(no subject)

[thornyrose42]

Well, it's been a while since I updated this....

Mainly because the Easter Holidays are over as of ten days ago. So I have been busy catching up on all the work that I didn't do over the holidays because I was doing things like updating the journal. However I have not just been busy with school work, oh no! Not only have I produced several drabbles, (located on the UR drabble thread if you are interested) I have finally managed to finish the next chapter of GUB and have sent it off to my beta. So hopefully it should be up quite soon.

Also last night I went on a sponsored sleepout on the streets of Edinburgh, to raise money to help homeless people, with a group of friends from school. It was really good fun and absolutely nothing like really sleeping rough, as there was soup and hot drinks available through out the night, you were allowed to go inside this nearby building to go to the loo or if you got really cold, the entire square was sectioned off so that no actual homeless people (or other dangerous folk) could come in and the provided materials (cardboard and plastic sheets) with which you could make your own shelter. Our shelter was amazing, it covered all twelve of us, didn't fall down during the night and protected us from the wind. All in all it was a blast. Although my sister and some of the others went straight from this to a two day hike over the Pentlands for Duke of Edinburgh. Poor them.....

Also this: 

If she had been asked, later, what she remembered about that first night she would have said the clock.

 

It had been small, square, and made of shiny red plastic. It had sat upon the wobbly bedside table and ticked its way through the night. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes in bed she could still hear that tick. Persistent, unchanging, as if every single second was being marked down as present and correct. There had been something very…emotionless about it. Very Muggle. Only they could have forced Time to march at such a steady pace.

 

There had been a Sky-clock in her bedroom at home. Bought by some distant relative during his travels upon the Continent, it had hung opposite her bed for as long as she could remember. There had been no hands, just the moon and the sun dancing across the sky. She had fallen asleep counting the tiny pinpricks of stars and woke up when the dim light of the sun fell across her face. That was the way Time was, it danced to the music of the cosmos, not to the petulant ticking of some two Knut piece of trash.

 

And then she had cried, because she knew that she would never see her Sky-clock again. And then she had cried even more, because the first thing she had cried for had been a timepiece not her family. And she had cried because she had promised herself that she wouldn’t cry. And by then the lumpy pillow had been soaked with her salt tears.

 

She had stopped eventually. After all there are only so many tears one person can shed. But then she had been left with an awful, empty, aching feeling in the pit of her stomach and it had taken all of her willpower to stop herself from getting up and going home. She had wanted desperately to go home. Back to her Sky-clock and her mother who smelled of lavender perfume and old silk, back to her father with his “interesting stories”, back to her uncle and his books. Back to her sisters who were as different as night and day. Back to her family, who through the rose tinted glasses of recollection seemed…softer, kinder and more likely to forgive.

 

But she hadn’t gotten up. She had forced herself to remember what she knew. One sister had sold her soul to a monster. The other sister had taken their diminished fortune far too much to heart. Her parents were blind and her uncle was stuck in the past. If she had stayed she would have been trapped, trapped by obligation and duty and, yes, love. Because even then, on the eve of her wedding to a totally unsuitable person (as one sister would have said), she had loved her family. She had loved them and she still did love them. Despite…everything.

 

And she would have left her husband-to-be for them in a heart beat if she had known one thing more. That they would have accepted both of them back into the fold.