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Oct. 13th, 2009 04:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rachelleneveu
Title: Before this Dance is Through
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters/Pairings: Anonymous Muggle/Audrey, Percy/Audrey
Word Count: 2,345
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Title and subject aren't mine. Title belongs to The Beatles (from the song I'm Just Happy to Dance with You) and Audrey is JKR's. Written for Round Five of The Harry Potter Random Facts Fest!
Summary: Twenty Facts about Audrey Davies
Before this Dance is Through
(Twenty True Facts about Audrey Morgan Davies)
20. According to family legend, when Roger was five and their parents brought her home from the hospital, Roger asked if they could take her back and return her for a puppy. As they got older, every time Audrey annoyed her older brother in some way he would threaten to trade her in for a Yorkshire terrier, because even the dog’s constant yapping would be better than her stupid questions.
Deep down, that’s one of the things that Audrey misses most.
19. She loves being a Ravenclaw, but she thinks that the way to get into the Common Room is really, really stupid. Honestly – a bloody door knocker has no business asking a first year questions like that.
If it weren’t for Cho Chang taking pity on her, Audrey reckons that she would have spent most of that first year sleeping in the hallway outside Ravenclaw Tower.
18. Thanks to her mother, Audrey spent most of her childhood calling herself a “Paul Girl.” Growing up, her mother would play her Beatles LPs whenever she cleaned the house and although they were old, and scratched, and had the tendency to skip, and the vacuum always muffled the music, Audrey loved them as much as her mother did. She had once heard her mother call herself a “Paul Girl,” and she knew that Paul McCartney was the sweet one who sang “All My Loving” and made her mother smile like nothing else.
Audrey started calling herself a “Paul Girl” because it made her mother laugh. Now that she’s an adult, Audrey still loves him…even though she’s grown to respect John Lennon more for his individualism and his political views. Also, she doesn’t think it’s fair that John and Yoko Ono were blamed for the band breaking up…especially when Paul did the exact same thing with Linda when he was with Wings.
17. She loves to sing. It doesn’t matter what type of music – Muggle, rock, church hymnals – she will sing her heart out no matter what the tune, but only when she’s absolutely sure that no one else is listening. Her parents told her that it was perfectly normal, and it embarrassed her to no end, but all of her life she’s never been able to shake the stage fright she gets whenever she’s placed in front of a crowd.
One of the reasons she went into Magical Law was so that she could work on this phobia, because if she could stand in front of the Wizengamot and explain why her client wasn’t guilty or why a law needed to be changed, then she could certainly stand in front of a crowd on karaoke night and sing her favorite Weird Sisters tune.
16. She doesn’t remember what her first sign of magic was. When she finally gets Sorted and takes a seat at the Ravenclaw table, it seems like all anyone can talk about is how they figured out that they were witches and wizards – bouncing when dropped from windows, turning black hair lime green, almost impossibly making every goal at a football game – and all she can think of is how her letter appeared one bright November morning and she couldn’t remember doing anything out of the ordinary.
She makes up a story about levitating a plate of brownies down from a high shelf, just so she can have something to tell her new classmates. She tells this little white lie so often that after awhile, she starts to believe it.
15. Audrey knows that her parents love her. But there was nothing that could hide the disappointment Audrey saw in their eyes the day she received her Hogwarts letter. Instead of the pretty, delicate little girl they had hoped for, longed for, that her mother almost died for, their daughter was almost no different than their son; she was turning her back on the Muggle world – on her parents – just like her brother did before her.
She knows that no matter what, her mother and father are still proud of her. But nothing can take away how much that hurts.
14. Asteria Greengrass is the first friend she makes on the train ride to Hogwarts. They spend the journey walking the hallways between compartments, right after Audrey gets lost and Asteria gets kicked out of her compartment by her older sister, Daphne. They bond over a shared love of the Weird Sisters, talking for a good hour about how good-looking Donaghan Tremlett is and which album they like better (Asteria prefers Lunar Jungle, while Audrey thinks that their first album, Wand in Pocket, was the best). They promise to try and get in the same House once they get to Hogwarts, which leads to a discussion of what Houses their siblings and parents went into.
