The house was quiet. Mum had had two elves to help her after Dad died, but they'd both gone.
Warm woods and the smell of the lemon polish the elves used on them. The lingering scent of baking bread. All the smells of home, but none of the hominess.
It was three days after the funeral. The bread smell was entirely in her imagination, of course; Mum had been in St. Mungo's for months, too ill to bake.
That was one of the things Ellie remembered best about her childhood. The time in Australia was vague—she remembered that the kitchen had had white cabinets and that the piano had seemed monstrously large, but little else—but the rest of her childhood, after the brief time at Hogwarts, had been in the cottage where her parents had grown old. It was in the kitchen with the dark-stained wood cabinets, the white dish cloth folded over the handle of the oven just so. Her mother had baked bread every Sunday in that kitchen as far back as Ellie could remember, even when they'd barely been moved in.
"Miss you, Mum," Ellie murmured, closing the door behind her. Directly in front of her was the staircase, its gray-blue runner worn down the middle from years of feet.
There was much to do. It fell to her to go through their mother's things, as she had the time off. It was July; she wasn't due back at Hogwarts for more than a full month. Bast would be by in the morning, and Hugo's summer seminar finished in a week and he'd help after. Sofia would probably be by after work with a bottle of cheap wine like they'd had when they were living together before they'd met their husbands.
Despite the list of tasks for herself growing at the back of her mind, Ellie walked through the house first. It all seemed as if Mum or Dad might walk into the room at any moment. It was strange being at the cottage by herself.
Even after everybody had grown up and moved out, even during the school year when Mum and Dad had been living at Hogwarts, it had seemed so full. There were grandchildren underfoot, or Bast home to ask a question, or Sofia to borrow a book, or Hugo trying to pin down some theory. Ellie had spent more than her fair share of summer afternoons brewing with Dad. There was the potential that, any moment, somebody was going to pop round for tea or to talk or to just be home for a moment before they had to go back to their own lives. The cottage had always been a haven like that.
The library was quiet. There were charms on the walls and windows to keep it that way. Everything was comfortable without being plush. There were excellent places to sit and read, every chair with good lighting and a table nearby for tea. It had been Expanded over the years to accommodate the sheer size of her parents' collection.
Then the kitchen, the heart of the home in many ways. Her parents had seemed to rotate through the kitchen without any set pattern and without fighting about whose turn it was to do the cooking (a minor miracle, Ellie had come to believe, considering she and her own husband argued about who was making dinner every night except for Saturdays, which had been take-out night for as long as they'd been a couple; it was lucky they were at Hogwarts with the house elves to cook for them the majority of the year).
There wasn't a dining room so much as a big table that had to be spelled to fit them all at Christmas. It spilled over into the sitting room, which was hardly used and much less comfortable than the library. There was the fireplace, magically enlarged so that it was big enough to stand up in, which made Floo travel much more pleasant. There was Mum's piano, though she hadn't played since before Dad died. A little seating arrangement of wingback chairs and a small sofa, which Ellie had spent most of her life convinced they owned simply because a sitting room required a place to sit.
Upstairs were the bedrooms. Bast's room, an expansion of the library downstairs (though there were more photo albums and Muggle fiction upstairs than the more academic stuff downstairs) with a large couch that transfigured easily into a comfortable bed for visiting grandchildren. The room she and Sofia had shared still had their bunk beds (again for the grandchildren) and the Quidditch poster from Aunt Ginny's first year as a professional. Hugo's room at the back of the house had been transformed into an office following Dad's retirement.
She watched the dust swirling prettily through the afternoon sunshine coming through the office window and suddenly felt claustrophobic. She couldn't breathe in the too-still, too-empty cottage. It was stifling.
Ellie went down the stairs and out back through the conservatory. It was full of magical plants and flowers, all of them arranged around the gnarly old oak tree that grew through the roof. The glass panels that made up the walls and roof made it hot even in winter, and on the summer day it was both humid and hellishly warm—Ellie hurried through to the yard beyond, turning her face to the cool breeze.
The house elves had kept up the garden. It had only been a few days, but the garden was full of magical plants that tended to escape their bounds if given half a chance. There weren't even any weeds.
Ellie went left off the patio down the little path to the bench by the ever-blooming lilac bush. It smelled heavenly.
The spot on the bench gave the perfect view of the yard. There were the raised boxes of plants destined to be potions ingredients up near the house, the fenced-in patch of garden. Dad had built a shed for brewing potions at the far corner of the yard, the distance a safety precaution he'd never actually needed, with an overhang that provided perpetual shade for another raised box of plants that did particularly well with dark. Closer to the bench where she sat were the flowers, the whimsical plants Longbottom presented her parents every Christmas, and a particularly large turnip plant that Uncle Harry had given Mum (it was originally from Longbottom, and Ellie suspected there was some joke that she didn't know involved).
It was odd that the garden could be stifling as well.
"How long have you been out here?" Bast asked, making her jump.
"How long have you been out here?"
