suitesambo (suitesamba) wrote in adventdrabbles, @ 2012-12-31 11:05:00 |
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Current mood: | busy |
Fruitcake and Firelight
Title: Fruitcake and Firelight
Author: suitesamba
Rating: Hard R
Warnings/Spoilers: none
Pairing: Neville/Ginny, mention of Harry/Severus
Fandom: Harry Potter
Words: 1782
Disclaimer: Not mine. Never were. Never will be. No profit is being made from this amateur work.
Prompt: #30 Fruitcake/Figgy Pudding
Summary: After the death of his Gran, Neville tries to keep the old family Yule traditions alive.
A/N: roozetter asked me for angst centered around Neville and fruitcake. She didn’t tell me until I wrote it that the prompt she gave me was in response to an Advent drabble challenge. Thus, this is an extremely late first entry to the 2012 Advent Drabbles and is a short fic, not a drabble. It’s also a new pairing for me. You’ll see Harry/Severus if you squint a bit, and past Harry/Ginny and Ginny/OFC.
In Gran’s room, at the end of the corridor, he hangs a wreath of pine branches in the window. He ties back the dark blue velvet curtains around her empty bed with gold cord, then lights the old oil lamp on the bedside table and stands, for a long breath, watching the flame flicker in the wavy glass. He imagines he can see her reflection in the passageway, stopping to straighten a portrait with a heavy sigh.
In Uncle Algie’s room, second floor, west wing, he ties a sprig of mistletoe in the wide open doorway between the bedchamber and the sitting room. Uncle Algie’s stamp albums still sit, gathering dust, on the tea table. He cracks open a window to freshen the stale air.
In the formal parlor downstairs, Tipper, the mute house elf that has served the family for more than a century, carefully—as always, as ever—decorates the tree with Augusta’s fine Faberge crystal ornaments, a king’s ransom of fragility on the boughs of a Noble Fir. The fairy lights twinkle despondently, lighting to full glow only when he is in the room and flickering hopefully when he walks quietly by in the corridor.
In the parlor of the informal sitting room, he places the Yule log in the empty grate.
And in the tall, narrow windows that look out to the long front porch of the stately old home, he places white candles, tall pillars of soft, welcoming light.
But there is no one to welcome. Not since August, just after his birthday, when Gran did not wake up to the hottest day of the year, and Tipper found him in the greenhouse, asleep at the workbench after a night of harvesting moonflowers, and tried to pantomime death to him.
And he had understood.
In the kitchen, the fruitcake sits, perfectly cut on a silver platter under a crystal dome. Thick slices of rich brown, moist with applesauce, coloured and textured with English walnuts and figs and currants and raisins and glace cherries.
They shared it, Gran and Uncle Algie and Neville, on solstice eve, sitting together in warm if quiet companionship, in front of the slow-burning Yule log in the cozy sitting room, Uncle Algie and Gran with their tea but Neville, Neville always with milk. Cold milk, no matter the weather, from the time he was a little boy with round cheeks and earnest eyes, until now, when he is twenty-one and knows the bite of fire whisky and the warmth of butterbeer and the allure of strong coffee.
Neville puts the kettle on for tea and stands in front of the old stove, wondering why he is doing this.
Continuing the old traditions.
Decorating an empty house.
Sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter with a sad-eyed, silent house elf, shelling walnuts.
Filling the ornate sterling silver sugar bowl with sugar cubes for one.
He should have stayed at Hogwarts.
Would Gran have wanted this? Expected this?
Is this bone-deep feeling sadness or loneliness or something else, something new?
The whistle of the teakettle nearly hides the other sound. Rapping.
He waves his wand at the stove and cuts the flame. The teakettle’s whistle quiets.
A creak as the front doors opens. A woman’s voice.
“Neville?”
He doesn’t want to be alone here but somehow, inexplicably, is not in the mood for company. He sighs, though, and reaches for another teacup.
“Back here, Gin.”
“Hey.”
She is wearing a white stocking cap, the kind Molly Weasley makes—he has two of them himself—with the long, long point that reaches nearly to the ground. You are supposed to wrap them around your neck like a scarf. His always came undone, but Ginny’s is draped loosely around her shoulders several times. Her cheeks are pink and chafed. She has a faded bruise above her right eye, undoubtedly from a bludger or a fall from her broom. She is in Muggle clothing, and is wrapped in a warm white coat.
“Harry said you might be here. Are you in the mood for company?”
“Harry said that, did he?” answers Neville, raising an eyebrow as Ginny walks into the room and eyes the tea tray. “I haven’t seen Harry in at least a week.”
“He’s been spending a lot of time at Hogwarts,” she says. “He hears things.”
“I imagine he does,” answers Neville. They regard each other from across the room.
“How long have you known?” she asks, carefully casual.
“About a minute,” he answers. “I only suspected before that.” He watches her eyes flick over to the plate of fruit cake. “Are you all right with it?”
“Oh.” She looks up at him. “I was the one who broke it off with him, wasn’t I? I had the biggest crush on Carmella Conners and thought I’d give it a run before I settled down with Harry. I doubt mum will ever forgive me. Silly of me to think he’d wait, wasn’t it?”
“Probably,” answers Neville honestly. “Harry’s a good man. And a good friend.” He needs her to know that, to understand he will not take sides. “So the Headmaster is worried about me?”
“We’re all worried, Neville,” she answers. “It’s your first Christmas without your Gran, and tonight is the solstice…”
“She liked the old traditions,” he says, glancing again at the fruitcake. “Well, quite a few of them were her own traditions, and had nothing to do with Yule or Christmas. But…well, they’re my traditions now too, and I thought—this year, anyway—I’d continue them.”
He watches her as she eyed the tea tray, undoubtedly noticing the two cups. “Am I staying for tea?” she asks, even as she begins unwrapping her hat scarf. She pulls it off her head and shakes out her hair, then takes off her coat and hangs it over the back of a chair.
“Apparently,” he says. He looks at her gratefully. “We’re having fruitcake.”
Ginny smiles. “Old family recipe, I hope?”
Neville nods. Not everyone soaks the raisins in rum, or uses applesauce along with the oil, or tops it off with white satin icing.
“Harry’s family didn’t have Yule traditions,” Ginny says as she follows him out of the kitchen.
“Pity,” says Neville. But that is all he says.