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} In 1995, a prophecy trembles on the edge of its shelf.
It falls.
} At the end of that summer, a Muggle woman disembarks the 14:15 Greater Anglia two stops before her usual destination, overcome with stomach pains too painful to ignore. She asks a young man checking the time-table for directions to the A&E; she is so pale that he forgets his train ticket is only valid for the next forty minutes and takes her himself.
It's frightfully busy that day, as one of the town's youngest and brightest (and, indeed, their only hope of getting their name signed on with a professional league) had done something horrible to his ACL, and everyone who'd ever once had a conversation with him over the course of his entire life had apparently turned out to see how he was faring.
Outside on the street, children roughhouse in their Sunday best and their parents stand and smoke and discuss the wine one of them had brought to their last party, which had honestly reached its maturity some twenty years before they were born. Quietly, unobtrusively, same as she'd ever done anything in her life, the woman delivers a son to that afternoon light. She gathers him close and sings to him of nonsensical things. The young man brings her water in a paper cup, and the rain comes suddenly, a breathless gasping flash of a downpour that rushes down on them and turns the whole world to rain-flushed color.
} She still gets postcards from that young man sometimes, as he travels the world looking to write a novel. He talks about it as if it had been chopped into pieces and scattered across the globe and he needs to retrieve it to put it back together. She keeps them all; postcards aren't made to be thrown away. On the back, he writes about the weather and the food; she traces his handwriting to the end, where he signs,
Say hi to the baby for me!
-Paul.
} Thirteen years later, and the Muggle woman steps into the kitchen to find the baby standing at the sink, clearwater running from the faucet and the breakfast dishes lined up on a dishtowel with a pattern of apples and pears, returned to a shine by a quick scrub of soap. They live in a flat she cannot strictly afford, but the landowner lets her stay because she's a reliable tenant, quiet and kind and prompt, and that son of hers is something of a handful, sure, but the landowner doesn't see how the lad could possibly turn out bad, mother like that.
He's staring out the window, forehead wrinkled into a slight frown.
Honey, says Sally, and he reaches out without looking, twisting the tap off. He says, My magic feels off.
Sally has no magic; she is a dead zone for magic. Spells cast on her never stick. Two years ago, she had to sit on the Charing Cross monument and wait, watching shoppers go back and forth on the Stand, while her eleven-year-old son went through Diagon Alley alone, because she couldn't step inside the Leaky Cauldron; it wouldn't appear to her. Afterwards, they walked up the street to the National Gallery and they sat in the company of seventeenth-century portraits and he showed her his wand, his spellbooks, green eyes as bright as spell-light, until she felt better.
Off how?
Her baby is long limbs now, coltishly adolescent, with a body that isn't growing all at the same rate and leaves him confused about his relationship with doorways and the showerhead. She hangs her purse on its hook by the strap and crosses the kitchen to him. Her jeans are second-hand, molded to a body shape that isn't hers, and her jumper has holes she can tuck her thumbs through when she's cold.
Like I'm coming down with something, the son decides, and adds quickly, as she approaches with one hand outstretched to his forehead, I don't feel sick! But, like, I feel it there, like my magic is my sinuses and it's starting to block. I don't like it.
Pulling her hands back to her, Sally twists the rings on her fingers, absent-minded. There are no thermometers she can bring out for this.
You go back to school soon, she decides, and goes to put on the kettle. This calls for tea and a piece of chocolate. Maybe that's why you feel peculiar. You haven't done magic all summer. That I've seen, she amends airily, and he quirks a smile at her. They both know that the Ministry of Magic watches for such things, and he's never disobeyed her, not on purpose.
} She preorders their tickets to King's Cross online, grumpily clicking around on the site afterwards, letting Gabriel lean on the buzzer and ignoring it. Her son casts her a curious look, folding his robes over his arm with no care for how the seams line up, but doesn't comment. Gabe's a right nasty bloke, but he's the only wizard in the building, and Sally keeps the bare minimum of cordiality between them so she can ask him things when necessary.
A gull taps on the window, bobbing its head and peering at them with the usual vacancy Sally's used to associating with the American postbirds.
