18 Feb 2024, 23:45
Drift
⋄ Winter Holidays 23'-24' | Leeds, England ⋄
⋄ Mentions: @Helena Rose and @Raizel Voltrouz ⋄
⋄ CW: Depiction of a panic attack ⋄
December 24th
𝓣he first thing Bex had done after being picked up from the train station by her dad and ferried back to her mum’s house was to turn her cell phone on. She’d received it early that previous June and had hardly gotten to use it at all before having to leave it behind when she was shipped off to Hogwarts. A steady stream of notification pings went off as her phone caught up with the backlog of missed texts, Instagram DMs, and snaps. She ignored them all though, instead sending a quick text out to her neglected groupchat with Kayla and Darcy, her two best friends from Muggle primary school, letting them know that she was still very much alive, and was spending the Christmas holidays this year at her mum’s.
As you might expect, they had the typical questions one has for a friend recently returned from the ether.
How was she doing? Good, she lied, and tired from the trip, but happy to be home again. How had boarding school been? Boring, not much to talk about there. Exactly like you’d imagine fancy boarding school to be. Played a lot of cricket, revised more than could possibly be healthy. Did you miss us? Very much so. All the time.
The two of them filled her in about the things she missed: all the dramatic pre-teen romances and breakups, gossip and scandals, new teachers, new lessons, and new grievances. Events she would have gotten to live firsthand had she continued on in muggle school with them. She genuinely couldn’t believe she was at a point in her eleven years of life where she longed for just one more maths class, if it meant that they could have it together.
There’s a feeling that only muggleborn and more muggle-reared halfblood kids will understand, a feeling that there’s no real name for, but one that will slowly but surely become as familiar to them as a well-worn pair of slippers over the course of their tenure at Hogwarts. The sudden shift of going from the magical world to the muggle one feels like you’re waking up from an odd dream, one that felt so real to you in the moment that you struggle to readjust to your real, waking life in the aftermath. Once you go back again though, it’s a mirrored version of the same exact feeling, like waking up groggy in a world half-remembered, the edges of which only start to coalesce into something real and sharp once the dream finally begins to fade away.
Both of these lived realities, the muggle and the magical, are equally real. For very few, though, do they manage to touch each other neatly at the edges. There was always at least just a little bit of an overbite where the two met each other, and a gap here and there just big enough for you to fall through, swallowed up into the abyss.
Bex was home, and she didn’t quite know what to do with herself, now.
So, she did the only thing that made sense to her: she made plans to meet up with her two best friends before New Years, and tried not to think about anything further than that.
⊢———————————⊣
December 25th
𝓢ince her parents’ divorce, holidays in the Lark-Ishida households followed a very specific pattern.
Christmas morning was spent with her mum and Leo at her maternal Grandad Allen’s house, with her now step-grandparents coming up to join them for the past couple of years. Her grandad had been a quiet man since her Grandma Becca’s passing, and Bex didn’t have any cousins on her mother’s side, so Christmas mornings were typically quite peaceful, and more often than not the whole morning would be spent in pajamas as they opened presents and watched movies together.
In comparison, her Christmas dinners were usually far more chaotic.
Christmas dinner was spent at her paternal grandparents, August and Vera’s home, with all of the Lark cousins shoved into one (admittedly rather substantial) home. Her uncles Mason and Marcus each had children of their own - Mason having four and Marcus having three – which led to one very loud, close-quarters Christmas celebration. There were children around every corner, and you couldn’t so much as get a moment of peace to yourself in the bathroom (not without barricading the door, at least, and even then, some of the craftier cousins may figure out a way to get in through the vents.)
Bex loved every minute of it. It was messy and chaotic, and she basked in it.
It was admittedly very nice being an only child with three doting parents, but she genuinely missed her cousins while she was away, even if they did regularly make her consider the merits of premediated homicide. The only unfortunate snag of the evening was the reminder that, while her uncles knew she was a witch, by the nature of having watched Milo go off to Hogwarts when they were children themselves, none of her aunts or cousins did, and as such she mostly stayed silent and picked at her dinner while the other children around her swapped stories from school.
The moment came and passed, though, as the conversation topics of children are often wont to do and talk of classes and schools were gladly traded for tiffs over whose turn it was on the Xbox and who was going to be on what team for the annual gingerbread house building contest. This was maybe the most normal she’d felt in months. She wished she could capture the feeling of it, build a home for it in a jar like they did with butterflies as children, and bring it back with her to Hogwarts to keep on a shelf in her dorm room. A memento for a rainy day. She’d been chasing the feeling of safety and connection for months and she was just so tired. It felt good, for the moment at least, to be home.
