Ariana

She had only wanted to help her beloved Aberforth. She didn't know that her attempt at helping was dooming her brothers to years of guilt, heartbreak, and that it would damage their relationship for the better part of a century.

Ariana ran her fingers over the textured wallpaper in her basement bedroom, feeling the bumps and groves that followed the pattern of the paper. She had done it before many, many times, but she was still fascinated by the feel of it under her fingertips. Even though she had spent the vast majority of the last six or seven weeks locked up in her room, she still had not bored of this.

She had barely been allowed out of the house for eight years now, ever since those horrible boys had hurt her. Even though she couldn't always remember things that had happened recently, she was able to still picture that summer day in 1891 perfectly. It still haunted her and was especially prone to forcing its way to the forefront of her mind at night when she was trying to get to sleep.

She had been outside, minding her own business and experimenting with her magic on the things around her, when the three Muggle boys had seen her. They made their way into the garden and asked her to show them what she had been doing. She could still remember the terror she had felt when they came in, as though it was only hours ago. She hadn't been able to do the magic again, although she was trying desperately, and the boys did not take it well.

They had started off small when she couldn't do what they told her to, yanking on her hair and shoving her around a bit. The minutes that followed were mostly a blur of pain, shock, and confusion, even when she looked back at what had happened. All she knew was that when she was down on the ground, bleeding from the head and with one of her eyes starting to swell shut, she had heard her father come out of the house.

"Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing?" came the voice of her father. He was going to save her, and she had never been as happy to hear him as she was then.

The Muggle boys seemed to have realized this about the same time she did, because they had jumped off of the ground, where they had been kneeling over her. One of them took longer than the others, because he had to pull his hand out from beneath her skirt and tried to wipe it on his trousers, as a half-hearted attempt to remove the evidence of what he had just been doing.

Her father had come over to see her and to help her off of the ground. He was just telling her to run into the house and to go see her mother when the sounds of the boys trying to run away reached them. Ariana had stood rooted to the spot as she watched her father turn on the spot and yank out his wand.

Her father had aimed at the boy who had his hand up her skirt first, putting him in a full body bind, before he turned to the other two and used the stunning curse on them. She found herself growing almost scared of her father, even though he had saved her, as she watched him use a red curse that made each of the boys scream in agony one at a time. She had never seen people scream for help the way the three boys who had hurt her did.

This had all happened at the old house, before they had packed up and moved to Godric's Hollow. She hadn't seen Papa since they had come here, and he wasn't talked about. She hadn't really seen anybody other than Mama, Albus, and Aberforth since then, because she had barely been out of the house. Sometimes Aberforth would take her out at night to see the goats that they had, but not much more.

The fact that he had convinced their mother to let her outside from time to time, even though it was always at night, was one of Ariana's favourite things about Aberforth. He didn't get mad at her for not being able to control her magic. She could tell that her mother had been annoyed at her because of it and Albus seemed to ignore it, like it would mean the problem didn't exist. Like she didn't exist. But sweet Aberforth never got angry at her when she was struggling to do something, nor did he yell at her when she lost control and made something bad happen. He hadn't even gotten angry when she had one of her episodes at the start of the summer, even though it had killed Mama.

That was when she had started spending almost all of her time in her bedroom. Albus was in charge now, and he didn't want to spend time with her. She could hear what happened in the rest of the house from her little room in the basement and she almost never heard his voice. It wasn't much different having him home for the holidays as it was from having him at school, both ways he was almost never at home.

That was one of the things that surprised Ariana most about that afternoon. She could hear that Albus was home. Her Aberforth was home as well, like he usually was, but she also could hear a different voice, one that she had only heard a few times before. It was Albus's new friend, Gellert, she was sure. She had only caught a glimpse of him for a moment one time before she was rushed back downstairs, when he had come over for the first time at the start of the summer. She only knew his name because Aberforth had told her. She had not been allowed to see him, which she did not mind. She felt rather skittish around men.

Gellert had only come over to their house a few times, so his presence upstairs was unusual in of itself. The other four times that he had been over, Ariana had heard the slamming of the back door and had been able to see Aberforth heading into the backyard towards where the goats were kept. For some reason, he did not seem any more pleased with having a strange young man in the house than she was. Whenever he returned inside and Gellert was still talking with Albus, Aberforth would make his way back downstairs to her room and spend time with her.

When she could hear the voice of Albus's friend, Ariana had moved closer to her window to see Aberforth leaving. But as the minutes passed and she had not heard the door slam shut, she started to realize that Aberforth might not be leaving. This struck up her curiosity somewhat, but not nearly as much as the voices that started coming from the ground floor did.

"— can't leave," she could hear Aberforth say. "She needs attention," his next few words were muffled, but she could hear, "stable" at the end.

A laugh that Ariana did not recognize floated down the stairs then. "And you think you could stop us?" asked the accented voice of Gellert.

Albus's quiet voice came next, but he was not speaking loud enough for her to be able to comprehend what he was saying. It must not have been very pleasant though, because Aberforth swore at his brother in reply.

"Don't pretend you're doing this for her," Aberforth spat. "You're selfish and want nothing more than to be rid of her to be free."

