When Worlds Collide

Magic will be created when an unconventional person comes to stay.--Fortune Cookie

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It was Christmas Day of 2007, and I was in the depths of a depression.

Why, you ask?

Because the two people who had taught me the meaning of Christmas joy, the two people who meant the entire world to me--in short, my parents--were dead.

Just two weeks earlier, my parents had been running late to a friend's holiday party. The worst blizzard of the year had finished the night before, leaving a foot of snow behind; and rather than risk the highway traffic into Minneapolis, my parents decided on taking a deserted country road as a shortcut.

They never made it to the party.

The police report described how their car must have slipped on a patch of black ice not thirty miles from our house and careened into a tree at highway speed. My parents were killed almost instantly. The car burst into flames an hour or two later; and the resulting fire attracted the attention of the lone farmer living on that stretch of road. Once firefighters came to put out the blaze, they discovered the charred remains of two people inside.

Strangely enough, I had been feeling uneasy within an hour of my parents leaving home; and I was understandably worried when they didn't come back at the time they had promised. I tried to calm myself down--maybe they decided to spend the night in the city--but nothing really worked. When they still weren't home by mid-morning the next day, I called their friend's house to find that my parents had never arrived at their destination. After many frantic phone calls to the police station, I finally learned that my parents had died--most likely, at the exact time my intuition had started to bother me.

I don't remember how I finished out those last weeks of school before Winter Break. Everything passed by in such a blur. Teachers and friends would mutter their condolences to me wherever I went. I just stumbled from home to school, from class to class, from school to home. Surprisingly, the state allowed me to live by myself although I was only seventeen: my parents had no other relations left on the planet, and they had willed me the house and enough money for a person to live off of for the next several years.

I was alone, all alone in the world. And never did it hurt more than on that Christmas Day.

I stood at the edge of the large pond behind our house--my house--at dawn of Christmas morning. The weather was pure Minnesotan, cold and grey with a one hundred percent chance of frozen precipitation. I would have considered the wintry sunrise over the pond to be beautiful, if it weren't for my present state of mind. I was without a coat, but the cold wind didn't bother me yet.

And if I got my will together soon, it would never bother me again.

I wanted to die. Badly. I couldn't bear the loneliness anymore. The pain, the grief, the emptiness--it was just too much for me to take. I wanted to see my parents again, spend eternity with them; and I, a most impatient and impetuous girl, did not have the patience to wait a lifetime for the opportunity.

The pond, I knew, got progressively deeper as one got farther from the shore until the water was about waist-high. That was when the pond floor dropped off into a wide and deep trench that spanned the majority of the pond. When I was young, I had dropped a fishing line into the trench from the safety of a boat we had; the water level measured nigh on thirty feet in the deepest part. My parents had always forbidden me to swim in that part of the pond, for fear that I might cramp and disappear there forever.

It would be the perfect place, I figured, for me to drown myself.

And that was why I was shivering at sunrise on the shore of the pond. I was trying to get myself to walk into the pond, but my legs wouldn't let me. It seemed like my mind's survival instincts would not allow me to die knowingly.

After several more minutes of internal struggle, my teeth started chattering as well. If I couldn't find the courage to drown myself in the pond, at least I would kill myself of exposure.

You're being ridiculous, Estella, I chided myself. Come on! Pull yourself together like a true Bonavideo and get the hell into the water!

My bare feet slowly inched their way into the water until I was ankle-deep in the pond. The iciness of the water made me wince. It took me another minute before I could find the will to continue into the pond. I took one step, paused, then another. This would take a very long time, it seemed.

That was when it happened.

I heard a tearing sound from overhead and just behind, followed by the sound of someone screaming at the top of his lungs. I whirled around--just in time to see a man fall from the sky onto the ground about ten feet behind me with a loud thump. The screaming stopped when the man hit the ground; I assumed he'd been knocked out by the impact.

I sighed and began to slosh my way out of the icy pond. Suicide would have to wait for a better day.

The man turned out to be young, probably no older than me, and thin to the point of disappearing. His dirty blond hair fell almost to his shoulders; he was covered in mud and grime. But there was no denying it: he was definitely handsome. He would have made all the girls at school swoon in his wake if he hadn't been so thin--or so filthy.

What really got my attention was what he was wearing. His clothes were tattered rags of filth, just like everything else about him, but I could still tell that they had once been "magical robes" one could find in a costume store.

Probably some homeless nutcase with a penchant for Harry Potter, I thought. How he had seemingly fallen out of the sky was another matter for debate, however. What, had a gust of wind picked him up, Dorothy-style, only to drop him in my backyard? Not likely--although, with his frame, I wasn't saying that it was impossible.

As I mused over these thoughts, this young man stirred. He groaned, then spoke without opening his eyes or moving. "Oh, Merlin, my back hurts." His voice was weak, but he had a cultured British accent that would put even the host of "Masterpiece Theatre" to shame. Some HP fan this was.

