Diary Of A Lost Girl

 

The Book Closes….

“This is a time for believing in fairy tales;
One in which you are brought back to me.”
Wolf, Veruca Salt
 
A girl of medium height with dark brown hair and green eyes perched on the end of her bed, clutching a worn, stained piece of parchment. She peered closely at it, her wire-rimmed glasses slipping down her nose…

* * * * *

Dear Fawkes, it began, I suppose you’ve always wondered how you got your name…
I was four when my parents were murdered. I remember my mother as being beautiful; I remember the silky texture of her long brown hair, but I cannot remember her face. I don’t have any photographs of my mother, though I do have one of my father. He was fourteen when it was taken, but seemed decades older. It’s odd, that; I remember him being a lively person, swinging me around on my birthdays.

* * * * *

I don’t know if you know that your mother was a prisoner of war in that long battle against Voldemort – but that must be many years ago, for you, the letter continued. I know that if you are reading this now, he has finally won; for if your mother or I were alive, we would have told you our story before now. Know that we love you, have always loved you, and always will love you; love is a voyager beyond the bounds of time, life, and death.

* * * * *

There weren’t so many pictures of my mother; to my knowledge, the only ones in existence were burned up in the fire that destroyed my home and my parents’ bodies. My mother’s parents had died a year previously, and everything they had owned was lost as well. Voldemort killed all of them, my parents and grandparents. Only my mother could fight back; she killed him, but lost her life in the battle.

* * * * *

I fell in love with your mother a long time before I knew it, perhaps the day I met her, her father’s long-dead voice said in his sprawling black writing, and my heart was broken the day she was captured. We were sixteen; we had discovered our love for each other perhaps five minutes before, and she was taken from me. I thought she was dead for two years. Then your aunt Ginny was captured and taken to Azkaban – and she found Hermione there, still alive.

* * * * *

Hermione was my mother’s name. She had a beautiful voice – it seemed that everything about her was the personification of loveliness, of serenity, of calm. On nights when it’s rainy outside and I’m lying in bed, I remember her voice reading me fairy tales. She deserved a wealth of fairy tales, where she could be the princess and my father her champion. She deserved a happy ending.

* * * * *

Ginny escaped a few days later, and she came back and told me that Hermione was still alive. There was a frenzied week of Order of the Phoenix meetings – an organization that banded together to fight Voldemort – and then we made an attack on Azkaban, once our prison, and now Voldemort’s finest fortress.

* * * * *

I live with Ginny now, in a little cottage on the fringes of a little seaside village in Wales. She’s never married – I think that perhaps she was in love with my father, but he didn’t love her back the same way. They were always friends, though. The only picture of my father that I have ever seen sits on her mantel.

* * * * *

The Death Eaters there put up quite a fight, but in the end they went down in a blaze of fire and brimstone. Ashes and soot rained down on us, but we pressed on, freeing prisoners, until we came to the final wing, where your mother was. I made the rest of the team let me go in alone.

* * * * *

He was a good person, Ginny tells me, the bravest man she ever knew. His name was Harry, and they called him The Boy Who Lived, because he had defeated Voldemort once when he was just a little baby. My father would read me stories too, some nights, and I never knew how courageous or famous or brave he was, but I knew how much he loved me. And that was all I ever needed to know about him.

* * * * *

I unlocked her cell, and at first she couldn’t believe I was real; she thought I was a hallucination of some kind. She was thin, pale, and the most wonderful thing I had ever seen, because I loved her. You were conceived there, in Azkaban, out of the ashes and the fire, and you were a phoenix, because you were our love reborn.

* * * * *

Sometimes I dream of my parents returning to me, saving me from the nightmares of their deaths, drowning me in kisses and hugs. I have Ginny, and all my Weasley aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins, but they aren’t the same. They never will be.

* * * * *

We were married a few weeks later, and when you were born, we named you for Fawkes, our friend Dumbledore’s phoenix, who had saved my life a time or two.
We love you, Fawkes. Happy sixteenth birthday.
The letter was signed, Harry Potter, your father, and then again, in the corner, in a neat, feminine hand, Hermione Potter, your mother.
Fawkes held the letter in her hand for a long moment before she dropped it into the fire. For from out of the ashes of her desire for parents, she would find something new. She would be a phoenix; she could learn.