Rose's childhood was filled with love and many moments of happiness, though her young life was marked by tragedy as well. For the first few years after Rose was born, she lived happily with Maggie and Dan in the little house with the blue door. When Maggie returned to work at the public library, she brought Rose with her. She napped in a car seat tucked under Maggie's desk, and played on a blanket laid on the floor. When Rose got a little older, she would toddle around the library to the amusement of the other librarians and the patrons, stopping in the children's area to flip through picture books, and returning to her mother's side at the main circulation desk to draw pictures next to her. When Dan finished his day at the school, he would swing by the library to pick up his wife and daughter and drive them all home. Rose loved spending time with her mother, even if Maggie was constantly distracted by library patrons, and even from a young age was able to keep herself occupied and amused. And in the evenings and on weekends Dan was able to help watch her, giving Maggie some time to herself as well as providing chances for the whole little family to spend time together.
Their life was a simple but happy one, until tragedy struck when Rose was three years old. It was a chilly Sunday in early November, and Maggie had run out to the grocery store while Dan and Rose stayed at home putting together a puzzle on the kitchen floor. Unbeknown to any of the Aurums, who knew nothing of the wizarding world or the dark forces rising within it, the Death Eaters had marked out the area for an attack, intended to cause panic amongst the muggles. Maggie Aurum was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time as she crossed the parking lot from her car to the store, though the Death Eaters would no doubt have been pleased to learn that one of their victims that day was the mother of a muggleborn witch. Maggie heard an odd cracking sound, and turned to see a group of hooded figures moving across the parking lot towards the grocery, figures who she would have sworn had not been there moments before. She may not have understood who they were or what exactly they wanted, but it was clear that they were not there to pick up some tomatoes and a nice piece of cheese at the store. She turned to run towards the presumed safety of the store, but never made it there. Maggie did not see the beam of green light that hit her in the back and ended her life. The Death Eaters continued past her body, lying on the asphalt, killing the few other people in the parking lot who tried to run or hide behind their cars, and continuing into the store. Their plan, presumably, was to murder everyone inside the building, but they were stopped by the arrival of another group of wizards, the fledgling Order of the Phoenix, not that any of the muggles in the area knew any of that. With the appearance of the Order, the Death Eaters chose to depart rather than fight, leaving Dumbledore's people to modify the memories of anyone who might have seen what occurred, and called the police to the area. When the police arrived, it was to a group of cowering witnesses who swore they had seen a gunman run through the parking lot and shoot the handful of shoppers who were moving to and from their cars. Despite the lack of evidence, most noticeably the lack of bullet wounds in the bodies, this was accepted as the official cause. The case was considered effectively closed, and all that remained was to identify the victims and inform their families.
Meanwhile, Dan and Rose had finished their puzzle, and Rose had started to draw a picture at the kitchen table while Dan pulled out a stack of essays to grade. Both looked up when they heard a knock at the door. Dan stood up and went to open the door, assuming that Maggie simply had her hands too full to search for her house key. Opening the door, Dan was unpleasantly surprised to find a policeman rather than his wife, and politely, if hesitantly, asked whether everything was alright. The policeman's expression at the question was enough to let Dan know that things were not, in fact, all right, even before the other man opened his mouth to answer. Dan's feeling of unease soon transformed into shock and grief as the officer gently explained what had happened. A terrible incident, he called it. The officer continued to talk, but Dan barely caught more than a few words. Drive-by shooter. No one got a good look at him. Six dead. So sorry for your loss. Dan looked blankly at the policeman, trying to process what he was saying, not wanting to believe it. How could Maggie be dead? She'd just run out to buy some groceries...
Dan pulled himself out of his own swirling thoughts long enough to see the policeman out, then turned back to face his little daughter. Rose had moved from her spot at the table, moving down the hallway towards him as he had spoken to the police officer. She held a paper in her hand, which she held out to him now with a smile. Dan looked down at the paper, a crude crayon drawing of three stick figures: A big one with brown hair and a red blob at its neck that might have been a bowtie, a slightly smaller one with a blue scribbled dress and long hair, and in the middle, the smallest figure, holding hands with the larger ones on either side. As Dan looked down at the drawing, at Rose's attempt at depicting herself and her parents, he finally broke down. Between sobs, and holding his daughter tightly, Dan tried to explain that Mommy wasn't coming back, that it was just the two of them now. As he sat on the floor of the kitchen in the little house with the blue door that he and Maggie had chosen together, holding their wailing daughter as tears continued to run down his cheeks, Dan wondered how they could possibly go on.
