Drowning.

In which Charlie finally gets her and Jack avoids her.

She had convinced herself that it would be easier without Jack, that she didn't love him, that it wasn't right and he would be abandoning her for the real world. None of this seemed to work.

And what was worse, she did not feel as thought she had done the right thing at all. She was Bill less, she missed Jack terribly – although she had not loved him, he had been her best friend. She could do nothing but yearn for her best friend.

When she suggest this to Charlie, who had been ecstatic as she told him the news the next day at the Hufflepuff table (she hadn't dared to sit in her usual spot) he had laughed shortly. "Dora, the boy needs time to get over you. Give him a bit of space before you try to make buddies with him."

Lowly, she asked, "How long does that take?" but he had merely shrugged.

It was no help to her and especially Jack that exams were only two weeks away. She had no time to dwell, none of the deserved mourning period with the work piling on.

Not capable of being alone, but too suffocated by the crowds, Nymphadora spent her remaining free time in the back of the library, hidden between the shelves with Charlie.

The boy was surprisingly supportive, only asking how she was dealing with life when she really felt awful, although this could have been his male incompetence shining through, and not just an ability to recognise emotions.

Most of all, he never left her alone, and when she told him to stud, he actually bloody did. Whilst his other friends strove for his attention and time, Nymphadora never once had to strive for it. Charlie was there without asking, waiting for her outside her common room in the morning and walking her back in the evening. He joined her at the Hufflepuff common room for meals (all the other students had left her alone because of this) and studying with her into the late hours of the night.

Charlie eased away the darker edges of her world. He soothed her; helping to forget she much she loathed herself for what she had done. Charlie steeped her loneliness by almost smothering her, not once in the few weeks since she broke Jack's heart had he left her alone. Only when she slept – excluding the times when she fell asleep on the Gryffindor sofas, or the foot of Charlie's bed in a pile of parchment and library books – did she gain privacy.

Charlie believed he was her crutch, that he somehow dominated the right to know everything she felt, every heartache, every bout of loneliness. Charlie thought he knew her inside and out, back to front, when he had only really scraped the surface.

His pledge to get to know her inner being came at the worst time. She threw herself, and Charlie with her, into her exams, leaving nothing but each other and an impossible workload to think of.

OWLs finished on the same day as NEWTs, with Bill and Jack's defence exam on the Friday morning, and the herbology OWL that afternoon.

When she had chosen to let Jack out of her life, she never once thought that Bill would follow. Like it was his obligation, Bill had not spoken with her until Jack did.

Their final meal at Hogwarts was an emotional one. Until she had met the seventh years, she had never noticed how depressing ending school could be. Seven years of their life finished, their childhoods gone. The era of extended deadlines and few consequences snatched away so suddenly. She had always been ecstatic to return home before, but now that she had…friends? Charlie… she could understand the trauma of the whole damn thing.

After Dumbledore had spoken, she picked herself up and slipped towards the Gryffindor table. None of the teachers seemed to notice, or if they had, reasoned that she needed this, that it was okay for her, that perhaps a little inter-house unity was a good thing.

Poking Charlie on the shoulder, she sat on the side furthest from Jack, with Bill and Miranda between them. Jack couldn't even look at germ too broken to face her just yet. But with hours left to ay goodbye and apologise in some desperate way, she had only now for a chance.

They finished eating, and she hadn't yet spoken with him. Why was this so hard for her when they had dated for the better part of eight months? Jack her innermost secrets, how was this difficult?

The Gryffindor's were beginning to disperse. Seizing her chance, she leapt from her seat, and grabbed his hand. Startled, pale, he turned to her and swallowed.

She hadn't thought this through, not really. With nothing to say, she smiled weakly.

Smiling back, he said hoarsely, "I got into the ministry."

"That's great," she said, though her voice was not she own. "When do you start?"

He couldn't even look her in the eye. The crowds milled around them. Suspended, separate from the other students, Jack barely a student at all. This was their moment, but was it really a moment at all? Was it really anything, other than a fall from grace?

Was she anything but a disgrace?

"A month," he said, the ground more comforting than her. "They need my NEWTs first, but I'm pretty confident."

"Yeah, of course," Nymphadora muttered. Almost all the students were gone now, just them and a few stragglers, and the Weasley's waiting in the doorway.

She wondered how people were not permanently crumbled, when the world threw them so far. No wonder Jack couldn't look at her, she had not had the strength to look at herself this morning.

"I got a flat," he continued on, "I'll be moving out of my parents within the month, I guess. It's even connected to the floo network, so," he swallowed hard, "I could visit yours in the holidays and-"

"Jack."

