Bowtruckles
Christmas was quiet.
It was always quiet at her house, because it was just Hazel and her mum and both of them tended to keep to themselves, with the wireless softly playing Christmas music as they floated about the house in their individual orbits. It always felt peaceful to her, to be on the sofa with a blanket and a book, or curled in bed with a book, while her mother did the same thing and they occasionally had a gentle chat about the books they were reading.
Quiet, and peaceful.
And boring.
She couldn’t focus on the book she’d brought home from school, the new Ruqayya al-Rachid book the Charms Club had purchased, and switched to a more exciting one, a mystery story about a darling elderly witch who solved crimes in her cosy little village that Hazel had found in the library. Technically it was the dining room, but most of the room was taken up by the bookshelves that lined every wall, filled with the books her mother and she had collected over the years, so they called it the library.
The mystery story only reminded her of Johnny and his detective story, though, and then once she was thinking about him, she couldn’t get him out of her head. He’d invited her to visit over Christmas, to his little brother’s birthday party, and she didn’t want to miss the chance to go if she didn’t know when it was. After Christmas, he’d said, but she didn’t know what day.
On Christmas afternoon she wrote him a short note to ask about the party, re-reading it twice before deciding there wasn’t any point in trying to ask politely, since it was Johnny and he wasn’t sensitive enough to be bothered by politeness.
I’m very bored. I think I want to get out of the house. Were you serious about me coming to your brother’s party?
She dispatched the owl before she could think better of it. Johnny’s answer came almost immediately, half an hour after she’d sent the owl to his house.
Yes. Come to the party and keep me company. It’s this Friday, come over around one. There’ll be plenty of food. It’ll be fun. Well, it won’t, because the little kids will be everywhere, but it’ll be loud and busy and lots of people and food and that’s nearly the same thing as fun, if you squint.
His Floo gate address was at the bottom. Hazel tucked the letter into her pocket and went to the library, where her mother was perusing the stacks.
Though she was a librarian by trade, Marianne McGregor never bothered sorting her own book collection. The shelves were arranged vaguely by topic, but there was always a fluid sort of movement as they added new books to the eclectic collection and shuffled books between their library and their nightstands. Sometimes Marianne bought books at charity shops just because they were old or unusual, or rescued a book from the deacquisition piles at the Transfiguration Society library where she worked.
“Don’t we have the seventh volume in that Frances Fernworth series?” Marianne asked vaguely, glancing over her shoulder at her daughter. “I thought I saw it the other day so I didn’t buy it when I saw it at Obscurus Books last week.”
“We have through the sixth. We never had the seventh. You were waiting for the paperback,” Hazel reminded her mother.
“Oh, damn, that’s right.” Marianne straightened up. “What are you reading, darling?”
“I’m on the second Frances Fernworth, actually,” she admitted.
Her mother looked amused. “We’re both on a cottage mystery kick, are we? Well, I’m on number four, so we should be timed good. I’ll pop by Obscurus tomorrow and pick up the seventh.”
Hazel had read the seventh book at school last year, so she wasn’t really concerned about the book. “Mum, I’m going to a friend’s on Friday. Just to hang out for a bit.”
“All right, darling.” Marianne had turned back to the bookshelf and started rearranging a few books, putting a series of historical fiction books into their proper order. “Going to Tink’s, are you?”
“No, it’s a different friend.”
“That reminds me, we’re almost out of Floo powder. Put it on the list, would you?”
Hazel went to the kitchen where her mother kept the grocery and to do lists on the fridge, located a pencil stub, and jotted Buy Floo powder onto the to do list.
Her mother’s voice came from the other room. “Going over to exchange gifts?”
“No, it’s his little brother’s birthday party.”
Her mother stuck her head into the kitchen, wide-eyed. “Did you say his?”
“He’s just a friend,” Hazel told her firmly.
Marianne gaped at her for a moment, and then closed her mouth suddenly. “Well, all right. What is this friend’s name?”
“Johnny Lupin.”
