Till Forever Falls Apart

Tell Me Something

*I was editing this chapter and I remembered how much fun I had while writing it:) Enjoy your day!

May 9, 1993 - 12:18 A.M.

Hours after the attack, Val could not go to sleep. The common room was all but deserted, except for another girl with pale blonde locks, staring out of the window along the farthest wall.

"Hi there, Luna," Val greeted her, taking the seat adjacent to the girl a year younger than herself. "Are you alright?"

"Oh yes," Luna tilted her head, gazing at the forest. "Awful, isn't it? What has happened to Hermione and Penelope?"

That's what Val was trying so hard to forget at that late moment in the night. "Yes. Terrible. What are you still doing up at this hour?"

"Breathing," she smiled lightly. "It always helps me think."

The older girl simply nodded, pulling her knees up to her chest and watching Luna take off her necklaces and align them in neat rows. "It's best we take care of the creatures, such as we do for jewelry. My mother taught me that when we saw a bundimun near our home."

"Can I see-" Val stopped, hearing a thunderous banging outside the room. Luna made herself smaller in her chair, acutely focused on the silver chain of one of her necklaces.

Holding her wand and remembering a series of spells, Val crept towards the door. "Who is it?" She hoped they hadn't heard the crack in her voice.

"It's Harry and Ron!" Their voices muffled from the thickness of the walls. "Let us in!"

Visibly relaxing, she allowed them passage from the other side, watching as they ripped off the invisibility cloak she had given them back hours ago. "Did you find anything out?"

Harry rubbed his glasses on his sweater, placing them back on his face as he told her that Dumbledore had been removed, and Hagrid sent to Azkaban.

Val felt the fear twist her heart just a little bit more.

May 29, 1993

When Val had told Padma this news, such as she felt it was her right to do so, the girl went absolutely ballistic.

The weeks that followed, Padma wailed in between classes, ate only soup and cheese toasties (Parvati had told her that those were her comfort foods during times of distress), and the most frightening part of it all?

She had started to prepare for their funeral.

"It's the end of Hogwarts as we know it," she sniffled one day, begging Anthony and Val to go with her to the grassy lands near the greenhouses. Summer was coming, its notes of free-spirited fun moving through the breeze of spring's air, waiting for the end of the year. In the rarity of Hogwarts weather, the sun shone brilliantly on the hills of Scotland, enriching all with its fragrance of a time filled with exhilaration.

Or, that was supposed to be exhilarating.

Plucking flowers from their lush bushes at the steep of the high ground, she cried quietly, searching for the mountain avens that had sprung up some time ago. Wood anemones, Scottish bluebells, she had even managed to find white roses neatly growing near thistles in the remaining days of that month. Her arms filled with flowers of all colors, carrying them as one did when they're mourning and clinging to a remembrance of a lost loved one.

"Padma," Val tucked her skirt underneath her feeling the dryness of the grass. "No one is dying."

"Our friendship will!" The girl hugged the floral bouquet. "When they shut down the school, we'll hardly see each other! Sure, we'll write letters, see each other for a week here and there. But you know what happens then, right, Val? You make each other promises to always be in contact, and then one day, boom! Before you know it, we're strangers to each other again! We'll forget to respond to letters, we'll get busy with other things. It's the end of us!"