Chapter Text
Friday, 31st August 1984
The roar of the rising fire echoed through the deserted alley the moment Bonnie appeared in the green flames; the leaves of the ivy that meandered along the cool stone walls trembled in the accompanying gust of wind.
She pushed her dark hair out of her eyes, a grin stretching on her face as a familiar chirping came from down the passageway.
“Kiwi!” She pulled herself over the sooty rim of the hearth and dusted some of the ashes off her robes. “Is that you?”
In the corner of the alley, behind the golden bars of the old birdcage, a green parakeet hopped from perch to perch to get a better look at her. He started to chirp in recognition as she came closer.
Bonnie chuckled. “You missed me, huh? Wait, I brought you something…” She put her hand in one of the pockets of her skirt and pulled out a handful of raisins. “Tada!”
Kiwi hopped in delight and as he pecked a couple of raisins from between Bonnie’s fingers, the fire in the hearth blazed green once again.
“Bonnie?” a worried voice sounded from amidst the flames.
Bonnie called over her shoulder, “Here, Uncle Evander!”
A feeling of relief danced around her uncle’s tall figure once he noticed her standing in front of the birdcage. He shook his head before stepping out of the hearth, and with a simple tap of his wand, one of the brushes on the wall sprang to life to clean his black suit and matching robes.
“Arms up,” he ordered Bonnie as he sent another floating brush her way.
She stuffed the raisins back in her pocket (to Kiwi’s loud dismay) and lifted her arms.
She glanced around the overgrown alley as the brush dusted off her robes and knee socks. “There’s more ivy than last time.”
“Really?” Uncle Evander took a look at his pale face in the mirror next to the fireplace and ran a hand through his dark hair.
“Yes, but Kiwi’s still the same.” Bonnie turned to the little bird again. “You look like you haven’t changed a day!”
Kiwi responded with a sweet tune.
Uncle Evander snapped his fingers to call the magical brush back to him and pocketed his wand. “Ready to go?”
“Yep!”
She waved to the parakeet as her uncle put his hand on her shoulder and guided her around the corner towards the sunlit street of Diagon Alley.
It was the last day before the start of the new term, and the shopping street was black with witches and wizards. Emotions, memories and other thoughts swirled around the heads of the busy shoppers as they wriggled themselves past each other to get from one building to the next.
“All right,” Uncle Evander sighed, somewhat disheartened. “Time to pull up a mental barrier, otherwise we won’t make it through this crowd.”
But Bonnie wasn’t listening. Her attention was drawn by a witch further down the street who nudged one of her friends and pointed at Uncle Evander, dark clouds of gossip floating around them. But just as Bonnie wanted to zoom in on their thoughts, Uncle Evander stepped in front of her, blocking her view.
“A mental barrier, Bon.” His pale blue eyes looked stern.
Bonnie sighed, closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing. She pulled up a wall that slowly but surely muffled the whispering feelings and thoughts of the surrounding shoppers.
Uncle Evander watched her attentively. “Well done. Better now, isn’t it?”
Bonnie shrugged and stared at one of the cobbles underneath her shoes. From the corner of her eyes, she noticed her uncle’s features soften.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She chewed on the inside of her cheek, glancing at the gossiping witches who had now disappeared into the crowd. “It’s just… We can’t go anywhere without someone recognising us.”
She hated it. And yes, she knew it was because of what the papers had published about her brother – the bad and questionable things he had actually (and sometimes not actually) done, but still… that was all three years ago. Why was everyone still so preoccupied with it?
“I mean,” she complained, “don’t they all have anything better to do?”
To her surprise, Uncle Evander stifled a laugh. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” But when she didn’t join him in laughter, he added in a more serious tone: “Some things are hard to forget, no matter how much time passes.”
She stared at him as a melancholic smile appeared on his face.
“Come on.” He extended his hand to her. “We have lots to do.”
Making their way through the crowd was hard. Bonnie had to push herself through two arguing wizards – who seemed to disagree on whether they might as well use a fwooper feather instead of a phoenix’s because of the high price – so as not to lose sight of her uncle.
“You know, I was thinking…” Bonnie began hopefully as she reappeared at his side, “maybe we could skip occlumency lessons tonight?”
“Absolutely not,” said Uncle Evander, and he ducked just in time to avoid a heavily laden post owl flying past. “You’ll be needing it more than ever once you get to school.”
Bonnie groaned. “But I always feel so tired the next day, and I already have to get up early tomorrow. Can’t we just practice my legilimency a bit more?”
