Posted: 12/24/15

Thanks to the few people who have gifted me with a review. It makes me indescribably joyful. (Any and all Brit-picking is welcome! said the sadly ignorant American.) Happy Christmas Eve!

The Ash in the Antipodes

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

-C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed

19th July, 1995

The Headmaster of Hogwarts was worried.

Almost two months ago one of the darkest wizards to ever have lived had regained his body and the full use of his terrible powers. This alone was a very bad thing, but to make this sad matter even worse the Minister for Magic and almost every member of the wizarding government refused to acknowledge the truth of this fact. Albus Dumbledore was doing everything in his power to thwart Voldemort; attempting to figure out who all of his followers were, establish who he was next planning to recruit or coerce into helping him, and somehow gain covert access to all of his other diabolical plans in general.

As soon as Harry Potter told him of Voldemort's rebirth in the cemetery, Dumbledore had contacted the remaining members of the Order of the Phoenix, people he trusted who trusted him in return. He was desperate to warn as many people in the magical community as possible that Voldemort was back and their lives were in mortal peril once more. It was slow work. Between the Ministry's adamant denial of Voldemort's return, and the Daily Prophet making him out to be senile, he had yet to make much headway.

But on this rainy night Dumbledore was sitting at his desk contemplating three well-read pieces of paper that, while they directly related to his problems with the insane dark wizard who was currently liberated and undoubtedly scheming, seemed altogether a completely different matter.

Last week a man who worked undercover in the Muggle post office in London had redirected a letter addressed to Dumbledore and sent it to Hogwarts via owl. It certainly wasn't the first time he had received a letter from a Muggle in this roundabout fashion. In fact, Harry Potter's own aunt, a Petunia Dursley nee Evans, had managed to put a letter in his hands in this way some thirty years previously. And over the years of his appointment as Headmaster of Hogwarts, other children, envious siblings of his Muggle-born pupils in the main, had written him similar messages. The contents of this letter, however, couldn't have surprised him more if Voldemort had unfurled himself from the envelope.

While he absently stirred his tea, Dumbledore pushed his spectacles further up his long thin nose and perused, for the umpteenth time, one of the pages that contained an entire transcript of a private conversation he had conducted with his portraits, in this very office, ten days ago. The script offered up by this paper struck him forcefully in its accuracy. It was verbatim. He had an excellent memory and obviously the person who had written it did too.

He set aside this page and picked up another, equally worn piece of paper. He read the entire letter, again:

Professor Dumbledore,

You don't know me. My name is Luxminder O. I'm fourteen years old and I'm a Muggle.

The reason I know who you are is because I was born with the unusual ability to leave my corporeal body and float around unseen and, if I like, watch people. I've been watching you for a while now. I've heard you talking about Lord Voldamorte and his plans to conquer the world. I want to help you by spying on him for you.

But the main reason I'm writing to you is because I need some help of my own.

A year and a half ago I relocated to England with my mum and dad from America, because my grandma was ill and we had to come here and care for her. About a year after we arrived, my parents and my little sister, Roxander, were in a fatal car accident. Then my grandmother died from cancer six weeks later.

These people that I'm living with are distant, distant relations of my mum's, and they're just using me for free room and board and slave labor! Whenever I'm home I have to clean the house, by myself, and I spend most of my free time taking care of their young children. I never get to do my school work and my grades are certainly suffering for it. They make me cook dinner for them every night and I just can't take this anymore!

I wouldn't mind doing chores and helping out with their kids. I always willingly helped my parents as much as I could, and I loved taking care of Roxie. She was born when I was eleven, so she was more like a daughter to me than a sibling. I used to spend hours playing with her, reading and singing to her and such.

But this isn't like that. They don't care about me or my well-being. We're not working together as a team to make the household run smoothly. They don't even use my name when they talk to me! I'm a serious cipher. A non-entity.

The man that lives here, I can't really bring myself to refer to him as my foster dad or a even a third cousin, is a sadistic pervert. In addition to random acts of cruelty, he makes me watch dirty movies on the television with him at night, after his wife has gone to work and I've put his kids to bed. I don't really want to describe all the disgusting things he makes me do to him. I'm sure a person as clever as I know you to be, has an imagination that's well up to filling in these sordid blanks.

