T h e . H e a t h e r . W o m a n

Author: Tinuviel Henneth

Rating: PG-13, I suppose

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Summary: The war was over, but there were still those out to avenge their Lord's demise. Now, Blaise Zabini's world is contained in one room in a hospital, and Hermione Granger's world is like nothing you've seen before.

Note: These companion stories, written in July of this year, are the Blaise/Hermione ship's first official darkfic. A list of a few inspiration songs are after the story. Considering this one deals in metaphor first and foremost, feel free to tell me you're confused!

T h e . H e a t h e r . W o m a n

000

Everything was orange in one room, and paisley in another, and dark, murky, greenish-red in the third. The three rooms were in a string, each connected by one door, paisley sandwiched neatly between the orange and the greenish-red. In each room was a select and ill-grouped set of monochrome objects. Each object served a purpose, even the topiary that stood in the center of the paisley room. Each object had a reason to be where it was.

There was a curtained doorway that led outside from the paisley room to a wide field of heather. The curtain was a black, gossamer sheet that swirled and lifted with the slightest provocation. In the center of the field, halfway between the building and a stream juxtaposing the heather and a sand dune, stood a proud old paper birch. A swing hung from one of the highest branches, and it moved ever so gently with the breeze.

The sky was the palest blue above the field of heather and an angry purple-black over the desert. The tree's highest boughs pierced the sky and a brave climber could have ascended into the chambers in the clouds above if so inclined. There was no grass or heather in a certain radius around the base of the birch. There was a sun high in the northern end of the blue sky, and another, smaller, redder one setting in the western end of the same sky. There was little other light in the desert, but one always shined brilliantly.

On the structure's exterior wall, surrounding the curtained doorway, were thousands of still and moving photographs, colorless bar codes, scallop-edged postage stamps, and paper restaurant napkins with scrawled phone numbers and drink rings in varying colors. The color was in waves, and not a single square inch of the cerulean blue wall behind showed by itself. Some of the posters and gum wrappers tacked to the wall had come loose at a corner and flapped in the cool breeze that made the heather dance as well.

On the swing hanging from the birch, facing the structure, sat a teenage girl with smooth brown hair and blue eyes, a red Art-Deco 'H' pinned to her black sweater, next to a shining silver 'P' and a gleaming golden 'HG,' both of which were in an out-dated font. She was not smiling, and even though both hands were tightly curled around the hemp ropes supporting the swing, her eyes were fixated on the patch of naked dirt under her bare feet. She wore a petunia-pink pencil skirt with a silvery belt, the black sweater, and dozens of silver bangles around her wrists. The girl was always there, on the swing. She never actually swung, just sat there and stared, at the ground or at the sky. Even though she faced the building, she never looked at it. She spoke sometimes, but the words never made it past the ring of bare earth surrounding her. She was in a vacuum.

A little boy, scarcely eleven years old, stood on the roof of the building, his messy dark hair gleaming wine-red in the setting sun's light. He faced due east, his cheek turned to the girl as if he hated her but wanted to keep her within his sights out of mistrust. He held a turtle and a ruby walking stick, and an intricate silver machine clung to the slate shingles at his feet with snakelike fangs. He had a noble look about him, even though he wore an oversized gray sweat-suit and a pair of badly skewed spectacles. Sometimes, he spoke, too, but his words were too loud to be understood. It was if he was using a worn-out megaphone to speak into, and thus his magnified voice came out staticky and distorted.

There was an old woman who lived in the building, where all her possessions served her with the understanding that she would always keep them safe. She wore her white hair in a thick braid that coiled on the back of her head, covered in a beige kerchief. She wore a welder's apron and white cotton pants, not to mention wooden-soled clogs and a sleeveless pink shirt. Like the teenage girl, she had dozens of bracelets on, although hers were clunky and made of Venetian glass beads or thick plastic instead of delicate silver filigree. She spent most of her time in the red-green room, which served as a kitchen of sorts. There was a stove and a pantry in there, and a dozen or so mismatched small tables she used as countertops. The topiary in the paisley room stood over the old woman's little sleeping cot. A Chihuly vase full of orchids and funeral lilies past their prime bloom sat next to the bed. The old woman's glasses floated in midair beside the vase, but she rarely used them. Her face had that hollow quality that told the world of an old curve, a place that was once fleshy and beautiful. She had perfect teeth.

Sometimes, a black panther would come cautiously over the river from the desert and into the heather. He was the old woman's best companion, the panther with blue eyes, because he would curl up against her when she slept, or he would circle at the girl on the swing, or he would lie on one of the tables in her kitchen and watch her as she cooked. He had the most beautiful eyes; they haunted her. They were the same color as the girl's on the swing, but his eyes were a cat's eyes and framed with his black fur. He did not have a feline's grace, and the old woman was not upset because she did not have much of a woman's grace. She imagined that he was content to be a misfit, and so must she be to be as happy as he.

