I've always been a painfully late bloomer so of course I would contract covid now. This leaves me a bewildering amount of time though and I found myself stumbling back to Clara. Hope you guys enjoy. 3

Chapter 21: Homecoming

Keela,

I'm so -

Miss Mckinnon,

I can't properly-

Keela Mckinnon,

We're friends and I-

My friend-

Please forgive me.

The train gave a shrill, unforgiving scream, sending Clara's shoulder slamming into the cold windowpane. The clammy cold seeped into the metal and glass, reminding Clara of how close to Christmas it actually was. Outside the wind pushed bitterly against each snowflake, bullying them into walls and people alike. When Clara was younger, she had thought all that lush ivory had cast the world in a new glow, allowed it a fresh start to begin again in innocence.

Now she thought that it all looked vaguely like a blanket falling over a dead body - a pathetic screen against an atrocity that had happened.

"Sweetheart! Over here, my love!" Her mother's piercingly joyful voice flew across the nearly-deserted train station, bombarding Clara and the three other travelers that had done almost everything in their power to forget that there were others on the train. The silver-haired girl winced, offering a small wave and an even smaller curl of her lips.

There is a certain kind of smile that only a mother has when seeing their child for the first time after a long absence. It is the kind of smile that bends the very fabric of a person's being and shapes it into something softer, warmer. It's important to note that while all women with children are granted the title of mother as men with children are granted the title of fathers, this expression is used as more idealistic and less biological. These words that children give people who are meant to protect them unconditionally are handed out sparingly, no matter what any adult will tell you. They're given and taken away in a matter of moments depending on the person rushing toward them, the intent behind their words, and the earnestness of their expressions.

In this moment, the word mother to Clara Deschamp condensed and expanded in that bitterly cold train station, her shoes too tight and her clothes so much looser than just a few seasons before. In this moment, the smile that her mother was racing toward her carrying was a thing of whimsy. It bent the very air around her, lightning it from the dreary winter haze to a spring-like shine.

And it was that that finally broke the last seal of her control, the thing that forced the icy lump of sorrow and humiliation up from the middle of her throat and to her tongue. Hot tears burned defiantly against her chilled cheeks, adding the sting of pain to the already excruciating feeling of being strangled by her own sobs.

Clara Deshcamp hadn't cried when they had put one of the guards patrolling the castle for her distant relation, Sirius Black on watch beside her cot in the infirmary. She hadn't cried when the other student's had flinched and whispered their way away from her when she had been led back and forth from meetings with the headmaster and her house teacher. She hadn't even cried when she had seen her friends pale at the very sight of her in the halls or when George had stared at her with the eyes of someone who should have been looking at a stranger instead.

She hadn't cried when a few days after that crushing darkness had eclipsed her, Professor Dumbledore had come into the infirmary with Professor Sprout. She hadn't cried even though she knew what they were about to say.

"For the safety of your fellow students and for yourself," Dumbledore had said, not unkindly, looking down at her with those fathomless eyes. "We think it would be best for you to go on holiday. You're nearly through with the year-"

Clara hadn't asked when she would be back.

"Oh, my love." The familiar scent of baked sugar and flour with the tang of lemon and lavender engulfed her. And she finally noticed the crisp little box in her mother's slender fingers, her favorite cookies placed lovingly in a lilac wrapper. It all made her cry harder, her head bowing into her mother's shoulders, her arms wrapping around her slight frame as if she was the last piece of driftwood in a tossing sea. "Oh, my love, come here."

The Deschamp residence in England was much as you would expect from a family with a history rich in coaxing plants to bend to the fickle needs of men. Located out in the English countryside, Clara's mother and father had found a cottage tucked away just down the road from a town that had farmer's markets on Saturdays and very few nosy muggles to contend with on the long road in between. For those that didn't particularly like to deal with the hubbub of wizard towns - too much chanting and candle-lit seances, Alicio Deschamp had declared on many occasions - the only other option was a life of near-complete solitude. The Deschamps had been living in much the same manner for the last few decades and didn't particularly see any reason to change.

"There's a duck," Clara murmured, staring in utter bewilderment as the little muggle mammal waddled haughtily nearer and nearer, its beak tilted toward the snow-heavy clouds, a strange little cape attached around its neck. The little witch blinked down at it, trying and failing to grasp what was happening as it cast her a disdainful glance and waddled into a small baby blue house with a cheery yellow ramp attached to it. "Why do we have ducks?"

"Geese, my love," Clara's mother corrected airily, clicking her tongue in an odd chorus which sent the haughty duck - goose in a returning chorus of honks.

Clara could only stare on in mounting bafflement as three other be-caped geese sprinted from the underbrush of a nearby hedge and bombarded her mother, pecking at her shins. Honks like the ever-present rage of city traffic filled the air, adding to pandemonium. Willa Deshcamp gave a few more clucks and a final honk before pointing adamantly to the little blue house, the geese obediently filing up the yellow ramp and through the door.

