"When Grandad asked me if I understood what you were going on about, I told him about this dream I kept having. I dunno if it answered his question, or not. But he was drunk enough that his words kept slurring and that I could've told him pink elephants flew outta my ass, and he probably would've sent me on my way" Jean offered half a shrug.

"That does sound like Grandad" Great Auntie Constance nodded in acquiesce.

Granny Gertrude quirked an unimpressed brow at the alchemist; her weathered hands clasped in front of her. It seemed that she wasn't too impressed with how they were talking about her husband. "Hm"

Great Auntie Constance threw her hands up in defence. "What? It's true!"

Granny Gertrude spared a glare at her great aunt, before she then turned to Jean again. "So, what's this about a dream?"

Jean held up her hands in defence. "Okay, so I gotta preface, that I don't put a lot of faith in the art of divination" She began. "It's all wishy-washy and seers always get a bad rap whenever one of their convoluted 'visions' doesn't play out like they said it would. Having said that, I did keep having this dream when I was kid…"

Jean licked her lips as her thoughts settled on the dream she was talking about. It was an odd dream. Not one she could really, truly put into words because whilst it wasn't inherently scary, it had haunted her throughout her lifetime(s). Especially when someone or something that she had loved, had died; a pet, a friend, a classmate or even family because they would be added to the strange dream.

"Well, I s'pose it's more of a bad dream really" Jean hummed, her gaze drifting off into places that only she could see. "I've had this dream—this reoccurring bad dream—for as long as I can remember. It started when I was a kid and Dad had taken me to the Pier"

Even now, Jean could still picture that day with stark clarity; it was, afterall, where she developed her petrifying fear of heights. She'd been—maybe—five or six years old (it wasn't too long after she'd started primary school, anyhow) when her father had decided to 'capture the day' by taking her down to the Brighton Palace Pier for the day. It had been unusually sunny that day, a little overcast, but nothing like the usual grey English days. She had worn her favourite dress—the blue one with the cherries all over it—and the her favourite pair of light-up boots that illuminated the heels with each step.

"That day, I'd gone on the Brighton Wheel by myself, whilst Dad—who's just as scared of heights as I am—had stood at the bottom to take my picture as I came back around." Jean wistfully recalled before her expression turned sour. "But there was a problem with one of the gears or something and the wheel got stuck with me at the tippy-top. I sat up in that ferris wheel for hours in the cold. I remember that the ferris wheel was so high up that everyone looked like ants on the ground, down below. And when I tried to look, I couldn't see Dad anywhere"

Jean quietly gripped tight to her forearms as the same childhood fear gripped her. It was so long ago now, but that immature fear of being left alone in a swinging cart, high up above the ground still terrified her. Her mind often cooked up strange and terrifying scenarios where she would plunge from the top, all the way to the bottom and crash into a thousand million broken pieces. Or maybe they would get stuck up there forever, never able to get off and never able to go anywhere. Which, subsequently, was where that dream had found its roots; all thanks to an overactive imagination.

"They eventually got it fixed again" Jean licked her lips, "And by the time I came down again, my tears had dried to my face, my legs were quaking and I was shivering from the cold. Not to mention, I now had a brand-spanking new found fear of heights! Just like dear old Dad!"

"What's this got to do with the dream?" Great Auntie Constance asked, blithely.

"I'm getting there" Jean retorted with a half-hearted glare.

"You can do it!" Delilah cheered from the corner. Though her encouragement wasn't totally warranted, it was, in fact, rather welcomed; even if cheerleading a story was a little odd.

"Thanks Dee" Jean flashed her friend a smile, before she turned back to the other witches. "As I was saying, in the dream—"

"—The reoccurring bad dream?" Great Auntie Constance clarified.

