Reticent (h.s fanfic, punk Harry)

Chapter 5

OPHELIA/PRESENT

I've always laughed at the damsel in distress. About how she always needed help in every way. She was always, as the cliché words went, in distress. I didn't believe in cliché's my mother made that very clear. There was no Santa, no Easter Bunny, and no Peter Pan. She didn't want me to rely on those fictional characters for happiness. I had to make my own happiness. Apparently my happiness was a slimmer body, head cheerleader, and rich friends.

I never doubted that all of this was true. At the young age of ten my innocent mind thought all mothers expected these things from their children, but my perception of her utopian expectations slowly crumbled away. I saw other mothers telling their kids to do whatever made them happy. They didn't have to wash their hands after touching the slightest thing in public, they didn't have to dress their finest outside the house, or in the house. They didn't have to do anything that I did. That was the time that I started to miss him.

Cameron only saw me on holidays and weekends and he didn't expect anything of me. But I was used to her orders because it was drilled in my brain that this was the way every adult expected of me. I was Ophelia Davis, daughter of Darcy Davis, the woman who could bend anyone anyway. Cameron would leave me to do what I did. He used to talk to me so much, he would make goofy jokes, funny faces, but I had to hold my laughs in. Darcy always said it was silly and childlike to laugh at such things. And I wasn't a child. So I couldn't act like one. After a while, he probably sensed that and stopped. The goofy faces were gone, the silly jokes were gone, and the talking was dry like sand. And soon those were gone as well. Cameron took a break from me. He said he had to get out of the country for quite some time, and Darcy forbid me joining him. I think some part of me truly craved to follow him there, and I was sure that if I had gone with him I would have run away.

And now it had been quite a few years. Four years without my father. And now I thought what he would like when he showed up to take me with him for the holidays. I felt somewhat in the middle; Cameron never looked too thrilled to be bringing me along. He smiled, but it never reached his dark grey eyes. Even when I was with him during those brief moments he didn't seem to want to converse with me. But then again when I was with Darcy I felt no better, I didn't feel more loved. Now Darcy has John, and Cameron had his work and his own problems, so I was in the middle, I belonged to both, but none was there to look for a moment or two, or talk for a moment or two. They walked around me like I wasn't there and they looked at me like I was fine with that void in my life.

I walked through the school doors, avoiding the Starbucks, skipping one day would be good. I had to balance it out, maybe another day I would allow myself something. I walked through the doors, and I was a little happy today. Maybe John had something to do and Harry was gone now. I'd never met someone like him, and I thought it best to leave it at that. He made me feel weird on the inside. The uncommon feeling worried me. It wasn't warm as it was when I met George and it wasn't like butterflies when George and I had our first kiss. This was something more perhaps. It was a type of feeling that possessed my entire body when I saw him. It was like something was sitting at the pit of my stomach and I just simply wanted something, I wasn't sure what it was.

I was sure it was hatred; he had fought with George for no apparent reason. George was a kind soul and he didn't hurt anyone, and no one had anything against him. Harry looked a little off... piercings and tattoos weren't something completely alien to me, but seeing those on Harry brought on a feeling that I didn't quite understand. I tried to envision George with something like that on his face and hands but nothing came to my imagination, George was too innocent for me to see him with anything considered dangerous on his person.