Author note: This story, like all my Penelope Clearwater stories, follows the chronology of the original 1998 edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which unambiguously placed Penelope one year behind Percy at Hogwarts. I am aware that the 2004 British edition subsequently moved Penelope to Percy's year, but I am sticking to the original chronology. Works of fiction take on lives of their own once they're released into the public sphere, and (as literary critics have noted with respect to other authors) writers who amend their texts after first publication must always contend with readers who have already become invested in the original versions.

Two years out of Hogwarts, Penelope Clearwater's life was not going well—at any rate, not as well as it should have been. It had been a busy summer for the Clearwater family. Penelope's elder sister, Helena, was the newly appointed, and youngest, member of the mathematics department at the University of Newcastle. Her brother Alan, back from a year spent reading international law at the E.U. headquarters in Brussels, had duly taken his First Class Honours and entered a prestigious set of chambers in Lincoln's Inn. Best of all, perhaps, her younger sister Samantha had just won an exhibition to Balliol. There are not many households in the United Kingdom in which a Balliol exhibition would not be cause for rejoicing, but in the Clearwater household, any academic distinction loomed very large indeed.

Samantha was definitely the daughter of the month.

Meanwhile, Penelope was shuffling papers in a stuffy broom cupboard at the Ministry of Magic. Her official title was Assistant Director of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office. The staff of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office numbered two, so that was not quite as great a distinction as it sounded. Nevertheless, it was—as Penelope reminded herself with daily increasing frustration—an unusually responsible position for a witch two years out of Hogwarts. Penelope's NEWTs had been numerous, her manner mature, her references impeccable, and something had done the trick. Since the ranking staff member, Perkins, only turned up for work about twice a week, she was now, at twenty, effectively the head of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office.

Her parents found this more worrisome than impressive. Her parents were not the sort of people who believed in disappearing keys.

Besides, it wasn't the sort of thing they could drop into the conversation at dinner parties.

The Clearwaters had greeted the revelation of Penelope's special abilities with ambivalence, not to say denial. They considered eleven-year-old Penelope an unexceptional but nonetheless promising child, and they had other plans for her. In the end, Albus Dumbledore having impressed it on Simon Clearwater that he had little choice in the matter, Penelope went to Hogwarts, curly-haired, shy, small, and alone. In those drafty dungeons, those termite-ridden towers, those worn halls, it quickly became clear that Penelope had, so to speak, the magic touch. She dazzled her Ravenclaw classmates with her precocious ingenuity.

Penelope also proved to have that useful quality, self-control, that so often distinguishes the great witch or wizard from the average. Perhaps that was why her parents, sunk in their academic abstraction, their professorial absentmindedness, had never noticed anything unusual about their middle daughter. To be sure, Nanny Emma, who doted on Helena and Alan, had never liked Penelope much; perhaps she had seen what others had not. Penelope herself, though she had long had a vague intuition that she was a bit different from her siblings, had scarcely been aware of her magical abilities until she was told.

Albus Dumbledore, when she met him, seemed surprised that she hadn't known. So, too, did most of the Muggle-born students she met at Hogwarts. She hadn't had the strange strings of accidents that had plagued most of them.

Apparently she had a surfeit of self-control.

The Clearwaters' attitude towards magic didn't change much after Penelope went to Hogwarts. Her parents, once the initial shock had worn off, ignored her oddity as much as they could, and Helena succeeded in ignoring it almost entirely. Alan, an eerily brilliant and intermittently obnoxious teenager, treated Penelope's wizarding education as one vast joke arranged for his personal amusement. Only Samantha, a faithful little sister with an insatiable curiosity about virtually everything, from international politics to sex, listened with rapt attention to Penelope's tales of Hogwarts classes and common rooms, mischief and mayhem. And even Samantha was not an uncritical observer. As she warmed to the topic, she repeatedly pointed out the limits of Hogwarts's overwhelmingly pragmatic vocational curriculum and, still more troublingly, the limits of what magic could do. Samantha's knowledge of the wizarding world was as deep and profound as that of any Muggle child who had never set foot in Hogwarts Castle could be, and her criticisms generally hit the mark. Somewhere in the course of those midnight conversations over mugs of cocoa on the floor of Penelope's chilly fourth-floor bedroom, it became clear that Alan was not going to be the only eerily brilliant one in the family.

