|| Mentioning @Aaron Jones and @Dealla Prince ||
TW for parent death, grief, & alluding to depression.

Nobody had heard from Aly Salinger for months.

It wasn’t their faults, really, that she had up and vanished after the Christmas holiday, that she had never returned to school, never responded to a single worried letter — and, trust, the house had received a lot of those. (Not that Aly ever saw a single one, as her mother Hesper had intercepted them all before she could even know that anyone had feared for her existence.) No, it wasn’t her friends’ faults at all that Aly had never reached out.

In truth, she had just needed some time.

November began quite like any other blustery autumn month at Hogwarts, bringing its wind and snow to the castle doorstep about as gently as a hammer-wielding warrior trapped in a room full of delicate glass bottles, but it had left with more of a punch than any hammer — not that Aly had discovered it until the next day, December the first. That was, after all, the day the letter had arrived.

Aly had opened it, less than thrilled at the prospect at what was sure to be another few parchments’ worth of lectures from her mother Hesper, sitting atop the blue coverlets of her top-bunk bed in the Ravenclaw girls’ Booted dormitory. Her eager green eyes had scanned the wrinkled, crispy parchment, looping handwriting, and the words three times before she had really realized what was happening.

It came out of nowhere.

We’ll wait to have the funeral until you get home for the holiday.

Stay focused on your studies, please, as much as you can.

Tears had splashed down onto the parchment, only later to dry even more wrinkled and crunchier than before. Someone else had sobbed into this parchment, before — the only indication Aly Salinger had ever gotten that her mother could show emotion. That her mother was human. That her mother had loved.

Aly stayed there, atop her bed, frozen, for a long, long time.

She’d floated numbly through her classes those next few weeks, unable to remember a single word spoken by professors or written in textbooks. Her grades had plummeted, despite her mum’s wants and wishes. By the time Aly boarded the Hogwarts Express to go home for the holiday, her trunk packed and sitting at her feet, she could barely remember the past weeks at all; it really all did feel like a bad dream, one from which she was bound to wake up any second.

But she didn’t wake up.

✿

Instead, Aly stumbled through her own beloved father’s funeral just the day after getting home for what was supposed to be a joyous break full of song, food, and cheer. She wore black from head to toe, a rare sight indeed, and spent a great deal of the somber affair clinging to the side of her father’s casket; her gaze stayed, roaming over her father’s face, paler than normal and lacking his trademark freckles. What should have been two pairs of emerald green eyes, meeting identically at the center, had instead turned into a tearful stare at closed lids behind familiar round glasses, smudged with coroners’ fingerprints. Why wouldn’t he just open his eyes? Why wouldn’t he just wake up? She was right here, damn it! Aly couldn’t remember the last time she’d written to her father, let alone said to him that she loved him, but she could do all of that one last time, right there, right then, if he would just open his eyes and talk to her. If he would just be alive again. Please.

When the time came to take Aly away from the casket so that Benjamin could be placed forever in his final resting spot of cold earth so frozen it had taken adults multiple Hot Air Charms to help dig the grave, Aly clung to the side with all her strength, tears streaming down the freckles she’d stolen from her father.

“I need to clean his glasses,” she cried out through her sobs as they tore her away from her father’s side for the last time. “He hates when his glasses are dirty. Please, someone. We have to clean his glasses. Please…”

Just to calm her, Hesper took a handkerchief to Benjamin’s glasses before they lowered him into his final resting place, as if he was going to be needing them. It only placated Aly a little bit. Definitely not enough.

✿

Though Becca cooked for the two Salingers left behind, it took days for either to eat a full meal after that. Even longer for Hesper to return to work, or for Aly to crack open one of the textbooks she needed to study for the upcoming latter half of the school year. But it was no use, anyway — with every subject, the letters just blurred together on the page until tears splattered them away entirely, even when it seemed like there were no more sobs left to be had. Because there were always more.

And when Hesper came home to this sorry sight one night in the early days of January, just before the Christmas holiday was set to end, all she could do was shake her head and retreat to her office to pen a letter to Hogwarts. Aly would not be returning for the rest of the school year — at least, not until Hesper felt that she could.

Of course, Aly didn’t understand this. When Hesper sat her down at the dining room table the night before she was supposed to go back to the castle of her schooldays, trying to explain that she felt it was best that Aly stayed close and was homeschooled by Becca and herself for the rest of the year, all Aly saw was another way for her mother to control her — to imprison her. All of her friends, all of her carefully crafted plans, even her relationship … like Rapunzel in the tower, Aly had been well and truly trapped. Or, at least, that was the way she saw it.

