Chapter 10 Marionette
The view of the castle from atop the dazzling mountain was the perfect picture in Oliver’s eyes, especially when the air was layered with curtains of colors that evidently could not make up their mind as to what shade they should be. Also busy with their decision making were the overcast clouds that potted his vision. Watching them busily plow along under the guidance of their inner cores, seemingly nothing could stop them from floating across the skies of vast choices, regardless of their shapes and sizes. Childishly, he wondered if they had ears, because he had for them a piece of advice, and it happened to be caught between his teeth…
“All of you should stop, take a moment, and consider what it is that all of you are so eagerly chasing after, and whether it is worth it…”
“Oliver! What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense!” Ginny growled and zipped her oversized jacket to a close. The winds lifted their speed to another notch, perhaps as a prelude to snow.
Thanks to Ginny’s thunderous display, anything that was mulishly fuzzy inside Oliver’s head hastily clarified itself. In the process, his mind quickly gave him a nudge that speaking one’s thoughts out loud when there is company is not an acceptable human social behavior.
“You didn’t hear a word I said?” she steamed louder than necessary, in an attempt to speed up her blood flow to her neglected extremities.
Oliver crawled up from the snowy ground and stomped to a nearby barren tree, his mind finally lining itself to the frequency that was reality. He couldn’t help but notice, to his dismay, that Ginny’s voice was now comparatively more higher-pitched than the last time he saw her. Could it be that a girl’s general state of happiness be measured by the tone of her voice?
“YOU were rambling ‘bout Harry like you’re going through an episode of intense verbal diarrhea!”
Ginny’s jaw jolted open, fumes of angry but inaudible vapor puffing out of her lips and into the chilly air.
“I could have been picking my teeth THE ENTIRE TIME and you wouldn’t notice it…”
Ginny’s cheeks expanded maddeningly, spitfires of toxins roasting his back to a boil.
“Plus, you were as EARSPLITTING as Mrs. Weasley! I don’t know how poor Potter can still have a set of functioning ears at this point…”
That was it. How dare he associate her tender feminine voice, as per Harry, to that of her shrieking mother? It was the last straw. Clenching her teeth, Ginny rolled a massive snowball and hurled it at Oliver, hitting him squarely in the buttocks. But to her shock and horror, his firm and well-defined buttocks, at least according to her giddy roommates, a set of muscles she had the impression of being able to withstand any physical punishment, just shattered to the ground like porcelain upon impact along with the rest of his body in front of her eyes.
“OLIVER!” she raced towards him, her eyes cascading to the ground to track his fallen limbs which were all over the place. Next to the mound of yesterday’s snow, he reminded her of a wooden marionette that was just tossed aside and abandoned by its owner.
“Are you okay? I’m sorry! I’M SORRY!” she shrieked with an octave that had no ceiling.
“I’m… fine… Please… Gin… No need to shriek…” he begged with a flickering frown, covering his ringing ear with an unsteady hand, pondering why it had to be now that he become ultra-sensitive to piercing pitches.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized whisperingly. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Must be the patch of frost on the ground…” he reasoned unconvincingly, still crumbled awkwardly under the tree, not caring which part of his numb body Ginny was currently holding on to pull him upright.
“Yeah… you’re right… must be the frost,” she grimaced sympathetically.
“Your Bludger… it was a clean hit though,” grinned Oliver with an ailing strain. “Just… wasn’t expecting it to hit me from behind… that’s all…
“Just wasn’t… expecting… a lot of things… you know… to be this way…”
Judging by Oliver’s lethargic shadow that appeared to be fading, Ginny could foresee his disorderly body would suffer more damage if she were to handle it further, so she chose to simply feather the snow off his blazer. Knowing she could never lift all of him back up, she elected to curl herself up like a red fluffy cushion by his side under the tree, as an invitation for him to lean on if needed.
“Dumbledore told me everything that has happened. I… I… don’t know what to say… What can I do to help?”
Oliver straightened his workhorse spine and shook his head lightly. Instead of replying, he elected to annoy her with a rather irrelevant observation, “I see you still haven’t kicked the habit of wearing Harry’s jackets! But that’s okay, as long as you killed your other habit of crossing the street in a red light!”
Ginny smiled sweetly, her face blossoming into a red lantern, “Oh, Harry doesn’t mind. I told him he can wear my stuff if he wishes.”
