Note:

Greetings, fair readers! It's surprising to be writing to you again so soon—this story is very fun to write, and there is so much more coming up, which I just can't wait to put down! We will be exploring young Alice's development in this chapter, but more characters and events will show up in chapter three.

I will be underlining the names of original characters in the cast, just to clarify what is mine and what is not. Also, though I originally planned to only list new characters in the cast list, I think that might get confusing for both me and you, so I will just list every character involved in the chapter.

MY EXTREME GRATITUDE goes out to Avadakada, Charmed2100, and Neon5678 for your instant support of the story, and to une-papillon-de-nuit, for your heartwarming and encouraging review! Feedback is like air to me—so, truly, thank you all.

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling the Utmost Venerable.

Chapter Two Totally Optional Cast (in order of appearance)

Mackenzie Foy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Young Alice
Kathryn Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arabella Figg
Fiona Shaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Petunia Dursley
Richard Griffiths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vernon Dursley

II | Stemming

1980
Privet Drive

From the beginning, the girl proves herself to be anything but a normal young witch. Somehow growing faster than she should be, she looks as though she is five years of age, despite the fact that she is only three. And she is frighteningly intelligent and wise—so much so that Arabella Figg often finds herself subject to chills of the unknown when struck by the deep and faceted stare of the young Alice. The woman, at one point, driven to worry by the sheer speed at which her charge progresses in knowledge and in magic (magic being the more frightening of the two, as it is still unbridled—the books she lets the child read, at least, can be controlled), has to contact Dumbledore about the severity of the situation. But when she does so, he responds only with a simple, mysterious, It is to be expected. She may even out within a few years' time, in a steady but secretive penmanship across the parchment.

What troubles Ms. Figg more than anything is the headmaster's use of the word may, and for days and months after (during which she hears not another peep from him on the subject), she is troubled by a fear that the drastic day-to-day changes she witnesses in Alice may never slow or disappear.

To make matters worse, the girl is still three years of age when her magic begins to manifest itself dangerously.

Before that point, it had only been expressed in simpler, more manageable, but still worrisome outbursts. There had been the instance with the blender speeding up, when birthday cake batter had ended up all over the kitchen walls and Ms. Figg's face. Then had come the short-circuiting of the lights, beginning during her first year whenever she cried from sadness or confusion. Any number of objects might take unexpectedly to the air whenever the girl was in a lofty mood. Once, a car out in the street had broken down when she'd stubbed her toe on the stairs and screamed. The telephone never works unless Alice stays in the other room for the duration of the call. And, of course, there had been the incident with the television on her very first morning.

All of these, and countless more strange events, would not be soon forgotten, and as a precaution, the curtains are always drawn over the windows. But today, something else brews within the girl's powerful core. Something neither of them expects.

Monday mornings always go the same. Alice wakes at an all-too-early hour and remains in her bedroom making the hands on the clock speed up and slow down and run backwards at her whim until the smells of breakfast (pancakes, sausages and fresh fruit when Ms. Figg is in a generous mood; cereal when she isn't) waft up the stairs and under the door. Alice comes down into the kitchen in a whirlwind, pulls on Ms. Figg's arm until she bends down so she can give her a smacking kiss on the cheek, and sits herself at the table with the daily paper, gnawing her lower lip over a Sudoku puzzle until the food is sat in front of her. They tuck in, sitting across from each other, the woman asking the girl which new books she'd like checked out from the muggle library.

On this particular Monday, Alice requests The Tempest, a play from her favorite surprisingly-muggle writer William Shakespeare, any educational volume revolving around the Napoleonic wars, and, of course, another mathematics textbook.

Despite being just shy of four years of age, Alice's intelligence, alongside her magic, has flowered quickly and fully, only continuing to expand by the day. With each new morning, Arabella Figg must reign in the tremendous shock she feels at the thirst for knowledge, and talent for retaining it, which is trapped inside the small, undeveloped body (though two years or so older-looking than its actual age) of her charge.

"Are you sure you need another maths textbook?"

"I finished all the problems in the other one. I'll get it for you from my room," says the girl, taking a large mouthful of pulpy orange juice before leaving the table and running up the stairs, feet thudding loudly on the carpet.

