Living in Shadows [Harry Potter Fanfiction]

Chapter Fifteen | London, May 1979

Pic is Remus, the sweetie ------------>

Chapter Fifteen

London, May 1979

 

            Having grown up  in the country, Hazel liked a good dose of the city. The little town she’d visited to buy penny candy and borrow books was pretty much made up of a main street occupied by a post office, a bakery, a pub, several dainty shops that sold either scented candles or lingerie and other sorts of pyjamas. There was also a spiritual healer, but everyone knew she was just selling illegal moonshine out of her back room.

There was something about the hustle and bustle, the noise and the crowds-the millions of people with different lives and thoughts and opinions and loves and hatreds and each one had a beating heart, a past and a future. They could have been born yesterday, eighty years past; there could be a hundred years left of their lives, or a few minutes until their unfortunate demise.

It was something Hazel liked to think about, how her life was only one in a billion million, and her problems were nothing in comparison to a child lying in the hospital with a tumour or the man who had just lost his family to a car crash. She wasn’t an old woman who had never gone a day in fifty years without waking up beside her husband-and now he was gone. She wasn’t dying, the man she loved was still alive and breathing-although who knew if he loved her back or not. She had people she loved who had futures and was meeting with one of her closest friends in an hour.

Yet Hazel felt as if the future was forever set in stone for her, engraved and buried and put to rest –pushing up daisies already, one might say- since the moment Mo Bowen set eyes on her. Or the second Tom Riddle went looking for that one child that would be his most loyal follower-or so he believed.

“Sickle for your thoughts, Ms. Bowen?”

Looking up, Hazel was surprised to see the twinkling eyes of Albus Dumbledore observing her. He was wearing a ridiculous suit of plum and yellow stripes, and his half moon spectacles perched precariously on the tip of his crooked nose.

“Maybe a cup of tea instead?” she asked, standing to hug her old professor.

Smiling, Dumbledore sat across from Hazel at the outdoor café table. “Sounds lovely dear, how about a slice of cake, too?”

“Okay, lemon meringue is your favourite isn’t it? I saw a lovely fluffy one earlier in the window.”

Nodding, Dumbledore watched Hazel as she told him about the latest book she had been reading-it was not a work discussion. She could be the stunning and cunning young woman who masked the brightness inside for an evil mask, worn in the presence of the man she hated most on earth. It was this thought that kept Albus Dumbledore awake at night, thinking of how he had dimmed a light so bright-a girl that had shone so brightly yet timidly now was forced to hide it away.

“Hazel.” He said softly, interrupting her dictation of the novel.

“Yes professor?” she asked, smiling even though she hated to be interrupted.

Gaze strong, yet a little weary, Dumbledore removed a piece of his pie “Do you remember the day, you were eleven years old, when I told you I was sorry, that one day you would understand it all?”