xXx

Hettie reeled down the rickety steps of the Vardo, weak on her feet, and upended the basin over the side. The warm water steamed in the fog of the morning, slugging into the mud and churning brown, the earth sludge from a night of heavy rain that was still threatening to fall from the overcast clouds ahead.

Normally Hettie liked it when it rained, especially when it was very heavy. The drops hit the panels of the roof of the wagon with a tinkle of tiny hooves, and she liked to imagine a little carrousel above her head, dancing into the night and driving off the nightmares with a carnival tune. There had been no nightmares last night, no carrousel either, and definitely no sleep.

"Keep Jibben's arm in that sling for another day. I'll check tomorrow morning and it should be ready to come out by then."

Flinging the towel over her shoulder, Hettie jumped down the last step of the short stairs, indifferent of her bare feet sinking into the muck. Dukker, Jibben's father, hummed as he leaned against the open door, cap and cigarette and concern in hand.

"Ye sure ye don't want to sit down a little, lass? Have a warm cuppa and a biscuit? I've had mornin' shifts at the docks that have kept me less on me feet than ye."

The old saying went that idle hands were the devils work. Hettie didn't think so. Idle hands simply made a man think. The devil, however, was in the doing. Give a man time to think, and you can bet your last penny whatever he chose to do after was driven by demons.

Hettie, nevertheless, was already walking for Django's and Nadya's wagon. The fire-pit was drenched through, sodden even to its ashes and would need a good rake out. The clothes line near Tem's home was torn down from the wind last night and would need a new post. Drina's window was hanging on by a rusty nail and would need fixing before it shattered.

"No time for breaks today, I'm afraid! I'll catch you later!"

There was a shuffle behind her, a double-dab-retreat, the creak of wood as if Dukker had taken a step down only to steal one back again when he realized following her to argue would be unnecessary.

He wouldn't win.

"There was no time fer breaks yesterday either! Or the one before that!"

That, Hettie thought, was the point. No time for breaks, no time for sleep, and not time to think about what had happened underneath that bridge three days ago.

Hester Gray had enough demons in her soul without adding a few more onto the hell-fire.

xXx

Slinking into Nadya's wagon, sitting on the welcome step to wash her feet off in the tin pot beside the door before Hettie could track mud all across the floor, the young woman rolled her sleeves up and dragged the pot closer. The stove behind her must have been on by the pleasant heat blooming at her back. Which meant-

"Aye, look what the cat finally dragged in."

Which meant Nadya was in. Bullocks. Hettie had thought she'd gone to the stables with Django. Likely what the woman had wanted her to think.

"Just grabbing an apple and I'll be out your hair. Willy's going to need help with the-"

Metal clashed against metal. The tick of a stove turning over as the gas struck lit. The puff of breath from an annoyed and ardently stubborn Nadya.

The kettle was on.

Hettie wasn't getting out of there anytime soon.

"What ye going to do is sit down, have a drink, and breathe fer a minute. Then ye' going straight to bed fer a long sleep. Willy's survived turning the stables for sixteen years before ye came. He'll survive another go. Ye've been on the move for the last three days, Hettie. Ye. Need. Sleep."

Hettie dipped her feet into the chilled water, using the towel over her shoulder to scrub between her toes until the skin was pink and irritated. Just how she felt.

A not quiet wound.

"The storm that blew in has wrecked the camp. I need to-"

A gentle hand landed on her shoulder. Gentle but stern.

"Rest first. This isn't the first storm we've been through, and it won't be the last. The world doesn't fall apart, girl, just because Hettie isn't there to save the day."

Hettie turned to glance over her back, saw Nadya crouched behind her, wrapped up in her shawls and scarfs and tassels that had maybe once been gold, face an open plain of weathered skin and dark curls and a life well-lived if but lived with struggle. She had a streak of grey by her temple, and a certain sardonic arch of her brow that reminded Hettie of the woman below the bridge-

"One cuppa and a fifteen-minute nap."

The crinkle of a smile across Nadya's face warmed up the cabin much more than any lit stove.

"One drink, a good meal, and a four-hour sleep. No less, or I'll tie ye to the bed myself."

xXx

Of course when a woman like Nadya says no less, she really means there will be more. She struck when Hettie took her fourth bite of toast and jam.

"What happened then, aye?"

