I wrote this a couple of months ago, got stuck, and shelved it. Came back to it recently whilst cleaning out my files and found I rather liked it, so I tidied it up and decided to post it; I was going to extend it, but I think I've already ended it at a good place. Never underestimate my ability to get upset about Ariana Dumbledore and her brothers. Typical late nineteenth century misogyny woven throughout, I'm afraid. First published piece in quite some time—tell me what you think!
Though barely five o'clock in the evening, the sun had begun to set in Mould-on-the-Wold, leaving behind a chill that crept into the house despite the roaring fire in the sitting room; it was much too cold for braids, Ariana decided, and she tugged the little bands from her hair with careful fingers, wincing as the rubber snagged on blond strands and pulled them loose. Once free, she shook her hair out, letting it fall halfway down her back in rippling waves. She had pretty hair, or so she thought; quite possibly prettier than Mum's coarse, dark locks, and certainly much prettier than her father and brothers' heads of crinkly rust. It floated behind her, princess-like, as she flitted up the stairs to her oldest brother's room.
"Hold it like this, Aberforth," said Albus from within, and Ariana peeped inside the bedroom, curious. The boys had pushed all the furniture to the walls to make an empty, vaguely circular space in the center of the room. At one end of the circle stood Aberforth, the younger of her two brothers, brandishing a stick from outside like a wand; behind him, repositioning his arms, was Albus, the elder. They took no note of Ariana, not even when she crossed into the room and stood directly behind them with her arms behind her back.
"The book says 'a steady but light-footed stance,' you're looking like you've got lockjaw," Albus continued as he adjusted Aberforth's arm holding the twig.
"That's rubbish! What, am I s'posed to hold it like this?" Aberforth let his arm droop, the stick now dangling lazily from his fingers. "I look like a fairy. You could breathe on me and I'd drop it."
"Because you aren't doing it right," said Albus patiently, "here, let me show you."
He stepped away from Aberforth to return to the opposite side of the room, at last spied Ariana, and froze. After a few moments of silence, Aberforth twisted to see what he was looking at; then, seeing Ariana, he scoffed. "What are you doing here?" he asked rudely.
Ariana put her hands on her hips, letting her skirt flare impressively around her legs, and stuck her nose up. "Mum said you have to let me play with you," she replied.
"No, she didn't! You're making that up," said Aberforth at once.
"Am not!" retorted Ariana.
"Well, either way, we aren't playing," said Albus in a bossy voice, picking up a matching stick from the floor on his side of the circle. "We're dueling. So, kindly run along."
"It looks a lot like playing to me," said Ariana. It really did: Albus and Aberforth stood opposite each other in what they clearly thought to be imposing stances, waving around twigs. This knowledge didn't abash either brother in the slightest—Albus gave her a patronizing smile, and Aberforth snorted.
"Of course you'd think that," said Aberforth, sneering, "you're a girl. Girls don't duel."
At this, Ariana let out an indignant shriek, stomping a foot on the bedroom floor. "That's not true!"
"That is true," said Albus. Unlike Aberforth, he didn't snort or sneer, but instead looked at her as if she were really thick. Albus looked at a lot of people this way. "Girls don't duel, or they oughtn't; it isn't proper. Go and find Mother and she'll be happy to show you something suitably ladylike for you to do. Like—" he waved his stick thoughtfully as he paused, searching for a word, and then smirked, "—like knit."
Aberforth barked out a laugh. Color rushed into Ariana's face, and she balled her small hands into fists. "Girls can duel if they want to," she insisted.
"'Can' and 'should' are two very different things," said Albus. He waved his stick again, this time toward the door. "Run along, now, Ariana."
"No." She planted her feet, lips pursed, slim brows drawn in a scowl. "Let me play, too, or—"
"Or what?" asked Albus.
"You'll run and tell on us?" jeered Aberforth.
Flushing deeper with anger, Ariana blurted, "Yes, I will! I'll go and tell Mum and then she'll—"
But her words were drowned out by her brothers' laughter. "Oh, I'm scared now," said Aberforth between sniggers. "Merlin's beard, Ariana, no one likes a tattletale."
