Thanks to Silverly and Proto for proofreading. I own nothing.

EDIT UPDATE: Proto is kinda feeling miserable right now, so Chapter 9 is delayed until he cheers up. Proto provides a lot of criticism on chapters so I do not feel comfortable publishing chapters before he looks over them.

I will continue only updating Saturdays, though.

Prologue VIII

June 30, 1987

Waver had been back with his mother for about a week now. Finals had concluded easily; with all the studying he'd done, he was rather confident he got top scores.

Except Defense Against the Dark Arts. Waver was certain his reaction time and nerves dropped him at least one grade. The poor teacher didn't help; thank goodness he resigned after confronting one of the Boggarts in front of many students, which had transformed into a relatively harmless Cornish Pixie and caused him to go into complete panic while a student dealt with it. It was one of the last Boggarts seen before the infestation mysteriously vanished, too.

He was rather excited for his new booklist to come in, as it'd give him more excuse to avoid sitting in the living room drinking tea with his mother, by her insistence.

The minute Waver's mother had returned from work on the day Waver returned from Scotland, the first thing she had done was pull Waver away from his textbooks as he did his homework. After all, the door no longer locked itself, nor was it lockable at all, really. The way it was supposed to be.

So Waver grouchily sat in the living room as his mother hurriedly prepared tea for them. He didn't want to do this. His mother was the sort to stick her nose in everything Waver actually enjoyed. Waver hated her refusal to acknowledge that knowledge of the world should be known for the sake of knowing it, that skills should be learned for the sake of learning them. She didn't value what knowledge she had outside her profession at all. Knowledge without practical use, to Waver's mother, was useless.

Waver took the tea when it was offered, but he wasn't in the mood to actually drink it.

The annoying part of this new evening routine was that his mother had startlingly little to actually talk about. She dragged him away from his books every evening just to stare at him in silence.

"Have your grades come back yet?" Oh, she talks.

What a surprise, he thought.

"Not yet," Waver replied. "I'd expect them to come around mid-July like Professor McGonagall did."

"Oh." She was quiet again for a while. "Do you like it there? At that weird school?"

"For the most part." He wouldn't lie, there would be no point. There were things about Hogwarts that annoyed him, even if the good outweighed the bad. "I like it more than here, at any rate."

"I suppose that is the answer I expected..." She paused. Waver was fairly certain his tea, still untouched, was cold by the time she tried to make conversation again. "What is it like there?"

Waver tried to explain as best as he could. Being back to living with his mother in the non-magical world for the past week had made a lot of the past year feel surreal at times, where strange things were treated as the normal way things were. Funny how that happened right after he got used to it.

Waver's mother seemed to trust magical society less the more Waver described it. Once he had finished, her choice of descriptors were "unnatural and alien."

"It's odd at first, but once you're accustomed to it, it becomes normal," was all Waver had to say to that.

"Stuff like that doesn't become normal, Waver." She responded, shaking her head. They stared at each other in silence. If Waver's tea wasn't cold before, it definitely was now.

"...Do you feel different now? Than before you left?"

He hadn't been expecting that as a question. "Not particularly. I don't feel as if I've changed at all, beyond knowing things that were only theories to me before."

She continued quietly. "You're not acting differently either. You've always, always treated me exactly like this. Always convinced you had better things to do with your time than me."

Well, yes. Because she was annoying and pushy. He had plenty of better things to do than spend it on not drinking tea and telling her about school. He really didn't know why she didn't understand this. He wasn't about to lie about that, either. "Because as far as I can tell, I do. You annoy me greatly." He tried to make his annoyance as obvious as he could. Maybe that would make her leave him alone.

"I don't want to annoy you." She looked at him blankly. "You were so indifferent when your father died. You shouldn't have been. It's… not a normal reaction."

Why was she talking about this? There was nothing he could do about his father's death. At the time, Waver hadn't really been fully aware what was happening, as he was only six. Now… he viewed the event with ambivalence. The sudden intense illness was unfortunate, but he did not really care about it personally. His only memories of his father, which were quite few in number as he rarely visited, made him seem just like his mother. And what was with her expression? He wasn't entirely sure if she was still paying attention to him, or was just monologuing her frustrations at him.

"Maybe you should be more willing to appreciate learning." Waver snapped in reply. "Maybe you shouldn't try so hard to push this."

"If I didn't drag you out here, I'd never be able to spend time with you at all."

Well, he supposed that wasn't an incorrect assessment. If her goal was only to get him to spend time with her, then forcing him was the only realistic approach since he would just turn her down if she asked nicely. Unless she was willing to accept "sit quietly and read in the same room" as spending time with him. He doubted that.

"Could you at least make an effort to reach out to me?" she asked.

Why was she sitting closer to him now? This wasn't comfortable. He slowly tried to put some distance between them, though she didn't let it work, grabbing his shoulders as he tried to back away.

"Please."

Waver said nothing. He wanted to run into his room and hold his door shut until she gave up. The door swung toward the hall, so he would have to consistently pull to keep it closed.

Anything to get out of this awkward conversation.

"Don't disappear into that world."

She was hugging him. Crying- sobbing- into his shoulder, her black hair, perfectly straight as his own, tickling his nose.

He wouldn't be able to make his escape, regardless of what he did. So he just sat there, back straight, staring blankly ahead.

She didn't move the remainder of that night, falling asleep with tears staining her cheeks.

Waver's reaction to his parents dying in canon (selling all their stuff so he could run off and join the magical society of sociopaths that his mother hated) wasn't exactly the image of respect. It's like he just didn't care about their memory at all. We're not really told what their relationship was like beyond that, or much of anything about his parents personalities. I tried to come up with something. Maybe he's being too unsympathetic? I dunno.

Review replies:

gabe. d. clark. 1997: HP does have it's fair share of contrived conflict (oh hello OotP how are you today?), but I still feel it stretches my disbelief a bit too much.

PasiveNox: Thank you.

Mrcrazyman94: Well, we've got around 12 years of in universe time total in this fic, so he has plenty of time to grow up from his "all about me" attitude...

-Glace