Even though Grace had moved back to the Radford Estate to curb her homesickness, one thing that she missed from her brief stint at living in Hireath Gardens was regular visits to Rachawadee, the Thai-Indian restaurant nearby. She managed to return to the restaurant often for dinner and also sometimes would find her way there on lunch breaks as a means of getting out of the office and clearing her head. She always made sure to bring back extra as she never knew who else would be so caught up in work that they wouldn’t be able to get anything.

One person she regularly bought lunch for was her uncle, Jonas Trevelyan. Even after almost two years as a trainee, Grace tried to maintain a professional “distance” between herself and her maternal uncle. Many a conversation was had in the Auror Office about how working together could be hard on friends, let alone family members. Even with that concern ever present, it was nice to have him “around”. She hoped he was proud of her and, more importantly, was confident in the skills she worked so hard to perfect.

Sometimes, just a quick catch up with him over noodles fed into a part of Grace that had been lacking. Until her mother got sick, she had known very little about the Trevelyan side of the family and their connection to magic. A casual conversation over how Gwenna was doing at Hogwart’s sometimes morphed into hearing tidbits here and there.

So, on this day, Grace bustled back into the offices laden down with a variety of Rachawadee takeout. She dumped some of it in the main common area where the trainees tended to congregate, and then took two separate orders and headed towards his workspace.

“Hey,” she called as she got close. She held up her packages of food and grinned. “Hope you’re hungry because I brought sustenance.” She set them down and started to pull out some specific containers of food. “Bunch of noodles….Curry….” She glanced up and quirked a brow. “Whatcha want?”

---

Title reference: Stay Gold by First Aid Kit

Sometimes it felt as if he were counting down the days until Gwenna went back to school.  He'd been in late that morning due to a minor meltdown, when his recently-turned-teenaged daughter had exploded due to the unfairness imposed upon her when neither of her parents had been available to take her shopping at Hogsmeade that day.  He never got so far as wishing that they had never had kids, but recently Jonas had found himself wondering if he could drop a note to the Hogwarts Governors urging them to keep the school in session all year round. 

On days like this, the office served as a bit of a respite.  Jonas had buried himself in paperwork, files spread across his desk in sort of a factual jigsaw puzzle.  Correlating accounts, checking records....anything was better than having to spend the morning trying to convince himself that casting a Silencing Spell on his eldest child was indeed wrong, and not just a moral gray area.

At Grace's call, the redheaded Auror glanced up.  His trainee niece, who as far as he could tell would have never even thought about  terrorizing her parents at thirteen.  Jonas nearly sighed.  Where on earth had they gone wrong with Gwenna?  September 1st couldn't come soon enough.

"Curry's good," he replied, flashing Grace a smile as he mentally pushed those thoughts aside.  With a flick of his wand, the papers strewn across his desk began to arrange themselves into neat stacks.  "Thanks for bringing food by.  Reckon you've got time to sit and eat?"

Grace happily relinquished the Curry to her uncle kept the noodles for herself. "You're very welcome. I'm glad others like to eat this stuff besides just me. Early on I felt bad for buying so much variety knowing full well I might end up eating it all myself. But now I know there's no guilt; It's all gone by the end of the day."

Grace paused for a moment to hunt out some utensils from the take out bag but she also used the time to take in his demeanor. The trainee noticed that he did seem a bit frazzled that day and she wondered if everything was going well away from work. She quirked a brow and silently debated asking him.

His suggestion to sit and eat fit in well with her plan to eventually do so. "Sure! As long as I'm not getting in the way of important work," she hedged, though early on as a trainee Grace had learned that a good deal of important work could be accomplished while shoveling food in one's mouth and ruminating for a while. She and Fauna were the masters of that from their particular trainee group and among the newest trainees, Raine had quickly shown a fondness for such work methods.

Sliding into the empty chair across from him, Grace opened her noodles and started to push them around a bit in sauce pooled at the bottom of the container. After taking a bite, she threw out, "So....fatla genes?"[1]

1.	How are you? in Cornish

Jonas chuckled, clearly wracking his brain as he tried to recall an appropriate response.  "Da lowr.  Counting down the days for Hogwarts to start up again, or so it feels like." 