He grabbed her by her shoulder to make sure she didn’t bump into a group of children that came running out of the bookshop. “Occlumency really helps, Bon: the less you hear what other people think and feel about you, the easier it will be to let it go.”
Bonnie rolled her eyes as she followed him inside the lopsided bookshop. It was something he told her time and again.
“Legilimency is helpful too,” she muttered as she followed him to a table of books in the corner.
Unlike occlumency, she was already good at legilimency. And she knew that if she would just get a bit better at it, she would be able to do much more than just pick up on people’s thoughts and feelings: she would be able to actually change their minds.
A smile stretched on her face as she envisioned it: no one would point at them in the streets; the children in the neighbourhood would finally want to play with her again.
But Uncle Evander put a stop to her fantasy: “It’s hard enough to change one person’s mind about a specific topic, let alone get everyone around you to do exactly what you want.”
Bonnie frowned. “But you said Dad could make people see and feel whatever he wanted.”
“That’s not the same as completely brainwashing people. Even Alan wasn’t that…” Uncle Evander’s voice died; his gaze fixed on something further down the shop.
Bonnie looked over her shoulder. Between the bulging bookcases stood a man dressed in black robes grinning at them.
“Who’s that?” Bonnie asked.
Uncle Evander didn’t answer and slightly tilted his chin as the mysterious man drew closer.
“Avery,” the grin underneath his thin moustache stretched as soon as the man halted in front of them, “what a pleasant surprise!”
Bonnie’s eyes narrowed as she studied the man intently. The friendly air that hung around him felt sticky – a facade.
“Macnair,” Uncle Evander gave him a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, “I doubt this is ‘pleasant’ or a ‘surprise’ for either of us.”
“Right, right,” Mr Macnair chuckled. “Barnett told me I could find you here today, shopping for supplies.” With those last words he turned to Bonnie. “Preparing for your first year of Hogwarts, aren’t you?”
Bonnie opened her mouth to answer, but was interrupted by Uncle Evander: “Why don’t you just tell me what it is you want?”
Mr Macnair took a deep breath, peered over his shoulder and took a step closer. “There’s a special… package that has to be brought over to China.” Behind his black eyes the image of a huge cat-like beast appeared: its large mouth was surrounded by fangs, its red tail slamming against the steel ground. It roared deafeningly as the surrounding wizards closed in on him while firing red spells.
Bonnie gasped and turned to her uncle with wide eyes.
Uncle Evander rubbed his forehead, exhaling sharply. “You can come by my office on Monday morning.”
Mr Macnair uttered a laugh coated with desperation. “I don’t think you understand. I’m kind of in a rush.”
“I think I understand it perfectly,” Uncle Evander retorted, “and the documents you need for this aren’t simply arranged within one–”
“Avery, Macnair… I didn’t know Flourish & Blotts had been renamed as the ministry’s new meeting room?”
Bonnie looked up. A tall man dressed in shabby emerald robes had appeared next to them. He peered disapprovingly at the two wizards through his horn-rimmed glasses.
“Weasley,” Mr Macnair drawled, scrunching his nose as if he had smelt something awful. “You have a nasty habit of showing up when you’re not wanted.”
Mr Weasley smiled faintly. “Both a blessing and a curse, it seems.”
Bonnie gasped silently as a boy with a mop of red curls appeared from behind Mr Weasley’s back. He was the same height as her, which meant he couldn’t be much older, and his face was covered with so many freckles he looked almost tanned. His face lit up in recognition as his dark brown eyes found hers.
Bonnie’s eyes widened in horror when she saw the memory that pushed itself to the front of his mind: it was of a girl sitting on the low-hanging branch of one of the beech trees in the woods. Her knee socks and shoes covered in mud and her long dark hair entangled as a group of jackdaws gathered around her in the branches. ‘No,’ she giggled at the one perched on her shoulder. ‘You already had two. The others will be jealous if they see–’ She glanced over her shoulder as something rustled behind her, her blue eyes widening with fear when she spotted him.
It was her. Bonnie’s stomach turned and she withdrew so abruptly from the boy’s mind she almost lost her balance. Until then she had foolishly hoped he hadn’t seen her talking with the birds.
Meanwhile, the strained conversation between the adults was abruptly interrupted by a second boy that appeared at Mr Weasley’s side:
“Dad!” he exclaimed. “I know the perfect gift for Mum’s birthday! Remember when she was complaining about her cauldron?”
Mr Macnair made use of the distraction by leaning closer to Uncle Evander and hiss: “Fine. But if I don’t have the documents by Monday afternoon, you’ll be hearing from Malfoy.” And with those words he rushed off.