⊢———————————⊣
December 27th
𝓗er mother, despite Bex’s fears, did not make good on her threat to “talk” with her about what had been going on the second she walked through the door. Instead, she didn’t mention their owls at all, instead asking about the friends she’d mentioned in her letters and helping her to put her Grandma Becca’s antique angel topper up onto the tree like she did every year.
It wasn’t until two days after Christmas that she finally made her move, waiting for Bex patiently at the kitchen table, wrapped up snug in her bathrobe and sipping coffee while she waited, facing the stairs. Bex considered turning around and running right back up those stairs to her room, but her mum’s deceptively gentle, “Have a seat, bug,” left no room for argument, and she warily joined her mother at the table, slouching into her seat. Leo was incriminatingly absent from the kitchen.
Her mum was quiet for a few moments, perhaps to give Bex the leeway to start the conversation if she’d have liked to, but Bex stayed silent, staring at the kitchen tile and kicking her feet aimlessly against the legs of the table.
“How's school going?” Meredith finally asked. “Are you making friends alright?”
Bex shrugged, playing with the ends of her sleep-messy braid nervously. Across from her their wall clock ticked loudly, rubbing like sandpaper against her frazzled nerves. “School’s fine. My friends are cool, Helena’s really fun but she has house elves, which isn’t great. My friend Raizel brought a dragon costume to school with her.”
“Okay.” Her mum said slowly, doing her best to process the information she’d been given. “I’m glad to hear you’re making friends, love.”
Her mum gently tapped her fingers against the side of her mug, her expression unreadable. Bex could hear the faint sound of her neighbor’s frenchies barking their heads off through the back door. “And how about your classes? Which one’s your favorite?”
“Herbology.” Bex replied, skipping over the first question to answer the second. “I like taking care of all the plants. And Flying, too.”
Meredith nodded, taking another sip before continuing. Bex had braced herself for a comment on flying, as brooms and the inherent dangers of them had been a point of contention between her parents for as long as she could remember, but her mother breezed past it, relentless in her pursuit of the kill. “I know you were nervous to go away to school, and change can be hard, especially at your age. So, I can understand it possibly changing your behavior a bit, for a while. But Bex, love, the tone and frequency of your letters, or rather the lack of frequency, has been a little alarming for me. Is there something going on that I should know about?”
Bex shook her head, avoiding her mother’s eyes. “No, everything’s fine. I’ve just been busy. Learning magic, and I’m in a lot of sports and clubs. I just forget to write, sometimes.”
In the ensuing silence, Bex chances a look up at her mother, and the look on her face is wary and searching. Bex is not a good liar, and both of them know it.
“No one’s giving you any trouble at school?”
“No.”
“Your professors are treating you well, then? And your dormmates?”
“Yes.”
The clock continued its ticking, with Meredith’s offbeat tapping against her mug creating a staccato rhythm as the two of them sat stewing in the almost-silence. The sun was bright and inviting outside, despite the frigid temperature, and Bex found herself wishing that she was out there in the snow. Even the dreaded cold would be better than this.
“Rebecca,” her mum asks, finally asks, “if something was wrong, would you tell me?”
Bex can hardly look her in the eyes as she answers, mouth dry and hands shaking like she had been outside in the cold comfort of winter rather than inside her mother’s warm and tidy little house. Her responding “Yes,” is far too slow to come, and her mum freezes like a prey animal, her expression shuttering over until it’s locked away completely, somewhere far out of Bex’s reach. She suddenly looks a decade older, causing Bex to feel a wave of guilt so strong that she’s sure for a moment that she’ll throw up right onto their kitchen tile.
It is a great and horrible thing to be known. She cannot lie to her mother, no matter how desperate she is to keep her from seeing the rotted, decaying thing inside of her, and because of this, she is ruined.
Neither of them had much of anything to say after that, the kitchen silent except for the sound of cereal clattering in the bowl as Bex prepares breakfast for herself, feeling her mum’s eyes follow her around the kitchen relentlessly as the muggle woman quietly finishes her long-cold coffee, futilely searching for answers in the once familiar topography of her daughter. There was a time, once, when Bex would told her everything, every thought and secret she had in her head. Neither of them knew how to exist in this new, unexplored space between them.
