"Who the fuck are you?" said the boy.
"Who the fuck are you?" countered Faith.
"I asked first."
"And I asked second."
There was a tense silence. And thenㅡ "James! There's a girl in your living room!"
***
When Faith Potter gets expelled from Beauxbat...
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Faith didn't really know where she was, but she was running. There was someone in front of her ㅡ a woman? ㅡ she reached out a hand to grab her fluttering dress and was startled when she saw how small her fingers were.
Suddenly, as if someone had splashed colour into the world, her surroundings became clear. She was by lakeside near her home in France, and her feet were smacking against the wooden pier as she ran after her mother, and with a lurch Faith realised this wasn't a dream but a memory. She feared for what was going to happen next when her mother spun round and little Faith lost her footing and crashed into the lake.
Little Faith couldn't swim and was screaming for her maman, but her mama only watched.
Little Faith's head was being dragged under the water every time the thrashed and flailed, and could only listen in panic as her maman said, "If you're anything like him, you can get out by yourself," and walked away.
Little Faith took a deep breath before she sank, and didn't rise from the water.
Instead, the water rose her.
Faith gasped as she woke, the feeling of the water in her lungs too real for a terrifying moment that she struggled to breathe until she remembered she was safe. Out of all memories, it had to be the one where she almost died to dream of. The one where her papa had saved her one last time, and she lost both of her parents for good.
***
Faith slinked sullenly out of Professor McGonagall's classroom with the boys at her heels, for the fourth time that week. The woman was brutal with assigning detentions; the first day, they had to clean every single trophy in the cabinet which lined the entire wall of the fifth-floor troll corridor with elbow grease, followed by non-magically scrubbing cauldrons till they gleamed their murky reflections. Yesterday Remus and Faith had to alphabetise the potions store, while Peter, James and Sirius marked and organised a bunch of essays.
Remus had been acting a bit differently towards Faith ever since she spilled her guts out about her family dynamics to him. Not in a weird, suffocating way ㅡ but if she had to put it to words, he was a bit more in tune to her. He would steer the conversation to something else entirely when someone mentioned her new hair style without Faith even having to twitch a muscle in irritation, and sometimes she would just walk into the room and he would glance at her face and offer chocolate. The day Faith received a letter from her mother detailing her disappointment in her for getting caught mid-transformation he dangled a (nice-smelling) book in front of her face and let her read it while leaning against him, not saying a word.
During detention he let her ramble about the pranks that she would do at Beauxbatons to get her mother's attention, laugh and scowl at the right parts, and shared some of the stuff he and the boys got up to before she came along. There was a part of her which had regretted revealing so much in such short amount of time, but it felt good to talk about it with someone other than her aunt and uncle. Even James didn't know some of the stuff that she'd told him; likewise, Remus doesn't know some of the stuff that James does. It felt a bit weird having pieces of her scattered so unevenly between the two, but she couldn't find it in her to care much.
