A/N: First Septimus Heap and Harry Potter crossover. This is platonic, but you can read it as Sep/Jen if you like. It isn't a Ron/Jenna either, in case you wanted to know. I don't own Septimus Heap or Harry Potter. And please, if you like this enough to favorite, please review. Unexplained favorites can be frustrating.
Warning: Not exactly happy stuff ahead, but not super angst either.
This is story dedicated to Q. Jenna. If you haven't read her amazing stories, do so right now! The story Mystery in Past was so interesting.
Worlds Apart
She walks with faked confidence and a smile that doesn't reach her eyes, and nods when he talks as if she knows anything and everything about Hogwarts, this place she's never heard about or seen before.
She looked regal and commanding when the Hat was placed on her head, but now she is tiny and unsure.
When he finally stops at the Fat Lady's portrait and says the password, she looks up as though startled.
"Here we are," he says and points although he doesn't have to.
"Thanks... Ron," she replies, and she looks annoyed. Then she blinks and realizes and her lips curl up in the false smile once more. "That was a nice tour."
"Er... you're welcome." He stands back and lets her in first, because tiny and unsure as she is, she still has an air of something- royalty, perhaps- about her.
When he stumbles trough the portrait hole, she is sitting on one of the couches, half hidden in the firelight. He watches her for a moment and thinks about how no one knows her except for the brother who Hermione took on a different tour, about how no one knows how they got here and how there are rumors of "alternate universe" and "alternate reality" and "time travel" flying around, about how she was one person on the stool and another on the couch. She looks up and catches his eye.
Hermione waves to him from across the room. "Bye, Jenna," he says, and then begins to turn.
She looks as though she is struggling to sallow something, but she covers it with a half smile."Right. Bye."
*.*.*.*
Her brother has straw colored curls and lets his sister rest her head on his shoulder. They look nothing alike and impossibly small in the light of the dying embers.
"Jen tells me you did a great job on the tour," Septimus later comes up to him and says, and although Ginny always tells him he's not perceptive, he knows that she said the opposite.
"Thanks?" It wasn't meant to be a question, but it comes out that way. "That is, are you sure she did?"
He goes slightly pink. "No, really, she did. Hermione did good, too," he adds, looking at his sister out of the corner of his eye. "I better go."
He turns and rejoins her on the couch, and he doesn't come up until past midnight.
He enters the room when everyone else is in a state of half-sleep. He notices now that his eyes are startling green, greener than Harry's, putting to mind mossy stones and jade and emerald jewels. They shine in the smothered light of the moon behind the curtains and window.
Hermione says that he had been nice enough when she gave him a tour, that he had asked questions and looked interested at the answers, but that his words sounded forced and that he looked relieved when it was done.
She also says that he wouldn't answer when she asked where he came from.
He sits on his bed and looks pensive, staring out into the dark. There is another expression is his eyes, but there's no telling what.
*.*.*.*
He leafs through the pages of the books with genuine interest, but her's is all faked smiles and gasps. It's early afternoon and they sit side by side in straight backed wooden chairs with books and descriptions of each subject laid out in front of them, while Professor McGonagall watches them with hawk eyes.
He and Hermione stand against the walls. He would have objected to acting as babysitter for the new students if it hadn't meant missing Divination. He doesn't say this, though, because he knows Hermione will lecture him.
"Wow! Arthimancy!" Septimus says. "Marcia's teaching me that."
"The thing with the numbers that makes no sense?" Jenna replies as she reads about Charms, although her eyes are following the same line over and over again.
"It does make sense, Jen," he says, and he looks slightly irritated. "Just because you don't understand Magyk doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense."
"Well, if it makes so much sense, tell me what you do all day."
"You wouldn't understand it. Tell me what you do all day. Do you just sit on your throne or walk around? I mean, you don't even go to school." He picks up another book and thumbs through it. "Ancient Runes. This looks really interesting."
"Hmph." She looks up at Professor McGonagall. "Um, Madame- I mean- Professor?"
"Yes, Miss Heap?"
"I'm interested in law and politics," she says. "Do you have anything on that?"
"If you want to go into politics," Professor McGonagall says, "you'll have to do that after school. You'd be apprenticed to one of the political leaders. But to prepare, I'd recommend History of Magic, Muggle Studies, and perhaps Defense Against the Dark Arts."
