For AJ, as a pre-round challenge to the fourth year of the Houses Competition. Pansy Parkinson's tenth birthday!

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Pansy Parkinson's tenth birthday was not quite as she might have expected.

You see, she was expecting a party. That had been the tradition for the last nine years, hadn't it? Surely, it wasn't wrong to assume the same thing would happen? Instead, things were much improved from her own expectations. There was no need to dress fancy, there was no requirement of alcohol-induced conversations prompted by drunken family members. She could stay in her pyjamas - that was the best news she'd had all day.

So, dressed in flannel plaid, Pansy ran downstairs for breakfast, and both of her parents were there. Her mother, wearing a silk dressing gown and wonderfully hilarious slippers that looked like they had come from a dream. Boots, with a yellow bear's face on it. Peculiar, imaginative, and nothing like her mother. Her father, in comic-book pyjamas. She recognised them from the magazine that their muggleborn maid had brought the previous week.

Pansy didn't know what to say. She was so uncertain whether this was some other reality she might have stepped into during her sleep.

She hardly ever saw her parents, let alone for breakfast. At the very least, it would be for dinner once a week. On a Sunday, when her father was home from work, and when her mother had no other obligations. Maybe this was a new thing that would happen more often? Maybe, now that she was in the last year before going off to Hogwarts, they might want to spend more time with her? Maybe? Maybe.

Breakfast was extremely pleasant. Her parents talked to her about school, she asked them about their work and about the day ahead of them. It was all sounding so good, and she was so happy. It was a blissful happiness. She was learning about their lives, and she was appreciating them more than she had ever done in her life before.

After that, they went to the beach. They took her in side-along apparition, landed in the dunes together, and ran out towards the sea. They had fish and chips for lunch, like muggles. But it was one of the most delicious meals she had ever had in her life. Smatterings of ketchup, lashings of vinegar and salt and mushy peas - she had thought peas were only for soup and appetisers, but they were clearly a more variable substance. Her fingers were quickly coated with grease and tomato sauce, and she smelt of lemon and fish. It was wonderful.

She didn't need presents. She didn't need beautiful dresses, or gowns, or hats, or shoes to fill her life with love and meaning. She had everything she wanted, right then, with her parents. Walking along the beach with them, hand-in-hand, breathing in the salty, afternoon air.

It was a whole new type of happiness, and a whole new type of magic.

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Thanks for reading!