“I made a bet with Sam and Jamie about how long before you vanish.”

Miranda span her head around from the window, shooting a knowing smirk at her youngest older brother. Alec Carter was stood in the doorway to her childhood bedroom looking just as bored with the conversation as she’d felt. He stepped inside, pushing the door behind him, leaving it a crack open. The room itself was much like a time capsule, the sanctuary of a teenage girl from over 30 years ago.

“I suppose at least you made it, this year.” he continued, making his way across the purple carpet to the window seat where his sister had positioned herself. She’d kicked off her heels, and sat cross legged looking out at the garden. It was cold in the room, the December air being let inside by the open window. A quick glance to her hand explained why. His dear baby sister was reliving her youth by having a crafty cigarette in her bedroom. He raised a dark eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me like that. Dad doesn’t know.” she explained with a shrug. It was bizarre, to be nearly 49 years old and still take to smoking out of a window so as not to alert her parents.

Alec laughed and squeezed himself onto the seat beside Miranda. He reached out and plucked the cigarette from her fingers, taking a drag himself. The air was blown out through the open window.

“Do you remember when he caught Leon?” Alec asked with a grin, passing the cigarette back, “You might have been too young. He must have been fifth year, comes home for the summer, and Dad finds a packet of gillyweed in his trunk.” Miranda’s expression showed just how much she didn’t believe that their oldest brother; the one who’d gone on to become, and auror and later wizengamot, had been quite so rebellious. “All true. You were only like 4. Well, Dad flies totally off the handle, locked him in his room for half the summer. Let him out for toilet breaks and a bath.”

“Not Leon.”
“Oh Andy. Grew up with your eyes closed, baby sister.”
“Bullshit. Leon was squeaky clean. I cheated once in a game of chess and he wouldn’t speak to me for a month.”
“That’s because you outsmarted him.”
They sat in silence for a moment, sharing a smoke.

“I miss him.” Miranda muttered before another drag and tapping the cigarette out of the window. Leon had been murdered during the 10 year anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. Miranda had witnessed it, herself, among many other spectators at Hogwarts.
“So do I.”
“Things like this, he’d know how to actually make dinner bearable.” Or at least, how to steer the conversation. She suddenly grinned, eyes scanning over Alec’s face. “Have you seen the way Dad was looking at Ignan over dinner? And that question!”

Alec let out a laugh before pulling a straight face and, with his most serious tone, impersonated their old man. “Mr Storm, we should all like to know your intentions towards my daughter. Care to explain yourself?”

“As I told your father, ‘I've already married her, if you were expecting me to ask for permission.’” Alec’s impression of Carter Senior had carried through the gap in the door as he approached. He was paused in the doorway, unsure what to expect when his mother in law (dear Merlin, he had a mother-in-law now) had directed him to Miranda’s childhood bedroom to fetch two missing Carter siblings. Conversation with the Carters was as painful as a barefoot hike on broken glass, but Mira had cashed in on the deal. She’d come to the Pepper’s wedding in the summer on the condition he returned the favour at an equally excruciating family social.

“Your absences have been noted downstairs.” He offered by way of explanation for his appearance in the bedroom. He had noticed the purple carpet and part of him didn’t want to tread on such an awfully decorated room. He had expected Miranda’s childhood room to have been turned into a guest bedroom considering she was long past being a child. Instead, he was faced with a scene that he might expect one of his students to inhabit when they weren’t in his classroom.

Miranda’s gaze had shot to the door, her expression becoming one of very brief guilt. She’d just left Ignan downstairs with her brothers and parents after having dragged him here in the first place. Regardless, she made no move to get up.

“Well here’s a first, Andy, mum sending a boy to your room!” Alec let out a laugh, only for Miranda to grab a purple stuffed dragon from the seat between it and throw it at his face. He didn’t stop grinning, and instead, pulled the window open more and glanced down towards the garden. They were on the 3rd floor. “How many took this exit, sis?”

Despite their awful first encounter, Alec Carter had grown on Ignan. He had turned up to see Miranda when Ignan was almost certainly about to die, and had spent time talking to the resurrected. Even bought flowers. Once he had learned that more than one of the Carter children didn’t see eye to eye with Jacob Carter, he felt his animosity would be accepted. The description of ‘boy’ applied to sixty-something Ignan received a visibly humoured reaction from the older wizard. He stepped into the room proper, arms clasped behind his back, and wiggled his fingers at the door knob to close it behind him.

Miranda’s room did not stop at the purple carpet beneath his polished shoes. He tried not to look, but once something had caught his eye, it was hard not to take a second glance. Were those posters of half-dressed quidditch players, curling at the corners? Could he see more stuffed animals in bright colours? If he’d tried to paint a picture of how he expected teenage Miranda Carter’s bedroom to look, he would have been very far off the mark.

Given his curiosity, he loomed behind them both and inclined enough to see the drop out of the window Alec referred to. Valuing his personal space given the claustrophobic setting downstairs, he took two strides back into the middle of the room, looking very out of place. A deep black inkblot in the middle of a girl’s brightly coloured diary.

It was hard not to find Ignan stood in the middle of her childhood room to be at least a little bit bizarre.
“Expected an ice palace?” She asked with a smirk as Alec shoved the stuffed dragon back at her. She sat it in her lap. The room represented a very different person to who she was now, and Alec had perhaps been the one to most closely witness that change.

