Colourful: Red and Blue

PART I: RED AND BLUE

Tell me, did the wind sweep you off your feet?
Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day,
And head back to the milky way,
And tell me, did Venus blow your mind,
Was it everything you wanted to find,
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?

- Train, Drops of Jupiter

I fell in love with a girl in red, and now I'm falling for a woman in blue.

It began when we were sixteen.

Sixteen, an age of blissful days full with overstated agony and dramatised events. An age where suddenly you feel so grown, yet are oh-so-young. When summer days are full of joy, and friends lost are friends gained again, when every day is seen as a new trial, when everything seems too complicated but is so damned easy.

Sixteen, an age when love is simply that - love.

I fell in love - yes, I, in love - with her one autumn day, as she stood there in her red dress, clothing forced upon her by friends who wanted her to be a girl for a change, rather than just another person in jeans. She looked so beautiful that day, standing under the tree as its leaves floated through air, with her hair being pulled about her face and away by the wind. She always wore her hair up on her head, a scruffy ponytail that served its purpose, never down and free. I always loved her hair when it was falling about her shoulders, trailing down her back.

She turned to me from her silent watch of the lake that day, her green eyes meeting mine as she smiled. And by Merlin, that smile is the most beautiful I've ever seen.

It didn't take long from there. A winter's romance full of kisses by the fireside in the early hours of the morning, snowball fights in the afternoon and endless laughter in the evening. It was a season of mistletoe and dancing, a time that will never be forgotten. It was perfection for us, a period when we could be the happy ones for once.

But perfection never lasts.

Eighteen, that was the age when fate turned on us. I left early - too early - and she went too far away. She tried to tell me, over and over again, but I could not hear, could not listen for the noise of an excited mind. If only I had tried a little harder that day, tried to listen, tried to comprehend what she was trying to say to me. I always knew of her dreams, and yet a part of me never realised what they meant. To see everything, that was her desire - to throw herself into the culture of place after place, to visit the glowing lights of Vegas and the avenues of Paris. I suppose it came of her being a muggleborn and knowing nothing of our world. She once walked blind, living side by side with a universe she never stepped in, a place that was hidden to her for so long. And suddenly she could see, like a blind man cured, and she wanted to see everything.

For me, that only meant a holiday to Spain next year, maybe America the next. I didn't add two and two together, and as she tried to explain, I couldn't give her the intelligence of a child. I was wrapped up in myself, and as she looked at me with tears in her eyes, I only thought it was because I was leaving the next day.

I didn't find out how wrong I was until I received her last letter. I had been too busy to meet her, too preoccupied with the shop, with the money, with my life to hold a conversation. Oh, we exchanged letters, we spoke by floo, but it was not enough. Everyday, I missed her, but there was always tomorrow, because we were we and not two separate people. But her last letter shattered my illusion, shattered the perfection I'd dreamed of for us. For myself.

The day that letter was placed in my hand was the day my world fell down around me.

It was the final day of term, their final day at Hogwarts, and as we, my brother and I, stood waiting for them to arrive I could only feel joy at seeing them - seeing her - again. The train pulled in, on time as always, and as eager parents and siblings rushed to great family members long missed, I watched. I waited. I knew they would linger that day, for it was the last journey they would ever have together, the journey I would have had if only I would've stayed a little longer.

I saw her friend first. So different, yet so close, two girls who could never be separated. And then my friend following hers. They approached, but I paid them no heed - I only looked for one. It was only when the pair came before me that my gaze turned to them. How I could have missed the expressions on their faces before, I do not know - anger, sadness, regret, no joy to see me. I should have guessed. She would have been there, stood with them.

She, her friend, came first, ablaze with the temper that was her trademark, with her eyes filled with fire and her hands hot. The slap that rung my ears only confused me; the tears in her eyes were what filled me with dread. And then, he came, my friend, and with a look a pity and a fury withheld he placed it in my head. Red ink on folded parchment, a neat script that could only be hers.

But she had never tied her letters in black ribbon before.

She never used black if she had the choice. It was a colour she hated, a colour she associated with memories best left forgotten yet never quite banished. A colour of sorrow, of pain, of death; those were the words she spoke to me when I asked her. The colour she only wore upon her form by choice on one day. A day when she would write in black ink and seal her envelopes with black wax. A day when she wore a black ribbon in her hair.

