Rated for language, violence, depictions of mental illness, sexual content, and other adult themes. Mind the pairings.

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The alarm shakes the bedside table. Without opening her eyes, Rose feels for the clock's ice cold stopper. She'd been in a deep, soft, warm sleep and wants it back, one more tantalizing minute. But the dream eludes wakeful pursuit. There'd been water, dark water. Tons of it pressing at her, only she didn't drown. She breathed inside it better, in fact, than she does here, in reality, in grey rooms and behind the unsubtly pitying faces of her extended family.

A trumpet blares from outside the door of her room and a girl squeals. Rose sighs into her pillow. It's her cousin Lily, who lacks all emotional control when it comes to falling victim to her brother James' haphazard pranks, who has chosen to wake the young girl with instrumental torture, probably pressed up right to her ear. Seconds pass, and she can hear the angry thumping of Lily's feet after she punches James and races him down the narrow corridor to the bathroom. The bathroom door slams, James groans in defeat, and Ginny yells, presumably from downstairs, at them to keep it down. The Potters are all like this though, loud and shouty and oblivious to the stress they create. An expert at self-repression, Rose has never fit in with them.

Grey cotton stretches along her spine as she sits up. She arches her shoulders against the cold and breathes. Why does the air smell so unpleasant? It smells like cigarette smoke, which must mean Albus is finally home from the Austrian leg of his auror training. She remembers him mentioning he was coming soon in the many long, emotional letters he sent her that she mostly skimmed over. She has lost interest in keeping up with his overly successful life. Her cousin is a prodigious—cutthroat—wizard, a committed smoker, terrible with people, and, she has decided only recently, a confusing friend.

She lowers her feet to the chilled floor, cautious, and watches the lamp light blink on and off. Flickering lights mean that someone has just apparated in. Albus prefers flying wherever he can, so this someone must be Harry. She listens for the sounds of her uncle's heavy, fatigued footsteps up the stairs, burdened with the weight of his work, and she can sense his pause outside her door, and for a second she almost hears his knock.

Uncle Harry doesn't knock though. He works nights while she works days, so while they work in the same office, they hardly ever see each other. But for the past eight months he has done this, hovered outside her bedroom door in the mornings when he gets home, not knocking. Whatever he wants to say to her has been delayed another day.

She decides not to linger on this. Instead she stands up to bathe and wearily sets her timer. It commences its usual tick-tick-tick. Her psychiatrist has mandated that she set it whenever she goes into water, so that she remembers to return. She's had a few mishaps in the past, but luckily—or maybe unluckily—Harry and Ginny have always been around to pull her out. She's got money thanks to her own parents, plenty of it secured in vaults at Gringotts, enough to buy her own place, but she must live with the Potters until she is decreed 'mentally stable'.

For some reason, Rose takes baths exclusively. She peels off her flannel as the water pours. The women's fashion magazines scattered across the waiting room of her psychiatrist's office have informed her of the precise inches of her body she should fixate on. But hips and breasts can't compare to the pink scars on her chest. She leans in until her naked shoulder bumps the glass. The scar is three inches long and drawn from her jugular to beneath her collar bone. In the distance, she hears a bus screeeeech to halt; With the exception of school terms spent at Hogwarts, she has lived her whole life in Godric's Hollow, eighteen years, and can track the distance from the bus stop to the cemetary where her parents and brother all now lay buried. Her scars are a road map too, aren't they? To places she'd been best not to remember.

Dipping her ears under bathwater amplifies the sounds of squabbling outside her door; Lily yelling at James while Ginny yells at them both. The yelling is expected, like clockwork, and Rose ignores it. She slides a sliver of soap between her hands enjoying the feeling of being wetter than water, so slippery she can cut through liquid like a fish. Impressions of her dream press against her, heavy as a man's body. It is abruptly, shockingly erotic; she slides her soapy fingers between her thighs. She's gone on dates, had mediocre sex a handful of times with ex-boyfriend Scorpius Malfoy. But it's been months. Boys meet a girl who's mute, they take advantage of her. Never once on a date has a boy ever tried to communicate, not really. They just grab, and take, as if she, voiceless as an animal, is an animal. This is better. Solitude, and the press of warm water, is better.

But the timer, the infernal timer rings, goes ring-a-ding-ling!. Rose splutters, embarrassed even though she's alone, and stands, her limbs shiny and draining. She wraps in a bathrobe and pads shivering back into the room, where she accepts the bad news: 9:07 a.m. Where did she lose so much time? She straps on the watch Hugo had given her, ages ago, for her fifteenth birthday. It is engraved with the letters MY FAVORITE DORK. A heartachingly precious gift from the then-preteen boy, one she hadn't appreciated at the time, and one that he'd tried to blunt the sentiment of with his usual mocking 'you may be good at numbers but you're terrible at being on time, Rosie'. She thinks it's perfect now. It's the only thing she likes, really. She adores the faded leather band that is frayed at the ends. The way the cold metal kisses the skin of her wrist.

The rest of her attire doesn't matter. She shuffles into a utilitarian bra, buttons a blouse that is mostly shapeless with slight feminine touches at the sleeves, and yanks a bulky pair of trousers over her hips. Her clothing choices make her look larger than she is, but they conceal her, which is the point. Her hair is dried quickly and piled in an unglamorous bun on top of her head. She's a Hogwarts drop-out, never sat her NEWTs, chose not to finish her Seventh Year, let all her professors down because she couldn't quite handle the stress, and her mum is probably rolling over in her grave. It doesn't matter though. What she is good at is numbers. And luckily her job as a data analyst in the Auror department, one that Uncle Harry secured her mostly out of pity, doesn't require a dress code and affords minimal interaction with people. She should probably set her ambitions higher but she finds she rather prefers the comfort of coming to a small cubicle and settling into an easy routine. She'd felt ragingly alive in her dream but here, in real life, she's as inert as a dead fish. There's a mirror in her bedroom too, but she chooses not to look at it as she strides out, just in case her premonitions are correct and she really is invisible.

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08 May 19 edit: I had ch 2 up for a bit but took it down because I didn't quite like the way it flowed. I'll be back soon. Pls disregard if you read that!