'What about that new teacher, bloody boring that's what.'
'Are you mad? Gryffindor's team are falling apart this year, Potter can play but without a keeper what use is he?'
'He totally has the hots for you Meenaz!'
The constant chatter in Hogwarts was giving Marie a permanent head ache. Who cared about the latest Weird Sister's album? What did it matter which boy had the cutest smile? She had bigger things to worry about. The dream she had had a few night previously was boring into her skull, imprinting images of the couple laughing, walking smiling. Every time she closed her eyes, there they were, then slowly their faces changed, the skin agonisingly peeled away form their muscles, the flesh turned to dust and in a flash of green light the figures standing there were no longer Lily and James Potter but her own parents.
Her mother, brown hair clinging to her face with sweat, her bulging stomach just visible behind her father's turned back. He wore a hood and cloak and she could see his face. That was how it had always been. She could never see who he was.
Then they were gone and her whole body burned from the effort of trying to get just one look from her father, just one. Then maybe the mystery surrounding her birth might be solved. Maybe she could finally find out where the lightning shaped scar on her fore arm came from and why the boy she couldn't touch had one too.