Annabeth? she asks, as Percy drops the robes and goes to the window to open it, because that's the only person she can think of who'd use American post. Annabeth's father lives in California; he's a Muggle scientist with a badge that gets him in to see the particle accelerator on the Stanford University campus. By contract, Annabeth had to spend the summers with him since she was a girl, which she hated, up until she learned that the Americans are a lot more lax about underage wizardry than they are here, and now she spends summers mastering complex spells to show off almost as soon as she's on the train back to Hogwarts.
Sally met Mr Chase once; America had faded his accent like sunshine does to a book cover, but she took him to the Imperial War Museum because he'd mentioned something about liking old planes. He'd read every plaque beside every exhibit.
Percy's eyes dart distractedly across the roll of parchment. The gull flips its tail, disinterested.
Did she write you a novel? she asks, dry.
At the door, Gabe's given up. Percy puts the first page aside, and it springs back into a tight roll.
I told her about my magic. She's telling me about how the neuromagical centers of the brain are the last to develop, so it's not unusual for magic to be unpredictable at our age. That's not quite -- the frown is back, and she doesn't know if it's Annabeth's handwriting or that Percy expects Annabeth to always be right, but then his expression smoothes away into surprise. She says Thalia doesn't feel right either.
} In 1997, Thalia was seven years old: that's easy to remember. Too young for school, but old enough that memories started to stick to her, absorb into her like water into a sponge. Everything was really scary for witches and wizards that year; Thalia's mother could do small magics, meager magics, the way most people can, but there wasn't enough in her for a wand. The year Thalia was seven and Jason was two, she took down everything Quidditch in the house and got rid of the bobutubers growing on the sill and told her children to keep the magic to themselves.
This wasn't a problem for Jason, who was rounded and doughy and hadn't mastered complete sentence yet; the most magical thing he could do then was blow a spit bubble. But Thalia said, why?
Because they'll think you stole it.
So, when, a few years later, the representatives from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry came to the door to tell her she was a witch and it's time she learned how to control her magic, Thalia told them she didn't want to go.
We know it's scary, says the wizard to her right; he's wearing short blue robes over his trousers, patterned at the hem with Golden Snitches. He says his name is Mr-Creevey-please-call-me-Dennis. I didn't know about any of this either when I was your age. It makes no difference where you come from, trust me, you'll feel a lot better surrounded by witches and wizards your own age!
I don't want to, Thalia said again. She remembers the year they spend hiding. Who's to say they couldn't do that again, and tell a whole bunch of children they must be thieves?
It's really not safe -- Mr-Creevey-please-call-me-Dennis tries to say to Thalia's mother, but stops at the look on her face. She tells them, very firmly, that she might be a bit native and a lot Muggle, but she damn well knows enough to teach her daughter spell-casting, and if Thalia doesn't want to go to school, that's her right to decide, please and thank you and would you like a biscuit to take with you?
So Thalia grows up and does her GSCEs and dyes her hair black and gets a job at the corner newsagent, where a witch named Artemis works the night-shift and teaches Thalia the things her mother couldn't as they sort boxes and count inventory. She says that, in Britain, it's the fashion to use a wand when channeling magic for a specific purpose, but in actuality, most magical items can, in one way or another, act as a conduit. When she's seventeen, she finds a goblin-made tiara in her friend Zoe's bedroom, and uses it to make everything in the room levitate two feet off the ground.
} Jason, who is too young to remember Lord Voldemort, accepts and goes to Hogwarts when it's his turn. He does his best work in class when assigned group projects, but that's because he likes to make sure the work's being done properly, so he usually winds up doing it all by himself. He doesn't mind. He trusts himself more than anybody else. Made to be a leader, says the groundskeeper after an incident with escaped, highly intelligent, and carnivorous fly-traps, where Jason had done some incredibly quick thinking. The groundskeeper is a broad-shouldered man named Mr Goyle, with small eyes and a big, bushy mustache. He tries to be mean to the kids, yelling at them when they get underfoot when he's setting up the Christmas trees in the Great Hall, but he never quite manages it, like maybe he'd used up his meanness when he was young and just simply didn't have any left.
