Aegeus was last to arrive at the table. Adam at one end of the table, Jean at the other, Hermione in her booster seat between them, making a valiant and largely unsuccessful attempt at feeding herself and Aegeus beside her, quietly making sure more of her dinner ended up in her mouth than on the floor.
"So," Jean said, setting down her fork. "September."
Aegeus looked up. "September."
"Infants' school," Adam said.
"I know," Aegeus said, and went back to wiping a smear of mashed carrot from his sister's chin with a napkin.
"They'll be teaching the alphabet," Adam said.
"Probably, yeah," said Aegeus.
"And counting to twenty. And addition."
"Yeah"
He'd already worked through everything Jean's old primary school workbooks could offer him— fractions, long division, basic science.
Jean reached over and gently caught Hermione's hand before she could fling a spoon across the table. "That's sort of what we wanted to talk to you about," she said. "It might feel slow some days. Boring, even. And that's okay. School isn't only about the letters and the numbers."
"You've never had to be around kids your own age much," Jean said, softer now. "Just us. And Hermione." Hermione, delighted by the sound of her own name, banged her spoon triumphantly against the tray. "This'll be good for you."
Adam nodded along, and then they continued eating their food.
After dinner, the dishes were cleared, and Jean had wrestled Hermione into pajamas.
Adam clicked through the channels until he found the cartoon she liked— something bright and loud with a talking dog— and left them to it, disappearing into the kitchen to help Jean with the dishes.
Hermione watched with the total, unblinking absorption only a two-year-old can manage, occasionally narrating events on screen that needed no narration. "Doggy," she informed him, pointing, in case he'd somehow missed it.
"Yes, I see doggy," Aegeus said.
He wasn't watching, not really. He'd seen this episode before— he'd seen most of them before, more than once, since Hermione's taste in television ran narrow and fiercely loyal, and instead found himself watching her watch it, the way her whole face lit up at the same joke every single time, as if the dog falling into the same pond was, each time, a fresh and delightful surprise.
She yawned and slumped further against his side, thumb drifting toward her mouth. He caught her hand gently before it got there— a battle they'd fought a hundred times, Jean's voice in his head about the dentist and the thumb-sucking and the importance of good habits— and she let him, too sleepy to properly protest.
"Almost bedtime," he said.
No," Hermione said, reflexively, an automatic defiance of someone already halfway asleep.
"Yes,"
"No,"
She was asleep three minutes later, curled against his side, one small fist loosely wrapped around two of his fingers.
~~~pov Aegeus~~~
They lived in a detached house, it had a ground floor, a first floor, and a seemingly converted attic, a cupboard under the stairs, and a front garden that Aegeus sometimes liked to sneak into by himself to watch the stars late at night. Now he was doing just that, except he wasn't watching stars.
Once Hermione was tucked in and breathing evenly, and he made sure that he couldn't hear the faint speaking voice of his parents in their bedroom, Aegeus slipped back to his own room and shut the door carefully.
He'd been thinking about it for weeks now— the hateful cockroach, the exact second when his and his mother's eyes met his through the doorway. And he moved from the middle of the room to right in front of her in the blink of an eye.
He wasn't really sure what really happened, but he was determined that he wanted to do it again.
Aegeus stood at one end of the small stretch of grass and picked his spot. 'The flowerbed fifteen feet away,' he thought.
He closed his eyes.
There, he thought, fixing the flowerbed in his mind. There. Now.
Nothing happened.
"Figured," he muttered.
He tried again. Nothing. A third time, trying to recall the exact texture of the fear— and still nothing, no pull, no shift, just the ordinary evening air and the ordinary grass under his feet.
By the fifth attempt, he was starting to wonder if this was simply never going to work.
He didn't give up, he visualised himself there and really focused this time, more desperate. 'I really want to go there,' he thought.
This time something happened. It wasn't like the first time. The first time had been instant and painless, a door opening and closing, and before he even comprehended what happened, he had already walked through it. This was nothing like that at all. This felt like being pulled through a space too small for him, every part of him compressed and stretched at once, a pressure behind his eyes and inside his teeth and somewhere in his chest.
BANG.
He landed at the flowerbed exactly where he'd aimed, on his knees in the dirt, gasping.
For one triumphant half-second, he wanted to laugh.
Then suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his right hand. He then snatched his hand up, heart hammering, but he sighed in relief when he discovered that his only injury was a scratch across his palm, shallow, already beading with a thin line of blood, curled into an odd-looking swirl.
Behind him, where he had been standing, there was a small, neat hole in the grass.
He didn't wait around. He was back inside and halfway up the stairs, hand tucked against his chest, before he heard the back door open and Adam's voice drift out into the garden.
He watched, from the safety of the upstairs window, as his parents stood over the little hole, heads tilted, baffled.
"What is that?" Jean asked.
Adam crouched down, prodding at the scorched grass, frowning.
"No idea," he said. "Meteor, maybe?"
"A meteor? In our front garden?"
"Stranger things have happened," Adam said
Upstairs, Aegeus looked down at the swirl-shaped scratch on his palm, already starting to sting.
~~~
No one at that time knew that the place had a few more magical visitors.
"Did you find anything?" asked a cloaked man.
"No, everything is clear," answered a second cloaked guy after he made some bizarre pattern with a small twig-like thing.
"The device pointed here," said a third cloaked figure with a feminine voice.
"Maybe it's broken?" said the second figure.
"You say that EVERY TIME," scolded the female figure.
"That's because most of the time it is," he bit back.
They then quarreled for some time until the first figure finally had enough.
"Enough!"
"What should we do now?" asked the women.
"There is nothing we can do, let's go back," said the leader.
They then all left with a bang, albeit much quieter than Aegeus.
_________________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
What do you think? If you like my story, leave a stone, if you hate my story, throw a stone, maybe it would hit my head. You never know...