She went back to gaping again. “Isn’t that the boy you don’t like?”
Oh bugger, she’d forgotten she’d mentioned that to her mother a few times. “He’s my friend now.”
“I feel like I’ve fallen behind,” said Marianne, amused now. “But you have fun. He’s just a friend?”
“Yes, Mum. Just a friend.” She didn’t want to get into the whole life coach thing with her mother, since it felt like a can of worms sort of conversation. It was bad enough with Tink needling her about Johnny being only her friend, the last thing she wanted was her mother doing the same thing.
“My goodness.” Her mother shook her head. “Look at you being friends with a popular boy.”
“Oh, don’t,” Hazel said with a roll of her eyes. “I’m going to my room.”
Her mother looked amused as Hazel went to hide in her room again.
*
The Floo gate at the Lupins’ house opened into a tiny sitting room with two overstuffed yellow sofas overcrowding the space. A dog barked at her briefly when she stepped out of the grate, but before Hazel could even see where the dog was, Johnny had appeared in the doorway.
“Oi, shut it,” he told the dog, who slunk out from behind the sofa and licked his hand. The dog was black and looked like it was at least part Labrador, with some gray around its muzzle. Johnny patted the dog’s head. “Go lay down. It’s only Hazel, she’s fine.”
The dog went back over to the corner where Hazel, approaching Johnny, could now see a soft-looking dog bed. It turned in place a few times and then laid down, letting out its breath in a whuff.
“She’s really old, so we have her closed in here so the little ones don’t bother her,” Johnny told Hazel, smiling at her. “I’m glad you came. Want to go have some cake? You missed the birthday singing, now everyone’s just running around. It’s a madhouse.”
Hazel had deliberately showed up a bit late, hoping to miss the singing. She hated to be sung to for her birthday and didn’t care for witnessing other people’s fuss either. “Yeah, all right.”
“Come on. Everyone’s outside, we set up the marquee.”
There was indeed a marquee tent set up in the backyard. It took up nearly all the available space in the backyard, leaving only a small brick patio open where a little fire burned in an iron firepit. She followed Johnny into the tent, which had some sort of heating charm in it, because it was pleasantly warm despite the cold day.
“Grab that table, I’ll see if I can find something for you to drink aside from the kiddies’ juice,” Johnny told her, indicating a small table in a corner of the marquee.
She sat down alone and looked around at the Lupin family running around. Weasleys, she thought. They were so obviously Weasleys. Nearly everyone present was a ginger. No one seemed to notice her, so she was able to watch them while she waited for Johnny. It was a madhouse, as he’d said, and she felt a little like an anthropologist, observing the behavior around her. She wished she’d brought her notebook.
It didn’t take long for her to notice, watching the little clumps of children running around, that Johnny actually had enough cousins for them to form cliques. His brother Artie, identifiable as the birthday boy by the party crown he was wearing, was running around with three other little boys, and clearly Artie was not the leader of his own clique. That honor went to a little boy apparently called Callum, who spoke in a loud voice with a Highland Scots accent and what was probably unwarranted confidence. Artie, on the other hand, seemed to be happily doing whatever Callum told him, and hardly said a word.
Hazel immediately classified Artie as a stealth Lupin.
She caught sight of Remus briefly, ducking out of the marquee with a dark-haired man that she thought might be Mr. Lupin. Dora was nowhere to be seen, but there were so many people passing in and out of the marquee that it was possible she’d been there and Hazel hadn’t noticed her.
Not that Dora was usually unobtrusive, but in a crowd of their relatives, even Dora and Johnny seemed to blend in a bit.
Two tables down from where Hazel sat was a rather stout but pretty woman delicately eating a slice of cake, and a little ginger-haired girl ran up to her and promptly started hanging off of her chair. Hazel recognized a mother when she saw one.
“Run along,” said the stout woman to her daughter.
“Why isn’t Jason here?” the girl whinged. She looked absolutely bereft, her pretty little face screwed up in exaggerated despair.
