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kiss with a fist.
act one.
chapter one, summer of '93.

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GROSVENOR HOUSE
DORSET, ENGLAND
july 1993

SUMMER'S CLOSING DAYS SAT UPON GROSVENOR HILL. The sun's repugnant rays beat upon and reflected across the surface of the sizeable, cobblestone cottage placed snugly atop the hill, casting the Dorset heat with great vigor across the home's deadened lawn. The hill that drooped when thoroughly ridden with rain stood firm and proud with a texture identical to that of chalk.

The cloudless sky forboded the storms due the next day, a simple reminder of the calm before the squall. Hues of an invisible rainbow sparkled against the cobalt sea which lapped lazily a few hundred yards beneath Grovesnor House, a simmering reminder of the shades of a quickly receding summer.

Technically, summer would not cease until late September, nearly October, and though the reproaching heat would certainly support that claim, the harrowing air of Autumn's immediate doors was enough to have the residents of Highcliffe in Dorset, England flocking towards the beaches of the English Channel in an attempt to soak up the last of the July sunrays. The reclined figure of one such inhabitant could be just made out in the blinding sunlight through the paned windows of Grosvenor House, where they laid a few feet beyond where the dried lawn met the golden sand.

As an avid and true disparager of what most called "laying out", Elle Davies would swear on her life that she wasn't currently relaxed on a wooden lawn chair in a navy blue swimsuit, fully exposed to the harsh glare of the sun in the middle of summer. Would that make her a liar? She didn't particularly mind. An open, half-read copy of her summer reading book, The Handbook of Hippogriff Psychology, rested gently against the mound of sand gathered near her feet alongside a collapsed umbrella, where the two items had been discarded nearly three hours ago in favor of the sun's warmth.

The obnoxiously oversized pair of red sunglasses perched low on the bridge of her nose did little to protect her closed eyelids from the brightness of the day, and her forehead had begun to ache sorely after scrunching her eyebrows in a close-eyed squint for a good half-hour. With an almighty sigh, Elle pushed the large sunglasses further up her nose, nearly to her eyeline, and reached to the side of the chair in search of refreshment.

The moment her fingers found the chilled, condensed surface of her homemade glass of strawberry lemonade, she lifted the drink to chin-level and took the paper straw between her lips. Drinking mindlessly and practically hypnotized by her sun-drunk stupor, Elle failed to hear the front door to Grovesnor House, connected to the sand by a cobblestone walkway just a few steps behind her, swing open and slam shut.

It wasn't until the sharp footsteps echoed against the hard rock that Elle finally took notice of an approaching presence, and it didn't take much thought for her to realize exactly who had interrupted her moment of bliss. Elle held onto her loud groan until she sensed the person was near enough to hear it, and the moment she did, she made sure to release it as dramatically as possible.

The person said nothing, instead rounding to the front of the chair, and stood directly in front of her, effectively blocking her view of the ocean. With an almighty eyeroll, Elle placed her lemonade in the sand and fully leaned back to gain a better view of the intruder.

"Do you mind?" She voiced, peering up sharply at the figure in front of her.

Roger Davies shrugged, crowding closer to her so as to further obstruct her view. "Not particularly."

"You're blocking my view. And if you say 'I am the view', I'll snap both your legs," Elle said sharply, glaring at her brother over the bridge of her sunglasses in the way that one might glare at a rat.

Roger shook his head as he lowered himself onto the sand, wincing slightly as the scorching surface brushed against his bare legs. "If you think snapping my legs is the way to score captain, I'm sorry to say you'll need to get a bit more creative."

Elle scowled and kicked sand at him. "Prat."

Roger grinned (like a prat, Elle thought) as he mindlessly brushed the sand she'd kicked in his direction off of his board shorts before turning to gaze at the waterfront behind him. Elle watched him quizzingly, her eyebrow cocked as she awaited a reason for his rude interruption.

He seemed to sense her glare on his back and turned his head just to the side before he said, "I had to get out of that house."

Elle snorted. "So what, eating your weight in mince pies and bingeing Wycliffe is too taxing for you, now?"

She didn't waver beneath the unimpressed look he leveled at her and simply raised an eyebrow in wait of a response.

"She won't stop talking about her new promotion. I bet you I could tell you her entire schedule, starting with the time she sets her alarm in the morning and ending with her extremely detailed pre-bedtime skincare routine. Oh, and don't forget that fetching new apprentice who started working under her this month at the office - take that as you will," Roger said distastefully, earning a disgusted sound from Elle at his last few words.

The she that Roger spoke of was Elle's father's mother, Miss Greta Davies. Highly revered in the Ministry, but shitfully revered at home. It seemed that wherever she went, she managed to piss off just the right person which worked in her favor while at work, but was woefully damaging when it came to her grandchildren, especially Roger.

