Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Ophelia Moon was on the edge.
She gritted crooked, snow-white teeth and unstoppered another bottle of firewhisky, her eyes on the red-nosed, puffy-eyed girl in front of her.
"'N' then 'e says—'e says—C'mon, Sal, don't be like tha'—totally unreasonable, in'it 'e? Bloody Justin 'n' 'is bloody girlfrien'..."
She vaguely recognised the girl as Sally-Anne Perks, who had been in Ophelia's year at Hogwarts. Sally-Anne was an unpleasant, unattractive girl when she was a teenager, and Ophelia's friends had often made fun of her. Ophelia herself, however, had never had the courage involved in bullying, and so she simply attempted to tune Sally-Anne's loud, drunken rambling out as she crossed to the other side of the bar to serve an old man who had come in three times in the last week.
The Leaky Cauldron, needless to say, was never a nice place on Saturday night. Interesting, perhaps-but never nice.
"Oi, Moon."
Hannah Abbott—no, Longbottom, Ophelia reminded herself, Hannah's married now—peeked out from behind the door labelled Staff-Only. She was in the process of tying an apron around her waist. Hannah co-bartended the Cauldron with Ophelia, and she had also been in her year at Hogwarts, although in Hufflepuff. Unlike Sally-Anne, she had changed since school—she had lost her pigtails, for a start. She also seemed to have decided that the pompous Macmillan boy wasn't interested in her—or maybe she had never liked him, Ophelia often speculated wrongly—and married Neville Longbottom, a notoriously clumsy boy who was another target of Ophelia's friends' ridiculing.
"Yeah?" Ophelia said absentmindedly, pushing a glass of thestral rum across the counter to the old man, who drained it in a gulp.
"I've come to take over your shift."
Ophelia glanced at the silver watch on her bony wrist that had once been her aunt's. It was 8:02. "You're late."
"Well, I'm here now, aren't I?" Hannah replied irritably. "Get on your way, you've got a whole night ahead of you."
"Hold your hippogriffs, I'm going."
As Ophelia hung the apron up on a hook, she wondered, as she always did at the end of her shift, how she had come to be here. Here, bartending at the shabby Leaky Cauldron, of all places, when she had always aspired for bigger things—an Auror, a Healer, anything except the shoddy life she led now. She knew the answer, of course, but she didn't like it, and Ophelia tended to ignore what she didn't like.
But still, as she pushed open the Staff-Only door, it all came back to her. It always did. A clever, mistrusting boy, the most beautiful witch in all of Great Britain, and Ophelia Moon herself, of course.
And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains
Within the sound of silence
A/N: That's just the prologue, but I'm almost done with the first chapter. If you like it, review! Also, this is not a fluffy story, just letting you know- so if you looked up "Friendship/Romance" and were actually looking for fluff, this is not a rainbows and unicorns fic. I mean, I think you already got that just from this really short bit, but in case you didn't- there you go. And the song the start and the end of the story is loosely based on is The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel, one of my favorite songs, so check it out!
Reviews are love :)