"You know, if you tattle too much," added Albus, also snickering, "your tongue will fall off."
Her mouth dropped open. "No, it won't!" she shrieked.
"Will too," said Aberforth in a singsong voice.
"Will not!"
"Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't. Go and tell and find out if you must," suggested Albus. "And close the door behind you."
Ariana twisted, as if to obey, and then spun back toward her brothers with renewed fire. "You can't tell me what to do!" she raged.
Albus tilted his head, lips pursed in mock concentration. "Well, all things considered, dear sister—I am older than you, and you are a girl, so—yes, I believe I can. I believe I just did, actually." Opposite him, Aberforth crowed with yet more laughter.
"You're never going to get married," shot back Ariana, "if you're this awful to girls. Why do you hate girls so much?"
"I don't hate girls, nor do I hate you," replied Albus, "and I will get married, just not to such a loudmouthed brat as you."
And, at last, Ariana was stung: Tears filmed her eyes, and one rolled down her cheek when she tried to blink it away. "Oh, now look what you did," said Aberforth in pretend sympathy as he took notice.
"I'm—t-telling Mum you said that!" wailed Ariana, and she turned on her heel and flounced out of the room. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Albus raise a hand and flick his wrist; the door slammed shut.
She wouldn't cry, though she wanted to: They weren't worth it, and if she was honest with herself, this was but more of the same. Instead, Ariana made a point to stomp as loudly as she could as she journeyed from Albus's room to her own, where she flopped down in front of her dollhouse with an exaggerated huff. Her eyes still burned, and she irritably rubbed them against the sleeve of her dress.
"Stupid," she muttered, unsure of she was speaking of the tears or her brothers. The latter, she decided, and, slightly placated, she picked up one of the three dolls sitting in the pretend sitting room, smoothing back her pretty brown hair as she did. "Isn't that right, Miss Johanna? They're stupid. Stupid boys and their stupid duels and—they're stupid."
Miss Johanna stared up at her with big green eyes and a placid, red-lipped smile. Ariana imagined she could hear her agree.
"Let them have their fun," continued Ariana in a mumble, setting Miss Johanna beside her and lifting her sister, Miss Susanna, from the house. (She always gave her dolls names that rhymed with her own; it seemed to create a kind of bond between them.) "We'll just let them, won't we, Miss Susanna? And—" Something occurred to her then, and Ariana gave the redheaded doll a wide, watery smile. "Mum said not to duel in the house, anyway. She did. I remember, now. She said, 'No dueling in the house, or somebody will get hurt.'" Her favorite doll, the blonde-haired Lyanna, looked a bit left out, and so Ariana rested Susanna beside Johanna to take Lyanna into her arms. "So, you see, we're glad we're not dueling with stupid, silly Aberforth and Albus, because they're going to get in trouble, anyway. And I'm not even going to tell. They'll get in trouble all on their own. And you know what we're going to do?"
Ariana paused for effect. Susanna, Johanna, and Lyanna watched her in wait for her response.
"We're going to laugh," said Ariana, and the three dolls seemed to beam yet wider.
On a whim, she glanced out the window: The sun was about halfway through its departure, so that it nestled neatly against the surrounding hills like a pat of butter, lighting up the back garden in a brilliant orange glow. Technically, Ariana wasn't allowed outside without a brother or parent in tow after sundown, but— "The sun's not down yet, really, is it?" she asked the dolls. Misses Johanna and Susanna looked hesitant; wonderful, reliable Miss Lyanna, on the other hand, seemed to say, Well, of course not. Just look outside. It's practically still daytime.
"Still daytime," Ariana echoed. Smiling widely, much happier now than a few moments before, she stood with resolve and nestled the dolls against her chest. "Still daytime means we can go outside. And we—" she plucked her cloak off a hook on the wall, wrapping it tightly around her, "—are going to have much more fun than they—" she took her hat from the bedstead, folding its flaps firmly over her ears, "—are having. Isn't that right?"
Sandwiched between Ariana's dress and her cloak, the dolls gave silent cheers of agreement. Ariana folded her arms over them to keep them secure and scurried out of her bedroom as quickly and quietly as she could to keep from being seen—because, although it was technically not dark, she didn't think her parents would appreciate her loophole.
