I'll forewarn you that this is a fic full of OCs and ridiculousness. It's the brainchild of one of those weird late night conversations. It's in the same universe as HP, and you might occasionally see a familiar face, but for the most part, it's pretty much an AU, though I don't plan on screwing with the canon. I just want you to know what you're getting into before you get into it.
This one's for all of us who never got our letters. ;)
The fluorescent lights above the cash register flickered again. As if the store wasn't run down enough, management couldn't even manage to replace a bulb. Amy sighed and walked around the counter, looking down the aisles for customers, but at three in the morning, there were none. Why the store insisted on being open twenty-four hours a day when no one in her podunk town ever left their house after sundown, she would never know.
She did another quick check for signs of life or management, and then she hopped up on top of the counter and took out her phone, pulling up the calculator app. With thirty-nine hours last week and forty scheduled this week, that would make her next paycheck... She rolled her eyes. Great. Another year of sitting around and eating Easy Mac with coffee stirs in the break room, and she might have enough saved up to get the heck of out there. She was definitely meant for something greater than this. She could feel it.
"If you can lean, you can clean, Amy."
Amy jumped off the counter, stashing the phone in her apron before turning around to face the night manager, Mindy. Who knew Lucifer had a pseudonym?
"Sorry, I had something in my shoe and there weren't any-"
"Get the insides of the cola coolers wiped out." Mindy thrust a bottle of Windex into her arms.
"Sure." Amy waited patiently for Mindy to be far enough away for her to call her every swear word her Dad accidentally let slip growing up while she walked down the checkout aisle to the drinks.
She knelt next to the cola cooler and pulled open the door, spraying a paper towel down with cleaner. The lights inside the machine flickered. She looked up at the fluorescent light above her, still wavering, then over at the cracked, yellowing tile beside her. You could polish a piece of crap, but in the end, it was still a piece of crap. The paper towel squeaked on the inside of the glass, the cleaner making little rainbows in the lights, now flashing more violently. Amy reached inside and gave the light bulb a little tap. And another. And another.
With one last little tap, the bulb exploded, emitting a shower of sparks and glass. Amy screamed. Then, one by one, soda caps flew off their bottles. Amy scooted back, ramming her back into the candy rack. Reeses and Butterfingers and gummy worms fell on top of her while sticky sweet soda rained down. She was so fired.
Finally, the fizzy volcano subsided. Amy moved an unopened box of Blow Pops out of her way so she could attempt to stand back up.
"I'd like one of those, if you don't mind."
Amy jumped, half standing, her feet skidding in the puddle of pop. She had to grab onto the magazine rack to keep from falling back down in the mess. She looked up to see a rather kind-looking old woman in a red robe.
"Preferably a green one. I am partial to watermelon."
"Ma'am, I don't mean to be rude, but I have a bit of a mess to clean up before I can, um, you see..."
"Oh, don't be silly, Miss Winters."
Amy looked down at her name tag, double-checking that no, her last name definitely wasn't on it.
"This is a dream," Amy said. She looked down at the puddle of coke. "No, a nightmare. That's kind of a relief, I guess. At least I don't actually have to clean any of this up."
"Is it really?" the old woman asked. "That would be rather unfortunate. I've lived far too long to merely be a figment of some lost one's imagination."
"Lost one? What are you talking about, lady? How do you know my name?"
"Let's attend to this mess first, shall we? And then we'll address how inappropriate it is to refer to me as 'lady.'" The old woman reached up the sleeve of her red robe and pulled out a stick, which had the added effect of allowing Amy to keep imagining that she was definitely dreaming. The woman gave the stick a few waves, and Amy watched as candy flew back onto the shelves. The soda streamed through the air, back into its respective bottles, followed by caps of red, white, blue, and green. The glass was the last thing, reforming into the bulb inside of the cooler, the light shining as though it had never been broken at all.
"At least it's a cool dream."
"Honestly, Miss Winters, we've already been over this dream business." The old woman stashed the stick back up her sleeve. "As for how you should address me, both ma'am and Mrs. Ford would suffice."
"Right." Amy took a step back.
"You need not fear me, Miss Winters. I am here to take you to your destiny and all of that hullabaloo."
"Hullabaloo?" Amy raised an eyebrow.
"Yes, Miss Winters. Would you prefer to stay here cleaning out cola coolers and having weird older gentlemen ask if you're available, or would you prefer to come with me and learn things about yourself that you should've learned years ago?"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Amy put her hands up. "You want me to leave here and go somewhere with you. Look, lady, I-"
"I believe we have addressed what you should call me."
Amy sighed.
"Look, Mrs. Ford, you waltz in here in a bath robe and you somehow know my last name and clean up soda spills with some magic stick and you want me to just leave here with you in the middle of my shift?"
The old woman pursed her lips for a moment.
