CHECK YES JULIET ▷ JAMES POTTER [1]

𝟎𝟐. 𝐑𝐈𝐏𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐁𝐄 𝐀 𝐁𝐑𝐈𝐃𝐄

(02 : ERE WE MAY THINK HER . . .
RIPE TO BE A BRIDE)

✧࿐ ཾ✧

     ARIN FAWLEY WAS AN AMALGAMATION of his daughter's worst fears and insecurities — the embodiment of everything she hated about being a pureblood. From a young age, she idolised him, desperate for his approval and bursting with a desire to grow up to be like her father. However, that all changed one day when she found out ordinary men were not gods for a reason. If you cut one of his veins, red blood flowed and not ichor. It took her fifteen years to realise that, but she was glad that she did.

Sometimes people think there's a moment a little girl sees the men in her life as monsters, but there were exactly three moments that brought Juliet to that conclusion.

The first moment was when she saw the red, purple and blue bruises around her mother's wrist, she was eight and thought they looked pretty. It looked like rainbows encircled her wrists. Eliana always remembered to use a concealment charm after that.

The second moment was when there was timetable error in her third year and she had to attend Muggle Studies until it could be rectified. Charisma Hastings taught the class, she was a woman with bronze skin and kind, honeyed eyes, a woman that lost her job and struggled to feed her three children after Juliet's father had her fired. Juliet still felt guilty — she had lied to her father and said the class couldn't be dropped, so she could get an O.W.L in it. In truth, she simply liked the class. Professor Hastings was the woman that introduced her to Romeo and Juliet, asking her to stay behind one time because she wanted to introduce Juliet to the character of the same name. Although she turned up her nose at the teacher's battered copy, Juliet devoured the play in an entire night and had read it multiple times since.

The third moment was last year. Arin came home with the strangest tattoo on his arm and a vindictive smile. Juliet didn't think much of it, instead she grew her collection of muggle literature in secret, but her father thought she was too anti-social that summer, always reading. When he dragged his daughter from her room, she thanked Merlin she had the sense to charm the muggle book covers. It turned out him discovering her dirty secret was not the worst thing imaginable — no, the worst thing imaginable was watching the man that once twirled her around the garden as he loudly sang Celestina Warbeck crucio a muggle child. She threw up immediately after and lied about eating too many cauldron cakes on the train back from Hogwarts.

When Juliet closed her eyes, she could still see a small boy with corkscrew curls and chipmunk cheeks screaming in pain as her father laughed. That was the moment it dawned on her how despicable she was — all those years she hated muggles when they wrote stories to rival Merlin and Morgana, when they had children who couldn't control the fact they had lesser, non-magical blood, when they did nothing to warrant an attack by Arin Fawley and his Death Eater buddies. With all that in mind, Juliet was a Slytherin with a reputation and she knew better than to preach about muggle rights amongst the darkest house. For that reason, she remained the ever dutiful pureblood daughter on the surface whilst a rebellious storm brewed beneath her alabaster skin.