Aegeus was the last to arrive at the table. His father sat at one end, his mother at the other, and Hermione occupied her booster seat between them, making a valiant— and largely unsuccessful— attempt at feeding herself.
Taking his place beside her, Aegeus quietly made sure more of her dinner ended up in her mouth than on the floor.
Jean set her fork down with a gentle clink against her plate, leaning forward as a fond smile touched her lips. "So," she said. "September is almost here."
Aegeus looked up, his brow tilting slightly. "Yes."
"Infants' school," his father clarified with a knowing grin.
"I know," Aegeus murmured, quietly returning his attention to Hermione, using a napkin to gently wipe a smear of mashed carrot from her chin.
"They'll be teaching the alphabet," his father said, taking a sip of his drink.
"Probably, yeah," Aegeus said, steering Hermione's spoon back toward her plate.
"And counting to twenty," his father continued. "And addition."
"Yeah."
He had already mastered everything in his mother's old primary workbooks months ago— fractions, long division, elementary science. Sitting through school was going to require every ounce of his discipline.
Jean reached over and gently caught Hermione's hand before she could fling a spoon across the table. She said. "It might feel slow. Boring, even. And that's okay... School isn't only about learning."
"You've never had to be around kids your own age," Jean said, softer now. "Just us. And Hermione." Hermione, delighted by the sound of her own name, banged her spoon triumphantly against the tray. "This'll be good for you."
Adam nodded along, and then they continued eating their food.
After dinner, the dishes were cleared, and Jean had wrestled Hermione into pajamas.
His father clicked through the channels until he found the cartoon Hermione liked— something bright and loud with a talking dog— and left them to it, disappearing into the kitchen to help his wife with the dishes.
Hermione watched with total absorption, occasionally narrating events on screen that needed no narration. "Doggy," she informed him, pointing, in case he had somehow missed it.
"Yes," Aegeus said quietly, nodding along as if she'd just shared a vital discovery. "It's a doggy."
He wasn't watching, not really. He'd seen this episode before— he had seen most of them before, more than once, since Hermione's taste in television ran narrow and fiercely loyal.
And instead found himself watching her watch it, the way her whole face lit up at the same joke every single time, as if the dog falling into the same pond was, each time, a fresh and delightful surprise.
She yawned and slumped further against his side, thumb drifting toward her mouth. He caught her hand before it got there— a battle they'd fought a hundred times, Jean's voice in his head about the dentist and the thumb-sucking and the importance of good habits— and she let him, too sleepy to properly protest.
"Almost bedtime," he said softly, looking down at her heavy eyelids.
"No," Hermione said, reflexively.
"Yes."
"No..." her voice trailed off, weaker this time.
She was asleep three minutes later, curled against his side, one small fist loosely wrapped around two of his fingers.
~~~
Once Hermione was tucked in and breathing evenly, and he made sure that he couldn't hear the faint speaking voice of his parents in their bedroom, Aegeus slipped back to his own room and shut the door carefully.
He had been thinking about it for weeks now— the hateful cockroach, the moment when his and his mother's eyes met his through the doorway. And how he had vanished from the middle of the room to right in front of her in the blink of an eye.
He wasn't really sure what really happened that night, but he was determined to do it again!
Aegeus stood at one end of the small stretch of grass and picked his spot.
The flowerbed
He closed his eyes.
There, he thought, fixing the flowerbed in his mind. There. Now.
Nothing happened.
"Figure," he muttered.
He tried again. Nothing. A third time, trying to recall the exact feeling he had— still nothing, no pull, no shift, just the ordinary evening air and the ordinary grass under his feet.
By the fifth attempt, he was starting to wonder if this was simply never going to work.
But he didn't give up just yet, he visualised himself there and really focused this time, more desperate.
I really want to go there
This time something happened. It wasn't like the first time. The first time had been instant and painless, a door opening and closing, and before he even comprehended what happened, he had already walked through it.
This was nothing like that at all. This felt like being pulled through a space too small for him, every part of him compressed and stretched at once, a pressure behind his eyes and inside his teeth and somewhere in his chest.
BANG.
He landed at the flowerbed exactly where he had aimed, on his knees in the dirt, gasping.
For one triumphant half-second, he wanted to laugh.
Then suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his right hand. He snatched his hand up, heart hammering, but he sighed in relief when he discovered that his only injury was a scratch across his palm, shallow, already beading with a thin line of blood, curled into an odd-looking swirl.
Behind him, where he had been standing, there was a small, neat hole in the grass.
He didn't wait around. He was back inside and halfway up the stairs, hand tucked against his chest, before he heard the back door open and his father's voice drift out into the garden.
He watched, from the safety of the upstairs window, as his parents stood over the little hole, heads tilted, baffled.
"What is that?" Jean asked, her brow furrowing as she peered down at the lawn.
Adam crouched down, prodding at the scorched grass, frowning.
Adam crouched low, prodding gently at the scorched ring in the grass before shaking his head. "No idea," he admitted, frowning. "Meteor, maybe?"
"A meteor?" Jean echoed, skeptical. "In our front garden?"
"Stranger things have happened," Adam said with a quiet shrug.
Upstairs, Aegeus looked down at the swirl-shaped scratch on his palm, already starting to sting.
~~~
No one at that time knew that the place had a few more visitors.
"Did you find anything?" asked a cloaked man.
"No, everything is clear," answered a second cloaked guy after he made some bizarre pattern with a small twig-like thing.
"The device pointed right here," a third cloaked figure chimed in, her voice distinctly female beneath the hood.
"Maybe it's broken?" said the second figure.
"You say that every time," scolded the female figure.
"That's because most of the time it is!" he bit back.
They then quarreled for some time until the first figure finally had enough.
"Enough!" he snapped.
"So what do we do now?" the woman asked, crossing her arms under her cloak.
"There's nothing we can do. Let's go back," the leader commanded.
With a sharp, synchronized crack, all three vanished into thin air— a sudden bang, though distinctly quieter than the loud crack Aegeus had made.
_________________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
What do you think? If you like my story, leave a stone, if you hate my story, throw a stone, maybe it would hit my head. You never know...