Date: July 5th, 1984
Location: An Order Safehouse
Status: Closed for @pandoraalcmene
Zinnia loved puzzles when she was a little girl.
There was a sort of logic to them that was comforting. Even when all the pieces of the picture were haphazardly scattered across the living room floor, she knew that the answer was sitting right in front of her, waiting patiently for her to figure it out. Twenty years later, that knowledge still held a little comfort, though the puzzle had transformed itself. She was no longer picking which pieces of a picture fit together… Zinnia was trying to piece back together a life she couldn’t remember.
She had scrapped together little pieces of her life from those two years and ripped apart the little office in her cottage for every letter, note, and journal she could find. All of those pieces led to a list of locations and names, and that brought her to that exact moment. In the heat of a July morning. Staring at a building she hoped would be the answer to over two years of unanswerable questions.
Some piece of her had hoped for a familiar face to walk past. Robyn, maybe… Her name littered her notes- though she couldn’t tell if that was because the wix was involved, or if it was simply a product of their already being close. Or Alastor Moody- another name that popped up constantly throughout her research. Xeno, Alice… Merlin, she could have gone on for hours with her guesses. But sometimes, a puzzle piece came as a surprise.
Pandora Malfoy, a name that only held resonance from Hogwarts and in reference to Xenophilius Lovegood, had not been a player in the mystery of an organization Zinnia had once been involved in.
She stared in wonder from her hiding spot for a heartbeat, two, three, lost in a spiral of thoughts before she snapped herself out of it. Say something. Say something or else you’ll never know.
What’s the worst she can say? You’re crazy???
Zinnia pretended for a moment that she was that other version of herself- the version she did not know, the version who was ten times braver than the one that she’d become. She took a deep breath, and left her hiding spot, walking straight up to the blonde wix with her head held high.
“I’m here to join the Order.”
