CHAPTER FOUR: Cut it Off
Ollie spent hours in customs and security at the Mexican-American border. She's ushered through queues, shepherded through line-ups, had her car searched and bags x-rayed, and finally, finally, escorted to a small back room where she was hounded with a hundred and one questions on what her 'business' was in Mexico.
"I told you, I'm here to see my father."
The man across the table from her, dressed in a suit and an identity lanyard around his thin neck, ummed and arred, flicking through the stack of papers he had laid before him, though he clearly wasn't reading anything printed on the paper.
"It says on your passport that you're a British national."
Running a tired hand down her face, still waiting for that cup of water she'd been promised three hours ago, Ollie repeated what she had been echoing for the last who-knows-how-long as she reached for the folder perched precariously on her lap.
"That's because I am. I was adopted by a British couple, but I've been going to med school in America, and now I'm trying to travel to Mexico to meet my birth father because I've been contacted by the adoption agency for a contact request."
The man, young with some sort of tattoo peeking out the line of his shirt collar, shoved the stack of papers away from him, and still Ollie flicked through her own folder, searching for the slips of paper she thought would fix all this.
"Well, you're going to need a S-154 visa, which is going to cost you an extra three thousand American dollars if you wish to travel next week, and another five if you wish to travel today-"
Ollie faltered, spluttering on a dry mouth.
"Five grand? But I already have a visa for the thirty days I'm planning on staying. I applied for it a few weeks ago and got granted it last Sunday-"
The man's smile was sleek and cold like a snakes belly scales.
"But that was before the new regulations came in."
"New regulations?"
Ollie barked back, finally at the end of her rope. She'd been patted down and shoved through detectors, scowled and tutted at, barked and paraded around like a piglet. Enough was enough.
"What new regulations? Look-"
She shook her head, at last finding what she had been searching for, sliding them out the plastic sheet of her folder and pushing it towards the man reclining casually on his chair. Her adoption papers, the contact request letter, and her original birth certificate from the Hospital de Álamos in Sonora.
"You can see here. This is the contact request letter. It's from Sonora, Álamos to be exact. That's where I am going. The adoption agency is called Homes for a Lifetime, and see-"
She swivelled the contact request page around for the man, tapping at the bottom of the page and matching it to the one printed on her original birth certificate, though he didn't bother to look where she was gesturing.
"My father's signature is here and here. His name is Miguel Galindo and-"
The man's grin fell faster than Ollie could blink, tanned skin washing sickly and pallid as if he'd suddenly gotten ash blown into his streamlined face.
"What?"
Ollie wavered at the unexpected tonal shift, but stumbled through the best she could hoping, perhaps against hope, that this meant she was actually getting somewhere now.
"The adoption agency is called Homes for a Lifetime and-"
The man, rather rudely Ollie might add, cut her off as he snatched the pages from her fingers, careening forward to press across the table and into her personal space, scanning the contents of her papers quickly. Whatever he saw, it got him finally moving, taking the papers with him as he bounced off from the table and struggled with his slack pocket to pull out his cell phone out with a barely cursory glance Ollie's way before he was shuffling out the door.
"Excuse me, I'll be back in a moment."
The door slammed shut behind him with a clack and a click of a one-way lock catching, and through the small, boxed window on the face of the door, Ollie could see the man speaking animatedly into the phone pressed to his ear, though she could not hear the words. Fifteen minutes later, he was back in the room and a completely different man. All smiles and graces and bowed head, holding the door to the interrogation room wide open for her.
"Sorry for the mix-up. You're free to go on your way."
Ollie, bewildered and tired and sweating buckets from the broken aircon unit doing nothing in the corner by the ceiling, scrambled to collect her papers the man offered out for her to take, shoving them back into stripe printed folder in her lap.
"Go? I thought you said there was new regulations, and I had to pay-"
The man, wide-eyed and nervously smiling, flapped his hands at her, brushing her off not like one would brush off a fly, but a bee you were scared was going to sting you.
