Chapter Text
She lay awake in bed, a familiar moisture clinging to her forehead. This would mark the third day this week where she found herself much too overwhelmed. Yet, understandably so. Her hairs stood on end and her still body felt enveloped by some sort of electricity in the air. Squirming, twisting, breathing electricity that had made sleeping feel as if it weren’t within the realm of possibility.
See, she had now known that magic existed. And it was quite brilliant. It felt like the entire world opened itself before her, unraveling to tenfold the size she had ever expected. She had an inkling, only a faint one, that she mightn’t be as simple and plain as can be assumed from the outside. But that inkling went ignored for so long -- too long. Long enough for her to convince herself that maybe she was plain.
Along with the newfound knowledge of the magical realm, she recently found herself plagued by nights like these. Nights where her head swam with thoughts that dulled the excitement of magic and exchanged the butterflies in her stomach for lead. Dawning the harrowing truth heavy atop her small stature. She knew absolutely nothing.
Except for one thing, really.
She knew why her parents had chosen to keep her from this life, how they desperately wished their daughter to be simply just a girl. She felt a bubble of contempt rise in her as she began recalling the loud, angry argument that had occurred just a floor below her earlier this evening. An argument that left forlornly broken light bulbs strung along the hall in littered shards. That left the porch light blinking erratically, now in dire need of repair.
Her mother and father had grown as muggles. Lived as muggles. But were friends with anyone and anything but. They grew connections in the wildest of places, with the weirdest people. They had grown fond of this bright, wondrous universe and its acquaintances.
And then, someone very dear to them had ended up very dead.
It was then they decided their immediate retreat from the world of magic or anything even distantly related to the rather eccentric life they had come to grow so fond of. Much to their shock when their own daughter began displaying signs, unwanted remnants of that locked place in their minds.
It was quite terrible, really. At first, it was the smallest of things she hadn't even realized she was in control of. But they had ignored it, hid it in hopes that they could put their own past behind them. Never speaking a word to her about what she could or couldn’t do. Never confirming or denying any reality of the sort where magic might exist.
And with that in mind, they hid her as well. Not obviously, not to a passerby. Rather, they just moved. And moved. Over and over, never setting down real roots. It was done in a way that felt like running from an unknown, invisible beast as if it were just barely catching up and not residing in their very own home. Running until the very day they could no longer outrun the sly white owl in the frame of their daughter’s window, sporting a beautifully wax-sealed scroll.