And then, I knew. Even as he, my friend, spoke in a quiet voice the words 'If only you'd listened...', I knew. I knew that she was not coming today, and that she was not coming tomorrow. That she had gone, and she wouldn't be coming back.

I didn't read that letter for days. It sat upon the small desk in the tiny room I had above the shop, and I would simply watch it, willing the dread to go away. It was a week before I unlaced the ribbon, a week before I read those words, the ink smudged by tears willingly shed. Words that would forever remain in my heart, words that would haunt me for months to come.

They forgave me, of course, her friend and mine. My brother bore little resentment; any anger on his part was vanquished in one encounter between us. I had never known how much she meant to him until that encounter, until his fist had connected sharply with my jaw. He used to tease her everyday, call her names and test our pranks on her at every opportunity. Oh, they were friends, but it was on that day, when he lost his temper - and I mean truly lost his temper, an occurrence as rare as the blue moon - that it occurred to me that he only did those things because, in his own way, he loved her too. She was the annoying family member who corrected him and told him off, and he picked on her and taunted her in return.

My friend, he accepted the situation in time. He was always the one who protected the rest of us, even when we didn't quite realise it. Oh, he was every bit as outgoing and mischievous as me and my brother were in general company (even we would not have dared bring a giant tarantula to school as he did), but he was also the one that held all our secrets, held all our fears. Strange, really, for none of us ever saw him in that light.

Her friend, she took a little longer. Her temper held for a time beyond the normal limit, and her anger would flare every time I entered a room. She blamed me for breaking the heart of her best friend, and for pushing her to continents far away. Eventually, she came to acknowledge that I did not force her to leave, and that it was as inevitable as the turning of the tides. And then, friendship came anew, and we were almost whole again but for the one who explored a land none of us would ever think to know.

I kept that black ribbon, kept it until the horror ended. Two years have passed since that fatal day of sorrow and realisation, since everything ended. Two years since she left me for a world of dreams and dancing. Two years since she began a journey to the lights of the world and the sky as I waited for I was too afraid to follow, too foolish to fly with her.

And it's been two months since she came back.

It was chance meeting, that morning. Oh, I knew what day it was. I have known the date since I was twelve years old, when she was told the news and cried upon my shoulder for the first time. The morning of chance, I was there simply by a request of a friend who had lost a grandmother, and it was afterwards as I wandered the graveyard that I encountered her again. A place of despair, but a place of rest. A place where I always felt uneasy, out of place. I had not experienced much sorrow in my life, not true sorrow, and a graveyard was alien to me and mine.

It was underneath the Aspen tree that I found her, standing with a single tear rolling down her cheek. And her form was adorned in black, and in her hand she held a black rose. Yet no black ribbon tied her hair back, for she had given that part of her sorrow away long ago to the one who had broken her heart.

I had never known this had been the place. She would not let us go with her, would always stand at the grave alone. Even her family were discarded as she stood, her mind only focusing on the cold stone before her and the beautiful memories behind. I knew she would be back again that day, back to the country where she was born, back to the place of burial. She came every year, and she always would. It was a chance so unlikely that I was there too.

And that day, fate turned back to us.

I remember going her to, loosing control of my body as my heart took over. No thought was required, not for me, as took her hand and tied that black ribbon around her wrist. I spoke no words, I asked no questions. And we ended as we began, with her crying on my shoulder on the only day she wears black.

Now, we are friends once more. She still explores the world, but she comes home to us. To me. I learnt that her friend and mine and the one I call my brother have all been writing to her since she left. That they kept it secret from me, so it did not cause me pain and I did not hurt her again. There is no need for secrets anymore, because we are whole again. The one who left us has returned, the group dynamic once more set in stone. My brother tortures the traveller with his pranks, and her friend flares every time she looses her wand, and my friend never hesitates to lend a shoulder, just as he always did.

It is Autumn now, and she stands under a tree again, with her hair fixed upon the wind and eyes a million miles away. She is dressed in blue, as she once again fights the battle with her friend over feminine attire, and I watch as I always do. And she turns, and she smiles at me.

And by Merlin, it is the most beautiful smile I have ever seen.

I fell in love with a girl in red. Now, I'm falling for a woman in blue.

This time, it'll be different. This time, I'll be there, and I'll do the math, and there'll be no more letters bound in black ribbon.

This time, I'll listen.

[ George x Alicia ]