Chapter Text
Soft honeyed hair and olive skin were how Jade remembered her mother, Persephone Esposito.
The Italian beauty was immediately taken with the tall, shy British accountant, who had refused her advances when she worked as a secretary to one of his colleagues.
One night, during a particularly difficult audit, she stood back, silently offering her help to meet his deadline. His feeble attempts to ask her to go home were ignored, and by 3 am, they completed the audit with a weary hug where their faces touched, and slowly, their lips met.
Since then, they had lived in sin, giving birth to a little girl who had been their darling.
Jade’s earliest memories were of being chased around their lush garden by her parents.
It was probably the only thing she could remember being happy with both of them. Until her father lost his company, being cheated by his business partners, and they were forced to leave the home where Jade was born.
Nannan’s loving hands feeding her Struffoli would be the first of many happy memories with her grandmother. The two discovered the countryside of Italy, where Jade would experience her first fresh olive and meet her first real friend, Renza. It would be another few years until she bid goodbye to her friends, neighbors, and the small, loving little village in Brunello Valley until they made their move back to England.
As her mother left for work, her father would return from a day of job seeking to turn on the Wireless to wizarding jazz, light up a cigarette, and paint. Jade loved to sit next to him on the bench, the room smelling of smoke and the faint wisps of scotch from his breath. They shared moments together where he would encourage her to paint with him and laugh when he would dab some color on her nose.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her mother until one day, she stopped going to work. In late afternoons, Jade watched her mother get ready, applying makeup. Persephone would wink at Jade through the mirror before leaving, ignoring her father, who stood by the doorway and grew increasingly erratic.
On a rainy night, her father kissed her forehead, sobbing.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he would tell her over and over again.
‘Why Papa?’ Jade would ask.
He sniffed, taking a flashy silver object from the table and tucked it behind his waistbelt that Jade would later learn to be a muggle gun that her father would use to kill her mother and then turn it on himself, leaving her with Nannan forever.
In another strange dream, Jade woke up in a dark room as a tall, platinum-blonde man with silver-grey eyes approached her bed. She asked who he was before falling back to black, dreaming of her parents.
For the second time, Jade’s eyes opened to the brightly lit room. Seizing her head from the pounding headache, she blinked, trying to make sense of where she was.
It was a bedroom, filled with natural light from the balcony doors fully opened to invite the cool breeze and introduce the scene of a large lake beyond the grounds. As she wondered whose bedroom this was and why she wasn’t home, she became painfully aware of the dressings wrapped around her head.
Her hands went to her shoulder where a brightly inflamed line ran down her side, forming a deep crack across the center of her chest just below her breasts. There were cracks split down the shins of her legs, as if she had been pieced together. Everything hurt, from her head to her lungs, down to her toes; every muscle screamed in pain.
“Hello?” Jade asked, her voice hoarse.
A sharp crack announced the arrival of a baby-faced elf, who burst into tears.
“MISTRESS IS AWAKE?”
Jade gaped at the house elf who disapparated with a sob.
Mistress? Jade thought. Surely the house elf was mistaken.
Attempting to scoot sideways out of the bed, she ignored the pain starting to wrack in her legs. The whir of monitors blinking and beeping rapidly had started to unnerve her. Attempting to stand, the pressure on her legs sent her buckling to the ground. Jade cried out in pain as a figure appeared before her, lifting her swiftly from the floor.
“What’s happened to me?” Jade wailed, being set back on the bed.
It was the same man with platinum blonde hair and grey eyes, someone Jade had seen before. Though he was aged, his face had filled out, placing him in his forties, but it was the warmth and deep concern in his eyes that almost made him unrecognizable.
“Malfoy?” Jade asked in disbelief.
“Jade?”
Jade turned to see a group of people that had taken her a few seconds to register, just as she had done with Draco, based on their age. Out of all of them, it was Harry’s face that had given her the largest shock. The beard, the scars, and overall demeanor in full Auror robes had sent her reeling back into unconsciousness.
When she awoke the third time, the sun had started to set, and the only person in the room, sitting beside her bed, was Harry. He became stiff, frozen in his chair to her stirrings. As Jade rolled her head to the side, voice hoarse, Harry offered her a cup of water.
“What happened to your Auror robes?” Jade asked, noting his casual plain white long-sleeved shirt and jeans.
Harry looked down at his clothes, shaking his head. “The Auror robes may have been a bit too much.”
