Chapter 1
Breakfast with her parents always felt, well, awkward. At least, since the ruse went into place. Harry was still getting used to the fact that they thought she’d gone to AIM and wanted to talk to her about her school. Especially since Lily had gone there as well and was prone to.... reminiscing.
“We always loved going out on the river on weekends too, they used to let us rent kayaks and canoes. Have you done that at all?” Harry shook her head silently.
“Sorry Mum, I’ve been busy, keeping up with potions study on my own.” Lily frowned gently.
“You do still look a little pale, dear. You will try to get outside more this year, won’t you?”
“Yes, Mum.” Harry returned to her toast and her potions periodical, hoping as always, that this was the end of their conversation. There were only so many times she could use being a shut-in as an excuse for not knowing much about AIM’s student life.
It was, unfortunately, not the end.
“Are most students in healing from America? Or is it sort of a mix?” Harry could at least answer this one.
“Mostly British, I would say. There are some Americans, some Irish, one kid’s actually French. But mostly British.”
“Not surprising,” Lily commented, standing up to carry her plate to the sink, “It’s something which appeals to a lot of Muggleborns, since it has a Muggle-equivalent. Of course, I’d hoped you’d meet more people from other places.”
Harry shrugged again, longing to end the conversation.
“Still,” Lily continued, “I suppose it explains why you haven’t picked up much of an accent. Mine was all over the place the summer after my first year.” With that, Lily swept out of the room, leaving Harry frozen at the kitchen table.
Knock, Knock-knock.
Archie was jerked awake from his indulgent lie-in by the rapping on his door. Harry had a certain way of knocking, crisp and particular. He grabbed a medical journal and attempted to make himself look busy before calling her in—he really didn’t need his workaholic cousin’s mockery for daring to be “lazy”.
“Go on then Harry!”
The words barely left his mouth before Harry opened the door, and upon catching sight of her, Archie scrambled upright. His cousin had a nervous tension about her, lips pressed so tight that the skin around them was going pale. “What’s wrong?”
Harry crinkled her nose, the way she did whenever she wasn’t quite sure how to start.
“It’s nothing…or, I suppose it’s not really nothing. It’s just something we should have thought of.”
“Okaaaaaayy…?” Archie drew out the final vowel, letting in hang in question. Harry’s head jerked up, pointing at him intensely.
“That. That’s it. How did we miss this?” He felt a little uncomfortable with his cousin’s vehemence, and moved her finger away from his nose.
“What?”
“Oh-kaaaaaaaaa-yuh,” Harry mimicked, dragging out the vowel and sounding somewhat nasal. She sounded ridiculous.
“Mind filling me in?” Archie asked dryly. Harry always did this; went off on rants without even bringing him up to speed. Conversation with Harry when she’d been seized by an idea was like starting late in a broomstick race.
Harry cast a quick charm to ensure no one could listen and turned to him. “I don’t sound American, and you…” Realization hit him like a ton of bricks.
“…And I do. We have to homogenize our accents?” Harry nodded. A breathless sort of laugh escaped him. “How has nobody noticed?”
“Technically someone did notice. Mrs. Hurst mentioned it to me once. I just…kept putting off dealing with it I suppose.” Harry looked appropriately embarrassed, so Archie pushed down his mild irritation at her forgetting to tell him relevant information. Again. Harry, after all, couldn’t be expected to anticipate everything, and he really should have thought of this on his own.
“Besides,” she continued, “It’s not as though you sound properly American or anything. You’re still clearly British. It’s just…something has crept into your accent. It’s sort of—twangy?” Archie nodded sagely.
“Yes, that’d be the southern US influence I suspect. AIM is in Virginia, you know.” Harry shrugged. He knew she had known that. He also knew that Harry’s grasp of American geography outside of what was necessary for the ruse was woefully lacking. He wasn’t even positive she’d heard of less well-known states like Rhode Island or Illinois.
Not much to be smug about, American geography, but he found a small space to exalt in something his cousin had no real clue about. He refocused as she began speaking once more.
“…Of course we’ll have to isolate key factors of our given accents so that we can begin to mimic each other, and we’ll have to avoid any slang, and—” he cleared his throat.
“Or, um, we could just listen to one another speak a little more carefully? And if we hear one of us doing something strange, we’ll slip it in and mimic it? I don’t think you and I can have the exact same accent anyway.” Harry raised an eyebrow.
“I’m sure we could train ourselves.”
“Yeah, sure, but don’t you think people at Hogwarts would notice?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, cuz, I hate to say it, but you’ve gotten all posh.” Harry looked somewhat offended.
“No, I have not.” Archie looked at her sceptically, and she sighed. “Okay, I did hear it that time.”
“I think it’s best if we just accept that we can’t train ourselves to match accents exactly, because it makes no sense for Rigel to sound even a little bit American. So I’ll just be more careful when I speak. Maybe ask dad for pureblood elocution lessons or something?” Harry snorted in disbelief.
“Elocution lessons?”
“Yeah, most scions take ‘em. It’s so you sound appropriately ‘refined’ and ‘educated’. Haven’t you ever wondered why Dad’s much posher than the other adults in our family?” Harry startled.
“I hadn’t noticed, actually.” Archie rolled his eyes. Just like Harry to miss something like that. She was so observant when it came to things which interested her that he sometimes forgot how oblivious she was when it came to…well, literally anything else. “I suppose we’ll just have to listen to one another then.”