The same week his sister starts feeling poorly, like a cut on her magic is starting to scab over, Jason's sitting at the Slytherin table with Piper McLean, the both of them trying to remember if they signed up to take the same classes this year (Divination, yes; Ancient Runes, no, Piper's taking Care of Magical Creatures with Leo instead) and really hoping that they're going to get to eat soon, when Nico di Angelo's name is called at the start of the Sorting ceremony.
} Is that him?
The whisper goes up and down the Gryffindor table, fluttering out of mouths like it has wings. Startled by it, Percy looks up. The first-year crossing to the stool is small, the way first-years usually are, wearing a pinched, belligerent expression on his face, and he's shivering from the boat ride across the lake. He wipes his running nose with the sleeve of his robes before he pulls the Sorting Hat on over his head.
It bellows out SLYTHERIN! without much of a pause, and Nico di Angelo heads for the Slytherin table without a change in that irritable expression, trailing whispers after him like raindrops.
Next to him, because Percy's the only one that doesn't mind sitting too close, Nearly-Headless Nick bobs and sighs, Pity.
What was that all about? Percy asks, craning his neck around.
Clarisse answers, That's the dollhouse kid!
Percy turns, and at the blank look on his face, she snorts ungraciously. She's a burly fifth-year girl who played Beater on the Gryffindor team for approximately six months before she was banned for blatant overaggression. As long as he'd known her, Clarisse's greatest magical talent lay in unexpectedly blowing things up, which she did gleefully and as often as possible, until the end of last year, when Headmistress McGonagall took her aside and told her that explosions were the mark of a very poor witch, and perhaps with the advent of her OWL year, she might try to behave her own age?
What rock have you been living under, Jackson? she sneers.
Percy waves his arms exasperatedly. Diggle, Lacy joins the Hufflepuff table, turning promptly to wave at the Slytherins. Piper McLean waves back, almost sadly; Lacy will learn soon enough that the other Houses aren't supposed to be friendly with the Slytherins. Slytherins operate best on their own.
My mother's a Muggle, Percy reminds Clarisse. I'm a bit out of tune with the wizarding world during the summer, thanks so much. Now, what's so special about a snot-nosed firstie?
Be nice, we were all snot-nosed firsties once, says Silena, who has the misfortune of sitting in between them. Percy isn't surprised to see a prefect badge glinting from the front of her robes. Clarisse opens her mouth like she's going to angrily retort, but Silena nudges her and they all budge down a place so that Levesque, Hazel can join them at the Gryffindor table -- the movement dislodges Nearly-Headless Nick's neck from its collared ruff, and in tilting to catch it, he plunges half into Silena. She sneezes at the sudden shock of cold, and a magnificent tawny mane explodes all around her neck.
It does, at least, distract Clarisse, who grins and says, very Gryffindor, which makes Silena laugh, hands nervously flattening down her ruff.
Annabeth uses the distraction to pin Percy's foot between her own underneath the table, lowering her voice and saying quickly, Back in June, some old Muggle woman died and donated her entire collection of antique dollhouses to her local museum. A couple of them were cursed, so they called the Ministry in, and when they reversed the enchantment on one, they found him --
Nico di Angelo, apparently tired of his sleeves, uses the tablecloth to blow his nose. The second-year on his lefthand side, a sour-faced boy with very fine cheekbones named Octavian, stares at him in obvious disgust.
-- Transfigured into a doll and preserved for seventy years. From what I heard, he's got no living family and he still thinks Grindelwald's the biggest thing out there terrorizing the countryside.
So what's he doing here?
Well, what else are you going to do? You carry on. You educate your kids.
She says it so matter-of-factly that Percy feels it settle inside of him, calm as the structure of his own bones. Annabeth makes sense: Annabeth always makes sense. He nudges her ankle with the toe of his sneaker, and she nods back, scooting to the side one more time when, at the very end of the Sorting, Zhang, Frank comes and sits on the end of Lupin, Ted's robes and immediately goes scarlet.