Mrs. Deschamp brushed off her skirt with a content sigh, casting a quick spell on the hutch before breezily shutting the door and making her way across the small wooden bridge that arched over the stream in front of their house.

"Really, sweetheart, they're absolutely fantastic weeders for the crops. Absolutely besotted with fresh grass - you enjoy that word, oui? You hear it a lot at school? Very English, no? Besotted." Willa Deschamp grinned over her shoulder at her daughter. "Not to mention that while dogs can be bribed, geese cannot. They're our own little alarm bells for anything strange around the farm. Did you know that geese are known to kill smaller predators like snakes and foxes? They even attack humans."

She sounded absolutely delighted with the prospect.

In truth, the geese of the Deschamp residence - which were named Elizabeth Bennet, Kitty Bennet, Lydia Bennet, Jane Bennet and Mister Darcy - only tolerated the occupants of said home because of Willa. Alicio they had found to be too loud and the moody and the sickly one was just too sickly. They didn't deal well with fragile things. Willa however was always willing to give them all the fresh grass that they wanted and had even begun to cultivate patches of clover, bluegrass and other delicious greens just for them. Their little blue house was always warm and filled with fresh hay and the stream was just far enough from the house that they could doze without hearing Alicio's incessant stomping.

Across the stream, the sprawling corpse of a garden remained in the aftermath of winter. Snow blanketed the flat earth, wooden fences the only indication of the order of the previous season. Situated resolutely between the crops was a few large greenhouses, the snow melting from the clear glass sides as they hit the heated frame. Inside, Clara could barely see the neat rows of fresh crops, the glass fogged from the interior's humidity. Wooden placards decorated the doors, proclaiming loudly things like: Parasitic, poisonous, mildly lethal and food.

Just around the side of their house, she could see tiny little houses in a variety of strange colors and fences - leaving no doubt about the presence of more livestock. There was even more wooden signs attached to the houses which seemed to get bigger and bigger the farther around the house they went. Clara stared in growing bewilderment at the names scrawled across them.

"Peg?" She exclaimed, blinking across the way as a robust pink thing snuffled out from its tiny pink house, wobbling on legs that seemed a bit too tiny for it's belly. "What's a peg?"

"Oh a funny little muggle animal that eats everything in sight!" Will chirped, waving a hand and sending her daughters trunks whooshing across the yard and into a second-floor window that flew open to avoid being broken. She sighed as she turned to stare longingly at the pink ball currently waddling around. "I was going to chop it up and use it for fresh pork but I've grown rather attached." Clara's mother sighed again, tapping at her chin for a moment in clear dejection at the growing affection. Clara blanched. Emerald eyes snapped to her, an odd delighted glint shining in her mother's gaze. "Did you know they can digest everything - including human bone? If you die and fall in a pen and they get hungry enough, they'll gobble every last bit of you right up."

Clara grimaced. "You've become much more grotesque since I left."

Willa's grin was sunny. "The English countryside does wonders." She twirled around, flitting toward the door with a flourish. "Come along, darling. Your father's been absolutely beside himself with worry."

A sudden knot tightened in Clara's chest, cinching farther and farther as her mother moved farther and farther away. Alicio Deschamp had been one of the first to give her her previous wand. He had curled her fingers around it's dumortierite handle, telling her to be patient. To be in control.

"A witch doesn't hurt people, Clara," he had murmured to her, his eyes a steady weight upon her. His hands had been so big back then, warm and roughened by years of toil. "Especially people weaker then themselves."

That was all she had done. She had lost control. She had hurt people weaker than her.

How would her father look at her now?

How would she be able to look at herself?

"Clara?" The white-haired witch flinched, startled at the sudden sound of her father. There had been no time to collect herself - no time to prepare before the hulking form of her father was crowding the doorway, her mother slipping aside with a small smile, murmuring something about making sure the soup was still cooking correctly.

Alicio Deschamp looked much the same way as he always did - too big for the doorways and gardens that her mother catered to. His robes which should have been pressed neatly seemed oddly strained on his broad shoulders, looking a bit like playthings that had been shoved onto his limbs by a fussy child. His tawny eyes so like hers seemed muted in the winter sun, remote in a way like twin cabins huddled deep in a dense forest. His usual trim mustache had grown wild, slightly chaotic, crawling across his chin and along his cheek in a riot hair.

To be put plainly, he looked like an unwashed, underpaid office worker the likes of which many a Enlgish pub had seen.

"I told you not to send me there." Clara Deschamp hadn't meant to say the words. Sometimes words like that pop out of ones mouth like ahand thrown up at the first sign of an oncoming fist. Defense was safest to give long before the intial attack.