“Too much,” Jade repeated with a humorless chuckle. “I wake up somewhere I don’t recognize…to Malfoy of all people. Everyone looks older, and you look like you’ve gone through a meat grinder. What the fuck happened, honey?”
Harry didn’t answer right away. Something shifted behind his eyes, and he swallowed hard.
“What year are we in, Jade?”
“I’m beginning to suspect it’s not 1999.”
“It’s 2022.”
Stunned silence filled the room. Jade felt her heart stop, and her stomach churned from the news. Twenty-three years passed. The thought of it alone had made her pray that she was dreaming, hoping to be woken up, back in the arms of her unscathed husband and their toddler.
“What happened to me?” Jade asked quietly.
“Your memory’s been erased by a terrible man named Tiberius McLaggen. You were kidnapped and tortured by Death Eaters doing his bidding, along with four other women. Thanks to a woman named Daphne Greengrass, she provided her sister with a collection of memories and evidence to implicate him before she was murdered by him.”
“Daphne Greengrass is dead? We went to school with her,” Jade whispered. Harry nodded slowly, a tear glinting from the corner of his eye. “Were you close to her?” Jade asked.
Harry only nodded.
He looked grief-stricken, looking away as he composed himself, sitting straight. From his body language, he didn’t wish to elaborate. There were far more things to talk about before he spoke of his surprising relationship with Daphne. Like, where was James? There was a sick, twisted feeling in her heart as she realized she wouldn’t find her perfect, active child running around her, with his playful green eyes and mass of jet black hair.
He must have been a fully grown adult now. Did he have a family? Children?
Jade searched for Harry’s wedding band on his finger, surprised to see he hadn’t been wearing anything. Being caught up in the pain and information that had just been presented to her, she hadn’t realized how much she missed him. Though he was sitting at her bedside, he was far enough to be out of arm’s length.
“Baby,” Jade called softly.
Harry shot his head up, his eyes flashing with sudden surprise. This was not the reaction she had hoped for, and she felt an ominous twist in her stomach.
“Jade…” Harry’s voice had gone quiet, as if he were ready to deliver bad news.
“We’re still married, right?” Jade’s voice cracked. Despite Harry’s lack of answer, she started feeling tears slip down her face.
Harry edged forward on his chair, tormented. “We’re divorced.”
“No.”
“Fifteen years ago.”
“Why?”
“We started having problems when I had these injuries from an explosion. I wasn’t fair to you and the kids—”
“What kids?”
“We have a boy and a girl, James and Lily. They’re downstairs, waiting to meet you.”
Jade sat there, trying to pace herself. She felt overwhelmed to know she had a child she didn’t know about, and to top it all, a girl? It sent her over the moon and brought her small comfort, because she couldn’t recall a single thing about raising another child besides James. There had been no capacity to dwell on that just now. It was the news that her marriage hadn’t lasted that she could not move past.
“Why couldn’t we work it out? This is—” she leaned forward, touching his face, and he jerked backward, distancing himself to avoid her. “I can’t possibly dream that I would ever leave you in such a state,” she sobbed.
“You didn’t,” he said. “I had filed for the divorce. And then…”
“And then?”
“You fell in love again with the same bloke you loved in school and moved on.”
“You?”
“Not me.”
Jade felt something was missing, staring at Harry as if he were stupid. “You’re the only person I’ve ever loved in school. In my entire life. Who on earth are you talking about?”
Harry’s mouth slowly dropped in alarm. “You dated Malfoy.”
“I—WHAT?!”
The monitors in the room had started to beep rapidly, causing Harry to stand up, shooting a message out with his wand. “You dated Malfoy while you were pregnant with James—” he started to explain, but it had clearly been the wrong decision as Jade began to scream.
“Why would I ever do that?!”
The door flung open, and James ran in with Draco behind him, wildly looking at the monitors. Jade began to hyperventilate, unable to choose from looking between her son and the loathsome school bully who had surely slipped her a love potion.
“Dad!” James called as Draco, and Harry both looked at him, hands out. “Never mind,” he said, quickly filling a syringe with a potion from the row of colorful vials sitting on a desk at the corner of the room.
As Draco and Harry looked on, James injected the potion into her IV, and Jade felt herself drift, seeing an older girl with soft honey hair and a smaller girl with platinum blonde hair watching and weeping from the doorway.