The siblings had made a tradition of traveling from their home in Holyhead to their grandmother's estate for a month each summer when Elle was around eight years old and since then, it had quickly become the most dreaded part of the year in the Davies household. Their mother, of course, would manage to find a sudden occupation that prevented her from attending each year, whether it was a work emergency or a toe fracture (which turned out to be nothing but a hangnail), leaving Elle and Roger to fend for themselves for thirty lonely, miserable, sweltering days in the dusty, eight-bedroom ancestral home.

"I could have gone my whole life without hearing that," Elle replied, scrunching her nose in response to Roger's mention of their sixty-five-year-old grandmother's sexual habits.

"If I had to hear it, so do you," Roger declared, inhaling deeply before turning fully to face his sister again.

Elle watched him for a moment, debating on whether to speak seriously with him or poke at him a little longer. With a sigh, she brought her fingers to her sunglasses and dragged them upwards, positioning them so that they rested carefully in her hair. Her eyebrows immediately squinted at the lack of shade from the sun's reflection against the sand.

"You could choose to ignore it, you know. Getting riled up over her doesn't hurt her, only you," She spoke carefully, folding her hands together.

Roger's lips pressed together. "Yeah."

Neither of them spoke for several minutes, allowing the draw and crash of the waves several yards beyond them to fill the silent gap.

A thin sheen of sweat glistened against Elle's freshly sunkissed skin as she and Roger sat in silence, and when the first bead of sweat fell loose and began to trickle slowly across her cheek, she found herself sitting upright.

"Well, feel free to stay out here and feel your feelings but I do enjoy keeping my oddly perfect complexion so I," Elle announced, pulling her sunglasses onto the bridge of her nose once again, "will catch you inside."

Her fingers found her hair and bunched it within her fist as she gathered the items she'd discarded around her feet (why the hell didn't she bring a hair tie?) and within seconds, and without waiting on a response from Roger, she was out of her seat and making her way back up the cobblestone path and towards the front door.

As she turned the brass, diamond-shaped door handle and pushed the door ajar, Elle found herself assaulted by the ardent scent of vanilla that she was sure had to be wafting in from the kitchen. The unmistakable sound of clattering metal dishpans from the kitchen confirmed her guess that her grandmother was, once again, attempting her hand at baking. Elle suspected that the house would consequently smell of smoke, as well, within the hour.

Grovesnor House was an ancient piece, dating back to the 1800s when Elle's great-great-great-something had come by a large sum of money (nobody knew how but Elle suspected it was better to keep it that way) and had wandered upon the vacant hilltop overlooking the ocean and voila. Generations of Davies children had grown up in the home's four walls and Elle couldn't help but feel sympathy for them - growing up in this place sounded like a less creative form of hell.

Though hell it was, its beauty was undeniable. The simple nature of the home's interior made it all that much more elegant (and brain-numbingly boring, Roger would say). Its doorways and baseboards were constructed of dark, polished wood, as well as the floor of the entryway in which Elle stood, and the ceilings were adorned with giant wooden planks that acted as support beams for the tall ceiling. Anyone looking in from the outside might assume the house was warm and homely, not empty and cold, but Elle knew that was how her grandmother, one with a proclivity for putting on a facade, preferred it.

"Eleanor, is that you?" A stern voice called from the other room, snapping Elle's attention towards the doorway that led into the kitchen.

Taking a deep breath, Elle steadied herself and lifted her expression to one that wouldn't cause her grandmother's lips to purse sourly.

"It's me."

Rounding the corner into the open room, Elle caught sight of her grandmother leaning over with one hand on the oven handle, the other cupped over her forehead, her eyes squinted as she peered into the oven's glass window. Elle's foot tapped lightly on the stone flooring of the kitchen as she halted, drawing the older woman's attention.

Greta Davies peered at her granddaughter through her half-moon-shaped spectacles that always remained perched on the tip of her nose and gave a tight-lipped grimace. Elle returned it.

"I can't seem to get this oven timer working. Half-witted thing," She commented, making no effort to hide the irritation in her voice.

Elle's eyes flitted between the oven and the older woman. Greta looked her granddaughter up and down, clearly displeased in Elle's choice of outfit, before jutting her chin towards her.

"Go and get changed and then come back and help me with this."

"Sure."

"And please, do something with your hair, dear. It looks like a rat's nest," Greta called after her distastefully, causing an involuntary snort to escape Elle's nose.

Greta's head whipped around in search of the noise, her eyes trained sharply on the retreating figure of her granddaughter. Elle winced, her back remaining facing the older woman.