Uncle Evander pinched the bridge of his nose in irritation. “If there isn’t anything else you wish to discuss, Weasley…”
“Oh, no, I just came over to say hello,” said Mr Weasley after he had silenced his oldest son. He nodded at Bonnie. “I didn’t know you had a daughter?”
Bonnie felt blood rush to her cheeks as the curious gazes of the Weasleys fell on her.
Uncle Evander put a protecting hand on her shoulder and drew her close. “I don’t,” he responded coolly. “This is my niece.”
“Ah.”
A short silence followed in which only the sound of rustling pages and the pounding of Bonnie’s heart could be heard.
Eventually, Mr Weasley took a breath. “Well, we were on our way to the exit anyway. Lots to do… See you at the office, Avery.”
“Yes, see you.”
The Weasleys strolled through the exit which made the bell above the door jingle. The youngest decided to take one last look at Bonnie through one of the small windows in the door. To her surprise, he shot her a grin from the other side of the glass before disappearing into the crowd.
Bonnie blinked in surprise. “Who is that,” she sounded breathlessly.
“Arthur Weasley,” said Uncle Evander slowly, “one of my colleagues.”
Bonnie turned to him again. “You don’t like him?” His condescending tone hadn’t escaped her notice.
“Weasley is rather…” Uncle Evander pursed his lips, thinking for a moment. “Let’s say we don’t always see eye to eye.”
Weasley… Bonnie repeated the syllables in her mind while her fingers slid past the books on the table in front of her. If she remembered correctly, it was one of the names on the list of the twenty-eight families that her tutor had drawn up for her a while back.
“They live close to us, don’t they?” she asked.
Uncle Evander watched her in his periphery. “Yes… Why?”
“I, er… I’ve seen one of those boys before in the woods,” she explained. Her stomach clenched. “He saw me talking to the jackdaws.”
Uncle Evander stiffened. “What? When?”
She tried to shrug nonchalantly. “Two weeks ago, or something.” She didn’t dare look at him.
She could feel the cogs of his mind spinning as he stared at her. “And?” he tried to sound airily, shifting his weight to his other foot. “Did he have anything to say about it?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t really talk to him. I…”
Actually, she had run away immediately after she’d finally noticed him.
The thing was that the children in the neighbourhood didn’t only refuse to play with her because their parents had told them about Jacob.
She bit her lip as soon as the screams of Lea Fawcett echoed through her head again: ‘You see? She’s talking to the crows! I told you she uses dark magic!’
‘I bet she can talk to snakes too.’
Uncle Evander placed a consoling hand on her head, but that somehow made everything even worse.
“Ehm…” She pointed at one of the stacks on the table in front of them. “This book is on the list, isn’t it?”
“No,” Uncle Evander muttered. His hand reached for a book (The Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1), by Miranda Goshawk) on one of the stacks next to the one she pointed at. “But this one is… Shall we look for the others?”
“All right,” she said, relieved, walking over to the other side of the table.
“And, Bonnie,” he said before she had the chance to disappear behind one of the many bookcases. He pointed at her with the book in his hand. “Occlumency lessons, tonight. Don’t overexert yourself.”
“Fine…” she grumbled and dove into the aisle labelled as ‘Historical Wizardry’.
She sighed and rolled onto her back for what seemed like the hundredth time that night. The moon cast wobbling shadows from the tree branches across her ceiling, reminding her once again of the boy in the bookshop.
“Weasley…” she whispered, rubbing the fabric of her blanket between her fingers. She had been trying to recall the names of the sacred twenty-eight all afternoon and she was sure by now: ‘Weasley’ was one of the last names on the list.
‘Powerful magical abilities such as the sight, parseltongue and legilimency…’ she recalled the words of one of her tutors, ‘they are all passed on through blood. That’s why the sacred twenty-eight are important, Miss Avery. Their family lines can all be traced back to gifted witches and wizards: the founders of Hogwarts, Merlin, Morganach…’
She shot up in her sheets when something clicked in her head: would the Weasley boy be gifted like her?
Her chest swelled as she recalled his grin from the other side of the shop window. It could explain why he hadn’t seemed afraid of her like the other children in the neighbourhood.
She pulled her blanket off, threw her legs over the side of her bed and put her feet on the cooled floor. She was sure the tutor had had her make notes on special magical gifts and the families often associated with them. The notes were probably in the study on the other side of the hallway where she received her lessons.
