When the Dark Lord came to Hogwarts, Zacharias Smith ran without a thought. He thought little of the children he bowled over as he made his way down the passage toward the Hog’s Head and even less of those who had stayed behind to fight. If they were so keen to die, then they were welcome to it. But Zacharias wasn’t so keen to die. So he ran, and fast, the chaos around him sucking up the echoing of his hard-soled shoes against the old stone of the castle’s walls and floors as he went.
When he’d joined Dumbledore’s Army, he thought he would learn some cool magic, meet a few girls, and hear a little gossip. He had done all of those things. But he hadn’t signed up for this. He hadn’t signed up to be a soldier. Or maybe he had, the name being –Dumbledore’s Army†and all, but he’d thought it was just a clever name. It had been fun to career about the castle after hours, pranking Slytherins, feeling dangerous with his new dueling spells, knowing things only a few other people knew, being a hero among the younger students. Not that he had ever claimed to be a hero. He just hadn’t corrected the little blighters, and was that really so wrong?
He ran, and kept running with eyes for nothing but the pinprick of light near the head of the line. Madam Pomfrey had cast Lumos to make her wand more visible. To someone else the wand’s cold, bluish-white light might’ve looked terrifying, casting everyone’s terrified features into stark, deeply shaded relief as they passed. It made them look like ghosts. But to Zacharias it looked like a warm, glowing sun, a beacon that, if he could only just reach it, meant safety. Even as a reasonably good-looking, if gawky, eighteen-year-old boy with all of the roiling hormonal impulse that entailed, he truly believed he had never wanted anything so much as to reach that light. He thought he might hug Madam Pomfrey when he reached it, if only to get that much closer to the light. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it.
Or he thought he couldn’t. Until he did. His eye was drawn against all odds by someone fighting against the current. It was him. It was Harry. Scorched, bloodied, and generally worse for the wear, but Harry all the same.
It was his eyes that did it. Those green eyes. Zacharias remembered that they were green because that was the first time he had noticed them. They locked onto his own golden-brown eyes, and Zacharias saw something in them. Somethings, plural. He saw tiredness, he saw fear, and he saw determination. But mostly he saw anger. He saw anger in those green eyes, and it saw him. Zacharias stopped so suddenly that he nearly tripped, whether over a badly laid stone or a first year, he couldn’t have said. But as paralyzingly fast as those eyes had seized upon him, they let him go, moving on to bigger and, maybe not better but definitely different, more important things. Zacharias was nothing. An afterthought. He didn’t even know if Harry had actually seen him in the press of the crowd or if he had just imagined it.
Something inside of Zacharias Smith broke then. It didn’t hurt, not really. But it bled all the same. He tried to call out as Harry and the others passed, but his voice caught in his throat. He watched them go. When they had rounded a far-off corner, off to battle and another great adventure with their friends, their real, loyal friends, Zacharias found himself fixated once more on Madam Pomfrey’s wand. It wasn’t far now. He began to make his way toward it again, but slower, a little more careful of the little ones around him. His face burned. When he reached it, its glow seemed to envelope his entire world.
And that was the last thing that Zacharias Smith remembered of the day that the Dark Lord came to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He had been seventeen then, on the last day he would ever see Hogwarts or anyone he had known there. That was just shy of twenty years past.
---
When his father had come to retrieve him from Hogsmeade during the blur following the battle, Zacharias was expecting for there to be consequences. But there weren’t. None. A few days after he returned home to suburban London, he received notice that he had graduated along with the rest of the class. The school even apologized for being unable to hold a formal ceremony. No one from the Ministry came to snap Zacharias’ wand into pieces, though he considered doing it himself. Every time a story about the battle came out in a newspaper, he expected there to be something in it about his having run away, as ridiculous as he knew that was. If he didn’t tell anyone, no one would know. Even the people who were there would probably just assume they’d missed him during the chaos. Probably.
Everyone except Harry.
Zacharias didn’t break his wand, but after two weeks he stopped carrying it. A month after that he put it in a cardboard box that he had found in his basement and placed it gingerly on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. Every now and then he would feel a temptation to open the box, to take out the long, slender piece of cream-colored wood. But he didn’t. Not even just to look at it.
It was almost a year before he told his parents what he’d done. During that time they never asked him what had happened. They never wondered why he didn’t do any magic, why he never went looking for a job, why he didn’t seem interested in doing anything beyond sitting in his room and reading. They had been content to assume that his experiences had been so traumatic that he just couldn’t bear to talk about them, and that time would heal his non-existent wounds.
–Well…uh…what else could you have done?†his father had asked. His mother had stayed stone silent and seemed to have no intention of speaking up at all.
