The troubles of Family

Keith sat alone in the common room. He was in his favorite chair, a large squishy armchair that he sank into quite comfortably. His feet were propped up on a blue and bronze foot rest, and his shoes were kicked lazily over near the windows, outlined by the setting sun. His wand was clutched lightly in his limp fingers, ad his head rested lightly on the armrest, his chest slowly rising and falling to the rhythm of his breathing.

Several books and other assorted objects lay haphazardly strewn around the chair he sat in, as if someone had randomly thrown them around the room. (or perhaps an unpracticed 1st year had attempted levitating) The common room was empty, everyone either studying or eating, and so there was nothing to disturb him from his well deserved nap.

The edges of Keith's mouth twitched into a grin that could only be described as mischievous; obviously whatever was happening in his dream sat well with him. His head shifted, rolling over to his right shoulder, and he drooled a little bit. It had been a long day.

A moment later, there was a loud tapping, and Keith's eyes snapped open. His wrist popped up reflexively, putting his wand between him and the unknown noise, before a beam of yellow light burst from it and hit the window with a loud crash.

Keith watched in horror as the window shattered, several pieces tumbling down to the lawn below. He silently prayed that nobody would be impaled, as he really didn't enjoy the prospect of getting sent to Azkaban at only 11 years of age.

The source of the noise made itself apparent in the form of Baldur, Keith's eagle owl. It landed on Keith's head, swiveled it's neck 180 degrees to regard the now shattered window, and let out a small hoot of disdain, smacking Keith with the letter it was carrying before dropping it in his lap and flying off. Keith sighed.

He flipped the letter over, only to groan out load as he realized it was from his sister. Ripping it open, he took out the hastily folded paper inside, his eyes wandering over the familiar, flowing script of his only sibling.

Dear Keith,

It's Brooke, obviously. I got your letter. Is the owl Baldur? He's very sweet and seems to like me. All is well here at Beaxbatons, though I'm more interested in your stay at Hogwarts. Do you have any close friends? How are your studies going? How many detentions have you gotten already?

In response to your letter, I assure you that you will not be having a brother in law any time soon, so you can stop praying like a madman. And before you ask I've had several boyfriends, but I doubt any of them are marriage material. French boys are such charmers, you could use a few lessons.

I've got something to tell you actually. Mom and Dad contacted me a few weeks ago...money is tight, and they dislike how apart I've been growing from the rest of you recently. They claim I never visit, and when I do we never speak. (which is true) They also fear Beaxbatons has degenerated since it's little golden age that mom lived through, and so it is with no great pleasure that I say...

Keith didn't finish the final sentence. His chest seized up, and a small, choking sound escaped his throat.

His sister was coming to Hogwarts.

Amelia was still riding on endorphins as she took the steps to Ravenclaw tower two or three at a time, her long legs taking the distance in stride. Having just completed her usual ten mile circuit, Amelia would typically be winded at this point, but today’s run had produced the opposite effect and Amelia felt like she could do another ten without feeling it. She hadn’t even minded when the stairs moved and made her take the long way to the tower – with her current mindset, it seemed nothing was standing in her way.

This was drastically different than the way she had been feeling pre-exercise. Although it doubled as a way to stay in shape, Amelia ran primarily to clear her head and take time for herself. Only a year ago it would have been simple to find time alone, but it seemed in the last nine months or so her relative anonymity at Hogwarts had somehow evaporated. Her wallflower status had been revoked, and now time alone was becoming increasingly scarce. With the weight of classes, parental pressures, and certain emotions threatening to collapse her sense of well-being, Amelia had taken to the grounds and left her problems behind her.

As she reached the door to the commonroom, the bronze eagle knocker greeted her excitedly, as he had been doing since her first year. Amelia knew that this enthusiasm of the eagle was not shared for all students, but the otherwise inanimate object had taken a specific liking to Amelia after she had continuously answered his more complicated riddles with relative ease.

“Well, well, Miss Lyons,” he greeted, charmingly for a knocker, “You’re looking particularly sweaty. Let us hope your brain has been getting the same the workout your body has endured.


The redhead smiled knowingly as the eagle finished its riddle, pausing only momentarily to flash him an uncharacteristic smile.

“The letter ‘e’,” Amelia said confidently, and the eagle nodded in approval and allowed the door to swing open and for Amelia to enter.

The commonroom, which was usually deserted at this time of the day – especially with the current weather conditions being as they were – had only one occupant, a boy she recognized from a few brief encounters as being Keith Nicholas. His usual happy-go-lucky attitude seemed to have been replaced by an unusual amount of tension, and the look on his face suggested that some crucial element of his world had fallen apart. He was sprawled across one of the armchairs, tension stretching his upper body and face into something which vaguely resembled rigor mortis.