"Oh, we're just here for a short time."
Professor McGongall purses her lips and nods, while Septimus looks at his sister to the books and back again.
"Jen," he says, "they have Astronomy. And Divination!"
"Astronomy. That sounds fun," she replies, and then stops as though she is remembering something. "Divination, huh? Did you ever finish your Prediction Practical?"
"No... What with the time traveling and Glass and the Sicknesse all that, it kind of slipped our minds."
There is silence for half a minute, and then she breaks it.
"You came back, remember?" she says quietly, and suddenly he feels as though he and Hermione are intruding on something private. "We all did."
"We're in the Before Times, and there's no Glass here. The House of Foryx hasn't been built yet either," he responds. He rubs his face as though he is extremely tired. "And Dumbledore says if he finds a way for us to go back, there's a 87% chance everyone will be really old or-"
"Shut up, Sep," she says sharply. Her eyes are bright with anger- or perhaps tears. "Have you heard of hope?"
"Have you heard of getting your hopes up only to be disappointed? Not every-"
"Stop."
"Jen, I'm sor-"
"Just stop- stop it." She is standing up now, and her hands are curled up in fists.
"I think you and Mr. Heap need a little more time to decide which subjects to take," Professor McGongall says crisply, but there is a note of worry in her voice. "Mr. Weasley and Miss Granger will escort you both to my office tomorrow. Is that alright?"
"I- yes. Yes." She seems to deflate, and looks exhausted like her brother.
"Thank you," he says, and puts his hand tentatively on his sister's arm. She twitches but doesn't shake it off.
*.*.*.*
"Where do you come from?" he asks on the way back to the Common Room. Hermione turns and glares at him, and then he knows he has said something wrong.
"It doesn't matter," she says flatly. Her brother's hand is still on her arm. "It doesn't matter. What matters is that we can go back."
*.*.*.*
She wears a circlet on her head. She talks in stilted or emotionless sentences and her best friend is her brother. She doesn't slouch. She crosses her ankles when she sits and eats with her fingers. She turns up her nose when she's annoyed.
He hates the uniform. His manners are impeccable and he is sometimes pensive. He hunches over when he reads. He loves the library and puts too much sugar in his breakfast. He looks at his wand as though it is a wrong hand sewn on his arm.
Three days have come and gone, and he still can't figure them out, fit them into any molds.
*.*.*.*
He throws himself into this new life, and usually his smiles look genuine. But sometimes they falter and other times they are hollow.
She follows her brother a little more cautiously, but her rare smiles and laughter are real. They don't show as much as his false ones.
They sit in the back of the classroom, the way they will do for a week on Professor McGonagall's orders before they decide on subjects to take. The other Gryffindors try the best they can to welcome them, but there seems to be an uncrossable barrier separating them from the rest of Hogwarts.
The Heap twins, everyone calls them, until Jenna almost smiles one day before class and corrects them.
"We are the same age, but not twins," she says. "My mother's dead and I'm adopted. People make that mistake a lot."
She laughs unexpectedly when everyone goes silent or offers their apologies and starts to talk about her wonderful family, about how she is the only girl with a lot of brothers, about her sister-in-law and her unborn niece or nephew, about how Sunday dinners are loud enough to deafen you. She is like another person, eyes bright and gesturing rapidly as she spins tales of the Heaps and their adventures.
He thinks it is as if there was a dam in front of her mouth that has broken down and let everything and anything she wants to say out. She doubles over in laughter, and he realizes now she was keeping her emotions in, too.
It's hard to connect her to the small girl on the couch with her hands folded in her lap and clipped sentences, and harder still to connect her to the queenly girl with commanding features on the stool.
He sees her brother standing near him, off to the side, smiling and looking amused. "That was Simon, not Sam," he is correcting, although no one seems to hear. "Why would Sam be with Lucy?"
"Technicalities," she says airily, twirling over, and pats his head. She has to stand on tiptoes to do this, and even then he is taller. He pushes her hand off and laughs, and suddenly for the first time since they arrive they are both acting as if they are fifteen.