Flitting down the stairs, hair flying behind her, Ariana halted in front of the kitchen door, waited for her mother's shadow to pass, and tiptoed past the doorway, quiet as a mouse. Then, with one last peek around to be sure, she rushed to the back door, opening it with great care, sliding out, and shutting it just as tentatively. For a few moments, she stood on the doorstep, as if waiting for reprimand; when none came, she giggled and flew down the steps, her dolls threatening to slip between her cloak and dress as she darted for the tiny table and chairs her father had set up for her beside the back garden hedge.
Painted her favorite shade of periwinkle blue, with white trim, the little table and its matching two chairs were much too small for either of her parents, just barely too small for Albus, and almost too small for Aberforth, now, though he could still fit if he squeezed on the rare occasions she managed to coerce him into a tea party. However, they were the perfect size for slight Ariana, and Misses Johanna, Susanna, and Lyanna could fit side by side on the chair opposite her with no qualms whatsoever. With careful, trembling fingers—it was quite cold out—Ariana arranged the dolls in comfortable positions, and then curled up tightly in her own chair with her cloak swathed about her small form like a blanket. She hadn't brought any teacups or a teapot; she could possibly slip back inside and gather a few, but the February chill bit at her exposed skin and made her certain that if she snuck back into the warm house, she wouldn't be able to convince herself to leave again.
Well, no matter: It was surely almost time for supper, anyway. They could have a proper tea party up in her room after she ate. "And guess what?" Ariana asked the dolls, who watched her reverently with their large eyes, impervious to the cold. "If Albus or Aberforth try to come to our tea party, we're going to say no. We're going to say, 'Boys can't have tea parties, it's not proper. Go and play with your sticks and get in trouble and watch how I laugh and laugh.'" She let out a cackle, as if to demonstrate, and Johanna, Susanna, and Lyanna hung on to her every word. "And when I get married," added Ariana, "my husband isn't going to be stupid and mean like they are. If he's dueling with his brothers, he'll let me join in; he'll be happy to. And I'll be the best duelist there ever was, and he'll be so impressed. Everyone will be. You'll see."
You'll show them, said the dolls in unison. Their eyes seemed to sparkle with admiration. You'll show Albus and Aberforth and everyone else, too. You'll show them all.
"I will, won't I?" said Ariana softly. From the ground at her feet, she plucked a shrunken, withered blossom, and it immediately burst into life, stretching out petals that transformed from dying brown to brilliant violet. "I'll show them all," she said decidedly.
She stood, her cloak floating down around her, and rested the flower on the table. From their chair, the dolls watched her movements; she could feel their reverence, their love, emanating like fire in the chilled air.
Ariana stretched a pale hand toward a cluster of weeds at the base of the hedge. Their dried stalks shuddered, and then, still trembling, became bright, healthy shades of green. The tops exploded into vibrant colors: reds, blues, yellows, pinks. Holding out both hands, Ariana pulled the blossoms upward with invisible strings, and taller they grew, until the tufts of weeds were flowers up to her waist.
"I'm ten times the witch they are!" she cried, and she imagined she could hear the dolls cheer in response. She held her hands above her head, as if she were a conductor, the flowers her orchestra; the blossoms rose higher and higher until they were tall enough to weave into the crinkled leaves and skinny branches of the hedge, twining the dying plant with their brilliant colors. "Oh, they'll see. I'll be the best witch there ever, ever was, and then I'll find the best wizard ever and we'll get married and have lots of babies and live happy ever after, and Albus and Aberforth will be so jealous. They'll grow up old and alone and they'll wish they'd have been nicer to me. They'll wish."
She dropped her hands; sparks emerged from nowhere and threw her chair backward a few feet, and Ariana twisted with a squeal of surprise, hands flying up to her mouth.
Johanna, Susanna, and Lyanna stared with expressions of glassy surprise. "Sorry," whispered Ariana, and she extended her hands once more to return the chair to the table.
The levitation taxed her far more than sprouting the flowers had: Within moments, she was panting slightly, and the chair only hovered a few inches off the ground and moved nowhere. Simply walking over to retrieve it would probably be easier, she thought—but Ariana was stubborn, and she slowly drew her hands to her chest as if to coax it over to her.