Penelope's parents were happy, but scarcely excited, when she made prefect. Clearwaters nearly always made prefect, whether they went to Roedean (girls) or Winchester (boys). The fact that one of their daughters happened to be a witch made no difference. They complacently assumed that, however bizarre the standards of the wizarding world might be in other respects, Penelope would still make prefect, and Penelope did.

It had been nothing, of course, compared to the blaze of classical, mathematical, and literary glory in which, the following spring, her brother Alan came down from Winchester.

The same year, she passed her OWLs, ten of them (she did Muggle Studies in her spare time), with very high marks indeed, in spite of being petrified for a month by the Basilisk. Her father's comments were, first, that arithmancy sounded a lot like astrology to him, and, second, that he couldn't believe that she hadn't taken a foreign language, and that Ancient Runes, while undoubtedly useful if she aimed eventually to do some historical or archeological research, did not, in his opinion, qualify as a foreign language.

The upshot of it was that Penelope spent the rest of that summer in Rennes, living with a French family, studying French six hours a day, trying to make her parents proud of her again. She liked French well enough, to be sure—the truth was, she herself had been secretly worrying over Hogwarts's failure to offer modern languages, coming as she did from a linguistically capable family—and some days she even managed to like the Chateaubriands. She learned to cook that summer, from Mme Chateaubriand; she still read recipes more easily in French than in English. On the whole, it was a pretty good summer.

For one thing, it was a summer full of owls from Percy.

Percy had dawned on her fifteenth year like a blazing sun on a thicket of insecurity. She was astonished, dumbstruck, when he asked her out. They weren't in the same house, nor yet the same year; she had had a silly schoolgirl crush on him for a while, but she didn't realize he even knew her name. Then all of a sudden she had a date in Hogsmeade, and she spent three tortured nights thinking up what to talk about, making lists of topics, memorizing them, and tearing them up so he wouldn't think her dull. In fact, to her continuing surprise, they didn't run out of conversation that weekend, nor the next, nor the next. Percy seemed to find everything about her fascinating, even her Muggle childhood.

It was six months or so before she realized he was jealous.

Percy thought he wanted the background Penelope had. He thought he wanted the slender, tweedy, gray-haired parents, the academic dignities so lightly worn, the pleasant security of being just poor enough that one couldn't quite afford to spend every winter holidays skiing in Switzerland (they only went alternate years), the casual distinction of the occasional knighthood (Penelope's Uncle David had been knighted for his medical research when she was in her second year at Hogwarts, and of course Grandpa Hume had been knighted years ago for his interminable tomes on political science).

Poor little pureblood Percy.

It was sweet, in a way, that a boy so brilliant, so responsible, so assured, could be at the same time so innocent, so hopelessly and utterly naïve.

For the longest time, he didn't touch her, and she wondered if she had misunderstood. Maybe he hadn't meant to be asking her out, exactly. Maybe he was just trying to make friends. And she kicked herself (metaphorically) for being disappointed, because she was lucky, at Hogwarts—a place where she was very much respected but not so widely liked—to have such a friend.

Then one day he pulled her into the vacant History of Magic classroom and asked if he could kiss her. She said, "Sure." He kissed her so hard he nearly knocked the desk over.

So it turned out she hadn't been wrong after all.

They dated for more than two years, and those two years transformed Penelope's impression of Hogwarts. In those two years she grew up poised and confident, under a mask of gentle smiling reserve. In those two years her haphazard, bookish knowledge of the wizarding world (gleaned from volumes like An Appraisal of Magical Education in Europe that she traded with Hermione Granger in the dusty carrels of the Hogwarts library) was polished under Percy's adept tutelage. In those two years she came, finally and late, to see herself as someone who could charm, who could hex, who could transfigure—someone who could, in fact, survive and make a success of life in the wizarding world.

In short, she realized she was a witch.

Even when Percy came down, following a triumphant year as Head Boy and a glittering galaxy of NEWTs, she hadn't realized there was anything wrong.