And then he drops her hand and she glides off- like a queen or princess in a gown- into the crowd, and his smile fades. They both watch her laughing and darting about silently for a few minutes, and he is surprised that Septimus isn't laughing with her. Every time she has shown happiness in the past few days, it seems to make him happy, and the other way around, too.
But then again, he probably wouldn't know.
He stays quiet for a while longer, but he looks so odd that he asks, "Alright, mate?", and Septimus jumps. "Sorry, didn't mean to-"
"It's fine," he replies, smiling, and it looks almost genuine, but he's not sure. Then he realizes it's because it doesn't reach his eyes. "And I'm fine, too. Just watching her."
"Are you sure you're alright?"
"Yes, thanks. I do hope she won't mind that I've just sort of abandoned her, though."
He watches her for a moment, and takes in how she moves, how she laughs, the way her hair curls up and her violet eyes shine. "I don't think she will."
Septimus gives him an odd look out of the corner of his eye, as though he is appraising him. "How would- how do you know?"
He shrugs. "Look, I'm not going to pretend I know her, but I do know that she really likes you," he says. "She'll like whatever you do."
Septimus smiles again, and this time it reaches his eyes. When his sister goes past in a whirl of dark hair and robes, he catches her hand and lets himself be pulled along.
*.*.*.*
She isn't in any way magical, she says.
She talks like that sometimes, like magic is a door she can't and never will be able to open, but no one really comments about it because if a wand chose her of course she can do magic.
And also because they might be a little afraid of her.
He's a little afraid of her too, truth be told. Afraid of all the different sides of her he's seen, and partly because she's so unpredictable. He thinks he might have let it show a little because Hermione says one day that she's probably scared of them, too.
"It's kind of like going into the Wizarding World for the first time, except you know you'll never be able to return."
"I'd like never to return," Harry points out.
Hermione frowns and says that that's different, and then Harry goes off to his detention with Umbridge and they don't talk about it again.
But Jenna proves herself wrong one day in Professor McGonagall's office, where she and her brother are getting a little tutoring, when she raises her wand and the teapot turns red and gold. She just stands there for a minute, staring with her mouth open and clutching her wand so tightly that her knuckles turn white.
"Why Jenna," her brother says after a long moment, "I do believe your eyes are beginning to turn green, just like your father's. And mine. And your brothers'."
She looks up finally and grins at him. "Are they? Really?"
"May I take this off?" he asks, his hand on her dark hair. He is also smiling, and it's as if they are in on an inside joke that only they can understand. She nods and he pretends to pull her hair off. "And Jenna was bald underneath," he narrates. She tries to swipe at him and he ducks, laughing. Then he hits his head on the table.
"I'd laugh at you," she informs him primly, hiding a smirk, "but it would be so undignified."
He scowls at her as he rubs his head. "I'm disowning you."
"Are you even allowed to do that?"
"...Yes?"
"So you don't know?"
"Mr. Heap. Miss Heap." Professor McGonagall looks sternly at them. "Back to work. Miss Granger, show them the next spell. Mr. Weasley, find the chapter for Mr. Heap. Miss Heap, put down your wand."
As soon as Professor McGonagall says her name, she immediately reverts back to being polite and distant, and he thinks it's a shame that she does. Maybe Ginny's right when she says he's not good with people but he suspects more people would like Jenna if she would just be herself.
Supposing that this is herself. He still doesn't know what's an act and what's real.
*.*.*.*
He bumps into him on the way to the Common Room.
He is walking back from Quidditch practice- not team practice, just his own, because whatever the twins say, he knows he can try out for Keeper with his new broom if he just practices a little more- and sees him holding a stack of dusty books that Hermione would approve of.
He doesn't want to draw attention to himself, but this is a new student and he and Hermione were instructed to watch them. "D'you need any help?" he asks.
"Wha- Oh. No, I'm good." Septimus gives him a smile. "Thanks for asking."
"Er, you're welcome," he replies. He turns around and walks a few steps before Septimus calls him.
"You've dropped something." And then he is next to him, kneeling on the floor and picking up a photograph of the nine Weasleys. "Is this your family?"
"Er, yes," he looks at the photograph over Septimus's messy straw-colored curls. "There's a lot of us."
"How many?" Septimus asks. He sounds truly interested, which surprises him.
"Seven kids. Six boys and one girl."