"Oh, that's only for… people on business. A mistake on my co-workers part who has been… properly reprimanded for his negligence. Please, if you would like to follow me. My colleagues brought your car round back."
Tottering from the chair, caught up on the abrupt shift in the wind of fate, clutching at her folder the man led Ollie through the narrow hallways, out three sets of doors, nodding to people as they past, and then, ten minutes later and not another word exchanged, Ollie was steered out the last door and onto Mexican soil with a coaxing shove to the bottom of her back.
"Have a lovely time, and welcome to Mexico!"
The man grinned-
And then swiftly shut the door on her. She wasn't alone for long, had no time to question what the fuck was going on, however. Another man, tall with a bullet proof vest on, security by the walkie-talkie strapped to his thigh and gun slung on his hip, was rambling her way with long, sure strides, holding out a set of familiar car keys for her to take.
Which Ollie did, promptly.
"Your car."
He nodded behind him, to the brute of a pick-up truck parked only a few feet away, and then, like the other man, went on his bloody way, leaving Ollie standing numb, dumb and mum in the middle of a fuckin' car park.
"What the hell?"
Of course, no one answered her, and instead of wasting more time standing around trying to puzzle out the intricacies of muggle social customs, something Ollie was sure she would never fully grasp anyway since she spent most of her muggle life locked in a bloody cupboard and not learning the necessary social skills most others did, she dove for her car and the temperature controls. Yanking open the door, she slung her folder onto the passenger side seat, revved the engine on, blasted the aircon, and-
And found a shiny new travel mug of vanilla iced latte, double cream with honey syrup and cinnamon sprinkled on top waiting in her cupholder. Ollie, confusedly, plucked it up from where it innocently rested, spinning it in her hands as if, at any moment, the jack in the box would leap from the cap and the cream and scare the living shit out of her.
"Huh…"
She sniffed at the straw, cast a wordless and wandless hex scan and potion check just to be safe, found nothing out the ordinary, and on the side where a name would normally be written, a scribbled note instead. On the house for the misunderstanding.
No name, no number, nothing else.
Muggles were odd creatures, indeed. Did they always hand out free drinks at border control? Ollie had come to America by portkey, so… maybe? Who was to say? Muggles frequently strapped themselves into metal death machines just for a few seconds of high-speed screaming, jumped off bridges with no ability to fly but a springy rope wrapped around their ankles, and Ollie's personal favourite in the great muggle riddle, put pineapple on pizza.
Certainly they were all mad.
Perhaps this was merely one practice in a long line Petunia and Vernon's abuse had never let Ollie learn.
Ollie, precariously, took a long sip through a straw, sagging when her parched throat eased and the sugar hit the sweet spot. Still, Ollie would admit as she drained half the drink in one, it was strange that they'd managed to either guess, or by luck, get Ollie her favourite coffee.
Cinnamon included.
Dashing the half-drunk cup back into its holder, Ollie was only happy to, after hours of being tied up in bureaucratic red rope, throttle the gear and peel out the car park, back on her merry way as she slipped between a Nissan Versa and a black Mercedes that pulled in tight behind her for the exit lane.
Homes for a Lifetime was a small adoption agency on the outskirts of Álamos, which itself was a town of around eleven thousand people situated in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental in southern Sonora. This is, according to her birth certificate, the town her mother was from and possibly born in, and was where, once upon a time, Olivia herself had been birthed on a ground floor hospital ward.
As the main historical attraction of Sonora, and one of Mexico's most beautiful cities, Álamos had a rich, visible history of conquistadors, silver mining barons, imperialists and revolutionaries. Each street was soaked with the sun of a different age, of Spanish romanticism, born on the soil of Old Mexico.
Or so Olivia's hotel pamphlet tells her after she books into a room and promptly passes out from her long drive, longer wait at the border, another time-consuming drive, and slow check in.