“They’re visiting their dad’s family,” her mother told her around a mouthful of cake. “Now hush and find someone to play with.”
The girl flounced off just as Johnny rejoined Hazel, setting two glasses of butterbeer on the table.
“Why’s Josie in a strop?” he asked. “I had to dig these out of the back of the pantry and get my mum to chill them. Everybody drank the ones out here already. Do you want cake? It’s chocolate.”
“Apparently because Jason isn’t here, and yes,” Hazel told him. “There are a lot of people here. Are you sure these are all your relatives?”
“I told you there’s too bloody many of them,” Johnny said good-naturedly. “We’ll have cake and then I’ll try to introduce you to some of them. The little ones don’t count, though.”
He went over to the big table along the side of the marquee to fetch a slice of cake for her. She wasn’t sure if he was showing off or not, but on closer examination of his face when he set the cake down in front of her and slid into the chair across from her with his own slice, she thought he wasn’t. It seemed to be some natural manners, similar to when he’d brought her food at the Gryffindor party. He did have a few after all. Probably his mother had beaten them into him.
“So, who is Jason?” she asked as she started on the cake.
Johnny was making steady inroads on his cake. On second glance, he actually had two slices on his plate. “One of my cousins,” he said easily. “Aunt Roxanne’s son. They’re not here today. Josie is one of Aunt Lucy’s, she and Jason are always hanging around each other. Her big sister Flora will be at Hogwarts next year. She’s kind of a pain in the arse. I should make you a chart of all my cousins.”
“You really should.” She smiled at him. “You have a cousin named Flora and a sister named Fleur? Isn’t that basically the same thing?”
“If we couldn’t repeat names, the Weasleys would run out of things to call ourselves,” he told her deadpan.
“You’re a Lupin, not a Weasley.”
He wiggled his eyebrows at her, a forkful of cake poised in front of his mouth. “I’m both. And just me.”
Just Johnny. There was no one exactly like him, but now she’d had some time to observe his family, she was starting to see similarities. It felt a little like reading the Johnny Lupin origin story, in a way. Whatever genes had converged in Johnny to make the megalomaniac that everyone at Hogwarts knew and loved had expressed in a lesser way in several of his cousins, and she suspected in his aunties and uncles, too, though she’d only really got to see his Aunt Lucy so far.
“Your cousin Callum seems a bit like you,” she told him.
“Oh, he is not,” Johnny said with amusement. “None of them are like me. Callum is like his parents, his mum is the Keeper for Pride of Portree and his dad coaches the team. I’ve got loads of Quidditch relatives. I know you don’t follow Quidditch, but you ought to at least recognize Josie’s dad. Hilarion Winston-Fisher.”
Oh yes, she knew who that was. She’d tried not to stare when he had arrived, but every girl knew who Hilarion Winston-Fisher was. There was a poster of him in her dormitory, thanks to one of her classmates. No one had objected to it, of course. It was from five years ago, but he was just as handsome now. Tink blew kisses at the poster whenever she left the dormitory.
“That’s his son Ben running around with Artie and Callum,” Johnny added. “The blonde one. The other ginger is my cousin Noah Weasley. Here, come with me and I’ll introduce you to Uncle Hilarion. He’s shy, you’ll like him.”
Hazel blushed her way through an introduction to the world’s most handsome Quidditch player, who said roughly three words and blushed back at her, and then she followed Johnny out of the marquee so they could get some fresh air.
Remus was on the patio, a coffee in hand while he chatted around the little firepit with a handful of the adults. Johnny went over to them fearlessly and started talking over his brother immediately, telling them about the last Quidditch game before the holiday. Remus looked annoyed, with the air of resignation that Hazel was used to seeing from Johnny’s put-upon elder brother when he’d been at school still.
Hazel pinched Johnny to shut him up, and he rubbed his arm but did realize what he’d done, because he told Remus, “Sorry, mate, didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Remus gaped at him for a moment, then abruptly closed his mouth and looked over at the adults in consternation. They all seemed highly amused.