"There's eight in my family. Seven boys and one girl."
"You're kidding!"
"No, I'm not." He gives a little half smile. "If you tell me about them I'll find a picture of my family to show you."
"Alright," he says, leaning over Septimus's shoulder and pointing. "This is Bill, he's the oldest and he works at Gringotts."
"Gringotts?"
"It's a bank." He sees Septimus's confused expression and tries to explain. "You know, he works with gold."
"Like my oldest brother," Septimus says in surprise.
They spend the next half an hour talking about family, about their older brothers and stubborn sisters, about their parents and how they live. From there the conversation just flows. At first he thinks he is just being polite, but soon he can tell that Septimus really does want know all this. The conversation isn't awkward either; he is easy to talk to and listens with interest, he asks questions and makes comments with the sarcastic humor he didn't realize he had, and he gives lively descriptions of all of his family members.
He's actually sorry when he realizes it's only a little while before curfew and they have to head back. But there is still something he wants to ask.
"Do- d'you miss them?"
"I try not to. For Jenna." He swallows. "And because we- we might not go back."
He wants to offer his apologies, but he knows that he's never been good at this and everything he'll say will just make things worse.
"Who's older?" he asks instead. "You or Jenna?"
Septimus looks surprised. "Her, but only by and hour and a half."
He wants to say that that is a weird coincidence, but something completely different comes out. "You're taller than her." Which is stupid, he knows, because he is taller than Percy and the twins even though he is younger.
"I know. But I always thought that that should be Jenna," Septimus says. "I feel like I'm always relying on her." He looks at him carefully, as though he is trying to decide if he said too much. "She was taller and stronger than me when we were ten. In my head, I guess she still is."
*.*.*.*
Their next few conversations are still a little stilted- he still doesn't know enough, no one does- but they are more comfortable and less awkward. He, Harry, and Hermione try to make more of an effort to include them, and although they don't usually accept, they seem to appreciate it.
Mostly, though, he just watches them. He sees how anxious they are sometimes, how they stand back to back with their mouths clenched, how there are dark circles under their eyes. But he also sees how their anxiousness melts away sometimes, like when they are with each other, and how they are bit more confident, how they now laugh freely.
He mentions this to Harry one day, about how strange and contradictory they are, and he just shrugs.
"Maybe they're just still not used to us."
"You weren't used to magic when you first came here."
"I hate the Dursleys. Hermione's right, this is different. But Septimus... he reminds me kind of of me. Just a little."
"How?"
"I feel like something happened when he was young- oh, I dunno. He just does."
The conversation switches to Sirius to Cho Chang to Hogsmeade, and then it's forgotten.
*.*.*.*
What surprises him about Jenna is that she is quick to learn. Septimus is too, but he talks to Hermione about books in his free time so that's expected, but he didn't think that Jenna, with her fake smiles and annoyed looks, would be a fast learner. He doesn't exactly know why, maybe because he just doesn't understand her well enough, or maybe because she reminds him of Ginny when she's with Septimus and Ginny has never been able to warp her head around concepts so quickly.
She knows next to nothing about this world, but once she learns something she remembers it.
When Harry teaches her defense spells, the first time she doesn't get it, but the next time she's a little better, and then by the fifth time she is as good as most people. After that she is a sponge for defensiveness spells, because she says that she's always had to rely on Septimus to protect her, and she doesn't like feeling like a damsel in distress.
"He's taller than me, too," she tells Harry gloomily one day. He's standing nearby and wants to tell her that Septimus doesn't see it like that but for once he decides to keep his mouth shut.
She is quick to learn, but unlike her brother she loathes learning from books and would rather be taught by listening to people. She listens out of lessons, too, and she's really rather observant.
Which is why he's surprised when he finds out that she and her brother don't know about You-Know-Who's return. Hermione thinks it's wonderful because they can get the true story straight from Harry, and so the five of them sit down and let Harry talk and talk, with he and Hermione filling in the gaps from the first Wizarding War. They both sit through the whole thing without any hint of a disbelief, and when it's over Harry looks at them wearily.
"Do things like this happen in your world?" he asks.
Septimus shrugs. "Not as bad. But we have had some similar situations. Actually, for a while there was a prejudice against Wizards."
