Forest

Author's Note: I had the idea for this as soon as I saw the banner I had been assigned for the Banner Challenge in early March, right down to the characters involved. But, for some reason, I found this story rather difficult to write so it has taken a while to get out. Despite the struggle to get this written, I am quite happy with the way it has turned out.

The forest had always been special to us.

I had first seen her there, four years earlier. It had been a wonderful morning in late March, the kind that promised spring would just be around the corner. The snow had almost melted away, leaving muddy patches all over the grounds, but it was already greener than the day before. Soon, it would be beautiful again.

That morning I was nearly alone. It was a Hogsmeade Saturday, so the only other people I saw was the stream of older students heading to the village. I had been able to put enough distance between myself and them that I still managed to feel like I was alone. It was almost like I had the entire place to myself. In my family, that never happened. Nothing was just mine and nothing was able to remain a secret for long. But that day was different.

In my solitude, I skirted the edge of the Forbidden Forest. I was a rule follower, more or less, and had never set foot in it. I still don't know what drew me to its edge that day. Maybe it was the stories I had heard in the past. Maybe I believed that I would be able to walk in undetected. Whatever it was that brought me there, I'm glad that it did.

I was a few feet in, running my fingertips along the rough bark of a tree when something had caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. I paused, looking deeper into the trees, wondering where the flash of silver I saw had come from, but saw nothing. My interest had been piqued and my past fears had slipped away. I had glanced over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching me, before setting off through the trees myself.

Off in the distance, I could hear the crunching of twigs as someone – or something – stepped on them. With no other clues of where the silver I had seen was going, I chose to follow the sounds, hoping the entire time that it wasn't one of the scary creatures my brothers had told me about. When the crunching sounds stopped I knew I must be close. With a deep breath I gripped my wand tightly, just in case it was some sort of creature.

I was still holding my wand out, trying to seem confident in case I was about to run into something, when I saw the trees thinning in front of me.

As I set foot into the clearing my eyes darted around, trying to take it all in. The dead leaves of the trees, which must have been under the snow ever since autumn, covered the ground in the roughly circular clearing. The coniferous trees, with their deep green needles, had done a good job at blocking the gaps of the bare tree branches so it was only then that I first got my glimpse of the two figures that were standing in front of me.

One was what looked like a tiny golden horse. It was tiny, no more than a foal, with huge dark eyes and shiny hooves. It must have heard me coming, because it was looking in my direction when I first caught sight of it. I knew nothing about horses, but I knew that Muggle horses were never gold. This fact caught me so off guard that I had hardly noticed the figure standing next to it.

It was only when I heard, "Who are you?" that my eyes had turned to the girl.

She had thick, dark brown hair that was tumbling down her back in lose curls, over a silvery top that must have been what caught my eye earlier. But, now that I was looking at her closely, that wasn't what I was looking at. My stomach flipped as my eyes darted between her full lips and her wide eyes that were… what colour were they? Blue? I couldn't quite decide. All I knew was that she was beautiful. Why hadn't I noticed her before?

Realizing that she was still staring at me, I forced myself to speak. "I'm Lily."

If she knew that "Lily" meant "Lily Potter, daughter of Harry Potter" she didn't comment on it. Instead, she asked, "And what are you doing in the forest, Lily?"

"I…" My voice trailed off. Actually, it was a good question. What was I doing in the Forbidden Forest? What had made me decide that today was the day to venture into the trees? I didn't have a good answer to it. Not wanting to sound stupid, I shrugged while my mind raced, trying to come up with a good answer. Thankfully, something hit me then. "I thought that I would be able to get away with it with all the older kids going to Hogsmeade today."

"Not all the older kids," the other girl said as one of the corners of her mouth twitched upwards.

I was trying to process what she had said when she turned back to the golden horse. "Are you in third year?" I blurted out.

As she turned back to me with her wide eyes, I felt my cheeks grow warm. There I was, trying to sound cool, and I ruined it all by saying that like an idiot. I was trying to figure out how to remedy the situation when the other girl smiled.

"Yeah," she said. "But I grew up in Hogsmeade, so I didn't really want to go today. I figured I could see the unicorns instead."

Watching the other girl comb through the horse's mane, something clicked in my head. It was not a golden horse in front of me, but a unicorn foal. They were born gold and only turned while and grew their horns when they were a few years old.

I walked over so I was standing within a few feet of the foal. It was still looking at me with its huge eyes, seemingly unconcerned with another human approaching it. "I thought unicorns were skittish and didn't like to be around people."

"Adults are, but the babies are very friendly," the other girl said with a wide smile. "If you come closer you can pet him, if you want."

I moved so I was standing beside her and mimicked her gestures. Her hands were even paler than mine, with the scattering of red freckles that had remained through the winter. "How do you know so much about them?" I asked, nodding towards the baby unicorn. "And how did you know they were here?"