There was a string of simpering snorts from Oliver, but she was too distracted with Harry’s honeycomb do-no-wrong jacket to notice.
“I know it’s kinda heavy and big on me but I find men’s clothes to be so much better quality,” she babbled verbosely. “The stitching is so much better, plus I like the way it feels”“
“Oh, please spare me!” he zapped to her disappointment, squashing her zealous need to share the details of her and Harry with anyone that had ears.
“By the way, Oliver, Harry’s totally fine with me being with you alone like this now,” purred Ginny archly. “He is not jealous at all, like before, so I… can stay with you for as long as you need.”
“Speaking of Harry,” Oliver’s face arranged itself seriously, pretending to not have heard her offer. “I have a pathetic question to ask you.
“Have you… ever wondered… what if… what would you truly do… if Harry were to… you know…”
Ginny understood bleakly where he was wheeling this conversation. She tidied the space between them, their jackets now hugging each other, “It’s a fair question, Oliver. I would be lying if I say I never considered about it, given Harry’s precarious situation.
“In fact, we talked about it recently.”
She shifted her focus to the castle ahead of them, tabulating the number of floors of the castle to the amount of close calls and near death experiences Harry had so far.
“I know it’s schmaltzy, but we agreed… we made a pledge… Harry and me… if one of us were to… you know… die, the other one… the other one…”
It took forever for Ginny to finish her sentence; it must be because she was attempting to summon an additional intake of oxygen to power her message clearly to Oliver, and to herself as well, as much as possible.
“Must. Happily. Live. On.”
After hearing herself stone these words so affirmatively, she froze as she felt a drop of cold water fizzling longingly under her eye.
“Am I crying, Oliver?” she blinked spiritlessly, turning to him as she spotted a couple of sparkles on his pallid eyelashes.
“It’s the snow,” he smirked like a determined boy being manhandled, hacking his face off the pimples of water that evidently was the result of innocent melting snowflakes gone astray.
“Are you sure it is the snowflakes?” she teased.
“Look around you!” he hollered fruitlessly. “Can’t you see them tumbling down just now?”
“But we’re under the shading of a tree!” she argued back.
“What about the wind?” he barked in exasperation. “It’s swirling! Oh, who cares! Just change subjects!”
Ginny shrugged her shoulders and giggled smugly, “Oh well, I guess… what I said… wasn’t as touching as I thought.”
Indeed, snow was falling with unyielding candor, so much so they now outnumbered the lasting seconds ticking inside Oliver’s chest. The accumulation next to him resembled the heaps of memories he could no longer run away from, because like the snow, there were too many of them all over the place, in all directions.
“Ginny, I hope you don’t mind. I sort of… gave your Amoré to someone else.”
“Of course I don’t mind. It belongs to you,” she mailed a devilish eye at him. “But I must say… it’s not something you give to just anyone. The girl you gave it to… must be special.”
“Gin,” he denied her devilish eye’s request for entry, “the girl I gave it to… I think… is not even eight years old.”
“WHAT?? Prudence is a seven year old?” howled Ginny, her voice once again effortlessly threatening to breach the tenuous perimeters of Oliver’s sanity. “First you have a crush on me and now you’re working on single digit girls?”
Oliver shut his eyes, hoping illogically that could help shelter his eardrums and calculating obsessively why more girls couldn’t have a more manageable ear-friendly low alto-ranged voice like that of Prudence’s.
“Please… you don’t need to employ the loudspeakers… The trees in France can hear you perfectly.”
“It’s just…” her pitch wavered back, “earlier, I overheard you uttering her name in Dumbledore’s office, and then… I saw a lot of people’s faces swimming out along the walls. I was sure… she…”
“Ginny, I gave it to her daughter, Zoe!” clarified Oliver incredulously, at this moment quickly worrying what those indiscreet former Headmasters and Headmistresses had done to Prudence and her paintings.
Oliver glimpsed at Ginny, curious as to why she had fallen uncharacteristically silent. Unsurprisingly, the streams of words and questions were instead permeating in full force out of her brown eyes.
“Prudence is my neighbor!” he sounded like he was testifying, defensively purging all the information he had. “She’s a muggle… watches over my flat when I’m away competing. She thinks I teach English overseas. That’s all!”
“You? Teaching English to little kids?” she squeaked, feeling compelled to dismantle him for comparing her to her mother earlier. “Oh, I’m having a hard time visualizing that!”