Carefully, she opened her bedroom door and slipped into the hallway. Her ears pricked up when she heard muffled voices coming from the drawing room downstairs. Mum had probably just come back home.
“And then–” Mum had to giggle so hard that she almost found it impossible to continue. “And then it began to storm in the drawing room! Storm, Evan. It took their house-elves hours to find the right spell and turn the room back to normal!”
“Isn’t Eleanor’s husband with the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad?” Uncle Evander asked.
Mum still chuckled. “Yes, but he was at work, wasn’t he?”
Bonnie quietly made her way to the study. She had barely turned the doorknob when she heard her uncle start in a serious tone: “Speaking of work… Something urgent has come up and it’ll probably take the whole weekend for me to arrange the paperwork, so I told Bonnie you’ll take her to the station tomorrow.”
“Work?” Mum asked, confused. “Weren’t you at Diagon Alley with Bonnie the whole day?”
Bonnie almost let out a scream when the door in front of her was being pushed open, and a small black figure leapt at her.
“Fitzplume?” she hissed once she recognised the black kitten at her feet. She rubbed her hand over her chest to calm her heart. “What are you doing here? Have you been stuck here this whole time?”
Fitzplume purred and brushed against her legs, but Bonnie was distracted by Mum’s raised voice downstairs: “What?! You can’t do that! What if someone gets wind of it? You’ll lose–”
“Nothing,” Uncle Evander cut her short. “I’ll lose nothing because Malfoy will pull the strings as he usually does. The whole reason I’m stuck in this job is because he needs me there.”
Bonnie lifted Fitzplume off the ground as he began to scratch at her legs for attention. She gestured to the cat to remain quiet.
“Which reminds me of something else,” Uncle Evander continued. “Did you know Bonnie has been hanging out in the woods again?”
Bonnie froze to the spot. Oh oh…
“What?”
“Yes, and that isn’t everything.” Uncle Evander let out a bitter laugh. “Apparently Weasley’s youngest saw her talking to the birds.”
“Oh…” A brief silence followed, as if it took Mum a moment to digest his words. “Oh, shit… What do you think? Will it be a repeat of the Fawcetts?”
Bonnie tensed at the sound of that name and must have hugged Fitzplume tightly to her chest, because he started meowing in protest.
“I… I don’t know…” Uncle Evander sighed. “It’s just– You should have seen her today, the things people still feel and think about us… It made Bonnie quite upset, and rightly so. She’s still so young and her occlumency…”
Bonnie bit her lip and stared at her bare feet. The stone floor of the hallway suddenly felt cold against her skin.
“I still think it would have been better if we had enrolled her at Beauxbatons instead,” he settled on.
Bonnie gasped while Mum groaned, “We’ve been over this eighty times already! I’m not going to send my daughter to some second-rate school across the border because of some stupid gossip.”
“‘Some stupid gossip’?” Uncle Evander repeated scornfully. “Merlin, Celia… Who we are, the things Jacob has done– Everyone knows about it since those ridiculous articles in the papers. It will truly be a miracle if she manages to–”
“Everything all right, miss?”
Bonnie almost jumped a meter into the air at the sudden voice. “Poppy…” she sighed with relief when she saw the tiny house-elf standing behind her. She wrestled Fitzplume, who had nearly escaped, back in her grasp. “You scared me.”
“Having trouble sleeping, miss?” asked Poppy, whose inhuman golden eyes almost shone in the dark. “Poppy can make a glass of warm milk for the miss.”
“No, thank you, Poppy.”
“Or some tea, miss?”
Bonnie’s answer was drowned out by Mum’s raised voice below: “Stop, I get it! Merlin… You’re just as insufferable as Alan sometimes.”
Bonnie’s mouth went dry at the mention of her dad’s name. It was Mum’s usual way of ending a conversation she didn’t want to have.
“Poppy could tell the miss a bedtime story?” the house-elf suggested when she noticed Bonnie’s discomfort.
Despite the situation, Bonnie managed to smile. “No, thank you. I had to use the loo, that’s all,” she lied. “I was just about to go back to bed.”
“Of course, miss. Goodnight, miss.” Poppy bowed, but her eyes remained fixed on Bonnie, waiting for her to actually return to bed.
“Yes…” Bonnie mumbled and shuffled back to her room, Fitzplume still in her arms. “Goodnight, Poppy.”
“Sleep tight, miss.”
Bonnie closed the door behind her and sank down on her bed, defeated. And as she absently stroked Fitzplume’s head, her tutor’s notes were left forgotten in the study down the hallway.