Chapter Text
At the end of Tinker’s Lane, in a house perhaps a bit wider than its fellows with old, clean lace curtains and a well-loved car parked right out front, lived a man with Brylcreemed red hair and a briefcase and a parcel of flowers that he loved very much.
Chief among the flowers was his wife, named for the Forget-Me-Not, and she was a champion housewife and mother, a true blossom growing up through the shabby brick all around them, bright-eyed and kind with thin wrists and knobbly knees. If there was one trouble in her life, it was that she was a bit odder than her neighbors. Her grandmother had been the lunatic of Miller’s Mile, raving and prone to strange visions, and her second-cousin had up and disappeared, spirited away by some strange force that the people of the town had christened The Dangers Of Youthful Drinking. In fact, her entire line was bizarre in the extreme, the Asguibs of Cokeworth, so named for their patriarch, who’d been discovered floating on the Derwent in a basket with a note pinned to him that read, “this is octavius asguib,” although the writing was very hard to make out and so subsequent attempts to locate the Asguibs and reprimand them for abandoning their child came to naught. Probably the original family name hadn’t been Asguib at all. Forget-Me-Not and her descendants would never uncover the truth, so probably it was better to focus on more pressing and concrete matters.
For the delightful Petunia, tall and blonde, peeping out of windows and winding her way through the gossip circles, the most pressing matter was what people were saying about them, about the awful family madness and this awful mad family. About how their darling youngest flower could be spotted smoking near the river, plucked roughly by some dirty neighborhood boy, her stockings caked with dirt, her hair matted, carting horrible pots full of reeking liquid garbage to and fro.
And people did talk. It was terrible to see the youngest flower of Tinker’s Way behave in this fashion. It was appalling. It perhaps explained why she’d gone away to school — some criminal school, to hear her sister explain it — for clearly she could not be trusted among the good children of Tinker’s Way. She was dirt caked under nail varnish, that one. She was the spirit of things suddenly disappearing and reappearing in the muddy river, of the inexplicable toad apparitions on the windowsill, of that awful spark of life in the Snape boy’s dead black eyes.
Cokeworth knew, in its solid brick heart, that Miss Lily was trouble. This concerned them. They would have preferred it if she had vanished forever, been carted up to the loony bin, snuck away with that band of troublemakers who’d shown up to greet her in Carpenter’s Corner, or perhaps flown off with The Dangers of Youthful Drinking. Goodbye, dear flower. Please forget us. We fear you.
They did not realize that somewhere far away, in a realm of criminals and visions, where the people crushed flowers into potions and lived in terror of the solid brick normalcy of Tinker’s Way, she was gaining prizes and high marks, well-liked if not always welcome, and constantly encouraged to forget Tinker’s Way, to trade stockings and schoolgirl skirts for robes and tall hats.
But she could not. She was dangerous and magical, true. But there was a happy, solid dad and a kind, thin mum; and a grey, common town in her. There were the threads of a solid family, a kind of sensible sacrificial love, which forgave you even when you were at your oddest. And it screamed out (whenever she heard that it was better to deny them, better still to be ashamed of them) a defiant and angry: Forget Me Not. Forget Me Not.