Nightmare (Harry Potter)

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For as long as I could remember, a part of me had always known I wasn't normal. 

My maternal aunt Josephine Kim and her husband, my uncle Alexander, had been my guardians ever since I was only three months old, at which time they say my parents, Celeste and William Park, were killed in a terrible automobile accident while I was being watched by my maternal grandmother Maisy Jeong.

So that was how I came to live with my three cousins and their parents.  My oldest cousin, Julia, was only 2 years my senior, Wendy was right around my age (older by just a few months), and Kristen was just under a year younger than I.  Therefore, they were just as oblivious as I was about the crazy things that happened around me as a kid.

Even my juvenile brain registered, though, that Aunt Jo and Uncle Alex, on the other hand, somehow never seemed surprised by all the inexplicable phenomena that practically followed me everywhere.  In a strange way, they seemed to expect-and, understandably dread-every impossible event that came with me.

It wasn't just that I was a quirky kid or anything like that, either.  I was genuinely terrified of myself for the first eleven years of my life, terrified that the next time wouldn't be a close call, but rather the real thing.  My worst nightmare was hurting what I had left of my own family.

I had a right to be worried.  When I was five, my anger at my cousin Wendy for stealing my favorite doll very well could have burned down the house if things had gone worse.  As it was, our living room needed new curtains, a new sofa, and new carpeting. I was eight when I flooded the basement after the pipes burst in response to my anxiety over my kitten Midnight going missing.  (She was soon found and returned to us by our friendly neighbors, thank God.)  Just a year later, when Grandma Maisy lost her long battle with lung cancer, it stormed every day for three weeks straight-over our house only.

Needless to say, it got bad enough that my aunt and uncle thought it best that I was homeschooled as an attempt at some form of damage control.  They pulled me out of public school at the age of eight, right after the flooding incident.  I didn't really care.  I'd never really made any friends there.  On top of naturally being relatively introverted, I never felt that it would be right of me to get close to anyone, considering the danger I brought with me everywhere I went.

So that's how it went for some time, and for a while that's how I thought I'd always be: constantly afraid that I would hurt someone, and unable to get close to anyone new because of that.

But then came the discovery that I was not alone in my extraordinary tendencies: then came my Hogwarts acceptance letter.

AN: Hi everyone!  I hope you enjoyed!  But please let me know what you think, even if it's constructive criticism.  Thanks so much!  Love always, Kira :)