When Leo returned home from his suspiciously timed “meditation walk”, Bex was eager to remind him of his promise to her regarding a cat, desperate to get out of the house as quickly as possible. She felt like the same cloying anxiety that accompanied her to Transfiguration class had now followed her home, making a nest for itself in their kitchen cabinets.
A few hours later Bex was suddenly a ferret-parent, and her mum thankfully had something far more distracting to be upset about. Bex had never been so grateful to hear her stepdad get dressed down before.
They do not talk about it again.
⊢———————————⊣
December 29th
𝓓arcy had cut her hair since Bex had last seen her.
It looked fantastic, really. She’d lopped it off sharply at her chin, and it made her look more grown-up than Bex had ever seen her. She’d always been a vain little thing and could clearly tell that her new haircut suited her. Kayla, meanwhile, had been allowed to get a second set of ear piercings for her 12th birthday and was eager to show them off, craning her neck like a swan at every opportunity.
Bex had gotten a wand, a broom, and a ferret since she’d seen them last, but only one of these things was legal for her to tell them about, so ferret show-and-tell it was. Pleione mostly slept during the day, though, being crepuscular and all, so this largely consisted of them quietly cooing at her while she obliviously slept the day away like a little princess in her hanging bed.
Kayla had always sat the same way in Bex’s bedroom, ever since they were in nursery school. She’d plop herself down onto the bed let her head fall over the edge of it, her arms flopping down after her, like she was doing the roller coaster wave upside down. It didn’t look at all comfortable, but she refused to sit any other way. It was a constant, rock solid anchor in the otherwise rapidly shifting landscape of Bex’s life. It settled something frenetic inside of her, and she found herself absurdly grateful for her presence.
Sentimentality was hard, though, so Bex just flicked her on the nose, to which Kayla responded with some very unladylike language about where exactly Bex could put her hand.
They shared tiktoks back and forth for hours, catching Bex up on the jokes and trends she’d missed up at her posh, tech-free boarding school out in Scotland. Bex was hopeful that she’d get to see them a few more times during break, as the two of them had quite a few plans already for their remaining time off. The two muggle girls were going to a New Year’s Party the following Sunday, one that Bex hadn’t been invited to by nature of no longer being in the hosting girl’s class.
For the past three or four years, Kayla and Darcy had accompanied her to her own family’s New Years party, but she refused to let herself be disappointed by this. She did many things these days in her day-to-day life that Darcy and Kayla were never going to get to know about, let alone participate in. They deserved to be able to do things on their own, too. She tried to take some measure of solace in this, and not let the jealousy eat away at her. None of this was her friends’ fault in the slightest.
Later that evening, once Kayla and Darcy’s mums had come by to take them home, she finds herself missing them like a spilled cup; they’d filled her too full and now she’d tipped herself over, leaving her empty again. She let Pleione curl up on the bed next to her, counting the ferret’s breaths as she slept on, unbothered. One, two, three, four. It was a long time before she fell asleep.
⊢———————————⊣
December 31st
𝓜eredith and Milo’s newly amended custody agreement, now that Bex spent most of her time away at Hogwarts, was as follows:
Meredith would get Bex during the Christmas holidays, as well as during the month of July. Milo, on the other hand, would get her both during the Easter holidays and during the month of August. The two of them each loved their daughter dearly, and there was little they wouldn’t sacrifice to ensure her happiness, safety, and well-being. But the fact of the matter was this: they were absolute shite at co-parenting, and it was best for everyone involved if the two of them spent as little time together as possible.
There were some notable exceptions to these custody rules. Both Christmas day and Easter were divided down the middle, with one of them getting the morning and the other getting the evening so that both parents could spend a part of each holiday with their child. New Year’s Eve, however, was an entirely different beast.
Every year, Bex’s paternal grandparents hosted a New Year’s Eve party for the whole extended family. It was a Lark family tradition that had been going on for longer than Milo had been alive, and it was the one night a year that Milo and Meredith assented to a truce, doing their best to play nice and give Bex a fun, united holiday.
In the handful of years since they’d gotten divorced, the two of them had managed this exactly once.
A row between the two of them was, at this point, tradition. As they got ready for the evening, Bex and her stepdad, Leo, would shoot each other nervous looks as they watched Meredith anxiously flit about the house. By the time Milo rang their doorbell a bit before nine, Meredith had worked herself up into quite the lather, and the mood for the evening was set.
