A Life in Green

A Life in Green

Green was the first colour that Alice saw when she opened her eyes. The leafy forest canopy seemed to smile down on her in welcome, and the mossy carpet under her drew her into its velvety softness. The Healer midwife told Alice's mother that she had never seen a baby so wide-awake, so soon after being born. It was as if, she said, the child was aware of her surroundings and approved of them.

And Alice lay smiling at the plants around her, and the flowers bent their heads in acknowledgement of the birth of a new queen.

Green was the colour of Alice's bedroom as a child. The tree that grew outside her window (planted the day of her birth by a loving father) had long since marked the carpet inside in its own patterns of dappled light and shade, and when she lay on it, she could imagine herself deep in the forest, gazing up at the shifting leaves silhouetted against the changing sky. Herbs grew in boxes on her windowsill; sage mingling with comfrey and lavender, and moneywort trailing its tendrils down both sides of the wall. When they had grown enough, they were planted in the big herb garden by the side wall with all her mother's plants.

And Alice's herbs grew faster and stronger than any of the others, and always stretched towards the room where their sunlight lived.

Green was the colour of the ink on the Hogwarts letter Alice received the summer after she was eleven. Her mother spoke excitedly of trips to buy robes, wands and cauldrons, and Alice smiled dreamily and hoped there would be plants at the school for her to love. She said a sad farewell to her herbs the morning that she left, and they brushed their leaves gently against her hand in understanding of the coming time of winter.

And Alice looked at the streets of London, and hoped with all her heart that Hogwarts would feel more like home.

Green was the colour of Alice's Herbology lessons, working in the crowded greenhouses with plants pressing against her arm as she worked. Professor Sprout nurtured the girl's talent as a young tree, feeding and watering her thirst for understanding in the already fertile soil of her ability. By her third year Alice was working with plants beyond OWL level, and staying to assist the Professor with others after classes and on weekends. Her gentle voice and soothing touch quieted even the most recalcitrant of transplants, and she was called in to help when, in her fifth year, a Whomping Willow was planted in the school grounds.

And Alice stroked the trunk of the tree that thrashed around her, and thought she had never been happier.

Green was the colour of the Slytherin boy Alice tutored in her sixth year. A potions accident had turned his hair the colour of spring leaves, although its natural brown was showing through at the roots, and Alice told him it looked like the shoots that crocus bulbs would send up to break through the earth at the end of winter. He laughed and said he'd always known he was a dim bulb. When he graduated at the end of that year, he asked her if she would mind his writing to her, and she agreed, never expecting that the boy from the green house would want to keep up their friendship.

And Alice was kept busy that summer, replying to the letters, and there were days when the plants outside waited for her in vain.

Green was the colour of the Dark Mark, when it started appearing as Alice drew near her graduation. Whispers flew in the corridors about the rise of a new Dark Lord, with powers that surpassed even Grindelwald's. Muggleborn students were disappearing from her classes, summoned home to attend the funeral of a loved one. Alice listened from her refuge among the plants, and soothed their trembling leaves with gentle fingers, until the day of her graduation, when the letter came for her. It seemed strange to her, as she listened to Professor Sprout's sympathetic explanation, that her possession of one Muggle grandparent could bring the grief caused by the death of a beloved father (killed for being a half-blood in the wrong place) and mother (by her own hand, of a broken heart).

And Alice wept into the shoulders of those who came to comfort her - of Sprout, of Frank, of his mother - and they were all green.

Green was the colour of the robes Alice wore to work as an Auror. As the war progressed, there was an increased need for people who could create medicines and antidotes for wounds and poisons. Alice could brew a potion competently, though not brilliantly, but her real skill lay in plant collection and preparation. Soon, she was sent out with another Auror as backup to gather rare and essential plants from places close to the enemy, and somehow Frank was almost always the Auror assigned to be her protector.

And Alice watched his face as he stammered out a proposal after returning from an excursion that had so nearly gone wrong, and she wriggled her toes in the grass, and said yes.

Green was the colour of Lily Potter's eyes, and the first thing Alice saw when she walked in to her first Order of the Phoenix meeting. She vaguely remembered the girl from Hogwarts, although Alice had been a few years older, but in one sense, Lily had now caught up to her. They were both pregnant. And they had the same due date. Alice listened vaguely to the cheerfully rude comments made by Potter's friends, sitting with one hand curved protectively over the swell of her stomach, and caught Lily doing the same thing.

And Alice smiled at the other girl, and wondered if Lily felt the same sense of wonder at creating a new part of the growing cycle.

Green was the colour of the killing curse, when Alice heard in October of the Potters' deaths. She grieved for her friends, sitting in the grass on the lawn with the toddling Neville playing with the flowers. It seemed somehow wrong that someone so full of life as Lily had been should be cut off in a flash, like a flower from the stem, before her proper time of winter had come. Alice wondered what would become of the child, Lily's child, who had Lily's green eyes but might never know.

And Alice hugged her own child to her breast and was thankful that he would never have to suffer the same fate, now that Voldemort was gone.

Green was the colour of the room where Alice lay, day and night. The oaken panels around her bed were covered in pictures of plants, of forests and flowers. On her bedside table were round pots, each labelled with the name of the plant it contained. Healers trotted in and out in their green robes, some pausing to check on Alice or the man who lay silently beside her, but most simply passing by. And sometimes, an old woman would come, dressed in flowing, mossy green, and bringing with her a brown-haired, round-faced boy.

And whenever she saw him, Alice fought through the fog surrounding her to give him a single gift: a green gum wrapper.

And she hoped, with all the remnants of her shattered mind, that he would understand its meaning, and know the story of her life in green.