Harry Potter One Shots

Beauty Thrives

Judging by the grandfather clock it had just gone six in the morning. The world seemed oddly silent without the bright call of birds to break it. The wind hummed, but she felt it more than she heard it. The cool brush of gasping air raising bumps on her bony moonlit knees with the gift of a small comfort in the eerie silence of the morning that felt like night. The thin black curtains fluttered and danced and draped softly across her ankles. She couldn't feel her fingers and her head felt heavy with drowsiness, along with something intangible and disconcerting.

She had stopped trying to sleep altogether. Every attempt plagued her mind with her worst fears; memories that felt like ice cold fingers on your shoulder and rope around your wrists. Blink too long and her breath was stolen from her lungs. She had stopped crying too. She had thought that maybe she had stopped altogether.

This was not true. She knew that. Because she hadn't stopped caring. In fact, Pansy Parkinson probably cared more than anyone else did. She cared about the pain in a way that she couldn't justify entirely except that she cared simply because it hurt.

She blinked, and it stung her eyes. The stars began to fade behind the cloth of dawn and for a moment she couldn't feel the weight on her head. Though it didn't lift, it was almost as though she had forgotten about it for the smallest fragment of time. And that was all she needed.

Without aim or purpose or reason of any sort, determination pooled in her stomach, it ricocheted up her spine, and spread through her veins like the life she lacked. Without destination, her feet swung from their perch on the window ledge and landed with a muffled pat on the floorboards. Without a poke nor prod from any peer or sponsor, Pansy Parkinson rose, and she grinned, and she started again.

/////////////

Seamus Finnigan watched the other boy cup his hands around the mug of coffee and regarded him closely. He had known the boy for years. He knew the exact colour of his eyes and where the dimples were in his cheeks. He knew all his smiles and the almost-invisible mole just under his ear. He knew of his quick wit and crooked nose. He knew his worst fears and best stories. He knew this boy and yet he wanted to know more. He wanted to know it all.

Dean Thomas crossed his legs under himself as he sat on the kitchen countertop and bit his lip, staring at the floor littered with scrunched up newspapers and flat pack boxes. "Are you going to go?" Dean had asked, nodding vaguely in the direction of the living room, where two near-identical envelopes lay torn open, the contents leafed through and left. Seamus didn't know the answer, so he shrugged and told the boy so. Dean nodded, apparently satisfied by the lack of proper response.

Two days later, Seamus was watching the boy paint. He couldn't see what he was painting from his position on the floor, but he wasn't really watching the paint. Light streamed in through the windows that didn't have curtains yet and Seamus's eyes fixated solely on Dean, watching, seemingly unaware of doing so. The light softened his features and contrasted against his dark skin and hair. Occasionally, Dean tilted his head and bit his lip and furrowed his brow. And Seamus would smile, and his breath would be gone.

He snapped from his reverie when he heard his name being called, having forgotten to be pretending not to watch. Splotches of pink blossomed on his cheeks and he blinked up at Dean. The boy gave him a small smile and took a deep breath like he did when he was about to say something he'd been thinking about for a while. Then he drew his eyebrows together again, but this time he looked at Seamus and not the painting.

"I think I'm going back," Dean had said simply, and just as simply, Seamus' mind had been made up. He smiled back at the boy, then down to the book that he wasn't reading. "Yeah, I think I am too."