Hettie chewed deliberately, slowly, before taking a languid sip of her tea. The cup was chipped in the corner, painted with bluebells. Bluebells.

Her favourite. The same thing the woman-

"I don't know what you mean."

Nadya sipped at her own tea, black and sugarless and as dark as her eyes.

"Ye don't, do ye? Right. So ye didn't come home three days ago as pale as Jesus on the cross, on the back of that beast ye call ye own, wind-worn and mum. Ye didn't spend the last three days runnin' this way and that like Dukker's hens? I've seen ye polish Drina's windchimes seven times. They ain't never shined as they do now. No… None of that could possibly mean a thing, cannae?"

Taking another hearty bite of her toast, latching onto the tart taste of wildberries, Hettie one-armed shrugged. Nadya sighed and leaned back in her wonky seat. One of the legs got broken five months ago, and was now held up by tins, books, and a slab of stone. Hettie should go and find a replacement, or at least drag it somewhere private where she can transfigure-

"I only worry fer ye. Ye look… Well, if ye could see, ye would be worried too. Ye eyes are as black as night from tiredness."

The next sip of her tea burned its way down Hettie's throat, sloshing into her belly like that water into the mud, everything roiling to something soiled and dark and indistinguishable. That's how Hettie felt. Indistinguishable, as if she'd been let loose from her skin and left to seep out into a splash that the rain was going to wash away. For a long, long while it was quiet. Silent. Barely a rattle of the window in the wind.

"I was abandoned as a baby."

Nadya's tea cup paused halfway to her mouth. This was, perhaps, the first time Hettie had ever spoken about the time before they found her in that bush. By the way she said it, softly but brittle like autumn leaves, it was clear it would likely be the last too.

The weight in her breast pocket seemed impossibly heavy.

"I was left on the river Thames in a wicker basket with only a thin blanket, the clothes on my back, and-…"

Hettie's finger's tightened on the teacup, thumb pressing into the petal of a bluebell. Maybe the fine china would crack and shatter in her hands. It would only be right. Make the outside match the inside.

"A couple found me there crying. They took me in. Lily and James Potter. They were… They were good people."

Gently, Nadya's cup lowered to the table, tinkling in its mismatched saucer.

"They still around?"

Still around? Hettie found that funny. All of the terms, really. Pass away. Popped their clogs. Kicked the bucked. All little cheats to get around actually saying the word dead. And of course Nadya would ask, Hettie thought. You didn't often find a teen bleeding out in a fuckin' bush if they had loving parents at home.

"They died when I was just over a year old. I was taken in by Lily's sister after that. She… She, uh, didn't like me much. She knew I was a stray, as she called me. New the story well. She liked to remind me of it. Remind me that I really wasn't one of them. I think she hated me because I survived, an outsider, when her sister-"

Hettie shook her head violently. Her childhood sob-story, one to a dime, didn't matter right now.

"I knew how I came to be where I was. Whatever the reason I ended up in that wicker basket, all I had was an old letter from my mother."

Breaking her hold on the teacup finger by furled finger, Hettie slipped a scarred hand into her waist coat pocket, fingertips finding the curled edges of a well-read letter. She pulled it free and placed it gently on the table between them, the paper yellow now, torn by the crease.

Hettie, for whatever sense be it duty or grief or hopeful thinking, had kept this letter on her since Petunia had thrown it in her face when she was six. Through Troll or Tom Riddle, it had been in her pocket. She wouldn't say it brought her comfort, but maybe it did bring her a broken promise. The only type she had.

This letter, her wand, and herself were the only things that had appeared here, jumbled up in that bush, however they had gotten from 1998 to 1920.

Nadya stroked her thumb along the handle of her cup.

"I guess ye read it?"

Hettie stared down into her tea, ice lost in the amber, and she left the letter there folded up between them. She can't bring herself to open it, to read those words for a millionth time again.

She knows what it says, and she knows it does nothing.

"It's only a little scrap. It says she would see me again one day. That I wouldn't be gone long. She'd see me soon and she would come and get me-"

Hettie blinked as the tea in her vision swam, and she realized, belatedly, with a little bit of vulnerability and fatigue that three sleepless nights gave a mind, that it couldn't possibly be raining inside.

She was crying.

Hettie scoffed and scrubbed a sleeve across her eyes. She'd gotten over this long, long ago. Or so she had thought.