“Who’s this, Johnny?” one of them asked. He had blonde hair in a short ponytail and a sharp chin that reminded her of Johnny’s cousin Ramses.
“Johnny, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend,” said a woman with curly ginger hair and turquoise cat’s eye glasses who looked just like all the other Weasleys, so Hazel assumed she was a blood relative of Johnny’s.
“Oh, Hazel is my life coach, not my girlfriend,” Johnny told them cheerfully.
Another redheaded woman snorted her butterbeer out her nose and had to turn away, mopping at her face.
“You have a life coach?” asked a ginger-haired man. He was smiling widely. “Where did you get money for a life coach?”
“I don’t pay her,” Johnny informed him, making Hazel want to hide her face in her hands. “She just likes bossing me around.”
“Sounds like a girlfriend to me,” said the blonde man with a broad grin, and the woman who’d snorted her drink turned to punch him in the arm. “I’m just joking, Rose,” he added quickly.
She gave him a dirty look, and Johnny grinned at her.
“This is my Auntie Rose,” he told Hazel. His fondness for his aunt was clear in his voice. Hazel gave his favorite auntie a closer look, taking in the air of mischief about her and the fine lines at the corners of her eyes that came from laughing a lot, while Johnny added, “She’s my godmother too.”
“Am I?” his auntie said in shock that Hazel wasn’t sure was feigned. “Bloody hell, when did I agree to that?”
Johnny completely ignored that, still smiling like he was vastly enjoying himself, and introduced Hazel to the other adults. “This is Uncle Scorpius, and Uncle Hugo, and Auntie Lily. Auntie Rose and Uncle Scorpius are Ramses’s parents. And you know who Remus is already from school. Family, this is Hazel.”
“Oi,” said Lily. “Johnny, are you sure she’s not your girlfriend? Hazel, you’d tell us the truth, wouldn’t you?”
“Johnny wouldn’t,” put in Remus with a grin.
“Shut up,” said Johnny.
“I’m not his girlfriend,” Hazel assured them, since there seemed no way out of this gracefully. “I really am his life coach.”
“She’s training me how to not be a twat,” Johnny said brightly, and both his brother and his uncle Hugo choked on their drinks.
Rose had to hide her face against her boyfriend’s chest, her shoulders shaking with silent laughter, and Scorpius looked highly amused, glancing over at his nephew with a broad grin. Hazel remembered abruptly that he’d been the one to call Johnny catastrophically charismatic.
“Well, I can’t believe you’re not getting paid for that,” Lily drawled, smiling widely at Hazel. “Send his dad an invoice, Teddy will pay you if you can manage it. Probably deserve hazard pay, honestly.”
“Thanks, Aunt Lily,” Johnny told her with a chuckle.
“He’s been a twat since he could walk,” Remus said. He was still a little red-faced, but he looked like he was enjoying himself now. “Hell, I’ll give you ten Sickles if you can get him to stop.”
“Professor Longbottom gave me a Galleon,” Hazel admitted, and the adults nearly fell over themselves with laughter.
Johnny was completely unperturbed by his relatives’ reactions, and turned to Hazel with that aggressively cheerful grin of his. “Come on and let’s find my gran so you can meet her. Do you speak any French, Hazel?”
He herded her off toward the house, but not before she heard his aunt Rose murmur, “That is definitely Johnny’s girl.”
Hazel was tempted to punch Johnny in the arm because now they all thought that, but remembered that his auntie had punched her boyfriend the same way and stopped herself. She didn’t want to give them any further ideas.
“They all think I’m your girlfriend now,” she hissed at him. “I told you they would if I came over.”
“We’re just friends, Hazel. Calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” she snapped.
He rolled his eyes. “Why do girls hate that so much? Dora and Fleur get really pissed when I - wait, is it twattish to tell people to calm down?”
“Yes,” Hazel bit out. “It is.”
