disclaimer: Still not J.K. Wish I was, but alas, some wishes will just never come true.

a/n: Here it is! We finally get to meet Jules! YAY! (waves her arms around enthusiastically, then pouts when everyone ignores her) Oh, well. Enjoy!

Per Ardua Ad Astra – "Through Hardship To The Stars"

Part II: Genesis

by nightshade468

Chapter One: Peculiar Trunks and Kamikaze Pigeons

"Juliet, get down from there! The floorboards are rotted; you could fall in!"

Eleven-year-old Jules Donovan rolled her eyes and ignored her mother. "It's fine, Mom! I'm watching where I'm going!" She was more careful about where she stepped in the old, musty attic from that point on, however.

Her aunt had recently decided to move from Jules' grandmother's old house in the suburbs into a sleek new condo at the other end of town. Jules and her mother had bought the house outright from her aunt and uncle, their only condition being that they had to go through the old boxes in the attic and decide what needed to be pitched and what didn't.

Or rather, her mother was going through the mountains of boxes and chests stored up in the old attic. Jules was just poking around, exploring and generally making even more of a mess for her mother to sort through. After only about half an hour, she was bored out of her mind. She was heading back in her mom's direction when, for some peculiar reason, one trunk caught her eye.

It was buried under four other trunks and boxes, shoved back into the far corner of the room. Coughing, Jules managed to lever the others out of the way, finally reaching the old black chest.

The thing was covered in almost an inch of dust. Caught in a sneezing fit, Jules rubbed her tearing eyes and fumbled with the old-fashioned latch. After a moment, she was still jiggling it, but it wouldn't open, darn it! She slammed her palm down on the top of the trunk, sending up a huge cloud of dust and starting another sneezing fit.

"Jules?" her mother called. "What are you doing back there?"

"Just looking around, Mom!" Jules called back between explosions.

"Well, don't make too much of a mess! Whatever you get out you need to put back!"

"Ok, Mom!" Now she was getting a bit exasperated. It wasn't as if her mother hadn't told her the same thing fifty other times.

"I'm going downstairs to get the mail; don't break anything!"

"All RIGHT, Mom!"

Finally, she heard her mother's footsteps going down the stairs. "All right," she said again, and hunkered back down in front of the trunk. "Now, let's figure out how to open you. There must be something I've missed."

She felt around the front of the chest, carefully wiping off the dust and polishing the nameplate on the front. "Elisabeth N. Galloway," she read. "Wait, Elisabeth? Wasn't that my grandmother's maiden name? The one I'm named after?" She thought back to the time she'd looked at her mother's family tree. She'd never met her grandmother, not that she could remember, anyway, so she couldn't really be sure.

"Well, if you were my grandma Lisbeth's, then she probably wouldn't mind if I opened you," she said to the trunk, feeling rather foolish talking to an inanimate object. "So, if you really wouldn't mind, could you please…" She trailed off in awe.

While she'd been talking to the trunk, she'd also been joggling at the lock, and as soon as she'd said the word please, the dratted lock-thing had popped open with no resistance whatsoever.

The trunk lid then popped open all on its own. "Wow," she whispered. "Okay… thanks, I guess?"

The trunk did nothing further.

"Right," she muttered. "I'm talking to a trunk. I sound nuts." Shaking her head, she peered inside. "I wonder what's inside here. Must be pretty old."

Reaching a hand down in, she felt something very soft. Pulling it out carefully (she didn't want to damage it if it was fragile), she spread what was apparently a silky-soft velvet cloak on her knees. "Wow," she whispered again. "I wonder where she got this."

In the dim light, it was difficult to see what color the garment was, but Jules thought it looked like it was a deep, rich violet, almost black. Stroking its plushness softly, she folded it and laid it aside, careful to place it on top of a nearby wicker chair so it wouldn't get dirty on the floor.

The next thing she pulled out was a book, one of many she had felt inside the chest. She held it up in the dim light and rubbed at the cover. "Fantastical Beasts and Where To Find Them, Twenty-Second Edition?" She blinked. "What the heck? It looks like a schoolbook, for crying out loud."

Shaking her heads he set it aside and pulled out two more. "Quidditch Through The Ages? What the heck is quid-datch?" She glanced at the other one. "And what's 'Dark Forces'? And why would you need to have self-protection from them?"

Completely baffled, she sat back. What had her great-grandmother been into? Was she a fan of science-fiction? 'Cause all those books and things almost looked like they were about magic and stuff. And she did have that cloak… but magic wasn't real, it was all pretend. Why had her grandmother kept all this stuff locked in the attic in an old trunk?

Jules was jerked from her thoughts by her mother's voice, hollering up from the kitchen that it was time for dinner. Puzzled, the eleven-year-old headed down the stairs after stacking up the old boxes on top of the trunk again. Something prickled on the back of her neck, though, as she started down the stairs, and she fought the urge to turn back and look.

She was really creeped out by the discovery of her grandmother's trunk, but somehow it didn't feel right to tell her mom about it. Carrie Donovan watched her daughter throughout the evening, wondering what was making her typically cheerful child brood so much.

Jules went to bed on time for once, and she knew her mother thought it was strange that she didn't even beg to stay up another half-hour and read.

After tossing and turning for close two an hour, Jules finally drifted off to a restless sleep. She didn't have any real dreams, per say, but she kept having a sense of something, just on the edge of her perception. When she woke the next morning, she felt as though she hadn't gotten any sleep at all.

She rolled out of bed, groaning, and stumbled towards the bathroom, but suddenly she stopped in her tracks.

There, just next to the door of her room, sat her grandmother Lisbeth's trunk.

Jules stared, uncomprehending. She remembered packing it up again, locking it and stacking other boxes back on top. She remembered doing that.

But there sat the trunk, its black leather sides clean and dust-free, as if it had never been up in the attic. Its silver fastenings and lock were polished so well that they gleamed like mirrors. The engraved name on the silver plate above the lock almost seemed to glow in the morning sunlight.

Juliet E. Donovan.

Jules ran.

xxxxxxx

Twenty minutes and four waffles later, Jules felt almost normal again. Watching her mother water the plants at the open kitchen window, she sighed to herself. It had just been a figment of her imagination, after all. And if it wasn't perhaps she had gone up and dragged the trunk down the night before. She just didn't remember it. Yeah, of course, that was it. Her memory was going, her being an old lady of eleven and all. That was it. Of course it was.

She was still buried in these reassuring thoughts when the kamikaze pigeon zoomed in through the window and dive-bombed her head.

TBC…

xxxxxxx

a/n: Well? A thought, anyone?