She never forgets the look Asteria gives her when she finds out that she was a Muggleborn.
13. Audrey was ten the first time she saw Schindler’s List. Roger, who was fifteen at the time and reading as many of their mothers’ history books as he could before his Christmas break ended, snuck her to the little movie theatre down the road without telling her exactly what they were going to see. She sat in the dark, horror-struck and clutching to her brother’s arm for dear life, as they watched terrible, inhuman things unfold on the screen before them.
She cried for two hours straight after it ended – Roger had to tell their parents that she fell and hurt her knee so they wouldn’t get in trouble – and couldn’t understand just how people could be like that; how they could cause so much pain and suffering and actually sleep at night thinking that they had done something good.
12. She’s an absolute sucker for those terribly trashy romance novels, particularly Fifi LaFolle’s Enchanted Encounters series. They’re terribly cheesy, with bad euphemisms for love, lust, and sex, terrible characterization, flimsy plots, and awful, almost violently purple prose filling the pages from cover to cover.
They’re complete rubbish, all of them, and she knows it…but they’re horribly addictive rubbish and she can’t seem to stop reading them.
11. Her father taught mathematics at a prestigious private school for boys called Smeltings. Like her father, Audrey also has a fascination for numbers and can do math both quickly and accurately in her head. This talent came in handy at Hogwarts, especially in Potions, where Snape demanded absolute perfection in everything that they brewed and her knowledge of numbers helped her to calculate percentages of ingredients quicker than her classmates.
If it had been any other teacher, or if she had been a Slytherin, she would have gotten Os and Es and 110% on her exams. As it was, she barely scraped an A during her first Practice O.W.L.
10. Audrey was one of the girls who followed Viktor Krum around the Hogwarts library during the Tri-Wizard Tournament. To be honest, she was more than a little star-struck by him, and all she really wanted was an autograph for her brother. She’s pretty sure Roger would have owed her his broomstick and then some for getting Viktor Krum’s autograph for his birthday…even if it was on the brim of her pointed hat. And he didn’t spell their last name right. And he signed with the tube of lipstick she borrowed from Marietta Edgecombe.
Besides…she was eleven. It wasn’t like she knew any better.
9. Audrey spends the war Fidelius-ed into Roger’s three-room, ninth-floor flat in London, reading every book in his apartment six times and trying her hardest not to lose her mind. Their parents were abroad, their memories charmed away by Roger when he first got the notice to appear before the Muggleborn Registration Commission, and Audrey didn’t know where. He promised to tell her when the time was right, and in the meantime left her to her own devices. He was cut from Puddlemere United’s Reserve Team and he went underground, taking her with him as they tried to keep themselves out of a war they wanted no business in. He got a job in the mail room of a Muggle law firm and kept Audrey locked away so no harm would come to her.
There was a park outside their building, and she would watch people come and go for hours; she’d make up stories about their lives, about their families, about where they worked and why they were at the park. She listened to her mother’s records until she knew every single Beatles’ song by heart. She slept entire days away and watched the night move outside her window. Roger brought her their father’s math books from Smeltings and his old ones from Hogwarts, and candles and chocolate and a kaleidoscope and Chinese takeaway every Sunday. She read The Diary of Anne Frank seven times that year. It turns out that irony is not as funny when you’re living it.
8. She loses her virginity a year and a half after the war ends, to a Muggle University student that she meets in a pub in Edinburgh. She is a little over sixteen and never catches his name. Audrey has one drink and he has three, but neither one are drunk when they make the decision to go back to his place. It’s awkward and fumbling (on her part, anyways) and the actual act of sex hurts more than she thinks it should. She doesn’t stay very long afterwards, dressing as quickly as she can while he steps into the shower, and it is almost dark outside as she walks down the road back to the pub. She takes a taxi to Cho’s parent’s place and cries the entire way, her fingers gently pressing at the bruises he left on her body. Cho doesn’t say anything when she lets her in; she just sets her up in the guest room and rocks her in her arms when she once again bursts into tears.