"She never came though. Years passed, and she… She never came."

The nights and days Hettie had spent in that cupboard underneath those stairs in that nice little home on Privet drive, wishing, begging, pleading for someone, anyone, her mother just to come back and sing her a song to sleep-

"Oh, lass-"

Hettie can't take it. She doesn't know what that it is exactly, the last straw for the camel, the soft sympathy in Nadya's voice, the memory of a child wishing for her mother, growing year by year and realizing that was all it was ever going to be, a wish, a childish, infantile wish, but she can't take it.

"I grew up. Got over it. Kids get abandoned all the time; you know? Like this storm, I'm not the first and I won't be the last. I grew the fuck up and I moved on. People like us… We don't get the fairy godmothers or the happily ever afters'. All we get is the pumpkins and the pinpricks."

Hettie knows it's bad when Nadya didn't call her on the curse with that indulgent twinkle in her eye, but what she said next was, maybe, just maybe, even worse.

"Did ye get over it?"

Yes. Of course Hettie had gotten over it. Maybe? Possibly? Hettie shook her head anew.

The war had eaten so much of her childhood, consumed nearly all her formative years until it was nothing but bone and marrow and pathetic glimpses of youth other children got to play with. Somewhere along the way, between running from Tom and trying to save her friends, maybe Hettie had… Had…

Ran away from more things than one.

"I thought I had."

In one swift go, Hettie downed her tea down to the dregs, and unceremoniously shoved the letter back into her pocket. The tea leaves at the bottom of her cup sort of looked like a horseshoe. Hettie didn't know what Professor Trelawny would say about that, but she thought she might need all the luck she could get.

"Then I went to go get Demon back."

xXx

"The woman kept staring at me-… I mean… Staring more than probably appropriate for someone who had threatened the man she was with. And then she took like this… Lurching step forward. And another. Then three all at once and I, well, I stumbled backwards, thought she might be drunk, you know? I wasn't about to start a fist fight with a drunk woman in the back of a Birmingham alley but she said Hettie? Hettie, bluebell!"

Nadya frowned, brows pulling tight over her dark eyes.

"She knew who ye were?"

Hettie hopelessly shrugged.

"Never a good sign when someone knows me by face, so I thought to get out of there. I swung myself up on the back of Demon before she could reach me, and I was planning on bolting when she…"

Nadya pressed closer over the table.

"When she?"

When she turned Hettie's world upside down.

"She looked at me and she said it's me, Polly. Bluebell, don't you see? Elizabeth Gray."

Nadya doesn't understand it. Hettie doesn't blame her. The only ones who would have recognized that name would have been herself, James and Lily, Petunia, and perhaps Dumbledore.

"Elizabeth Gray is the name signed on my letter… Underneath Your Loving Mother."

A breath, a beat, Nadya sagged back into her chair, levelling Hettie with a long, deep look with eyes that saw more than most. Nadya wasn't a Witch, but, maybe, she was as close to one a muggle could get without exchanging their microscopes for wands.

"Ye ran."

Hettie jerked from her seat, flopping onto her feet as if someone had yanked her up by the armpits and dropped her, suddenly in movement, needing to… To… Push, to turn, to go.

"Of course I bloody ran! I kicked my heels in and Demon booked us down the road passed the pair. They called after me, I think they tried to follow but I just… What else was I supposed to do? What else was I supposed to say? I-… She looked like-… The man, I didn't see it before, but we share the same eyes and I thought-..."

Hettie can't get her words out right, can't get her thoughts straight, and it was frustrating, infuriating, being this shattered over something short. A fraction of time, she had been under that bridge for barely five minutes, so how could it be so important? So monumental?

It didn't seem right. It didn't seem fair. How big things in ones life can take but a moment, a singular beat out of right field, to come barrelling in and grasp right onto you like a leech.

A leech you couldn't rip off without bleeding out.

It also didn't make sense. However Hettie had ended up here, in this place and in this time, surely it could have only happened once? What was the other explanation? She was from here, ended up there, than came back and-

It felt like trying to untangle the Gordian Knot with one hand tied behind her back. She wasn't working with the full picture, and whatever that full picture was Hettie wasn't sure she wanted to see it at all to begin with.