The Hacienda de los Santos Resort & Spa was expensive, especially given that Olivia had booked the room out for an entire month, but given that she'd spent a childhood in a damp caked cupboard, then into a shared Gryffindor dormitory where girls often forgot to cast silencing charms on their beds to hide the snoring, then squished into a Med school hall residence, for once Ollie wanted to treat herself.
And treat herself, she did.
The room was large, the largest room Olivia had ever stayed in, had its own balcony, a double downy bed with a welcoming chocolate on the pillow, real timber above her head and spare cupboards for clothing and items. Outside her balcony was the resort gardens, rich green and with high palms dotting the horizon.
She even had her own bathroom, lined with Moroccan patterned tiles, and a walk-in shower she could hold her hands out and spin around and still not touch the walls, and a jacuzzi bath.
A Jacuzzi.
When muggles did finer things, they did finer things.
It does, nevertheless, not stop the frenzied rush Olivia has in the morning when she oversleeps and misses her alarm for her appointment at the adoption agency only two hours away.
Forty-five minutes now that she slept in.
It's a stubbed toe dash from there.
Showering, bunning her hair up, Olivia fixes herself into a clean pair of jeans with no holes in, a white tank top, and the smart tweed, slightly oversized blazer she'd worn for her med school interview. She forgoes heels, knowing she was more likely to make a prat out of herself and break an ankle if she wore them than look respectable, and instead opts not for her battered tennis shoes but the pair of flat sandals Hermione had given her for Christmas last year.
Sweeping up her folder, purse, car keys and a pair of sunglasses for the already blinding Mexico sunrise, Ollie darted for her car and out the welcome lobby, stumbling past a man in braids and a patterned shirt reading the local paper by the window, jabs in the address for the agency, and follows the arrow on the GPS screen, pulling out the car park just as a black Mercedes, catching a glimpse of its licence plates beginning with GA, begins to pull out too.
Muggles… mad but marvellous.
She manages, against the odds, to get there ten minutes early for her appointment, and is left standing in the waiting room.
It's… peculiar, Ollie would admit, the adoption agency, standing inside it, and the… emotions it brings. It's a nice enough place, has toys in the corners of the room, plastic rollers and light up books that do barn yard animal noises and wooden blocks to build with. The carpet was that colourful jigsaw patches of primary colours, and on the wall was photographs of 'successful' stories posed out in a heart shape, snapshots of newly formed families smiling at the cameras with children of varying ages blearily, and confusedly, looking on.
Yet it's a little sad too. This place existed because these children, through various means, had no one else to take them in.
Don't get Ollie wrong, adoption was good. There was hardly anything in the world kinder and more loving than to adopt. What happened to Olivia, the murder of her adopted parents and then the subsequent abuse of the Dursleys because she was dumped on their doorstep in November, was not, at all, a common story.
Most adoptions worked out really well, for parents to be and children, and that was fuckin' beautiful.
But that wasn't Olivia Potter's story. She didn't get the happy family. She didn't get the loving home. She got belts and curses and a broken cot in the dark, and she had been lucky if she had three meals a week that weren't scavenged from the kitchen bin in the middle of the night.
She had only just recently taught herself to eat at least twice a day, and still had issues she was working on with food insecurity, never mind all the other neuroses and complexes living with the Dursleys and then fighting a war as a child had instilled in her.
Standing there now, staring at the photos shaped in a cartoon heart, feet planted on the very same ground Lily and James Potter once stood as they were handed a bundled baby Olivia, she's suddenly struck with the… the… grief of what went wrong.
The pain of what could have been but wasn't, the bitter regret of what if.
"Olivia Galindo?"
A women's voice piped up from behind her, and Ollie snapped to, whirling to face the short woman who'd snuck up on her back.
"Olivia Potter, actually."
She corrected politely, and the woman, a good head and shoulders above Ollie, though that wasn't a very difficult task given how short she was, smiled courteously back.