I know that I'm young, and a muggel, and a girl, although you've never struck me as a sexist type, and that's one of the reasons that I chose you. God, it's so late and I'm exhausted. I barely know what I'm writing. I'm begging you to help me and give me a chance to help you. I know that I have the capacity to make a genuine difference in this war. Please, consider this petition and give me a chance. You won't regret it.

Thank you.

Luxminder O

P.S. I've enclosed a copy of a conversation I listened to you having with your portraits so you'll know I'm not trying to blow smoke up your… robes.

Once the shock of its contents had worn off, which wasn't the work of a moment, Dumbledore had reread her letter over and over until it was beginning to tear at the creases. Certain words and phrases seemed to stand out to him, such as: "corporeal", "I'm completely on my own", "slave labor", "sordid blanks", "sexist type", "one of the reasons that I chose you", and "capacity to make a genuine difference". He was also strongly struck by the desperation with which the letter was infused.

A man of Dumbledore's age and experience understood that no matter how long you've lived, life will never stop surprising you. He also didn't believe in coincidence. But this... The contents of this letter were so unprecedented that he felt frozen in indecision whenever he contemplated it.

He set the papers aside and brought his middle and index fingers to his temples and began massaging them with slow gentle circles, trying to increase the blood flow to his brain. He wasn't sure what to do now.

~x~}{~x~

19th September, 1995

Dumbledore cast a Disillusionment Charm over himself before he Apparated to the address that the Muggle had written on her envelope, and he found himself at the end of a close. He was a bit confused at first, because there were two brick houses facing the street, each had been divided into four separate flats, and her house was down a narrow, bending, dirt road that led behind them. Dumbledore assumed she would live in one of these sub-flats, but after studying the numbers he noticed the two-tracked path leading to the rear of the spacious property and decided it bore investigation. The house he came to in the back had the proper number that he was searching for, and it was much bigger than the preceding two. But it also presented an odd picture to him, and it took him a moment to decide what was peculiar about it. For although the house and the yard surrounding it retained an impression of meticulous care – sturdy and beautiful woodworking for the shutters and porch, large flower beds and meandering stone walkways – there was a markedly dilapidated feel to it as well; overgrown grass, weeds, and a coating of last year's leaves among the dried out flowerbeds, chipping paint, a birdfeeder that dangled from its posts askew, a broken wind chime lying on the porch which nobody had bothered to re-hang. Dumbledore thought that if he'd come upon this place a mere year ago, he would have found it picturesque.

Doubts about what he was planning to do this day had been effectively quashed, as Dumbledore let himself into the house without knocking or announcing his presence in any way. It was the epitome of rude, but more than even his eschewed basic decency was that he was abusing his power. Dumbledore had invested inordinate amounts of time pondering what he was now doing, and concluded this was the cleanest, quickest, and almost only way to achieve his end. He had to be sure that the young person who had written him the desperate letter was really in an unlivable position before he could justify interfering. Dumbledore could have come in waving his wand around, dispensing Veritaserum – which would all have been just as unethical and more illegal as what he was now doing – but he was simply going to stand around in the periphery, invisible, and observe. It was the most unobtrusive method to see what Ms. O's home life really entailed, and if it was all much milder and less…perverse than she claimed in her letter, he could simply leave. No traces of magic left behind, no memory charms needed at the end of the day - no adolescent tantrums to deal with or lies to sort through.

The inside of the house, Dumbledore found, was like an exaggeration of the outside. As he walked around he noticed remnants of splendor, such as lavishly carved woodwork, spacious, airy rooms well-lit with large French windows. He walked across hardwood floors that were unpolished and scuffed, observed a hefty dining table littered with rubbish, including a dirty nappy, and one of its matching chairs, piled high with disorganized junk, had been pushed to the side of the room because its arm had come loose and was sagging precariously to the side.

Dumbledore heard thumping noises above him and the sound of a young child crying, then the strident voice of a remonstrating woman.

He continued his perusal of the downstairs while he listened to the fussing and squalling noises from the second floor.

