DISTANT GAME ━ charlie weasley

vii. just avery & just charlie

To remember such picky memories like that would be considered miraculous in a sense. At first, she remembers pestering her mother and brother about the intricate details on what exactly made Oliver leave, or what kind of a person he was. To Jeremiah, was kind of dad was he — since Jeremiah was four at the time, his memories of times with father would have been more materialised. Now, having grown up, Avery has stopped asking these kind of questions. Though she may have been young at the time beforehand, she now thought it cruel and selfish to have brought up such painful memories — especially to Valerie. She realised that she should have been more grateful that she still had a parental figure as loving and supportive and put-together as Valerie. Many people have no parents — Avery realised that she was lucky to have gathered both in one.

And though it's been years since Avery has mourned the absence of a father in her life, (again, she reminds herself that she was fortune to have both in the form of Valerie) there have been fleeting moments where she had just wondered. About this mystery man; about Oliver Hearst. Like, did he snore when he slept? Or, did he like football just like her mother did? Back then, Avery would have given anything to get answers on the man she once called her father. But that was back then.

     Avery now realises there's no point in wallowing over what could be in her life, when she already has so much to be taken grateful for. Her mother, her brother; her grandparents, Uncle Douglas, Laurel and now baby Abigail. Oliver Hearst cannot compare in a life he was never present for. That much, Avery has ingrained into her brain. She doesn't know anything about his current life — if he's settled down with someone else, if he still paints, draws, does all the things she knew he once loved.

     There's something Avery can vaguely recall, though. About the conundrum that is Oliver Hearst. When playing hide-and-seek one day with her older brother at the vivacious age of eight, seeking solace beneath Jeremiah's dust-ridden bed, where Avery found the absently folded corners of a discoloured image, wedged in between the wooden leg of the bed and the *blue* wall it was flush against. Four people, in the picture. And it was clear to see who the man no longer present in this collective family was; the man holding the baby in his arms so delicately, his wife and son huddled in beside him with a winsome gaze overlooking the baby — one year old at the time.

     From what one could gather, Oliver Hearst was a handsome man. In the photo at the time, he would have been around 23, a young age for a father of two, and he still had many of the features young adults held in their books of attractive hallmarks. His fern-coloured irises exhibited the same glint of fresh delirium Avery has seen swirling around her own deep pupils so many times, flickering strikingly like newly fallen leaves in the Autumn. Just like Jeremiah, Oliver's hair wore that same mousy brown colour, only his stuck up on it's near-shaven ends, rather than piling softly around his head like his son's (with similarities to Avery's, too. She may have had that slight rosy twinge to her sunkissed tresses, but the main obstacle preventing Avery's hair from becoming as rouge and vibrant as Valerie's was the hazel tint inherited from Oliver) He had the smile one would have in reconciliation with an old friend — the one where it was easy to see where the stress marks laid from the intensive stretching. Firm, taut muscles protruded from beneath the short sleeves of the thin t-shirt, and a full stubbly beard grizzled the sculpted face of the man, whose smile now bore an unknown recognition to the three surrounding him.

It was for this reason, that Avery applauded photographs for their work. The way in which Oliver Hearst's mouth was so enthusiastically gleaming with a wide beam, the way Valerie looked at the baby just as she would look at her grown daughter now — yet in that photo, one couldn't guess that the man smiling so enthusiastically in lieu of his children would eventually exit their lives, for good. And how in pictures, one moment can be captured in spite of an abundance of discarded ones.