Heritage
The Black Hole residence, Kent, England, the United Kingdom
22nd August 1998
Getting away from the alcohol is pretty easy when your well-respected guardian nearly died because of your drunkenness.
Well, it was my first time binging on alcohol. But suffice to say, there won’t be any second time to that, and not because Andy has forbidden it or threatened me with not seeing Teddy ever again, before that disaster with my uncontrolled magic and the potion bottles and the mixed potions and her potion-and-glass-punctured lung ever happened.
Once she was back from Saint Mungo’s and our lives went back to more or less normal, that shrewd, long-suffering, self-titled aunt of mine interrogated me about the reason for my drink-binging and… well… many, many things spilt out.
Not the cocoon, though. Never that. And since then, I’ve been trying to return to that state of bliss, to that state of safety, to that state of close companionship, to that state of home….
Go figure. This could have been a better motivator for me to study the mind arts, instead of “clear your mind and hope to keep your thoughts to yourself if you don’t want the Dark Lord to take them all.” Snape needn’t torture me so, if only he’d known. (But then again, he did enjoy torturing me, did he, despite his vow to my dead mum?)
`Snape. Ha….` Stirring the sweetened tea idly, I listen to the silence of the house for the sound and feel of Andy Portkeying back with Teddy. – With my thoughts getting bleaker again, it’s better if I’m not alone like this. Swearing off alcohol doesn’t mean I won’t get into other kinds of trouble, after all, if I got driven into maudlin land again.
But would I feel and get better, if I sought the company of my new fans, the workers belonging to my combined estate, or the friends I don’t really have, right now?
Scowling to myself, I gulp down the tea that’s now grown cold and tap the cup with the tip of my wand to clean it.
A little too enthusiastically, maybe. The cup is now squeaky clean.
Damn. If Andy knows, I will never live this down. Excusing the poor cup as the result of accidental magic will get me teased as an overgrown boy, while blaming the poor teaching of Severus Snape in DADA my sixth year about silent and wordless spell-casting will get me hours of lecturing about looking to the future instead of bemoaning the past.
Well, but Teddy will love all the squeaks, won’t he? Besides, this is a good distraction from all the gloomy thoughts.
So I set to making the poor, squeaky tea cup unbreakable, temperature retaining and ever-fresh; then making it interchangeable by thought with a nippled bottle, a sippy cup, and a ducky figurine for storage; then making it lighter, transparent, a little bit squishy on contact, and able to change a few sizes up and down; then decorating the sides with the colourful but also freezable animation of a chameleon chasing a wolf chasing a dog chasing a stag chasing a snidget chasing a lily with flapping pair of leaves which is trying to land on the chameleon’s back….
Proudly, though rather tiredly, I present my on-the-spot invention to teddy right away, with a flourish at that, just after Andy has found firm footing on the overgrown, small backyard of the equally tiny house, the refuge we hastily bought close to half a year ago for the sake of necessity and practicality.
Predictably, he squeals and tries to grab the now-ducky-shaped former tea cup from my extended hand.
Unpredictably, Andy gives me a sharp, heavy stare caught between awe (`For Merlin’s sake!`), gratitude, grief (`Whatever for?`), and… other things that are too jumbled to notice.
I retract the ducky and fidget with it, giving Andy a puzzled stare and for once ignoring Teddy’s cranky demands for his withheld new toy. “How’s Diagon Alley? Did you hear any new gossip from Madame Malkin?” I ask the rooted woman, in lieu of anything else to say.
She shakes her head; shaking off the strange mood in the process, it seems, because then she moves, ushering me back under the roof, escaping the still-burning late-summer afternoon. She doesn’t talk, though.
Not until Teddy has been put to bed to sleep off the heat, and not about Diagon Alley or pieces of rumour and news from anybody there, either.
“Do you know,” she begins, as we settle at the kitchen counter that doubles as dining table, with each an un-squeaky cup of freshly brewed tea in hand, “that moulding things into other things, things that are far more complicated than the original, has always been the specialty of the Potter bloodline?”
I shrug, treating the question as retorical. She knows, after all, that I am yet to find my family book in any of the Potter vaults, although I’m still to visit any Potter property except for the ruined cottage in Godric’s Hollow, and it might be in one of those. (It’s still a surprise that the Potter wealth lies mostly in land, property and the loyalty of its retainers, for that matter.)
Judging from how she opens her mouth, closes it again, and gets a faraway look that has more the bitter than the sweet in it, I’ve completely misjudged Andy.
I open my own mouth, ready to placate her, or change the topic, or dismiss my ignorance with some hard facts, but she shakes her head before I can let out a sound.
Her look, given straight into my own eyes, is so maternal and sad and understanding that my heart twinges in response.
Not because I miss someone who could really be my mother, although it does play a role, since Andy has always been just Teddy’s grannie and my self-titled but well-acknowledged aunt, but… that understanding…. Well, it’s new, and as if a mother were regarding her child as grown-up and free to choose to think, and all the other trappings the adult world has, however reluctantly.
Nobody ever gave me such acknowledgement and freedom to choose for myself, even though I have never been truly a child, whether by circumstance or design… or designed circumstance….
Damn. It all comes back to Albus bloody Dumbledore again, doesn’t it?
“Do you wish to know more about your family?” Andy is asking. So, to escape a returning gloominess as induced by the current realisation, I hastily nod to the offer before she can explain further.
It all comes back to Albus Dumbledore and his machinations and his secret keeping, but I refuse to play to his fiddle – so to say – long after he’s dead.
Go figure. A Black does manage to turn me away from Dumbledore, and the person is not whom people will ever think of, when thinking about a sharply caustic, disturbingly cunning, dangerously ruthless, alarmingly knowledgeable, frighteningly competent magical person with a soul as black as his or her name is.
But, well, then again, was Albus Dumbledore as “light” as he let himself be believed to be?