The Witch of Milkweed Manor
Summary: Even the brightest witches can have the most humiliating fall from grace. The question is, can she find a way to pick up the shattered pieces that remain? Regency era, love triangle.
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When first I knew her, I found her to be the most frustrating type of a girl - bookish, sensible in an almost infuriating way, and more than a bit snobbish. When not tottering about out of doors in her mother's chaotic gardens, a garden that could hardly qualify as "properly English", nose in a book, she loved to pose the most disturbing of questions. Even at 9 years old, I found her to be brilliant.
Still, I liked her even then, and, I think, she admired me. But my father took notice and dubbed her unsuitable, effectively snuffing out our young friendship before it ever had a chance to bud. A muggleborn and a pureblood would never be acceptable, my father declared, and I soon forgot about young Miss Granger of Hampstead. Or so I convinced myself.
When we met again, any chance at a friendship was nonexistent. Slytherins and Gryffindors didn't mix; it was an unwritten rule, and I soon found myself friends with the opposite sort than she would ever have approved of. Friends who were more stepping stones and body guards and would one day be proud heirs to their own father's businesses or even, possibly, suitable matches. My father's warnings of mudbloods would ring in my ears whenever I would even glance her way, and I feared his wrath, and so I ruthlessly taunted her alongside the rest of her house.
Years passed, Hogwarts became our past, and I took over my father's apothecary as he had always decreed I would. Miss Granger became an even more distant memory.
The next time I saw her, she was altogether changed. Not only her situation, which had changed from rather privileged to piteous, but also her very substance. As though the light within her had been dimmed to a mere flicker. At least it seemed so to me, and I ached to cradle that flame in my palms and breathe life back into it.
Others would look at her with much different eyes. They would see, perhaps, a fallen woman at the deepest point of humiliation. A woman to be flicked off one's sleeve like a disgusting worm. Or an insect to be tormented. Cruel, overgrown schoolchildren that many are, that I had once been myself, they seem to delight in ripping off one wing, then another, watching in morbid glee as she falls helpless to the ground only to be crushed to nothingness beneath the heel of a boot.
To the gentler observer, she is a creature to be scorned at worst and ignored at best, but certainly not one to watch with hopeful anticipation.
I, of course, can only watch from a safe distance - safe for us both. For me, now a married man, an apothecary of great note, a man of firm standing in the wizarding world. And for her, whose reputation I am determined will suffer no more - not if it is in my power to prevent it.
And yet, as I watch her there among the milkweeds, I confess all these thoughts fade away. I think only of her.
How lovely she looks. Not abstractly beautiful, but perfectly fitted to the landscape, etched into a painting of purest golden glow above, and mad, overgrown garden below - gold, green, purple - heaven and earth. And there at the center, her still figure, looking not at me but at the distant horizon, where the sun is spilling its first fingers over the milkweed, over her milky skin, her only barely tamed hair, her gown of blue sky.
The light moves toward me and I am stilled further, speechless.
A sharp barb of waiting fills my chest and I can barely breathe. If I don't move, the light will touch me, the painting will encompass me. If I step away, retreat into the shadows, I will be safe, but I won't be there to see her when she finally flies away..
Dear Merlin. Please guard my steps. And somehow bless Miss Hermione Granger.
A/N: Here she is! The prologue! I have had this sitting in my head for literal years, and I have been aching to write it. I hope you enjoy this adventure with me. :)
No, I have not abandoned LEAP. I'm just stuck. T.T
Ciao,
Em