What could it change? Nothing. What would it mean? Nothing. Everything would be exactly the same. Hettie would have still been thrust into a war not her making, forced to fight men thrice her age for thrice the danger and thrice the square root of fuck-all, she still would have grown up locked in that cupboard, hungry, and she still would have died.

Her mother being alive, here and now, wouldn't and couldn't change all that. As funny as it was for a Time Traveller to say, Hettie's life was written in the bloody stars, lived through with the scars to prove it. The ship had sailed. The dog had rolled over. The fat lady and fuckin' sung.

Then why did it feel as if the whole world had gone slightly askew? Everything just a bit to the left? A little displaced? A tiny bit… Lost?

It couldn't change anything… So why did everything feel changed?

"Hettie, love."

Nadya said gently as she stood from her chair, wincing when her back, which wasn't what it used to be she usually bemoaned goodnaturedly, straightened out with a crick.

"It's gonna be alright."

That's what does it. The nail in the coffin, and suddenly Hettie wasn't pacing anymore, couldn't find any energy to, as if she had abruptly been drained of it, of the irritation and anger and confusion, as if she could barely hold herself up on her two legs.

When you have nothing left, the truth was a stark, cold thing indeed.

"I panicked. She said that name no one should know, and I… I panicked and I ran because that's what I'm good at. Running."

The hand that came up to scrubbed at her eyes shook, trembled, and ached.

"I bloody run. I always bloody run. I can't help it. I panic, and I run because-"

Because there were two types of people that war bred. Those who never left the battlefield, trapped in the trenches and the memories and raging their own war against the world that saw them under blitz, and those who ran and never, never, never looked back.

Hettie was the latter because that was the only way to survive Tom Riddle most days. Hettie had been running since she was eleven, and she had ran through the war, ran through the battles, ran through Sirius's death and she just kept going. Bloody feet and weary, she runs because she has to.

Running meant she didn't have to look back and see the dead bodies piled so high they could drown her. Running meant maybe one day she would cross the horizon and finally find a sunrise. Running meant not having to stand still and wait for the ghosts of your past to grab you and drag you under.

Hettie has plenty of those. Places weren't haunted. Oh no. People were.

"And now I don't know where she is. Birmingham is a big place and we leave for London next week."

Five days left until they left for a place called Camden, where Willy said dock work was going to bolster money that was drawing thin from a long and hard winter. Five days. What could Hettie do in five days? It would be like looking for a pygmy puff in a cotton field.

Wasn't that funny? A Time Traveller running out of time.

"Where do I even begin to look? Maybe she's not even from Birmingham. Maybe she was passing through, and who knows where she is now. I lost my one chance to get answers because I did what I always do. I ran."

Hands still scrubbing eyes, Hettie didn't see Nadya come closer, but she felt her grip on her shoulders, those stern but soft hands, felt them rub up and down her arms dusting warmth along the path they travelled.

"Hey now, lass. It's gonna be alright. Ye'll see."

xXx

The hands fell from Hettie's face pathetically, limply, only to see Nadya smiling at her with that old smile of hers, prickly but warm.

"I don't know what to do."

Admitting that doesn't come easy to someone like Hester Gray. With the Dursleys she had known what to do. Don't make them angry. With Riddle she had known what to do. Simply survive another day. Yet, here, now, Hettie doesn't know what to do, where to turn, what way she should head.

It doesn't come easy, and it doesn't come softly, and it ruins her all the more.

"What ye gonna do is-"

The Vardo door swung open, the mop of blonde curls damp from a drizzle and sweat from turning hay at the stable with Willy, Django's smile both delicate and watery.

"There ye are lass! Been lookin' everywhere fer ye'."

He nodded back out the door.

"Got a visitor here. Came down to the stalls with Charlie Strong. Brought 'em over when they said it was important."

Visitor?

xXx

Instead of heading for the door, Hettie darted for the window over the stove, the one overlooking the firepit out front. It was easy to spot the interloper in his three-piece suit, flat cap and wool coat that looked as expensive as two of the Vardo's put together and a whole years dock wage. He must have felt her looking because he began to turn her way-

Hettie ducked below the window with a curse.

"Bloody 'ell. It's him."

"Him?"

Nadya asked as she came tottering over to peer out the window for a look.

"The one I threatened under the bridge!"

Nadya, of course, reached for the cast iron skillet resting on the stove.

