Chapter Text
I.
She wakes, kicking and screaming, with the acrid burn of steel and fire and pavement still at the back of her throat.
She doesn’t know anything at first. This world is too bright, too harsh, but the hands that cradle her now are soft. She can’t make out anything except white light and beige shadows and a haze of voices that settle over her like a blanket.
She is tired and afraid.
II.
Her hearing sharpens. Her vision improves. Colours (red-orange-yellow-brown-green) fill her eyes.
People speak, and she listens, and she understands.
There is a deep wrongness set into her bones, one that comes bearing glances over the shoulder and cold shadows in the night, one that touches her face with hands barely human and whispers you don’t belong here.
III.
She hears words like wands and Floo and owl, and the mobile above her bed of broomsticks and tiny people can’t just be moving from wind, but it’s not until someone calls her by her name that the pieces slot themself into place.
A family of redheads, a tilted house, magic.
Harper screams, and the strings on the mobile snap as if cut by scissors.
IV.
Soft hands, warm hands, brush at her curls and wrap her in blankets. The woman (mother) sings to her in a voice as soft as the echo of hummingbird wings— you are my bright, you are my river— and she wraps her tiny hand around a finger.
This is what Harper knows of love, in this new-old world: It keeps her safe. It makes her afraid.
Who will protect them, if not me?
(a cold brush of fingers— you don’t belong here.)
She remembers, she remembers. She was not Harper Weasley. She was not magic.
But she knows. She remembers—
V.
Her brothers stand over her crib, and she blinks up at them.
“This is your sister,” her mother says. “Her name is Harper. You must always protect her, understand?”
She stares, solemn, at Bill and Charlie, so young and already draped in red and gold.
You won’t die. You won’t hurt. I swear it.
If a vow is made and no one hears it, did it happen at all?
(Of course.)
VI.
She crawls. She walks. The months fall by. Time is inconsequential, liquid. It slips through her fingertips and weaves tangles around her ankles.
Her mother’s belly swells. She presses an ear against it and closes her eyes and hears two heartbeats, beating in tandem, so close they may as well be one.
“These are your new brothers, Harp. You’ll be a good big sister, right?”
Harper looks up at her with wide eyes and nods. Trust me, I will, I’ll protect them, they’ll never have to know the world without one another.
Fred and George Weasley are born on April 1st, 1978. It’s a Saturday, and it rains. Uncle Fabian and Uncle Gideon are watching her and Charlie and Bill while their parents are at the hospital, but when they come home the kitchen is alight with laughter and love, love, love.
The war has shadows here, and they are dark and bitter. She looks at her uncles and knows. She looks at Lily and James Potter when they visit and she knows. She looks at Peter Pettigrew, Albus Dumbledore, Alice and Frank Longbottom while they sit around the table in the Burrow, with her balanced on her father’s lap, and she knows.
She hates the word necessary. She hates it. But some things aren’t meant to be changed. History clings to some truths, and the end of the war is one of them.
And oh, she despises it.
But she looks at her brothers-- Bill, eight and pretending to be grown-up, and Charlie, wide-eyed and smiling, and Fred and George next to each other in the crib with tufts of red hair sticking every which way, and she knows it is necessary. For them.
Her family would survive. Her brothers would survive, and they would live.
(Or she’d die trying.)
VII.
It is 1980 and her parents are always up late, always whispering. Her mother watches the clock, now with a new hand labeled RON, near-obsessively when her father is at work. Harper sits in the garden and watches the gnomes run over the stone wall. She braids flowers into crowns and sits them on her baby brother’s head.
For now, she will be a child.
On long nights, cold nights, when she’s alone in her room listening to her heart beat solid in her chest, she makes lists and lists. Diary-ring-locket-cup-diadem-snake-Harry. Fred-Tonks-Lupin-Sirius-Cedric-Lavender-Dumbledore-Colin-Snape.
The moon glows from outside her window, casting silver shadows over the wide floorboards, the slanted ceiling. She pulls the blanket up to her chin and shuts her eyes.
VIII.
It’s spring when the owl arrives.
Owls arriving isn't an unusual occurrence at the Burrow, and this one seems no different at first. It arrives after lunch, bedraggled from the rain that drips steady down the windowpanes and makes the ground swell.
Harper is drawing little stars all over a piece of scrap parchment. Bill’s out chasing a snitch. Charlie’s poring over his magical creatures encyclopedia, Fred and George are stacking coloured blocks with pictures that shift and change, and Ron is upstairs sleeping.
Her mother opens the letter, and her face goes white.
Harper’s up and her arms are around her before she can get a word out. Charlie jumps up, too, and Fred knocks over the carefully stacked block tower and Molly cries and Harper tries not to think about her uncles spinning her around in the summer sunlight, smiles lighting up their faces.
Necessary, she tells herself, and buries her own tear-streaked face in her mother’s apron.
IX.
Ginevra Weasley is born in August. She’s a tiny thing, like all babies are, eyes still blue and practically blind.
Harper leans over the crib. She thinks of Ginny lying on the Chamber floor, all dark robes and red hair, and Tom Riddle standing translucent over her barely breathing body.
It won’t happen to you. I won’t let it.
No matter what else, this role of big sister is a familiar one.
X.
The Dark Lord Voldemort is dead.
