Jay had nothing to do with her time for the first two days, she didn’t see anyone around the huge house while exploring and soon enough she had found everything that could be in this place.
She had found a huge library like the one at school, in the basement there were a few potion brewing stations, much more advanced then the ones she had used but she still managed to brew The Antidote For Uncommon Poisons, a potion she had learnt that year and wanted to practice. She remembered struggling with antidotes specifically in class and if there were resources available to her, why not use them?
That had been her excuse for stealing the potion ingredients from their storage cupboard. It had taken her quite a while to find them as they didn’t have any labels on them so she had to get out her potion book and look at drawings of each magical ingredient that she needed and then finding them on the shelves.
Jay had quite a lot of time on her hands so she started doing something that would help her. She started learning Japanese.
In the library there were language learning books that she sat and read for hours, then she would talk to her Ferret, Nacho in Japanese. His only reaction to it was to chase his tail in circles around the room and bump into something before curling up into a ball, glaring at anything in the room his tiny eyes could see. Jay shook her head but internally she found it quite amusing how silly he could be.
Jay only actually saw people at dinner, her dad, his new wife who seemed… very cold and calculating and then there was the daughter who looked as if she was over this dinner talk too. Jay pitied the poor girl, she couldn’t image growing up like this and living here for her whole life, constantly under pressure to be perfect or special to appease her mum.
“What school do you go to?” Jay asked, definitely more loudly than need be but it got everyone to look at her. “What-“ Jay asked her question again but was interrupted.
“ Mahoutokoro” Jay turned her head to the mother sitting at the table “She goes to Mahoutokoro“ Jay glared at her for a few moments before she leaned back in her chair and fiddled with a pendant on her neck “Does your daughter have a right to answer me?” she asked sharply “or is free speech against the rules here or something”
The two adults sitting at the table looked enraged by Jay’s response “also I wasn’t even talking to you, so shut the-” Jay started but yet again was interrupted pretty quickly“Jay, leave the table. Now”
This time her dad was speaking.
“What if I don’t want to?” she smirked, stabbing a slice of salmon with her fork and biting into it “I’m not finished eating”
Afterwards everyone sat in an angry and awkward silence until her dad stood up and left and one by one the other two followed suit until it was just Jay at the table, reading a book and muttering the words in Japanese to herself.
Every time she got back to her desk, it had a new form of chaos on it, often papers or ink everywhere with random scribbles and notes no one could make out even Jay herself, the one who wrote the notes. She would squint and flip the paper around every way you could even think to flip paper around until she eventually gave up, throwing the papers in the waste paper basket beside the desk in exasperation.
She was emptying that waste paper basket every day or even twice a day on some occasions when she was really struggling. Above the desk were multiple charts of the hiragana, katakana and kanji all stuck up with blutack she had got from a muggle store on one of her walks out of the house, not that her dad knew about those.
Soon enough she could speak basic Japanese and write a little bit of it. Very wonky writing but it’s ok Jay could still read it and it would come with practice and time, so she continued to learn and hopefully by the end of the holidays she could write it properly even though the mess it created of her brain and her room was quite unfortunate.
No one even came in her room, so there was no chance of him seeing the muggle items she had and throwing them out or taking them away from her. Jay would not let her CD’s be taken from her by a rude, old, sad man who had no idea how emotion worked. Thinking about him now made her remember what Mikaela had said to her in the owlery.
Go with him and make his life impossible
Jay grinned at the thought, silently thanking Mikaela as she thought about what she could do.
