RED SPARROW ➼ George Weasley

[𝟎𝟎𝟗] - good omens

    On the 12th of August at 5 in the morning, Magdalina was awake.

    She'd had a nightmare. Since she was forbidden to use occlumency now, the bad dreams had been creeping into her nights, growing darker with each passing day, and threatening to completely ruin the sleeping pattern she'd formulated over the weeks at Grimmauld Place. The dreams were rather stereotypical for someone like her – gross memories of blood and guts and bombs and torture, etc – and on this particular night her subconscious had been reminiscing about a particularly grizzly encounter she'd had with a fellow Vasilisa who had reacted badly to the sense-altering experimental magic that was often used on the girls. The girl had been an agent-in-training, undergoing the relatively routine procedure of vision enhancement (which Magdalina herself had been given a few years earlier), but her optic nerves were irreversibly damaged. And, as a result, so was part of her cerebral cortex, thus making her believe that everything around her was predatory, and she was prey. She became animalistic in her need to defend herself, snapping her wand in two to stab every mediwizard in sight, escaping the Gorynych hospital wing, and Magdalina, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, suddenly found herself being viscously assaulted by a girl who she had called her friend mere hours before.

    Magdalina had defended herself well, but when her eyes flew open that morning, her hand automatically reached across her body to touch a long jagged scar behind her ear where the splintered point of the girl's broken wand had cut her so deep that even enchanted stitches took weeks to heal the wound.

    What was her name? She tossed and turned for a moment, trying to get comfortable, but was unsettled by that fact that she couldn't remember. Her brain harboured far too many violent memories for her to be able to recollect every trivial piece of information from each one. She did recall that the girl was only 13. She had to be detained by the Gorynych, thrown into one of their underground cells. Magdalina wondered what had become of her since the Federation's fall. Dead, most likely. Just like everybody else. But she hated to think what kind of effect that permanent magical brain damage and isolation in prison must have done to that poor girls mind. Maybe she was better off dead.

    Annika. That was her name. And this sudden humanisation of the memory made the scarred skin under her fingers feel absolutely disgusting. She withdrew her hand and crawled out from under the covers – there was no way she was getting back to sleep now.

Silently prowling down the third floor corridor towards the stairs felt awfully strange now. She often transformed and flew to avoid disturbing anyone, but she supposed she had no reason to hide from the kids behind the bedroom doors that flanked her on either side anymore. And despite said doors being closed, she felt awfully exposed, and also like a right idiot for wanting to be seen so badly just weeks before. Though it was still remarkably early, she feared it would be a moderately awkward morning. Everyone had been perfectly welcoming in the few days since her appearance, with everybody individually displaying all of the reactions to her existence that Magdalina suspected they might have had; Hermione and Fred's inquisition and curiosity, Harry and Ginny's fascination, George's caution, Ron's amusing fear, although she admittedly hadn't been expecting Molly Weasley's immediate nurture. The handful of days since had passed with a few polite hellos and odd questions, but she still found that each morning, she had no idea what to expect.

She needn't have worried that particular morning; there was hardly any time for it, because upon her arrival in the kitchen, all dark-eyed and bead-head ridden in her now typical uniform of baggy jeans and an old band tee of Sirius's, she was met immediately by Molly ushering her into a chair.

"Good morning, Magdalina, how did you sleep?" She asked, conjuring up a place setting that floated down in front of the girl and landed on the table with a graceful thud. Magdalina looked around the room, surprised to see Arthur, Sirius, Lupin and Tonks already seated around her.