emily

Val was adopted. Her dad, lovely though he was, wasn’t really her dad. She didn’t know who really was though, and her dad was kind, even if she refused to call him “dad”.

She’d never known why he’d fought so hard adopt her. She was the weird kid at the foster home, the one weird stuff happened around, the one who’d managed to warn Gemma that there was an adder by her foot, and managed to tease the adder away. 

(She made things vanish too, though she didn’t know where they went. She could get them to come back, sometimes.)

But Dudley had fought for her, said that yes, the other children were perfectly lovely but Valerian Makepeace was something else, something, he said, pointing to her empty file, no other parents had seemed prepared to accept.

Val was a child Dudley Dursley fought to adopt, and adopt her he did. When things went missing he was never angry. When odd things happened he never demanded to know what had occurred. When the snake crawled up his leg and only Val could get it off he just nodded and said, “just like Harry you are.”

She didn’t really know who Harry was. 

But when, that summer, the year she turned 11, an owl landed on her windowsill, holding a letter in its beak, Dudley smiled. “Just like Harry you are,” he said again.

He explained about magic - or what little he could. Explained how his cousin - no, he wasn’t in contact with Harry much anymore, just that odd moving Christmas card each year - could do magic. Explained how there was a place in London, Diagonally, where she could get the things on the list, if she wanted to go.

Val wanted to go.

Dudley sent a letter to his cousin. The address (Godric’s Hollow, what a funny name, Val thought) neatly written and the letter quickly responded to. A barn owl (named Wendelin, apparently) came with a letter saying to go to a particular corner in London, where Harry would meet them.

Meet them he did, him and his whole family, and extended family, red head after red head, and Harry standing dark haired among them all, two dark haired boys, bickering beside him.

"Val are you?" he said, bending a bit so his eyes, dancing and green, were at her height. "It’s alright, I didn’t know what was going on when I was told. You’re a witch. Have you ever done strange things before?"

Val nodded because she had, though she’d always hesitated to call them magic.

"It’s alright. Would you like me to show you how to do something else strange?"

Val nodded because this was an adult not just, as dad did, accepting the strangeness, but asking for it. When she tapped the bricks, lifted by Dudley so she could reach the top one, she didn’t expect anything to happen.

But they moved.

Behind her the army of redheads cheered, and as her dad lifted her down and touched a kiss to her hair she smiled, properly, widely, as she handed the wand back.

She knew what she was now.

(Image Source)

"When I was a kid, I believed you would become a mermaid when you went in the water to swim".

It’s something feminists have been talking about for years it’s called toxic masculinity and it’s one of the common threads among the topic of ‘Patriarchy hurts men too’. If fact the first time I read about toxic masculinity was on a feminist blog.