"Yes. That first war you described," Jenna adds, "sounded a lot like how our world was until I was ten."
"Maybe they aren't so different after all," Harry says. Hermione glares at him. She does that a lot when the Heaps are around.
Jenna bites her lip and looks away, but she doesn't leave like she usually would.
*.*.*.*
Harry invites them to the first official D.A. meeting, and Septimus turns out to have an efficacy for dueling. He twirls and ducks and doges as though he was made for this, his wand moving so fast that it's just a blur. His sister isn't as good, but he thinks she would be much better if she wasn't so afraid of hurting someone with her spells. He doesn't say this, though, because he hasn't been on her wrong side yet and doesn't want to see it.
He tells himself he's not afraid of her anymore, but sometimes he thinks that maybe he still is. Just not as much as before.
He stands against the wall to watch her duel with Ginny, and spots her brother standing a few feet away. He catches his eye and moves closer.
"All right, Septimus?"
"Fine. You?"
"Never been better," he replies. "No, actually, I have. Did you get tired already?"
"A little." He half smiles- the way he always does- and lets his eyes wander over to his sister and back.
"How'd you learn to duel so well?" he asks. He knew that Septimus was good at magic but the way he was out there was shocking.
Septimus shrugs. "Marcia taught me how. The magic is different, but in the end it's the same concept and movements."
"Who's Marcia?" He thinks that maybe he's heard the name once or twice but can't place it.
"She is- was- my mentor," Septimus explains. "A really good one, too. I was her apprentice."
"What kind of apprentice?" he asks.
"It's hard to explain, but she's, um, like the boss Wizard, and I am- was- going to be the next one." He sighs, and his eyes are oddly bright. "She's amazing, she taught me everything I know. She was really more than just my mentor."
"She sounds nice," he replies lamely, not really knowing how to respond, but Septimus doesn't seem to mind.
"The truth is, she's saved my life over and over again. She gave me a life and a family. She was the first adult I trusted."
He doesn't comment, just listens, because now it seems as if he is talking more to himself than him.
"Jenna, Beetle, Nicko, Marcia- I didn't want to believe it was real at first because I knew everything good was always taken away in the end, like Boy 409. But she- they- showed me that it didn't have to be that way."
And then he suddenly realizes why Harry said that Septimus reminded him of himself, because Harry didn't grow up normal and thinks he doesn't deserve good. He wonders how Septimus grew up, because now all the information he knows about the Heaps isn't adding up now.
"But I knew it was too good to be true, and I was right in the end," Septimus finishes bitterly.
He's supposed to be the happy one, he thinks numbly.
He's about to say something- anything, really, but Jenna glides over next to them with her wand tangled in her hair and grabs her brother's arm. She looks thrilled about something, her violet eyes shining. She turns to smile at him, and it suddenly occurs to him that it wasn't so long ago when the smiles she gave him were polite and fake.
Septimus grabs her hand and shakes out his hair as though he is trying to get rid of something. He looks down and smiles at his sister, and even slightly hunched over he's a whole head taller than her.
He might be slightly pessimistic and incomprehensible, but whatever his faults, it's clear his loves his sister more than anything.
"I'll see you later," he says, pulling out his wand, and lets his sister drag him out onto the floor.
He watches them go, and for the rest of the day he can't stop thinking about what they lost when they came here. He's thought of them as slightly ungrateful and even cynical over the past month, but he's never really thought about why. It's the first time he's realized how complicated their situation- and they themselves- truly are.
*.*.*.*
His and Harry's plan to send Sirius pie and biscuits by mail had sounded brilliant in the common room, but now, almost at the kitchen, he is starting to question the ingeniousness of the idea. Harry would have come, but he has yet another detention, and Hermione decided to stay back to knit her House Elf hats.
He still thinks they don't resemble hats at all, but at least you can actually fit them on your head now, although it takes at least ten minutes. Ginny got stuck in one earlier and Fred had to cut it off her head.
He also thinks that they should just send some money to Lupin and get him to buy the pie for Sirius, but a very Hermione like voice in his head tells him that he's missing the point.
When he goes through the entrance, he is greeted by a swarm of elves and a cry of, "Harry Potter's Wheezy!"
"Huh?" he says, and then realizes. "Oh, hullo, Dobby."