They broke up suddenly, in one of those squalid, blazing rows of the sort that people do have when their first real love affairs shatter and burn. They had the row mostly by return of owl, and Penelope wasn't sure who had suffered the most: she or Percy or Hermes. In the end Percy had, reluctantly, apparated into the Clearwaters' shabbily elegant Georgian rowhouse in Hampstead. They sat in the chilly parlor, among the first editions, the dried flowers under glass, and the faded red silk furniture, and ranted and raved and wept while fifteen-year-old Samantha eavesdropped from the stairs.

Percy had even had the nerve to hint that she was too young for him. That he was a grown-up now, that he was Barty Crouch's personal assistant, destined for greatness, and she was just a schoolgirl, a curly-haired little Ravenclaw prefect still worrying about her NEWTs.

The actual age difference between them was, of course, eight months. And Penelope, coming from a family of Muggles, of educated and moneyed Muggles, had, even at seventeen, seen a great deal more than Percy had, faced a much wider variety of persons and settings and situations. Even at seventeen, she had made choices and transitions and leaps of faith that poor little pureblood Percy could scarcely comprehend.

She said what she thought. He got pretty angry. And that was that. That was it. The end.

Percy disapparated, and Samantha emerged from the stairs and said unhelpfully that he wasn't bad-looking, not at all, glasses or no glasses, but he seemed pretty short-tempered, and was he always like that?

Her seventh year at Hogwarts was a dark and bitter one, mostly spent studying for NEWTs with a grim and joyless determination, enlivened only by a short-lived flirtation with a Beauxbatons boy who liked her mainly because she was the only Hogwarts prefect who spoke passable French. The year ended with a bang. A student younger than Penelope was killed, and Voldemort rose again.

After that came the equally joyless task of planning her future.

It had been exceedingly hard to explain to her parents that there was no Oxford or Cambridge of the wizarding world. It had been even harder to explain that she was not going to take three or four years out of her wizarding life to come home and get a "proper" university degree. More than once, her parents had hinted that she could simply give up on it all. They had hinted that her mother was a personal friend of the dean of Somerville. They had hinted that arrangements could be made. They had hinted, in increasingly plain language, that Penelope's whole wizarding life was a little sketchy.

They didn't know how close she had come to saying yes.

They didn't know how tempting she found it, then, to close the book on her whole wizarding life, to slam the door, to come home and sign herself, "Penelope Clearwater, Muggle."

Three things stopped her. One was the war. One was Percy, or the idea of Percy. One—and it was probably the most important one—was her parents' principle, instilled in her from early childhood, that there were few crimes greater than wasting one's natural abilities.

If she was a witch, so be it. Sometimes she hated the whole magical world, but the magical world needed her. She went to work for the Ministry.

She moved home. Alan's acne had cleared up, and Samantha was ten inches taller; otherwise, nothing much had changed in the seven years since she went away. Her father was still absorbed in his theorems; her mother was writing yet another book about the inherent instability of Third World democracies. The manuscripts on Third World democracies had been a constant feature of Penelope's childhood. They rotated from time to time. Every five or six years, one would get published, there would be a flurry of BBC interviews, of academic speaking engagements, some provincial professor of politics would make a nasty remark about one of the footnotes, and then another book would be started.

It wasn't that Penelope objected to books. At eighteen, in those last lonely months at Hogwarts, she had penned the first couple chapters of her own book manuscript, which analyzed basic charms and transfiguration spells in terms of Newtonian physics. It was a topic that had long intrigued her. The only problem was that she couldn't imagine any audience for the book whatsoever, aside from Hermione Granger, possibly Samantha, and of course Percy, who wasn't speaking to her.

Still, she felt impelled to write the book. Even if no one else would ever read it, there was so much she needed to think through, so much she needed to know. Penelope had spent far too many Hogwarts holidays snooping around her siblings' bedrooms. Samantha, home from Roedean, littered her bedroom floor with physics and chemistry texts, and Penelope combed through them, trying to teach herself the Muggle science she would otherwise never have the chance to learn. Even after she went to work for the Ministry, she spent one entire August vacation teaching herself solid geometry, calculus, and statistics from Samantha's A-level maths notebook, a frustrating experience. Long practice had taught her to decipher her sister's crabbed handwriting (in those long years at Hogwarts, it had been Samantha, and only Samantha, who answered her owls), and she did understand some of what she read. But she had no one (save Samantha, now seventeen and deeply preoccupied with hemlines) with whom to discuss it, nor would she ever have any opportunity to use what she had learned.