"Olivia Potter, I'm Maria Garcia and I'm your case manager. if you would like to follow me to my office?"
The woman with a stern bun streaked with large chunks of grey but a kind smile and flowing skirts, led Ollie to a backroom behind the receptionist counter, where a desk fan whirled on a slightly lopsided table, next to an old desktop computer and printer opposite a single chair.
A single chair Olivia took as the woman worked her way behind the desk, opening drawers and pulling out magnolia packets as she nattered.
"I hope you had a safe journey here? Can I just see some ID before we talk, please?"
Olivia fiddled with the long strep of her purse slung over her shoulder, flashing her passport to the waiting Maria.
"The ride from Sonoyta to Álamos was nice."
Olivia respectfully and tactfully said, ignoring the strange happenstances of the border just before Sonoyta a day ago. The woman, Maria, grinned as she nodded for Ollie to put her passport away after a hard look at the photo and name.
"Very long and very hot too, I suspect. I see Lily and James stayed in Britain by your accent? Last time we spoke they were thinking of moving to France. Were quite adamant about it, actually."
Olivia's hand tightened on her strap, so hard her knuckles bled bone white.
"You knew Lily and James Potter?"
"Knew them?"
Maria chuckled.
"I met with them quite a lot. I was the administrator on your adoption case for them. Lovely couple. One of the nicest people I ever met, that Lily. How are they doing?"
Dead.
Ollie, of course, doesn't say that. Instead she swallows around the thick lump in her throat and winces.
"They… they passed away in a car accident a while ago."
It was not a lie, but it wasn't the truth either. The woman's face crumbled like sand in the sea, and she fumbled with the wallet in her hand that Olivia could spy her own name written across.
"I'm… I'm so sorry. I-"
Maria shook her head, scrambling to get back to safer waters. Olivia was thankful for it. There was nothing worse than sitting through the empty platitudes of I'm sorry for your loss, they're somewhere better now, you'll see them again one day and all the other slightly hollow I understand's.
"Here-"
Maria said as she held out the pack for Ollie to take. Wearily, she does, unsure of the light weight of it and what it housed inside the glued down lip.
"This is the information we were given by your biological father a few months back. Customarily, when a contact request is applied for, the individual applying for it gives over contact details such as phone numbers, email addresses, sometimes a father or mother or both put in written letters. It all depends on what your biological father has decided to include. Our job here, seen as your above age, is to pass it along, and, well, what you do with it is up to you."
Ollie pulled the brown pack closer, down into her lap, feeling how fragile it felt in her grip for something that had such metaphorical weight.
It didn't seem quite right.
"Do I just… take it?"
Maria, anew, chuckled.
"Take it away, read it here, throw it in the bin unopened, all of which is entirely in your hands."
"So that's it? We're done here? No… questionnaire or… I don't know, screening?"
Maria's grin was white and big and kind.
"That's it. You've shown your documents, faxed over your adoption papers, proved your identity… all's above board."
Slowly, sluggishly as if she was treading through treacle, Olivia stood from her chair, keeping a grip on her purse and the pack.
"I-… Thank you."
"Your welcome and have a good week!"
"You too."
Ollie chirped back as she left the office. By the time she reached her car parked out front, she was still slightly in a daze.
In her hand was more than paper and ink. In her hand was a choice, a real choice in her real hand, something that hadn't felt quite as heavy until that moment.
Getting that letter posted below her door, the long drive over, all of it had been… intermediate. A transitional movement of getting from point A to point B where there was plenty of turn-back options, and now, with this letter, she was squarely and surely at point B, and the choice was right at her feet.
Open the letter; throw it away.
She had come here to open it, to meet her biological father, but thinking of doing something and actually doing something were, Olivia found, complete opposites.
