A/N: Any references that I have made will be credited in the next chapter (or perhaps the next chapter for the relevant character). Thanks also to Aurora West for her welcome input, because it's impossible to know what is good/bad without it (and she's also my first review ever!).
Disclaimer: You all know what goes here. Today I'm just pretending to be Rowling, but I know that (sigh) I'll have to return everything, and that I never owned it.
He is static as she sketches him, still, and somehow precious under her hands for that stillness. There is no hint of a laugh on his face, only a soft wonder as his fingers press the strings to the frets of her guitar, his gold-shot copper hair hiding his eyes while his head is bowed over the slender neck and his arm curled around its sleek body, caught in a moment of curiosity and drawn from memory.
She can hear the guitar strumming as she fights with the end of her essay (a horrible sixteen inch long thing about the defining characteristics of wolfsbane versus monkshood and asphodel, and the dubious nature of their origins); she winces as a wrong note sticks out, jagged and raw, and laughs as George moves Fred's fingers to the right frets, remembering her brief lesson. Fred swears at him in a low, pleasant voice that sends shivers up her spine, and she might be fourteen but she knows they are meant to be together, that they will burn bright and long and hard, the way stars do. They will light up the night sky and put the moon to shame, and it will be beautiful.
It's dark, now, though, at twenty one. There is a distinct lack of light, of heat in her world, and she is left with just the cool embrace of night—dark velvet, and glittering, sharp-edged diamonds in the sky above her where once there were hopes and dreams, disguised as stars.
There, and she's pinned the curve of his wrist, the loose kiss of his fingers on the pick and the angles of his strong arms in charcoal on the parchment, never to be lost, never forgotten, always to burn as bright and fast and hard now as they do in her memory for everyone else who cares to look. She wishes she could show it to him, let him see himself through her eyes. He'd come up behind her and look over her shoulder and see the lyrics she scribes in every line of him, because that's what he is to her, pure joy and music.
He used to hold her like that when they sang, arms wrapped loosely around her shoulders, his breath a whisper on her neck, lips murmuring against her skin in the spaces between their scripted words, sunlight spilling like water through the shades and over their entangled hands. She can feel that moment there with him, her own hands moving to rest on her hipbones lightly, unsure of how to respond, eventually settling as she reaches behind her and hooks her right thumb into the pocket of his jeans, pulling him flush against her body...
She looks at the sketch with sightless eyes, unable to see him in the scattered lines she's drawn, though they are cohesive and true. It's an empty picture, devoid of life; there is no spirit, nothing in it that makes it Fred, just an empty scrawl that doesn't describe even the beginnings of him. It's an obituary, the last promise of him, and it's gone now, lacking, cold. His brightness aches in her soul, and she thinks that maybe she too is a star, dying, going gentle into that good night without a whimper of protest.
He is a supernova against the sky, and it has always only a matter of time until she hurt herself, because what star will she look to when she can't find her way in the darkness now? Lost and alone, and left in a world where music wounds her more surely than any of the slings or arrows of misfortune?
Fred's voice almost whispers in her ear: Let go.
Somehow, suddenly, she is in free fall, and there's nothing she can do to stop spinning in place, to regain her bearings, and there is nothing left but a choice too horrible to make. Minutes (or maybe hours, because it's hard to tell when sound and light have lost their meaning) slide by unnoticed, and she is drowning, drifting in her hollow house, looking for any out from this devastating spiral...
She makes up her mind suddenly and pulls herself together, whirling into her cloak and grabbing up a wand that hasn't been used since she was so thoroughly blinded by the absence of him, leaving behind only the fragile sketch, the final delineation of a young man blurred out in spots by something that looks suspiciously like tears.