Then, everything changed when the fiendfyre attacked.

There were a lot of things Oliver couldn't remember. Like the part when Jack showed up, or when the roof collapsed. Like when he was taken to St. Mungo's or how they saved him. He didn't even know who to thank, other than Jack herself. More than anything else, he wanted to know who in the hell had attacked Grimmauld Place while he was sitting inside of it. Had they known?

He wasn't sure it mattered. Either way, the Order had been attacked. Violated, almost, if he wanted to be a bit horrible about it. And he felt like he had every right to be so angry, considering what had happened to him. Not that he'd wanted to see it. It had just happened. He'd gotten up on his second day at St. Mungo's, determined to get out of that damned bed, and he'd seen his reflection.

Merlin help him, but he felt like a monster. He'd been through his share of struggles when it came to his self-assurance, but this was altogether different. His left hand - the one he wrote with, the one he casted spells with, the one he ate with - was deformed. Terribly so. And the burns had reached up his chest, along his neck and across a good half of his face. What was that movie his sister loved? The Phantom one? Maybe Oliver needed a mask too.

One morning, he woke up to a new set of sounds. More of them. Animals, he thought. Fewer medical noises, replaced with suburban ones. Oliver didn't understand. He hadn't gone home, but even if he had, it wouldn't have sounded like this. Eric wasn't there to wake him up, so something was really off.

He would've reached up to run a hand over his face, but the hand he wanted to use was a mess. Groaning a little, he forced his eyes open and nearly let out a noise of surprise. This was not his room.

With absolutely no idea what was going on, Oliver forced himself to sit up, only to jerk back against the headboard. A little girl was sitting on the end of the bed, and for the first time in his life, Oliver thought he had gone insane. Or maybe he had actually died and he'd imagined the whole St. Mungo's thing. Either way, he had never felt so confused - or, for that matter, scared.

Sunny Dyllan had become accustomed to Layabout Lane's strange attraction to random and new tenants. She had been the first 'just for a little while' guest, followed by cousin Charlie, then Goose, and now her grandfather - all of whom had stayed months (and years) longer than they originally claimed. And beyond that, there was always a wait list of 'vagabond' werewolves looking for a room for their full moon recovery. And this was to say nothing of the steady stream of magical creatures that filtered in and out of the paddocks.

In all honesty, Sunny enjoyed it. She was a people person. And an animal person. An everything person, really. She enjoyed the unfamiliar faces, and especially loved the evolution from unfamiliar to familiar. And lately, the management of these guests had become of the utmost important to her. Jack was busy, Charlie was travelling, Goose was in school, Greg a mess and Max... Max was gone. So it fell onto her nine-year-old shoulders to keep the home afloat.

So try as Jack might, there was no getting past Sunny the House Manager. Greg slept through his daughter's apparition and even the stumbling and the crashing, loud as it was... loud even for Jack. By the time Sunny decided it was safe to venture out of her room, she stepped into the hallway in time to catch Jack edging out of Max's room.

"Why were you in there?" Sunny asked, causing Jck to start and whip around.

"Sunny, you're not-"

"You never go in Max's room."

It was true. No one ever did, except herself. Even Charlie, who had taken over the room when Max had moved in, usually slept on Sunny's floor (at the smaller redhead's request) or pitched a tent in the backyard with whatever friend she was travelling around with at the time. And anyway, she hardly came home anymore. Sunny, however, had taken to curling up in Max's old bed with a book, or dragging her coloring books into his wardrobe, surrounded by his smell and a forgotten scarf and jumper. It was her second room. Her safe space. And it had been invaded.

Jack's shrewd eyes were even more tired than usual. A bandage ran up the length of her arm. Something was different. With a sigh, she approached Sunny and offered to make her cocoa. They needed to talk.

Sunny had been sitting there for, what? A half hour? Something like that. He looked bad. It was a bad burn. But once the eye made sense of it, it wasn't so horrible that she couldn't look at him with an unmoving placid expression. And the other side of his face was handsome enough to make up for it, in her opinion. And it helped the imagination to fill in what his face must have looked like before.

He began to move about and her eyes slid from the pages of her favorite book (Ostriches and Everything About Them). She closed the book and settled her large, soft eyes on him once more. And finally, his eyes met hers.

So, he was surprised. She supposed that was fair.

"I'm Sunny," she said, as if that explained everything. "I live here - Jack's my aunt. She said the two of you have just 'been through an ordeal' and you're probably going to be a little sad. She actually didn't say the sad part. I used context clues. I thought you might like waffles for breakfast. Waffles and strawberries and whipped cream always make me feel better but I didn't know if you'd want that, so I waited for you to wake up." She cocked her head. "Your name is Oliver, right?"

The thing that felt stranger than all others was the inability to use his face to express his reactions. He couldn't portray the confusion he now felt, deeply. He couldn't recall hearing about Sunny before, but then, he couldn't quite remember a number of things. Apparently, anyway.

But this girl lived wherever they were. Jack's home, presumably? He didn't even realize that Jack had any siblings through whom she could be an aunt. Well, there was the thing with Kip, but surely Oliver would be aware of any children on that front? How little he knew about his poker buddies..

An ordeal. That was pretty fair. But it was clear that she'd hid the details from this girl, so he would do so as well. At least for now. Things like this inevitably got around, and who knew what Sunny would think if the adults in her life kept something like this from her? But it wasn't his place. This home wasn't his place. So he would keep his mouth shut about it.

Oliver didn't know what to think about the breakfast suggestion. It must have been early. Food itself wasn't calling him, but the idea of waffles... it was so weirdly mundane after what had happened.

As unnerved as he felt, Oliver couldn't allow himself to make this child feel the same. She was, as far as he could tell, an innocent. And as a man who could not have children, he didn't want to offend.

"Yeah," he said finally. "It is. I- uh.. Waffles are fine, I guess." Merlin, it felt so strange to speak. Like his cheeks weren't meant to pull that way, when they always had been before. "H-How long have I been here?"

She smiled encouragingly when he accepted her idea for waffles, correcting him gently. "Waffles are great. At least, mine are." Jack was something of a terror in the kitchen, so Sunny had spent lots of time alongside Max in the kitchen, as a preventative measure to keep Jack from creating some sort of weird chemical spill in her quest to make anything other than macaroni and cheese.

"Just a night," Sunny said. "You slept a lot. Came from Mungo's, where they said they did what they can do. Jack said you'll probably stay here awhile, which is good. My grandpa lives here and I think he needs someone to talk to about man-stuff. He always wants me to play PlayStation with him," she said, rolling her eyes. "Right. So. Do you feel okay enough to stand up and go to the kitchen? Or should I bring the waffles here for a bed-picnic?"