} Chantilly La Rue and Lucien Beauregard were both born in Nantes on a particularly blustery day at the end of July, trees shaking outside the hôpital in great gusting blows and tapping hard at the windows. Both attended the Academie de Beauxbatons in turn, but they never really exchanged more than a few lines of dialogue about holiday feasts or assignments until they were twenty-eight years old, and Chantilly came into Lucien's office with a racing broom she wanted to patent. A squat, bulky witch with very curly hair, Chantilly snapped her sentences and never cleared the dirt or splinters from under her nails. Lucien came from a line of Metamorphagi, and although he worked in a government office, his real dream was to open a chocolate shop; he liked the idea of being the person people went to when they wanted something sweet.
After Voldemort fell in the fall of '81, they moved to England to take advantage of the climate; if there were ever a people in need of entertainment, it was the English. On Chantilly's brooms, Puddlemere United soared to the top of the leagues.
Clarisse and Silena grew up together and have been best friends their entire lives. The fact that they have grown into two very different people doesn't seem to have occurred to them.
} Metamorphagus? Frank looks curious. I never knew that's what you called it. In our culture, we call shapeshifters -- he says something that's all long vowels, and Silena blinks at him helplessly. Teddy tries it and mangles it. He laughs at them both. Something explodes on the other side of the common room in an almost vindictive manner, and Silena (who's used to Clarisse) doesn't react, but both Frank and Teddy jump, going scaly green all over in surprise.
} There aren't a lot of opportunities for Gryffindor third-years and a Slytherin first-year to talk, and on the day before the first Hogsmeade weekend, Nico di Angelo finds them at the Gryffindor table.
Stirring too much sugar into his drink like he normally does, Percy breaks his enthusiastic speculation about what Hogsmeade'll be like to watch the second-years come up from double Potions, covered in frogspawn and looking faintly miserable about their lives, trailed by Rachel and Octavian, who are screaming at each other at a volume so impressive he's almost convinced one of them put a Sonorus Charm on themselves. Annabeth keeps eating: the novelty wore off long ago, and there was an incident last year involving Rachel, a very cuddly niffler named Yates, and the girls' dormitories that Annabeth still hasn't really forgiven her for.
Then, a voice from right behind him says, Oh, it's you.
Percy blinks and looks up, just as Nico swings a leg over the bench and settles in, pulling the jam towards him. He's not covered in snot today, but he's still got that look on his face, like everything annoys him: Percy's pretty sure his face is just stuck like that.
There aren't any rules against sitting at the other Houses' tables -- they looked it up, after Leo Valdez kept sneaking over during dinner to talk to Jason and Piper or, sometimes, Percy and Annabeth, like he just didn't like the idea of eating alone and would rather be the third wheel to other people's friendships than be by himself at Ravenclaw. But he's the only person Percy knows who does that.
This is the Gryffindor table. Never let it be said that Percy's talent doesn't lie in stating the obvious.
Nico eats the jam straight off his spoon. He doesn't answer.
Annabeth tries a different tract. What did you mean, 'oh, it's you'?
Not you. You're fine. It's him, and Nico's eyes are on him again, squinted up and glinting black. You make my magic itch.
} Thalia's thumbing through her keys to lock the back door after a delivery, when Artemis comes through with a girl right behind her. Artemis's silver hair is wrapped into an elegant bun, pinned with hairsticks in the shape of arrows, and she greets Thalia briskly, taking her clipboard from her and Summoning the tea kettle with a snap of her fingers. It hovers at her elbow, immediately beginning to steam. The girl looks Mediterranean, wearing a too-big Oxfam shirt that goes down to the middle of her thighs and a bulging schoolbag tossed over her shoulder, the strap too long. She looks at Thalia curiously, without comment, and Thalia can see the wand tucked into her back pocket, hidden by her shirt.
Underneath her skin, her magic itches, making her squirm like she needs to scratch at that one place in her back she can never reach. Things feel wrong inside her, everything skewed a little off-center.
Artemis says, This is Bianca. I found her in a charity bin. No, literally. She was a doll at the time.
} Leo's best subject is Charms. He'd mastered Banishing and Freezing Charms by the end of their second year, even though they weren't even supposed to cover that material until the fourth year. He usually surrounds himself in hovering bluebell flames, flicking his wand so that they orbit around his head like frozen-blue planets. It makes the other Ravenclaws nervous, having that much fire so near their books.