"Well I'll just tell our guest he better get gone-"

Hettie cut her off at the door, hand reaching over to lower the skillet she was holding.

"It's alright. He was with-… Maybe I should go speak to him."

Nadya hummed, jiggling her skillet.

"Ye sure, lass? Ye don't have to. Ol' Bertha here is more than capable of running off unwanted callers."

Django chuckled, thudding up the last step inside to pat a large, calloused hand on her back.

"Best believe her. The first time I called on me wife to see her out at Applebee fair, her mother came out with that bloody thing swinging. Took me a few months to work up the courage to knock her door again, and te' stop the ringin' in me ears."

Despite the situation, despite the stirring in her gut and the sickly feeling in her throat, Hettie laughed.

Running.

Hettie had spent her life running.

Maybe it was time to stop.

xXx

"You're a hard one to find."

Hettie stopped across the fire-pit the man was standing beside, bare toes curling in the grass and the mud. The cold grounded her to the earth, kept her stable, steady. Kept her from running.

She can tell straight away, even with his back turned, that the man doesn't like the mud. The way he refuses to move even a step in it, to swivel too fast, the dislocation of seeing him there like seeing a Bengal tiger in the arctic.

"Not many people want to find me."

The man finally turned around, and Hettie's breath caught in her throat. From the cut of his suit to his hair and cap, it was clear this man knew how to carry himself. He seemed calm and observant, and Hettie knows how dangerous that can be-

And then she sees it.

That certain tilt of shoulder, the angle of a spine, the squared feet.

She sees it because she stands very much the same, as most soldiers do. Ready for the first spell to blast or the first bomb to fall. Soldiers who stood because they could say the word dead and really know what that looks like when so many other's couldn't.

He might have seen the same across the fire-pit, empty and soaked as it was, this strange man with familiar eyes, because he frowns at her, clearly confused, and… Yes. There it is.

The soldier's minute. Just one. The only one you get when you face someone across an enemy line. One minute of everything at once, and anything before is nothing. Everything after, nothing. One minute of having the world in your blood and the stars in your eyes, and one minute of being unbound and wild where anything is possible.

They're no longer standing on a field in the middle of buck wild Birmingham. There's no fire-pit between them. Just a checkered board.

She doesn't think this man is a King. He's more a Queen. A piece worth nine points, and the most dangerous of all, the most free to move. Hettie had always pictured herself more a Rook, someone who runs headfirst into said danger and hopes that it can bulldoze anything in its way.

The man blinks, and it was over. The clock had ticked over its minute. Whatever he saw or didn't see, he kept it to himself.

As Hettie did.

Reaching into the breast pocket of his expensive coat, the man pulled free a silver case, flicking free a cigarette and sparking it up with a red-capped match.

"The woman I was with, her name's Polly Gray and she's-"

"I know who she is."

The man took a long, hard drag, gazing right at her. Blue struck blue, and Hettie met it head on, didn't back down, didn't flinch. Maybe he wasn't used to that, either, by the cock of his brow.

"You do, do you?"

His accent is thick, brummie down to the core. It almost makes her smile. It almost makes her weep. Was she born here? Would she have had an accent if-

Hettie reached into her own pocket now, producing the small, folded letter. His cool gaze zeroed in on it immediately. It's clear he knows what it is, and it's clear there's a sudden weight hanging between them.

"Still have that? Polly wasn't sure you would."

Hettie shoved the letter back in the dark, where it belonged.

"Why did she do it?"

The man flicked the but of his smoke, ash blowing in the wind. It's strange that he knows what she's really asking. People normally couldn't read her so well.

"She didn't have any other choice."

Hettie scowled, taking a step closer. Bulldozing.

"She didn't have any other choice but to leave an infant in a basket on the edge of a bloating river in the middle of fuckin' November with barely a blanket?"

The man spluttered on his cigarette, smoke blowing out his nose harshly.

"What basket and river?"

He flicked the cigarette away, and Hettie watched it bounce and roll, swallowed in a puddle.

