BROKEN PIECES & GOLDEN SEAMS

I

01. it is rarely what we expect

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It's a happy little home they step in. The occupants of it? Not so much.

Harry didn't know about it though. All he knew was that his breakfast was interrupted with the revelation of a possible descendant of Voldemort and now, he was being dragged all the way to America to meet her.

Nothing life threatening had happened yet except, of course, the flights of stairs they had to scale to reach Voldemort's daughter's house.

If you'd told Harry that the Dark Lord's family lives in an apartment in the busy streets of Manhattan, he'd have laughed. His imagination conjures a spooky run down castle for kicks and giggles with unrest spirits prowling the corridors and dark artefacts that gets your heart racing.

He'll have you know eleven storey apartment is more or less the same. The damned stairs are absolutely an addition of the Dark Lord.

His skin prickles at eyes on him but he stubbornly doesn't look at Hermione who had been giving him worried and scolding looks alike ever since they reached Manhattan and he lost the map.

"—that would be appreciated, thank you, Sally," Minerva was saying and Harry's mind reels in to get the gist of the conversation in case Dumbledore asks him to record his meeting minutes.

His attention snaps back to the present at the disappointed look he can envision the Professor giving him over his crescent shaped glasses.

"It's no trouble." The woman who had introduced herself as Sally Jackson was smiling enquiringly at them.

"Uh..."

Hermione takes over with a roll of her eyes, "Water would be fine, Mrs. Jackson."

Pardon his eloquence for he quite felt overwhelmed at the sudden developments. Again, his expectations of Voldemort's daughter wasn't reached.

Sally Jackson resembled a lot like the woman you'd go to when you're lost in the crowd. Smile lines adorning her kind bronze face and blue eyes that shone despite the tiredness that comes from raising a child and battling the society in the meantime, all on her own.

She had welcomed them warmly after her initial suspicion of them being salesperson had faded upon their introduction as representatives from the Hogwarts school. The oddest thing was that the alarm bells remained dormant in Harry's mind, simply content with meeting the woman.

Shaking out of the momentary lapse of reality, he notices Sally going into the kitchen.

Ron elbows him sharply and it is only years of practice that he doesn't yelp in pain. "Not what you expected, eh mate?"

"Not at all," Harry hisses back, rubbing his chest.

"You and me both, mate."

"How're we gonna break the news to her, Professor?" Remus questions, his tension having eased off at the seemingly least threatening atmosphere.

"We'll wait for the daughter."

Sally returns with a tray of cookies and the water they had asked. "What was it about Percy?" She asks as she takes a seat on the sofa opposite them.

"Percy?" Hermione echoes with a confused furrow of her eyebrows. "Isn't it Perseus?"

The woman winces in turn, gaze averting to her tightly clasped hands on her lap. "Yes, but she prefers Percy."