halt the clock —that syncopates our love (Harry Potter OC)
Calix is eighteen when the Dark Lord dies.
But he doesn’t yet know that the man is dead. He spends that Samhain night with the Branch members of House Parkinson, his thoughts turned towards his deceased parents as he sacrifices some of his blood and magic to light the bonfire and leads the procession when time comes for the others to make their own sacrifice to honour their ancestors.
His relatives ask him if he’s planning on taking the Dark Mark any time soon; he gives them non-committal responses. His uncle Jared, his father’s youngest brother is particularly insistent.
“Your parents dithered about it too much,” he claims, proudly revealing his own Mark. “It is time you join us, child.”
He later shows off his daughter, a wailing one-year-old all dolled up in pink and stresses that he would like to see her study at a school devoid of mudbloods.
Calix hums in sympathy, as if he cared about what poor Pansy will suffer if she’s made to share a class with a muggle-born student. His grandmother reminds his uncle pointedly that the celebration is meant to honour the dead, not engage in political discussion. It isn’t out of any sympathy for muggles; Calix’ grandmother is simply suspicious of this political entity with an assumed name and no fortune. She believes that what truly matters about being pure-blood is that in a society where no one struggles to meet their basic needs, it is only the smartest families who have made sure to keep their Houses wealthy, magically powerful, and politically and culturally influential. When the others stayed complacent or lost everything due to reckless investments or feuds, they accumulated riches, set trends and passed laws that changed the face of Albion.
“Everyone in the magical world should be rich,” she says, “and I seriously side-eye those with decent lineage who weren’t able to accumulate treasures and inventions like we and the other Unbroken Houses have.”
As such, Rowena Parkinson nee Lestrange was unimpressed by this Dark Lord with not a sickle to his name who had been a host of the Malfoys since he made his first appearance in Albion.
Calix on the other hand isn’t enthusiastic about all the murder and torture involved in the whole ordeal. He has read the papers and heard his classmates talk. He doesn’t see what is so exciting about all this gratuitous violence and gore.
Besides, muggle-born integration is only the pretext Light wizards use to pass laws restricting Dark practices and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise. Actual muggle-borns do not have the standing to do anything about what bothers them about the magical world. Being mildly inconvenienced by an ignorant religious muggle-born gasping in horror at blood magic does not constitute oppression.
Having their religion suppressed and their grimoires criminalised does.
Though to be fair, Calix hears more about the Light families that have been targeted than about the ones Death Eaters claim to hate the most.
Dead muggles, muggle-borns and squibs make up numbers in the Daily Prophet.
The scions of established Light Houses have eulogies written about them.
But Calix doesn’t care enough about the Light to want to kill anyone on the other side of the magical world’s divide.
He didn’t hate any of these people enough to be able to throw the Killing curse at them, let alone the Cruciatus. He found them annoying, nothing more.
But Samhain is not the right time to explain that to his least favourite uncle, so he just keeps his answers noncommittal until the family magic finally responds to their sacrifice and sends back the echo of their deceased’s magic through the bond that unites them all. Calix bites his lip when he feels the phantom hand of his father touch his shoulder and his mother’s kiss on top of his head. He curls his hand around his wand to stop it from trembling.
He misses them so much it hurts. He feels their absence like the vanishing of a rib, leaving the cage to collapse and his lungs and heart to be exposed, vulnerable.
His parents did not take part in the war. They died performing a ritual, as many wizards do. He had no one to blame for it, though he dearly wished he could point fingers at someone, anyone.
After the celebration is over, he excuses himself from the celebration.
He gives instructions to the three house elves bound to his family's land and goes to sleep, secure in his knowledge that his grandmother would make sure that his guests would not overstay their welcome.
That night, he has a strange nightmare.
He dreams about being an owl.
She is an owlet, the last of a clutch of three. She and her siblings were caught by wizards at a young age. They are fed potions and bespelled to heighten their natural magic, until their intelligence is almost alike that of a human and they can find any address in the world. The process is uncomfortable, painful even. Her siblings cannot take it; they are deemed unsuitable and released back into their natural habitat. She is the only one of her breed that remains. For some reason, this is significant.
When they deem her ready, they bring her to the shop to be sold off. She is bought by a giant-magical-human and gifted to a tiny-magical-human-child as a birthday present.
He gives her a name. She had no need for one before, but she likes it more than just being called “the snowy owl” by her trainers and the shopkeepers. And Naming sometimes has power one cannot predict. She likes that too.
Hedwig grows to love him. He feeds her treats, scratches her feathers in the right way and talks to her like a friend. He tells her secrets he wouldn’t tell anyone else. They are all about human concepts she cares little about, but she listens anyway. She learns about his human’s parents, who hatched him but were killed-but-not-eaten before they could properly see him fly. She learns the names of the predators that stalk him, and more about them than she would care to know about the arctic fox who almost ate her clutch when they were fledglings.
She loves him, but she cannot protect him from the other humans. Her tiny-human-magical-fledgling is the target of predator-rotten-smelling-human-magicals, the corrupted-predator-who-flies-and-kills-but-does-not-eat especially.
She can do nothing to protect him, until she can. And she dies for it.
But her story doesn’t end there. Hedwig’s bond to her fledgling, built during her Naming tethered her to him in death and let her watch as he sought the pieces of the corrupted-predator-who-flies-and-kills-but-does-not-eat to destroy him. She stays with him until the end, where he has to sacrifice himself to eradicate the last piece of the predator who stalked him his whole life.
Hedwig’s soul comes with his to the white-station-of-death. Perched on Harry Potter’s shoulder, she waits for him to board the train.
She screeches when she sees the old-powerful-magical-human-with-guilty-eyes.
“You did this to my human,” Calix screams.
“Hedwig, no!” yells his-her human.
The old-powerful-magical-human-with-guilty-eyes raises his wand, and the world turns dark.
Hedwig — Calix, his name is Calix — wakes up, disoriented, only to find out in the papers that the Potters are dead, and the Dark Lord was defeated by their one-year-old son.