The walls were rather odd too. In addition to the crayon scribbles and holes in the plaster, there were discolored patches all around the living room and the hallways. Each rectangle and square of fresher and brighter paint had a small hole at the center top, and he easily surmised that frames had hung in them until recently and had all, for some reason, been taken down. He wondered why they'd been removed and not replaced with updated photographs or artwork. It was the same throughout the first floor. He looked over gorgeous bookshelves, half-filled with books and covered in dust, ruined furniture that showed signs of having been well cared for in the near past. It was a mystery. It was as if this home had once belonged to meticulous, appearance-conscious people, and then been overrun by tenants who preferred squalor.

Dumbledore hoped that the letter-writer would be home soon. He assumed she was still in school and was eager to see what she looked like. He knew there was a chance she could be upstairs, and decided that if she didn't appear soon he would make his way up there and look for her. But within fifteen minutes he heard the front door open and close. He was standing in what would have been a lovely sunroom, save the broken furniture, ripped window screens and the plants that had sadly browned and wizened with neglect, and made his way to the living room to get his first glimpse of her.

But then Dumbledore was disappointed when he saw who had come in, for she looked like a first year student of Hogwarts, rather than a third or fourth year. Or was this Ms. O? Dumbledore realized that she might have added to her age, to make herself seem older and more mature. Dumbledore didn't know what he would do if she was really only a ten or eleven year old. How much difference will it make? He wondered.

She just stood there in the small alcove of the foyer, glaring into the living room with narrowed eyes. The little girl did seem very grown up, he thought, when he saw her taking in the mess before her. She peered around at the dishes piled on the end tables, the clothes, toys, and rubbish littered across the floor, an empty crisp packet half tucked in between the couch cushions, and then, when she noticed a partially torn book that was lying beside one of the bookshelves, she lifted her hands to her hips and released an indignant puff of breath. She went carefully down the three steps that led into the living room and Dumbledore noticed that she walked with a slight limp.

She was wearing a pair of faded jeans, a voluminous flannel button-up with the sleeves rolled up, and a big pair of boots. Her hair was long, fell down her back to her waist in a single braid, and it swung in time to her unflared hips. She went straight to the book, leaned down to retrieve it, and when she saw how many pages had been ripped up, Dumbledore watched her throat clenching, her mouth turn down, and her eyes start to sparkle. He realized that she was about to cry, or was doing her best not to, and he wanted to give her a hug. In sympathetic solidarity over a destroyed book, because he loved books, and so did she obviously.

She didn't cry. She did however, with an air of resigned indifference, drop the book onto the floor, readjust her book bag farther up her shoulder and cross the room, picking her way carefully around the detritus, to the dining room table.

Without pausing, she set her bag on a chair and began to clear off the table. Dumbledore, slowly and carefully, made his way into the room with her, keeping close to the walls. He watched her gather up the rubbish, making a face over the smelly nappy, and the dishes; then she brought a damp dishrag to wipe up the food spills from the last meal.

Once the table was cleared and clean, she brought out her school books, sharpened a pencil and began to work some equations. Dumbledore, who had remained in a shadowy corner of the room up until that point, made his way closer to her. He was hoping that a glimpse of her schoolwork might help him get an accurate inkling of her age.

But two things happened almost simultaneously. As he moved out of the shadows she must have heard him, for her head darted up and she looked directly at him. Her eyes happened to make their way up to his. To exactly his, and it was uncanny, because she looked into his eyes for such a protracted length of time, for a moment Dumbledore was beginning to think she could really see him. And then he noticed a clatter of footsteps descending the stairs and a woman with a small child on her hip arrived in the dining room.

"What you think you're doing?!" she bellowed at Luxminder.

~x~}{~x~

It was just another day in her life. A typical shitty day.

Luxminder had decided not to take the bus anymore. It was approximately eight kilometers from school to home, and when the weather got too cold and wet she might start riding it again. But for now, while it was mild and cheery outside, she was going to walk.

Anything to delay getting back "home" was her goal in foregoing the government provided ride. She hated it there. Hated it everywhere come to that. She didn't even like school anymore, and why should she? She was about ten times smarter than all the other kids in her class, probably smarter than some of her teachers. Before the accident she'd attended a private school, and she and her parents had held high hopes that she could sit for her A-Levels a year, or even two, early and quite a few of her teachers had remarked that she was Oxbridge material. It was all so pointless now. Everything felt pointless these days, and she couldn't even finish her homework because she wasn't allowed to by Them. They were slowly pulverizing every dream she'd ever had for her future, so that now it was gloomier than the slum they were turning her house into. Bleaker than ash.

