(1) 𝐍𝐄𝐏𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐇𝐄 | d. m

Chapter four

That night, sleep didn't come at all. Instead, I spent the long hours of the morning tossing and turning in bed, my head filled with vivid photos of my life before I came here.

***

I was nine when my parents disappeared.

They were the sweetest people you could ever know, but they had their secrets. Things that made them not like everyone else. Things that ultimately led to them being taken from us.

Mom got taken first.

It was a beautiful, sunny day, and I had spent the afternoon in the garden with my babysitter Ralen, picking garden gnomes. The sun was shining and my parents were at work, The Ministry of Magic, as usual- or so I thought. It wasn't until I was fourteen that I learned what really happened to both if my parents. You see, they didn't actually work at the Ministry for Magic, in fact, they were a part of something far more sinister. The day of my fourteenth birthday, I found out that they were actually so called Death Eaters, followers of the most evil wizard of our time- Lord Voldemort. It was Ralen who told me, who in turn had been informed by my parents years ago. They never told me themselves, I guess because they wanted to "protect" me. I don't know how they ended up on the wrong side of history, but I know what they were friends with Voldemort before he became the dark wizard we know of today. At first, my parents agreed with some of his ideas, but when he became more and more power crazed, they went into hiding, scared for both their lives and mine.

A year ago

I spent the last couple of years looking for my parents, hoping and praying that they were still out there. Ralen kept telling me that I should give up the search, and that I was only meddling in dangerous affairs, but I refused to believe they weren't still out there. Somewhere. When I started at Bauxbatons, I was a scared little girl who had just lost both her parents, and no one really acknowledged my existence at first. I guess, they didn't know how to approach someone like me, and I wasn't exactly a clear choice of a new student. When I looked back, I realised that the reason why I was even accepted into the school in the first place, was because people felt sorry for me.

Poor girl. She must be miserable.

I was, don't get me wrong. I only wish I had made friends earlier on. I only started clicking with people a year before my transfer to Hogwarts.

***

Fleur Delacour was beautiful and everyone around her knew it. She had silvery hair that glistened in the sun and piercing blue eyes like the banks of the ocean. She was also extremely kindhearted and if it wasn't for her, I might have never made it through last year.

She approached me one day in between classes, wondering how I was doing. I guess since I had spent the previous class sniffling at the back of the classroom, she felt that something was wrong. She wasn't wrong, I had indeed spent weeks trying to hide the fact that I was immensely broken and emotionally unstable. At first I hesitated to tell her when she asked, but after having spent some time with her, talking and getting things out of my system, we ultimately became inseparable. She seemed to be the only one who listened, and she never pretended like everything would go back to normal. Instead, she spent weeks, if not months, telling me that she understood my struggles and that it was okay to not to be okay. Something I appreciated tremendously, and from there on, she was the one I trusted the most. It felt like everything would somehow, by some miracle, work itself out. I would never be whole without my parents, but I would learn to live with the pain of losing them. I started believing the things people had been telling me for years; that maybe they were gone. Maybe they went into hiding and due to some incredibly bad luck, died of natural causes or of some muggle accident. It might have taken forever to reach that place of acceptance, but after the support from Fleur, I was content. Safe, dare I say—  happy.