Who: Seamus Finnigan & Ramona Hardy What: A chance first meeting, with a broomstick. Setting: The O'Flaherty home in Kilkenny, Ireland, 30 June 2006 Rating: PG
Eimear didn’t exactly tear around the house, she was far too tidy for that, but she was unfolding clothes and linens from where they’d been neatly folded, and brushing aside winter robes and soft, matching caps whose points had made Ramona laugh, at first, when she’d moved in. Her mother didn’t want a stereotypically tragic hat this afternoon, however, she wanted her Indian shawl which was, apparently, missing. As it had been a gift from Maureen some fifteen years ago, she could not very well show up at the woman’s birthday party without it.
"Go on ahead, Mona," Eimear insisted, waving her daughter down the hall toward the cherry-bright door of the cottage they shared. Ramona didn’t hesitate; Eimear wouldn’t have suggested it if she hadn’t meant it, and this was one of the few opportunities she was able to travel without her mother’s assistance. Being a Squib even in a small Wizarding community was difficult, if only for having to walk everywhere or suffer side-along Apparition, which made Ramona nauseated.
A Portkey had been arranged by her mother’s friend’s family especially for the occasion, as they anticipated a fair number of guests - like many Wizarding families and Irish, too, they were numerous - so Ramona walked to the nearby library that served both wizards and Muggles (the wizarding wing, of course, invisible to Muggle eyes). The Portkey was in the first floor loo inside a stall marked 'Out of Order.' Crouching to lay her hand upon a near empty wastebasket, Ramona rose again to the sun on her cheeks, a play of light and shadow from a nearby grove of elms, and as many people as she was like to see of a Saturday night at the pub where she worked.
Finding Fergus - the tall, sandy-haired bloke her mother wished particularly for her to meet, not least of which because the best present to his mother would be his having a steady girlfriend - was going to be difficult in this crowd.