II
Summer

'I once spoke to a girl named Summer
and one fall she stood so tall.
She found some confidence and some wings and she, she flew away.
And she said, "You can't hold me down any longer."
what a beautiful song it was.'

And then there had been Meghan.

Meghan, he'd met at one of his first quidditch game as a starting player. She'd been a friend of the team's healer Suzie, and had been invited by Roy, the Puddlemere seeker, to join them for the after-party to celebrate their victory.

Quiet, delicate and intensely gorgeous in a way Oliver had never seen before, dark-haired and chocolate-eyed Meghan Daily was fascinating. She drank in moderation, and spoke only when she felt so inclined, not just for the sake of talking. This, to some people, may have seemed snobby but Oliver knew better, being a man of few words himself.

Her soft seriousness had unnerved the rest of the team and so, within the first hour of their outing, Meghan and Oliver had been left at the table by themselves, the others off dancing and gallivanting about as per usual. Buying her a butterbeer and sitting in the seat next to her, Oliver had smiled and suddenly she'd begun to talk, her voice husky and musical all at the same time. Oliver, mesmerised by her, had asked her out again, and by the end of the fortnight they had seen each other every day, Meghan tagging along with Suzie to the practices and Oliver apparating to her flat each night.

On the last evening of that fortnight, Oliver had apparated into her apartment to hear the soft but confident sound of female singing drifting through the hallway. Following the beautiful sound, he'd found her in her bedroom, a fairly tiny room in which she'd somehow managed to fit a small piano, at which she was sitting, her eyes closed as her long, delicate fingers skated across the keys and her mellow voice rose into the air.

He stood there for a full ten minutes, lazily listening to the languid quality of her singing, before she'd realised he was there and with a snap of the piano lid the music disappeared, leaving an embarrassed silence in its wake. She'd been mortified: music had only ever been her secret passion, and she was too shy to even contemplate performing, though Oliver could tell it was something that would make her happy.

He had urged her to play for him again, and eventually she'd given in and sat back down to the squished-in piano; a smile, small at first but gradually growing, present on her face.

The next three months wrought a change in Meghan, and by fall she wasn't the timid, serious girl he'd first met in the summer, she was suddenly playing for his and her friends alike – her husky voice no longer enclosed in her small flat, echoing off the walls, but soaring out into the open like a bird taking flight.

Meghan had found her calling, and with it she had found her confidence.

Oliver was hard-pressed to decide whether he liked this new Meghan or not, it unnerved him that someone could change so much in a season. True, her music had matured in a way nothing short of extraordinary, but at the same time it didn't cut him anymore with its exquisite, almost unbearable honesty and personal charm anymore. And he just couldn't tell why.

And then, suddenly, one day, a week into the fall, as he stood at the front of a small crowd in Hogsmeade that had gathered where Meghan was busking, Oliver was shocked to hear her play a new song. A song he hadn't heard. A song, that, by the look in her eyes as she sang, he knew had been written for him.

He could feel his stomach twisting with bitterness for this wasn't a love-song; it was a break-up song. The lyrics were written with that same brutal honesty that her very first songs had had way back at the start of the summer when he'd first heard her sing, and they were raw and intensely beautiful... perhaps even more so than before, but oh god, how they hurt.

And so Oliver learnt vital love lesson number two:
change is not always good, and you will not always be needed.

hey all,
thanks for your reviews - you're all so good to me! haha.
and i'm sorry for confusing so many of you too, FFnet was being screwy last night and wouldn't let me post parts two and three.
sigh.
anyway, hope you enjoy them.
Ash x