In search of what might have caused this distress, Amelia surveyed the rest of the room, though it took only seconds to notice the shards of glass which littered the floor next to the opening which was once a window. Feeling this was a problem she was more equipped to deal with than whatever Keith might be experiencing, Amelia crossed the room to the broken window. She looked down at the glass, then back at Keith. All signs pointed in one direction, but Amelia wasn’t one to jump to conclusions. Also, it looked like the last thing Keith needed right now was a false accusation.

“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about this, would you?” Amelia asked with a gesture toward the window, her voice louder than it usually would be in order to draw Keith’s attention in her direction. She wondered momentarily if she could draw him out of whatever personal hell he seemed to be experiencing, or if she even wanted to. Amelia wasn’t particularly good at dealing with problems which involved emotions or feelings or anything without concrete explanations or solutions. She had the belated realization, though, that her interruption regarding the window might end with a conversation leading right in that direction.

“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about this, would you?”

"What?" Keith asked suddenly, head snapping up so quickly that it hurt his neck. He glanced around the room before finding the source of the distraction, a sixth year girl. Blue eyes, long blonde hair...Keith had met her before but couldn't quite place the name. Addy...Amy....Amelia?

Amelia. That was it. Amelia Lyons. Keith blinked once or twice, trying to focus on the question she had asked. His eyes strayed towards the broken window, and he let out a groan as he remembered what had happened.

"Oh. Um. That. Yeah." He said, color rising up to his face. "See, I was sleeping...and then Baldur woke me up trying to get in...." he trailed off, something in the back of his mind reminding him he had left out something important. "Oh right...Baldur's my owl. He was trying to get in to give me...give me this." Keith waved the letter in his hand. "I kinda reacted without thinking. My wand came up and did something I've never seen before. Big crash. And then, um, that." Keith finished lamely, pointing at the window. "I'm no good at fixing things," he admitted, looking away in embarrassment. It was true. He wasn't much good at anything that didn't involve a victim. "So could you....maybe...."

All while he talked, the final line of his sister's letter bounced around his skull.

I'm coming to Hogwarts.
I'm coming to Hogwarts.
I'm coming to Hogwarts.
I'm coming to Hogwarts.
I'm coming to Hogwarts.
I'm coming to Hogwarts.


Outside, he struggled to keep a straight face, a fight Amelia had to be noticing, but inside he was screaming. He and his sister had never gotten along. They never saw each other, and besides that, they were polar opposites. Keith's lips curled into a snarl, and he suddenly crumpled the paper into a tight ball before chucking it out the window. It was caught by a gust of wind, (whether magical or mundane, Keith wasn’t aware) and landed with an inaudible plop into the lake, where it sank. Keith wasn’t sure if he felt better or worse about that.

It was clear from Keith’s reaction that he had been oblivious to Amelia’s presence before she spoke. The boy moved his head so quickly that Amelia temporarily feared for the effects of whiplash. The look of confusion on his face was evident, but there was also another emotion that the redhead had a difficult time putting her finger on. It was clouded and distant, as though he hadn’t yet sorted it out himself. It took Keith several full minutes to recover enough to answer her question, which was curious because he always seemed to be so present in the conversations they had had in the past. It was Amelia that usually took the time to weigh her words, which kept the flow of the conversation from ever reaching its true potential.

That’s what happens when you don’t get enough practice, I guess, Amelia thought to herself as she awaited Keith’s response, though from the look on his face Amelia wasn’t sure Keith was even aware that she was still standing there. Just as Amelia was about to interject again to see if she could reign him in from whatever corner of his mind he was disappearing into, Keith seemed to regain his presence of mind enough to stutter a response, the blush in his cheeks just as incriminating as his words.

His sentences were fragmented, as though he was speaking without full commitment to the situation at hand. It was the way Amelia sounded when she was reading a book and her mother was harping at her about a dress for an upcoming ball or a friend from the country club whose son would like to go to dinner with Amelia. Amelia, obligated to give a response, would usually string some acceptable jumble of words together, simply to acknowledge that Antoinette was speaking. It seemed that Keith was following the same method now, still lost in something else, something which seemed all too serious for a first year, especially one so typically happy-go-lucky as Keith was.

The struggles of some internal battle seemed to be threading their way across Keith’s features, and Amelia, though curious, could not find the words to ask what pained him so. Instead, she watched the progression from pain to anger, caught slightly off-guard as Keith made short work of crumpling a piece of parchment into a small projectile and proceeding to dispose of it through the broken window she was standing next to. She watched as the parchment dropped from the high tower, carried away from the castle on some well-placed wind before landing into the lake, where the giant squid’s tentacle promptly pulled it down into the depths.

Pulling her eyes away from the lake below, Amelia looked back at Keith, then to the shattered window. There were presently two problems facing her, and there was no doubt in her mind which would be easier to deal with. Although Keith might be no good at fixing things – a common trait of most first year students; better at breaking than fixing – Amelia had a great deal of experience in that arena, which is how the pieces of glass at her feet and on the incline of the roof outside were lifted from their rest and returned securely to where they belonged, not even a crack to show the damage that had been wrought.

