Harry Potter Round Robin
Ok, here's my turn.
Part 1 from zagzagael
Part 2 from hauntingdream
It was the hush around her that pulled her upwards out of the book she was reading, tucked up like a cat in a bright red blanket on her tiny sofa. The lamps that they always burned at night in the small stone house -it felt so much warmer than Muggle electricity-were painting ephemeral landscapes on the walls and the tea on the low table beside her still sent small swirls of steam into the air. But the quiet had changed. It felt more purposeful somehow.
She got up and went to one of the small windows. The glass pane was old and somewhat waved, but she could that it had begun to snow. She loved snow, always had. How to explain the sudden melancholy that seized her?
The hush, yes, it was how the hush filled her ears in a way that wasn’t silence, that reminded her of the sound of Harry’s breath in the hollow between their faces almost touching under a quilt in their bed. She shivered and looked up, out the very top corner of the pane, towards Hogwarts away in the distance. She thought of Harry checking now on Minerva and on Hermione, too. Probably Ron was at the castle also, at this hour, and she thought of the three of them walking together, out over snow that crunched under their boots as their high young voices crackled in the sharp air. Walking together again, that trio of friends, walking away and she wished she could join them in a way that had nothing to do with a walk in the snow.
Which was silly. She loved them all intensely. But sometimes Harry felt like a map and she wanted to travel everywhere that was Him, but some parts she had no compass to navigate. She wondered how Minerva was taking their kind assaults, and not for the first time realized that her sympathies were more with her old professor than her family. Minerva McGonagall was just not a woman who belonged in an old age home. She felt, deeply, that Minerva would rather crumble to the ashes of her age and mind with the fine dignity of one who did so on their very own steam, and if that meant sooner rather than later, well, that was not in itself a tragedy.
And still there was that peculiar shiver quivering along her spine. She went still, with the unnerving intensity she sometimes possessed, and let her mind pick and tease the conversation it was having with itself up to the front so she could read it. She remembered now how Hermione had seemed preoccupied when she was last at the cottage for tea. How she had picked at the threads of her cloak while they talked.
And Harry, he had been distracted lately when he came home from work. She had thought it the stress of office politics, or a busier than normal schedule, but now she felt that there was something more worrying him. She wondered what it could be. Something must be worrying them all.
She wasn’t terribly concerned that they hadn’t shared it with her. That was their way. They would bring it to her eventually.
She climbed the stonework stairs, running a hand along the chipped wood of the banister, not bothering with a candle. The little bedroom she entered looked out toward the high plain that ran along the southern edge of the village. Crooked hawthorn grew there, and a great oak that marked the seasons calmly, regally sure in itself and its place. She walked to the hand-hewn cradle and picked him up, her small son that smelled of her breast milk and rising yeast. As she tucked his fuzzy head under her chin she brushed her lips over the soft spot of his skull that still pulsed, still counted out the beat of his small life taking up room in the world, filling her world up in ways she had never expected. Sometimes she felt the symmetry of an unrealized past pressing up against her present, and she held the boy close to her heartbeat at those times and she let him feel all the fire burning under her skin so he would know. He would know that there was no fate or prophecy that could touch what she wove around them unless they let it, and she held the boy and thought of the three people closest to her who did not know it as she did, those three somewhere in Hogwarts with their symbiotic secrets.
And rillalicious is next!
~
Part 1 from zagzagael
Part 2 from hauntingdream
It was the hush around her that pulled her upwards out of the book she was reading, tucked up like a cat in a bright red blanket on her tiny sofa. The lamps that they always burned at night in the small stone house -it felt so much warmer than Muggle electricity-were painting ephemeral landscapes on the walls and the tea on the low table beside her still sent small swirls of steam into the air. But the quiet had changed. It felt more purposeful somehow.
She got up and went to one of the small windows. The glass pane was old and somewhat waved, but she could that it had begun to snow. She loved snow, always had. How to explain the sudden melancholy that seized her?
The hush, yes, it was how the hush filled her ears in a way that wasn’t silence, that reminded her of the sound of Harry’s breath in the hollow between their faces almost touching under a quilt in their bed. She shivered and looked up, out the very top corner of the pane, towards Hogwarts away in the distance. She thought of Harry checking now on Minerva and on Hermione, too. Probably Ron was at the castle also, at this hour, and she thought of the three of them walking together, out over snow that crunched under their boots as their high young voices crackled in the sharp air. Walking together again, that trio of friends, walking away and she wished she could join them in a way that had nothing to do with a walk in the snow.
Which was silly. She loved them all intensely. But sometimes Harry felt like a map and she wanted to travel everywhere that was Him, but some parts she had no compass to navigate. She wondered how Minerva was taking their kind assaults, and not for the first time realized that her sympathies were more with her old professor than her family. Minerva McGonagall was just not a woman who belonged in an old age home. She felt, deeply, that Minerva would rather crumble to the ashes of her age and mind with the fine dignity of one who did so on their very own steam, and if that meant sooner rather than later, well, that was not in itself a tragedy.
And still there was that peculiar shiver quivering along her spine. She went still, with the unnerving intensity she sometimes possessed, and let her mind pick and tease the conversation it was having with itself up to the front so she could read it. She remembered now how Hermione had seemed preoccupied when she was last at the cottage for tea. How she had picked at the threads of her cloak while they talked.
And Harry, he had been distracted lately when he came home from work. She had thought it the stress of office politics, or a busier than normal schedule, but now she felt that there was something more worrying him. She wondered what it could be. Something must be worrying them all.
She wasn’t terribly concerned that they hadn’t shared it with her. That was their way. They would bring it to her eventually.
She climbed the stonework stairs, running a hand along the chipped wood of the banister, not bothering with a candle. The little bedroom she entered looked out toward the high plain that ran along the southern edge of the village. Crooked hawthorn grew there, and a great oak that marked the seasons calmly, regally sure in itself and its place. She walked to the hand-hewn cradle and picked him up, her small son that smelled of her breast milk and rising yeast. As she tucked his fuzzy head under her chin she brushed her lips over the soft spot of his skull that still pulsed, still counted out the beat of his small life taking up room in the world, filling her world up in ways she had never expected. Sometimes she felt the symmetry of an unrealized past pressing up against her present, and she held the boy close to her heartbeat at those times and she let him feel all the fire burning under her skin so he would know. He would know that there was no fate or prophecy that could touch what she wove around them unless they let it, and she held the boy and thought of the three people closest to her who did not know it as she did, those three somewhere in Hogwarts with their symbiotic secrets.
And rillalicious is next!
~