She would not be taking up any Balliol exhibitions. She was a witch, and she had been educated as such. Her education was now over, and work was on the menu. But still she longed for more. She still found herself thinking from time to time, I'm not just a witch. I could have made a pretty good Muggle. I'm not quite as brilliant as Alan, I'm not quite as brilliant as Samantha, but I could have made something of myself as a Muggle, all the same. If I hadn't been snatched from my home when I was eleven years old, by a nice old man with a reassuring manner, who said I was magic.

If I had gone to Roedean.

Two years out of Hogwarts, Penelope still lived at home. Her parents, skeptical as they were of all things magic, were nonetheless fiercely protective of this, their most unusual daughter. One fireplace in her parents' home had been connected to the Floo Network, by special dispensation of Cornelius Fudge himself, and she flooed herself daily to the Ministry. She was making good money for a witch her age and, since her parents refused to accept a Galleon for room and board, the little cache in Gringotts was piling up. She had, one summer evening, dragged her uneasy mother and a miniskirted and goggle-eyed Samantha to Diagon Alley, where she pointedly displayed her bank balance (gold was so much more impressive than a checkbook!) and bought Samantha copies of Hogwarts, a History and Dragon Species of Great Britain and Ireland at Flourish and Blotts. A week later she dragged them, protesting and fearful, to the Ministry, where several rumply old wizards and witches addressed her as "Ms. Clearwater" and congratulated her mother on her precocious appointment. Celia Clearwater was, in spite of herself, a little impressed. Celia's Uncle Jack had been in the shadow Cabinet for a while in the seventies, though an untimely stroke had unfortunately prevented him from ascending to the actual Cabinet when the opposition at last came to power. If Penelope chose to sacrifice the academic future her mother had envisioned for her for the sake of a political career, Celia Clearwater could console herself that it was in the blood—though, of course, she would have preferred that Penelope's political career go forward in Whitehall.

Penelope herself would far rather have been an academic. She just didn't know how to go about it, not if she was going to live in the wizarding world. She was far too young to apply for a teaching position at Hogwarts. Besides, she wanted to do research, and Hogwarts didn't seem to be the place where witches and wizards did that. So she tried the Ministry. She didn't like it overmuch, but she still hoped she could do some good there. She had already discovered, in seven years as a Muggle-born student at Hogwarts, that there were a great many pureblood witches and wizards who did not care, who found it positively amusing, if Muggles were bewildered and tormented by disappearing keys.

As the horizon darkened and the rallying Death Eaters shattered the last slender strains of normality in the wizarding world, Penelope realized that her choice had been made. As the war stabbed and bloodied the once placid surface of her parents' world, she knew she was stuck.

Her parents neither believed nor understood a word she said about Voldemort. Her father, who had studied engineering for a couple terms before he realized that number theory was his true calling, had his own theory about what had caused the Brockdale Bridge collapse. He drew her a diagram. He drew several. Helena, who had never studied engineering but had the supreme confidence that comes with being the newest and youngest member of the mathematics department at the University of Newcastle, had her own theory, and she drew some diagrams too.

Poor Muggle Helena. Poor Muggle Dad.

It was sweet, in a way, that two people so brilliant, so responsible, so assured, could be at the same time so innocent, so hopelessly and utterly naïve.

In Alan's room, picking over the shelves of abandoned schoolbooks left from his years of glory as the star classical scholar of Winchester College, she found a bilingual edition of the Odyssey. She stayed up all night that night, and she read all about long-suffering Penelope.

She thought about staying at home while others saw the world.

She thought about living a life warped by a war that she didn't particularly want to fight.

She thought about loving a man she wasn't sure would ever come back to her.

She thought about being miserable and alone and spinning an even thread.

She wondered if it was just a coincidence that her parents had named her Penelope.