When, at last, she could have sworn it was beginning to drift nearer, a branch snapped, and the chair crashed violently back to the dirt.
Ariana froze.
Behind her, she could hear footsteps, several pairs of them, crunching leaves underfoot, accompanied by low, unfamiliar voices—men, or perhaps boys, she thought; certainly no one she knew. She didn't dare turn to face the intruders. Instead, she kept her eyes straight ahead, hands still cradled against her chest, legs trembling in a slight squat; across the yard, she could see the sitting room window, glowing orange behind its white curtain drawn tightly shut. A leg had broken off the chair she had dropped. Slowly, still shaking, Ariana pivoted to face the strangers, straightening her shoulders to appear larger and, hopefully, conceal the broken chair from view. She found herself faced with three boys, a couple of years older than Albus, perhaps, who were eyeing her with much less restrained alarm.
"How did you do that?" asked the first boy, a sandy-haired one with a freckled face and a bit of belly poking out from beneath his waistcoat.
She just managed to avoid glancing back at the chair, which would surely give her away, but her head half-twisted instinctively before she could control the impulse and put an awful crick in her neck: She winced in pain, and directed her almost inaudible whisper at her feet. "I didn't do anything."
"You did," said the first boy, and a second, one with a very prominent chin, added in a high voice, "I saw you!"
"I didn't do anything, honest," mumbled Ariana again, and she took a trembling step backwards. Her father had given her very specific instructions for what to do if she were ever cornered by strangers: She was to scream as loudly as she could and run to a well-lit area. It should have been easy; her house was a mere hundred feet away, if that, and she was scarcely even cornered. But, aside from tiny, quaking movements, her body seemed paralyzed with fear, her voice lodged somewhere in her throat: The resulting lump was hard to breathe around. "I'm sorry."
Either they didn't hear the apology, or they ignored it. The first boy spoke again. "You're not fooling us." His voice was slightly tremulous, but otherwise hard and sure. His friends seemed eager to let him do the talking, electing instead to nod along insistently. Ariana continued to survey her shoes. They were her nicer shoes: White, shiny leather with a luster that shone under bright lights, and, as she noticed, a small black scuff on the right toe. She oughtn't to be wearing these shoes outside at all, Ariana thought randomly; if Mum saw she'd dirtied them, she'd get very angry. Ariana's lower lip began to quiver.
The boys were now muttering amongst themselves. "She's some kind of fairy or something," said the first with conviction.
"No," said the second, shaking his head darkly, "never heard of no fairy who can move stuff with her mind. She's a demon."
"Demons aren't girls," interjected the third with a snort. "Maybe she's got one in her—"
"So she's a witch?" asked the second.
The lump in her throat swelled, and Ariana made a choking sound, small and scared. The boys ignored her.
"Being possessed don't make you a witch, dumbass," scoffed the blond boy.
"So she's not possessed," insisted the boy with the prominent nose, "she's just a witch."
Ariana whimpered.
"You some kind of witch or something?" he asked, directing Ariana.
And now, she was really trapped. To say no would cause further conflict as the boys insisted that she was abnormal—that what they had seen behind the hedge had been real, which, of course, it had. But to say yes, though providing her with an out, would break the rules. From the time she could toddle, Ariana had been taught that there were two kinds of people in the world: witches and wizards, like herself and her family and a few friends, and non-magical people, Muggles, like these three boys, undoubtedly. For the safety of both parties, these two worlds were to mingle as little as possible, and the latter could never, ever know about the former. This was not a family rule, her parents had told her firmly; this was a rule all over the world, an international rule, that everyone had to follow without fail, even children like herself and her brothers.
And she had broken the rule. She had played with those flowers, and levitated that chair, while they watched in gaps between the hedge's branches; she had shown Muggles magic, and they had pieced together what she was. And, even if she ran to her house now, she was going to be in so, so much trouble—heaps more trouble than Albus and Aberforth were going to get in for dueling in the house. Forget being spanked, or sent to bed without supper: Ariana was going to go to jail. The lump in her throat dissolved, and she let out a loud sob, tears leaking out of her eyes and spilling onto her cheeks.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she whispered.