Leo, kind and benevolent man that he was, did his best to facilitate conversations between the four of them on the car ride to Grandma Vera and Grandad Gus’s, but the vibes in the car were tepid at best, and eventually the conversation was left mostly to Leo and Bex, who were happy to discuss what vegetables they’d like to plant in the garden this year.
Upon arriving at the party her grandma greeted them all cheerfully at the door, hugging each of them in turn. After being ushered inside, Bex let the general Lark chaos envelop her and found herself happily swept up into the New Years shenanigans of her sugar-addled cousins.
It was a good few hours before she rejoined her parents, somewhere around forty or so minutes before midnight. Her mum and dad were sitting stiffly on opposite ends of the couch while they made stilted conversation with Milo’s brothers and their wives, and Bex, as she was so often relegated to doing in this life, took the middle spot between the two of them.
“No Kayla and Darcy this year?” Her uncle Mason asked, not unkindly. “Usually, you three are a package deal at these things.”
Bex just shrugged, fidgeting with the end of one of her braids. Darcy and Kayla were allowed to have other friends, especially since she didn’t even go to the same school as them anymore, but she’d be lying if she said that their absence didn’t sting. “No, a girl in their class invited them to her party this year.”
“That’s too bad.” Mason replied. “Hopefully they’ll be able to make it again next year.”
“Don’t let it sting you, Bug.” Her dad added, placing a soothing hand on her back. “It’s normal for friendships to drift apart as you age, especially with you going to different schools now. It never feels particularly good, but sometimes it can be for the best.”
“In what way, exactly,” Her mother replied, coldly, “Would that be ‘for the best'?’”
Mason and Marcus stiffened in their seats and shared a tired, knowing look with each other, while her aunts looked mostly confused and uncomfortable.
“Meredith, let’s not do this here-”
“You were the one who brought it up-”
“You’re right. I did bring it up. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. Let’s not ruin tonight by arguing.”
And just like that, the quarrel dissipates as quickly as it began. Her mother, while as quick to anger as her daughter was, was usually willing to accept an apology freely given. Bex should feel relieved that they managed to dodge the brewing argument so easily. But something thick and tar-like had begun to build up in her stomach at her father’s words, and her muscles suddenly felt tight and coiled like a garden hose, because, well. She had a rather good idea of what her dad was talking about. Most of the people in the room, barring her aunts, knew exactly what it was about, as it was by no means the first time that this particular disagreement had come up, nor was there much hope of it being the last.
While her parents had usually tried to keep this discussion out of her earshot, Meredith and Milo were loud when they were angry with each other, and not half as discreet as they ought to be. The crux of her dad’s argument had historically been this: Bex was always going to have a harder time adjusting to the wizarding world if she was perpetually clinging to the muggle one.
Her dad hasn’t ever talked about it much, but what she’s gleaned from eavesdropping on her uncles and grandparents over the years is that her dad had a proper hard time, as a muggleborn, adjusting to the magical world when he was her age. Though he grew to love the magical world, he struggled to make a place for himself in it, leading to the mixed muggle and magical lifestyle he currently lived. He’d been vocally against her attending muggle school and had argued anew every year for her to be homeschooled, but her mother had always put her foot down, saying that Bex needed roots and connection with other kids her age.
Now that she was at Hogwarts, her father hoped that she would spend less time with her muggle friends, and form connections with her new schoolmates. He would never push her on this, but she knew he hoped for it. She didn’t have the words to explain to him that it just wasn’t going to work for her like that. The universe had made a fundamental mistake in making her a witch, and her ties to the muggle world, strained as they had grown, were all she that had left.
But she couldn’t fit in the muggle world, either. Like gallium, she couldn’t decide what state of matter she would exist in. Too magical for the muggle world, she’d broken windows and flung toys across the room with but a thought as a child – a lifetime of glass figurines, shattered beyond repair - without any finesse or control to protect the people around her. But too muggle for the magical world, she couldn’t even cast a simple Lumos competently. Her magic didn’t respond to her with any consistency, period. She was almost assuredly going to fail out of school, and there was nowhere else for her to go. She was caught in a riptide, and the current was pulling her under.
She couldn’t breathe. She could hear her family talking around her, but for a few terrifying minutes she couldn’t understand the words.
She struggled to come back to herself, and to not make a scene the one time her parents were actually getting along, and she slowly but surely drifted back into comprehension. She would get a handle on herself; she would allow herself no other option.