Her grandmother's criticism of her appearance was nothing short of expected. Elle had faced it her entire life, whether Greta's objections were indeed aimed at Elle's appearance or even at something as simple as the color palette she'd chosen to wear ("Eleanor, blue simply does not bode well with green. I would suggest changing the green into perhaps beige. Honestly, anything would be better than that."). Her only option by the ripe age of thirteen had been to stop taking offense to it and simply laugh.

"Sure."

And with that, Elle turned on her heel and exited the room. The moment she reached her own bedroom, the items that had been clutched in her grasp fell unceremoniously to the floor with a soft thud, and Elle fell backward onto her bed with a sigh.

Her bedroom was nothing special, and besides the few odds and ends of her own that had accumulated in the room over the years, it would be impossible to differentiate it from any other bedroom in the house. Same curtains, same bed frame, same dresser, same comforter, same frigid temperature. The only thing in the room that Elle actually liked was the row of five picture frames that rested atop her clothes dresser near the small window. The images waved and smiled at her now, as she rolled onto her stomach to gain a better view of them.

In one, Elle and her best friend, Mandy, were pictured running near the Black Lake at Hogwarts in their fourth year, Mandy close behind Elle and with a look of clear vengeance on her face and dripping wet hair after Elle had pushed her into the water in the dead of January.

The others sported similar pictures and included Elle's other friends and her cat, Bowie, whom she had started to miss far more this summer than any other summer on record; this was mostly due to the fact that the elder Davies woman despised the animal, and the mutual feeling on Bowie's end typically resulted in a stand-off and, consequently, an array of scratches and mismatched bandaids littered across her grandmother's extremities. (Elle enjoyed seeing her grandmother knocked down a peg by a cat).

      A sharp hoot sounded from outside the window behind the picture frames, drawing Elle's attention to the large tawny owl perched regally on the outdoor windowsill. With quick footsteps, Elle approached the window and unlatched it, allowing the bird to hop inside and onto the indoor windowsill.

      "What have you got for me?"

       The animal outstretched its leg importantly, revealing a rectangular envelope tied to its talons with a red silk ribbon. Elle's fingers found it immediately, and when she worked the knot out of the ribbon, she reached for the coin dish on the dresser. After it hooted in thanks as Elle dropped two galleons into the small satchel attached to its other leg, the owl flew off in the direction of the sea in haste.

      The bed creaked pitifully as Elle perched on the edge of the mattress and eagerly tore the envelope open; she would have known the contents of the letter without reading the letters inscribed on the front of the envelope: Miss. E. Davies, The Freezing Bedroom to the Right of the Kitchen, Grosvenor House, Dorset, England.

       Her hands paused when she pulled the folded parchment out of the envelope, hovering shakily over the contents in her lap. With a deep breath and a quick nod of her head, she unfolded the letter. Her eyes drank in every square inch of ink, widening more and more the further her eyes drifted down the page.

      Relief flooded through Elle's system, and a wide smile graced her features as she placed the paper in her lap with a deep exhale. She knew she should have been relieved to gain so many Outstandings, but it was simply enough for her to know that the dozens of hours spent studying leading up to exam week hadn't been entirely wasted, even with a nitwit Defense teacher and a muggleborn murder spree.

"Eleanor!"

The sharp beckoning of her presence from the kitchen rudely drew Elle from her thoughts and had a soft groan slipping from her mouth.

"Coming!"

***

The next seven days passed with alarming lethargy, much to both Elle and Roger's distaste, and had included doing a whole bunch of nothing due to the storms that had ravaged the English Channel's coast for four of those days.

Due to the aggrieved sheets of rain pelting against the home's cobblestone walls, any preconceived hope of running Quidditch drills with Roger for the week had been squashed. When Elle had realized this, she'd sulked around Grosvenor House for a solid twelve hours until she'd grown so intolerable that Roger had resorted to pelting her square in the face with a pillow. Thus, Elle had taken up residence in the home's extensive library for the remainder of the week, claiming she'd had so much school reading to catch up. When she was sure neither her grandmother nor Roger would attempt to disturb her, she'd whipped out her good old cassette player and the extensive collection of Nancy Drew books she'd brought from home. With David Bowie and mystery novels as her companions, she'd found the last two days to pass only slightly faster than those previously.

And so, that was how Elle found herself tucked into the backseat of her grandmother's old station wagon, pressed against the window by the mounds of bags that she had deemed necessary while packing a month ago (note to self: packing three duffel bags full of books when you're going somewhere with a full library was wholly unnecessary).

Roger was sat up front beside their grandmother much to his disdain, but Elle had claimed that her smaller size would make her a more compatible backseat passenger and luggage companion. Roger had simply glared at her.

