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The boy is barely old enough to count to ten. When he holds the toy broomstick, nothing happens.
“A squib? You’re certain?”
There’s a dozen other toys littered around the space. A sparse table is the base for a tower of blocks that wavers under its own weight. A toy snitch is being balanced atop it by tiny fingers. When touched the snitch is supposed to unfurl, revealing soft feathers that children can pull and yank at—
Nothing happens. The snitch wavers before rolling off and hitting the table without a sound.
“We’ve done every possible test. If he’s not a squib then he’s, at best, severely limited in his magic.”
The child looks up; he’s less than a few feet away. He’s capable of overhearing their conversation, and even more capable of being seen and not heard as expected.
The man sighs, and with a click of his tongue: “A disappointment. A squib Thicknesse— imagine if Mother were here to see it.”
Pernell makes eye contact with Pius over the table, shifting his eyes from his father between them. Dressed in his white smock and with his hair tied back with a lovely ribbon, he looks the part of a pureblood child: Dainty and ethereal. Nearly genderless in his make and lacking even a single blemish along his skin.
He looks to be the type of child master portraiture artists strive to paint. In another life he’d be heralded and groomed as the perfect heir.
“In any muggle family he’d be adored.” Pius says, looking straight into his nephew’s dewy brown eyes. He feels nothing when the boy blinks at him.
Pernell’s father snorts. “I’ve already spoken to Puckett about a placement for him. He’ll be extradited by dinner. Which reminds me— Lilith has sent the servants ahead to Bartholomew’s. You still prefer mint with your lamb, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Lovely.”
A tea kettle floats over to Pius and refills his teacup. Pernell watches unblinkingly as he takes a sip.
Pernell’s father notices and for the first time since Pius’s arrival, addresses his son directly. “Leave us. Entertain yourself elsewhere.”
When Pernell stands he’s silent. If Pius were not seeing him, he doubts he’d know Pernell was among them at all. “Yes, Father.”
A teacup clatters. “Do not address me as such any longer.”
Pernell’s eyes cast downwards, catching on the blocks on the table. “Yes, Sir.”
Then he scurries from the room as quiet as a mouse, and Pius still pretends to feel nothing.
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“Mother?”
Pius’s mother is dressed in her blue silk gown, the one that looks like the pond water. He’s only six and still restricted from approaching the pond on his lonesome, which is why he’s usually accompanied by—
His mother cocks her head towards him, locked in her reflection’s gaze in the mirror as she fiddles with an earring. He wishes he were her favourite; that she’d look at him with her crystal eyes the same way she looks at her firstborn.
“Mother, where is Dorcey?”
A pearl dangles from her fingers. “Who?”
Pius wiggles in his socks. He’s not permitted to step into his mother’s dressing room. Only one is.
“Dorcey?” And at her silence, “My older brother? He said he’d hunt frogs with me.”
Pius’s mother thins her lips. There’s a deep plum color to them. She looks at him in the mirror as if to keep him at a distance.
“You’re our eldest son, Pius.”
He fidgets under her gaze, but is only subjected to it for a moment. She looks back to herself, focused on applying a powder to her cheeks. It shimmers in the light that pokes out from around the drawn curtains— morning is held back by heavy fabric.
“But Dorcey—“
”Enough!” His mother shrieks, snapping away from the mirror.
She moves so fast that Pius takes a step back, wanting to put distance between himself and her sharpness. Pearls swing violently around her jawline. He is never on her gentle side, the side reserved for Dorcey; firstborn.
She stares at him, all sharp teeth and pain that holds his tiny body in a trance. “Enough.”
His mother looks away. The pearls glint in the light and when she swipes at her face, the plum color is smeared to her cheek.
“You are our eldest son, Pius.”
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Midday is when Pernell’s father takes his older brother on a sweep through the gardens. Their mother had worked house elves to the bone keeping it maintained throughout her lifetime. In her wake it’s been nearly entirely reshaped. Pius doesn’t recognize the spaces where frogs would once dig into dirt, nestling themselves into damp earth.
“Are you sure you’re never to marry? I worry about you in that dreadful little cottage.”
”It’s temporary, I assure you. A good auror has no need for a wife,” Pius says, “They’re unnecessary weight. I’m more productive on my own.”