Luxminder couldn't believe that less than a year ago she'd had everything. A good home life, loving interested parents, a sweet little sister to spoil, healthy home-cooked meals: everything. She'd taken it all for granted of course. That was intrinsically linked to the impenetrable innocence that she'd lived in then, because only the innocent ones are oblivious to their innocence. Now she understood that saying, 'ignorance is bliss.'

As she made her reluctant way through the tidy neighborhood streets she started to feel heavier than an anvil the closer she got to her house. Oblivia was mad at her for spending a good forty-five minutes to walk home, when a bus ride would have delivered her there in fifteen. But this was the point, any fool should see that. But she was beyond dense, that one, hence the nickname Oblivia. She couldn't believe that her bright, organized mum was even remotely related to the dullard who called herself a third cousin.

Luxminder wished that it was all a lie. Wished her mum hadn't been related to people like this, but she knew it was true. She'd actually met Oblivia once, after they'd moved to England, but before her parents had passed. She'd been incredulous that Saturday afternoon when the bitch had shown up at the doorstep, ostensibly for "tea".

If her mother hadn't spoken of her philandering father's family often, or with much enthusiasm, at least she brought them up sometimes, and they'd even been to visit them a few times. Her mother's side of the family was a whole different subject, which Elizabeth had almost never talked about. Not willingly. Not without an influx of drilling questions from Luxminder first. Then she'd told her stories about times before her dad had left them - her mum and herself and her little sister Beatrice. She'd told Luxminder about taking a picnic lunch to the park and feeding their bread crusts to the ducks. Or about the time she'd taught Bea to ride her bike in less than a week. But she'd almost never talked about what life had been like after her dad had gone to France, and her mother had fallen to pieces, and she'd gotten a job at only fourteen, so she could save money and put herself through school. Eliza had wanted to become a doctor, but that was out of the question when Bea needed her to put food on the table. And of her maternal aunts and uncles and cousins, not a peep. Nobody had told Luxminder what was wrong with them. Now she knew.

When Oblivia had rung the bell the previous June, Luxminder and Xander had come from the smaller of the two downstairs bedrooms, which her father had wasted no time converting to a dark room upon their arrival in England, to see who had come over uninvited. Was it a traveling salesman? One of their tenants to ask for a repair on a leaky faucet? No. It was a shabby stranger, with a baby on her shoulder, and a rowdy toddler in tow.

Oblivia had obviously "dressed up" for the visit, and a hot pink, knee-length skirt clung unflatteringly to her bulging thighs, and she'd couple it with a flower-print blouse that didn't quite match, and she had on gobs of mascara that made her lashes look like fuzzy spider legs, and plenty of lipstick on her teeth. Luxminder had thought she'd come to see if any of their flats were for rent. Especially when she saw how uncomfortably her mother was speaking to her. Eliza's upper body was stiff, like a board had inserted itself beneath her shirt when no one was looking, and she was clinging to Roxie so tightly that she'd begun to fuss. Something her little sister rarely did when she was being held.

She and her dad joined them, and once the introductions were made her father was the one who'd actually asked her to come in for tea – for which he received a sound tongue-lashing afterward. But once she'd been invited in, Oblivia had given a simpering smile of acceptance and mulishly dragged herself and her little boy over the threshold.

"It's a real shame that Stephen couldn't come here with us. He'd a love yer house, Liza," Oblivia had rambled as she looked around at the sizable living room, the shining floors and the gleaming electronics, in frank admiration. "He's workin' on the neighbor's car today. He's a real hand at that sort thing, you know." As they ushered her into the sunroom she just jabbered away. "I tells him to come on over, it ent but a short drive over from Headstoke, you know, only a half hour on the motorway, but he don't want to be messing with it, when he promised his friend Nigel he'd get his car fixed up for him."

"Is that right?" Xander had asked politely. He was a munificently-hearted man, prepared to give anybody the benefit of the doubt no matter how they looked or spoke.

"Luxie, help me with the tea, sweetheart," her mother told her.

Oblivia's three year old, Robbie he was called, had already begun exploring the plants that they'd bought to add some beauty to the room. He'd started to pluck some of the blossoms off of their foxglove, and Luxminder expected her dad to say something about it, but he hadn't.