Now, Ms. Figg's four cats (Mr. Tibbles, Snowy, Mr. Paws and Tufty), have always been hypersensitive to loud noises. Thus, since Alice's first arrival in the house had caused the television to explode extremely loudly, they have, since then, associated the young witch with unpleasantly loud sounds. At best they ignore and avoid her, at worst they form a front against her, depending on her mood towards them on any given day. But regardless of the specifics, none of them like her, and she doesn't like them, either—a mutual dislike punctuated by the fact that they are forced to deal with each other all the time, except for when Alice is let into the backyard, which is rare.

On this particular morning, in Alice's rush to reach her room and retrieve the maths textbook for Ms. Figg, she fails to spot Mr. Paws running across the hallway from one open door to another directly in her path. She almost stumbles over him, sidestepping and barely missing his tail. In fear he scampers, flings himself around and scratches at her ankles viciously before leveraging his body against her lower calf, making her accidentally trip in her haste.

She falls loudly on the floor, making Mr. Paws scramble away but just a short distance, lingering to witness the fruits of his spiteful labor. The entirety of Alice's knee is burned instantly by the rug and she hisses at the pain, looking over at the cat with a look of pure hatred in her eyes.

Suddenly, Mr. Paws's body throws itself against the wall and rebounds again, landing on the floor. The cat mewls in pain, a harsh and deep sound that sends a shiver of fright through Alice's body. And for a second, she is afraid, thinking that he is dead—and realizing at the same time that, somehow, though she hadn't intended it, the startling event had been her own doing. She reaches out tentatively to touch him, but he stands up before her fingertips can reach his fur, managing to scratch her deeply on the forearm before limping away with a growling meow into another room, leaving her alone in the hallway.

All of this transpires in just ten or so seconds, and suddenly the shock and speed of it, combined with the stinging pain in her scratched ankles and forearm, and her burned knee, makes the girl break down in tears. Moments later the lights go out all through the house, and she curls up on the floor, scared of something horrible which resides in very close quarters-scared of herself.

Arabella Figg, registering the series of sounds, both human and feline, calls up to the girl from downstairs, hurrying through the darkness of the kitchen and climbing the stairs, her heart rising into her throat to see Alice curled on the floor and sobbing, so. She goes to her and gets down onto her knees, inspecting the girl's scratch wounds and the bleeding rug burn on her knee. Alice's limbs tremble, and her body suddenly tumbles into the woman's arms, her skin sizzling with power as she embraces Arabella fiercely.

The girl calms her sobs in order to tell the woman what had transpired, and works through her fall, her anger, her shock and self-hatred in due course as the woman cradles her head against her chest, craning her neck into the other room and watching Mr. Paws absentmindedly licking himself on the long-unused guest room bed.

"Am I a bad witch?" says Alice after a moment of quiet. "Dangerous, like the ones that make you hide me away in the house?" But just as soon as the words have left her mouth, another, much darker thought, occurs to her, causing another layer of tears to prick stingingly at the corners of her eyes. "Are you hiding me in the house to keep me out of the world because I'm the bad one? To protect them from me?"

"Oh-" Arabella says, trying to sound reasoned and wise but only succeeding in sounding pained at the sudden outpouring of fear and emotion on the part of the young witch. "Absolutely not, my darling. Absolutely not. You are not evil, Alice. You are just extremely... special, and the world is not ready to see your power, yet… The world is going to need you someday, and then you will be ready. But for now, you have to wait-"

"But I hate it!" she wails, her sadness quickly turning to anger as she pries herself out of the woman's no-longer-comforting grasp and stands up, blood trickling down her knee, circling her wrist, and speckling her ankles. "I hate it!" she repeats, screaming, now, "I hate being special! I hate safe! I hate you!"

She falls silent again suddenly, her tongue tumbling in the wake of her uncontrolled words. She spends a moment trying to rationalize the connection between the red-hot hate and fear in her brain with the sudden heavy coldness in her mouth, but then goes blank. All she knows, all that matters, is that she doesn't like what she said; that she doesn't quite know who she is, but knows that whoever it is, she's afraid of it. Her seven-year-old body trembles, injured and not just from Mr. Paws's scratches and her hard fall.