So are Lily and James Potter, but nobody is talking about that, at least not now. The shock of losing them will come later, will ache and bleed and scab over.
The Dark Lord Voldemort is dead, and Harry Potter killed him.
She finds a garden rat behind the rosemary, missing a toe, and oh.
A cupboard under the stairs, an Azkaban cell. She picks up the rat with hands more gentle than Peter Pettigrew ever deserves and carries him inside.
Necessity, she thinks, is the child of despair.
XI.
When she sleeps she dreams cities. Packs of cooing blue pigeons. Food carts with banners and prices bright in the sun. Brick walls and stoplights, cars and planes and bright-white electric bulbs. Wide roads, bus schedules, rows of maple trees.
She wakes and paces her room.
My name is Harper Weasley, she tells herself, over and over. I am five years old. I’m going to save my family.
XII.
She meets Hazel Saville purely by chance, while shopping for groceries with her mother in the village. The war has been over for eight months. Hazel’s mother is a witch, a fact made apparent by the wand casually tucked in a side pocket of her canvas shopping bag. Her and Molly arrange to have tea together while the girls play.
They begin to meet every Friday at the Burrow. Mrs. Saville takes mint tea with honey and Molly has chamomile with ginger and milk and they talk about anything and everything while Harper and Hazel run off.
Here are the reasons Harper Weasley likes Hazel Saville.
Hazel has soft hands. They are always clean and her fingernails are pretty little ovals, all shiny and neat, but whenever they run off to the stream and get sand and soil on their skirts and fingers, she doesn’t mind.
Hazel is smart. She likes to talk about magic, about how there’s something wild in it, something more, and Harper will sit with her chin in her palms and soak it all in.
She likes Hazel because she doesn’t always say the right things, and it makes it better. Perfect people always have more to hide.
Above all, she likes Hazel because they just fit. Harper and Hazel, Hazel and Harper, rarely one without the other, fire and earth. Hazel will scrape her knees and Harper’s magic will rise, unbidden, to heal them. Harper will lose a shoe in the river-mud and Hazel will retrace their steps, balancing on sticks and stones, to tug it back.
Harper-Hazel. Hazel-Harper. She wishes all their years could be spent like this, all wind-tossed and sun-dizzied.
XIII.
They walk Bill to the platform. She holds her father’s hand and stares and stares at the cherry red train, the hundred owls, the students and families. She clings to Bill, arms around his waist, not wanting to let go.
(Be safe, be safe, be safe.)
“Be safe,” she mumbles into his new robes, black and clean-pressed.
He ruffles her hair and she lets go, reluctant. “Course,” he says, and then it’s a kiss on the cheek and bye-mum-bye-dad-bye-Charlie-Harper-Fred-George-Ron-Ginny and dragging his trunk onto the train and the doors shutting.
As it pulls away from the station, Harper breaks off from her tight-knit group and runs along the edge of the platform, waving to Bill as he hangs out a window, red hair aflame—
And he’s gone.
XIV.
Bill comes back from Hogwarts with a red and gold scarf and half-written Herbology assignments in the bottom of his trunk.
He lets Harper read his textbooks, his cramped handwriting in the margins. She spends hours sitting on her bed, sun drenching her room in yellows and pale golds, reading, learning.
She doesn’t know what to do with Pettigrew. He sleeps in a drawer of her dresser she filled with soft gauze because Circe if he slept in her bed she might vomit. She wants Sirius to be free but there’s too much that could go wrong-- the resurrection, the Ministry battle, and so the rat sleeps on.
(Even if she wants to strangle him, with or without a silver hand.)
XIV.
Months pass. Bill leaves again. Fred and George are rapidly growing menaces, and Harper learns to lock her door so they can’t get in, for now.
She and Hazel learn to fly in the backyard, playing pick-up games with Charlie and Cedric Diggory. The snitch is tiny and shimmering and Charlie and Cedric race after it, but she only cares for chasing. Being a Seeker is such a lonely role, even if they do get the glory. She spins the red Quaffle in her hands and tosses it through the makeshift goal hoops.
Summers are a haze of sun-blistered shoulders and the smell of apple blossoms from the orchard. Charlie leaves for Hogwarts in the fall and comes back in summer to regale them with tales of moving staircases and secret passages and magic, magic.
Harper is eight years old and she has never not felt like the world is trying to drown her.
XV.
In July it thunderstorms, hard.
She steps out in the middle of it. Rain soaks her skin, and the sound of thunder and wind shakes her bones, but she doesn’t move until her mother drags her inside.
Outside, branches of white light arc and twist. She presses her face to the cold glass and stares at the rain falling through that invisible barrier in the sky, wishing it solid so she could crawl out the window and walk straight across the sky to freedom.
XVI.
Her father brings home a blue Ford Anglia home and starts to tinker on it in the garage.
She sits next to him on long days, warm days, passing him the right wrench or watching him cut runes into the metal siding.
Her hair is always tied up in a mess of braids on her head, and her hands are always streaked with motor oil and scratched up with fine lines by the end of the day. Her mother tsks disapprovingly but she washes her hands with lemon soap and hot water and the skids of grease fade away into nothing.
Other days she’ll sit outside with her mother, doing embroidery and feeding the blackbirds handfuls of breadcrumbs, or she’ll brush Ginny’s hair while her mother pulls a batch of scones from the oven.
The world is bright, blazing, spinning past.