"Oh!" Oblivia had cried when she appeared to notice Lux for the first time. "I heared through the grapevine that you'd adopted yerselves a little crippled girl! Aren't you just the prettiest thing? When I's heared it, I thought you up and adopted a girl who'd probably be all ugly and retarded, but she's just as pretty as a pic-"

"She isn't crippled!" Xander had cut in sharply. "And what exactly is wrong with mentally handicapped children? Is being retarded synonymous with being ugly in your book?!"

Luxminder knew that Oblivia calling her crippled was just the blundering tip of the chilly iceberg. Oblivia's comment about her maybe being ugly and retarded had gotten under his skin just as badly. What Oblivia had failed to realize – and this was only one of the many, many reasons Luxminder had dubbed her 'Oblivia' in the first place – was that Roxander had been born with Down's syndrome. Anybody who'd looked at her properly could see it. She had all the characteristic facial features denoting it, namely the bulging forehead and the slanting eyes that always visually set them apart from other children over the age of one.

Oblivia had looked around at them all in shock at her father's outburst but, catching sight of Roxie in his lap, she'd done a double-take and then had the decency to blush.

"Well, I-I'm sure I didn't mean any harm, sir – er, sorry, I's done forgot your name," she stuttered.

Mollified by her embarrassment and pseudo-apology, her dad had calmly repeated his name to her.

Her mother wasn't so quick to forgive and, after fetching the tea and biscuits, lapsed into an unequivocal huff for the remainder of the visit. Alexander had to carry the conversation, which hadn't been difficult because Oblivia hadn't seemed to notice her cousin's sulky silence - or she'd done a very good job at affecting it – and, other than a few cursory questions, had simply nattered away the teatime by enumerating all the wonderful qualities of her husband and her two perfect boys. Luxminder supposed that Oblivia must feel that even if she was deficient in certain things – like a commodious home with a sunroom and an elegant tea service – she could console herself with the knowledge that both of her children were physically and mentally sound.

Luxminder had asked to hold her baby a couple of times, and Oblivia had more than willingly passed him off to her, but both times Roxie had eventually noticed that her favorite plaything was cheating on her, and begun to issue wails of protest and stretch out her arms for Lux, demanding her place of honor in her sister's lap. Robbie had a glob of half-crusted snot under his nose, which Oblivia didn't seem to see, let alone clean off. Finally, getting more and more irritated by it and realizing that his mum didn't give a damn how gross he was, Lux had led him to the bathroom, claiming he was doing a weewee-dance, and had worked it off with some hot water and toilet roll. Robbie had screamed like he was being murdered, as if no one had ever dared to try cleaning up his snot in his entire short life.

When her parents had died, followed less than two months later by her cancerous grandmother, the British authorities had told her that if no family was willing to take her, she'd go into foster care. With many misgivings, after her family in France and Lenora had failed to come for her, Luxminder had given the man at social services the names of Oblivia and her husband. She should have known by how keen they were to pack up all of their belongings and move two towns over at the drop of a hat that it could only mean trouble. She should have closed up her house and gone into foster care. Now she really understood that saying about hindsight being twenty-twenty.

So Oblivia and Robbie and Dylan and the Pervert had moved into the house that her grandparents had left her in their will. (Well, technically it had all gone to her father and mother, but as they'd left her everything in their will, including naming her dead grandparents as her guardians, it had all come to Luxminder.) She now owned four houses, one in America and three here in England. She also had a nice little trust fund set up in her name with a moderate sum of money that increased every month from the rents that the flats collected, and she couldn't touch any of it until she turned eighteen. This was what drove them, the Pervert and Oblivia, barmy she knew. They received a little bit of money from her account for her care, a smaller amount of money from the government for fostering an orphan, and even less money for 'managing' the rental properties. It didn't matter that they had no rent to pay, a much bigger home than whatever shoebox they'd crawled out of, and extra income for doing absolutely nothing on her behalf. The Pervert had really believed when he'd agreed to "care" for her that he would have unfettered access to her entire inheritance.

Luxminder still couldn't understand everything that was happening to her, but she wasn't nearly as clueless as she used to be, and what she did know, by now without a doubt, was that the Pervert hated her because she had and was so many things that he could never have or be. So he'd made it his personal mission in life to set about systematically destroying all the beautiful accouterments of her's that he would never be allowed to possess. Including her spirit. And he was winning. By god, he was crushing her.