Audrey wishes that she could at least remember the Muggle’s name. He had nice eyes.
7. She hates eggplants and mushrooms with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.
There’s no amusing anecdote tied to this hatred, or any particularly scarring childhood memory. She just hates the foul things.
6. Sometimes, she still has nightmares about Amon Goethe finding her in the middle of the night and killing her in front of her family. After the war, though, Goethe’s pointed face often turns into Voldemort’s…and it is never her that he comes after. At first, it is always Roger that Voldemort turns his wand on, then their parents, then her.
When she’s older, he pulls her daughters from her arms.
5. Right after he calls her “Kitten,” there’s a ten-second period where Audrey seriously, seriously considers Charlie Weasley the handsomest man alive and has half a mind to ask him out to dinner. He’s got that look about him; that lopsided, charming, self-assured grin that she can picture him wearing as he takes her to bed and when he leaves the next morning before she can even make him coffee.
But then the ten seconds are over and she sees his brother – her boss – turn bright red from embarrassment as he tries to inconspicuously peek over his cubicle wall, and the sheer absurdity of the situation just makes her giggle.
4. When Cho comes to the flat looking for Roger the night of the Final Battle, all she finds is Audrey curled up on the settee with the cat. Roger left just before Cho had arrived, armed with only his wand and his wits and his battered Nimbus 2000. Cho tells her what is going on and she leaps out of her chair, rushing about to find her wand and telling Cho straight out that she’s coming with her, underage or not.
Audrey goes with the full intention of helping the cause and fighting the Death Eaters. She leaves with the smallest shred of hope that she will stay alive long enough to find her brother, and even then he pushes her towards the safety that lies beyond the portrait hole before going back to fight.
3. She buys The Diary of Penny Clearwater on a whim one day, when she was stopping at Flourish and Blott’s to pick up the books she’d need for her upcoming Juriswitch apprenticeship. It takes her three days to read it.
She joins Muggleborns for Change the day she finishes.
2. She had a ridiculous, sappy crush on Percy her very first year at Hogwarts. He was a Tri-Wizard judge, and smart, and handsome, and his hair fell into his eyes in such a perfect way that she couldn’t help but stare at him whenever the Judges sent up their scores. She grew out of it, though, like many girls do with their “first loves”, and eventually set her sights on a boy closer to her own age. Her crush was forgotten for ages and it wasn’t until she saw him again – eating alone in her favorite booth in the Ministry cafeteria – did those feelings resurface. It took her absolute ages to act on those feelings, anyway, because he was still a widower and still seven years her senior and still just as bloody handsome as the day she first saw him, and it was like he turned her brain to mush every time he so much as looked at her. Even when she finally got the nerve to speak around him – acid-barbed little comments alongside arguments about laws and politics – she still had a hard time trying to keep herself breathing around him.
She loves him. More than she ever thought she could love another person. But no matter how much she loves Percy Weasley, she would rather gnaw off her own hand than ever admit the truth about her crush on him.
1. Roger died before he could tell her where their parents were.
She likes to think that they’re living someplace warm.
.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 08:12 pm (UTC)The last fact in this one is a gut-wrencher. Beautiful last sentence.
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Date: 2009-10-20 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 11:15 am (UTC)re: #14/#12: ah, OK. It threw me, that the wording was exactly the same for each. If each were written differently, it would be easy to think, "Hey, Asteria and Audrey have stuff in common," and continue reading, rather than being confused, stopping, and going back to check. Of course, this is totally unsolicited, so take with as many grains of salt that you like! :)
*delighted* Yay, a new story about these two! I believe I'll add you to my list to be better able to watch for that. Oh, and there's the community
no subject
Date: 2009-11-13 10:32 pm (UTC)Such a great list. I'm loving this fest thing!
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Date: 2009-11-17 09:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-02 04:17 am (UTC)I went to fandom_secrets & found very little (in general). Wanted to see if I'd missed a spot.
2009 Harry Potter Random Facts Fest Master List
Date: 2010-09-01 12:42 pm (UTC)Davies, Audrey: By , here [...]