We Can Be Heros

Kings Cross

❝  had been looking for something she couldn't name her whole life. She didn't find it here. But she found three boys who would do for now.  ❞

The thing about goodbyes, Myla had always thought, was that they contained everything you hadn't said. Her mum was fixing her tie for the fourth time in twenty minutes, and Myla was letting her, because this was the kind of thing you let someone do when they needed to do it.
"Straight," her mum said, as if the tie were the problem. As if straightening it would resolve anything.
"It's straight, Mum."
"It will be in a moment." Her mum stepped back and looked at her the way she sometimes did — with that particular expression that was half pride and half something Myla had never been able to name. Something that looked, occasionally, like relief. Like: you are still here. You are still mine.
Myla had been adopted at eight months old. She'd grown up knowing this the way you grow up knowing other fundamental facts: the sky was blue, summer was warm, she was wanted. Her mum and dad had told her early and often and without ceremony, because they had always been the sort of people who believed that the truth, stated plainly, was kinder than the truth discovered. She had never not known. It had never not been fine.

It was fine now. It was completely fine.
She just sometimes, in crowds, found herself scanning faces for something she couldn't account for.

✦

King's Cross was magnificent chaos.
Myla had been to a few magical gatherings before. her primary school had two other magical children in it, and the three of them had been pulled into the loose orbit of the wider wizarding community enough to know that it existed, but she had never seen anything like Platform Nine and Three-Quarters on the first of September. It was the kind of noise that had texture to it: trunks scraping stone, owls objecting to the indignity of cages, parents giving contradictory instructions at volume, and underneath all of it, a steady current of barely-contained excitement that seemed to vibrate in her chest even though it wasn't hers.
Or maybe it was. She couldn't be sure.

Her dad was wrestling her trunk through the barrier with a concentration usually reserved for his crosswords. He had a system, he'd explained in the car, involving angles and momentum, which he'd then applied in a way that suggested he had invented both words that morning. Myla had loved him for it.

"Cart's through," he reported, materialising red-faced on the other side. "Platform's real, then."
"Was always going to be," Myla said.

"I had ninety percent confidence." He adjusted his glasses. "It's the remaining ten percent that gets you."

Her mum squeezed her shoulder. Myla let herself be squeezed.

Around them, the platform pulsed. She watched a pair of redheaded boys sprint past, yelling something at a third who was older and trying to look as though he didn't know them. She watched a girl with dark curly hair pull away from her parents and stride toward the train with the absolute authority of someone who had already decided she owned the place. She watched a tall woman in emerald robes consulting a list with the focused expression of someone who would not, under any circumstances, be having a bad day.
She watched, as she always watched. Filed things away. Looked for something. She didn't know what.

"You'll write," her dad said. It wasn't a question.
"Every week."

"Every week," he confirmed, as if ratifying a treaty.
Her mum hugged her properly then, the kind of hug that said: I know you'll be fine. I know you don't need me to say so. I'm saying it anyway. Myla put her arms around her and meant it completely.

"Same time next year," her dad said, and Myla smiled and let them go.

✦

The train compartments filled quickly.
She found one that was empty and wrestled her trunk into the overhead rack, which resisted with what felt like personal objection, then settled into the window seat and watched the platform through the glass. The crowd had taken on a different quality now that she was on the other side of it more distant, like watching a painting of something she'd just been inside.