"That's okay, Alice," Ms. Figg says to her. "It's okay."

Slowly, the girl allows herself to curl back down into the woman's arms, and to be held for a while until the storm of her tears abates and the lights flicker back on one by one.

By the time another week has passed, things return to a sense of normalcy—if strained—around the house. Ms. Figg continues to homeschool Alice in the muggle way. Mr. Paws recovers from Alice's magical outburst, though sometimes he will go more slowly than usual down the stairs, and he seems to hold no grudge against the girl—in fact, he is more friendly towards her than he ever had been before, even allowing himself to be stroked and purring against her ankles if she's particularly quiet on the given day.

What Ms. Figg considers to be the girl's greatest flaw is her inability to focus on her studies, apart from the esoteric muggle history that interests her. She seems more engrossed in fiction than in current muggle events—and the woman cannot blame the girl. There is such a degree of separation in all things muggle from the Wizarding World—the world to which the girl truly belongs. How could she be anything but bored, if not distressed and disheartened, by a constant influx of muggle information, and not a single dose of magic?

Alice herself feels stagnant and stuck in the non-magic of the house around her; trapped as by a cell. She knows what she is missing only because she reads, and sometimes she will become angry at her books, at the free-rolling Scottish hills in Shakespeare's Macbeth, and the boundless mischievous oceans that set the scene for ancient Greek epics. Each day that her mind is pumped full of muggle information, she only thirsts more for knowledge of the world she knows to exist, but which Ms. Figg will tell her nothing about.

To cope, she requests more and more muggle literature from the library; literature on magic, hoping that there might be some parallels to be found between muggle speculation and the true world to which she belongs. It begins with Shakespeare and the Greek myths, then progresses to Dracula and books full of strange mythical fairies and creatures.

Arabella Figg is reluctant about some of these volumes. Yet, she feels that the girl achieves a sort of peace through them, and knows that they serve as a lifeline (no matter how tenuous and sometimes laughable, or so it seems to Alice) to the world in which the girl truly belongs. The woman suffers a crisis of faith which only builds as time passes, in Dumbledore's 'plan,' which seems to have brought no good to the girl. Sometimes when the angst is too much to bear she will send out a letter telling him of their state, and asking him to tell her what to do. But always the letters are answered vaguely, or not at all.

In the meanwhile, Alice is still not allowed out of the house because of her powers, and has no friends of her own—has not, in fact, ever met another person her own age. Her domain is the interior of the house and, when Ms. Figg allows her because the neighbors are away, the backyard.

Her guardian is ruled by a fear that Alice might get them 'caught' if they were out in the world and her powers suddenly got away from her. And Alice, in turn, is ruled by the knowledge that the woman is perfectly fair and right in being plagued by such worries. For it is true that she has no control over her abilities. And from this realization, comes a spiteful aggravation on the part of the girl:

If Ms. Figg knows about the magical world she so diligently conceals and blocks from Alice every day, and truly cares about her well-being and happiness, too, and desires for her to be able to venture beyond the four walls of this house… then why doesn't she simply teach her how to do the controlling for herself, thus banishing the risk and causing her the great relief and freedom which would set her at ease with herself and her world?

One evening over their meal, Alice asks Ms. Figg just that, reciting the words just as she'd been practicing them in her head all that day.

Arabella, listening to the question, feels her face drain of color. She'd never thought that she would have to explain herself to the young witch, never thought that her non magical nature would be anything but perfectly clear from the outset. But now, she sees she's been proven wrong, and she finds herself startled thoroughly by the question—oddly so, for one so simple, one she should have expected.

"I couldn't teach you, my dear," Arabella says, hoping that this might suffice, that the girl might already have a creeping feeling about her guardian's nature, a feeling which could be confirmed without any explicit statement of fact on Arabella's part. But in reaction to the words, Alice only looks more confused than before, and disappointed.

"Why won't you do it?" the girl says stiffly, her voice forcing itself through her throat as it starts to swell with the threat of tears.

"Because…" Arabella listens to herself say, in disbelief. "Because I can't."

