.i(Hermione).
It's not her fault people just can't seem to help themselves around her, and Hermione even says so to the therapist her parents bring her to after she witnesses a woman stab her cheating her cheating husband with the stiletto heel of her sparkling gold shoe.
"It's like there's a pit in my stomach," she confesses once. "A dark, bottomless pit, and every time I reach for it, bad things happen around me."
She doesn't say how natural it feels, to spread this hunger, to reach for that pits, or how it gets easier the more she does it. She doesn't mention how powerful she felt, watching that woman stab and stab until her hands were too slick with blood to hold on her shoe and she had to use her hands, her fingers digging into the wounds, widening them like the flesh she was ripping into was butter.
She doesn't speak about the way the woman licked her hands clean after that, or how for the first time Hermione felt full, even if it only lasted seconds.
That would be bad.
The therapist looks at her with pity, prescribes medication Hermione will never take and tries to tell her that the pit doesn't exist, that she's making it up.
Hermione pretends to let herself be convinced after a few sessions. She gets very good at that, and she gets a lot of practice, with a lot of therapists over the years.
It's easy, to make people want things. Most of the time, they already do. To turn it into the kind of hunger, the kind of hunger Hermione has to deal with every day, doesn't take much.
It's too easy, so Hermione tries to rein it in. She still practices, a lot (like when she convinces Roger Smith, the boy sitting across from her in class who always pushed her around at recess, that he really, really wants to jump of the roof – that took a lot of work), but mostly she focuses on filling her own hunger.
Knowledge is good at that, and books don't judge the way people do – they can't leave her behind the way every kid her age always does, can't avoid her, shifting uneasily, the way adults do.
Of course, that's not the only weird thing happening in Hermione's life. There are other things – unexplainable events that she's unable to link to the pit in her stomach, things that happen she she's feeling something particularly strongly: objects flying or turning invisible, unreachable books suddenly falling into her open hands…
She comes up with magic months before Professor McGonagall comes to visit, books of science having long proved useless to explain what Hermione could do.
She feels something settle inside her when she accepts the letter, and thinks 'yes, this is my place'.
.i(Neville).
It takes Neville years to figure out how to make his plants stop rotting around him, but when he does they turn glorious.
Of course, they're all dangerous – great man-eating plants that could swallow a grown man whole, vines that could and would strangle you before you ever had the time to react, small berry bushes covered in a poison that would eat through uncovered skin in instants, and more beside those.
They can't harm him, and well, if they do it heals quickly. They're fascinating to watch though, and even more to study.
Just by looking at them and the way he got them to grow, Neville can think of a dozen plagues the world would never recover from.
His grandmother slapped him though when he said that, still seven and chubby-faced. She looked at him with such horror that Neville decided it would be best to keep those works theoretical for some time still.
They visit the hospital where his parents stay once a week, and though he hates seeing them that way, he treasures those moments, and not only because they're the only way he gets to interact with the parents who gave up their sanity for him.
(he fashions slow-acting poisons for the Lestranges as revenge for his parents – in this, he doesn't think his grandmother would be against him)
The hospital is his favorite place after the greenhouses. He always wanders for a while after he visits his parents – goes anywhere from infectious diseases to incurable curses.
He watches, and he learns. Sometimes, when he finds someone he knows deserves it (and he always knows, a dirty stench no one else notices clinging to them), he experiments a little.
A single touch, a stroke of a finger, and he gets to watch how his diseases react to real people, if only for a handful of moments.
(his family doesn't believe he has magic, but Neville knows better – even if he didn't though, he thinks he wouldn't care much, not when he has something so much better at the tip of his fingers)
(he would have missed the others then though, and that'd have been unacceptable)
.i(Ron).
A few days after he turns three, Ron's mother stumbles upon him alone in his room, playing war with chess pieces.
It's clear he doesn't know the game yet, but for some reason the pieces listen to him anyway as he leads them into what looks like a ferocious battle.
The scene would be cute if not for the terrifyingly blood-thirsty grin dancing on her youngest son's lips.
There are other things too. Things that pile up over the years. People fighting for no reason when they're around them, the way her own temper seems to always rise up to the surface when they all sit at the table for diner, the way he sucks up the few tidbits of stories about the last war they sometimes let slip.
"I just find them interesting," he tells her in a quiet voice when she finds Arthur and together they confront their son about it. "It's history, and history's important, isn't it?"
"And that's all?" Molly persists, worried.
"Of course, Mum," he replies, looking truly bewildered.
He's not lying, she knows that, but there's also something about his answer that doesn't sit right with her. Is it possible to be both lying and not lying at the same time?
In the end, when his Hogwarts letter come, Molly is guiltily relieved to know that her son will be away from her home for almost the entire year.
(she loves her son, but there is something unsettling about him – a bloodlust that scares her, that scares her because sometimes, she thinks she starts to feel it too)
.i(Luna).
Out of all of them, Luna will be the first one to know who she is.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, she knows – they're all supposed to remember together, to be guided through this by Him, the one whose presence she can feel, a dark, addicting cloud at the edge of her mind.
But He isn't there, and Luna's mother dies in an accident in her lab, and for a moment, Luna does too.
Only of course, nothing can kill Death – nothing can kill an idea, a concept as old as time.
All it does is… Wake her up. Show her who she truly is.
It doesn't even change her much. She suspects it's the same with the others – they're already themselves, for how could they be anything else – and soon, they will be more.
They will be more, and the whole world will see it.
And Luna can't wait.