“There’s more to life than productivity, big brother.”
There’s emerald brickwork throughout the grounds of Thicknesse manor. Slytherin after Slytherin showing off their loyalty through garden decor.
“Mother always said you’d be alone though, didn’t she? Such a frivolous career.” Pernell’s father remarks, stopping in his tracks. “Oh, these blasted pests— they eat right through the roses.”
A snail hardly larger than a knut has caught his brother’s attention. Pius watches as he brandishes his wand and the snail dies a death so macabre and needless that it nearly makes him ill. He is not sympathetic to the pests, on the contrary— he used to crush them; Dorcey and he in their riding boots. Ridding their mother’s garden of pests.
There’s a pop from behind them.
“Master Thicknesse?”
Pernell’s father turns to the house elf behind them, dressed in hardly more than a sash. It’s wrinkled and small, and is one of the same pathetic creatures Pius remembers from youth.
There’s a scar on its forehead. Their mother’s ring. Pius has a matching one hidden along his temple.
“Yes?”
“M-Master Puckett is here to discuss with you the- the squib boy.”
“Oh, excellent, he’s much sooner than expected.” Pernell’s father turns to his brother, “Pius, would you—“
“By all means, go. Do as you must.” Pius responds with a hand wave.
Pernell’s father thins his lips, just as their mother had. “I was going to ask if you’d like to accompany me. No one takes care of negotiations quite like you.”
“I’d prefer to stay out here. Finish my turn about the garden.”
Pernell’s father nods and accepts this. Pius has no children, no wife, no family— his opinion is useless. He has nothing to throw in during a discussion of how easiest to dispose of a squib.
Pius watches as his brother walks away, house elf limping after him.
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His mother’s tea tastes different. Sharp, and it burns his nose. He is eleven and it is the night before his journey to Hogwarts, where he’ll be sorted into Slytherin.
The first Thicknesse in a generation.
His mother’s tea makes his throat hurt. She’d fallen asleep drinking it, and he hadn’t wanted it to go to waste.
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Three turns around the carefully trimmed hedges leads Pius back to a… sight.
The squib, lingering where his father and uncle had stood only a short conversation ago. Crouched in his smock, he’s toying with something on the ground amidst the dirt, his back to Pius.
Pius wants to pretend that he does not care. That he is coldly and properly indifferent to this young boy as he would be any muggle. But the boy’s hands are fretting through dirt as Dorsey’s once had, eager to show a younger brother a slimy creature.
They have the same hair. That dark brown merely a few shades lighter than his own.
Pius expects to startle Pernell. He expects the boy to jolt and stammer and do what any abused house elf would do— “What is it you have there?”
Pernell doesn’t even turn to look at him.
“Father killed a snail here.”
The boy twists and holds out a shell for Pius to observe. It’s dirty, but has been stripped clean of the executed snail within. Pernell has buried the creature that once existed, patting down the dirt with his bare hands. He must’ve pried its flesh from the shell, dirt packed under his fingernails.
Dirt clings to his smock. It’s dirty now; unpresentable. Tarnished.
“They’re a pest.” Pius responds.
Pernell’s hand closes around the shell, pulling it tightly to him.
“Me too.”
The squib boy— his nephew, has his uncle’s eyes. An uncle who haunts the furthest reaches of Pius’s mind; An older brother that never was.
Pernell looks at Pius. He is a young boy who’ll vanish before his sixth birthday. He’ll be erased from the records just as Dorcey was, nothing more than an ink blot on paper. A doll that only briefly existed.
“Are you?” Pius asks, genuine.
Pernell nods. He traces a fingertip along the spiral of the snail shell.
”Father hates me. Wants me dead, like a pest. The snails and I are similar.” Pernell pauses, “Don’t you agree?”
It’s starting to rain. There’s water droplets hitting along his scalp, and while Pius can’t feel them through his thick coat, Pernell must feel every single one in his thin smock. They’re cold; the air is chilly. The rain feels sharp.
He’s been staring too long at Pernell. The skin of his knees is becoming visible as his smock dampens, but the boy is uncaring. He’s disconnected from Pius now, focused entirely on the shell in his hands.
Doesn’t he feel the rain?
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Did it rain on Dorcey’s last day as well?
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