“Huh.” He stopped at the door to the house and turned to look at her. “Thanks, Hazel. You’re a good coach. See, I can already identify twattery as I’m doing it.”
“I very much want to punch you right now,” she told him seriously.
He flashed that perfect smile at her and then opened the door, waving her in ahead of him. “After you, Coach.”
Oh bugger, he was being gentlemanly. She told him in a low voice as she went past him into the house, “You really are infuriating.”
He winked at her. Absolute git.
*
Johnny had half his attention on Hazel’s face as he took her into the living room to find his grandmother. She was a little flushed, pretending to be appalled by his manners, but she kept looking up at him. When Hazel was really mad, she didn’t look at him, so she wasn’t actually mad at him, fortunately. She was so pretty right now, with the color in her cheeks and her eyes flashing as she looked up at him.
She’s your friend, he told himself sternly. Therefore he ought not be thinking about how pretty she was when she was pink and irritated. He almost wanted her to hit him, in case she hung onto him afterward like she had at the party. But she was his friend, and he liked having her as a friend. He wasn’t going to risk wrecking that by trying to kiss her.
The prospect of losing Hazel as a friend was sobering. He wanted to keep on being her friend. It was more important than the potential fun he could have kissing her. Hazel’s friendship was fascinating and different, and he was starting to wonder if any of his other friends were really his friends at all. He was friendly with everyone, but maybe that didn’t make them his friends.
Johnny doesn’t need friends, his uncle had once said. He has an army of minions.
Hazel was his friend, really his friend, and it turned out that was something he valued more than any of the army of minions.
His grandmother was on the sofa in the playroom, watching his baby sisters playing on the floor, and looked up at him with a smile. Her silver hair was pulled back into a twist, held by a comb made from firecrab shell. Dora had stolen that comb from her over the summer, so she must’ve stolen it back from his sister.
“Hello, Johnny,” she said in her throaty voice, the familiar soft French accent that always felt like the hazy warmth of childhood to him. “Who is your friend?”
“Mémé, this is Hazel.” He watched the two of them do a quick sizing up of each other in that strange way women had, and then his grandmother smiled.
“It’s lovely to meet you, Hazel.”
She’d dropped the aitch in Hazel’s name, since Mémé always struggled with her aitches, but Hazel didn’t look offended, smiling now at her.
“Hi. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Isn’t she lovely,” Mémé murmured to Johnny. “Elle est ta copine?”
“Non, je suis une amie,” Hazel spoke up before he could respond. Her accent was terrible. Johnny didn’t speak very fluent French himself, but the bits he did speak sounded like a native speaker, and he knew a bad accent when he heard one.
“You do speak some French!” he exclaimed, pleased to hear it. “Not very well, though.”
“Don’t be rude, Johnny,” she told him, apparently unwilling to say the word ‘twat’ in front of his grandmother.
“Oh, I like her,” said Mémé. “Johnny, take your sisters outside so I can have a rest.”
Johnny glanced down at the twins. The last thing he wanted was to be in charge of them. They were playing quietly for now, but it wouldn’t last, and then one of them would want to be carried while the other shrieked. Hard pass. “Where’s Mum?”
“In the kitchen, I think.”
Johnny darted away before his grandmother could stop him, grabbing Hazel’s hand to pull her along after him. He let go as soon as they were out of the playroom, before she could tell him that dragging her along like that was twattery.
His mother was in the kitchen, with Liam and Ramses sitting at the table. They were both eating sandwiches, and Liam waved at Hazel. He was chewing, and though most of Johnny’s siblings would happily talk with their mouth full, Liam seemed to have taken too big of a bite to do anything but chew.
“Hi, Hazel,” Ramses said, then took another big bite of his sandwich. His cheek bulged with it.
His mum looked up from where she was rummaging through a cupboard. Her eyes roved over Hazel, and she smiled widely, pushing her red curls back from her forehead as she stood up straight. Behind her in the sink the dishes were washing themselves, and a vegetable peeler was working away at some carrots.