She could cope with being removed from her private school and kissing away her bright dreams for an excellent education. She could deal with them turning her father's childhood home into a rubbish bin. She could even handle the pinches, hair-pulling, slaps, kicks, the constant cleaning up after them and their children, preparing almost every boxed and frozen meal that they ate, barely finding the time to have baths, let alone take care of her abundant hair, and going through every day in a miserable daze. But it was the sexual abuse that was doing her in. Even if it was just the fellatio she had to perform on him (every night that Oblivia went to work), she'd be okay, she thought. That night in the loo, though. If she had to go through that again she'd slit her wrists.

So she didn't fight them anymore. She didn't have tantrums when the Pervert turned a profit from selling her things, sentimental or just valuable - like her father's antique cameras and her grandfather's expensive carpentry equipment. Her grandmother's rare coin and stamp collections had gone as well. Luxminder didn't scream at them anymore and cry, like she'd done when the little ones had destroyed all of Roxander's old toys and books, or when they'd thrown out her wooby.

That blanket had such a precious history to Luxminder, to all of them. Back when Alexander and Elizabeth were just a fresh, gullible couple, lured to America with untarnished hopes of a better life, they'd tried again and again to have a child of their own. Eliza had knitted the blanket when she'd missed her first period. But the blood had come gushing out again a mere few months later. And again; and again. She kept the blanket though. Couldn't stop crying into it, but couldn't let it go the way her insufficient womb had rejected every fetus it had attempted and failed to cradle into life.

So the blanket had stuck around long after the dream had departed.

But then her father had found her. Sitting by the sidewalk, eating dirt, so covered in it he wasn't even certain she was dark-skinned, thought perhaps she was just dusty. But her teal eyes had shone out from her earth-caked face, and her artistic, beauty-loving father had been enchanted. When the little Mexican woman who fostered her had come out to see who was talking at her abandoned charge he'd told her, You have the most beautiful daughter, Senora.

No, senor. She's not my bambina. I take in the kids for the state, ci?

And that was when he knew he told her later. Her dad used to call her his greatest discovery. And the blanket, the old dream knit anew, had been brought out from the trunk and had at last found a babe to swaddle and pacify.

And passing that wooby on to her little sister, the little usurper, had held such a wrenching, coming-of-age symbolism for Luxminder. It had represented her acceptance of Roxie, and her security in remaining her father's greatest discovery.

Indifference, or perhaps acceptance, which was worse in many ways; that was Luxminder's greatest burden now. What her parents dying had taught her, cursed her with. As Luxminder had been pounded through each layer of her downward mobility, she had learned the truest depths and meanings of sorrow, anger, defiance, retaliation, hatred, and now indifference. And here in the antipodes the external world was unchanged, but she could only see it through the ash-colored lenses of apathy. It was her carapace and her rocky core; her whole being.

Once home, Luxminder walked in to the usual disarray. All the evidence of Oblivia's day alone with her two children - number three on the way - was scattered across every surface in sight. Dirty sippy cups and half-eaten biscuits lay on the floor in front of the telly, a high-heeled sandal stuck out from the beneath the skirt of the sofa, discarded crisp packets were sticking out of the cushions they had been tucked into instead of being taken to the bin, tiny pieces of Robbie's building sets spread out across the wooden floors (a tripping hazard for Lux, a choking hazard for Dylan, and sure to have added more scratches to the gleaming, handcrafted flooring that her grandfather had lovingly laid before Luxminder was born – not to mention that these gouges detracted from the overall value of the house), and it was all going to be picked up by her before the Pervert got home from his job at the mechanic shop or she'd get slapped around until it was done. Not because they wanted a clean and tidy house, but just so she wouldn't forget her place.

Then she noticed something that made her heart ache.

She picked up her grandfather's book off the floor. It had been slaughtered in her absence. Another one. She'd used to beg Oblivia to keep the kids away from the books. If they didn't tear the pages up - apparently they even loved the sound of destruction - then they'd take their crayons and markers to them. It was a shame. This book was the last of an old, expensive set of encyclopaedias.