She used color carelessly sometimes, the old woman did. The orange room, where there was lots of water in all its forms, she had taken a boar-hair brush and dipped it in a pot of boiling oil, and she smeared it across the yellow walls. It discolored the paint to a deep umber in places. In others, the paint peeled away from the plaster and lath and fell to the low pile carpet below. It scorched the wood trim and turned it dark brown. The ceiling was painted with an ocean of sunflowers and poppies and tiger lilies. The old woman loved lilies and had them all over her house.

"What's God to you?" asked a voice from the radio on the floor in the orange room. "Are you God? Is there a God?" The old woman stood in the doorway between the orange and paisley rooms. The old woman didn't question the fact that she was no longer useful and it must have been that she was alive solely because whatever God she was meant to revere didn't want her yet. It had been a very long time since she contemplated that idea; she decided that she was just too old to worry about it much.

There was a large bird that lived in a cardboard tomato sauce crate near the riverbank. It had a foul smell to it, and no feathers. Its skin was black but it wasn't otherwise terribly ugly. Its purpose was to monitor visitors to the old woman's heather field, to make sure they didn't stay too long. A visitor overstaying his or her welcome disrupted the balance in the field. The clocks the line the walls in the paisley room would go haywire or stop all together. The old woman no longer had the stamina to go around and fix them all.

Sometimes, although never when the panther came, a woman with square spectacles and a magnificent green sequined gown would come to see the old woman. They sat in the sunny orange room, where it smelled of paint always and occasionally chocolate and had the dry heat of Oklahoma. It was a much different climate from the cool humidity of the paisley room, and the cozy warmth of the kitchen room. The old woman wondered sometimes if the woman in the gown and the panther were the same person, but even she knew it was silly. The woman in the gown asked her stupid questions and gave her the food she cooks, as well as lovely recipes to try out, and she cut her hair sometimes. Sometimes the old woman felt intruded upon and the clocks began to stop ticking in the next room, one by one. Before long, much shorter periods of time than the panther was allowed, the bird would leave its cardboard roost and fly in carrion circles over the fields, crying its death cry, signaling the end of the visit. She never felt intruded upon by the panther, but he never asked her anything at all.

The old woman, always hearing the cry first, would jump to her feet, screaming. The bird's cries unsettled her and frightened her, even though she depended on the creature to keep her safe.

The green-gowned woman would never hear the bird but the old woman screaming would send her running, back across the heather and across the bridge and back to the desert from which she came. The old woman resented the green-gowned woman because there were always large gaps of time between that woman's visits and the panther's, as though the panther was afraid to invade the old woman's fragile sanctuary. She wished she spoke panther, so she could tell him that if she had her own way, he would stay with her always. Alas, she did not speak panther, and he never overstayed his welcome. He always bowed out before the bird had a chance to rouse itself. This tact he possessed might have been what endeared him so much to the old woman, because she never associated him with the fear that came from the bird's cries.

"I don't know his name," she murmured to herself one day when he did not come, sitting on the floor in the red-green room, where it was black tile.

When the second sun, the one in the northern part of the sky, would set in the evening, the woman would know it was time to go outside and make sure the girl was all right, and that the boy had sat down. If they weren't, she wasn't sure what she would do, because they always were. They operated on the same timetable she did and never let her down. Once assured they were perfect, she would go back and lie down on her cot in the paisley room. Her bedspread was emerald green and purple paisley, and the carpets were blue and gold like the feathers of some exotic parrot. Once, the panther forgot himself and slept the whole night in the paisley room with her, curled up on the floor while she took the tiny cot by herself. She awoke early in the morning, when the cool red sun was at its zenith, but said nothing, preferring to watch him lie there, breathing so silently. When she woke again, he was gone.

When a stranger who was not the panther or the woman in the green sequins would dare to cross the bridge, the bird went crazy. The old woman's entire world was built upon a certain structure, and disruptions to that balance were reacted to very badly. She would fly into a sort of fit in the presence of a stranger. At first, she had with the woman in green, but the woman had persistence and eventually she learned to tolerate her presence. She was used to her dropping in every so often after so long. There wasn't trauma in her visits so much any more, although it happened when the woman overstayed her short welcome. The gatekeeper bird did not trust the younger woman.

Once, a man all dressed in a white tuxedo came over the bridge, bearing a tray of live sea scallops, still in their shells, struggling vainly against the air. She had freaked out completely at the sight of the scallops' suffering. She grabbed the nearest thing, a chair from the paisley room, one made of metal, and had broken it against the wall. She had attacked him, trying to save the scallops. Once he was out and bleeding, she took up the tray and dumped them into the salty river that protected her field from the desert landscape beyond.

She had never ventured onto the bridge or gone on to the desert. She could never see it very well, even though it was very close. There were indistinct shapes moving always, quickly through the corridors between the dunes. Most of them wore the same shade of green as the woman in the sequined dress. Some wore white that matched her pants. There was a gleaming reflective surface she could see reflecting the suns' lights from her window, and she suspected that this was where the panther lived and watched her from afar. She couldn't imagine why he would live in a ball of light, but it suited his rich, dark fur. She couldn't look for long at the bridge or the light, though, because it reminded her of something she couldn't quite remember.