"Yeah, that one" The eleven year old's brow quirked in irritation. She gave her Great Aunt a short & terse nod, but couldn't help the sour expression that coloured her face at all of the interruptions. "In the dream, I am back on the Brighton Wheel and I'm stuck. But this time, there's no one there to fix it and I'm all alone. Sometimes there are other people in the other carts, but they don't move and they don't say anything, no matter what I try. So, we just sit there and we play out the dream. And it always—always—goes the same way"

"Oh?" Granny Gertrude quirked a brow in interest. "Do tell"

Jean's brow twitched at the umpteenth interruption, but continued on anyhow. It wouldn't do for her to back talk her grandmother; afterall, the woman was wicked with her wand and just as creative in her punishments. Besides, Jean was already walking a fine line as it was. "As I was saying" Jean grit out, physically holding herself back from snapping at the two elder witches. "In the dream, I'm stuck on top of the Brighton Wheel; just swinging there, idling up in the air with nowhere to go. And when I look out at the beach, all I can see is the water. Sometimes it's calm and other times it's rocky, but it's always grey like the shimmering shoals that lie beneath"

"It's that grey kind of water that you see at night—in the dusk or the dawn—right before the light hits the water" The eleven year old explained as her expression turned grim. "And as the sky lightens with each passing moment as the sun's about to rise, so too, does the water. And it turns into this tumultuous, angry red colour that's kind of pretty and also kinda scary because it reminds me of blood; like it's a sea of blood. Like everyone I've ever known—pet, family, friend—whomever they are, has gone and died in that sea. Like they've purposefully stained the grey waters red with their blood"

The young witch started to get a little choked up as she continued, her far-off stare now locked tight on the half-empty bowl of pork crackling. "And if I could just get off of the wheel, somehow— apparate to somewhere else or—or find a way to clamber down if I have to—to—to—get to the ground, so that I can get away from that goddamn wheel" Jean sighed heavily, like the weight of the world was squarely upon her little shoulders. "But that never happens. I'm always forever stuck going around and around on that goddamned ferris wheel. And the dream always—always—ends with the sun rising and the faceless carnival barker waving more people on. Though I never get any further than that sunrise"

"It's funny, really" Jean huffed a sad and almost wet laugh, "No matter how much Dreamless Draught I down, I can always recall that part on the wheel with extreme clarity; like it's clear as day. That part…that part is basically real, but the rest? Whatever there's supposed to be after that…that I can't ever see. It's like I just know that whatever I do, I can't get off of the ferris wheel; like, whatever's out there just isn't in the cards for me"

"Well, you're not exactly a seer, now are you, Jeanie?" Delilah lazily offered as she drew patterns in the air.

"Not with a preface like that, anyway!" Great Auntie Constance scoffed under her breath as she slumped back in her seat, arms crossed. Jean was almost sure that she could see the hint of a pout on her lips too, but she couldn't be sure.

Jean flashed her friend with a sarcastic smile that only held a tinge of relief in it. "And thank Hecate for that!" Jean cheered, ignoring her great aunt's remark. "Because, knowing me, I'd probably end up looking like the Prophet Cassandra"

"Keep going, girl" Granny Gertrude huffed a chuckle at the reference to the prophet whose prophecies were always accurate, but never once believed. "Finish your story"

"Uh—uh, right! Well, there's not much left to it, really" Jean nodded, jerkily. "It's just that the more that I have that dream, the more people are added and I still don't go anywhere. It's like my mind is trying to tell me that this—the ferris wheel—is all there is. Of course, I didn't know this at the time—I mean, I was only nine years old—but in retrospect? Yeah, I'm gonna be stuck on that ferris wheel for a loooong time; just going around and around. Only adding new people as we go and always passing that terrifyingly cheerful carnival barker with no face"

Jean offered a half-hearted shrug as the story kind of wound down. "But yeah, in hindsight I now know—no matter what my mind is trying to tell me—that deep down, I am never getting off of that ferris wheel. I just know it" The eleven year old sounded so strangely defeated and it pulled at the women's heartstrings, just a little. It baffled them to think of what had to have happened for someone so young to sound like a war veteran. But still she continued. "Even when, late at night when I'm all alone—no matter what I might let myself hope or whatever I might tell the Potters, or the Marauders, or hell, even Crookshanks—I know it. It's like this deep feeling set in my bones, you know?"

Jean heaved in a rather wet breath as she tried her best to ignore the tears gathering in her eyes. She didn't want to seem weak in front of her gangster great aunt or her no-nonsense grandmother, but there was just this worthlessness that she couldn't help but feel as the words kept tumbling out. It was like someone had slipped her Veritaserum because she couldn't stop the words, no matter how hard she tried. And, you know, it was kind of nice to get these kinds of things off of her chest; cathartic, even.

