It was not necessarily fated that they should meet, although any peer who was asked afterwards would proclaim they were a match made in heaven, by God's own design. That they were the example of what a perfect relationship should be. It was a belief commonly expressed that they were love personified, what everyone hoped they would one day find, but a very few knew the truth.

In fact, it was not even entirely likely for them to meet, or at least not to meet in such a way where they made any sort of impression. In fact, they had met, many times, at various parties and school functions and one never remembered the other, she could vaguely recognize his hair and he could vaguely recognize her name from talk from his parents, but they had never had that true love at first sight that every person who could be asked would claim.

In fact, the first time they met, properly met, she was in a relationship.

It was a Thursday, and she was staying with her sister's soon to be husband Louis Macmillan and his family. Louis and her sister had been dating since they'd met at the Daily Prophet, about three years past. Louis had been working on an article and her sister, Bernice, had been trying to gain some standing in the paper, but was stuck in the dead end job of the editor's secretary. One day he noticed her fetching coffee and struck up a conversation. The rest was history.

In fact, in Alice's opinion her sister's relationship was the example of true love, the love she hoped maybe would one day fall into her lap quite as easily as it had her sister's. However, things were never quite so easy for the sixth year Gryffindor. She'd had a total of six boyfriends in the past four years, spanning from two weeks to three months. Her current relationship, one with a handsome boy named Gilderoy Lockhart, was going quite well in terms of relationships, almost meeting the three month mark, but Alice was scared.

She was always scared, and that's why the relationships ended. Alice craved love, a full blown beautiful love that could move mountains and happened at the first glimpse, but she found it wholly impossible. She could get close, but anytime she started to properly like a boy, and feel they might have some sort of future things started to get complicated. Alice loved the idea of love, but could not handle the feelings or trouble that came with it and thus she ran.

Frank lived in Old Lyme, a prominent wizarding town. He was an only child and hated when they stayed home for the summer. They had a house in Somers; a nice house along the coast where they would often vacation over the summer, at least for a month, where some of his friends would usually stay as well, but due to his father's decreasing health he and his family had stayed home that year.

Frank was starting his seventh year, a Ravenclaw who had only been such a good student for fear his mother might beat him if he was ordinary, and had only had two girlfriends. Girlfriends were a distraction more often than not, and Frank had broken things off with the two when he'd noticed a decrease in his grades, he had liked the girls well enough but Frank wanted to be an auror, and aurors couldn't just stumble through school, flirting with random girls and showing up late.

It wasn't that he wasn't fond of girls, he most certainly was, but as an only child there was a lot of pressure on him to succeed, especially from his mother who seemed to think that he was a perfect child, born a genius and destined to do great, and ergo he couldn't let a girl, no matter how much he liked her, get in the way of his dreams. Plus his mother had not liked either girl.

Frank hated upsetting his mother. He also feared upsetting his mother if he was being honest, although he never was. At least not when it came to his mother, aurors weren't supposed to show fear, especially not of their mother.

Frank fancied one day maybe he'd settle down with a nice wife and give his mother a few grandchildren to put pressure on rather than him, but not until well after the war was over. It wasn't safe; bringing a child into a world that was so full of hate and death, and Frank couldn't risk leaving a widow or an orphan behind if he so happened to die.

All besides, he was seventeen, newly licensed in apparition, with his whole long life ahead of him, he could worry about girls and love and all that nonsense when he was done. Done with school, done with auror training, done saving the world from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. There was always time, Frank figured, when he was older, maybe in his thirties, to find a nice girl and settle down but as it was he just didn't have the time for romance or love.

There was no real predestined plan for them to meet, there was nothing that stated that Frank was to meet Alice and fall in love or visa versa. It was not divine intervention or fate, and when they did meet it wasn't instant love. Frank and Alice both had very different ideas about life and the way they wanted to live theirs, they had near nothing in common, besides perchance their pure blood, and neither was prepared for love.

However, no matter the telling of the story, either by a doe-eyed second year who believed Frank and Alice were the definition of love, having been destined for each other, designed to complete the other's half, or Frank or Alice themselves, who knew the gritty details of their time together, almost all the tellers of the tale could agree that it started on a windy Thursday afternoon outside an ice cream shop where Alice was reading a book, a muggle novel her friend Aurora had demanded she read, and Frank was in dire need of a table to avoid an approaching ex, Nora Whitehorn, who had not been particularly happy with the way Frank had broken things off the year before.

It had been by chance that Frank had noticed the pretty, although he had not noted the pretty part at the time, blonde girl with her ice cream half melted, engrossed in her book and it was more by chance that he happened to notice the rather empty seat across from her at the table.

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters are owned by JKR.