She lets the careful small talk wash over her, forcing herself to focus on the words.
“How are classes going at your new school, Bex?” Her uncle Marcus asks.
She feels a yank somewhere deep inside of her, and suddenly she’s struggling not to throw up. “Good. I like most them so far.” She replies, careful to keep her words measured and not inaccurate. She does like most of her classes.
Her dad smiles at her, a hint of pride in his expression. She wants to die. “You’ve always been a bright kid, Bex.” Her aunt Rachel chimes in, and the dam inside of her breaks so suddenly and forcefully she doesn’t see it coming in time to get out of its way.
She is suddenly crying in the ugly, breathless sort of way. She can’t stop long enough to get a full breath in, and she feels dizzy with it, her chest aching as if she’d just been hit by a bludger. She could hear a high-pitched, whinging noise, and it was many long moments before she realized that the sound was coming from her. Chaos descended around her as the adults around her frantically tried to ascertain what had happened as the panic slowly overtook her.
The next few minutes were fuzzy at best, and when the transition from inside to outside took place was unclear to her. The next thing she knew, she was being held in her father’s arms as if she was a child again, the four of them standing next to her mum’s car as she fumbled in her purse for the keys. Once she’d managed to unlock it, her dad opened the door of the back seat, setting her down upon it.
“I still have the number of child psychologist she saw after your mum passed; I can call her in the morning.”
“And what if something’s seriously wrong with her, Milo? I think we should go into A&E.”
“I think she just got overwhelmed, it happens. Let’s bring her home and let her get some sleep-”
“Overwhelmed? Does this look like just overwhelmed to you, Milo? I won’t just stand here and let you do nothing.”
Bex wished that she could stop crying so she could actively speak up in her own defense. She did not want to go to A&E. She wanted to climb into a little box and live inside of it for the rest of her life.
“Maybe it’s best to get her looked at, just in case. It would definitely make me feel better.” Leo added, voice far more level than her other two parents.
“Leo.” Her dad said, voice strangled. “I know you mean well, but please, don’t try and make parenting decisions right now for my child.”
Leo reared back, clearly stung, and suddenly Meredith was on a warpath.
“You will not speak to him like that. What kind of father have you been to her, recently? She was doing so well before you sent her to your fancy little magic school.”
“Meredith, we cannot talk about this outside-”
“Do you think I’m fucking stupid, Milo? Look at her and just try to tell me that any of this has been good for her. You’ve been very clear about the effect you think that my world will end up having on her. But take a good, long look at what yours has done.”
Bex curled into herself in the car, knees to her chest and arms wrapped tightly over her head.
“You know that’s not fair, Mer.”
“I don’t know anything anymore! She’s refused to tell me what’s going on!”
Above them, fireworks suddenly began to light up the night, the loud gunshot cracks of them startling the three adults into silence. It was midnight; Happy New Year.
“Enough.” Leo said, stepping between her other two parents. “Enough. This is not helping.”
Meredith's own eyes were watery, and it was quite clear that she had more she’d like to say, but she stood there in silence, jaw clenched. Bex stared up at the crackling colors, her face pressed to the cool glass of the windshield. They were especially beautiful this year, and it was clear that whoever had designed the 2024 show had taken a special care with the project. In a juxtaposition to the cacophony outside, the one inside of her had finally receded, leaving her with a numb, scooped out emptiness that she found to be much preferable.
In the end, her dad takes the coward’s way out, the way he always does. He submits to Meredith and Leo’s requests and leaves Bex in their care, making his way back to the house to find a private place to apparate from. Her mum carefully climbs into the back seat with her, curling up against her as Leo drives them to A&E.
She’s a little dehydrated with an elevated heart rate, but otherwise entirely healthy. Of course she is. Panic attack is what is whispered between her mother and one of the nurses, none to quietly. Prior history of them. Bex closes her eyes and tries to sleep.
⊢———————————⊣
January 2nd
“𝓘t’s been a while.” Lucie said, looking warm and cozy in soft looking sweater as she lounged on the couch of her posh Airbnb somewhere in Spain. She’d been kind to agree to a session after so many years, especially seeing as she was currently out of office on vacation. Bex got the impression that some favors had been exchanged on her Grandma Vera’s part, as she’d been the reason they’d been taken on as one of Lucie’s clients when Bex was small.
“It’s good to see you again, Becca. How are you doing?”
