Chapter Text
Somewhere in England (even the locals aren’t exactly sure where), surrounded by rolling hills and sparkling valleys on all sides, lies a sprawling country house at the bank of a winding river. Its only visitor is a young woman, maybe 14 or 15, who is ankle deep in the cool water just before a crudely fashioned dam. A row of odd, flat rocks is lined up along the tree trunk that makes up most of the dam, and every few minutes the girl meticulously selects one; she tosses it between her hands a couple of times, weighing it and getting a feel for its balance, before gripping it between her thumb and the flat of her first knuckle and, with a sharp and precise flick of her wrist, sends it skipping along the pool at the other side of the dam. She gives a satisfied sort of smirk after each string of six or seven skips, and cocks her head a bit to listen to the relentless stream of noise coming from the house’s open windows. Every few minutes a bang or explosion of one kind or another cracks through the air, directly followed by a shout of “FREDDIE I SWEAR TO MERLIN HIMSELF” or something of the sort. ‘Freddie’ does not seem to be paying the woman any mind, as the noises continue. The girl in the river rolls her eyes and chuckles to herself, as if explosions and expletives are commonplace on this strange secluded bit of land. Eventually, as the line of rocks gets shorter and shorter, the girl dips her hands into the clear water, running them through her unruly red hair. She wipes the excess water quickly on her cutoff overalls, not paying much mind as she wades to the riverbank and swings herself onto the grass.
As she walks barefooted up the dirt path, a window several stories above her swings open, and a gangly, grinning mess of limbs and freckles sticks his head out. Her brother, if the red hair and dusky skin are anything to go by, is completely unaffected by the raised eyebrow and unimpressed smirk she directs at him, and opens his mouth as if to say something, before a look of panic crosses his face and he quickly ducks back inside. The source of his fear becomes apparent a moment later when a decidedly unimpressed but not-altogether-surprised looking woman takes his place at the window. She gives her daughter a stern look, as if daring her to cause any trouble with her brother already wreaking havoc, and the girl gives her a chagrined smile, ducking her head and moving at a much quicker pace towards the door. She hastily brushes the dirt off of her feet before she enters, giving her father a side hug as she passes by where he’s sitting in the front room, before climbing the three flights of stairs to the landing outside her room, where her mother is waiting. The woman says nothing, simply raising an eyebrow and nodding slightly to the mess of clothing, furniture, and god-knows-what-else spread across the girl’s room and out into the hallway. Sucking her lips between her teeth, the girl snorts and nods, giving a “yeah that looks about right” as she scoops up the clothing and headbands that have spilled into the hallway. As another bang rocks the house and her mother briskly stalks upstairs towards Freddie’s room, Dominique heaves a sigh and prepares to leave her home for another nine months of crazy friends and stress-fueled adventures.
***
Somewhere in the countryside of Northern England is a small town, spread out and sprawling. In the town center—if such a small town can even have a center besides the consolidation of the post office and supermarket—is an ice cream shop. The final days, for some the final day even, of summer vacation have brought out a relatively large crowd, and the line is out the door. A rambunctious game of tag has children skipping and ducking around trees, benches, and people alike, and a group of older kids are down the hill at the pond trying to catch water striders. The hill itself is proving to be a popular attraction of children and adults alike, and there is a row of people at the top holding cones for their companions, who have chosen to lie down on their backs with their arms outstretched and roll down the hill like barrels. There’s a tree at the top of the hill, off to the side of the shop and its customers; it is currently occupied by two teenagers: a boy at the younger end who is sitting on a very thick, low branch with a chocolate cone, and a girl on the brink of adulthood, who is sitting several yards higher than the boy and is clearly quite pleased with herself. Directly below the boy’s dangling feet is a young couple, perhaps mid-thirties, sitting on a park-style bench and regarding the proceedings of the shop customers with great amusement.
