if you think it's overwritten, then fine, it's just an experiment. But if you liked it, I have been thinking of doing other characters through the year too. Let me know with a review xx

C O U L O R S

Two things have always intrigued Dean Thomas and he thinks two things will always intrigue him. They are numbers and colours.

As a child, it was the numbers drilled into him. As his stepfather pointed out, you can't get far with colours.

But now as Dean says goodbye it's the colours he sees. The fuzzy darkness of his sister's hair, the glitter of his mother's crystal tears. He kisses their cheeks and makes each hug last all-too-short an eternity, but in the end he has to go.

He walks out of the faded house, red and blue and green and brown into the monotone grey of the suburbs. Somewhere above him, the world is the colour of drizzle waiting to fall, and everything is the dark shades of grief and despair and loneliness. Every time he blinks he sees the gold parchment that brought it all on. Crawling across it are the tarantulas Seamus calls handwriting, three words, three desperate words from one boy to his best friend. "Get out now."

Of course Dean has seen corners of newspapers at the chequered breakfast table before he hushes it away from his family, but the black and white words are as clear as day, he can't prove his lineage, and to them his veins are the colour of mud, mud that needs to be washed away.

So he's leaving. He finally found that red and gold courage and explained to them. They understood, he spent three days wrapped in golden love before he packed the rainbow of his life and was gone.

The wand, the wand, it's at the top of the rucksack, ready to use, but he's determined not to. After all the murky pain that the thing has brought about, he suddenly doesn't want it anymore. He doesn't want magic, he doesn't want enchantments and charms, for the first time since his eleventh birthday, Dean Thomas wants to be normal.

He walks away from the soft faded life he's always known into the jungle green unknown of, well, everything else.

He stops when he steps onto one of the dirty lanes that leads into a purple undergrowth behind brick houses, on the rise of a hill. He stops and feels in the indigo of his jeans for the coin.

The coin. It's yellow gold, and only he noticed what no one could see wrong with Hermione's work, it's the wrong gold. It's too yellow, too bright, not subtle enough for the real thing, and now he realises he's never pointed the problem out.

It's the thirty-first of August, tomorrow everyone will be leaving, on the crimson train with cloud-coloured smoke. He wonders if the colours will be dulled by the gloom. If Ginny's copper laugh will be heard ringing in the corridor or not, if Lavender's rose petal smile will appear under her midnight eyes. He sees behind his eyelids the colours of it all, the colours he's always associated, the shamrock of Seamus' Quidditch robes, the gold flecks in Parvati's inky hair, the fresh yellows of Neville's cacti. He sees it all and suddenly realises how much definite colour he has seen in life, compared with the ambiguous shades that surround him now.

He pockets the coin again. When it burns orangey red he'll know, and he'll come running back to the rainbow that he's left behind.

But for now, all Dean Thomas can do is shoulder his rucksack full of twilight and make his way on to some sort of freedom.