He shot his niece a sheepish smile as he picked up a fork, along with the curry.  "I don't think Thursday can come soon enough.  Gwenna's been a terror these past few weeks at home.  I hate to wish her so fervently on the Hogwarts lot, but I reckon Anna and I are ready for some peace and quiet come the weekend."

He could almost -- almost -- understand where his daughter was coming from.  When he'd been her age, summers spent back home had felt a bit like living in the dullest movie with the color all sucked out.  Nothing in Muggle life ever had the verve or the excitement of a school year at Hogwarts, full of independence and magic and friends.  But even growing up in an entirely Muggle household, he couldn't remember being quite the little brat that Gwenna seemed to morph into at the end of every summer.

Not to mention that this August had been considerably worse than the last.  It was something that he and Anna would need to sort out once  their daughter was home again.  But for now, they could simply count down the last few days until they were seeing her off again on the Hogwarts Express.

"Alright yourself, then?" he asked, raising an eyebrow at his niece as he began to eat.  "I remember how miserable the third year of training seemed, way back when.  Not so much the tasks, but just feeling like I ought to be done and with me own badge already."

When her uncle mentioned Hogwart's starting soon, Grace's eyes went wide and she gasped, "Oh, that's right!" It had been a while since she had corresponded with Gwenna, but Grace was keenly aware of her cousin's personality and how taxing it could be. She hoped Jonas wasn't tormented too much. Gently chewing on her bottom lip for a moment, Grace offered, "I should have some free time coming up this week. Would you and Aunt Anna like for me to take her shopping for her supplies? I may even still have my own things stashed away in some boxes."

She flashed Jonas a sympathetic smile, hoping that her offer might help bolster his patience for Gwenna's remaining days before the school year started. Her own patience could be tested, but Grace often felt like she was making up for lost time with her cousins.

Growing up, her mother had always spoken so fondly of Jonas and his family, but their interactions had been mostly at larger family get-to-gethers and Grace knew now that they had never been able to be as close as they could be due to the circumstances connected to muggle life vs. life in magic.

Jonas' question about how she was doing pulled her out of her own thoughts and she smirked. "It's not so bad," she hedged. "But then again, maybe I don't notice it so much because I've been too busy for my own good." Grace leaned forward with interest, though, when he spoke of his own time early on in the corps. After chewing thoughtfully on a bite of her food, she queried, "What was it like in your day?" After a beat, she added, "What were you like back then? You know....what kind of trainee were you?"

He'd always known that he liked his niece, but he hadn't known how very much he liked her until that moment.  Jonas flashed Grace a bright grin, resisting the urge to throw himself at her and hug her.

"If you think you can handle her on a trip to Diagon, I wouldn't say no," he said gratefully.  "Reckon she'd love to spend some time out and about with you."  Spending some time with her responsible and mature cousin might actually serve to calm his daughter down before she returned to Hogwarts again.

As she put it, Grace had certainly kept busy since joining the Auror Corps.  He knew his niece still harbored interest in healing, and there'd been mention that she was interested in going beyond the usual Auror training.  As much as they saw each other around the office in passing, there wasn't much chance to cross paths and stay caught up.  It was good to hear that she didn't feel like the program had been overwhelming.

And then she jumped on his offhanded comment, and took it to the next logical place.  What had he been like during Auror training?

"Well, it was a bit of a different office culture back then," he said cheerfully.  "We weren't too long off the last war, and a lot of the office was still populated by the stalwarts, like Scrimgeour, Moody, and MacDonnell.  Saw themselves as soldiers more than they did investigators, so they expected the lot of us to fall in right quick and do as they said."  He chuckled, flashing her a crooked smile.  "Not sure we always fell in as well as they liked, though."

"Na, I don't mind at all," Grace said with a shrug, sensing her uncle's relief at her offer. "I'd be happy to do it. I do have some experience in taming unruly early year students. And it gives us time to bond, actually." She paused to chew thoughtfully on her food for a moment, realizing that it had been a while since she had corresponded with her young cousins. Then she added, "I know you and mum had a tough task navigating the Muggle vs. Magical worlds given the circumstances, but sometimes I do wonder what life would be like now had all of us had been closer when we were growing up."

