A large chocolate cake, decorated with lilies made out of sugar, stood right in front of her. Eighteen candles lit her face with their soft light, diffusing her sharp features just a tiny bit. The emerald eyes glowed with joy and surprise. "You can't be serious," Violet Deermer spluttered, pushing a strand of endlessly long hair out of her face with a trembling hand.
"We actually are not serious. You can only look at the cake. Ron will devour it all by himself momentarily." Ginny Weasly said teasingly, giving her brother a rather disgusted glance. Hermione Granger, all flustered when she looked at Ron was probably the first to laugh out loud and everybody joined in. It wasn't as carefree as it should have been, but what was in troubled times?
"So, are you going to make a wish?" Ginny asked excitedly and looked intensely at Violet, who felt uncomfortable being the object of attention. If it would have been for her, nobody would have actually known that today was her birthday. She did not want anybody to make a fuss out of it. But now, as she already was in the situation she did not want to seem ungrateful. Feeling to aware of everybody watching her Violet took a deep breath, shut her eyes tight and blew out the candles. The wish she made that very moment could not have been suspected by anybody in the room. They probably were too preoccupied by wishes of their own that they made them a common wish. Peace, safety, joy, happiness, no more worries. That were they wishes and their minds were clouded by them. As much as Violet supported their wishes, she wished for something entirely else tonight. Nobody would have guessed, because nobody knew of the little fairytale going on in her mind. None of them could guess that she was disobedient princess who wanted to make a run with the Black Knight, the bad guy. It was good to be all alone in this fairy tale world, that not even the Black Knight knew he was part of it. Even though he was entirely devoted to her in her imagination, in real life the Black Knight really was bad and besides he had stolen her heart, but who really cared?!
"No, Ron, Violet gets the first piece. She's the birthday girl," Mrs. Weasley scolded her youngest son.
"Really Ron, don't be such an animal about food," Hermione added, sounding slightly more lovingly than Mrs. Weasley had. As if she didn't actually mind him eating so much. It sounded more like she was fond of his appetite. Violet could feel Hermione's fondness of Ron, she had sensed it all summer long. Well, she wouldn't really call it a fondness; it was so much more than that. Violet sighed very quietly, picking on her cake. She wished she could be like Hermione, in love with someone so close by. Someone who was on the same page like her, who would fight by her side, if a battle would be coming over them. Someone who did not rip a piece out of her and then just left her without an explanation.
"Something wrong with the cake?" A familiar voice asked her ever so quietly. Violet turned her head just a few inches. Of course it would be Harry's voice, she'd be able to recall even from miles away in a noisy rainstorm. His green eyes pierced through her eyes, like he knew what she'd been thinking about. Maybe he didn't, maybe it was just hard for her to get used to having a pair of eyes, exactly shaped and colored like hers, stare at her. "It's nothing," Violet said quickly, trying to shake Harry off. "I'm just so full from dinner." That seemed good enough for an excuse, after all dinner had been very satisfying. Violet surely had gained 5 pounds over the summer thanks to Mrs. Weasley's cooking abilities.
"You could give the rest Ron," Harry suggested jokingly. "He still seems hungry." Violet chuckled a little at Harry's words and let her eyes glide over to Ron, sitting next to Hermione, who just told him to rather go in the bathroom to clean his chocolaty face than try to blindly smear the frosting around with his napkin. The gentleness in her Hermione's voice made Violet sad. Wishing once again she could be in love with somebody close to normal, she turned back to her cake again. With a little bit of furry she dug in the brown masse and shoved a huge amount into her mouth, hoping that the sayings of chocolate helping to soothe heartache would be true.
Of course they weren't true. But then again, they might apply to other heartaches. Heartaches not as severely and twisted as hers. She probably could have eaten the whole cake and it would not have helped her sleep a tiny bit through the night, just made her sick. Nights were the worst. When she finally found some peace and would fall into an uneasy slumber, the Black Knight wove in and out of her dreams. Sometimes as a really knight, sometimes just the sixteen-year old boy he really was. In her dreams he never looked like he had the night when she had last seen him. In her dreams he was smug as usual, but not in an annoying way. He was good-looking in her dreams too, of course. In her dreams were no shadows under his eyes looking like purple bruises, his skin wasn't an ashy-grey and his eyes were definitely not blood-shot. That way her dreams were not as hard as the reality, in her dreams he did not suffer from whatever he had in the rainy night when he had suddenly appeared at her room in the Leaky Cauldron.
When she woke up from her dreams, his face haunted her over and over. There was never a minute she did not think again, which was particularly bad when you had so much to think about. Falling in love was not what she had signed up for when she decided to stay in England, but then again, falling in love was something she had never intended to sign up for in her whole life.