Summary: Harry and Gemma share a moment in the courtyard at the Perenelle Flamel Adaptation Center where they are both learning to adapt to life-changing events.
For the Pomegranate challenge on Reddit r/fanfiction December 15, 2019. The challenge was to write the life story of a canon, OC, or SI in under 500 words/15 minutes. The story had to include the word pomegranate and reference fire, earth, air, and water. I wrote this scene between Harry Potter and Gemma Boot who are characters from my very, very long Harry Potter fanfic, Basilisk Eyes, available on Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.net and Wattpad.
When he entered the courtyard Harry paused, listening. A sound like feet shuffling against gravel came from the center, under the rustling leaves of the tree.
Harry waved toward the sound and walked to the shade of the tree, the silver tip of his staff tinging against the gravel. A bright and crisp aroma floated in the air as he approached the bench.
“Hi, Gemma,” he reached out his hand to her and she greeted him with a sign on his hand and guided him to sit next to her. He collapsed his staff and turned toward her, offering his hands so that they could talk.
Gemma tapped the side of Harry’s hand with her cupped hand and he opened his palm with a furrow between his brows. She dropped something so tiny into it that he wasn’t sure that anything was there. He felt with the fingers of his other hand and found a delicate, squishy seed-like object. He lifted it carefully to his nose and inhaled. It was the source of the almost citrusy aroma he’d smelled earlier.
“What is it?” he asked, listening as the papers that wrote out his words for her to read fluttered in the breeze.
She pushed his hand to his mouth, encouraging him to eat it. He held it between his teeth and bit down on the tiny fruit, touching his tongue to the seed and allowing the sweet tang to flood his senses. Then she took his hand and fingerspelled, “Pomegranate.”
“Oh, I’ve never had one before.”
She made the sign for writing tools on his hand and he summoned them from the undetectable storage compartment in his staff and handed them to her. He listened while the pencil scratched across the surface of the paper. He held his reading tool, his anagnóstis, in his hand, waiting. When she was done writing, she guided his hand holding the anagnóstis to the beginning and he listened to the words she’d written, spoken aloud by the reading tool.
“When I was sick with Spattergroit and my throat hurt like a fire burning inside me, my pa would go to the muggle market…and he’d buy pomegranates and then peel them in my room—it smelled so good!—and squeeze the juice into the water, one-by-one—not using magic, because, well, you know he’s a squib—until it had the most marvelous flavor and then he’d get me to drink it. It was the only thing I could tolerate. I was still so delirious… I didn’t even notice then that I couldn’t hear… that I’d missed my first year at Hogwarts… that my voice was gone… that I had nearly died. Do you like pomegranates?”
“Yes, it is small, but it really packs a punch… like you,” he said as he leaned against her shoulder, smiling.
She scratched across his back—her voiceless laughter—and pushed him back so that he almost toppled off the bench and into the lavender.
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