Him and Her
I've been trying to write the entire day. Writing on my longer fics, which I REALLY should be doing, but I just say one thing: writer's block… I've also made some rather pathetic attempts on one-shots, but none of them turned out well, UNTIL… well, this. This was that kind of story that developed during the time I wrote it, and it could probably use some editing, but I was so excited about it by the time it was finished it I just had to post it. Please leave a review.
Oh, and by the way, Harry Potter obviously isn't mine, because if he'd been, he'd have ended up with Hermione or Luna or ANYONE besides Ginny.
It's a wonderful day in August when she realises what she has to do. She eats breakfast with him and Ron in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place when the thought hits her.
"I have to do something today" she says softly to her friends who immediately asks her what she's going to do. She lies and tells them she has promised to meet Luna for a cup of tea around noon. She sees that he knows that she's lying, but he doesn't say anything and Ron starts talking about Auror Training, which is starting in less than a week. He gives her a pleading look but she ignores it and leaves the table. She hurries up the stairs to her room and finds the small, beaded handbag she always carried around with her during the year on the run. She grabs it and hears footsteps, his, in the stairs, but before he reaches her door she has apparated away.
She lands on the pavement next to the house where she lived for the first eleven years of her life. It's a typical British upper middle-class, two story house with a small garden and a garage. The garden her mother put so much time and effort in is overgrown with weed, and the rose bushes her father loved are dead, as well as the rhododendron that always bloomed in the early summer. She walks around the house and no visible damage has been done to it. She walks over to the front again and decides that there's no use in putting the ineviteble off so she opens the door and the hall that has always been so warm and welcoming is cold and empty and dark. She enters the living room and notices that the T.V cable has been drawn out from the point in the wall. As if they're only away on vacation. It's such a small thing but it makes her crumple and tears starts streaming down her face. She doesn't know for how long she sits on the floor in her old living room and cries before putting herself together and continuing going through the house.
She goes into the kitchen and closes her eyes. She sees a younger version of herself sitting by the kitchen table, eating toast for breakfast as her parents drinks their tea and reads the paper. Sometimes her mother leans over to her father to show him something in her part of the paper, perhaps an interesting article on gardening tools or a new dentist who has opened his own practice just a mile away from theirs, and her father listens and nods and maybe comments before going back to his own paper. The little girl goes over her english homework a last time in case she has missed something, maybe a misspelling or a grammatical error that will give her one annoying little fault. The kitchen is light and warm and lively, because her mother has finished reading the paper and is running around the kitchen looking for a lipstick, and the younger version of herself shares an amused smile with her father. She opens her eyes and suddenly everything is gone. Left is only a pale version of the image in her mind and she walks over to the refridgerator.
It's with dread she's opening it, afraid what it will reveal. As soon as the unpleasant smell of mould hits her she regrets her decision but she takes a quick look on the shelves. A very mouldy piece of cheese, a couple of eggs, something that she thinks once was a cucumber and a litre of milk. Everything smells horribly and she closes the door. Something wet is streaming down her cheeks and when she tastes it she recognise the familiar taste of salty tears. She doesn't even bother wiping them away, but goes up the stairs. She takes a quick look inside the guest room, but it's a room she doesn't have any particular connection to, because it was a room that was never used during her childhood, not even by guests, and she always wondered why. The room is white. White floor, white walls, a white double bed with a white, croceted spread and a wooden wardrobe and chest, both painted in white. A mirror, white of course, is hanging above the chest and she watches her own reflection for a few moments. Her hair looks even wilder than normal, her eyes are red and she haven't managed to regain all the weight she lost during the war which makes her face look even more hollow.