–I don’t know,†Zacharias lied. They never had another conversation about it. Zacharias often asked himself what was worse: the idea that his parents were silently judging him for being a coward and a traitor, or the idea that maybe they weren’t? He went through phases of believing both of these alternately, scrutinizing every word his parents did or didn’t say to him on one of those two bases. He didn’t want to, but it was hard to avoid. He rarely left the house, and he never spoke to anyone when he did. His parents were his only company.
It was another long year before Zacharias couldn’t do it any longer. He left, and he didn’t come back. All he packed was a backpack full of clothes and a stash of Muggle money stolen from his father’s safe, about £1000. He never said goodbye, neither to his parents, nor to his wand. It wasn’t as though he made some pact with himself, cutting his palm and squeezing until enough blood was running to write with. Nothing like that. He just knew, somehow, that he would never do magic again.
What he would do, on the other hand, was very much in question. He had no plan other than to make his way into London proper and figure something out once he was there. He was twenty years old, still objectively good-looking in spite of two years spent as a relative shut-in, and had a full wallet. Surely, something would come his way. As long as that something wasn’t someone who knew him from back then, he thought he would do fine. In fact, he’d begun cultivating his first beard in the few weeks that this non-plan had been in the making. It was a rather tufty, flesh-colored thing just then but it was already beginning to change his face to the point that he thought someone would have to look very hard to recognize him.
Funnily enough, his plan worked out almost exactly as it had in his head.
---
When he got off the bus that had taken him into the city, he decided that his first stop would be for a cup of tea. It was raining and cold, and it soon emerged that his jacket wasn’t nearly up to the task of keeping him warm. The nearest café was on the other side of the street behind a grey façade with one large window looking out onto the street. The word –BREWSBANE†was written in large white block capitals near the top of the window. What the word could have meant, Zacharias didn’t know, but he wasn’t sure it mattered as long as they could do a strong builder’s.
It was mostly empty inside, the time being slightly after lunch on a Wednesday. A few patrons were scattered throughout the place. Only the girl behind the counter seemed to take any notice at all of Zacharias as he entered. She was very cute.
–G’day.†And apparently very Australian. Brewsbane; now he got it. She looked the part too, with a freckled face, strawberry blonde hair held back by a dark blue bandana, and eyes the color of an aggressively cloudless early afternoon sky. The smile she gave him, though forced, was full of charmingly crooked teeth. Over a red and white striped shirt she wore a black apron that said –BREWSBANE†on it in the same lettering as the window.
–Uh…hi,†Zacharias said. It was an appalling time to realize that he had never ordered anything in a Muggle café before, but it happened anyway. He consoled himself momentarily with memories of ordering drinks at the Hog’s Head, but this only took his mind to places that he didn’t want it to go. The last time he had been at the Hog’s Head. Madam Pomfrey, the first years, Harry. Everything.
–Did you want to order something?†the girl asked, snapping Zacharias out of his reverie. He was torn between gratefulness toward her and anger at himself for almost immediately falling back into the trap he was trying to escape from.
–Yeah, sorry,†he said. –Can you do a builder’s tea?â€
She sighed dissappointedly, –I can.†The implication being that she wouldn’t unless he made her. She made no move to actually do anything.
–Is there something you’d rather make?†Zacharias asked.
–It’s more of a coffee shop, but no one ever wants coffee. I told Mum and Dad that would happen before we moved, but heaven forbid anyone listen to Edie,†the girl said.
–I’ll have whatever you want to make for me,†Zacharias said, if only because it seemed strangely important to her. And in any case, whatever she wanted to make for him was unlikely to cost more than £1000.
–Serious?†she asked.
–Until I change my mind, yeah,†he said, taking a seat that would give him a view of the espresso machine, a great silver tank of a thing, all brushed metal and brutalist corners. Without another word, Edie set about making him something. There was much grinding of beans, clacking of depressed toggles on the machine, and the whooshing of pressurized steam which turned to crackling when it met milk. What she passed to him after a minute was a small cup featuring a brown ring of coffee around a bean-shaped white center.
–What is it?â€
–Flat white. Try it.†He did. In the years to come he would tell people that he had fallen in love with Edie the first time he tried her coffee. She would laugh, their friends would laugh, but they would both know that he was just covering for the fact that he couldn’t pinpoint exactly when he’d fallen for her. In the end, this was just as good a time as any. And in fairness to him, she couldn’t remember when she’d fallen for him either.
–What do you think?†she had asked him.
Zacharias looked into those blue eyes and said, –I…think I need a job here.â€
She was taken aback, but recovered quickly. –A job?â€
–Yes.â€
–You know that’s not how you go about getting a job, right?â€
–I didn’t know that actually,†he admitted with a shrug.