"Yes, that sounds about right."
"No, thank you." Amy walked back around the counter, as though that somehow made it final.
"Miss Winters, haven't you always felt like there was something more to you than all of this?" The old woman waved her hand at the store around her, at the world outside of the store's walls. Amy looked up at the light above her, flickering, flickering.
"I..."
"Take my arm, dear, and your life will never be the same again." The old woman held her arm out, the way a gentleman might for a lady. Amy looked down the empty front aisle of the store, at all of the yellowed and broken tiles, at the tiny station with supplies to clean up puke. She looked at the arm of the old woman and swallowed. She was, after all, probably dreaming. Tentatively, she reached out and took it.
The next few moments were a whir of suffocation and bits of color. For a second, Amy thought the old woman was actually killing her. Everything felt very compressed, very dark and interspersed with flashes of something else. She couldn't breathe and was sure her lungs would collapse under the pressure at any second. Then, she fell face-first onto a patch of grass and threw up.
"Apologies, Miss Winters," Mrs. Ford said. "The first time can be quite rough."
Amy stood up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and rubbing it on her apron. She wouldn't need it anymore. No way she'd get to keep her job after leaving mid-shift. She looked around her. They seemed to be standing in the middle of an empty field, the flowers looking silvery in the moonlight. Not exactly life-changing. Then again, she had just teleported if this wasn't a dream. That was at least a little impressive.
"You'll be able to see it once we pass through the wards."
"Wards?"
"Yes, let me see. Ah, here we are." Mrs. Ford took a couple of steps forward. "It's very important you step between these two stones here, Miss Winters." She pointed at a couple of baseball-sized rocks on the ground.
"If I step elsewhere?"
"You'll be blown to pieces."
"Oh, I see." Amy stepped between the two rocks, fully expecting nothing but more field. "Oh, I see," she said again.
In front of her stood a large, stately mansion. It looked to be at least four stories. On the grounds were several greenhouses, what appeared to be some sort of field for sports, a large pond, and a small hut.
"Where exactly are we?" Amy asked.
"The Putnam Institute of Magic."
"Of what?"
"You see, Miss Winters, you're a bit of a witch."
"A bit?" Amy looked back at the huge building.
"Someone your age should far more advanced in her training, but you're one of the lost ones."
"The lost ones?"
"Many years ago, a dark wizard tormented these United States. He destroyed many of our records of magical children. See, the methods by which we find magical children rely on spells that only work very early in their lives. With those records destroyed, well, for a while we thought we may never find all of you. There is an entire generation of lost magical children in this country, Miss Winters."
"But you found me? And I'm..." Amy shook her head. No. There was no way.
"We had to develop new methods. We are slowly tracking down all of the lost generation and allowing them to train."
"When do people normally start?"
"At age eleven."
"Yep. I'm definitely way late."
"Yes, twenty is a bit late, but you are certainly not our oldest."
"Who is?"
"The dark wizard was disposed of in nineteen-ninety-four. The records were destroyed earlier that year. Anyone who had not already received a letter from the Putnam Institute by then was lost."
"So your oldest is..." Amy thought about it. Honestly, she had never been good at doing math in her head. She scribbled onto the air with her fingers. "Like thirty?"
"Yes, Miss Winters."
"And this dark wizard was killed?"
"Yes."
"That's it? He's dead. He didn't like... cheat death and kill both of my parents and imbue me with part of his soul setting me on this unavoidable path to battle him to the death or anything?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Miss Winters," Mrs. Ford said, opening the front doors to the mansion. "I assure you Mr. Nixon is very much dead."
If there had been a soundtrack to the day, the record would have scratched to a halt.
"Nixon? As in Richard Nixon? As in President Nixon?"
"The very same, my dear. The darkest wizard in American Magical History."
Amy took a second to process that. Just as soon as she had managed to swallow that little tidbit, she actually noticed the room she was in. At the front of the room was a large coat of arms—red, white, and blue, with the silhouette of an eagle in the center. The banner below it read, "Manducare bubulae et caseum." That wasn't the most surprising part. The paintings on the walls were all moving, some hopping from one to the other, talking to each other. She was pretty sure she just watched the dude from the American Gothic painting feel up Mona Lisa.
"Holy crap."
"Well, you're taking it better than most."
"Holy. Crap."
"If you're all done talking of sacred fecal matter, I shall take you shopping. You can't do magic without a wand, after all."
Amy watched a ghost float through a painting of a forest, and then she was completely and totally done with the information overload for the day.
"If it's all the same to you, Mrs. Ford, I'd like to take a nap. I just learned Nixon was a dark wizard and ghosts are real. I need to process or something." Amy took a deep breath, and looked back outside toward what was seemingly normal. Someone flew in front of the moon on a broomstick. Mrs. Ford sighed.
"Oh very well. We'll go in the morning."