Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
—✧—✧—✧—✧—
ONE (BLOW 'EM AWAY)
ONE MORE TIME
—✧—✧—✧—✧—
STORIES HAVE NO START, Holly Lippincott is beginning to realise. Whilst one tale may have a natural place to begin explaining, there is no true beginning. There's always a cultivation of prologues, epigraphs, footnotes explaining different moments, the ways others act in certain situations. Whilst Holly's story seems to start on the 29th August 1980, the day she was born, it doesn't necessarily begin there. Once you factor in the tragedy of her mother that took place before her birth, or the inspiring tale of a boy determined to prove himself and become a surgeon (albeit the sort that slices people apart, stitching and tucking to make the client look younger) you have two possibilities...
But then you think about every other person that's featured in her tale. Friends, relatives, even that random man in the Florence airport that tapped Holly on the shoulder when she was seven, saying she had dropped her teddy bear. Thousands of possibilities crop up as to the beginning, and the truth becomes this — a story never has a single start, just an easy place to start.
In more recent weeks, this has been applied to something else, an annoying little phrase that stemmed from what her school's headmaster said last year. Right, or easy? When she first heard her headmaster propose the idea, of choosing between the two, Holly felt as though there was only one way to view it. To her, there was one concrete path of choosing right, and that meant confidently stating the fact that she thought Lord Voldemort was an evil man and should be stopped, not helped. Her best friend Pansy, however, thinks that right is staying safe, looking out for the people she cares for. Her mother, Margo Valen, thinks a little similarly to Pansy, only, Margo Valen went full-force in her idea of this, choosing to move the world to keep one little person safe, who cared what happened to anyone else.
And then there's her father.
Augustus Lippincott, no matter how much he denies it, is the greatest person Holly has ever met. She might be a little biased, what with him being her father, but that's her honest opinion. At aged eighteen he packed his bag, swapping his bedroom in Los Angeles to a dorm in London, and five years later, he was told he was going to have a daughter. Every so often Holly brings this up, reminding him how difficult it must've been for him, and every time he shrugs it off, and gives her a little smile and says something sappy like, "I wouldn't have changed it for the world," or, "I did what was gonna be best for you, in the long run."
So now, Holly's hit a conundrum.
Holly Lippincott likes to think she's a little defiant. It has taken years upon years for this fact to be agreed upon, thousands of tiny little tests trying to figure out whether or not little Holliday dearest would choose right or easy. Durmstrang laid the foundations, where she was forced to perform the Dark Arts in order to survive in the nightmarish school — and then she joined Hogwarts, a school that encouraged her to realise the truth, to encourage her to the right thing.