“That’s because you haven’t seen me wearing specs,” he joked. “I can look… how do I say… quite -Harry-ish!”
“More like… how do I say… -McGonagall-ish- to me!” she thumped the back of his head, “Professor Oliver Wood, I’m not implying you’re dumb. You just… don’t strike the impression of a sweet little teacher, that’s all.”
“But I was assistant here for a handful of months--”
“Assistant to one weird looking Madam Hooch!” she seized his breath. “Even with your pierced ear and madman qualities, her freakishness can easily make you look almost maiden-like in comparison!”
“I’m not a madman! Fred and the others must have told you how I pushed the team!” he blasted back. “Don’t listen to them! Trust me. It wasn’t as manic as it sounds!”
“I don’t have to!” she whacked his thigh. “Don’t you remember? I trained with you for three months last year for the Hogwarts broom flying competition you concocted! You are the synonym of the word madman!
“So I’m a bit staggered Prudence bought your tiny little lie…
“But then again, people have a way of choosing to hear and believe things when they’re coming out of the lips of someone you like. I should know. It’s called selective hearing…”
Before Oliver could insert his opinion on this dicey subject, Ginny popped in gingerly, “Zoe’s father… is he…”
“We’re neighbors, not bosom buddies! I don’t know anything about that!” he yelled in frustration, clearly having lost control of the conversation. “That’s all I have to say! I don’t know anything more! If you’re so curious, you can ask her yourself!
“Anyway, change subjects!” he demanded hotly, and Ginny made a very long face.
“You know… I recall it was you who had a crush on me last year,” Oliver suddenly corrected her and broadened his shoulders into a display of manliness. He swore he could hear himself laugh. It was a foreign husky sound, as if it belong someone else, but there was no one under the tree except Ginny. Nevertheless, it appeared the wind and snow held their hands around him, forming a glass jar, trapping the echoes from dissipating so he could hear them more.
“Don’t make me throw up!” she gagged him and pinched his arm like she used to. “You’re the one who wanted me to be your Chaser at the Burrow. Then you asked me to be partner for the competition, and it was you who “proudly-- told that receptionist at St. Mungo’s I’m your girlfriend!”
Oliver’s face stiffened to that day in the street, effortlessly casting away all the teasing words that had exhausted into the winds.
“You know, seeing you and Harry across the road that day… it gave me hope but…”
He could not continue as the heaviness in his throat dulled his voice cords. Another untimely arrival was the burning sensations in the inner corner of his eyes. While busy suppressing them, Ginny unexpectedly turned towards him and cupped his head with her small hand, gently guiding it to her shoulder.
“No, it’s okay,” Oliver blinked very quickly and dodged his head away from her hand, because to him, any tilting of his head might risk spilling the water behind his eye sockets. His eyebrows rapidly tightened his face like a thread, to keep the cloth of his pasty face from falling apart, but the red in his eyes was unmistakable.
“I have… a cold… that’s all,” he justified ineffectively, keeping his weary pupils steady.
“You’re right. Must be… your cold…” she agreed pleadingly.
“And the… needling sharp winds too…” he gulped.
She nodded without a doubt, her voice skidding off-key, “Yes… the needling sharp winds too…”
Despite his reasons, she still took the bold initiative, and she wrapped her arms around him, but he fought them away. Between the two of them, he could easily win a physical battle on any day, but today was different. There was no doubt she was the stronger one today. He was the one in need of protection. What strength he had in his body were all allocated to his eyes, monotonously muzzling the eventual tears, one by one, but…
“Gin, I’m beyond pathetic…” he admitted with a whimper, his vision now completely hampered by trembling rays of rainbows as his eyes grew warmer and warmer to the point of no return. He hoped every single living creature around him could look away.
Ginny shook her head as her hand glided to the back of his trembling head once again, pushing him towards her, “As I’ve said before, you’re not a fool, and you’re not pathetic…
“You sound bad now because… like you said… you have a cold… and the needling sharp winds…”
“You might wanna… add your perfume… to the list that’s… irritating my eyes…”
“It’s… Harry’s favorite…” she wept with a smile.
