Summer was supposed to be the best part of the year. No school, no responsibilities; sometimes you travelled, saw your family, spent time together. The sun was supposed to be shining, the sky blue, the birds chirping. Mahlioz had almost even managed to convince themselves that it would be that way for them, too. That things had simmered down kver the last year, that it would be a good summer. They had been so naïve to even consider it an option.
They'd sent a good dozen letters to Reltyl during their third year, none of which were responded to, other than by their parents to apologize and explain that Reltyl wasn't feeling good. Whatever. For once, Hyltwis was being a little more pleasant. The sisters had exchanged a few owls between Hogwarts and Beauxbatons. It was a little awkward, given that they didn't know each other that well, especially for siblings. But Mahlioz was starting to see her as less of an annoying big sister and more of a friend.
But of course, Hyltwis didn't come home for the summer. She didn't run away, or not technically - she wrote home and explained she was going to stay with her friends for July, do a sort of road trip with their brooms and a tent. The reason, though not stated, was clear: Hyltwis was sick of her parents telling her to give up on theater school. Mahlioz wished she could join in on the trip, despite the broomsticks involved: with the rest of her family, in her new "home," everything felt like it was falling apart.
Their parents came to get them at Alyce's after the Hogwarts Express. They took the floo network to a wizarding neighbor's house before walking to the house Mahlioz hated. It was not home. Even less so with the amount that she felt her parents had abandoned her and Reltyl hated her.
Reltyl. Mahlioz had expected them to completely ignore her, but that wasn't the case. They spoke to her, finally, but bluntly, like they were only doing it because they were forced to. She couldn't even recognize them and it broke her heart. The first time they heard her refer to them in the third person to her parents, they interrupted: "Oh come on, not they. You really think I kept that cringe pronouns thing up? I'm a boy, Mahlioz."
That had been a... change. She could barely tell if it was because they - he (she would respect his chosen pronouns, as weird as it felt) - had genuinely realized his original gender was wrong, or if he was just transphobic now. When she asked her mother a few days later, she replied, "He's been hanging out with... maybe the wrong people. They are a little mean sometimes, but... well. You know Reltyl's always been so masculine, he needed someone to pull him out of his phase."
Mahlioz had been dumbstruck. Never in a million years... Her mother had tried to jusify it, saying trans people weren't inherently bad and that it was just obvious Reltyl wasn't one, but the third year had stopped listening.
So some French boys at his school had made Reltyl bigoted. Of all the things to happen while she had been gone, this was not one of those she expected. And just when they had really been beginning to understand their own gender. They couldn't come out now - perhaps never. Their parents would just brush it off as a phase, find an excuse - they were too feminine.
To hell with that. After fighting back the tears, Mahlioz left the house. She didn't know where she was going, but everything felt horribly, horribly wrong. Perhaps she should have stayed, tried to explain things to her mother, that transness had nothing to do with presentation, but. They weren't in the right state of mind. And would it even change anything?
Mahlioz found a public library and hid in the bathroom. She couldn't cry even though everything felt horrible. Her skin felt wrong, like it wasn't hers, like she had to claw it off. She settled for shaking her hands, like that would get rid of the horrible anger in her heart. No one she loved was the same. Change was already a bad enough thing in and of itself, but this change? That made the world feel black and white?
They spent a lot of July outside of the house. They couldn't bear to be near Reltyl, nor their parents, people they thought they knew. For once, Bergerac was the right place to be: no one knew her, she could roam free without being noticed. She went to the library, read, used the free internet. She researched genderqueerness, found some wizarding forums and made some muggleborn and halfblood online friends, tried to figure out if what Reltyl was doing was normal.
It was almost by accident that she found exactly what she was looking for. While looking through the lgbtqia+ wiki, just out of fun and a want to find really obscure labels for no reason, they came across the genderfluid fragment system. It was honestly rather insane how in depth it all went. So many different types of genderfluid (and so many different pretty flags!). And one of them... one of them felt very similar to them.
They found more forums, asked more questions. They had all the time in the world, didn't they? Better get it done before they lost access to the internet at Hogwarts. And it was so worth it when she figured it out. Years of searching and questioning for two final, concrete, perfect labels. Microlabels. They still liked genderqueer a lot, but just for them, in the safety of their own mind, librafluid and genderflorict were immaculate.
Not that she could tell anyone. Her parents were beginning to get annoyed with her antics, trying to gently tell her to get over it all and get used to her new home. She was ever more angry at them for it. Could they not see what had changed? How Reltyl was being towards her just because of a tiny incident last year? And still they wanted her to stay home. She tried to get a job at a nearby bakery, but wasn't the legal age. Fine. Whatever. She could sit in her room and sulk, if that was what her parents wanted.
A few days before August, a few days before she would be going to summer camp for the first time, her French uncles, Alexandrain and Anatole, came over, with their two kids, Céyès and Manon. It was interesting to see how accepting her mother was of Céyès being nonbinary - anyone would assume she was accepting. But only because they were androgynous, right?
Céyès was rather disappointed that Hyltwis wasn't around, and Manon decided to cheer them and her two little cousins up by bringing them all to the mall. She proposed to buy something for the three of them, and seeing her made the Slytherin miss her older sister even more. They didn't really like malls, but they did like their cousins, and accepted to come with them but had no will to buy anything.
That is, until Céyès was getting makeup and Mahlioz's eyes fell upon some orange hair dye. They weren't sure what came over them. They had the urge right then to prove Reltyl wrong. They weren't a wizard, a horrible wizard like he thought they were. She was Muggle, she was still part of the Muggle world, she would dye her hair the Muggle way to prove it. "En fait, je peux acheter ça?" Actually, can I buy this? she asked Manon, who smiled and accepted, though seemed a little confused that Mahlioz wouldn't just use magic.
But once they got home, Mahlioz couldn't do it. She couldn't open the bottle of dye. She could do nothing but stare at it in contempt. She couldn't even describe any of it. She didn't owe Reltyl anything. And it was such a change. She could continue pretending this was all a bad dream for now, but if she dyed her hair, it would all become so unbearably real.
So a bottle of orange hair dye (she wasn't even sure why she'd chosen orange, it was stupid) accompanied her to Alyce's house and on the Hogwarts express as she said goodbye to a family she barely recognized to find the school she called home.