While Ariana wasn't able to understand exactly what Aberforth was getting at, she was able to deduce that they were talking about her. Who else could it be, now that her mother had died? She hoped that she had misunderstood, but she had the horrible feeling that she had the right idea.

While she was thinking, she was only vaguely aware of Gellert speaking, sounding as though he was talking down to Aberforth. Albus spoke in an attempt to cut him off, but his voice was overpowered by the voice of his younger brother. Aberforth had barely finished speaking when Gellert said something. The word that he had shouted didn't mean anything to her, until she heard the scream of pain that followed it.

She responded to Aberforth's scream immediately, bursting out of her room and heading to the door that would lead her upstairs. It was locked, as always, but she felt a strange tingling sensation in her fingertips and next thing she knew the door had flung open, slammed against the wall, and she was pounding up the stairs towards the ground floor.

It wasn't hard to find them. She could tell that the voices had come from directly above her bedroom, placing the three adolescent boys in the sitting room. She could hear Albus yelling at his new friend, his usually calm voice filled with rage. "Gellert! Stop!"

"I was showing him a taste of what he deserved for trying to stop us," hissed Gellert.

Other any other circumstances, the anger in his voice would have been enough to make Ariana turn around and head back downstairs. She didn't like men she didn't know at the best of times and now that he was angry, she really didn't want to see him.

"Not in my house!" Albus retorted.

Ariana was torn. She didn't know if she would be able to help Aberforth, not if Albus was there, but she still felt that she should check on him, just in case. With another loud bang, she flung open the door and stepped into the sitting room.

The scene that met her eyes puzzled her. Albus was standing closest to where she was, facing so she could only see his profile. His mouth was set in a firm line and his light blue eyes were unusually dull. His wand was drawn and was currently pointing at Gellert Grindelwald.

Gellert was standing opposite of them, wand also drawn. His hair was falling across his forehead and into his blue eyes. He didn't seem to have noticed that his hair was a mess or that his clothing had been ruffled up. He was staring down at Aberforth with a smirk on his face when he asked. "Did you honestly think you could do any damage to me, you little arschloch?"

Aberforth was pushing himself off of the carpet, breathing heavily and staring at the foreign boy with intense hatred. His own wand was on the floor next to his hand, as though he had dropped it. Her brother grabbed the wand before standing up and pointed it at Gellert. With a single word, the other boy's cheek split open and he started to bleed.

"Stop!" Albus's voice filled the room, angry and commanding. Mixed with the fighting, it frightened her. Her eldest brother, tall and slender with auburn stumble across his face looked back and forth between the other two boys. It got the attention of the others, but they didn't stop.

"Why do you choose his side?" Aberforth snapped. He moved his wand between his brother and Gellert, even though Albus didn't have his wand out. "You care more about him than your own family."

Albus glared. "Don't talk about things you don't understand."

"Is that it? You think I can't understand what you two are talking about? Your egos must be so inflated, you aren't that great. You can't change anything. You can't even control your own family!"

Gellert's face twisted and he started casting a curse at her favourite brother. But, before the ray of red light could hit him, Albus's wand was out and the light stopped.

Before she knew what was happening, the three boys were shouting things around her. Flashes were going off all around her, hitting thing other than their targets due a combination of poor aim and what she could only assume were protective spells. The glass in a frame shattered with a loud crack and Ariana looked over to see a line carving through a photograph of of their family before the incident, of her and her parents and her brothers when things were good. She didn't like it.

When she looked over again, her brothers were still yelling. Albus's long hair was messed up and the bottom of his shirt was brown and smoking, as though it had been on fire only moments before. Aberforth was grimacing, clearly in pain, with dirt still on his dark trousers from when he had fallen on the floor earlier. Or maybe the dirt was from something that had happened since, Ariana couldn't quite be sure. Gellert was still bleeding from his cheek, the blood dripping onto his starched white shirt. The look on his face scared her.

All three had their wands out, but they were moving so fast that she couldn't tell who was pointing at who. Did they want to help or hurt each other?

She tried to yell at them all to stop, but no words came out. Instead, it was like her magic came out instead of the words she had been trying to say. But it didn't make the noises, the shouting, and the flying lights from spells stop. She didn't even know if they had noticed her outburst, or if they thought one of them had done it.

Ariana tried to make her way forward to get their attention, wringing her hands in desperation. Every couple seconds, something would shoot out of them, but she couldn't control it. She hadn't been able to control it for years, not since those bad boys had hurt her. She took another step forward and heard all three of the others shout at once. Their voices blended together, all shouting words she didn't understand, and she couldn't tell who said what.

As she tried to reach her brothers, something hit her. For the first time in a while, she was positive of what it was. She didn't know the name of the spell or what it was intended to do, or even if it was just one spell, but she knew that it was magic and she knew that it had hit her.

She stumbled, unable to control her legs. She tried to scream, but she couldn't make her voice work properly. As she fell she looked up to see what had happened, to try to figure out what was going on.

The last thing she registered as her brain went fuzzy was a pair of blue eyes.

Author's Note: Comments? Any guesses on who the pair of blue eyes belongs to? I would love to hear from you!