She fled to her room and slammed the door behind her, a resoundingly ear-splitting sound that echoed throughout the too-empty house for far too long.

Hesper knocked upon her daughter’s door, softly, a few hours later. “Alyssa? I know that you must think that this is a bad idea, but I promise to you, if you were to just sit down and think about it-”

Anger flared to life inside Aly’s withering heart, the first true emotion since that fateful last day of November that had so callously and cruelly taken her father and best friend away from her, and she bolted upright from where she had laid in her bed for hours, just staring at the ceiling, wondering when the hurt would go away if things just kept piling pain atop her fragile form. The teenager’s arm flung out to one side, snatching the first thing around which her fingers could wrap — a vase on her bedside table — and throwing it with all her (albeit not large) strength at the door that had just begun to creak open with Hesper’s hand on the other side’s knob.

Like her heart, like her soul, like the part of her that her parents had raised, the vase (as it crashed into the door) shattered into hundreds of millions of tiny shards that scattered across the floor like the most dangerous of glitters.

“I hate you!” Aly screamed at it, at the door, at Hesper on the other side — at whatever forces had decided it would be okay to steal her father away from her. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you! Just go away and leave me alone!”

The door didn’t open again after that. Not for another long, long time.

✿

The next time that Aly stepped foot outside her room, March had already sprung, though judging by the blizzards she had watched from her windows instead of paying attention during lessons, spring had not yet followed in its footsteps. It had taken her a week to speak to her mother again after the vase incident, another two to allow her to come into her room. They were on fragile terms now. It wasn’t the best situation, but then again, how could any of this be good?

Ghosts swarmed Aly as she tiptoed down the main stairs of the empty house as softly as she could. These weren’t real ghosts, of course — this place could not have been any more different from the hallowed halls of Hogwarts — but, rather, the ghosts of her past. Of her father’s laughter, often and hearty and boisterous. Of the records he would spin in his office, singing loud and off-key, of his oldies music that Aly now so desperately missed. Of the terrible jokes he’d make. Of the times he taught her to dance in the kitchen, her little feet atop his as he did all the steps himself, holding her upright by her hands to keep her from toppling onto the tiled floor.

She paused for a moment, staring into the kitchen. Aly could almost see those ghosts, see her father twirling her across that very space and throwing his head back with laughter. She’d danced with someone else, too, once upon a time. A waltz, if she was remembering correctly.

But Aaron too was gone. Not — not dead, at least, so that was something… but still gone from her life. It had been months since their breakup, but that wound was too yet raw; first loves often are. Truly, she’d lost two of the most important people in her life nearly at the same time.

Benjamin took precedence, though. He always had. He always would.

Tears welling up in her eyes once more, the first in days, Aly squeezed them shut and turned away.

The home was emptied then normal today. Becca had gone out, shopping for the week’s food, and Hesper had returned to work ages ago, throwing herself into her tasks as an Auror until the only times Aly saw her was when she had some scheduled lesson. Hesper seemed determined to keep Aly on the Hogwarts curriculum, even if she wouldn’t let her go back.

And for all her talk about ‘keeping me close’, when is she ever here? The bitter thought crossed Aly’s mind as she wandered through the echoing halls. The Salinger home had always seemed empty, too empty for just one person, even when Benjamin and Hesper both had just been away at work. Maybe she could just pretend her dad was away at work forever, now. He’d be home any second, bursting through the fireplace with soot smudged onto his cheek, those trademark Salinger eyes glittering, his usual grin upon his face—

Aly froze in the hallway, eyes locking onto a door at the end of the corridor.

A closed door. Her father’s home office.

The house had always been big enough to fit a family, perhaps of five or six, if each child were to have received their own bedroom. But Aly was an only child. She’d never needed multiple rooms. So two of the other bedrooms had been converted into spaces from which her parents could work, even from here. They had been used as private spaces, where even Aly could not go, unless the door was open.

This was the first time Aly had ever seen her father’s office door be closed.

She moved forward to it, barely breathing, and tried the knob; to her surprise, it turned in her hand, the door’s hinges creaking as it opened. Perhaps this was the first time it had done so since Benjamin had died. Opening the door, Aly was immediately greeted by a rush of a familiar scent — woodsy and warm, perhaps cedar and cinnamon. Her father’s favored cologne. She had not smelled that since the summer, but she recognized it immediately. This time, she did let the tears fall, shutting the door behind her so that none of the familiarity would escape.