He politely listens to Dobby obsess over Harry for a few minutes, and then slowly tunes him out, but he is brought back to his senses by Dobby saying, "...And Dobby is thinking that Harry Potter's Wheezy can be sitting next to Miss Heap, and the elves will be making the-"
"Wait, Dobby," he interrupts. "Did you say Jenna is here?"
Dobby goes characteristically silent for a moment. "Miss Heap is sitting at the table, and Dobby is thinking that she is looking sad. It is not good for a young girl to be being so sad."
He turns to look where the elf is pointing, and in the very back of the room, he sees Jenna's circlet glinting in the dim light of lanterns set in the wall. He takes one of the eclairs an elf is offering him, and is about to go over to her, but stops halfway because he doesn't know what he'll say.
But he's not afraid of her anymore, he realizes. He doesn't know her but he's not afraid of her, either.
So he goes over to the table and sits across from her. She looks up, and he notices that she isn't wearing the uniform. Instead she is dressed in blood red robes with shimmering gold on her sleeves and around her waist, and, coupled with the circlet glinting on her head, she looks like a queen.
"Hi," she says, her voice cracking slightly.
"Hello," he replies. "You do know that students aren't allowed in the kitchens, right?"
"Sep and I had an argument. I'm going to st- obtain some chocolate for him." She half smiles at him the way her brother does, but it doesn't reach her eyes, like the way she used to smile. "I'd use my Chocolate Charm, but it doesn't work here. And anyway, you're a student, too."
He doesn't know what she means by Chocolate Charm and decides to ignore the last sentence. "It's not stealing if the elves give it to you," he says instead.
Now she is smiling completely, and it looks almost genuine. "I never said anything about stealing."
"I s'pose not," he says. "How'd you find out about the kitchens?"
"Harry mentioned it and Parvati told me where to find it."
There is a moment of silence, and he can't help but break it.
"What did you row about?" he asks. She looks up sharply and he immediately regrets it and thinks about all those time Hermione and Ginny told him he was tactless, because they were right.
"Sorry- didn't mean-"
She surprises him by cutting him off. "He says we're not going to go back, ever. But we are, I know we are," she says fiercely, her hands gripping the polished wood.
"Er," he offers pathetically.
"It's happened before but he says it's impossible and to stop walling myself off and thinking of home, because then I'll miss it more and be depressed here and and and..."
She takes a shuddering breath and fixes the circlet on her head, her cheeks pink. And then he looks at her and she's sitting there, all anger and fear and trying too hard. She's so different from the girl he met what feels like so long ago that he's caught off guard. He can see that girl underneath, but what she's showing now is a part of her as much as that other girl is.
"He's trying to be a part of this world because he knows we're not going back. And I'm not sure if we will, either."
She's the girl who shields herself away and talks stilted and acts like she doesn't care about learning about Hogwarts, he thinks.
But she's also the girl who left her family behind and is there for her brother and doesn't want to get attached to Hogwarts because she wants to leave so terribly much. He hasn't thought about that before.
"It'll be alright," he replies.
"You don't know that for sure," she says. She looks like she might cry. "I said horrible things to him."
He wants to say something, but can't find the words. There is a long silence, in which she examines the chocolate she is going to give to her brother.
"I hope he'll forgive me. We've never argued this badly before," she says quietly, almost to herself.
"Of course he will," he answers automatically, the way anyone would. But he thinks that really, no matter how badly they argue, no matter what she says, Septimus will always forgive his sister.
"How do you know?" she asks, her dark eyebrows furrowed.
"Because he loves you," he replies awkwardly. "You're important to him. He'll forgive you, it doesn't matter what you did."
"You know him well."
"No," he says. "Not really."
She frowns, looking like she is deep thought. "I guess. Maybe you should obtain something for your sister- Ginny, right?"
"Ginny doesn't like me that much. I'm actually kind of jealous of you two, that's how we used to act," he says. He's never told anyone this before, because Ginny is the baby girl and perfect, but he thinks he owes Jenna this."I suppose she sees me as sort of a burden now that she has her own friends. She's rather popular, and she looks annoyed whenever I open my mouth."
"She loves you. She has to, underneath." She states this as if it is a fact, a job every sibling must do.
"You don't know that for sure," he echoes.