Bast raised an eyebrow, and in that moment he looked so much like her father that it hurt. The tears came on with surprising quickness.
"What are we going to do?" she asked him when the tears slowed to a trickle. He'd sat next to her on the bench and pulled her into his side.
"Maybe we could put a stasis on it and sell tickets," he suggested, and she had to pull back and look at his face to be sure he was joking. "People have been trying to get the inside scoop on Mum and Dad almost as far back as I can remember."
"I was being serious," she said, wiping her face and trying not to sniffle. "I don't know where to start. I went in the house and it was just—it was exactly like it always is, was. Whatever."
Dad had died suddenly. They'd all been called to the cottage one morning, and Mum had been alone. Mum's death had been expected. They'd been checking in on her for months, then it was visiting her in St. Mungo's, and then the Healers had Flooed and told them they should come in because she was close to the end. And then they'd been talking about wills and funeral arrangements and who would be able to stop in and sort out the cottage.
"It's still home."
"Yes."
"Isn't that strange?" he asked, half to himself. "Neither of us has actually lived here in decades."
"It's just… It's the place they built for us. For themselves, but for us."
"They built us for themselves," Bast said, and she elbowed him in the side harder than she probably should have. He didn't laugh like he might've on a different day, but he definitely smirked.
"I wasn't expecting you so soon," Sofia said, joining them. She did indeed have a bottle of cheap wine with her.
"Brenna shooed me out of the shop," he said, scooting over so that there was room for Sofia on the bench.
"They made me leave work early, too," Sofia said.
"That's one advantage to having famous parents I suppose," Ellie said, conjuring herself a glass for Sofia to pour into.
They were quiet for a long moment, sipping the wine without tasting it.
\\
The weeks that followed were full of emotional upheaval. Ellie cleaned the house, going through each room, sorting things before putting them back. The others stopped in to help as they could. Bast and Sofia had day jobs. Hugo wasn't able to help at all until he finished teaching a summer seminar. Nobody specific was inheriting the house—there were more Prince properties than any of them could ever need, and they had all settled here or there as they wished. It went unspoken that the cottage would be the family gathering place, for Christmases and birthdays. It would be the family library and the family haven as it had always been.
Bast found a box of old letters from the war. Their parents had written each other constantly for months. They weren't quite love letters; in fact, they seemed to be trying very hard to scare each other off, or at least offend each other. Dad insulted Mum's hair quite a lot, and Mum had sent him clips of the driest, most boring publications (notated, of course).
Sofia found a letter that had been folded and reread so many times that it was nearly falling apart despite the preserving charms Mum had layered onto it. It was Dad's proposal. The story had always gone that he hadn't expected to be with her on Christmas, so he'd written her a letter and sent her a ring. She'd showed up for Christmas with a marriage license. And now here was the proposal, words like "cherish" and "please" looking odd in his spiky handwriting.
Hugo was the one to find the manuscript. It was the book Mum had been working on since Dad died, a memoir from the war. It was a compilation of many peoples' experiences, but mostly Mum and Dad's. There were photographs stuck in between some of the pages—from a very old photo of the original Order of the Phoenix to Dad's Chocolate Frog card. They read it together, passing around the pages when they were tired of cleaning out drawers and sorting through the old receipts Mum had kept in her meticulous files.
Ellie felt she'd done well; she hadn't broken down since that first day in the garden. What finally did it for her was the photograph she found in her mother's night stand. It was on top of the comb and her dad's wand. It wasn't the photo itself; she'd seen that plenty of times—it was a candid from the Christmas after Hugo's eldest had first manifested magic (thus allowing him to tell his Muggle wife the truth despite the Statute of Secrecy). The children were so small, their smiles so large. They were all gathered in the cottage sitting room in their pajamas, laughing as Bast pretended to be appalled at his daughter's exuberance over the toy broomstick she'd just unwrapped.
Dad had taken the photo and obviously given Mum a copy; he'd written "Thank you, H" on the back, and that was what had Ellie crying again. It reminded her of the letters—addressing each other as 'H' and 'S' instead of by name. Maybe because they'd been worried the letters would be intercepted? Maybe because they both knew perfectly well by handwriting if not content who was doing the writing?
She sat and cried and thought of the two of them together. She had a very vivid memory of being very young—probably only a few months after Hugo was born—and sitting on her mum's bed. Mum had been running a wide-toothed comb through her hair, still wet from a shower. It was long and straight for only a few moments before it began to curl up as it dried, and Ellie had liked to watch it; it was so much like her own hair, but somehow madder and more vibrant, copper and honey tones hidden among the browns (and later, the grays and whites). Dad had liked it to, running his fingers through it, stretching a curl out straight to watch it bounce back up, and then ignoring Mum's protests that that made it frizzier.
"The pair of you are hopelessly romantic figures, even in death," she murmured, heading for the bathroom to splash some water on her face. "You're lucky you didn't spoil the lot of us for marriage, setting such an example."
She didn't know who she was talking to, but it seemed like the sort of thing to say.