Alice puzzles over her guardian's words and face for a moment. Her first instinct is to react, to argue, to deny. But then she realizes, from the woman's tone and the look in her eyes, that her words had been serious and literal, not false stepping-stones to her usual excuse. Alice realizes, for the first time, with a sensation of all her blood rushing to her head, that Ms. Figg cannot do magic.

In front of her on the table, her water glass shatters, the ice clattering onto the table and the water seeping into the tablecloth. But neither of them moves to clean up the mess. Alice's face is not angry, but startled, upset, and confused; her body silent and still. Inside of her is coiled a feeling that all children must go through once: a strange, sinking sensation, which causes the shade of everything around her to shift just slightly-whether to a darker or lighter hue she cannot tell yet.

She'd never considered the possibility that she was totally alone. She'd looked up to Arabella, assuming her to be a magical being such as herself, who had learned to control her magic, who knew just what it felt like to be in Alice's exact position, and comforted her from a place of experience and strength. But now the girl sees, at last, how alone she has been all along.

A tear slips down the young girl's cheek and she excuses herself from the table, quickly returning to soak up the spilled water, and sweep the broken glass pieces into the wastebasket. Then, silently, she returns to eating her meal.

The backyard soon becomes her most treasured place of refuge and release. Arabella allows her to go out silently at her leisure, unlike before, and she can spend hours every day sitting or laying on the grass, without even a book full of magical whimsy to keep her company. It seems to the woman that, quite suddenly, the myth and the hope have been leached out of most everything for her charge, and a harsh realism has taken their place.

But then, one day, the woman is vacuuming the carpet inside the house when she looks outside into the backyard and sees Alice with her hands in the soil of the ground. Before she knows it, the girl's hands have created seeds, and suddenly, blooms start to spring up from the yard all over, the shoots quickly flowering.

The woman can hear Alice's gasp of awe and panic over the buzz of the vacuum. Outside the girl considers trying to rip up the flowers, frightened that Ms. Figg will be startled and worried by the sudden flowers which she had not intended to create whatsoever. But when she turns around slightly to see if the woman has been watching her, she finds not an expression of terror or worry on Arabella's face, but one of calm and grace; a motherly wrinkle puckering at the corner of her mouth as she smiles.

"You're not angry? I'm sorry…" the girl starts.

"No, to the contrary, I am very happy," the woman interjects. "You've made a beautiful garden."

One final fragment of doubt: "I didn't do it on purpose."

"In that case," says Ms. Figg, smiling, "it's even more beautiful."

However, by the next morning, the beauty of the garden has expanded to a point of danger-the backyard has transformed in just a few short hours into a jungle of bright and diverse flowers, some unrecognizable completely to the woman. Some have already grown so tall that they peek over the fence and out to the street, and the woman plans hurriedly while she and Alice eat breakfast, to find a lawn mower, or to find some other way of rooting them all up, as soon as possible, and without giving their creator cause to be offended.

She may have coasted through her school years with sub-par marks, but Petunia Dursley had never been a stupid woman. And she knows very well that such an array of flowers, and at such an unnatural height, has no business peeking over the backyard fence of the neighbor across the street. Her eyes narrow and her neck cranes, a cat scoping out prey. She turns from her pan of omelette in the direction of her husband Vernon, expecting him to see it, too, and to take issue with the nature of the flowers, but he is staring down mundanely at the morning paper, and so she is left to look out the window, herself.

Ever since the first day that old Figg woman's distant cousins had dropped off their infant child, never to return again, strange things had been happening inside that house across the street. It had been only the first morning when some explosion had taken place, causing a terrible ruckus all up and down the street, ending her sleep early and bringing firetrucks to the scene at no later than half past seven in the morning. Later, Petunia had discovered the exploded object to be the television set, when the Figg woman had had it taken away by a handyman who had shown up a few days later to dispose of it.

Petunia knows she could name any other number of strange events surrounding that household, but doesn't care to think of any of them, now, for what puts her over the edge this morning is the sight of those tall flowers peering over the gate across the street—flowers of which there had been no sign yesterday, or for weeks before.

"Vernon!" Petunia says to her husband in a stage whisper.

The man offers up a grunt, the grunt he gives her when he thinks she's probably just asked him a question, and wants to make a sound which could answer either way—surely a tactic he thinks is very wise but Petunia sees directly through and takes as yet another piece of evidence to prove how entirely boring her husband is.