She quickly turns around and closes the door to the guest room before entering her own room. The room is made in light pastel colours like pink, yellow, blue and a minty green that she never liked as a child. She has a distant memory of her mother telling her that one could never go wrong with pastels. Every wall has its own colour and she recalls countless nights lying in bed looking at the four walls. She had thought the green wall looked like toothpaste tasted, and despite being the daughter of two dentists, it had taken her parents years to make her brush her teeth with anything else than children's toothpaste with 'bubblegum' taste. She'd been so happy when she'd come to Hogwarts and Lavender Brown had showed her how to clean her teeth with magic. Probably the only useful advice Lavender Brown has ever given, she thinks but immediately scolds herself for such thoughts. Lavender Brown is dead, she even attended her old classmate's funeral not more than two months ago. In her fourth year she'd kissed Viktor Krum and he'd tasted of spearmint, and suddenly she had decided that maybe it wasn't so bad after all. Even if her relationship with Viktor Krum never became anything more than a short-lived romance or a 'fling' as Ginny liked to call it, it was thanks to him she had discovered her hidden love for spearmint toothpaste. After this she didn't dislike the colour of the wall as much as she had in her childhood, but really old grudges are of course hard to just let go of.
The pink wall she watches with mixed emotions. She was never a girly girl and the pink wall always makes her think of Evelyn Hatcher, a particularly mean girl who always wore pink dresses, pink skirts, pink blouses and pink shoes. She recalls a period when she was around six when she wanted to be like Evelyn Hatcher. No, she wanted to be Evelyn. Her mother had always been a practical woman who'd bought her daughter practical clothes and had been confused when she'd suddenly started demanding pink, frilly dresses. She thinks about the memory and almost smiles. Her mother, her sweet, helpful mother who always wanted everyone to be happy, had bought her daughter a pink dress that actually resembled the one Pansy Parkinson had worn to the Yule Ball. She thinks about the dress and how she'd come to school and Evelyn Hatcher had stared at her with jealousy. That day everyone had wanted to be her friend, Ruby Rollins, who always sat next to Evelyn, insisted she'd sit next to her in math class and Libby Carter had offered her a brownie after lunch. The next day Evelyn of course had the same dress, and she'd gone back to being the smart girl, but she still remembered that one, wonderful day.
Her glance moves over to the pale blue wall. Smart girls were suppoused to have blue as a favourite colour, she'd learned at young age. Blue was a neutral colour that never made anyone angry. Calming, the Ravenclaws at Hogwarts had claimed, unemotional and calm, the fiery Gryffindors had answered. When she'd gone to kindergarten, people had began to ask her about her favourite colour. Girls like Evelyn Hatcher obviously said "pink!" without a second thought, the slightly less silly ones might go with red or purple, the tomboys with green or black, and the ones who didn't really knew just went with yellow. Then they would turn to her, and ask her what her favourite colur was. "It's must be blue, right? The colour of your jumper. Oh yes, blue suits you" they used to say before she had a chance to answer and just like that, her favourite colour had been decided without her own opinion. For years she'd selected blue shirts over green or red ones, always getting the blue balloons on birthday parties and bought blue school bags and pencil cases. One day professor McGonagall had knocked on her door, revealed the wizarding world and brought her and her parents to Diagon Alley where they'd gotten her school material. Her father had also bought her an early birthday present, a book called Hogwarts: A History, which had later become her favourite. She'd read about the four houses, and by only admiring the Ravenclaw emblem, she'd conlcuded that Ravenclaw must be the house for her. When Ravenclaw students' studious natures and intelligence was described it only made her even more sure, she'd belong to the house of Rowena Ravenclaw.
Then she'd read about Gryffindor and had felt a strong wish of ending up there instead, but her rational side had said that it wasn't an option. She wasn't brave or daring, she was smart and ambitious and would make an excellent Ravenclaw, not to mention that she already preferred the Ravenclaw colours. Red and gold seemed so… bold. Then she went to Hogwarts and ended up in Gryffindor anyways, and many years later she thought that maybe the hat had seen the wish she'd buried deep down in her head. She looks at the wall again, her favourite colour was no longer blue, she changed favourite colour the second the sorting hat shouted 'Gryffindor!' and has since almost grown an aversion to the colour blue. The last wall is yellow and it makes her think of the people she loves. Ron, her parents, the Weasleys, the Order… Him… the yellow wall has always been her favourite because it's the only out of the four that is warm, even if, technically, pink is a warm colour too, but she has difficulties imagining anything related to Evelyn Hatcher and Dolores Umbridge as warm.