–What’s your name?†she asked.
–Zacha…,†he began.
–Your name is Zacha? Sounds Australian enough.â€
–Sorry,†he said. –Zach. Just Zach.†It had come out of his mouth without any warning. A new name for a new start, he supposed. Or newish at any rate.
She considered him for a moment, the steeliness of her gaze undermined significantly by her freckles and said, –Well, I’ll have to talk to my mum and dad since they own the place but...well, I’ve been telling them we need to get another person in here. Just Zach, mate, it might be your lucky day.â€
---
That was how it had all started. And how it had all ended. Zacharias, now Zach, began working full-time at Brewsbane, making just enough money to live in a small flat with two roommates, neither of whom he saw very much of. He, Edie, and her parents, who had moved the family to London when Edie was fourteen to open the shop, were the only other people who worked there. He barely had time to spare a thought for magic. His parents still lived only a short bus ride away, but he didn’t go to see them. He didn’t try to get in touch. Neither did they. If they really wanted to, he reasoned, they could have found him easily enough. It wasn’t as though they’d given up magic too.
But they never did, at least as far as he was aware, but he was okay with that. He had bigger things to think about. Six months into working at Brewsbane he asked Edie for a date. Her father had been less than pleased, but with an admonition of –I know where you work†had let them go about their business anyway. Zach expected every single day that she would break it off with him and he would have to find a new job. She knew little of his parents, having been told they were both dead, nor anything of his life before he came to London. She must’ve sensed that there was something he wasn’t telling her, but she had the good grace not to ask. Or at least he thought it was grace. It might’ve been fear of what she would find out.
But for some reason, she didn’t. Edie seemed to accept that whatever was in his past, he was worthwhile whether she knew it or not. He hadn’t the foggiest notion of how to process this most of the time, and instead just accepted it for what it was.
When he was twenty-four and she was twenty-two, they were married. As he had no family and most of hers was in Australia, they had done it there on a beach in Sydney. They had no honeymoon. There wasn’t time; the shop had been closed for a week straight. They returned to England and life went on again much as it had been for the past four years. Magical in another way, but one that Zach was finding himself increasingly used to.
A year later, Edie’s parents had died in a car accident on the M4. They had left the business to their daughter and son-in-law. Watching Edie grieve brought some of it back. And not just memories of grief, though those were there too, particularly the sight of Harry holding Cedric Diggory’s lifeless body during fourth year. Good memories too, of experiments in the Hufflepuff common room with mood-altering potions. Could he find the ingredients to whip something like that up? Should he? The answer, of course, was no on both counts, and he settled once again for finding a sort of magic in the way that she persevered through everything.
After that, he barely thought about magic at all. He could almost have convinced himself that he had really left it behind. Until the day Edie told him they were going to have a baby. When she was born, a roiling bundle of red-blonde hair and soft pink skin, they named her Jezebel. As much as he tried to convince himself that she might be different than he was, each birthday made it clearer and clearer that she too had magic. He had spent so long and tried to hard to forget magic, and now he found himself in a constant state of alert, waiting for the next accident he would have to cover for when she had a tantrum. Once, when Jezzie was five, she had screamed so loudly that a window shattered to pieces in their flat. The night after her eighth birthday party, Edie had mentioned how she had walked in on her that morning having what sounded like a very interesting conversation with a bird that had landed on her windowsill. Zach had laughed it off at the time, but the sound had been hollow in his ears.
On her eleventh birthday, his daughter had walked into the coffee shop below their flat and taken up her usual seat in one of the booths. She’d grown to look very much like her mother, but with her father’s brown eyes and angular, handsome features and gawky limbs. She insisted on cutting her own hair in the most outrageous way possible, shaving it to a reddish scruff on the sides and in back while leaving the top long. Zach thought it was a bit extreme for an eleven year old at the time, but then, her parents did own a coffee shop in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of London.
–What the…?†he heard her mutter from the booth. She picked something up from the seat, hopped out of the booth and walked to where her father stood behind the counter. He nearly collapsed to the floor when he saw what she was holding out to him. –I sat on this,†she said in the blunt way she often spoke. –Did you put it there? Is it a birthday present? Is it money?â€
The envelope was just as he remembered it, heavy, parchment-like paper, every word hand-written in green ink. He only had time to read
Ms. J. Smith
The Booth on the Left
before he felt his chest begin to tighten. Zacharias Smith knew his well-crafted deception wasn’t going to hold up any longer. He only hoped that his world would. He was absolutely certain of only one thing: he was going to need his wand.