"She didn't leave you. Poll's a lot of things, but she don't abandon family. A neighbour reported her for stolen bedsheets, and when the police came they found a gypsy woman with a gin still in her home and two kids. Social services came in and took you for placement when she was sent down for six months for illegal brewing. You were meant to have been placed with some nice family somewhere in the countryside. Yet, here you are, and
I doubt the good ol' services placed you here with the gypsies."

xXx

Hettie stood at the edge of the pit, wind blowing through her curls and skirts, feet bare and mucked, feeling as if she had been spun from glass. She doesn't know where to land, what piece is more important, what square she needs to take. The fact she hadn't been ditched by a river willingly, whether through desperation or hatred, her imagination taking her on different spins depending on what mood struck that day, or whether this aforementioned countryside would have been nice at all, or how she had ended up at a river and not a house-

She lands, however, on two words. Just two. Two.

"Two kids? I have a… I have a sibling?"

Hettie had never imagined she had a brother or sister somewhere out there. She doesn't know why the thought or possibility had never come, despite the likelihood of it, but it hadn't. Now it struck her, knocked her right over the head until she felt a little dizzy and lightheaded.

She thought of Ron and his brothers and sister, of banter over breakfast tables, of having someone there-

"You didn't know? You were meant to be given the files of your adoption when you reached sixteen. What are you now? Eighteen? When you didn't get in contact, Polly thought…"

Hettie swallows around the lump in her throat.

"She thought I wanted nothing to do with her."

Maybe the noise trapped in her throat is a cry, maybe it's a laugh, but there's something heavy and heady in her chest that threatens suffocation.

"And do you?"

Do you?

Hettie… Hettie doesn't know. She doesn't know how all this got to this point, to this ungodly mess, to this clearing, to this moment. Rivers and police and stolen fuckin' bedsheets-

It's a lot.

xXx

The man pulled something from his pocket, a slip of a card, and held it out for her to take. Hettie hesitated.

"Take it."

Hettie does, and eyes the small, neat script on the face, one embossed and the other scrawled on with pencil. She runs her thumb over the thick paper.

"What is it?"

The man slipped his hands into his pockets.

"A chance. When you come to a decision one way or another, come to that address or lose the card. If you decide you do want to talk, ask for Tommy or Polly. Anyone there will know who to get."

Hettie folded her stiff fingers over the card, frowning at the man.

"And the other address? The one in pencil?"

He smiled at her, a ghost of a thing, wispy and thin and barely there, but a smile all the same.

"That's where your brother lives. His name's Michael. If you want nothing to do with Pol, you still have the option of finding your brother. Your choice."

The man buttoned up his coat, readying to leave.

"Why?"

Why give her a choice at all? If he knew she was here, had found her, he could have brought Polly along and jumped her with the lot of it, gave her no choice but to face everything all at once.

He hadn't.

Hettie wasn't used to people giving her choices.

"Family, Hester, is a precarious enterprise. The greater the love, the greater the loss. That's the trade-off we pay when we have family. Every single one of us. You need to decide for yourself if you're going to be willing to buy in or pay out."

Anew he met her eye, same to same, and there was something in his, a tiny shard in the ice, something that looked a little sad.

Very sad.

"Once you're a Shelby, there's no going back. Make your choice wisely."

Shelby? Who-

The man, however, was already turning away, walking in the direction of the nearest road which would still take a half hour stroll to reach.

He must hate it. Being so far out in the mud.

Hettie would hate being stuck on the concrete.

"Who the fuck is Shelby?!"

Hettie thought she heard the man laugh, a husky draft in the wind.

"You are!"

"And who are you then?!"

He paused by the trees, by the wooden gate leading away, and glanced back one more time.

"Tommy."

And then he was gone, and Hettie was left standing by an empty fire-pit, choice heavy in her hand, and wondering who the hell was Tommy?

xXx

"Ye alright, lass?"

Hettie jolted to, whirling around from staring at the way the man, Tommy, had disappeared, spotting Nadya and Django peering out their Vardo.

They must have been watching from the window, ready to intervene if things got hairy by the skillet still clutched in Nadya's hand.

Family.

Hettie had one of those right here, with these two, and this clan. They were her family. They had taken her in, housed her, fed her, held skillets ready to come fight for her. But family wasn't something so limited. It didn't contain itself to numbers or proximity. It could be however big or small a person made it, stretched across countries and timelines.

Brother.

Michael.

Hester Gray had a brother.

The card burned in her palm.

"I'm good."

She walked towards the door, watching as Django's shoulders sagged in relief.

