#flongbottomed

[hollowedlilies]

Where: Longbottom’s cottage When: early February Who: @flongbottomed

What are you doing, Lily?

She’s standing before the Longbottom’s cottage. Already too close to claim she wasn’t intending on walking up. She hasn’t spent much time near the house since they’ve all moved out here--it’s easier to avoid Alice that way. It’s too hard, seeing the blank look on Alice’s face, the flashes of unbridled grief when Alice catches a look at Harry. The same age her son would have been, had he been the one to live instead of Harry.

It happens with Frank, too, but it seems to Lily he’s coping better, doesn’t get the look on his face when it’s just her. He had almost been a friend before James’ death. He had, at least, been someone who knew James, who had reached out to her, attended the funeral, been there. And maybe Lily hadn’t been as proactive after Neville’s death. Maybe she’d tried, and pulled away when she realized that her son’s life brought attention to their loss. It was hard to say, now. So many of her memories from that time were foggy now.

She doesn’t want to pull away anymore. She’s been living alongside them--carefully steering Harry away, around corners when she hears Frank or Alice’s voice, back into the house if she sees them striding by. Living on their periphery, trying not to make things worse. For once, Lily wants to make things better. So she knocks, resolute, shoving her hands into her pockets while she waits. Please don’t let it be Alice.

[beealight]

Hierophant and Tower

hierophant: do you value tradition?

Charity believes that there are traditions worth preserving and respects others’ right to honor their traditions as long as they aren’t harmful in nature. She understands the value and comfort that can lie in traditions. Her mother always told the bees whenever anything important happened in their family, a tradition Charity brought with her to her own home and hive draping them in black and sobbing the news of Althea’s death and then later whispering her goodbyes when she left them for Godric’s Hollow. But when tradition begins to stand in the way of progress she has little care for it. It is tradition after all that so many hide their hate behind. The tradition of purity and separatism is what led them down this bitter road to war and it is only the striking off of those rusted old beliefs that will bring them out of it.

tower: what do you most want to change about yourself?

Before the war Charity was rather content with herself and her life. While she knew that some people would consider her life mundane or unambitious, she was just a tea shop owner after all in a world full of magical opportunities, it was full of that which she valued most- kindness, sweetness, and most of all love. Althea’s death and the onset of war changed everything for her including what she saw when she looked in the mirror. Once she had been happy to be kind and gentle by nature, now more than anything Charity wants to be ‘stronger.’ There is certainly a strength in her softness but years of loss and the ever growing dark presence of the war that they are currently losing have worn away at her confidence in her light leaving her feeling small and helpless in the face of the darkness overcoming their world. While she does what she can to remain a soothing and positive presence in the Order it grows harder for her daily to feel as though this is anywhere close to enough to make an actual difference in the war effort as she is desperate to do. She badly needs to seek emotional nourishment and coax what little light she has not bled out already back into the blaze of sunshine it once was but she is blind to this and instead seeks to harden herself longing to create a strong enough shell of armor to become the soldier she believes the Order needs her to be while ignoring the risk that this shell may snuff out what remains of the light inside of her (figuratively or literally this is war after all). 

[omg-dorcasmeadowes]

Hermit and Tower

hermit: what are you like when you’re alone?

answered here.

tower: what do you most want to change about yourself?

Some days Dorcas wonders if it would be a crime to wish that she could change everything about herself. She wishes she’d had an actual childhood and hadn’t felt the pressure that her family had put on their children, she wishes that she had never had that accident that ruined Quidditch for her, she wishes that she could leave Quidditch in the past and just enjoy what she has now. She wishes she could change all of that and more (even the fact that she wishes it was easier to tame her hair some mornings and so easy others). No, what she’d most want to change isn’t about herself and it isn’t as easy as wishing either.

Herself though, she’d probably land on her wrists most days -- she knows she could do more if she wasn’t fearing the risk of shattering her wrists again.

[rcmus-blog]

Hierophant and Death

do you value tradition?

     ‘Not particularly, no. The kind of people who value tradition – the Blacks, the Malfoys– these are the people who got us into the position we’re in, the people who are trying to kill us just because of who we are. As far as I’m concerned, tradition can rot with all the rest of it.’

do you like change?

     ‘Let’s just say, if I could put everything back the way it was three years ago, four years ago... I’d do it in a heartbeat. I like the idea of change. I like change when it means progress. But I don’t like change when it means watching the people I care about die or go missing, when it means moving from a decent life, or a hard-won fight, into living hand and foot in the ruins of a massacre. We’ve had a bit too much change, lately. I think we could all use a break.’