book one
where she has to found herself


I

"I have to do what?"

"You have to run straight at the wall, darling", her grandmother said with the same ice-cold voice she used to everything that annoyed her in the slightest. In the few days Audrey had spent in London, safely tucked in her grandparents mansion – the old and fancy Blanchard House – had been enough to grasp a lot of things about Mrs. Evelyn Blanchard, the matriarch of her family; first, she was a tall, elder witch with grey hair always in a tight bun, and second, she had no patience with children at all.

And normally adults loved Audrey. She was educated, pretty and knew when to shut up. What more an adult could ask from an eleven-year-old?

But while her charm worked in almost anyone over eighteen-year-old – just bat her eyelashes and make some cute comment that would make all the adults go "oooh, isn't she cute?", Evelyn Blanchard (who hated being called grandma) was immune to anything that Audrey tried. She was a wall of ice and pragmatism with no time to spend with her only granddaughter.

"You want me to run into a wall?!", Audrey squalled. She wasn't a girl who complained easily about stuff – she liked to think of herself as overall lucky, and when not lucky, complaining never helped much – but asking her to run into a wall was a bit too much. If she were back at home, she had sure Ilvermony would never ask her to be part of such mess.

How gauche, running into walls. Had Hogwarts any finesse?

"I always knew my son was a bit of a useless excuse of wizard but had him failed to raise you to be any less stupid than him?", Evelyn cut her with no remorse. "Just run in the wall, silly girl. We don't have all day, it's just magic. I'm sure you know magic".

Audrey huffed, and her fingers curled around the cart with her heavy trunk – her grandmother had made her pack her things three times, until all of her clothes had been perfectly folded, and scolded Audrey at least a thousand of times for almost forgetting something. "I'm a very bright girl. I won an estate award for my last essay, thank you very much", she sassed.

Because it was true. Audrey wasn't stupid; of course, she hated maths with everything in her (after all, the numbers never made sense and it wasn't her fault1), but she excelled in almost everything else.

Her grandmother's nostrils flared in anger. "Audrey, run at the wall".

"No".

Audrey was sure Evelyn was close to physically hitting her.

But you see, it wasn't she was trying to be difficult (even if Audrey could be difficult sometimes), but she was angry. Terrible, awfully angry, with so much anger and resentment burning just under her skin, because her dad – who she always thought to be cool and all that – had woken up in the beginning of the summer and said:

"I enrolled you at Hogwarts"

Just that. No excuse, no whys, or I'm sorry. Just one "you are going to Europe in late August, darling, now can you pass me the maple syrup, please?"

Audrey cried and made the biggest scandal her lungs could do. Then she cried some more, went on a hunger strike, and even tried to run away from home. Audrey even tried to argument or convince her dad – and she was very good convincing people to do what she wanted – but all her attempts had been futile. Apparently, her father didn't like her any more.

What other reason was to send your only daughter to another country for almost all year?

Audrey always wanted to go to Ilvermony, with her friends – Cal, and Liz and even Betty Fairchild, who cut her hair once when they were six years old, but suddenly she was the only one shipped to Hogwarts, where her dad had graduated before flying away from UK as soon as he could.

"For Merlin's sake, Audrey, just run at the wall before I throw you into it!", Evelyn threatened, her grey eyes – same eyes that Audrey's dad had, but completely different from her own blue ones – swirling with anger. "I'm not saying it again!"

"Great. Do you think any of grandpa's owls are quickly enough to get to Ilvermony before the start of term? I'm sure I'm not going to run into walls there! Problem solved!".

Audrey tried her best smile. The one that make boys blush, girls lost her words and her dad buy her the new Barbie's dreamhouse – you know, the one that was almost her height. Audrey never knew if that smile was one of her things – a ability born with her, to bend people to her will, or if it was one of the mom's thing.

Like her hair – melted silver, even if her dad was black-haired, or like eyes, or like the fact that she had not inherited the aquiline nose that all the Blanchards had. In fact, no one knew exactly what things Audrey had got from her mother – she never knew anyone like her, and her dad had no idea what else was in her blood but fair hair and pretty eyes.

So far, she had never spite fireballs and neither had transformed into an angry bird. Again, overall lucky.

Evelyn was ready to chop off her granddaughter's head (Audrey could almost see smoke coming out of her head). Audrey had never been surer of being ahead of a near-death experience – even worse than when she fell into an almost frozen lake in the middle of winter holiday when she was eight. Her dad had never been scary – a bit crazy, untrustworthy sometimes, but harmless as a little bunny – but his mother could define the meaning of scare.