He and Annabeth find an unused classroom (Charlie Beckendorf offers to let them use the Hufflepuff common room, as there isn't a password and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more welcoming atmosphere, but even Leo suspects that Hufflepuffs have limits, and Leo has an alarming tendency to set things on fire,) and use it to catch Nico up on the seventy years of magical, historical, and social advancements he's missed.
Technically, somebody from the Ministry is supposed to be responsible for this, but Nico has a healthy disrespect of the Ministry that a lot of war-time kids do.
Just. Wrong war-time, Leo supposes.
Annabeth folds precise, symmetrical pieces of parchment and Leo casts a Locomotor Charm on them, and together they build empires and destroy them: a folded paper dragon stamps its feet and bellows, while a little star-spangled Dumbledore discovers seven uses for its blood; red-eyed werewolves become docile in the face of a fluttering goblet of Wolfsbane potion; a sinister, black-caped Voldemort murders and destroys its way across their table, until Harry Potter defeats him in the shadow of a multi-towered origami replica of Hogwarts castle, illuminated by Leo's bluebell flames.
I remember it, Leo says quietly, dropping the charm. Harry Potter flutters lifeless to the floor. I was almost three when wannabe Death Eaters came to my door. My mother, Aunt Rosa, my cousins and abuelita and great-grandfather Sammy were all there. I was the only magical one, but of course I didn't know that then. I hid in the oven and performed a Flame-Freezing Charm while the house blazed and waited for an adult to find me. It was my first magic.
Muggle-killing for sport, Annabeth comments, disgust thick in her voice. Nico pokes at the paper Hogwarts with the tip of his wand.
} Nico's best friend is a ghost named Myrtle, who lives in the out-of-order girls' bathroom on the second floor where Nico goes when he's tired of the Slytherin common room and the things people ask him. Everybody calls her Moaning Myrtle, which Nico thinks is rather mean. She only cries sometimes, and Nico thinks it's much more entertaining when she ruptures the plumbing in other bathrooms. He kind of wants the sight of Octavian pelting down the corridor with his trousers around his ankles immortalized forever.
Should we be worried? Percy asks him, when Nico elbows his way in between Hazel and Frank at the Gryffindor table.
Percy has a lot of dark hair and eyes that can't decide between blue or green, like seaglass, and Nico wears this entire century wrong, but at least he isn't the only one that itches under the skin. Spellcasting comes easier to Nico when Percy's around; the times when the third-years Gryffindors and the first-year Slytherins have a class in the same vicinity, Nico does better. He doesn't know if Percy's noticed the same thing; Gryffindors are kind of bull-headed.
Worried about what?
The fact your closest friends are dead.
I resent that remark, Mr Jackson, comments Nearly-Headless Nick.
You really shouldn't, Nico responds, and Nick looks affronted for a moment before Hazel turns to quietly reassure him the comment wasn't directed at him. I know her. She was in my sister's House, seventy years ago. Bianca cried when she died.
Bianca di Angelo and Myrtle Wilkes had never exchange a single word to the other, at least not that Bianca ever told Nico about, or that Myrtle remembers, but that doesn't mean she wasn't upset about Myrtle's murder. Nico understands the feeling: it still catches him off-guard, the casual disarming thought that the kindly woman who mended his mittens on the train from Salisbury that one time is probably dead, that the next-door neighbor who stole his father's wand and invited Nico to come with him so they could hex frogs by the creek is probably an old man, if the wars didn't kill him. Nico doesn't sleep a lot at night, worried that if he does, he'll blink and another seventy years will slip by without a care for who Nico will leave behind.
} Bianca's mother had been a tall, formidable witch who wore satiny red pumps under her robes and encased her wand in solid gold. She used to complain bitterly about the English rain; her accent meandered, depending on where she most wanted to travel on any given day. Bianca remembers the business-like set of her profile as she cast the wards up every night, remembers the way she'd charmed a flute of champagne to hover beside her, her arm tucked easily into --
And that's where her memory stops. Just, cut ragged, leaving Bianca with a feeling like she's trying to find a word she knows and it won't come to her. But no matter how she tries, how she waits, her father's face never returns to her.
