initium

Interview: Gebo-9 - Subject: Wilson, Katherine Jane - Date: 10 June 2090

We were the last to leave. I was older then. By a whole year on paper. In my soul, though ... in my soul, I felt so very, very old.

Interview: Gebo-2 - Subject: Wilson, Katherine Jane - Date: 25 April 2090

My first impressions of the place? Oh, that's difficult to say.

It wasn't home, that was for certain. Nicer than I expected. Everyone told tales of torture and bloodbaths in those days. Children could be especially gruesome in their imaginings. Merlin, I remember once that Robbie — my brother, the older one — I remember once that he told us the Death Eaters would skin us after they caught us. The nightmares I had after hearing that!

Hm? Yes, yes, he was quite the troublemaker, Robbie. Even in the centre, he ...

But that was what you wanted to know about. The centre. How it looked. How it felt. How it was.

In a word: pretty. Very clean. I remember that. Surprising, really. Not the sort of place I could imagine Death Eaters skinning Muggle-borns so they could make book covers. The strangest thing was that it looked something like a Muggle suburb. There were paved roads and green gardens and houses separated into neat rows. Houses that were barracks on the inside, mind, but from the outside? They were pleasant. We were in a lovely valley with hills to the east. It looked like a charming little village, the sort you might holiday in. The only difference was that our little village had invisible walls and a small army of guards who wouldn't let us leave.

It was a funny thing, I thought. For people who didn't want us, why did they insist on keeping us?

When the experiments started, I understood why. They wanted to hurt us and they couldn't hurt us if they didn't keep us.

Interview: Gebo-7 - Subject: Wilson, Katherine Jane - Date: 30 August 2090

My most beautiful memory was formed there. Does that surprise you? I can see that it does. You have read the books, the articles, and the survivors' accounts and you think that you know what it was like. Grim, hard, hopeless. But it wasn't always. A speck of light can seem a star in the darkness.

That was what my mother told me when Stella was born. When I saw her face for the first time. So squashed and ugly and red. But she was vibrantly innocent and ignorant of the misery around her, and that was what made her beautiful.

Interview: Gebo-1 - Subject: Wilson, Katherine Jane - Date: 4 January 2090

We were the first to go. I was young then. My sister was younger — too young to know why we were leaving home, but she knew that my mother was crying. That is what I remember most clearly of those first days. The tears shining on Mum's face. They had dried by the time the Snatchers had brought us to our destination. I wouldn't see them again until we left the camp.

His people called them rehabilitation centres. A harmless term. You might call it an almost Muggle term, but they were death camps all the same. No one who went in was supposed to come out, no matter how loudly it was claimed we could be taught to 'stop stealing the magic of our betters', as Voldemort claimed.

Oh, don't do that. You have no right to flinch at that name, young man. I doubt that your parents were even born back when he rose to power the second time let alone the first. You do not know what it was to fear that, at any moment, you might draw the wrong attention. And draw it we did.

How could we not? My siblings and I, we were the first of my parents' families born to a witch and a wizard. Mum and Dad had come from another world entirely.

I'm not sure even now what made them stay in Britain after the so-called 'Dark Lord' came to power. That same strain of stubbornness that all Muggle-borns like them have, most likely, and some measure of disbelief. The latter was one you saw a lot with the prisoners who came after. I remember one, a scholar of some sort; I believe he might've worked in the Department of Mysteries before the war. He would sit in the corner of the barracks we shared with a dozen other families, muttering about how this couldn't happen after Hitler. 'This can't happen; this can't happen.' It was all that he said by the end.

What he didn't understand, what so many of our kind didn't understand, was that most pure-bloods hadn't learnt any lessons about Hitler and the dangers of hate in school. No, they had learnt of Grindelwald and the dangers of Dark magic. Those people, Voldemort's people, they didn't have our history; they had their own. And we were never meant to be part of it as far as they were concerned.

But they were wrong, thank God. They were wrong.

Interview: Gebo-16 - Subject: Wilson, Katherine Jane - 1 November 2090

There were many hardships. I've told you as many as I can remember, dear. But the one that hurt the worst? That happened after we left. The three of us, Mum and Stella and me, we left St Mungo's as soon as the Healers let us. Though ten was too young for me to precisely articulate why I didn't like it there, I know it now. Everything was regimented. The Healers came and went on schedules like guards. We couldn't leave. It was too much like the centre.

Once we did leave, we headed straight for home by Floo. We landed straight in the middle of a hurricane. No, what a hurricane had left. The house had been gutted. Ruined. There was such filth written on the walls, filth that wouldn't wash.

Mudblood, they called us, the ones who had been free. You heard that correctly. It wasn't the Snatchers or the Death Eaters, you see. No, it had been our neighbours in Godric's Hollow. Our neighbours who watched us when we were dragged away. Our neighbours who did nothing but write on walls when we were too far away to see them do it.

The war was over, the papers said, but we were still fighting it. The first generation to come into Hogwarts after the war, we were fighting it. We are fighting it still. Hatred does not end with a single victory, a single defeat. It remains under the surface and there is no such thing as a happy ending to scrub it away.

People like the Death Eaters still exist. They will always exist, as will those who fought them. As will those who were pulled into the hurricane.

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Note: A quick unbeta'd job written for this prompt at the /r/HarryPrompter subreddit.

r/HarryPrompter/comments/4j1i38/a_family_returning_home_after_being_detained_in_a/