#snakewand

Summertime, means, a chance to ESCAPE. Few understand, but there’s something stirring to the heart to be delivered to the door of your ancestral home, even if it doesn’t quite fit in with the new lives that her parents have carved. The identities that they have chosen for themselves. Back in London, they’ve dropped the accent, pulled everything they could from their posh surroundings to make themselves appear more civilized. It’s there that she realizes that there’s something to be said about hiding your true nature, that you’ve got to fake it until you make it. Ministry jobs, they’ve got now, and it seem so far from home; Scotland is just a dream, save these hazy summer months.

Marlene, too, has learned to adapt; the lovely brownstone back beneath stormy English skies, the way to smile, to flatter, to be apart; pureblooded families send their children to Hogwarts, and she’s thrown in amongst the snakes to MAKE SOMETHING of herself. But summers here, mean exposure to new souls, magic and muggle alike; the village scoured for company, before she knew that these things were supposed to matter, before it all feels like an affront to turn down sweet girls with brown eyes that have sticky hands that want to play.

Grace is special; in fact, it’s a shock when she meets her amongst the students her first year, the same for her, though they hardly have a chance to speak to it. It’s more a hallway thing where they LAUGH and pull back to realizations that suddenly now draw clear, who they are, what they are. And in summertimes, they get to revisit simpler times, as they do now, Marlene’s feet kicking back and forth as she waits at the ice cream shoppe at the time they’ve agreed upon, fingers curled about the edges of the bench. Knowing Gracie will be there, when she’s able.