Written for Tigger, as thanks for being an amazing mod on The Golden Snitch.
there's a story written on my bones (would you like to read it?)
When Alice is born, her family rejoices. They rejoice not simply because of her birth though, even if that is obviously a factor in the festivities, but because of the spidery script inked on her back, letters thin and scrambled still.
They'll unscramble as she grows, they know, and they tell the story of the most important thing to ever happen in her life.
Most people only get a few words – a couple of lines at most – that narrate they'll meet this person and help them, or how that one action they take changed another's life for the better. Sometimes it's even something as simple a message as a couple of words saying you'll meet a celebrity.
Only heroes, it is said, get more than a few inches of black ink – and Alice's back is covered by it.
(nobody talks about the darker words, the ones that say you will kill someone or destroy lives – they happen too, but everyone knows that it is better not to have words at all than to have the mark of the evil you will one day commit bared for all to see)
Alice is eleven when her first words become legible. It's just a small section on the top corner of her right shoulder, but it's still more than she's ever been able to read before.
She spends ten minutes twisting her body in front of the mirror in order to try to decipher the untidy handwriting before she remembers that she can just ask her mother to read it to her.
It takes her mother only a moment. The message is, as Alice had already realized, very short. It only tells her that she will meet someone named Frank while going to Hogwarts.
She spends every night until then dreaming about Frank will be like – will he be like her, with enough ink to fill a journal spread across his body? Will he too, have been waiting to find her, warned by a mysterious note somewhere on his skin?
She doesn't know what to hope for – for him to bear her name the way she bears his, or for him not to.
(no one talks about them either, those poor, poor people whose fate is to go unnoticed by the one that impacts on your life the most)
Frank turns out to be the boy who helps her get her trunk aboard the Hogwarts Express. He has dimples when he smiles, and the words 'you will help Alice get to Hogwarts' scribbled around his uncovered wrist like a bracelet.
By the time the train arrives, he has become her best friend.
She gets more and more of her words as the years go by, chunks of it before every Sorting that tell her who among the first year, will be important to her.
It is kind of frightening, to know that she will have an impact on so many people's life, and that they too, will have an impact on hers.
It is something she has noticed, ever since Frank admitted that his words spread across his arms to his neck like tiny black chains – many in her generation have long messages where their elders only had a few words.
She doesn't get why for a long time, not until she sees an old uncle she hadn't visited in years in the summer after her fifth year.
She had been telling him how weird it was, to find that she wore so many of her classmates' names across her back – sometimes in obscure sentences, sometimes in much clearer ones, and sometimes, just an unscrambled name in the middle of a still illegible sentence – when he had startled.
He had taken her hand in his withered ones and looked at her with pity in his eyes. "I'm so sorry, Alice," he had said, and then he had told her that the last time something of the sort had happened, Grindelwald had started a war.
His words freeze the blood in her veins, and she wishes he had never uttered them, that she could go back to thinking this was just a coincidence, even if she had only been fooling herself then, and poorly at that.
Still, she carries back his revelation with her, and she shares it with everyone she wears the name of.
"If there is a war," Frank tells her, his eyes more determined that she's ever seen them, "we will fight it together – and we will win it."
She kisses him then, so thankful that her words, at least, led her to this wonderful boy who always knows what to tell her to make her feel better.
"Sorry," she says, blushing, as she steps back.
"Don't be," he answers, a twinkle in his eyes, and he draws her back against him.
(she only realizes what the words 'you will share Lily's greatest wish' really mean when she gets the news that the Potters were murdered, when the Lestranges invade their home)
(she only gets it when she thinks 'please, let my son live' as she feels the last shreds of her sanity slip between her fingers like smoke)