Every now and then the kids shout something down to their parents about how boring and domestic they are, but the shorter, dark-skinned man simply sticks his tongue out at the two, while his partner—presumably his husband if the bands on their fingers are anything to go off of—threatens to eat the ice cream which has been left in his possession. In response to the threat, the girl subtly makes her way down the tree to sit on the branch opposite her brother’s, and holds a finger to her lips, eyes dancing with mirth. She hooks her knees around the lower branch and, much to her brother’s barely contained glee, swings down and stealthily grabs the two half-eaten cups of ice cream lying on the bench beside their parents’ legs. The two men startle and call foul as she passes the treats up to the boy, freeing her hands to pull herself out of her fathers’ reach. After spluttering indignantly for a moment, the sandy-haired, taller man shucks off his overshirt, grabs the lowest branch, and begins a heavy pursuit of his now-cackling children, whose young limbs and light bodies can carry them much higher than his. As the lone member of his family still on solid ground, the other man smiles and shakes his head, well-used to his husband and adoptive-children’s antics by now. With a glance at his watch and a twist of his lips, he calls up to the other three, reminding them that the whole family has to be on a train the next morning and no one has finished packing. The kids, who’ve taken refuge at the top branches of the tree, stolen ice cream now sitting within reach on the shop’s roof, groan melodramatically, but begin slowly making their way back down to the lower branches. They stop on the lowest branch to finish every last bite of the stolen ice cream, grinning like mad and frequently sticking out their tongues, before finally dropping to the ground below. After tossing the empty cups into the practically-overflowing bin, the boy jumps on his sister’s back, cackling with glee as she breaks into a run. Their fathers walk at a more subdued pace behind them, hand in hand, and as a crazy, mixed up, happy family, the Finnegan-Thomas’s leave for home.
***
There’s a girl sitting on the front step of a nondescript house in a nondescript suburban town just outside of London. She’s dressed comfortably in leggings and a dark green cardigan, ready for the drop in temperature that the almost-autumn days have brought. There’s a book open on her knees, and her right hand keeps her page while the left lifts a large blue “police box” mug to her lips. Her black hair is piled in a messy bun atop her head, and she looks up every now and then to smile at the child’s birthday party across the street. A car drives by the house and she looks up, cracking her neck and rolling her shoulders, but she doesn’t track the car with her eyes; she knows the driver cannot see her. No one on the street can see her. They can see the lights on in the house. They can see the car in the driveway. Back when the girl went to the local elementary school, the people on the street could see her walking to the bus stop. In short, they can see the things that they want to see. They can see the things that make the house just like every other house on the street.
But they can’t see the girl. The girl is different. The girl is a teenager enjoying simply being outside. The girl is thirteen and reading during the summer holiday. The girl is whispering under her breath in Latin. The picture on the cover of the girl’s book is moving.
The girl goes to school at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and for nine months out of the year the girl studies magic.
The girl is Ella Edgecombe. Her mother is Marietta Edgecombe and her godmother is Cho Chang. Her family fought in the second Wizarding War alongside Harry Potter, savior of the wizarding world.
And Ella? She wants nothing more than to be a normal teenager doing normal teenager-y things. Fate was not so kind to her parents, but perhaps it will be more generous to her.
***
There’s a young man sitting on the lone swing-set at the edge of the lone playground in an otherwise busy-and-bursting town outside of London. The chains have long-since become too low to the ground for him, designed for legs much shorter than his own, but there he sits, eyes on the sunset without really seeing it. He rocks back and forth unconsciously, heels digging and toes pulling in a steady rhythm, but he seems otherwise oblivious to the fact that he is even at a playground at all. Every so often he shivers at the late-afternoon breeze, and his forehead creases deeper in thought. When the last sliver of sunlight drops below the treeline and his shoulders hunch against the chilled air, he looks around. His face puzzles further, as if asking how or why he ended up on a children’s playground, before the confusion is replaced with an air of nostalgia. He grasps the chains of the swing and hauls himself to his feet, hands lingering as he steps slowly out of his shadowed corner. He runs his fingers along the yellow slide, a small smile playing at his lips, then lets his hand drop as he finally shakes himself of the cloud that has followed him from the swing-set. The playground emptied as the sun drifted lower behind the trees, and there isn’t a single child to look at him with curiosity, or a parent with wary concern, though he’s used to the side glances that always seem to follow him. He was the new boy. He was the boy who brought his pet toad to school. He was the boy who turned a bully’s hair slime green. He was the new boy again. He was homeschooled this time. He was the boy with no father to speak of. He was the boy whose only friend was a girl two years younger and four towns over. He was the boy, he was the boy, he was the boy.