She wakes in the middle of the night and tiptoes out of her room. The shades are drawn in Thalia's room, blocking out the moonlight; the only light comes from the iPod charging in its dock. Thalia's been using its Wifi-seeker to religiously check X Factor updates at work, draining its battery faster than usual. The room is covered in band posters. Bianca doesn't think she realizes, but Thalia's magic glows hot as coal inside of her soul when music is playing; it affects Bianca's magic, too, which is why she notices.
Thalia, she whispers to the dark.
Thalia comes awake instantly, reaching instinctively for the tiara on the bedside table. Bianca? What ...?
Bianca sits at the foot of her bed and says, I want to find my brother.
} Sometimes -- okay, more often than sometimes -- Piper thinks she was Sorted into the wrong House.
She'd talked to the Sorting Hat for several long minutes in her first year, conscious the whole time that she was an eleven-year-old sitting on a stool in front of hundreds of wizards-in-training, and her feet didn't reach the floor. The Sorting Hat had been very kindly, humming in her ear and assuring her that the fact she'd been raised by her Muggle father and didn't know any magic beyond what they did in the CGI departments at BBC, where they'd let her peek over their shoulders and steal the leftover pastries from somebody's run to the nearest Pret, didn't matter in the slightest. It'd told her more about the Houses when she'd asked, and when it mentioned that Slytherins relied primarily on themselves, Piper felt her heart jump in recognition.
The Hat, of course, noticed instantly. Are you sure?
Which was a stupid question, because of course Piper wasn't sure.
The Hat said, slowly, It's not Slytherin nature to go out and seek control over others, mind. A true Slytherin recognizes that the only person they can control is themselves, and does so. Don't think it means you can't make friends, nor does it mean you can't rely on your friends in times of trouble, Piper McLean. I don't have much of an ego, being a hat, and I will be the first to tell you that your House is not the end-all, be-all of who you are.
So Piper had gone to sit with Grace, Jason, and three minutes later, was joined by Nakamura, Ethan, and wonders if it's unheard of for a witch or wizard to go through seven years of magical education and then go right back to living in the Muggle world. Or does magic change a person so fundamentally that it becomes impossible?
And what kind of relationships will she foster if you're exclusively supposed to keep to your House? Will they be enough?
(This is, of course, a very Slytherin thing to think, but Piper won't realize that for years yet.)
} She wouldn't call herself cunning, exactly, but surely she can't be the only one who's noticed that she, Percy, Annabeth, Jason, and Leo were all raised by Muggle parents, without a clue who their magical parent was, without any memories at all?
That cannot be a coincidence.
} People have a tendency to tell her that they're sorry her mother is dead, which always bemuses Hazel, because what was she supposed to say to that? It's all right? Because it obviously isn't.
No, wait, I'm not sorry that your mother's dead -- well, no, no, no, I am! I'm sorry, that was a horrible thing to say! What I mean is that that's wasn't why I was apologizing, I know it's awful, of course it's awful. I meant, more, I'm sorry that I brought it up -- I think that's what people mean when they tell you they're sorry. They're sorry for your loss, and they're sorry that they've reminded you of it.
Frank delivers this all very fast, leaving Hazel blinking at him the way you do when you step into a very bright room after having been in the Potions dungeon all morning.
Then, because she recognizes what's in herself when she sees it in other people, Yours died too, didn't she?
Frank's hair turns blue, drooping despondently around his ears. I don't remember her at all. I was only a few weeks old. She wasn't a witch the way the British define it here. She was a -- there's that word again, the one seemingly all vowels, and at the look on her face, he quickly switches to -- a Metamorphagus, but she didn't have a wand. You would have called her a Muggle. Or a Squib.
I wasn't raised by wizards, either, Hazel reminds him, but gently.
She and my grandmother shielded our house with old magic, different magic. When the Ministry went after Muggleborns, we offered to shelter them. One was a woman named Alicia Spinnet: I have a picture of her somewhere, she helped birth me when I came along. When the call came that they were fighting Voldemort at Hogwarts, she answered, and my mother went with her. Alicia came home, my mother did not.