"I might… I might be gone for a few days but I'll be back before we move for London."

It's a promise, Hettie knows, as Nadya and Django do. She leaves no room for doubt, hesitation, the thought that now she had this she would ditch. She'll be back. They have five days before the caravan moves to Camden. Five days to do what she must.

Plenty of time for the Girl-Who-Lived.

"Oh?"

Nadya asked, finally putting down the skillet before reappearing at the door.

"I have someone I need to go meet. I'll take Demon. He's the fastest horse we have. It's not far from here. Two days tops and I'll be back."

If Hettie was going to meet her mother, she was going to do it with her brother at her side.

Nadya dipped back into the Vardo, huffing and puffing but smiling.

"Well, yer gonna need a lunch or two! Now where did I put that bread-"

Django moved to the side to let her through, waving her off.

"And ye gonna nowhere without some sleep first!"

xXx

Regents Canal. Camden.

The pair appeared in a crack of noise, a burst of colour, and a splash of sickening magic. The taller of the two, a red-haired man, heaved over, vomiting on the walkway of the canal. The smaller, a woman with a mass of curls barely contain in a bun, hissed and bounced back from the spray.

"Not on my shoes, Ronald!"

Ronald Weasley spat onto the concrete, wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand, and glared at the Witch.

"Sorry if travelling nearly a century in the past makes me a bit nauseous, 'Mione. Perhaps a little heads-up next time, yeah?"

Hermione Granger huffed and slung her beaded bag from her shoulder, unzipping the clasp to store the now broken Time-Turner away in its depths.

Straightening out, Ron took a gander around the empty canal, frowning.

"We sure this is the place?"

Hermione nodded, pulling out an old photo from her bag, eyeing the couple on its face staring back. The background was this exact canal, in this exact spot, if not this exact time.

"This is where the photo was taken. 1922. Camden. Hettie's here someplace… Or she will be if I've timed our journey right. We might be a couple of years off either way, hopefully earlier than later, but she's here. She has to be. We don't have time to mess around."

Ron, still green and pale from the journey, winced at the photo Hermione flashed his way.

"Still strange seeing her in a wedding dress."

Skulking to his friends side, he nodded down to the item held in her grasp. The pair looked happy grinning back from sepia, Hettie smiling with her dimples on full display and bluebells in her hair, eyes brighter than Ron could remember.

She looked good.

She looked happy.

Ron couldn't remember the last time he had seen his dear friend that way. It must have been something to do with the man at her side, arm slung cosily around her waist, holding her close, smiling just as brightly as she was.

"Who do you think he is?"

Hermione shrugged, and placed the photo back where it belonged, their only clue scavenged from a museum Hermione had found when she first started searching for her lost friend, and began pulling out trousers, shirts, skirts and hats from the bottomless bag.

"No idea but I suppose we'll find out."

Chucking the clothes in Ron's direction, she gestured over to a bush close by.

"Now get changed. Merlin forbid if the muggles spot us in jeans. I'm going to get arrested for indecent exposure, and we don't have time to be sitting in jail cells twiddling our thumbs. We need to find Hester before Dolohov, Greyback or Yaxley does, and they won't be far behind us."

Next Chapter: Michael was minding his own business, going about his daily chores, when, crossing the local wishing well through his villages' green, he spots an imp of a girl sitting on the white brick waving at him…

Happy season 6 premier everybody!

Is there going to be Alfie Solomons in this fic? Apparently so. Is there going to be flirtation? Seems like it. Can I help myself? Absolutely not lol. Don't worry, this fic is still a Tommy/Fem!Harry but Tommy could do with some competition, and… Well, it's bloody Tom Hardy.

On other news apart from my insatiable thirst, I've aged Michael up a little here so when we meet him he's not seventeen but nineteen. This obviously changes the game a little, but I think it makes things more interesting for what I have planned. Additionally, a horseshoe in Tasseography is meant to mean a lucky trip. Is that for Hettie's outing to Michael or Camden though? I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

I also know we haven't had much Tommy yet, but the chapter after next is told from his P.O.V so we have a good heaping of him coming up for those waiting for it.

Oh, and ten points to Gryffindor if anyone can spot the Brad Pitt quote inspiration.

Thank you to everybody who has favourited, followed and reviewed. If you have the time, drop a review, they're the fuel to my mad muses. 😉