WHAT I NEED - HERMIONE GRANGER

𝟎𝟎𝟎; 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝

[ — PROLOGUE! ]

[ 000; HUNTED. ]

ENGLAND, 1990.

CHALK.

EVERYWHERE.

IT WAS ON her hands, her dress and a little bit of it was smudged on her face from where she'd itched it earlier. Aurelia was drawing a picture on the concrete of the garden— well, it was more of an array of colours that made up something indecipherable to anyone other than her. To her, the drawing was her and her mother holding hands, free of the glamours they usually had to wear and their pointy hairs sticking out through their blue hair (she only had coloured chalk). She didn't have the right colours to perfectly capture their eyes — pools of amber flecked with the most wonderful green — so she simply drew them shut.

"Mummy, come look at my picture!" Aurelia called from where she sat crisscrossed on the pavement. A bright smile took over her face.

Danika came over with a smile on her face, brushing Aurelia's hair back with her hand and staring down at the mess of chalk. Despite not really being able to tell what she'd drawn, she smiled proudly at Aurelia. "It's beautiful, darling."

Aurelia barely had time to register what the cracking noise was coming from the trees surrounding their home before her mothers face changed and the grin dropped from her lips. Danika was now frowning and pulling Aurelia up. Before she could protest, Danika had her in her arms, carrying her to the house. "Let's go inside, baby, we can finish drawing later," she said.

They would only have so much time after that, she later realised.

Heading straight upstairs, Danika shushed Aurelia before she could voice her thoughts. Why were they going upstairs? Why weren't they going making drinks and snacks like usual?

Even stranger, they headed straight to Danika's room, after she waved a hand over Aurelia's to make it seem as though there was nothing there. As her mother began pacing back and forth in front of her, Aurelia asked quietly, "mummy, what's happening?"

"Okay, it's okay," Danika muttered, not quite answering Aurelia's question, and pulled her jacket off to reveal both her arms covered in tattoos. Aurelia had been told that this was a staple of the Fae and she had a few of her own that she was born with, a few were birth marks (for instance, the two sigils she bore of the houses she belonged to) but a mortal would deem them tattoos. Her mother had many of them and they were beautiful to look at, really.

She pressed a finger to the one on her upper left arm, a black band that jutted out in different directions, and sent her magic coiling around it. Aurelia briefly remembered her mother explaining this one to her, it was given to her when something bad happened and her friends that she met when she came here, to the Wizarding World, all bear similar ones— something about messages passing between them, a kind of charm.