She found the diary when she was eight-and-a-quarter and three days.
No, to say Mercutio found it would be incorrect. She bought it with the pocket money her mother put on her plastic card at a sale. It would also be incorrect to call it a yard sale - no one had yards, not even measured in them. Mercutio had once learned about the imperial system in a year six history class but it hadn't made a bit of sense, and so she immediately forgot it, like you're supposed to.
If it doesn't make sense, why waste your mind on it?
Something else that hadn't made sense - the diary had called to her. A tugging, deep in her, to have it, a voice in her body so powerful, the woman took out the barcode bookmark and lowered the price. "No one else will buy it," she said, but the words on the woman's lips were odd, not quite her own.
It hadn't made sense. When she'd brought it home, she was frustrated to find it unreadable. It wasn't printed, a strange font with so many inconsistencies, her eyes blurred to think about it. She tossed it aside and forgot about it. There were more interesting things to take up her time with it.
She was rather upset to discover a large amount of missing pocket money the next week, but didn't complain too much. Their cards always malfunctioned, except Jenny's - her mother's. Jenny talked to the bank, the bank frowned because they were sure there had been a transaction, and restored it. Mercutio was no liar.
When she truly found the diary, she was twelve-and-a-seventh and fourteen days. Upset, frustrated, deeply hurt, she found it in the act of cleaning her room.
It was still unreadable, it wasn't sensible, but she felt rebellious, even against her own mind.
•1•
Rigel Evanson is odd, from a family of odd, and a very fascinating odd he is. Given names, to begin. They're ancient classifications for stars, when stars had names. Not m113h and s45g3, but names like Bellatrix and Draco and Orion. Most all their children are named like that.
And they all, back through the line, share some interesting, consistent features. Blond, most with grey irises or red-tinged eyes, they were offered a chance to be rid of the albinism in their genetics almost a hundred and fifty years ago, in a study of cleaning up human genes. They refused. That, too, was odd. They kept a human weakness, too-pale skin and sensitive eyes and wispy bright blond hair like the beauty standards of centuries past. They were proud of it, taking advantage of cousin-marriage laws, or maybe they really love each other.
They're full of such contradictions to themselves and society that any room they enter explodes with life. They speak and write strange, beginning sentences with 'and' and 'but' and twisting the laws of grammar to elegant phrases and choose odd, old-fashioned words that tug at things inside, they have been described as speaking like living poetry, a writing form no one really understands anymore. They walk into a room and energy unknown to all inside fills them. Dry conversations explode into fascinating talks and passion pulls itself from what had been dry wells all their lives.
Rigel Evanson was odd, from an odd family.
His parents were second-cousins, who doted on and loved each other, holding each other tight so their pale skin seemed to blend together, whispering things in their ears with pink lips.
He couldn't tell their faces apart. They only spent the government required minimum with him each week.
Rigel was odd. He took medication since he was a little child, and everyone took medication from when they were thirteen till they were twenty to control their impulses and hormones but this medication wasn't for that. Every night, his entire life, he's had the same dream. He can never remember it, but he knows it's the same, and it scares him. Scares like when the machines of his home shut down for no reason and he's locked in a room, waiting for lights and movement, never taught how the emergency manual exits work.
Sometimes in that dark, knowing there will be no medicine to chase the dream away tonight with it behind a locked cabinet, he wonders why it's always the same.
ˆ1ˆ
Raphael had once read a book.
A real one. It had been old, with crackling pages and dried leather and the cover once embossed. It had been hidden, far below in his family's ancient home, a manor they now still lived in, and he wasn't to have seen it at all, the treasures hidden down there. Jewels and books and carved wooden sticks. It was the family secret, and maybe it was a hint at their past because once it was four centuries ago, his family and its manor just appeared from nowhere, the Notts. It was different, and they did their best to hide it.
Raphael had followed his father and grandmother down into the dark, they'd carried a flashlight and he'd walked softly, and they'd looked upon the old jumble of things, grandmother whispering something, maybe important. "We must never touch them," she then said. She led her son back upstairs.
Right past her grandson and she never notice, his father never noticed, and he scrounged in the dark for one of the things to look at in the light, curious. He felt the smooth frame of something, maybe a photo but for the lack of glass and the texture, and then he'd heard a voice. He'd grabbed the first thing under his hands and fled.
It was a made-up textbook for a made-up class that acted completely serious, as if magic existed and children took classes called Transfiguration. The strange texture of the cover fascinated him, and he had the computer analyze it. Leather, it said, and he had to go through manually and remove the history of the analysis, and his search afterwards on the internet to find any trace of the author and their real name. Nothing.
It was a good book, at least, to keep the attention of a ten-year-old boy. And oddly durable. He'd been told in history classes how paper was so frail and easily damaged, its use given up centuries ago when e-readers got to be waterproof, and yet when he spilled nutrient drink all over the pages, it had been perfectly fine once he hurriedly wiped it away.
That day, he began a distaste for e-readers. They weren't the same thing, no weight and no true pages, turning with a swipe of the finger, a tap. You couldn't accidentally fold down the corners, and they didn't yellow with time, they weren't true books.
He snuck it back eventually, startling at what he knew was a human voice, and he probably should have forgotten about it and the book, since they didn't make sense, but Notts weren't like that. If it didn't make sense, you remembered it. If it happened again, you'd be the one to know. With enough of a pattern it would make sense.
He'd need to sneak another book one day to find out. Meanwhile, burning questions tipped on his tongue.
π1π
He often felt like his life was the beginning to a story. Once upon a time there was a boy named Zac. He was the middle child of a middle-class family who lived on the middle level of a living complex. They did not, in fact, live in the middle home, they had the one on the corner, with lots of windows. But it was just enough middles to make him think, and often feel a kinship with the characters of the free teen novels in the e-book store. The old ones, where the copyright had run our decades or even centuries ago, so they were free, or there were fancy editions with a cursory euro to pad the publishers paychecks a little.
He liked those novels. They were about characters who were strange or found themselves in strange situations. Zac was strange. He could summon things across a room, across his home, across a level, concentration and a rush of something in his limbs would see it fly into his grip, no matter from where. He guessed if he forgot his lunch he could summon it down the levels to the city floor below but he wasn't going to try. He was strange, and sometimes strange was dangerous. Strange, for him, could mean living in a lab, with wires and dangerous surgeries and one day an autopsy.
Autopsies required you to be dead. And organs floating in preservatives, and who knew what else.
All to figure out how a sixteen-year-old boy could defy the laws of science. Nope, no thank you.
He felt like his life was the beginning of a story. The beginning was usually where everything was good, or at least tolerable. He'd just stay here, go to school, be the big buddy to a year twelve. Whatever her name was. Something Weasel. They never talked much. He helped her with her homework at lunch like buddy duties stated and got on with their lives.
Though, he wondered, just a little, what would happen if he moved on to the second chapter. That place where the adventure almost always began and there was magic.
He liked the idea of magic, even if it wasn't real.
Oh, look, I'm writing what may be the first ever future-set-post-wizarding-world AU on the site. Probably not, but I can always dream.
This idea came from a one-shot I wrote called Waiting, which I did for a contest. As you can obviously tell since I put this at the bottom of the chapter, you don't need to read it to understand this story.
Also, yes, Rigel has consistent-tense-problems. Hopefully those will clear up. And if there's anyone who's actually reading this, the review box is now yours.