She won't lie, as she didn't fully lie to Maria Garcia, she was… scared? Perhaps not scared, but cautious? Sad and happy. A mix of a hundred things she couldn't name all buzzing about her head and in her chest and swan diving into her gut, standing on a sidewalk in the north of Mexico, caught between the change of thinking something turning into actually doing it.
Her thumb slipped into the lip and ripped the paper open, but before she pulled out the single paper housed inside, Ollie glanced up and saw a car across the way, parked outside a little bistro, empty of its driver.
A black Mercedes with licence plates beginning with GA and ending with 01-444.
Funny.
That car had been at the hotel and spa, hadn't it? A black Mercedes, though at the time she hadn't looked for the number plates, had been pulling out behind her at the border stop too.
Coming this far outside Álamos for a cup of coffee, especially when the city centre was lined with coffee houses and bakeries, just at the exact same time Ollie came for the adoption agency, both coming from the same hotel... was a bit of a coincidence, wasn't it?
Ignoring the pack and slinking into her car, turning the ignition and beginning a slow drive down the street the opposite way from the hotel, Ollie stashed her unread letter in her glove box and took the winding street to nowhere.
Seven minutes later, with a glance at the rear-view mirror, she saw the hood of a black Mercedes turning the corner to drive down the same street Ollie had turned onto.
She took a left.
They took a left.
She took a right, left, left, right, left, right, right, right, ending in a bloody full circuit.
They did the same.
Fan-fuckin'-tastic.
She had a tail. Merlin knew why, how, or how long it had been trailing behind her, but there it was.
And there was only ever one thing you did to a tail.
Cut it off.
Olivia Potter parked up at the hotel and, in broad daylight, slowly crossed the park for the entrance of the spa, taking her time to cross the street, hanging around the doors before ducking inside the cool shade.
She meandered in the welcome lobby, pausing to pilfer through the rack of pamphlets about the local sights to see, having a quick chat with a retired couple sitting on the sofas by the bay windows to ask how their vacation was going, before making her unhurried way towards her room, taking the stairwell and not the lift.
She gets off the stairs two floors down from her room, where the bars would be, keeping track of her steps on the carpet in the empty hallway.
Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump-
Thump-thump-thump.
Another set of footprints. She doesn't glance back once, gives no indication of outside awareness. For all her worth, she looked like any other resort resident going for a cheeky midday drink.
Ollie grinned as she turned the corner, ostensibly heading for the cocktail bar on the floor of the empty hallway. The footsteps grew closer, loud in the vacancy of the closed doors, and the noise of what sounded like a whip cracking was muffled by the bend in the turn.
The man turned the corner and-
Ollie had already apparated behind him, had her wand out, aimed and ready, stunner flying from the tip. He crumpled to the floor face first before he could get a look behind him at the sound of popping air.
Ollie pocketed her wand and stood over him, bending down to turn him on his back. He was a big man, huge compared to her, dressed in slacks and a patterned shirt and a muggle gun holster strapped across his chest. His black hair was braided away from his face in two plaits, eyes closed in slumber, mouth slack in sleep, and he was kind of handsome-
And also the man who'd likely been following her since the Sonoyta border.
The same man who had been reading the paper in the lobby this morning.
"What the fuck am I meant to do with you now?"
Woo or Boo?
A.N: Thunder clashes, lightning strikes, smoke oozes from an open grave as a fanfic author rises from the fog; IT'S ALIVE!
It's been over three years since I last touched this fic, and I really wouldn't be surprised if no one is reading this anymore lol, but I've been slowly coming back into writing and just having fun with it, and wanted to return to some of my older fics, and this one holds a special place in my heart. I couldn't leave it be. So here were are lol. If this hasn't echoed out into an empty void, I'm so sorry for the enormous wait, and I hope you guys liked this small peace offering I humbly hold out.
Which really means please don't boo too hard, and keep the rotten veg to a minimum XD.
As always, thank you for taking to time out to read this nonsense, hope you enjoyed it, and if you can, and want to see more, don't forget to drop a review! See you all soon.