So, one weekend in February, when most of the older students are in Hogsmeade and the castle is largely deserted, she and Frank and Teddy go down to the entrance hall, where, in the back, there's a memorial plaque. Lit by sunshine-colored fairy-light, the dedication runs beneath the emblem of two crossed wands, thanking all of those who gave their lives on the Second of May, 1997, in Defence of the Wizarding World and All That it Protects.
Teddy finds the names of his parents with an ease that suggests he's done it before, and there, at the very bottom, is Frank's mum.
} Hazel is ten minutes late for the start of Transfiguration. It doesn't matter that the professor is an easy-going, portly man with a wobbling Eastern European accent and rarely takes himself seriously, or that they're just going over theory today since he doesn't like giving homework over the weekend, being late makes her hurry, and she's running up the staircase by the tapestry of a shrieking medusa when her foot goes right through the trick stair. Her running momentum makes her sink straight to the knee without pause.
With a cry of dismay, she braces her other foot and tries to wiggle herself out, but she's stuck fast. The contents of her bookbag lay scattered across four stairs.
Since everybody is already in class, it's a half-hour before anybody comes by, and by that point, Hazel's almost weeping from the pain in her leg.
Woah there, says a voice, and Hazel looks up to see the Head Boy hurrying down the steps towards her. He grabs her under the armpits and heaves her straight out, and gathers her belongings for her when she can do nothing but sit and wait for feeling to spread back into her numb foot.
He's a Slytherin seventh-year she only knows by sight, so he introduces himself as Luke, and easily starts asking her questions that she has to answer, giving her no time to dwell on what just happened or how bad the pins-and-needles hurt; her name, what her parents are like (mother dead, and no recollection whatsoever as to a father, yes, she supposes that's strange) and how she's liking Gryffindor House (she likes her friends, although she feels a little sorry for Teddy sometimes, because she thinks some people only talk to him because of who his godfather is, but honestly, what are the odds that three orphans and two Metamorphagi wind up in the same House in the same year?) and not to worry about the trick step, that's what Head Boys and Girls and prefects are for: to get you back out again.
He walks with her in the direction of the Transfiguration classroom -- she's now horribly late -- when they hear raised voices up ahead.
Luke lengthens his stride and Hazel jogs to keep up.
They round a bend in the corridor just in time to see Octavian yank his wand from inside his robes and cast a hex at the retreating backs of a clump of Gryffindors, most prominent of whom is Rachel. It misses, hitting the portrait behind her and making its subject, a grumpy-looking woman in a Flemish collar, get up and tap dance.
Before Luke or Hazel could do anything, Percy Jackson and Nico di Angelo (oh, hey, not all Gryffindors, although Hazel forgets sometimes; Nico sits at a table with her and Frank and Teddy in Potions) cast a counterspell that makes the whole corridor glow fission-bright.
Hazel's never seen a spell that powerful.
Neither, judging by their expressions, had Percy or Rachel. Nico just looks smug; Octavian's now sporting some very long, fine tentacles from his chin.
What was that? Luke murmurs, eyes thinning and darting between Percy and Nico speculatively.
} And then, on one sunny, hazy day in the April of 2009, Percy falls asleep in Divination.
The last thing he remembers was looking at the curtains, soft white lace lifting with every stray breeze that whipped around the tower, so maybe it's no surprise that he dreams of weddings: his mother's, first, her hair long enough to pin into an artful plait over one shoulder, the smile on her face as she turns to greet a man he doesn't recognize. He catches a glimpse of himself in the background, Annabeth tugging his lapels straight and fixing his carnation, using the motion to tuck his wand firmly out of sight.
Then he sees a long lane, snaking back to a cottage by the seashore; sees a woman pause at the gate and sneeze hard enough to turn her hair auburn. Silena runs the rest of the path to greet the Hufflepuff Quidditch Captain, Charlie, who scoops her up like she's weightless and spins her around. They hang a framed marriage certificate on the wall.
There's a rosiness to the way the scene fades in front of him, like even in the dream, Percy knows it isn't real.
Next, Headmistress McGonagall, talking fast with several teachers, a map of Hogwarts fanned out across her desk. At the end of the table, there's Jason Grace, Head Boy badge on his chest, standing next to a girl whose name Percy thinks might be Reyna.