Rose was too young to fully understand what had happened or why her mother hadn't come home from her grocery run, but Dan was devastated. Neither of them had been prepared for anything like this. How could they have? A freak shooter in the grocery store parking lot (as they thought it had been) wasn't something you expected, and Dan struggled to figure out how he could possibly move on with his life. At the beginning, full of grief for his beloved young wife, the only thing that kept him going was Rose, and knowing that he needed to pull himself together for her sake and figure out how to get their lives back together without Maggie. The first few months after Maggie's death were a blur for Dan. Somehow he got everything figured out – funeral arrangements, convincing a preschool to take Rose despite the late date, convincing Rose to attend the preschool (a much harder battle). It took time for both husband and daughter to recover from the sudden loss of Maggie, but eventually they fell into a new rhythm, and began to move on. Rose attended preschool, where she mostly ignored the other children in favor of drawing or flipping through picture books in the corner. Soon, with Dan's help, she learned to read on her own, allowing her an even better option for retreating from the world. Over time, she began to open up again, though she always remained somewhat of an introverted, quiet child, happier with her family, her books, and maybe a few friends, than with a larger crowd.
Over the next few years, Dan began to open up more as well. A couple years after Maggie's death, Dan met Jenny Howard, a widow a few years older than him with a young son, John. The boy was 5 years older than Rose, but the two attended the same school, and their parents met through PTA meetings and school activities. The two adults became friends, bonding over the struggles of parenting a small child without help, though their children had little to do with each other. Over time that friendship turned into something more, and after much deliberation Dan and Jenny decided to get married. Neither wanted an elaborate affair, so they were married in a simple ceremony when Rose was 6 years old, and John was 11. Jenny and John moved into the blue-doored cottage where Rose had lived her whole life, and the little girl had a mother again. Rose adored Jenny, though there were occasions when she wondered whether it might be disloyal to her own mother to say such a thing, particularly since she could barely remember Maggie herself. In one tearful conversation between father and daughter, Dan reassured Rose that her mother would have loved Jenny, and would have been happy to see their family happy and taken care of, even if she couldn't be there with them herself. After that Rose felt no reservations in showing affection for Jenny, and her stepmother reciprocated the feeling. John was slightly less pleased with the new arrangement. He latched on to Dan, having never met his own father, who had died before his birth, but wasn't quite as thrilled about having a younger sister. Still, John and Rose managed to get along well enough, mostly by ignoring each other, and life seemed to finally be going smoothly again for the Aurums.
When Rose was 7, about a year after Dan and Jenny had gotten married, she performed her first big accidental magic, though of course no one in the family could have known that explanation. It was in the autumn, and the leaves of the big tree in the backyard had turned to brilliant reds and golds, and some had begun to fall. Rose was playing outside the house after school, throwing leaves into the air and dancing among them, as children are wont to do. Suddenly, as she danced, the leaves on the ground rose up in a brilliant swirl of color and began twirling around her, floating in the air. Jenny, sitting at the kitchen table doing homework with John, happened to look out the window at that moment. She was startled, and somewhat alarmed, to see the leaves appearing to float in midair around her stepdaughter. She rushed outside, leaving a confused John behind her at the table, but by the time she reached Rose, the leaves had fallen back to the ground and lay motionless, and the girl was dancing alone. Jenny, with no reason to think magic could exist, assumed there must have simply been a sudden wind, but still made Rose come back inside the house with her. When Jenny told Dan about it later, he was equally puzzled by the occurrence, but since neither could come up with an explanation other than the natural wind, they just let it go and soon forgot about the incident.
