Chapter Text
The first sense of awareness came slowly, tangled with fear, confusion, and then grief.
Rowan remembered the cold, the dark, and the echo of voices that weren’t her parents’. She was only a year and a half old, and Harry was beside her, just as small and fragile. Their parents had been taken from them, and everything familiar had vanished in an instant.
The memories arrived in fragments. A nursery that smelled of warmth and song. Hands that held them with love, gentle and sure. Then cold hands, harsh words, and the musty darkness of a closet that would become their home with Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon.
Rowan had shivered curled up in the closet beneath the stairs while her brother slept fitfully beside her. Images slowly aligned in her mind, strange pieces of another life layered over the one she had now.
It wasn’t until she turned five that the pieces fit, and she realized she had lived before this. She remembered that life ending in gold dust and the wheels of fate.
That realization sharpened something inside her—a sense that she was more than the little girl cowering in the cupboard beneath the stairs.
Living with the Dursleys was a daily exercise in endurance. At three they weeded the garden, at four they cooked breakfast, and by five they cooked every meal, cleaned every corner, and slept where they were shoved.
Rowan kept their little space tidy, making small order in a chaotic house.
She protected Harry whenever Uncle Vernon’s temper flared. She learned to take the blows so he wouldn’t, to stand between him and the belt. Later, when she knew enough, she would slip away to make small healing potions for their wounds.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said one evening, handing Harry a tiny vial of shimmering liquid. “Promise me.”
“I won’t,” he whispered, eyes wide and trusting.
By eight, Rowan’s memories of another life were complete.
She saw their situation clearly now, understood the weight of the man who had placed them here, the strange network that left them in the care of people who hated them. She made a potion for unblocking their magic, explaining each step to Harry and about the man that placed them where they were.
“Why doesn’t he take care of us?” Harry asked softly, staring at the glowing liquid. “Why leave us here?”
Rowan swallowed, steadying her voice. “We’re part of something bigger, Harry.”
“I don’t want to be part of that,” he said, frowning.
“I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you won't. No one can hurt you, not while I’m here.”
She drank the potion, with Harry following her example, Rowan felt warmth and strength spread through them. Magic hummed beneath her fingers again, alive and awake. For the first time, she felt a flicker of control. Not much, but enough.
Enough to keep Harry safe, and enough to start planning for the life they deserved—one she would fight for, no matter what.