And Merlin knows that she couldn't talk about this kind of stuff with Harry and Ron. Not that they wouldn't have listened, but just because their usual topics of conversation revolved around how to keep Harry alive that year, whichever Quidditch-slash-chess strategy was the best and the ever-growing avalanche of homework that had been left to the last minute thanks to their…exploits. Not to mention the nightmare that was Second Wizarding War and all that that entailed.

"I—I think that if I told all that to Grandad now, he'd probably cuff me over the back of the head. If I had told him that now, he'd probably look at me with those big sad eyes of his, with the crow's feet crinkled at the edges, and he'd tell me off for being stupid" Jean huffed a wet laugh, finally giving into the urge to scrub at her eyes; the heels of her palms digging into her sockets. "He'd say that them—the old folks, that is—had already written their pages; that their stories were close to ending. 'But you?' Grandad would say. 'You? You young'uns, you can do ANYTHING. You could ALWAYS do anything. You've got the WHOLE world in your hands and YOUR story's still yet unwritten' He would probably tell me to go off and write some new pages before he'd shoo me off towards the cousins to do that, right away"

"Mm…that does sound like something Grandad would say" Great Auntie Constance nodded in agreement.

"I know, right?" Jean flashed her a small uncertain smile, looking for-all-the-world like the eleven year old she appeared to be. "But that's only in hindsight, you know, and on that day I simply told Grandad about being stuck on the Brighton Wheel and how it scared me. I remember him making some sort of anecdote about Dad's fear of heights—something to do with a pushy cousin and faulty broom—and he told me to buck up"

An affectionate smile danced across Jean's face as she recalled the rest of that memory. "Grandad told me that our family—both Dagworths and Grangers, alike—were made of tough stuff. That, that was why we always had the best stories in the end because you had to live to have something to talk about and you gotta make mistakes to learn from them. He said that making mistakes meant that you could both give amazing advice and tell awesome stories"

Here, Jean perked up a little. "Like, on the one hand Mum read her Bible ever night, she got a scholarship for college, married Dad basically right after graduation, tenured in a local dental practise and then had kids in the subsequent years that followed" Jean smiled fondly as she thought of her mother. "Her advice was always terrible. She'd be like 'Don't do that!' and then we were like, 'Why?' and she's like, 'Because the Bible says so' and we'd go, 'Why'd the Bible say so?' And she'd say, 'Because it's God's plan' And we'd go, 'What's God's plan about?' and she'd be like 'I don't know kid, I read it in a book. I've never really lived" Jean was only half joking.

"Uncle Ian, on the other hand—that's Mum's brother—is the black sheep of the Johnson family" Jean continued, sobering up a little more. "He's a drug-dealing, cocaine-addicted chain-smoking alcoholic who got shot in the '70s and now breathes through a hole in his neck"

"Dear Flamel…!" Granny Gertrude quietly gasped, hand on her heart at that rather…blunt description of the muggle man. Thanks to that, she could picture him quite clearly and it wasn't a pretty picture.

A little smirk even tweaked at the corner of the eleven year old's mouth at that reaction and it only grew as she thought of the black sheep of the Johnson family. "I listen to everything that man says 'cause he's got the shit to back it up! He's like 'Don't do that!' And I'm like, 'Why?' and he just goes, 'Cause Uncle Ian pees sitting down, now. Go, play" Jean beamed as her eyes darted over towards her great aunt for a moment.

Because in her eyes, her muggle uncle and alchemist great aunt were cut from the same cloth—the addiction part, but the slightly crazed, out-of-their-minds part. And Great Auntie Constance did not disappoint. Her eyes held this sort of curious gleam in them; the kind that you would often see when she was working on her projects and her lips had parted just a smidge as if she were thinking of what to say to the man, if he had been there. It was just like Mum had said, those two would get on like a house on fire.

"But yeah, that dream always stays the same even as the years go on, and I continue to age" Jean eventually ended, bringing everything around full-circle. "Although, I guess it doesn't really answer that original question, does it? But it was all I could think of at the time and, mind you, I was only nine years old at the time"