He was the boy who wished so hard to disappear that one day it actually happened. He was the boy who always had the right words to dry tears, and always had a candy bar in his pocket for exactly those such circumstances. He was the boy with a smile so quiet it could only be felt is the calm stillness of nature. He was the boy who could make any animal, no matter how wild, eat out of the palm of his hand.
He was the boy who came back from his first year of boarding school with a louder laugh, a brighter smile, stronger hugs, and dozens of stories on his lips about a French girl with hair the color of sunshine who told him stories about the stars.
He was the boy who came back from his second year of boarding school with the fiercest, older brother sense of protection an only child can muster, and even more stories about a shy little boy who wanted nothing more than to be accepted for who he knew he really was, and a boisterous girl with flame-red hair and a desperate need to fulfill her family’s expectations.
He was the boy who came back from boarding school with the one thing his mother could never give him: siblings, a family, a sense of community. He was the boy who took his mother, his aunt, and his chosen family, and wove a web that the force of the entire world could not break. He is the boy who looked at the discrimination of his mother’s past and the promise of the future, and made a decision. He is Andrew Chang, and he is going to change the world.
***
On the northern shores of France, secluded enough that the villagers have very little gossip material (not that this has ever stopped them) is a large, rather peculiar cottage. There’s a strange mist around it, as though the fog is particularly thick in the ten feet surrounding it, and it seems to be in a constant state of about-to-fall-over without actually doing so. Inside is a spacious kitchen, though rather stark in the way of appliances; a bookshelf-lined study, books sorted by color rather than alphabetically; and a well-lived-in mess of a living room, with two packed trunks resting near the fireplace.
The third trunk, instead of ready to go with the other two, is up two flights of increasingly disastrous stairs and lying open on the floor of the third largest bedroom in the house. Currently though, it looks less like a bedroom and more like a warzone. The cumulative mess that one can only assume is supposed to be packed into the trunk is instead strewn in and around it. The main ingredient to the wreckage is a disarray of clothing and shoes, some easily recognizable as belonging to a teenage girl, others... less so. Scattered on and under sets of robes and sweatpants are several textbooks with increasingly bizarre names such as Defensive Magical Theory , One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi , and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them . A large pewter cauldron and set of slightly tarnished scales sit in the top of the trunk. At the outskirts of the mess, spilling out of two upended organizing units, is a quite extensive range of makeup, some of which shimmers in a way that defies science. A small black cat is purring on top of a tangled mess of charging cords, none of which seem to plug into conventional outlets. Perched on a desk at the exterior of the mess is a large birdcage with quite a lot of brown and white feathers scattered along the bottom. A variety of green and silver accessories—scarves, ties, hair ribbons and the like—are draped over and pinned around the girl’s bed posts, the corners of the trunk, and the back of the desk chair. To complete the utter mayhem is a stuffed bear lying under several pairs of pants; from the visible top half it appears to be brand new, but there’s a look in its glass eyes that says it has experienced quite a lot.
A girl, who appears to be the owner of the room, and, by extension, the trunk and its considerable contents, is lying on the bed in the middle of the room. The bed has also been subject to the havoc that has been wreaked; an assortment of comic books, their covers varying levels of recognizable, are spread across and around the pillow, glossy pages being creased by the girl’s feet. Her head rests at the foot of the bed, left arm dangling over the edge as she lies on her stomach. The other hand is lightly brushing a charging cord, which is wedged between the mattress of the bed and its box spring, and appears to be attached to some sort of electronic device, judging by the mellow music issuing from the bed.
Her wavy blonde hair is in a loose bun at her crown; several strands of shorter bangs have come free and are lazily drifting in front of her face. After a few minutes her nose scrunches up against the tickling strands, and she sighs sleepily. Her eyes crack open and she groans, pushing the hair out of her face and squinting through her sleepy haze. Groggily, she mumbles to herself and wiggles her phone out from under her mattress, checking the time on the screen’s locked display. 3:27 AM is set against a photo of herself and four other people her age. The girl pushes herself off of her stomach and up into a kneeling position, surveying the room. She curses, not quite as softly as the hour would dictate, and, tilting her neck until four or five audible pops satisfy her, the girl slides off of her bed and approaches the wreckage of her trunk.
At 3:29 AM, September 1st, 2018, in the third largest bedroom of Shell Cottage, Dominique Weasley began to pack.