Dark Arts, Oliver Wood

One: Cruel Summer

Mae looks at herself in the mirror, and makes a heroic effort to at least smooth some of the frizz from her hair; English humidity has completely screwed her over, which is probably the least of her problems, but it is something she can sort of fix, so she's focused on it. Mae pulls her hair back into a ponytail before instantly deciding that it looks bad. Okay. Okay, she can do this.

She wants – needs – to make a good impression. She needs for them to be able to look at her and see something different from what her father sees. She supposes that teenage screw-up is somewhat better than complete failure. But still. Neither is particularly promising.

"Shit," she says aloud, and pushes the door open, heading back to the car. Shit.

♥

Mae's not evil. She swears. Like, cross her heart, stick a needle in her eye, all of that. But she will be the first to admit that she's the master of toeing the line between forgivable transgressions and actually wicked dark magic.

Mae's sitting with her arms crossed over her chest, the car AC blasting in her face because she's worried that turning it off will make her dad crash the car. (See, she can be considerate!) This whole thing is so ridiculous that she actually wants to laugh. It's not like there's a handbook for this sort of thing; as far as Mae's aware, she's probably the only person in the history of magic to be given a second chance after such a colossal fuck-up. It doesn't make her feel good. It just makes her feel like she's wasting what she has been given.

Everything was so much easier back in California.

And to be completely honest, San Francisco is not, she admits, the perfect place for raising the dead. To begin with, the dead are kind of hard to find. The place itself has been around for millenia, but it only really became this anomalous boom town during the California Gold Rush. Mae did go to No-Maj school before Ilvermorny, and she remembers being awestruck by the idea that a town like San Fran – her town – could've had less than five hundred people back in the early 1840s. Point is, the dead are scattered around the foundations of the city – cemeteries were supposed to be moved out of the limits in 1902, but she thinks No-Maj authorities just got lazy; there's no gravestones in the middle of Grove Street anymore, but Mae feels the skeletons every time she walks past the library there. She knows it's not normal to be able to sense things like that – believe her, she knows – and it's only gotten worse as she's grown older. Retrospectively, Mae can pinpoint dozens of times when she was a kid that she'd been able to just... know things other people couldn't understand. Not even her dad, or other witches and wizards her age. Like, the Lincoln Park Golf Course is built right over where City Cemetery used to be. There is something darkly ironic about it, and Mae feels like the dead are not laughing. She speaks with some authority. It's little things like that, a mosaic of various moments collected over the years, that might as well form a neon sign reading, THIS GIRL IS A TOTAL FREAK.

When she was six, she'd dug up the ribcage of some small animal on the playground, partly by accident, but mostly because she had this headache that just wouldn't go away until she started digging. And it was just buried there amidst the gravel. Her mom drove them home in complete silence – Mae still thinks that magic scares her mother sometimes. Hell, it scares Mae sometimes. Her dad is the only one who still seems to be unaffected, and as an Auror, he's probably seen a lot of bad magic. Worse than anything Mae could do, anyways.

The thought of her mother makes something ache in Mae's gut. She wants to go home – to San Francisco, not to wherever it is that her father's driving to. She'll miss going to Chinatown on spring afternoons and getting milk tea at her mom's favourite shop. She'll miss the rare times Dad let her drive the car up to Twin Peaks, giving her increasingly sarcastic pointers as they went on. She'll even miss the damn San Francisco fog, which is a sentiment that no should share. Ever.