“Hello,” she said with a welcoming smile. “Johnny, who’s your friend?”
“Mum, this is Hazel.” He looked down at Hazel with a smile. From the look on her face, he thought she already liked his mum. Everyone did. His mum was the best. They were the same height, he realized, Hazel and his mum.
His mum rolled her eyes at him, but she was still smiling. “Does Hazel have a last name?”
“McGregor,” Hazel filled in for him. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Hazel is my life coach,” Johnny told his mum before she could get any ideas about Hazel being his girlfriend, and because he was enjoying watching people’s reactions to hearing that.
His mum raised her eyebrows. “What on earth do you have a life coach for?”
Johnny flashed a wide grin at his mum. “To teach me to be a better person, of course.”
“She’s teaching him to stop being a twat,” put in Liam.
“Oh, Johnny,” his mother sighed. “Honestly. Liam, don’t say twat.”
Liam shoved the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and gestured at Ramses, and the two of them dashed off toward the stairs. A second later Ramses came back and said, “Thank you for the sandwich, Aunt Victoire. Bye, Hazel.” Then he dashed away again after Liam.
Johnny’s mum smiled fondly toward the two of them, and then said to Johnny, “I wish you lot would have such nice manners as your cousin.”
“Lupins are feral,” Johnny told her playfully. “Malfoys aren’t. Mum, I’m going to take Hazel down to the pond. We’ll be back later.”
“No snogging at the pond,” his mother told him. Hazel turned bright red.
Johnny rolled his eyes at his mum. “She’s not my girlfriend. Come on, Hazel.”
“It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Lupin,” Hazel managed to say, though she was still rather red.
“You too, dear. Johnny, be back in time for cleanup.” His mother gave him a stern look. “You are not getting out of helping because you have your friend over. Do you pay her to be your life coach?”
“Nah. She does it for free because she likes telling me what to do and calling me names,” Johnny said cheerfully.
“Well, who can blame her. Run along. Don’t forget what I said.”
“About the snogging or the cleanup?”
“Either,” said his mother.
Hazel followed him out the front door and down to the end of the street, where a large field opened up and led down to the little pond surrounded by willow trees. The field had been the site of many imaginary battles when he’d been a little boy, usually pitting half his younger siblings against Remus’s half. Being the general directing the battle was almost as much fun as being in the battle.
“Why are we going to look at a pond?” Hazel asked when they’d crossed the field. Her footsteps were lighter than his, but he could still hear her in the crunch of fallen leaves under her boots.
“Cause it’s cool.” Johnny put up a finger to his lips to hush her, and then ducked under the branches of one of the willow trees. Hazel followed him, her eyes wide as she looked around the miniature clearing the willow’s branches formed.
Johnny pointed silently at the trunk of the tree and waited for Hazel to notice the little creatures. They nearly blended in with the tree, but one was particularly curious and climbed out a bit to stare at Hazel, blinking its tiny eyes as it examined her.
“Oh,” she breathed, her eyes bright. “Bowtruckles.”
“Aren’t they cool?” Johnny smiled proudly at the little tree. His parents didn’t own the pond or the willow trees, but he felt a little proprietary toward them anyway. He’d been coming here for so long, exploring his neighborhood and looking for interesting nooks and corners of his little world, that the place felt like it belonged to him.
“Yeah.” Hazel looked up at him with a smile more open and warm than any he’d seen from her yet.
For a moment Johnny stared down into her eyes, feeling like the world had stopped all around them. The tiny sounds of wintry nature in the willow trees and the frozen pond faded, and he was hyperaware of the movements of Hazel’s chest expanding with each breath as she stared up at him with that quietly delighted smile.
And then, just as suddenly as the moment had come, it was gone, and Hazel looked back at the bowtruckles again.
“They’re very cute. We should go back to the party.”
“Yeah, all right.” He held the branches back for her and she ducked under his arm, close enough that for a moment he felt the delicate brush of her coat against his before she hurried away.