"I like animals and they like me," she said as she rubbed the foal's golden side. "There are lots of unicorns in the Forbidden Forest and most of them are used to seeing people. And, now that spring's coming, I knew there would be little ones in here."

She seemed so at peace that I couldn't help but watch. When she looked up at me and grinned, I felt my stomach flip again.

"You never told me what your name is," I said as we walked out of the forest, side by side, shortly after.

"Elia," she said, flashing another grin at me. "Elia Gardener."

In May of my forth year, I helped Elia study for her OWLs in the shade of the trees from the Forbidden Forest. It was already evident that we were going to be having an uncomfortably hot summer, as the thermometers were already climbing to thirty degrees in Northern Scotland. The breeze off the lake would have helped cool us down but Elia had wanted to be away from everybody else to get some peace and quiet and I had found myself unable to say no to her.

She was lying on her stomach, head propped up on her elbows with her shins sticking up in the air. Her dark hair was tied up to keep it off her face, which meant that I was able to see down her tank top a bit. I did my best to keep my eyes away, knowing I shouldn't look, but it still made me flustered

As I quizzed her from her textbook, she was able to sprout off most of the answers off the top of her head. When she didn't know the answer immediately her eyebrows would furrow in concentration and her eyes would look towards the cloudless blue sky, as though trying to pull an answer from it.

Every part of her was beautiful, but her eyes were striking. It was only after I had run into her a few times after our initial interaction that I had been able to figure out exactly what colour they were. At first I had thought that they were an unusual sort of deep blue, but they were more than just that. There was a depth to them that it had taken me a while to pinpoint but when I had I realized that they were undeniably indigo.

Elia sounded bored as she listed facts about Doxies. Across my lap I had her dog-eared copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (the most recent edition, with additions and changes by Rolf Scamander) opened. As she spoke, I ran my finger across the page, making sure that she was hitting all the major points.

"What classification are they given?" I prompted.

"Level four," she replied. "Dangerous, but a skilled wizard can handle them. What's next?"

I glanced over at the other page. "Dragons."

"Level five, impossible to train or domesticate," she said promptly. She sighed. "It's unfortunate too, I think I would quite like to ride a dragon."

"You would like to ride a dragon?" I repeated in disbelief. Even my Uncle Charlie, who had been working with dragons since long before I was born and who I sometimes thought loved dragons more than people had never said anything like that."

My reaction didn't seem to faze Elia. "Yeah," she replied. Looking at me, she laughed. "Don't look at me like that, I know you can't actually ride a dragon. I'm not planning to try to hatch one or anything, I just think it would be cool. I mean, I enjoyed riding a Hippogriff so I imagine riding a dragon would be much the same, but bigger and wilder."

I laughed as I shook my head. "You're crazy, I hope you know that."

She flashed me a smile that made my heart flutter. "The good kind of crazy, I hope."

"The best kind of crazy," I said, the words slipping out before I thought to stop myself. Ignoring the warmth in my face, I quickly turned back to the book on my lap. "How many kinds of dragons are there?"

"Ten pure bred species," Elia said as she rolled onto her back. With her hands now free, she began ticking off the types of dragons as she spoke. "The two from Britain are the Welsh Green and the Hebridean Black." She ran through the others, moving from her left hand to her right. When she reached her final finger, her indigo eyes met my blue ones, "And, of course, there's your dad's favourite, the Hungarian Horntail."

"I'm not sure he'd classify it as his favourite," I laughed, "but that's the ten."

I stopped quizzing her when we reached the end of the K section (Kneazles, classification three), when Elia announced that she needed a break. Not even giving me time to question whether it was smart to quit, she started speculating because of the final Quidditch match of the year and I couldn't resist talking to her. When she asked to braid my hair, I was putty in her hands.

When goosebumps covered my arms, I wasn't sure whether it was because of that or the fact that she was still only inches away from me. When the sun was starting to set and the temperature was starting to drop, with the long shadows of the forest falling over the long abandoned textbook on the grass beside me, we finally left. When we walked back to the castle, arms brushing against each other, I couldn't help but wonder if she was doing it on purpose.

"We're almost there," Elia said. Her shoes crunched the fallen leaves and twigs, while the undergrowth rustled against her jeans.

The temperature was similar to the first time I had entered the Forbidden Forest, but nothing else was similar to that first day. The first day had been a spring day, where the trees had been starting to bud and the melting snow had made the ground very mucky. This day was in early autumn, where the leaves had changed colours and it grew colder every day. While the school year was just ending then, it had only just begun.

But, more than anything else, the biggest change was in me. Then I had been an anxious twelve-year-old girl, afraid of getting in trouble if one of the teachers happened to be looking my way when I was walking past the tree line. In the years since I had slipped in and out of the Forbidden Forest so many times that I hardly even thought about the fact that I was technically breaking a school rule every time I set foot into my favourite place on the grounds.