There were several more incidents over the next few years, all minor, and all brushed off by Jenny and Dan as not being an issue, when they even noticed anything at all. John never noticed any of the accidental magic. He had never spent much time with Rose, considering himself much too old to be concerning himself with a little kid, even if she was his stepsister; Rose found this arrangement quite satisfactory as well, and the two avoided each other as much as they could without arousing suspicion from their parents. Rose, of course, noticed her magic when it made its rare appearances, but she simply accepted it as a natural occurrence and didn't think anything of it. None of her accidental magic was anything that an imaginative little girl couldn't come up with an explanation for, and despite reading her fair share of fantasy books it never seriously occurred to her that she might be performing magic without knowing it.
Everything changed on Rose's 11th birthday. It was early May, still a little chilly out that year. Rose came home from school on the bus as usual, dropping her backpack on the floor of the front hall with a loud thud and rushing into the kitchen where Jenny was waiting with a hug and a plate of apple slices for an after-school snack. John came home not long after, still complaining about the increased workload that he had now that he was a high schooler, despite the fact that he had been in high school for over a year already. After a reminder from his mother, he mumbled a quick "Happy birthday, kid" in Rose's direction before pounding up the stairs to tackle his homework before dinner. Dan, coming in the door right behind his stepson, was much more enthusiastic in his birthday greetings to his daughter, and offered to play her in a game of chess using the new set that he and Jenny had bought her as a birthday gift. The two settled down to their game at the kitchen table as Jenny began preparations for a celebratory dinner.
About halfway through the first game of chess, a knock came at the front door. Dan and Jenny exchanged puzzled looks; neither were expecting any visitors. With a shrug, Jenny went down the hall to answer the door, and Dan turned most of his concentration back to the game. Looking out the peephole, Jenny saw a tall, handsome woman with dark hair pulled back tightly into a bun, wearing a simple green dress. The woman didn't look threatening, so Jenny opened the door and politely asked if she could help with something. Professor McGonagall, for of course it was she, answered that she was looking for the family of Miss Rose Aurum, to discuss a scholarship to a special school in Scotland at which she was deputy headmistress. By this time Dan had come to the door as well, to see what was going on. None of the adults noticed, but Rose had followed him and was listening to the conversation from further down the hallway. Despite their initial confusion, Dan and Jenny invited the professor into the house to discuss the issue further. Rose, starting to scurry out of sight down the hall as the adults came back into the house, thought better of it when she realized her father had noticed her, and instead joined them in the living room as if that had been her intention all along.
When the whole family was assembled on the couch facing Professor McGonagall (except for John, who was doing homework upstairs, oblivious to what was going on), she began to explain. She was a witch. "Hogwarts", as she called the school, was a school for young witches and wizards. Rose was a witch as well, despite not coming from a magical family. There was a stunned silence, as Dan, Jenny, and Rose tried to process what they had just been told. Professor McGonagall, used to such reactions from the families of muggleborns, gave them a moment before continuing her spiel. She gave a demonstration of magic, turning herself into a cat and levitating some books that were sitting on the coffee table. By this point the family had gotten over their skepticism, and most of their shock, and were beginning to recall all of the times when odd things had happened around Rose, and wonder whether maybe McGonagall was right that she could be a witch.
The professor, seeing that they were coming around to what she had said, relaxed slightly. The hard part was over, she assumed. All that was left to do was to give the girl her official Hogwarts letter and supplies list, explain how to get to Diagon Alley and Platform 9 3/4, and then leave. Unfortunately for McGonagall, the Aurums were not going to be satisfied with such little information. As Dan told her, she couldn't just tell them there was a whole other society out there hiding in plain sight, a world that their Rose was expected to join, and not expect them to have quite a few questions about the matter. So, with a small sigh and a hope that they wouldn't ask too many awkward questions, McGonagall settled in to tell them more about the wizarding world. Luckily for the professor, it did not occur to Dan until much later to wonder whether the mystery around Rose's mother's death might have anything to do with wizards. If he had thought of it, and McGonagall had been forced to admit that the issues of the wizarding world were not limited only to wizards, but that regular people often were caught in the crossfire, Dan and Jenny may not have been as willing to let Rose venture out into such a world. But, luckily for our story, that did not occur, and when McGonagall left the Aurum household that day she left behind a family excited and intrigued by the prospects of a wizarding world, a wizarding school, and a magical daughter.