Next, Luke Castellan, alone in a dungeon with his arms wrapped around himself, staring sightless; his eyes, eerily, flash golden. It fades into darkness and when it rematerializes, all he sees is a shroud, burning, the way they do at wizard funerals, and Annabeth at the back, crying.
Next, Nico and a girl he doesn't recognize, who shares Nico's upturned nose and short-cropped black hair, sitting close together on the bench seat of a train he recognizes vaguely as the Heathrow Express, out of Paddington. She holds something cupped between her palms, and when Nico tugs her wrists down, she opens them to reveal a figurine of Harry Potter, who looks up at them resignedly and walks across her palm. He's wearing scarlet robes. Percy watches her mouth form over the words, Master of Death.
Next, he sees a great golden dragon, lying belly-flat in a field of waving canola. A bald, heavily-scarred, and happy-looking Leo limps over a rise and hails the beast with a shout. The dragon roars back, and Percy hears Leo say as he closes the distance, Supreme Mugwump, Festus, that's what I could have been, if they hadn't snapped my wand. I stand by what I said, and the dragon nudges its great, shining head against Leo's chest, smoke curling from its nostrils. Everybody just needs to be given a chance, even dragons. The seventh wheel is the most powerful, as seven is the most magical of numbers.
Next, he sees himself, handing a bag of groceries to Nico out of the boot of a tawny-colored car.
I can't tell if he's being deliberately slow or if he's just really that stupid, Nico drawls to Annabeth. He's grown taller than both of them, spindle-thin and pale, like sometime during puberty he'd been tossed onto a board and rolled until all his limbs stretched thin as noodles, and his hair's longer than it had been in the scene with his sister.
Annabeth doesn't look very old, but there's a shock of grey in her hair. She hands a keyring to Nico and replies, You think you'd know the answer to that by now.
Gryffindors, Nico sighs, and lets Annabeth trail after him, up the porch to a narrow two-storey with paint that matches the car and a yard the size of a postage stamp. They disappear inside, and Percy looks back at his older self, who's still standing by the boot, looking hesitant and a little wrecked around the edges and a lot confused.
Annabeth pokes her head around the doorjamb, saying, Aren't you coming?
Disbelieving, Percy wavers, muttering something to himself in a language that sounds a lot like Mermish, and a minute later, there's an exasperated, oh for heaven's sake, and Annabeth reappears again, points her wand directly at him, and says, Accio!
} He wakes up to Professor Trelawney's face, upside down and magnified to twice its usual size by proximity. He yells in surprise and recoils, and the room rearranges itself to make sense; the chintz poofs and pillows and cozy tables of the Divination classroom.
My dear! Professor Trelawney exclaims, pushing aside the crystal ball Percy was supposed to have been contemplating before he dozed off and reaching out to take his hands, gazing at him imploringly. Has your Inner Eye been opened? What did you dream about? Quick, tell me, boy, before it fades!
Against his will, Percy's eyes dart sideways.
Jason's too preoccupied to meet his eyes, but Piper looks back at him, curious. Reyna isn't here: she'd elected to take Ancient Runes and Arithmancy this year, not Divination, and Leo isn't either. When he catches Annabeth's gaze next, the annoyance in the press of her mouth fades into something else entirely as she takes in whatever expression has to be all over his face. She mouths something he can't make out, and he wonders why he dreamed about her with grey hair, Summoning him like he's something she wants.
Nothing, he gets out, and Professor Trelawney's face falls comically.
} Besides, Rachel and Octavian are the true Seers at Hogwarts. Everybody knows that. Whatever the rest of them dream, it must just be dreams, right?
Nobody wants to hear about them, in any case, especially if it's just more war. There's been too much of that for everyone. No one's going to listen. No one wants to hear about anything but peace and quiet. They're just dreams. Are you listening?
Just dreams.
} In 1995, a prophecy trembles on the edge of its shelf.
It falls, and breaks.
Pelting past, Ginny Weasley hears only a snatch of the ghostly whisper that comes out of it, the words seven half-bloods, before a Killing Curse passes so close it makes her hair blacken and shrivel away on one side. She fires a curse over her shoulder, terror bounding hard between her ribs, and keeps running.
The rest of the prophecy goes unheard.
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fin