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001. A Not-So Hardworking Hufflepuff
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WHEN BEA IS AT HER little village house in Herefordshire with her tight-knit Muggle family and the childhood friends she hasn't properly spoken to since she went to Hogwarts (her fault, really, because she figured that would just add to the list of people she can't really be her around), she feels as though she might as well be lost as sea. Floating in an endless blue; no one else around, just Bea. Just Bea and the ocean and the little energy she has left keeping her from drowning.
Out there, she has no magic. She's not a witch, she's just little Beatrice Walker from Herefordshire and she's not weird or normal or different or the same but she's just her.
It doesn't make complete sense, she knows, but that's just how things are because if sense was a factor in Bea's life then a short, stout lady named Pomona Sprout never would've knocked on the Walker's shiny red door that warm day on July 24th and ruined their perfectly simple life. It wasn't her fault, of course, it was Bea's. Because that day, the Walker's found out that their daughter was a witch; cursed with a terrifying evil that they didn't—and still don't—understand, something Bea calls magic and the Walker's call the Devil's gift.
All of it is Bea's fault, she knows it, because neither Miriam nor Jonah Walker are wizards. Nor is Sebby, Bea's baby brother, or Aunt Lula or Uncle Tom or her cousins, her grandparents, no one. None of them are magic, just Bea. Just Bea in her endless sea of blue with her curse and no one else to blame other than herself.
Still, it feels unfair to her, that she had to be cursed with this. What did she do? Is it because she doesn't go to Church, because she doesn't share the faith that her parents so devoutly believe in? It just.. Bea doesn't understand why it had to be her. Why does she have to be different?
Safe to say, the summer had been a tense one. Talk of Bea and her magic was nonexistent, and thus was pretty much any talk of Bea at all. Every moment she opened her mouth—whether to say she was taking Percy, their chocolate lab, on his walk, or to ask if they needed anything from the shops—an audible intake of breath followed. And, shit, if it didn't hurt.. It still hurts, knowing that they don't see her as their little Bea anymore but instead something different, something dangerous.
Now that summer is over, their relief has been nothing short of obvious. (Apart from Sebby, who has no idea of his older sister's other life and had sworn at her when he learned that she never had to read Of Mice and Men or To Kill a Mockingbird and over-analyse every syllable like he's having to do in his year 8 class.)
"Have you got everything?" Mariam Walker smiles at the daughter she quite often finds wishing didn't exist, a small and futile attempt to make up for her lack of parenting. Still, Bea will take what she can get. At least her mum's talking to her, which is more than she can say for last year.