Grace's comment was not meant to make Jonas to feel guilty but more so an innocent observation of "what ifs". In her own early years at Hogwarts, she had experienced moments of isolation, loneliness and homesickness because of her muggleborn status. She imagined that may have been mitigated to some degree if she had known Jonas was also in that realm. She would have asked him so many questions to sooth her curiosities and worries. And surely she would have felt a kinship and sense of belonging that didn't manifest itself immediately.

And yet, those "what ifs" were hard to bank on and Grace knew that. So she made a concerted effort to be thankful for the time she spent with Jonas and his family and the memories she made with them in the present, including being able to work with him and have conversations like this one.

Grace sported a bemused smile as he responded to her question. It was fascinating to her that he had gotten to work with the legends that they read about. She appreciated his depiction of Auror life, her eyes wide with interest. His last comment piqued her interest. "So you were a rebel, huh?"

The older Auror laughed.  "More like bloody annoying," he said, flashing her a crooked smile.  "We didn't take much the older generation said seriously.  One of the legends from the First War, Moody, was on the verge of retirement, and we used to try to make him twitch so badly that his fake eye would pop out and plop into his soup."

That had been most of their years in training -- laughing together with Tait and Radley and the others at the older Aurors, not really taking any of their warnings seriously.  Back then, it had seemed impossible that You-Know-Who would ever return.  It wasn't until the Dark Mark had been spotted at the Quidditch World Cup in 1994, soon after he'd been promoted to a full Auror, that he'd had any sense that things might take a turn.

And even then, he'd had no idea as to how bad it was going to get.

He'd given a slight, sad smile at Grace's prior comment a moment before,  about the difficulty of navigating two worlds.  Now, he paused to chew his food, reflecting.

"It's funny," he said, swallowing as he nodded to her.  "Our parents -- your grandparents -- kept things so quiet, I'm not sure how much your mum ever really understood.  By the time I was in my fourth or fifth year at Hogwarts, I was spending most of the holidays with me best mate from school."  And then after everything had fallen apart in 1997, he'd disappeared and distanced himself from his family as much as he could.  The last thing he'd wanted was to give the Ministry any reason to pay any attention to them.

Grace joined in with her uncle's laughter for what he and others had tried to do to Moody.  With much of the business of being an Auror taken up by serious matters, indulging in some pranks was one way to relieve stress. With a smirk, Grace was quick to pick up on something Jonas said. "So you're saying that we shouldn't take the older generation seriously?" It was a cheeky, rhetorical question. Grace already knew that there was a healthy balance of respect vs. joking by her fellow trainees and the veteran Aurors.

The conversation did seem to take a more somber tone. That did not bother her but she hoped it would not bring a heavy heart to her uncle's day. "I think mum probably knew more than she let on, even with all the quiet." Grace ruminated quietly a bit on the dynamic of their family and also what was known about the world of magic. Then she posed, "What if....there were other witches and wizards in the Trevelyan family and nobody ever said anything? What if...." Her eyes went wide and she leaned forward a bit lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, "Granny and Grandpa and mum were....squibs?"

Jonas flashed his niece a crooked grin.  "Make for a bit of an awkward time at family reunions, wouldn't that?" he asked cheerfully.  "No one wanting to mention it, and everyone just talking along."

He paused as he took another bite, using the excuse of chewing to buy himself a moment to think.  Grace had likely started at Hogwarts in 2002.  At that point, he'd been well entrenched in life in Exeter, still maintaining a distance between himself and most of his family in case someone from the Ministry came looking.  It wasn't until the end of 2003, after Artie had been born and when Anna had gotten the job offer at a new firm up in London, that he'd risked visiting Charisma Aldridge and discovered that the metaphorical coast was clear.  And then they'd moved, and reconnecting with his siblings and his parents had never seemed like the most important thing to do.

Suddenly, he was left wondering if Eugenia had ever tried to reach out to him, if she'd ever sought out his help with navigating this new world alongside her daughter.  If she had, he'd probably completely ignored it.

"Not sure that that's how being Muggleborn works, though," he said cautiously, a beat after finally swallowing.  "Maybe it is.  We'll have to go digging through the attic next time we're all down in Truro together."