Padfoot's Daughter

Her eyes haunt me the most.

Whenever the Dementors get too close (or if they get a little overenthusiastic during feeding time, for that matter), I see these ghosts of Jeanie and Kates. They hover in front of me like the ghosts at Hogwarts, and those never bothered me at all, but these ones...these ones are solid and non-transparent and they look real enough to touch. THAT is what drives you mad...seeing things that trick your brain into thinking that they're real and then they just vanish.

Sometimes I'd be in my cell, staring at that damn picture Jeanie gave me the last time I saw her, and all of a sudden she'll be there in that blue dress she wore when she turned two, tugging at my robes with her chubby hands and pulling at her long braids that took forever to get into her head because she kept squirming and wanting to play and looking up at me through those big grey eyes of hers---eyes that are so much like mine---and I'll try to take her hand. And the second I do, she's gone.

All that's left when the apparition that is my Kate are those eyes, staring at me even when I have my own closed and locked tightly to the rest of the world.

~*~*~*~

Is it possible to physically miss someone you've never met before?

I've often pondered this. You see, when I was little and would wake up in the middle of the night from a bad dream, I would never run screaming into Mum and Eric's bedroom. That's something Ethan or Winnie would do. For you see, what I would do is wrap myself in all the blankets on my bed and squeeze my eyes shut, because if I concentrated hard enough I could feel someone wrapping their arms around me; comforting me, even, until I drifted back off to sleep.

As much as I love Eric, my stepfather, I know for a fact that he's never done that.

I was born February 7^th, 1979, about two years before You-Know-Who's downfall. Mum was only twenty when she had me, and my father left her and me not long after I turned two.

Mum says he was "too immature" to be a parent.

Mum also believes in the Crumple-Horned Snorkack.

Whatever.

So, yeah...where was I?

Right, right...Eric.

Mum met Eric when I was about three or four, I can't remember which. We'd been living with my Granddad and my Uncle John out at Bell Homestead in Devonshire, and----

"Blargh!" An inarticulate noise burst out of my mouth as I crossed out the words on the page before me. A few first years that had been passing by the compartment I occupied jumped in fright before running away from the open glass doors.

Great. Not even the first day of term, and already the first years were scared of me.

"Are you still working on that?" Leanne Ellicott asked as she walked back into our compartment, her arms full of sweets from the Trolley Witch and Charlotte Wood following close behind her with her nose in a book.

"No," I said hastily, hiding the leather notebook Oliver had given me as a birthday present last year inside my open bag. Leanne laughed as she ripped open a chocolate frog wrapper with her teeth.

"How long have you been working on that, Katie? A year? More?" Leanne asked through a mouthful of chocolate. Charlotte took one of the everlasting lollipops that lay on Leanne's lap and undid the wrapper, her green eyes never leaving the book she held in her right hand. My eyes glanced at the cover, the words Quintessence: A Quest embossed over it in a curvy gold script.

"Are you ever going to finish it?" Leanne continued, swallowing the chocolate in her mouth and brushing a lock of her long blonde hair out of her eyes.

"Not that my personal autobiography is anything of your business, but yes...I plan on finishing it in the near future." I reached across to grab a sweet off of Leanne's lap, only to have her ferociously swat my hand away.

"Buy your own chocolate, Katie-kins," she growled playfully.

"Why buy chocolate when I can just as easily get some from you?"

Leanne looked thoughtful, and then tossed a chocolate frog directly at my head. I caught it, and the two of us locked eyes and laughed as Charlotte snorted in disgust.

"You two should be setting a better example for the younger students," she said as she closed her book. "Not throwing food at each other like a couple of buffoons."

The first years who had passed by during my incoherent expression of writer's-block tiptoed past our open compartment, all three of them staring straight ahead and walking painfully upright, as if the slightest movement would cause me to attack them.

"Right, Lotte," I said as I tore open the packaging on the chocolate frog. "The only example this lot is going to follow from me is what not to do on the first day of school."

"Like date Cormac McLaggen?" Leanne smiled innocently at my glare of purest hatred.

"Mention that name again, Leanne, and I'll shove my wand up your left nostril!" I brandished my wand threateningly at my so-called "friend", only to have her laugh obnoxiously in response before pulling a Teen Witch magazine out of her bag. Charlotte rolled her eyes and curled up against the window seat, her focus once again on her book.

I rested my head against the cool glass of the window and watched the green hillside roll by, a nervousness I couldn't place building up inside of me.