Audrey ended running into the wall, trunk and cat and everything else.

And even if she was seething angry, furious even, with a lot of tears still stuck in her throat, Audrey took time to admire the magnificence of Hogwarts Express. She had seen trains, of course she had, but never paid much attention to them – old beasts of metal and smoke, roaring by the country. Audrey liked the elegance of her dad's expensive muggle cars better, with the feeling of the leather under her fingertips and the windows she could open and feel the wind in her hair.

But the Hogwarts Express was something else, painted in black-and-red, almost too shiny to be built by anything else than magic itself, reflecting the warm sunlight that gently peaked from the glass ceiling. It was imposing and powerful and all the things that wizards and their world are meant to be, and Audrey let herself admire it.

The platform ¾ was something else too, filled with a crowd of new and old students and their families, their voices mixed with the sound of owls and cats. The magic was impregnated all way around her, and she could fill her own under her skin, running in her veins.

Audrey never had paid much attention to the fact she was a witch. It was something as normal as being a girl, or being blonde, or being a half-human. Being a witch was intrinsic and one of the things that defined Audrey Blanchard as Audrey Blanchard, but being there, in the way to school – even if wasn't the school she wanted – made her think of what it meant.

Bubbling magic in her veins, with power in her hands. All the things she could do, the impossible, amazing things that being a witch meant.

"You are going to be late", Evelyn said somewhere behind Audrey, "if we don't find you a compartment soon".

"And Blanchards are never rude enough to be late", she repeated. Her grandmother hands – pale, and bony, with long, elegant fingers full of expensive rings – latched in her shoulders, and guided Audrey between the crowd. Somewhere, she heard a boy talking about not being a monitor, and someone was gossiping about the boy they meet in the summer.

They found her a compartment by the end of the train, still empty, and Evelyn put her trunk in the train with a flicker of the wand she always kept hidden in her sleeve, while Audrey hold the Cat's cage as hard as she could. She would be damned if her cat got lost in the middle of the train.

"Now, listen. Don't get in trouble; and we don't care in which house they put you if you get good grades. For Merlin's sake, Audrey, remember you are the Blanchard heiress. You must behave accordingly. Therefore, I hope to not receive any letters of poor conduct. I'm clear?"

Audrey looked to her grandmother. Really, really looked. Evelyn used to be a beauty in her younger years – Audrey had seen the pictures in the Mansion, but it wasn't the beauty that made her famous.

Was her ruthless mind and the cunning ways to get her family in the top of the world.

Audrey could respect that.

Respect her rules was another completely different thing.

"I will try", she said, in her best honey sweet voice, wearing a charming smile and all. Had Evelyn been anyone else, Audrey would probably have got a pat in the head and a compliment for that.

But Evelyn was Evelyn and never liked Audrey very much. She shot the girl a withering gaze. "Audrey, I'm serious. If Albus send one word of bad conduct, I'm sending you to Durmstrang, and don't think your father are going to help you out, because he isn't the brightest of the sons I had, but not even him is that stupid".

"Okay, gran. I'm going to be a good, nice, girl. Is that fine?"

"You better, for your own good", Evelyn sighed and closed the train door. "Goodbye, Audrey. Send word, darling".

"Yeah. Bye, Evelyn"

Audrey wasn't going to waste any drop of ink writing to home. No. Nope.

No way. They didn't deserve her calligraphy – she had worked really hard on it, until she could write with a quill as good as she could with pen, and then even better, and she wasn't planning on using her abilities to write stuff to her family, who probably despised her.

Maybe was one of the mom's things.

Or maybe Audrey was just useless enough that not even her dad – who was her favourite person in the world – could bear living with her.

Audrey sat by the little window, and her eyes watched as Evelyn – with her perfect grey hair and beautiful crimson dress, went away, until she disappeared. The last two weeks she had spent in London, with her grandparents, had been the most she had spent away from home. Audrey used to visit, as a little kid, but never without her dad and never to spend the whole year in a new school without any of her friends.

Her throat burned.

Cat meow from her cage, big, yellow eyes craved into Audrey, as if trying to say, "Are you going to let me lock up in here all day?"

The girl sighed, before quickly opening the cage. Cat, the cat, was a big American bobtail that Audrey had got as a gift from her last anniversary in the last February. Since then, Cat had become her best friend.

