Hi all! Thank you very much to the 12 people who have read this so far! I hope you're enjoying it.

So many things about Hilary's childhood only made sense when she happened across a stray sentence about Muggle Repelling Charms halfway through her second year. Accidental magic, yes, she had put that in its mental place pretty quickly: the fact that any smudges in her primary school writing books often disappeared; the way that her bedroom was always just the right temperature at night even when everyone else's wasn't. That all made sense immediately.

But it took her reading that one little sentence to suddenly realise the rest of it too. To go on a frenzy of research, find maps, cross-reference everything.

She had lived her whole life right on the edge of a wood where a lot of magical creatures lived. Bowtruckles, Jobberknolls, Knarls. A few others which were temporarily stored there before being moved to somewhere more suitable. The whole place had been riddled with Muggle Repelling Charms.

So when as a little girl, she had laughed and pointed at birds that no-one could see, that no-one wanted to see, or flown into a tantrum about how that wasn't a hedgehog because it was different, people had only laughed once. Only thought it was cute once. The Repelling element of the charm was very strong, and her childish persistence meant that her family quickly became bad-tempered with her. Stop talking about that nonsense, Hilary. Stop looking over there, Hilary. Don't make up silly stories, there aren't any tiny grey men in our garden. Hilary, if I catch you down the bottom of the garden again you'll get a right hiding, do you understand?

(She suspected, in hindsight, after yet more reading, that her parents must have had a few Memory Charms cast on them in the past too, and that the fogginess of the memories she was trying to talk about made them even more irritated.)

Eventually, after enough smacked hands, shouts and cold shoulders, her young brain had understood, ok, she didn't talk about those things. The wood was Not to be Named. So she stopped. For a brief period of time all was well. Then gnomes appeared in the school playground, and that nearly broke her.

These were home things. Wood things. Why were they here? Even though she knew, with a cold sinking feeling, that it wouldn't work, she still tried to ask a playground supervisor, "Can you see the weird thing over there?" She watched with the cold feeling twisting into a knot as the supervisor's eyes did the hatefully familiar flicker, where they saw but instantly looked away again with nothing registering.

"I can't see anything, sweetie. What is it?" She hated that reaction. That sugary tone which meant "Aw, she's playing an imaginary game!" It was a bit better than being accused of lying for attention, but not much better.

From that day on, she made a promise to try not to see those things again. To make her eyes skate over them like everyone else's did. The second bit of that took a lot longer to do than the first, but because she was very clever and very, very stubborn, she managed it. By the time she was eleven, when her letter arrived, she was seeing only the tiniest glimpse of gnomes and similar creatures before her mind blanked it out.

The Muggle liason sent to her family didn't notice. She asked about the accidental magic, and that was ok to speak about, but the cute little blue birds and ugly little grey figures sat like a stone in her throat until she swallowed it down, hid it again, covered it over with the excitement of discovering that she was magical. So no-one knew, and no-one expected the problems it would cause.

Like not buying any of her school supplies, because they couldn't find the Leaky Cauldron. She sort of knew where it was, kept catching glimpses out of the corner of her eye, but she'd trained herself too well and she couldn't see any more than that, and the thought of telling her parents even that made her feel sick. She ended up sending a secret, panicked letter to the address the Muggle liason had given her, but even in that she couldn't quite explain the problem. Being four seems like a long time ago when you're eleven, especially when all you've heard for the interveneing seven years is that you are lying or imagining things. So the letter was garbled and tear-stained and largely just consisted of: "I can't do it, please help."

Five owls arrived at her bedroom window the following evening.

Platform nine and three-quarters wasn't an issue. They'd been given clear instructions – Hilary and her parents were alike there, they loved clear instructions. And lists. (And, of course, twelve year-old Hilary thought, the platform wasn't charmed to Repel. It didn't need to be, there were Ministry officials on standby, and no sensible Muggle would randomly run at a wall.)

Hogwarts, though. That was an issue. A horrible, painful issue. As her carriage had approached the castle, her brain had tried its usual avoidance "I can't see it if I'm not looking at it" methods, but Hogwarts was too big. She couldn't look somewhere else. It was everywhere – because the Repelling Charm stretched to the full extent of its grounds, of course. She had spent the entire journey staring fixedly at the floor of the carriage. Her head pounded.

Then she had got out of the carriage and there had been no more barriers: the forbidden and the unseeable was everywhere around her, even the ground, and she couldn't avoid it, she couldn't not see it.

She tried to trudge along behind Hagrid with the other first years, but her hands were numb and she couldn't breathe and she didn't know whether to scream or cry or be sick and every movement around her looked like an aimed smack, and every voice was aiming its displeasure at her and

Thankfully at that point she'd passed out. When she woke up, she could just about cope, but she still couldn't look directly at anything for a few days. The mediwitch was confused. She'd never known of someone training themselves to see like a Muggle before.

How ironic, then, that she had the wand of a Seer.

Hopefully I'll flesh this out into something less summary-like if I make this into a proper full-length fic after July, which I intend to do.

All opinions welcome!

xIlbx