Bex shrugged, slouching to a rather heinous degree as she sat crisscross applesauce in front of the coffee table, where her mum had placed her laptop.
“I’m good, I guess. I go by Bex now.”
Lucie merely nodded, smiling as she made a note of it in her papers. “Bex, that’s pretty. Have you been enjoying your holiday so far, Bex?”
They made small talk for a while, the way they’d always used to. It was harder now than it used to be, with Lucie being a muggle and Bex therefore having to be very careful with what she said. Lucie’s soothing demeanor hadn’t changed, though, and Bex felt herself slowly but surely start to relax.
When it came time to discuss the incident from New Years’, Bex kept the details of what had actually triggered it vague, and as always Lucie didn’t push her, preferring to let her set her own pace.
“Grief can sometimes pop up again when we’re not expecting it. Brains can be sticky like that. Why don’t we practice some breathing exercises together, so you can feel a bit more prepared for it if it happens again?”
So Bex sits on the floor of the parlour, fingers curled tightly in the carpet as she and Lucie count their breaths. In, one, two, three, four. Out, one, two, three, four.
If only all her problems could be solved with simple box breathing.
⊢———————————⊣
January 4th
𝓛ena had sent her an owl a few days before New Years, and she’d been turning the blonde girl’s parting question around in her head ever since then. She’d had an itch under her skin since the New Year’s incident, a feverish sort of energy that demanded action. She’d quickly elected to channel it into Helena’s problems rather than her own.
What does somebody do when their life is falling apart?
The recently nicknamed Crumb had entertained herself for the past couple of hours by attempting to crawl up and under the furniture, and climbing up to try and eat the strings of Bex’s hoodie whenever she mistakenly lost her focus on the creature. She’d finally tired herself out, though, and was now napping peacefully in Bex’s lap. Bex ran her fingers through the ferret’s fur as she stared at the telly absentmindedly, searching for the right words to posit her question to her mum.
She and her mum have been in a quiet, tentative truce for the past few days, while she’d been largely rejecting calls and texts from her dad. Maybe it wasn’t fair to pin all the blame on him and make him the scapegoat of the whole affair, but she was just angry. And sad. And he wasn’t here, and her mum was. So.
“If someone wanted to fix their whole life,” Bex asked, causing her mum to look up sharply from her phone, “how would they go about it?”
Her mum is silent for a few minutes, staring at her intently. “Well.” She cleared her throat, appearing to take Bex’s question with the utmost seriousness, which Bex appreciated. She wanted to be as helpful to Helena as she could.
“Fixing your whole life would be a pretty big undertaking. Maybe it would be helpful to start with something, uh, smaller. Like just changing your hair.”
“Your hair?” Bex asked, dubiously. Her mum worked as a hairdresser, so it wasn’t surprising that this is where her mind had gone, but Bex wasn’t quite convinced that this would be the solution to Helena’s parents’ divorce.
“Sometimes a change of appearance can bring a change of perspective. Getting a new haircut or dying your hair can give you some power back, make you feel more centered.”
Bex chewed on her bottom lip, thinking it over. “Okay. Do you have any hair dye that I could have?”
Her mum’s look was piercing, and Bex felt a little uncomfortable from it, like her mum had opened her up on an operating table and was dissecting her, trying to see what made her tick. After a few moments, she finally replied saying, “Most of the hair dye I have is for professional, salon use. But why don’t I run to the store after my appointments, and pick you up some at home dyes?”
Bex agreed to this easily enough, and the matter was settled. Tomorrow she’d be making her way back to Hogwarts, fleeing her fire to return to her frying pan. But she’d had months of practice now at keeping the latent anxiety at bay; keep moving and surround yourself with as many activities and tasks as you can. This was something she knew how to do, and was good at doing, even, a small shawl of control to wrap around herself. It wasn’t by any means a large accomplishment but having a possible solution for Helena, even if it was just a band-aid fix, made her feel just a little bit more settled. She would not be returning to school empty-handed, one less failure to her name.
She didn’t know what the next few months at school would bring with them, and she was in no way prepared, but she was nothing if not stubborn, and would take whatever punches Hogwarts intended to throw at her and return them back in kind. Leaning back against the couch, she closed her eyes and focused on the breathing techniques she’d worked on with Lucie, determined to not let her fear tarnish her last few hours of vacation. In and out, she counted her breaths, letting the sensations of her home around her fade into the background.
One, two, three, four.
