations — 3. The B-List: Write about someone average or someone who feels that they are average.
WC — Em's Emporium — 12. Liza: Write about an incredible mother.
WC — Bex's Bazaar — D2. [Character] Mrs Jumbo - Write about a protective parent.
Word Count: 1784