Luxminder had tried to move all the books up onto the higher shelves and out of their reach. But the second Oblivia turned her back on them, which she did all the time, they'd just scale the shelves for them. One time Lux had spotted one of Robbie's favorite plastic dinosaur toys on the sixth shelf from the top. That was about six feet off the ground. Oblivia wouldn't give a damn, Luxminder guessed, until one them cracked their head open. Then, even if she were at school, Oblivia and the Pervert would probably find a way to blame it on her. She got blamed for everything around here. She was the resident 'whipping girl.'

Luxminder just dropped the book, tired of caring, and went to the dinner table, cleaned it up, and got out her school books. She could hear the kids running around up there while Oblivia shouted at them to be quiet. She was probably trying to sleep. But Luxminder thought, or hoped, she might be able to get some of her trigonometry finished before the bitch realized she was home.

Lux only solved one of the problems when she saw someone moving in the corner of her eye. She looked up. And was greeted by the most beautiful thing she'd seen in almost a year. But it was too unreal to be believed. She just looked at him in dumb confusion. He was transparent, like a ghost. Like a figment of her imagination.

Oh, god! This was it! She'd finally cracked. She always knew would. What would happen if she were locked up in a loony bin? Peace, that's what, she thought. Blessed, oblivious peace and you won't have to worry about this shit anymore.

And there was Oblivia, with Dylan on her hip, and Robbie jumping around in circles behind her.

"Wotcha think yer doing?!"

"Homework," she replied.

"I'm tellin' Stephen how long yer taking to get 'ome today!" she barked. "I have to get to work in less than five hours, and I need some sleep! Now do yer chores, and keep 'em quiet!"

Luxminder kept looking back and forth between Dumbledore and Oblivia, but she was either living up to her moniker in an unbelievable way, or she couldn't see him. Was it a spell he'd done so that only she could see him? And if so, why?

Oblivia put Dylan down and pounded back up the stairs.

Luxminder wondered if she should address the wizard she'd…somehow…managed to lure here. Should she just ask him what he expected her to do? No. Whatever was happening, she decided, she would allow him to initiate their first contact. She had an idea that he might want to see her home, her life, her hell.

So she packed away her books and put some cartoons on for the kids to keep them pacified while she began to tidy and clean. It wasn't easy. Today, as he had many times before, Robbie waited until she'd packed most of his toys in a big cardboard box they kept against the wall of living room when he wasn't playing with them. After he sent her to the kitchen for another fizzy drink, he opened the box and started redistributing them across the floor.

"Oi!" she cried, as loudly as she dared, on her way back in from the dining room. "Robbie, please don't do that!"

About thirty seconds later the Pervert walked in the door. And Luxminder knew it was going to be one of those days.

He saw his son tossing his blocks into the air, watched them land and skid over the floors, and immediately made his way to Luxminder to issue her the first slap of the day. He got hold of her by the hair, his favorite handle, and pulled his arm back pretty far, then pulled it in tighter before he clashed his open palm to her cheek. He rarely left bruises, and never on her face, neck, and arms. He felt safe kicking the soft flesh of her real leg, for at this point he knew that she never wore anything short enough to expose her artificial limb. Sometimes he'd give her swift punch to the abdomen – not hard enough to cause internal damage, but just knocked the wind out of her – and,if he knew his wife was at work or at the food market, he loved to pinch her nipples, and he frequently yanked at her hair. No matter how angry he was, no matter how much alcohol he drank, he never lost control, and he never left visible marks or hurt her so badly that she'd need medical care. To Luxminder these cool, calculating methods were what made him so frightening. And so evil.

Sometimes she wished he would slip into a rage and unleash on her, perhaps kill her. Then everybody would know what a monster he really was. But even in the past, even when she'd tried provoking him, he hadn't given in to his fury. Except once. But even then he had devised a way to torture her without leaving any cuts and bruises where anybody save herself was likely to look.

When Luxminder saw him coming at her she knew what he meant to do. She didn't flee or even flinch. She only closed her eyes and tilted her head back, waiting. The physical assaults and the debauchery were the only forms of human contact she received now. She was ready and resigned. If Dumbledore was only a figment of her insanity, so be it. If not, let him see.

"Pick all this shit up," he quietly growled.

Then he went to the couch, settled down into it, couldn't find the remote, grumbled, got up to flip the channel to a football match, and re-settled.

Luxminder went to the kitchen to get him a beer.