Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

June 1969, Cokeworth

The first time they meet, it’s at the local play park between two vastly different neighbourhoods.

Mum puts her out for the day—says she doesn’t want her ’round Da’s “special work friends.” Likely just a parade of blokes who wanted Da to feed their massive egos.

Granted, Mummy uses plenty of colourful words in the mix—but Nelly likes to think she means well.

She plays on a rickety swing set, leaping skyward whenever she gets bored or tired. It feels good—the breeze teasing her plaits before her feet settle gently on the ground. Untouched.

She’s mid-jump when a well-dressed boy with brushed-out curls and a pretty, mole-riddled face skips up, excitement bubbling over.

“You’re a witch,” he says. His eyes are a serene blue—like someone stole stars and poured them into his irises.

“Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say…!” she screeches. Her voice is shrill and nasal, nothing like the noble tone that flows so freely from the boy’s heart-shaped lips.

Her face catches fire—a blotchy, red-hot flush blooming across already pinched features.

“I’m not a witch! Witches are wrinkly and old and covered in nasty warts with gross green skin!”

Nelly never thinks of herself as dazzling. She doesn’t have Mum’s clear blue eyes or Da’s straw-like blonde tendrils.

Instead, she’s got a crown of frizzy red curls and beady eyes of sickly green. Nearly every flaw she can find on both her parents’ faces seems ingrained into her own.

But she’s never been likened to a witch. Not even when Tuney’s on her monthly.

“No, you are. You’ve got magic—I saw it. I can do magic too. I’m a wizard.”

He bounces on the balls of his feet, wonder brimming in his eyes.

He holds his hand over a patch of dead, yellowish-brown grass. A tiny light sparks out of nowhere. Mini plants bloom, bright and fresh, stretching from a patch of abnormally green, green grass.

“That was… Did you do that?” Nelly feels something bubble in the pit of her stomach.

It’s warm. Cosy. Like Christmas used to be—before Da got so sad, before he started spending every night at the pub, before Mum’s fond pinches turned sharp.

Before Tuney moved out and left her all behind.

“Yes.” He smiles, gentle and warm. His curls glint a vivid blue under the blinding summer sun.

From then on, they meet nearly every day. Sometimes by the polluted stream that divides Cokeworth’s good side from the bad. Other times at the park where their unusual friendship first began.

She doesn’t know his name then—but she’ll spend years trying to understand the boy who turns wilted weeds into lively, flourishing wildflowers.

August 1969, Cokeworth

The next time they meet, it isn’t at the park or beside the stream—it’s at primary school.

She sits in the back, hunched in on herself. Her red curls, stiff with grease, frizz around her face, shielding it from view. Sharp blue eyes drift down to a rickety desk.

‘Eleanor A. Evans’ is scrawled there in smudged, curling ink. He’s never noticed her before. Not until he’d seen her magic.

He slides from his seat with a quiet resolve, strides down the aisle with a carefree skip, and drops into the chair beside hers.

“I’m Sebastian,” he says, slipping a slim hand over to clasp the taller girl’s own. “Sebastian Prince.”

Her green eyes go wide and googly—like smaller, murkier versions of the strange fake eye thingy’s Mrs. Johnson’s keeps in the art room.

“Nelly Evans…”

They stare at each other for what feels like ages—or at least it does to Sebastian—until her pale, bony hand shoots out and clutches his with an earnest desperation.

“D’you wanna be friends?”

From that moment, it’s set cleanly in stone. The two young wixen take to each other like fish to water.

Nelly lobs questions at Sebastian, and he answers them all with bubbling, childish fervour before tossing back equally as wild questions of his own.

“Do witches really fly on broomsticks?” Nelly whispers, ducking the teacher’s gaze while faking interest in her nasty math sum.

Sebastian, one leg draped over the other, ignores his worksheet entirely. Ms. Smith never dares pick on him the way she does Nelly.

“Do muggles really have talking portraits?”

They spend the entire class yammering—about everything and nothing in equal measure.

They leave the classroom hand in hand. One dreams of tailored dresses and teacups that turn into cats. The other imagines non-magical flying metal that could apparate you anywhere, and a massive black screen full of moving, talking pictures.

That evening, the little Prince asks his mother if they might go to the cinema someday.

Lord Prince nearly drops dead at the sound of his heir speaking such mundane muggle nonsense.

But only nearly.

Late August 1969, Cokeworth

“Don’t your parents like you doing magic?” Seb asks one warm evening after school.

She plucks a handful of dandelions and lets the seeds scatter in the breeze like all her forgotten hopes.

“They don’t like anything much…” she murmurs.

“Oh…” His reply comes soft, sombre, paired with a smile that meets her gaze like a balm over bruised pride. “That’s sad.”

They sit in silence, watching the stream. Fish come and go. Plastic bags snag on rocks. The evening hums with quiet.

After a while, Seb’s fingers brush hers on the grass—tentative, quiet, nearly accidental.

She doesn’t move away.

That night, she comes home bouncing on the balls of her own feet. Her mother, Rosalyn, looks at her quizzically. “What’s got you in such a good mood…?” Her tone borders on suspicious, dripping with her usual pitying contempt disguised as motherly concern.

“Nothing…!” Nelly says, her voice guilty before she can help it, and she scurries off to her bedroom—a quiet, slightly dingy sanctuary inside the calculating walls of the Evans residence.

It’s there, free from her mother’s words, her father’s evasive glances, her sister’s expectations, that Nelly finally lets the warm smile in her chest escape and crawl onto her face.

It stays intact all the way to the bathroom where she lugs her nightdress and toothbrush. Not even the icy splash of bath water can wipe it away.

She thinks back to today, to the pretty willow tree. To Sebastian. Her first friend. Holding her hand.

That night, she dreams of herself in a bold red witch’s gown, locked in a tower. A noble prince with curly black hair and bright blue eyes swings his sword and saves her—from her wretched mother and her evil—but sometimes nice—father.

And for the first time in years, Nelly sleeps peacefully. No nightmares in sight.

END