They had been in the car for approximately three hours when they'd passed Worcester, and Elle had long since stopped keeping track, instead opting to stare out the window at the passing flat countryside. As the three streaked across the country in their steel bandwagon, Elle couldn't help but resent her grandmother's resistance to magical means of transportation; she wasn't sure what there was to dislike about getting to a place quicker, but Elle surely knew that anything would beat being crammed into a four-person minivan for fourteen hours round trip every summer.

Greta quietly hummed along to the tune of A Long Winding Road by the Beatles that flowed through the car's speakers as she gazed absentmindedly at the road ahead of her. Elle was almost certain that her grandmother had spoken a maximum of eight words altogether since the three of them had first entered the vehicle, but to her credit, she could have been overcounting.

Elle squinted narrowly against the sun's rays that beat against the side of the old car and internally cursed herself for packing away her oversized sunglasses; she'd only done so  when the Dorset weatherman had predicted storms on their journey home and now, as Elle struggled to keep her eyelids open against the bright glare, she internally cursed him.

It must have been another two hours before the car at long last pulled into the rocky offset that the Davies' cottage resided on. The moment the homely, two-story brick cottage came into view, Elle's hands fumbled rapidly for the seatbelt, everything within her body and soul screaming to escape from the three-square-foot radius she'd been confined in for the better part of the day.

Before the car had the chance to fully come to a stop, Elle was wrenching the door open and within seconds, planted her feet on solid ground and paced herself at least five feet away from the car in order to properly stretch. The fresh sting of country air rushed into Elle's lungs, and the mental fog she'd been in for an entire seven hours was gone in an instant.

Her eyes raked over the exterior of her house, newly ornate with luscious, green ivy vines that now stretched across the brick wall and formed a natural arch over the home's front door. The rose bushes, only just beginning to bud when she and Roger had left, were now in full bloom and even at a distance, she could hear the humming of honeybees echoing loud and clear against the afternoon air.

The creaking of the front door's rusted hinges drew Elle's attention from the bushes to the newly appeared figure of her mother, who jogged lightly down the steps towards her daughter, a bright smile gracing her features.

Before Elle could utter a word, she found herself wrapped into a tight embrace, and she returned it just as quickly.

Her mother only halfway released her after several, long seconds, her grip still firm on Elle's arms. "Hi, mum."

Saoirse Davies, in all her motherly glory, was a sight for sore eyes. Elle had always known her mother to be beautiful, but after thirty days of Saoirse's absence, she somehow felt that she had somehow grown even more so. Her bright, grey eyes sparkled as they examined Elle's face, her skin glowed golden in the late afternoon sun, and her hair, looking softer than ever, seemed to sit just perfectly as it brushed across the top of her shoulders.

"Y'know, I don't know how I do this every summer," Saoirse finally spoke, pulling Elle into her side as the pair slowly made their way towards the parked vehicle, where Greta and Roger had only just begun to exit.

Elle smiled, shaking her head. "Oh, come on, you can't have missed us that much. I, for one, could've gone a month without Roger's elephant snoring, so you really should count yourself lucky-"

Elle's statement was cut off by a quick blow to the arm by her brother, who had approached before Elle could jump out of the way.

"Dickhead."

Saoirse ignored her children's immediate banter and released Elle, only to take Roger in her embrace instead. Elle relished in the clear discomfort strewn across Roger's face at the sudden physical affection and shot a devilish grin in his direction before brushing past the pair and made her way toward the station wagon to gather her things.

With a quick glance over her shoulder, Elle caught sight of her mother releasing Roger just enough to lock eyes with her grandmother. Saoirse's expression, previously relaxed and cheerful, turned tight and unreadable within seconds. Greta did the same. Elle quickly faced the front again, her stomach twisting as though she'd been privy to something she'd had no business observing, and threw a bag over her shoulder.

Saoirse hadn't told Elle and Roger much about why she and Greta had such a tumultuous relationship. Elle had guessed long ago that it was likely related to her father, but past that, she wouldn't allow herself to make any assumptions regarding the situation, especially any of her father. Her mother never spoke of him, nor did her grandmother. Elle and Roger had learned long ago that mentions of their father were only permitted in the comfort of their own bedrooms.

In her deep contemplation of her mother and grandmother's interaction, Elle's chest tightened suddenly, and she halted as she slammed the car door shut with the bag in her hand. Her face contorted as she inhaled deeply and pressed the bag in her hand to her chest. A few seconds passed before the action no longer sent a strangled pain across her torso. When she was sure she could continue breathing as normal, she stepped toward the awkward gathering of mismatched family and allowed the only words to fall off her tongue that wouldn't send her loved ones into a further spiral.

"I'm bloody starving."

author's note.
so... surprise lol. after
about two years give or
take (?), i am SO excited
to get back into this book
(aka the first baby™️ )

I cant promise scheduled
updates due to working a full time
job at the moment and everything
else life throws at me but I
plan to do my best with updating !

thank you for reading! <3