The Scars to Prove It

"Farren! You weren't going to leave without saying goodbye, were you?"

With great difficulty Farren tore her eyes away from the massive scarlet steam engine and wove through the crowd back to her dad.

She wrapped her arms around him and tried to memories everything about her father: the faint odor of muggle cigarette smoke, the worn feel of his favorite leather traveling cloak, the way she felt so safe in his arms.

"I'm going to miss you, dad, and mum too," Farren whispered.

"We'll miss you too, sweetheart. Your mother wanted to come, but you know how she is."

Farren nodded into his chest, thinking fondly of her muggle mother and of her intense dislike for anything magical.

They lingered that way for a moment, and then Farren's father held her out at arm’s length and looked her sternly in the eye.

"Now," he stated, "Headmaster Dumbledore knows all about you, so don't expect to get away with metamorphosing into any teachers. Don't mess with Peeves and don't wander around the castle after hours, or at least don't get caught," he winked.

Her father's speech was punctuated by the shrill whistle of the train.

After giving her father a wink of her own, Farren dashed onto the Hogwarts Express and watched her dad get smaller and smaller in the window. When Platform 9 and ¾ was only a spec in the distance, she turned away at last and was faced with a difficult decision: go left and introduce herself to the older students, or go right in the direction of where the rest of the unsorted first years were assembled.

Well, might as well go introduce myself the people I’m going to be spending the next seven years with.

With a shrug she turned and walked to the right, and was immediately knocked across the width of the train by girl around her size.

After regaining her balance, she looked expectantly at the perpetrator and waited for an apology.

A few moments later, it became clear the girl wasn’t going to apologize.

“Where I come from, it’s polite to say ‘excuse me,’” she prompted, quirking an eyebrow.

“M-my father says not to apologize,” she stuttered.

Farren almost choked, and her blonde hair shifted to a savage magenta color. She saw the girls eyes bulge and felt a vicious satisfaction, even though she hated to lose control on her metamorphosing.

“Who is you dad?” Farren asked, shaking her head to clear it. She needed to control her temper, or she would make some needless enemies.

“R-r,” she stammered, and then cleared her throat. “Rosier,” she finally said.
And then Farren lost it.

“So I supposed you can sniff the lack of blood purity in me, can’t you? Can’t you?” Farren screamed, her lip curling in disgust. Rosier was the name of the Death Eater that brutally tortured her father; Rosier was the name of the Death Eater that sent her father to St. Mungo’s for weeks because he was “under the Imperious Curse.”

The girl seemed nonplussed and sputtered, “N-no,” but Farren plowed on, too overcome with rage to notice that she was running the other girl into the ground.

“I’m sure you’re going to be in Slytherin, just like your Death Eater father, eh? Going to murder some Mudbloods?”

The girl in front of her was clearly terrified, but Farren’s fierce temper, volatile during the best of times, prevented her from seeing that. All she could do was rage at the child of the evil man that nearly killed her father.

Then Farren’s voice dropped to just above a whisper, her wild fury turned to cold bitterness. “Of course. You’ll be just like your father. Did you know he tortured my father? Under the Imperious Curse, my ear.”

With that, the girl turned and fled down the train.

As Farren watched her retreating figure, her temper cooled and she managed to transition her hair from magenta to her usual ice blue color.

So much for keeping my metamorphosing on the down low.

Only after curtsying to her spectators did Farren turn her back and throw herself into the nearest car.