“Dad? Dad, I’m here,” she barely breathed out, taking a hesitant, wobbly step forward. “It’s me, Dad. It’s Aly. I’m here. Talk to me, please.”

Of course, there came no reply.

It was then that Aly truly allowed herself to glance around the office for the first time. Stacks of papers and files lay strewn everywhere, for, just like his daughter, Benjamin Salinger had never learned the meaning of neatness. Knickknacks from his time at the Ministry lined the wall’s shelves, each one stranger than the last — a single lima bean that, upon closer inspection, was carved out of wood; what looked to be a human finger, floating in a jar of some viscous liquid; even a moving picture of a curly-haired child with bright green eyes, sticking her tongue out at the older version of herself from her frame. And there — yes, there on the window ledge was the record player he had so loved to jam out to, even with a last record left inside.

As if on autopilot, Aly moved to set the needle. A few moments later, her father’s favorite song began much like one falls off a cliff: shocking, thunderously, and out of absolutely nowhere.

Move your body like a hairy troll…

To the beat of her father’s oldies record, Aly methodically began to peer through some of the papers scattered around the room. Anything that was marked classified, even when she tried to open it, she was only met with gibberish and sometimes even blank pages that were clearly not meant for her eyes; but she also found fantastical reports, in the non-classified papers, of her father doing heroic things such as helping to fix a Muggle who had grown fleshy wings as a result of a spell gone wrong or doing stupid things like getting written up for charming a raincloud to follow his boss for an entire April Fool’s. She moved through them at lightning speed, soaking in these tales of a different Benjamin Salinger she’d never really known, even though he was the same person as the one she’d loved her whole life. Even though he was still her dad, he’d had a life outside of her.

A life that would miss him, too.

Continually curious, once she’d finished all the papers she could find, Aly dove into the drawers in his desk. Most were unlocked and filled only with more reports, though in the second from the top, she also opened a file to find no papers but instead a small golden key. She palmed it, of course, not knowing what it was for, but knowing that at least her father had once held it and that it was another part of him to keep close and hold safe. The bottom drawer, however, was locked, with a small golden lock in one corner, and the key fit perfectly into it, giving her access to whatever was inside.

Aly was expecting more classified documents, perhaps, or maybe something a bit more shocking. A plain, leather-bound journal was not on that list, but that was what she discovered inside.

Pocketing the key, Aly picked up the journal and began to flip through it, comforted by the sight of her father’s chicken-scratch handwriting, faded from the years.

✿

Today was my first day at Hogwarts. Blimey, I couldn’t be more excited! I got Sorted into Ravenclaw, and I'm sure Dad'll be thrilled, of course. There's never been a Salinger in our specific line of the family who wasn't, so I'll fit right in. I've already made a ton of new mates, I sat with some blokes on the train who ended up in all different Houses, and I'm sure we'll get up to lots of wicked adventures together...

You know, today I think I met the love of my life. Well, I didn't exactly meet her. More just saw her from afar. But there's this Chaser on the Slytherin Quidditch team, and Alfie and Theo dragged me to the match today to watch, and I saw her for the first time. I didn't know her first name, but there were two of them, the Livingstons, and I couldn't keep my eyes off the one with long hair. Blimey, she was beautiful. Theo says her name is Hesper and she's in second year. I know I was supposed to be supporting Ravenclaw, but when Slytherin won, I couldn't help but be happy for her...

Today, I tried to join the Ravenclaw Quidditch team, and I sort of got laughed off. They told me I wasn't nearly athletic enough, not strong enough to be a Beater, not agile enough to be a Seeker. Apparently I've got my 'head in the books' too often. They're all Ravenclaws, too, which is what I don't get about it. I'll keep trying. Maybe someday I'll make it. Or maybe I could try duelling. Dunno, maybe if I made it on a team, Hesper Livingston would actually notice me for once...

Halfway through third year and I'm still top of the class, so Mum and Dad are quite proud, but I'm just so tempted to fail this upcoming Charms exam for the heck of it... all everyone ever talks about is how smart I am, and it's got me wondering if I can ever be anything else...

Gave up on trying to join a team this year. It's just not worth it anymore, since the captains keep telling me no. I'd rather hang out with Alfie, Theo, and the boys anyway... maybe this year we'll sneak into the Forbidden Forest like we've been tossing about for ages...

Perfect Outstanding grades on all my O.W.L.s. I don't write in here much anymore, but thought that it might be nice to record. The idiotic thing is that I didn't even really try. I'd have been happy with a single Excellent. But now it's all any one of my mates can talk about, and for once, I just wish we'd go back to being stupid first-years together, when none of this mattered...