"At least you aren't going to leave me, are you?"

Cat meowed again, with her yellowish eyes.

The door compartment slid open with a little screech. Audrey instinctively hugged Cat tighter; she had no idea how Hogwarts students are. Do they pick on the younger girls? Are they going to make fun of her because she had an accent? Can they find out who her mother is?

Audrey was ready to throw Cat to anyone who dared to annoy her when a round, baby faced boy around her age came in. He was probably a bit shorter than Audrey, with a mass of blonde hair in his head and a dread-stricken face by the fact the compartment he chooses had a girl on it. "S-sorry".

She smiled. Not her golden-winning smile, the one that probably was going to kill the boy, but her I'm-nice smile. "Do you want to sit? I'm all alone".

He looked unsure, shuffling his feet, before deciding by himself and sitting down in the seat in her front. Audrey smiled a bit more, just to be sure. People liked when she smiled. "I'm Audrey", she stretched one of her hands, and Cat hissed.

The boy flushed a deep red, before taking her hand in his in a sloppy handshake. "Neville. Neville Longbottom. Are you – ", he cleared his throat, "are you a first year too?"

"Yeah. And this is Cat, the cat. She doesn't like boys, so it's better if you don't pat her, but she is a nice girl".

Are you going to be my friend? Audrey wanted to scream. Neville looked sheepishly, and a bit of too soft, with his baby fat and round face, but Audrey had no friends here. She wanted friends.

"Oh, yeah", he looked to the cat in her arms. Then his hands went to one of his pockets, and Audrey made a confuse frown. "This is Trevor".

She almost screamed because Trevor was a toad. Not a nice, cute cat, nor a funny, small rat, but a toad. She had never ever put her hands in a toad, and honestly, they looked a bit weird and all that. She gulped and tried a smile, because Neville wasn't that bad, and he probably liked his toad.

Oh well, at least that thing was going to be in his dormitory and not in hers.

"Hello Trevor!", she squawked and hugged Cat a bit closer, just because she wasn't looking exactly happy about the other animal. Audrey was a bit scared of Cat jumping in the boy just to catch the toad and that was not how you start a friendship.

The door of the compartment opened again, just as the train started to walk. This time, it was a girl, with bushy, brown hair and already wearing the Hogwarts uniform that had made Audrey wrinkle her nose the first time she had seen it. Her dark eyes went from Neville to Audrey at least twice before she made up her mind. "Hey. Sorry, almost all the other compartments are full. Can I sit there?"

Audrey quickly thought that the probabilities of this girl having some weird pet too are low, so she smiled the best she could. "Yeah, sure! I'm Audrey Blanchard, and this is Neville Longbottom. What's your name?"

The girl looked at her. "Blanchard, like Edward Thorne-Blanchard? I've read about him; his spells are famous and very interesting. I hope they teach some of them to us, not in the first year, of course, but would be terrible useful to know some of them. Anyway, I'm Hermione Granger".

Audrey blinked.

"Yeah, I think he is my great-grandfather or something like that".

Hermione sited down by her side and folded her hands in her lap. "I'm so excited to see Hogwarts! I've read all about it in Hogwarts: A History, because I wanted to know the rules, and the history of the castle – do you know how old the castle is? – and how everything works, because you know, no one in family is magic at all. I'm so excited, because Hogwarts is the best magic school that exists, and having a good education is a decisive factor in life success."

Audrey blinked again and looked at Neville. He didn't look like he had read Hogwarts: A History either.

"My family is almost all magic, I think", Audrey said. "But I thought I was going to another school. Not Hogwarts".

"Are you American?", Hermione asked, suddenly curious. "I've read about some schools of witchcraft in America! Are they as good as Hogwarts, aren't they?"

Audrey blinked again. That girl could speak, and fast.

And was in her moment of shock by the quickly paced speech of Hermione Granger that everything went to hell, because Cat choose her owner's moment of listlessness to pounce directly into Neville's arms, where Trevor, the toad, was being safely kept.


a/n: its 4a.m i should be sleeping but i've wrote probably 15 pages for this fanfiction. next chapter will be up tomorrow or after that, depends on how quickly i can edit it.
also, english isn't my first language. i'm writing this fanfiction not just for fun, but because i need to improve my writing skills (and also because i'm locked in my house since march because of covid-19). if you find any mistakes, please feel free to point them. thank you so much, and please stay safe out there.
love,

star.