“Well, you smell… like… insect repellant… onion breath… ”
He nestled his chin on her shoulder, positioning his head at an angle that anything watery inside would spill over. As was last year in his quarters at the North Tower with her, the reaction was instant. Ginny was always the one to open the dam in his eyes. He knew it was time to surrender. All the sniffing was in vain. The battle was lost. He was too weak to fight. His tortured face was exposed with truth. He felt like every beam of support inside him was unraveling, imploding, and ripping apart at the seams.
“Oliver…” she cried, her arms clipping his quivering frame tightly; she was seemingly trying to keep him from crumbling to the snow, telling him it was all right for him to bury every ounce of pain and heartache onto her. She could handle it. She could handle it now.
“Onion breath…” she could hear him churn out an ashen laugh between the resigning cries. In response, she patted his back softly as his stifled sniffing sounds became more profound. For some reason, she felt larger than she physically ever was, so smashingly large she was certain she was at this instant, shielding him entirely from the elements. She was surprisingly sturdy, despite currently carrying the weight of a defeated collapsed man twice her size on her shoulder.
“She’s… gone…”
“Oliver… everything is going to be… okay…”
“………”
“Everything is… going to be… okay…” she repeated motherly, rubbing his back, his shoulders heaving on their path to gradual freedom.
“………”
Their muffled chorus of cries and hiccups harmonized colorlessly with the swirling winds, with each one stripping away the many hues that occupied the horizons, one by one, until everything was entirely white. It did not matter. Both had no plans for the rest of the day. She told him he could take as much time as he needed. In a sea of white ashes, as witnesses were the barren tree planted next to them, and the gentle snowflakes, no longer abandoned, documenting everything like leaflets of information, that landed on their sobbing skin, slowly melting to water.
****
“It’s… it’s… cream tomato soup…
“Wait! It’s the mountain again. I told you it reminds me of… dark chocolate pudding…
“And those cotton clouds… shaped like… a potato?
“But I had dinner already!
“Oh my gosh! The archway! I can see it… No! Bring me there! I MUST GO THERE!! NO… DON’T WAKE UP! NOT NOW!!
“AARGH!”
In a bowl of lumps, Oliver found himself on the floor inside his quarters, his blanket twisting itself to his leg. He was used to falling like this; he felt like he had been dropped from the highest point of the goalpost in the Quidditch field. Once again, the usual ripples of winds haunted the North Tower walls because of the high altitude. Wiping the cold sweat on his face, he realized he just had the dream about the moon gate again. But this was more real than before. It was as if he could feel her nearby. In fact, he could sense her familiar perfume brushing his skin now. Was he still dreaming, he asked himself. As he turned to the side wishfully, to his surprise, an opaque Yuriko was sitting quietly next to him.
“Yuriko? Is that you? What are you doing in Hogwarts?” he uttered confusedly. It was the first words he could think of to say. It had been so long he thought he would not recognize her.
Even though they were calling loudly for his attention, he didn’t want to blink or rub his sleepy eyes, for blinking and rubbing might hand someone the opportunity to steal her away from him again. All he wanted was to cast his eyes on her again, for her image to crystallize inside him again. It wasn’t an egregious request. Please let him have this.
Suddenly, a fine slither of light coming from the window momentarily lit up his room, and it was enough to disturb the silent fabric of air molecules Oliver had tried so hard to keep stable. It was also enough to tickle the muscles in his eyelids. A costly blink of an eye was all it took for him to realize he had been gazing at the white umbrella all along. It was teasing him with an illusion.
“WHY-CAN’T-I-GET-YOU-OUT-OF-MY-MIND?” he pounded his fists against the floor madly, his manic eyes on fire, hopelessly wondering how much more of this punishment he could endure.
The slither of light from the window illuminated again, with the precision of a watchmaker, striking and splintering through the dark skies like the veins in his arms. Seconds later, it was followed by another one, and another.
Knowing what he must do to resolve this once and for all, he instinctively grabbed his broom and umbrella and dashed out of his quarters like the determined whirlwind. There was no path out of this dead end; it was the only means to put an end to this, he concluded adamantly, all the silence, lingering anguish, recurring dreams, and tormenting emotions. There was no other choice. Like Zen before him, it was the only way to free himself out of the dream prison.
Moongate Beckons When The Canvas Sleeps by gossipweaver
Chapter Notes: Loving someone is like allowing that person to permanently dictate every movement of one’s heart strings, and every moment of one’s happiness and sadness. We wonder of his next move… it all depends on his owner….