The problem with listening carefully to each other, Harry found, was that she suddenly listed closely to everyone around her. Growing up she’d always thought her parents had the same accent, and that their accent was the same as hers. But now…
For example, she’d been eating lunch with her mother, attempting (once again) to read this month’s periodical, when Lily had asked her if she’d mind running a bath for Addy. Only, the way she’d said bath was…strange. The “a” was…shorter? Perhaps? And higher. Where Harry knew she and James might say “bath” so that it rhymed with “glass”, Lily said it so that it rhymed with “trap.” And once she noticed that, well, she suddenly noticed all sorts of peculiarities to Lily’s accent.
“It’s so…flat” She complained to Archie a few days after their initial accent-pact. “I’d never noticed before.”
“She is from the Midlands. She sounds a little like my mate Timmy sometimes, to be honest. I think he said he’s not too far from Cokeworth.” Harry had shrugged and decided to ignore her mum’s accent a bit more, if only for her sanity. Two days later, Archie ruined her streak.
“Actually,” he commented when they were safely ensconced in the potions lab after dinner, “She sounds a bit American sometimes too. Not a lot, just in her inflection. And well…some of the words she says sound a bit like Shannon. She’s from Virginia. ‘ou-et’ instead of ‘out’ and the like.” Harry did not find this observation comforting in the least.
“If she still sounds American when she hasn’t been to AIM in over a decade, should I sound more American too?”
“It’s not very noticeable, Harry. We only notice because we’re paying special attention to it. Most people can’t hear any difference between her and the rest of us, it’s only in a couple words, really.” Harry must have looked less than comforted because Archie gave her a pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry so much. No one’s really noticed my accent, clearly, or else we’d be dealing with a lot of questions.”
“You’d better keep an eye on yourself, that’s all.”
She’d thought the matter sorted, but then Remus had returned to family dinners after recovering from the full moon. She’d known he was from Northern Ireland, of course she had, but now that she was focusing on accents it was all she could hear. It was nowhere near as strong as Seamus Finnigan’s, but it was clear. How each sentence rose at the end, like he was asking a question even when he wasn’t. Or how he’d “pool on” his boots, and how dinner that night was absolutely “beezer”.
She supposed she probably spoke most like James and Sirius, because she hadn’t noticed much from either of them, though the way she said her “r”s sounded far more like James than Sirius according to Archie.
Through it all, she listened to Archie. Archie, who drawled on some long vowels. Archie, whose pitch had gotten flatter. Archie who’d picked up all sorts of slang she’d never heard in her life, from “mint” to “no duh” to the worst offender—
“Y’all.” Harry repeated the word back to Archie. He looked at Harry in confusion.
“Hmmm?”
“You said y’all just now. You said ‘see y’all later.’” Harry held Addie in her arms and frowned at Archie.
“Oh. Well…hmmm.”
“Add it to the list of slang words to stop saying I suppose.” Harry shrugged. They’d handled most of Archie’s slang (both American and otherwise) by having him practice not using it. It was better than Rigel suddenly using slang that no one else in Hogwarts would understand.
“I don’t know if I can stop,” Archie said uncomfortably, “It’s sort of automatic now. More than the other words anyway.”
“What do you mean? Just practice saying the whole thing. ‘You. All.’ Simple.”
“Do you think you could just start using it instead? I’ve gotten rid of my other slang; can’t you incorporate one phrase into Rigel’s dialect? Please? We can say I learned it from you.” Harry opened her mouth to give an emphatic no, paused, and closed her mouth. Adding a blatantly American phrase, one which she could have only picked up at AIM, would certainly help convince Lily that her daughter really did go to the same institution she herself had.
“All right. But only ‘y’all’. And only as Harry.” Archie shrugged in reply.
“You can try. It’s surprisingly hard to stop using once you start.” At the time Harry had rolled her eyes and vowed to rehearse the annoying phrase so it wouldn’t sound unnatural when she slipped it in at the dinner table.
The problem, of course, was that Archie was right. It was incredibly, annoyingly difficult to stop using “y’all” once she started. She’d say it as she left home to go to the alleys, say it when she sat down in the Phoenix and asked “How’ve y’all been doing?”, and she’d even begun writing it in a few letters, before furiously scratching it out and starting the letter over upon proofreading.
"It's just so bloody convenient!" She ranted to Archie a few weeks before they were due to return to school. "I can't seem to stop!"
"I told you, it's a hard habit to shake." She pursed her lips at Archie, displeased with how flippantly he was behaving in the face of this potential disaster.
"Yes, but it's not as though Rigel can use it."
"Would it be the end of the world? I'm using it now, and I am, presumably, Rigel." Harry shook her head. The phrase would stick out like a sore thumb amongst the carefully refined accents of her Slytherin peers, and if the ruse were ever discovered, she needed Rigel to appear to be a completely different person from herself. The y'all connection was too potentially risky.
"I'll just have to get rid of it. I trained myself into using it, I can train myself out again."
So, Harry spent hours practicing saying "you all", over and over again. She found that practicing in front of a mirror gave her some element of comfort, allowing her to stare and the shapes her mouth made as she said each careful word, returning Rigel's dialect to its proper place.
By the time September came and she was preparing to get back on the train, Rigel was fairly confident that she’d managed to escape her phrasal confusion. She wandered the train until she found her friends’ compartment. It looked like everyone except Draco was there. She stored her trunk in the luggage rack and took a set by the window.
“How have you been, Rigel?” Pansy asked, smiling softly in the way she was wont to do.
“Lovely, though not as lovely as you, Pan.” She gave her friend a jokingly flirtatious smile, and Pansy gently batted her arm. “Honestly, though, it was productive. Made some progress in my independent research. Did y’a—” She cut herself off with a cough “you all have a good summer?”
Perhaps this will be a bigger problem than I thought.