"No wonder," I said, still standing over him with my arms crossed. "How far did you fall to get here, anyway?"

He opened his eyes at my voice, and I found myself staring into the most intensely grey eyes I had ever seen. They were beautiful, really; but I didn't have much time to register it, as his next actions surprised me too much to think.

I saw his face contort--with fear? pain? hatred?--as he struggled to stand upright. He finally managed, after much heave ho. He was breathing heavily now, but the strange look in his eyes hadn't left him. "You!" he gasped. He started backing away, like some rodent before a gigantic cat.

"Me, what?" I asked, frankly puzzled. Surely my hair wasn't that bad in the morning?

He sneered at me and continued to back off. "Don't play games with me, Potter. Decided to change your sex, did you? Think it would fool the Dark Lord? Trust me, it's as transparent as glass. You still look like the same arrogant prat you always were."

Definitely a nutcase, I thought, and even more than most. All right, it's true that I have black hair and green eyes; but what could one expect from a girl of British and Spanish descent? Besides, even the most ardent HP fans of my friends would never hold a conversation like this with me, not even in jest. It was time to straighten this stranger out on more than a few things.

"First of all," I said dangerously as I advanced on this rude intruder, who backed away even farther, "you're trespassing on my property. I should really force you off, but I'm not going to do that yet. Secondly, I have never laid eyes on you in all my life, and nothing I could ever do would warrant such inappropriate comments as yours. Finally, I really think you need to have your head checked, because every fan of Harry Potter, myself included, admits that it can't exist."

The man looked like I had just slapped him in the face. He stopped trying to back away and sputtered, "Fine--fine, if you're not Potter, then--how do all you Muggles know about our kind?" He spat out the word "Muggles" as if it was as filthy as himself.

"Through the Harry Potter series, of course." I sighed and rolled my eyes heavenward. Lord, did this one need help. Maybe I should just call the Minneapolis Insane Asylum and have done with it. "There are seven books in all, and the seventh one came out last July. All by J.K. Rowling, all on the National Bestsellers' List--all works of fiction."

The man's only response was to shake his head in complete disbelief.

I was starting to lose patience with the fellow. I leaned in until I was inches away from the man's face. "Harry Potter doesn't exist. Magic doesn't exist. Hogwarts doesn't exist. They're all figments of our imagination, just a part of some best-selling book series that the whole world is raving about. Including you, obviously, although most people don't go to the point of believing that it's real."

The man stared at me for a long time. "So, you're telling me that Harry Potter doesn't exist."

"Glad you caught on to that part."

"How about Ron Weasley? Hermione Granger? Albus Dumbledore?"

"I told you, none of them are real! None! Not Harry, not his friends, not even--" I paused, trying to think of a character. It had been a while since I had read Half-Blood Prince, and for some odd reason my parents had forbidden me to read Deathly Hallows until I was eighteen.

But the man finished my sentence for me. "Not even Draco Malfoy?"

I was about to fling back a retort when I noticed the faint smirk he was giving me. I stopped and studied him over again. Grey eyes, the same hue as the storm clouds above me. Hair that must have been platinum blonde at one time, if it weren't for the mud covering it all. That self-satisfied, hateful sneer he had flashed at me earlier. It all fell into place, all in one second.

Shit. Never say never, I suppose.

There was only one thing I wanted to check, just to be sure. I grabbed the man's bony wrist before he could stop me and pushed back the sleeve of what had once been robes. I froze when I saw the black tattoo there, the snake tongue wriggling out of a leering skull. I blinked rapidly, hoping that it was just a trick of the eye; but the Dark Mark remained on his arm.

I looked up--this Draco was several inches taller than I--and stared back at him. They were truly mesmerizing, his grey eyes were. Releasing his arm, I said quietly, "You're really Draco, aren't you?"

He nodded.

My throat felt like sandpaper now. "And--magic? Is it--for real?"

Draco pulled out what must have been his wand, a sleek stick of wood about a foot long. He pointed it at the ground next to him and muttered some words; instantly, an array of crocuses burst into full bloom around his feet.

I smiled. Who would have expected those gentle flowers to come from such a menacing Death Eater? Maybe all those fanfictions I had been reading were right; maybe there was a soft side to Draco Malfoy.

My smile faded as Draco was seized with a fit of violent, hacking coughs that doubled him over. He would have collapsed if I hadn't grabbed his arm and kept him on his feet. That was when I realized how cold it actually was: both he and I were barefoot, and my own feet were beginning to tingle from the cold. Not to mention that what had been his robes were a lot less thick than my winter sweater and jeans.

When his coughing finally subsided, I let him have a moment's respite before tugging at his arm. "Come on," I said, giving him a friendly smile. "Let's get inside before we both freeze to death. I think there's going to be a lot of explaining to do."