✿

When Aly reached the last page of the journal, an entry full of exclamation marks and capitalized words expressing nothing sort of pure elation and glee that Hesper Livingston had asked Benjamin Salinger to marry her, she let it flutter closed in her lap and sat on the floor for a while, just staring at the worn, shut cover.

How had she never known any of this - known that her father had once so wanted to play Quidditch like her mum, that he'd grown tired of being "the smart one", that he had suffered through the same struggles to be perfect as she had? Worse, why had he never told her any of this or protected her from Hesper's strict authoritarianism when it came to her grades? Had he simply not cared, or grown too busy at work to notice? Either way, one thing was clear from her snooping: Aly Salinger had always been more of her father's daughter than even she had known.

Sports, adventures, sneaking into the Forbidden Forest... her father had wanted to do so many things before he'd given it all up for love, before he had married Hesper, had Aly, and joined a low-level job at the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes that would eventually so cruelly cost him his life. But, then again, had he really ever had a life at all if he hadn't gotten to do everything he had so desperately wanted?

Aly's hands seized around the journal and she pushed herself up off the ground to a standing position, teeth gritted, determination coursing through her veins.

So Benjamin hadn't gotten to live his life beyond chasing his heart. So he'd unwillingly left her a journal full of backlogged ambitions, dreams crusted with cobwebs and dust. Well, Aly was there, and she was a Salinger, was she not? Did she not have her father's same green eyes and brown curls, his same forced drive to be perfectly intelligent, his same desire to be someone different, someone new?

"Don't worry, Dad," she whispered, glancing down at the journal, thumb lovingly wiping dust off of its coated cover. "I'll do it all for you."

And that meant, first and foremost, finding a way to get back to Hogwarts.

✿

For the next two months, Aly threw herself into her schoolwork with a forced passion and strong vigor. It was ironic, really, that the way to carry out her father's dreams of being something more than an academic required... well, being an academic... but if that was the price Aly had to pay to return to her beloved castle, to see her friends again and discover what life could truly be like, so be it.

Her friends. Oh, her friends. Aly often found herself up late at night, wondering what had happened to Dee in particular, her best friend. Was she worried about her? Had she ever stayed up like this, wondering what had happened to the curly-haired girl from the bunk beside hers? Had someone else moved into her bunk - had Dee taken on a new best friend?

Would Aly even have friends when she returned?

Trying to force herself to not worry about that and to focus on the bigger picture, Aly brought back the girl she had been three years before - but a more perfect version of her. A quieter one. One who didn't ask too many questions at the dinner table and, instead, knew exactly which fork and knife to use for each course. One who didn't go off on rambles about flowers and their meanings during homeschool lessons, but rather daydreamed inside her head, instead, when she really needed an escape from reviewing the same spells over and over. Someone who hid the touching-up of her lipstick in her compact mirror from her mother, lest she be lectured about painting her face. Someone who learned to stop bouncing her leg all the time, and, most importantly, someone who knew better than to argue with her mother.

She was still becoming someone new, of course, but that was happening in secret. Aly clambered onto the roof of the Salinger home in mid-May, squeezing out through her window and shimmying the drainpipe, to watch the stars; she wrote in her own journal, a new find (having stolen one of her mum's empty notebooks out of her office), how angry she was about being trapped here, how much she hated it, all of her rage and negative feelings - and she wrote them so hard she snapped the nib from her quill, once, but at least she wrote it down, rather than screaming it out. She persuaded Becca to purchase her shirts and pants - Muggle jeans, even, which she took a liking to almost immediately - instead of her more traditional style of sweaters skirts. She dreamed of escape, of just leaving one night and never coming back... though that, at least, she never carried out.

And when the end of May crept up upon them, one night at the dinner table, Aly achieved the impossible: she convinced her mother to let her return to Hogwarts for her fourth-year exams.

So as she stood, packed trunk in her hands, her beloved cat Dauncey at her side, the June wind whipping at her hair, on the steps of Hogwarts Castle for the first time since the previous year, Aly finally let her old self go, breathing her out as a sigh of relief through her mouth. No longer would she care so much about being her mother's perfect doll. Instead, she had the sins of her father to pay for - or, rather, the wants of her father to carry out in his absence.

"I'll make you proud, Dad," the newly fifteen-year-old murmured as she climbed the steps to the entrance doors, lugging her trunk along with her, ready to return to her life here just in time for the end of the school year. "I promise to have the life you never had. I swear it."