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aut inveniam viam aut faciam; i shall either find a way or make one
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Lena Bones had been a sickly child.
The youngest born of Sylvia and August Bones never found it quite easy to live a normal childhood. Her family, plagued by their townhouse being destroyed in the Muggle war, moved into recluse within the old Bones family manor within the Lake District, which had long before since been turned into an orphanage for magical children that would particularly, unfortunately, flourish in the years of the Global Wizarding War.
They possessed the West Wing for their family effects, whilst the rest of the house belonged solely to the organisation the Bones family had created and thankfully, allowed for the family to have constant access to a doctor, as Lena grew up and suffered greatly from muggle illnesses and magical maladies alike; primarily pneumonia, tuberculosis and dragon pox.
The illnesses possessed much of her childhood, worst as nothing but a baby up until the age of nine, and through much of those years, she suffered almost entirely bed-bound, moved only between her bed, the bathroom and the window seat surrounded by bookshelves that looked out upon Lake Windemere.
She found peace there, alleviation from the pain. She had her books and her watercolours and an older brother who would come and play with her when she got too bored with all of that.
Her parents loved her dearly, her mother looking over the orphanage and her father Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at the Ministry, and so they afforded the best of care for her, a live-in-nurse constantly present within their home for those key years of her illness, and with the careful care, the year that Lena Bones turned nine was a year of recovery.
She was weak, weaker than any nine-year-old should be, and whilst no longer sick Lena was certainly not healthy, and it would take much of the next year or so for her to become who she truly was, who she truly should have been for the past decade of her life.
And Lena was happy. She was a wonderful, joyful girl, who carried her hobbies from her illness through to her health and only progressed with her. She would paint still, but now she could sit outside by the lake. Her reading was done in all manner of places now; up trees, in the kitchen, sat in her father's office whilst he wrote his documents. She could join the children on their trips, down to London to see Diagon Alley for the first time, join her father as he went to work, visit her old nurse at St. Mungo's, paddle in the lake during summertime and play with the other children on the sandy banks.
Lena Bones was a sweetheart. She became a quick favourite of her Dad's colleagues and the chosen play-mate of all the children, a good hand in the kitchen to help the cooks with their baking, a friend of the Hogwarts professors who would bring by poor children caught up in the crossfire of the war and left alone in the world.
Because, just like all the other children in the home, Lena Bones was magical; she was a witch. The nurse had suggested that, perhaps, her recovery came with the emergence of her magic, that it had helped her heal so that it could be used. It was only after she became better that she began to display actual signs of it, of actual, real magic.
Her books would float over her knees if she grew weary of holding them. Somehow, every painting she created, every portrait of the children, and every landscape of the lake, came out with incredible likeness to the example. She would heal from every injury she acquired, befriend every animal she found and her hair once seemed to turn pink in protest to one of the boys in the orphanage claiming it was a horrible colour.
Like all the other children, upon Lena turning eleven on the 15th of March, she received her Hogwarts letter. It seemed like the best news she could ever quite receive; she had harboured a secret fear that she wasn't magical enough, somehow, and receiving it was a reassurance that she most certainly was not.
She visited Diagon Alley that year, with her mother and her father, and bought her uniform, her new books, her cauldron and potions ingredient. She even bought her own owl to join the four that lived in the very top turret already. She named it Athena, after the goddess she had read so much about. Yet another visit to the Ministry with her father prompted a flurry of gifts to celebrate her birthday and, happily cradling a new kitten for the children and a basket full of pumpkin pies and chocolate tarts, Lena Bones returned to the home with well wishes and dreams of magical boarding school.
And when it came to September, she boarded the train alongside the other new first years, all rosy-cheeked and excited to finally be within the castle they had heard so much about, from the professor who informed them of their magic, from their friends, parents, and siblings. They had dreamed of that day, read Hogwarts: A History from cover to cover to indulge in every piece of information they possibly could, listened to every story they could, and took every piece of advice they were given. And it most certainly lived up to the picture they had created in their head.
The Bones most certainly were not a family who remained loyal, who stuck by a single house, like the others in the Sacred Twenty-Eight, like the Malfoys, the Blacks - who were Slytherins through and through - the Weasleys, who had been Gryffindors for many generations.
The Bones were a variety. Lena knew her paternal grandparents to be a Slytherin and a Ravenclaw, her maternal grandparents a Hufflepuff and a Gryffindor. Her parents, her mother was a Gryffindor and her father a Ravenclaw.
And Lena herself, when it came to approaching the Sorting Hat, found herself being placed in Hufflepuff, and there had been no doubt in her parents' minds that this would be the reality when it came to it, for no one could have possibly fit those qualities better than Lena Audra Bones.
It would be her years in Hufflepuff where she bloomed, monthly meetings with the pretty new nurse Poppy Pomfrey to keep her health in check (under the orders of her father, of course), and she made quick work of finding new friends from all over the place. The teachers, her dorm-mates, the Gryffindors in her Herbology class, some of the Slytherins in her Potions class, and the rest of the Hufflepuffs in her year and upwards.
She was smart too, the years of having nothing better to do but read and paint paying off and her ability to concentrate on a task was off the charts. She excelled in Herbology and Transfiguration, loved playing Quidditch, and thoroughly enjoyed her time at Hogwarts, even with the added annoyance of her parents' slightly overbearing tendencies.
But it was by the time her first year at Hogwarts came to an end and she returned to the manor in which they homed the orphanages of the wizarding world, would she find perhaps the most unlikely surprise to her life. Professor Dumbledore, her favourite teacher of her favourite subject, stood outside the walls, someone stood by his side.
She would find, later that evening, that there would be another resident within the home. Someone she knew.
Tom Riddle, who had grown up in a Muggle orphanage surrounded by no one but ordinary others, had found the truth to his powers at age eleven. He had spent a year at Hogwarts, and now that was over, Headmaster Dippet had agreed with Professor Dumbledore that it would be best for Tom not to return to that home.
He would be better dealt with in a magical setting, it was decided.
And despite knowing her for the past year, it was then that Tom Riddle met Lena Bones for the first time.