"-No, Dora, let me finish." He was there. Standing in front of her, his hand cupping her chin and she couldn't pull away. It wasn't right, it wasn't good for her to lead him on, to give him any sort of false hope. It wasn't best for either of them, and most of all it wasn't healthy to hold on.

He wasn't Charlie.

"We could make it work," he said, and his voice was shallow and rough, there was something desperate in his tone and she wanted to believe him, she really did. "We're good, Dora, we're damn good together. Take me back."

Nymphadora hadn't realised it, but she was crying with him, her face pressed into the palm of his hand, his touch warm and real when she felt so numb. "Jack," she said, and it was all she needed to.

Taking her cheek from his fingers, she pulled away, put some distance between them. "I love you," she said, and his mouth lifted briefly in a smile, "but I can't do this. It's just not going to work."

How often had she heard those words on the muggle television, in books or on the radio dramas her mother loved? How cliché, how true they were.

"I'll write," Jack said, and turned into the crowd. He was just another student.

Charlie was there, she knew that. His arms wrapped around her, her head pressed into his shoulder. The students all left, the two of them standing alone in the hall. Nymphadora sobbed.

Minutes later, she lifted herself up and dried her eyes on a tissue that had been handed to Charlie sometime during her misery. Taking it, she turned away, too ashamed to even look at the boy, her eyes sore.

Charlie perched himself on a newly cleared table, and said nothing. He seemed to spend all his time watching her these days, like he was figuring her out piece by piece through the little chunks of detail she offered him. Bill was nowhere, tending to Jack most likely, and it was odd to see just the one solitary Weasley when she was so used to them as a group.

He said nothing, only took her arm and escorted her to the Hufflepuff common room.

---

They had not bothered trying to sit with the seventh years the next day. The train was speeding on; leaving Hogwarts, leaving what she hoped was the worst days of her school life yet.

With Charlie the only friendly face, she sat amongst his friends. They talked excitedly and promised to keep in touch over the holidays. Nymphadora watched the scenery skip by, leaving Charlie to socialise.

But Charlie didn't jump to opportunity. Instead he sat quite silently, pushed up against her in the crowded space. "Missing Jack?" he asked.

She shrugged, but didn't turn to look at him, for fear he might be able to read her. "I do. But it's good this way, isn't? Better to fizzle out, or something."

He nodded. "Something like that."

She nodded numbly. The world outside was growing dark with the threat of rain, and as the neared London the world seemed to dim with her mood.

"Will you write to me, Charlie?" she asked, and this time she turned fully to face him, seriousness on her face. Pleading.

"Every day, if you want me too."

She knew he wouldn't. Charlie was little more than a yes-man when it came to pleasing her. It was sweet, but little help when it came to getting things done.

Kings Cross was close now. The excitement rose in the carriage, the students craning their necks to look from the window. Nymphadora didn't care to lean out of the way, pressed up against the cold glass, uncaring and unsympathetic to the emotional students around her.

The train pulled into the station, the children rose and grabbed for their trunks. Nymphadora remained seated, and because of this, so did Charlie. Waiting for the students to disappear – she would not tolerate the crowd in her dark mood – they stood. Charlie lifted her trunk from the shelves, pulled on his coat, and carried hers from the carriage. Seconds later he emerged with his own.

Their parents were stood together in polite conversation. Her mother had always taught the value of decent intellectual conversation, and she had learnt from an early age how to command it. Unluckily for her, she had entered Hogwarts with too high standards for children – they were not at all interested in her knowledge or polite intellectual conversation, and she had drifted away.

Her mother carried herself with rare grace. Tall and willowy, she stooped her hug her daughter, squeezing her tightly, whilst the Weasley's made a fuss over their second oldest.

"Charlie," her mother said, "you must come visit us over the holiday's. Good bye Molly, Arthur." Andromeda nodded to them both. She began to walk, her father trailing her trunk behind them, and sensing the mood, the Weasley's began to follow.

Trailing behind them, she said, "Keep in touch."

"Yeah. Yeah, course I will," he hugged her awkwardly as they reached the barrier. They would be driving home, whilst the Weasley's would take the floo in the leaky cauldron. "I'll miss you, Dora."

"Maybe you won't have to," she said, and loaded her trunk into the back of the car, "if you come round a few times."

Hands in his pockets, he grinned. "Okay, I'll owl you or something."

She nodded tightly, and swung into the back seat. The weasley's had reached the end of the road. "Speak soon, Charlie."

He waved as they rounded the corner, his bright red hair the last thing she saw before returning to a place she called her second home.