But the yellow wall represents happiness and life. She thinks about an incident when she was seven years old. It had been a perfectly normal Sunday in June and she'd just finished her biology homework when she'd seen the open window and felt a soft breeze stroke her cheek. She'd walked over to the window and looked out. The Kershaw twins had been playing in their garden while their mother had watered her dandelions and their father had washed the car. She'd felt a sudden urge to fly and before she understood what she was doing she'd been standing on the window sill looking down. Then she'd jumped. She'd thought about how many bones she'd break when she hit the ground, probably a leg and an arm, and definitely a couple of ribs. But she hadn't hit the ground, she'd simply floated in air and the Kershaw twins had stared at her but before they could start screaming she'd started to slowly fall to the ground. Her parents, who'd been sitting in the living room when they'd seen their daughter fall down outside the window had rushed out and given her the scolding of a lifetime. Her mother had cried and her father had stomped around upsetted, none of them had seemed to notice that their daughter had been perfectly fine. Afterwards, she blamed her flying-phobia on this particular incident, or rather, on the scolding she'd gotten afterwards. But neverthless it was an incident that had showed how much her parents cared about her, how much they loved her. It still seems like an exaggerated reaction, she can't help but think as she opens her wardrobe. There are only a couple of pieces of clothing in the wardrobe. Some basic garments like jeans, shirts, jumpers and underwear, but also memorable clothes her mother hadn't been able to put away.
A school uniform from her first year at Hogwarts hangs there along with a blue (it was pre-Gryffindor) dress she wore to her mother's cousin Maisy's wedding when she was ten. The crown jewel, however, are her periwinkle dress robes from the Yule Ball in her fourth year. She strokes the soft material and for a moment she is back in Viktor Krum's arms, and she can almost hear the music. She bends forward and inhales the smell, hoping it to be a mix of the perfume she wore that night along with the butterbeer she spilled on it but is disappointed when it only smells of clean laundry, her mother has obviously had it washed. She drops the hem of the skirt and closes the wardrobe before exiting her room and walking over to the last one. Her parents bedroom is exactly as she remembers it. Clean, neat and orderly, but somehow with a personal feeling to it. The bed is impeccably made, the curtains are pulled aside, allowing sunlight to stream in and on the chest and in the book-shelves, there are pictures of her parents and herself. Her parents' wedding photo is one of her favourite, and her mother told her just last summer that they had thought the photo shoot was over when her father had embraced her mother, and the photographer hadn't been able to help himself from snapping another photo. The photo had turned out to be really good, and she watches it now. Her father is pulling his new wife into a tight, loving embrace and her mother closes her eyes and just enjoys the moment.
She takes her eyes off of the picture and tries to laugh at one of herself as a toddler with mashed potatoes all over her face. Her parents has always had a white buereu with eight drawers in their bedroom that has always been strictly forbidden to touch. But now she has to, and even though it feels horribly wrong going over her parents' secrets, it is she who must do it. Three hours later she's still in her parents bedroom with hundreds of papers spred around her in different piles. Letters from the bank and the insurance company, lists of expenses at the practice, old passports, photos from her first year in school and letters from her mother's old pen pal in Lyon takes up almost the entire bedrooom floor as well as the bed. She is just about to stifle a yawn when she finds the small pile in a corner of one of the bottom drawers. First comes both her parents' birth certificates, followed by their wedding certificate and her own birth certificate.
She looks at these for a while before she realises she's holding another birth certificate in her hand. Sebastian Richard Granger. No, she thinks, this is not what I think it is. Born July 7 1974. It must be a cousin I've never heard of, she thinks. Yes, that's it, maybe aunt Sarah in Canada had a baby. Father: Richard Thomas Granger, mother: Jean Diana Granger. She stops convincing herself that the birth certificate isn't what she thinks it is, because it is. She has always been praised for her logical thinking and now logic is practically spelling it out for her. You. Have. A. Brother. She always wanted a sibling, she begged her parents they would get her a little sister or brother but her mother would just smile sadly and her father look uncomfortable. She looks at the next piece of paper in her hand. Lavinia Anne Granger. Born February 17 1977. Father: Richard Thomas Granger, mother: Jean Diana Granger. And then her world collapses even more. A sister, she thinks. A sister, only two years younger and it dawns on her what kind of room the guestroom must've been from the beginning. And then she looks at the next to papers and she realises nothing has ever been as she thought it was.