Her father didn't move, his eyes unblinking as he stared across the lawn at his eldest daughter. She looked thinner, he realized, his chest tightening painfully. What did they feed her at that school? Stale bread and milk? He needed to have a word with that headmaster sooner rather than later. They had promised full meals - feasts on holidays! - but clearly that wasn't the case. And her shoes were much too scuffed, her hair much too tangled and her eyes much too heavy with sleep. How much work had they given his daughter for her to look -

Well, there was a bit of a bigger issue that might have contributed to the harrowing image that his daughter currently presented.

"You lost control." It wasn't a question.

Clara's whole body flinched with the words, a slight tremor traveling along her fingertips and up her arm as she remembered all those lessons, all those times that her mother and father had tried to teach her only a fraction of the control that she needed. In Beauxbaton, she had been fine. In Beauxbaton, no one had been hurt.

She refused to back down, her lips trembling with the fear that was starting to press down on her insides, squeezing all of her organs until she felt like she might start babbling out every spell that she knew to try and make it stop. Try and make her stop. "You said he was the greatest wizard of all time-"

"Albus Dumbledore is the greatest wizard of all time, Clara-" Alicio cut her off, his palms extending in a vague attempt at a plea.

The motion chilled Clara to her very bones. Like her father was trying to soothe her. Like an unstable creature that needed to be calmed.

Her next words were bitter, angry things, the anxiety cresting inside her until it felt like waves battering against the delicate shell of her body. Months ago she had known who she was. She was Clara - Clara with a few problems but ones that could be fixed with a bit more time. Clara who didn't know who she wanted to be but who had time. Clara who knew that her magic would never be great but who didn't need it to be to achieve the life that she wanted. All of that felt oddly false now though.

"He isn't," she hissed angrily, her words venemously as she glared up at her father. "He didn't help me. You sent me to a deadly school and got deadly concesequences in return. Worse yet, you caused those consequences to come about. You gave me that blasted wand-"

"To protect you-" His voice lowered, an odd edge of plea entering it as Clara bulldozed forward.

"To RESTRAIN ME!" Her words shot across the space, cutting through the still winter air like knives through soft cheese. Had Clara always been a beast in human garb - one step from tearing apart the things that she loved most? Her eyes searched across the broad, brutal planes of her father's face. She found only devastation in those eyes so like her own. It was one thing that she irrevocably shared with him. "Did you know about the things that happen when you tie a person's magic down like you did?"

His eyes shuttered, something like real dread flashing there as he reeled back. "I - your mother and I-"

"DID YOU KNOW?" she shrieked, the words pulled from the deepest part of herself. The part that had been sick with fear and hurt and humiliation for so long. She wasn't speaking to him anymore. She was speaking to everyone - everyone who had seen that wand and known what it would do to her. Everyone who had seen her powers and feared her for them. Was it her fault? Did the fact that she had allowed them to make these decisions for her make it her fault as well? Pain lanced through her, sharp and clean like the fresh sweep of a newly sharpened blade.

Agony twisted her father's face, making the wary, tired lines of his face seem even starker. Around his back, she saw her mother creep closer, her face pale in the shadow of her husband. Both of them - in the cast of being home, she had forgotten that it had been both of them that had given her that wand.

"Clara…" her mother breathed and Clara felt an answering pull of tears bubbling up.

"Please." She was begging now. She could feel the way that the plea pulled at her vocal cords like an unwanted finger along the string of a violin. "Please tell me that neither of you knew what keeping my magic tied up like that would do."

Her mother's slender hand touched lightly at her father's arm, squeezing down in gentle reassurance. "We made sure that that wouldn't happen, Clara. We made sure-"

"You became lax," She seethed, hands clenching at my side.

Her mother's eyes searched her, growing soft like the dense underbelly of a leaf. Her next words were just as gentle. "And you became afraid."

It was a slap in the face - harsh and cold. Clara had never felt something like it - so swift that Alicio even flinched, his tan skin going a shade toward gray as he whipped his gaze to his wife.

Clara's feet moved before she could think, pushing past them and sprinting into the warm confines of the house. She didn't know where she was going. All she knew was that her room must be on the second floor so she dove up the first staircase that she found.

False words don't hurt in the same way that true ones do. True ones stay with you. They dig under your skin and burrow into your most vulnerable places with delight.

Cold metal burned into the heated skin of Clara's palm, the knob turning smoothly as the white-haired witch forced herself into a random room. It wasn't a good bet to be the right one but at the moment, she cared very little for the distinction.

The truth was that her parents sin had been thinking that she had been strong enough to eventually understand and control her magic.

Clara's sin was and forever would be that she feared her magic too much to do anything but keep it at an arms distance.

Hot, unforgiving tears, burned at Clara's throat. In that moment, more than anything else, she hated herself. She hated her weakness. The truth was that even though she blamed her parents for their misguided faith in a wand meant to bind, she blamed herself even more.

"You look like shit." Clara's head whipped up, the tears still hot and wet on her cheeks even as her breath hiccuped to an uneven halt.

Her body stumbled forward at the familiar voice. "Annabelle."

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