I had been nervous to find another person that first day, but I had grown to learn that Elia loved the forest as much as me, if not more. That awkward first encounter was very different than life now, where we could practically finish each other's sentences. That chance meeting had helped me find my best friend.

Elia pushed a low hanging branch out of the way and gestured me to go through. As I walked past Elia her hand rested on my lower back for a fraction of a second, which was enough to make my heart start beating faster. She smiled as my eyes met hers, leaving me to wonder if she knew the effect she could have on me.

By the time my head had cleared, she had brushed past me again. "We're here!" she said cheerfully, throwing her hands out to gesture around her.

My eyes darted around, trying to figure out exactly where "here" was. Even when you spent as long in the forest as I had, there was the risk of things all starting to look the same after you had been trampling around for a while. I was expecting that to be the case as I looked around the trees but as I turned, eyes following the outline of the clearing, I knew where we were.

"This is where we met," I said slowly, wondering why she had decided that today was the day to return here. We had been back a handful of times over the years, but always because we were looking for creatures (well, she was looking for them and I would tag along) or because we stumbled upon it by chance while exploring. If we had ever set out to come back to this place before, I couldn't remember it.

It was hard to read her facial expression. Her thick brows were furrowed slightly, the way they did when she was thinking about something, but I could not think of what would be bothering her here. "You remember?" she asked finally.

"Well, yeah," I said. I walked closer to the middle of the clearing. "There was a baby unicorn somewhere around here," I gestured, trying to guess how tall it would have been, "and me, being the idiot that I am, thought it was a horse."

Elia laughed. "The lack of horn really threw you off, I take it."

"Yeah," I admitted, chuckling at my own stupidity. To be fair, the horn was generally the first thing you thought of when you pictured a unicorn but, having grown up in a magical family, I should have remembered that the white coat and horn only came later.

The silence that followed between us was easy, the sort where you don't worry about what the other person is thinking. It was the total opposite of that first day where I had been standing in almost exactly the same place, worried that I would say something silly in front of the unknown older student. Even the baby unicorn hadn't been enough to make up for it.

Elia sat down on the carpet of dried out, colourful leaves, apparently unfazed by the fact that she was getting the dirt of the forest all over her trousers. After she had situated herself she looked up with a smile, flashing her white teeth. "Come sit," she said, patting the spot on the ground beside her.

I walked over without questioning. I sat where she had patted after tossing a twig away, towards the outer circle of trees. After getting myself situated, I folded my arms over my knees and rested my head on them. "So, why did you decide that we should come back here today?"

"What do you mean?" she asked. "Why would there need to be a reason?"

I hesitated before explaining my reasoning, wondering if there was a time that we had come back her purposefully before, before I explained my thoughts to her. "We haven't come here with no reason since the first day. We've stopped when we saw things here, but not when it was like this." I waved my hand at the emptiness that surrounded us.

"Well, I didn't come out here with no reason the first day either. I stopped in because I saw the baby's golden coat through the trees," she teased. "I know what you meant, though."

"Well, I didn't see any unicorns leading us here today," I replied.

Elia looked down at her hands, as though extremely interested in her fingernails. After all these years together, I could tell that she was trying to come up with a way of expressing what she wanted to say. I let her scrape the dirt from under her nails without saying a word, knowing that she would speak when she was ready to.

It took nearly a minute before she spoke. "Are the posters for the first Hogsmeade trip up in your common room yet?"

"They went up a few days ago," I replied. There was nothing unusual about them from what I had seen, but I wondered if I had missed something. "Why?"

Elia turned towards me more, so her indigo eyes met with mine. "I wanted to know if you had plans," she said.

"Nothing I can think of," I said with a shrug.

"I was wondering," she started, cheeks flushed pink. "I was wondering if you wanted to go… with me?"

We had gone to Hogsmeade together several times, with and without groups of our own friends, over the last few years. I had made the trip up to visit her at her parents' house a few times over the school holidays, too. But the way she stressed the final two words made me think that what she had in mind was very different.

I could feel my heart beating faster. "Go with you as friends or," I swallowed hard, "like a date?"

"Like a date," she said, not looking away from me.

I stared at her in disbelief, trying to process it all for several seconds before speaking. Elia was starting to look nervous when I threw my arms around her. "I'd love to," I whispered.

When I pulled back, I saw that she was grinning too. "Good," she whispered, brushing a strand of red hair behind my ear and sending shivers down my spine.

Still grinning, a leaned forward to close the already small gap between us. As my lips met hers, I felt myself having to hold back another grin. I had thought she was beautiful all along, but had never wanted to put myself out there, not knowing not only whether or not she liked me in that way but if she even liked women.

As Elia's hand twisted in my hair, I couldn't help but think how much I loved the forest.