Returning her wand to her pocket, Amelia turned to face her other problem, the blonde boy in the chair by the fire. This was an arena in which she had very little experience, not usually having to deal with this type of thing. When the headmaster had appointed her prefect, he had done so because he knew she had a counterpart; the male Ravenclaw prefect was a people person, and thus these types of situations, in the past, had always been easily handed off to him. Now that the prefect system had been done away with, though, Amelia was the person on which these duties fell, and though she would have liked to just escape to her dormitory and leave this for someone else, the look on Keith’s face was enough to remind her of her duty to her housemates.

Crossing the room slowly, Amelia attempted to think of something to say in order to break the ice with Keith. It had been a while since she had seen the boy, and they weren’t particularly close to begin with (no surprise there; Amelia wasn’t particularly close with anyone). She still hadn’t thought of anything when she reached the semi-circle of furniture that arced in front of the fire, but she took the chair next to Keith and said the best of what were very few options she had thought of.

“I hope the squid has a better time with that letter than you did,” Amelia commented in what she hoped was a light tone, though she usually struggled to keep the seriousness out of her tone. A few uncomfortable seconds of silence followed her statement, and Amelia felt compelled to fill the silence, though her talent for such things was limited.

“I won’t tell anyone about the window,” Amelia said, trying to reassure Keith, though she was well aware that the fret he was feeling had little to nothing to do with broken glass. She just wasn’t sure what it was that was bothering him, nor that she could handle it even if she did.

Keith only caught the gist of Amelia's words. He knew she had spoken, and he was vaguely aware she had attempted some sort of joke, which was a first for her, at least to Keith's knowledge. However, he wasn't really listening to her. How could he be? He wasn't even there.

In fact, Keith wasn't even currently in this time. He was back about a year ago, only a week after he had received his letter of acceptance to Hogwarts. His sister was...14 at the time, if he remembered correctly. She had seemed so old then. And she would be even older when he saw her next. He almost smiled. Would he even care? He had dealt with people so much older than she would be...but Brooke had always been more mature than her age would imply. She was like Amelia that respect - both of them seemed like they were born with the mental age of 30.

He had been so excited when he had received his acceptance letter. Of course, he had grown up knowing that it would come sooner or later. Both his parents were magical, his sister a talented witch, it was only a matter of time before he developed his gift as well. But it was different when you finally got that letter, when you were actually, physically holding it in your hand. It was a leap from faith to knowledge. You knew it was true. You knew you were special.

They had been on a family picnic, the four of them. Keith's parents were setting up in a small clearing near the lake. The sun was high in the sky, it was hot, but with a pleasant breeze. They were all forced to swat bugs away from their faces regularly, but they didn't mind. For the first time in a year they were all together, having a picnic. They were a family.

"So Brooke." Keith's mom had said, taking a bite out of an apple. "Keith's got some news for you."

Brooke opened her mouth to speak but Keith jumped in before she could start her sentence. "I got accepted to Hogwarts!"

Brooke rolled her eyes. "So? You it's not like you weren't. I mean look at your hair." Keith grinned. The first signs of magical talent he had gotten was a shifting of his hair color. He wasn't a metamorphagus, his parents assured, but right now his hair was a brilliant white.

"Of course, you're going to have a lot to live up to Keith." His dad said, leaning back and looking up in the sky. "Brooke's doing fairly well for herself at Beaxbatons." Brooke smiled smugly.

"Oh...right." Keith said, his grin shrinking a little. Nobody seemed to notice.

"She took the practice O.W.Ls this year you know. Straight O's all they way through." Keith's dad looked over at him. "You think you can match that son?"

"I...maybe." Keith said. The grin was gone from his face. His hair was slowly changing, reverting back to it's original dirty blonde.

"Of course the courses at Hogwarts will be different." Keith's mom said, "But that non-withstanding Keith, you've got a lot of expectations ahead of you."

"Yeah." Keith said, his hair now fully back to it's original color. "I know. I'm gonna go take a walk."

Keith was snapped back to the present day by Amelia speaking again. She said something about the window. Keith's brain communicated furiously with his ears, trying to figure what she had said. After a few half moments of panicked shouting to himself, his body finally agreed she had assured him she wouldn't tell anyone about the window. He breathed a sigh of relief. There was one load of his chest.

So why did he still feel like he was suffocating? "Thanks." Keith mumbled, looking up at Amelia. "I'm sorry about that. Fixing my mistakes is probably the last thing you want to do with your free time, isn't it?" He grinned weakly, struggling to master himself. His emotions were still churning just below the surface, but they no longer threatened to capsize him. For the moment at least, he was in control.