Her memory was a hazy maze that was like Swiss cheese or a bone stricken with osteoporosis. There were lots of gaps and only strands of structure left in inconvenient places. There was one image, of a dead man with brilliant but vacant green eyes and hair like the boy on her roof, and another of a man with red hair and an evil smile and so much green light coming towards her. There was one of a grayscale picture on a small screen, some indistinct blob moving and the distinct pang of utter happiness and the feeling of someone clutching her hand and the alien chill of liquid on her belly. Another image was of a castle on a hill, lit up with millions of candles inside. In one, a girl she doesn't know was dancing with a dark-haired stranger. There was one of a man's purring voice telling her he loved her, but one of the gaps stole his face from her.

Behind the building was an orchard of peach trees and a grape arbor and rows of yellow and pink rose bushes. She hadn't tended the plots in years and they had the overgrown look of any haunted house's gardens. They were once ordered and beautiful, she could vaguely remember. She used to stroll them without a care. But she had grown afraid to venture inside for fear there be monsters lurking amongst the vines and thorns and blooms. The orchids and dying lilies inside her paisley room were quite enough to sustain her need for beauty.

One morning, for morning she measured by the yellower of the two suns, she ventured to the bridge to look out at the desert, but she strayed too near the bird's box. It came out and perched on top, watching her with its watery eyes, as if not sure what she might do. She thought that perhaps saw the hazy outline of a woman with red hair standing on the road leading to the bridge, and a very small girl who looked exactly like the teenage girl back on the swing, standing with the panther, who looked distressed.

Why the panther had any reason to be distressed was beyond the old woman, who took this as a bit of an insult. "I'm not doing this for you!" she called in a reasonable tone, considering she was not sure if the sound could penetrate beyond the borders of her field. But it didn't matter any more because she couldn't see them any more. The light was too bright and it obscured everything she might have thought she had seen.

She went outside and looked up at the boy on the roof. He was holding the turtle up towards the sky, his brow set in grim determination. "Would you like some breakfast?" he asked the turtle in a reasonable tone. "I'm sure she's made some sausages. Would you like some sausages?"

The old woman imagined that the turtle was saying in a plain, bored voice, "No, I wouldn't care for some sausages. I'm a turtle and turtles don't like sausages." It took her a moment, and then it occurred to her that turtles don't speak. In any case, she knew the point was moot because the boy never left the roof for food, and the turtle never left the boy's arms.

She turned back to the river and the desert and squinted at the light, which had dimmed somewhat. Not for the first time, she wondered what might be on the other side of the water, but she had never asked her visitors, and she had never gone past the tree where the girl with blue eyes sat on her swing.

The girl was speaking, but the old woman couldn't hear her. Her feet were bare, her turquoise-painted toenails skimming the hard-packed dirt under the swing. But one thing was wrong with the picture. The girl had looked up, her blue eyes fixed intently on the old woman. A tear worked its way down the girl's cheek, and her lips were moving frantically. The woman squinted and realized with a start that one of the images in the tunnels of her memory was of watching a bearded old man explaining how to read lips.

"You are not brave," the girl was saying as she cried. "You let it hurt you and you shouldn't have. He tells me that you were so wonderful but you aren't. You aren't. You're nothing but a shape. You're nothing but a ghost."

"I'm not doing this for you!" she shrieked at the girl, but the damage was done. She stumbled backwards, off of the neatly trimmed grass path and into a stand of heather. She clutched her heart and closed her eyes. She struggled to her knees and turned her face towards the light. "I'm declining!" she shouted to it, thinking only of the girl on the swing. "I'm declining." She broke off and fell back to the ground, the pale purple buds on the plants smacking her in the face. "I swear I will!" she screamed to the sky overhead.

She peeled herself off of the ground and ran into the house, through the paisley room and into the red-green one. On the glass-top table in the center was a tureen of lumpy gravy and a plate of neatly cut-up meat. Her one utensil was set out next to the plate. She stared at it.

Later, in the evening, she lay down on her cot and mourned that the panther had failed to visit her that day. She could see the light through the curtain over the door, which her bed faced, and it glowed as it always did. But it was evening, the only time of day when both of the suns were dimmed, and as they both disappeared, the light across the river diminished as well.

When it was gone, she would close her eyes, comforted.

"There aren't any lights in the world," she whispered before she slept.

000

Autumn's Monologue (From Autumn to Ashes)

Can't Not (Alanis)

Amen (Jewel)

Honestly Okay (Dido)

You Could Make a Killing (Aimee Mann)

I Know (Fiona Apple)

000

Dedicated to nobody because I'm not in the mood.

Posted 24 September, 2004 (written 13 July 2004)

--tinhen