"Oh, look what you did," said the first boy with a slight laugh, and she thought of Aberforth. Oh, now look what you did. She wanted him to come outside, right now, and grab her roughly by her cloak and drag her inside, and grouse that she was going to get them in trouble, and ask why she was crying now, and call her a baby and a tattletale who no one would ever want to be friends with. And Albus would look down his long nose at her and tell her how she was close to seven years old, and therefore really ought to gain better control of her emotions— "But she's a girl, Al, of course she's still a crybaby," Aberforth would say, and Albus would smirk before returning to some huge book he had borrowed from their father. And Ariana would not run up to her room in tears, and rant and rave to her dolls about how she hated her brothers and would trade them and a years' worth of sweets for a pair of sisters instead; she would smile, and tell them she loved them, and give them huge hugs and plant sticky kisses on their cheeks even as they squirmed and tried to pull away lest she give them germs—because, as stupid and mean and brutish as they could be, she was certain that, between Albus's wise words and Aberforth's fists, they could get her out of this situation within minutes, and would gladly do so, too, if only to pummel her themselves for being such an idiotic girl.
She dared another glance toward the window. The drapes remained tightly drawn, the glow of light within becoming brighter as night settled down around them.
Albus was the clever one, not her. This was what she got for trying to find loopholes for rules. Albus always told her that rules existed to keep them safe, and now, Ariana appreciated how too true that was—and how Albus was the smart one, the clever one, not her.
"Relax. We're not Catholics. We're not about to burn you at the stake," the first boy continued in what he evidently thought to be a calming voice. Ariana hiccupped. On either side of him, his friends tried to stifle their smirks and nod. Ariana attempted another step backward, caught a small patch of frost in the grass, and slipped onto her rear on the ground; the large-nosed boy crowed with laughter, and his blond friend smacked him in the arm.
"Just show us how you did that," said the same blond boy.
"I didn't do anything," whimpered Ariana, "I don't know what you're talking about."
The dampness of the frosty ground seeped through her cloak and dress and bit at her skin, making her shiver. Her hands trembled from fear and cold as she tried to scuttle backward like a crab; moving at all, controlling her erratic breathing, took tremendous effort.
"You do too know," shot back the third boy. He was the smallest, and he looked like her mother, dark-skinned and sloe-eyed as he was. "We saw you, little witch girl, you were magicking those flowers and that chair."
"I wasn't," whispered Ariana. It was little use: They knew.
"You calling me a liar?" said the dark boy.
"Calling us mad, more like," said the large-nosed boy.
The sandy-haired boy moved forward until he stood less than a foot away from where Ariana lay sprawled. She tried to scream, but the only sound that escaped her was another whimper, and she slid in the grass again when she tried to scurry away.
"We know what we saw," the blond boy told her firmly, and despite his clear attempt at a kind voice, impatience ebbed into his expression. "We just want to see. Never seen a real witch before. Show us what you did. Come on, now."
"Yeah, come on," jeered the large-nosed boy.
"Come on, little witch girl," said the dark one.
"I'm not a witch," said Ariana quietly, shaking her head so that more tears spilled onto her face. The heat of them burned through the chill on her cheeks. "I'm not. There's no such thing."
If she could convince them that they were just mad, perhaps they'd leave her be, or so she thought—but this evidently proved to be the wrong move. With a sudden growl, the blond boy threw out a hand and snatched Ariana by the arm, pulling her roughly to her feet. Her legs turned to jelly; she couldn't make a sound as she was hauled upward, and could only stare up at the angry boy with her wide, wet eyes. Their faces were inches apart.
"Well, you're sure as hell not a good liar, that's for certain," he said.
As if on cue, his friends closed in.
Through the slim gaps between their bodies, in the now barely there light, Ariana could see the dolls still sitting primly in their chair. And not one of them—not Miss Johanna, not Miss Susanna, not even her most favorite, her most loyal, her most reliable Miss Lyanna—lifted a finger to help her; prettily, they sat, and smiled, and watched. And nothing more.