"Hermione says that Ginny likes violets," she says slowly. "Maybe you should obtain some for her. Actually, just buy them."
She gets up to leave, her red robes fluttering, and when her hand is on the painting of the fruit bowl, he calls out to her.
"Thanks, Jenna."
She doesn't turn around. "No, thank you."
*.*.*.*
A few days later, he waits in the Common Room for Septimus to leave the dormitory. It's early evening, and he knows he always reads in the Common Room for a while after dinner. So he waits, and waits, and waits, sitting on the best armchair beside the crackling fireplace.
When he comes out, almost an hour has passed, although it feels like much shorter. He waves at Septimus, and he comes over and sits next to him.
"Hello," Septimus says. He's smiling, but he looks tired.
"Septimus," he replies. "You and Jenna are friends again?"
He looks surprised. "Yep. She gave me some chocolate she obtained from somewhere that was of course not the kitchens."
They both laugh, the sound echoing around the nearly empty room.
"She reminds me of my sister, Ginny," he says. "Ginny's got no respect for me, though."
"Oh, I've seen her. She looks nice," Septimus replies, ignoring how he vehemently shakes his head at the statement.. "A spitfire like Jenna."
"You remind me of Harry," he says, after a moment's silence. Septimus's eyebrows fly up.
"How?"
"You talk- talked like he always does." He doesn't look at him, keeping his eyes on the fire as he talks.
He makes a sound like he might say something, but he doesn't, so he continues.
"He didn't grow up right, and he didn't know he was magical until he was eleven. Sometimes he stares at us like he can't believe we're real, and I reckon it's because for so long he didn't think he could be happy."
His eyes narrow, and he looks almost angry. "How did you-?"
"I don't know anything," he says. "Neither does Harry. I just reckon that perhaps you could talk to each other. One day."
Septimus doesn't reply for a while, but when he gets up to leave, he calls after to him.
"I don't mean I don't want to talk about it, ever," he says. "Just not now. Maybe later."
His face is set in a frown, but as he watches him leave he thinks, for once, he's said something right.
*.*.*.*
He spends the whole day talking with Harry, and when they leave the corner they look as if a burden has been lifted from both of their shoulders.
"Thank you," he says. "It was nice to have someone to talk to."
"Don't mention it," he replies. He looks at him, bright blue eyes to brilliant green, and in them he sees written that they will be alright.
*.*.*.*
She is a leader in where they come from. She is optimistic and would go to the ends of the Earth for her brother. She doesn't slouch. She isn't fearless but wants to think she is and sometimes walls herself off. She turns up her nose when she's annoyed.
He says the uniform reminds him of being stuck in a different Time. He loves his sister more than anything and is sometimes pessimistic. He hunches over when he reads. He laughs because otherwise he'd go insane with worry and puts too much sugar in his breakfast. He hates that he need a piece of wood to preform magic.
Two months have come and gone, and although they still doesn't know them, he thinks they knows enough.
*.*.*.*
They are sitting on the couch, side by side and surrounded by homework, and he can't help but remember when Jenna sat there two months ago, hands folded in her lap and a guarded look in her eyes. Her hands are gesticulating wildly now, and there is laughter in her eyes as she points to the book in Septimus's arm.
Septimus will always be taller than Jenna, but when he looks at them sitting there, Jenna with her back straight and Septimus hunched over his book, he thinks they look exactly the same height.
He watches them and thinks about how he knows bits and pieces about where they come from, about how their family resembles the Weasleys, about everything they left behind and how they really are Gryffindors, about obtained chocolate and duels and spells, about their smiles that turned from hollow to genuine.
He also thinks that it as if they suddenly grew so tall. He remembers thinking they were both tiny when they first came.
And then while he is watching she looks up from her book and turns to her brother, so close that their noses are almost touching, and says, "I think that maybe this will work."
He takes his sister's hands in his and smiles. "Me too."
The End
A/N: This originally was meant to be happier fic, but I was thinking about how Nicko and Snorri were then they got left behind, how Septimus was when he time traveled, and I realized they only way they would be happy was if they had a foolproof way of going home whenever they wanted to. I was also going to have this last over the course of maybe a few years, with Jenna going into politics, but this happened instead. Please review if you can.