Ignoring him, she finishes breakfast quickly, and then, without announcing the purpose of her errand, she goes out the door of the house, eliciting no reaction from Vernon, even when she slams the door (though not hard enough to make the neighbors notice). She picks her way across the street in her slippers, her pregnancy bulbous in front of her, stretching the fabric of her nightgown, and shuffles through the dewy grass, craning her neck up and over the fence to behold the jewel-like heads of the flowers in the Figg woman's backyard—ranging from tropical-looking flowers to autumnal, thistle-like blooms.

Something about this strikes her both as completely unacceptable and strange, but also as interesting, and she thinks for the first time how nice it might be to be shown around that backyard full of flowers by the Figg woman, how nice to take a few cuttings for herself to put in a vase on her kitchen table…

She approaches the front door and knocks three times quickly. The Figg woman answers promptly, and Petunia has to hide her disappointment—she's always found something wonderful in a long wait between her knock and the opening of a door; ample time to press her ear against the wood, to guess at what might be going on inside, what the person behind the door might be rushing to hide.

"Hello," the Figg woman says simply upon opening the door and finding her cross-the-street neighbor on the doorstep. "What can I do for you this morning?"

"I was admiring your flowers from my window, and I just had to ask—how do you get them to grow so quickly, and in such profusion?"

While she speaks Petunia cranes her neck slightly over the woman's shoulder, trying to look into the house further; but she is disappointed, seeing no sign of the Figg woman's distant cousins' child. In fact, the interior of the house seems so spotless—complete with a cat lying in a patch of early morning sun by the window—that Petunia feels a stabbing disappointment: her curiosity dimmed, and the knowledge that she should probably return to her own house and tidy up taking center stage.

"Oh, those," says the woman in the doorway. "They're just some potted plants from a friend who needed a place for them to be kept a short while. They'll be gone after she comes to get them."

"Of course," says Petunia, her curiosity hanging on by a thread; but still hanging on. "Well, they are very beautiful."

"Good day, to you," says Ms. Figg, turning her away politely enough, and Petunia turns around, going back across the street with her slippers flopping against the pavement.

But her interest, naturally, is rekindled once she finds herself again in the dust-layered dimness of her own house, Vernon snoring lightly with an empty plate of omelette in front of him—and she hurries to the window again, pulling up a chair and planting herself there, watching the flower-heads sway over the Figg woman's fence while she drums her fingers on her swollen belly.

She spends the rest of the day perched at the window, waiting for the woman's acquaintance to come and take back the flowers. At one point, her condition forces her to get up to use the loo, and to her bitter dismay, when she comes back to the window, the flowers are completely gone—she's missed it.

The wheel of time continues to move, more slowly, it seems, than ever before. In the summer of 1980, Dudley Dursley is born across the street, an insufferable boy who screams and whines all the time. Alice takes to viewing the world, at night, from her window—the only time when she is allowed to open the window-blinds and look out freely on the street.

During the daytime and carrying on into the evening, the street is full of people coming home from school, from work; cars and bikes and pedestrians, people her age on roller skates and skateboards and bicycles. Exciting enough, but while the sun is out she always must squint through the blinds, a terrible hindrance that only perpetuates her consternation and unquenchable desire.

But at night, though there is little to see, she becomes far more liberated. And as time goes on, she comes to pay attention to the small, secret whisperings and flickering movements of the night and its creatures. The wind stirs the hedges, lights sometimes flicker out and then back on, putting on a show for her, alone.

Once, she thinks she sees an owl flapping through the darkness, and at another point, a cat with strange markings about the eyes, prowling around the corner and sitting on a nearby fencepost, its eyes glowing in the yellow moonlight, seeming to look right up at her for a long time before walking off again into the dark.

I am so grateful for any feedback you may have, however brief! I hope Petunia came across in this chapter—I imagine her as a very lonely and self-conscious woman when she's not actively gossiping or bullying. Next time: Harry Potter arrives at Privet Drive by flying motorcycle...

Thank you for not plagiarizing my writing!

On_Errand_Bad

4,600 words

Tuesday, 13 October 2020