We will meet again ~ Fred Weasley

- Something Of Her Own -

"For the first time, she wasn't trying to become what the world needed her to be. She was beginning to discover what she wanted to become for herself."

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The first thing Katherine noticed was that she had absolutely no idea what she was supposed to do with herself.

It was a surprisingly uncomfortable realisation.

She had spent most of her life knowing exactly what came next.

When she was eleven, there had been Hogwarts.

When she was twelve, there had been lessons, homework, Quidditch, detentions, arguments with Draco, late-night conversations with Veronica, Blaise and Theo, and the endless, exhausting responsibility of being Katherine Potter.

After that came war.

Then came survival.

Then came the strange, quiet period after the war when everyone had begun behaving as though the hardest part was over simply because Voldemort was dead.

Katherine had never believed that.

The hardest part, she was beginning to realise, might have been figuring out what came afterwards.

She stood in the middle of the joke shop's upstairs sitting room with a mug of tea cooling between her hands and stared at absolutely nothing.

Outside the window, Diagon Alley was waking up.

The familiar sounds drifted through the glass in layers.

Shopkeepers unlocking doors.

A delivery cart rattling over the cobblestones.

Someone shouting about a late shipment of potion ingredients.

A witch laughing loudly enough that Katherine could hear her from two floors above the street.

Somewhere downstairs, George was arguing with a supplier.

Or pretending to argue.

It was difficult to tell with George lately.

Katherine had become increasingly aware that the shop had changed since the war.

Not merely because parts of it had been rebuilt.

Not because some of the windows were newer than the others or because the floorboards near the back counter still looked slightly different from the rest.

It had changed because they had.

The people who had once filled the shop with noise had all survived in different ways.

Fred and George were no longer simply two boys who had decided that school was getting in the way of a brilliant business idea.

Blaise, Theo, Pansy and Draco were no longer merely students who spent their evenings arguing in the Slytherin common room.

Harry was no longer just Harry.

Ron was no longer just Ron.

Hermione was already talking about Ministry reforms as though she had been born with a briefcase in one hand and a stack of legislation in the other.

Everyone seemed to have somewhere they were going.

Everyone except Katherine.

She took another sip of tea.

It was cold.

She grimaced and put it down.

She looked around the room.