“A cave.” he suggested, and gave her hand an affectionate squeeze. “I’ll see you downstairs.” He stood and went to move past Ignan, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t let her bully you. I didn’t even bring my wife to these dinners.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I’m here to just provide the parental fireworks.” Ignan replied dryly, turning a little to see Alec out of the room. He gave the slightest of nods in acknowledgement as the best of the remaining Carter siblings left the room.

“Boom!” Miranda lifted her hands up in an explosive gesture. “You’ve been remarkably restrained.” She smirked. “For you.”

“For my sins.” Ignan agreed, slipping his hands into his trouser pockets. He looked up, exhaling. Even though it was Miranda’s somewhat lurid bedroom, and despite her smoking, he felt like he could breathe properly up here. It was as he did this he noticed the herbology paintings adorning the ceiling. The first sign he recognised this could definitely have been a future Head Healer’s bedroom. The few seconds he lingered on examining them gave away the fact he’d noticed. No point hiding it now.

“Those fit,” he remarked, pulling a hand out to point upwards, “but purple carpet?” He pointed down to his feet and looked back to his wife of almost a year. “To think you had the gall to comment on my interior decoration at Godric’s Hollow.”

The last of the cigarette was, rather terribly, stubbed out on the windowsill before she flicked it out of the window. “I liked purple. It hid the potion stains.” As she untangled her legs from beneath her, Miranda rolled her eyes. “Besides, I was a teenager. You decorated Godric’s Hollow without hormones and googly eyes for muscled hunks and teenage boys.” she paused, smirking. “I hope.”

“I leave all of those at work.” He agreed, corners of his mouth betraying his amusement. Emboldened by the exchange, he turned away, perusing the other relics of Mira’s teenage past. He pointed to the posters as he did. “I’m only glad your taste in men has changed.”

With a lightness of step which only indicated his delight at a rare chance to apply sarcasm and curiosity to Mira’s past, he drew to a shelf of discarded books and parchment. “My, my. Your handwriting here could be described as semi-legible.”

“Who says it has? Have you seen a recent picture of Vladamir Goose?” She had. He was still as pleasant to look at as the poster above her old bed. Only now, in his 50s, he remained fully clothed for his photoshoots.

She was on her feet and across the room to snatch whatever it was out of his grasp.

“That’s clearly the same.” It clearly wasn’t. She glanced over the parchment, angling it so that he couldn’t read. Notes on potions making. Probably for her NEWTs.

Taking advantage of her scrutiny, Ignan helped himself to another of the pages, twisting on the spot to hold it out of reach the moment she noticed. For when one is in a childhood bedroom, one resorts to childish tactics when conducting an invasion of privacy.

“Well, this is illuminating.” He already very well knew Miranda had suffered through a NEWT in Defence Against the Dark Arts. She had confessed her inadequacy and demonstrated it too. He’d never had first-hand evidence of those two years of study until now. Months of decoding Mira’s awful handwriting in the present made teenage Miranda’s handwriting less of a challenge to examine.

Well there really was no point in going to snatch as there was almost a foot between them, and Ignan had long arms. No point, but he was trying to goad her, and there were countless possibilities for what was in his hand. They were certainly over 30 years past the origin of those notes and they could have been anything. So, she did try and step around him, but he only gave her his back again. If that was how he wanted to play it...

With no hesitation, or consideration for the age of her husband, Miranda, already barefoot, sprang up onto the edge of the bed and launched herself at Ignan’s back, legs wrapped around his torso, one arm around his shoulders and neck, the other reaching for the parchment.

If a member of the Carter family had come close to the bedroom door at that very moment they would not have drawn the conclusion that wife was grappling husband in a spontaneous piggy-back. The concept was so alien it was doubtful another living human would have considered it in the top hundred possibilities of exclamations of effort, bumps and bangs of furniture and comic accusations rang forth.

The last time he’d shouldered off someone hanging round his neck, Ignan Storm had been a much younger man. It was safe to say nearly dying earlier in the year had put his ‘shouldering-off abilities’ at a great disadvantage. That and hurting his wife was not a possibility, despite how crafty and wicked she was leaping upon him!

The pair crashed down ungracefully onto the old mattress, Ignan’s left arm still outstretched, trying to keep the parchment from her, Miranda beneath his shoulders, arm around his neck as if she were about to throttle him, one of his legs on the end of the bed and the other on the floor in an elaborate human knot.

“Troll!” Ignan laughed, flapping what he had thought was just the final page of a defences essay in his hand until he’d examined it. “I’d have thought you’d burned all traces of that…!” He relented, handing over the offending relic of her past so she’d release him.

Miranda, winded, snatched the paper from his grasp. It wasn’t even a shallow victory, because he now knew her dark secret. She’d not only done badly at her NEWT in DADA, she’d earned a Troll. Despite having the parchment back in her grasp, Miranda didn’t choose to release her grip on her husband.
“Pointless qualification.” she muttered in his ear, breathy. “You can’t even take your wife down.” Let’s ignore the fact that she was currently pinned under him, shall we?

“You much prefer my subtler methods to incapacitate you, my dear.” Ignan replied, grinning, though his voice was strained while his wife continued to pin his windpipe in the crook of her elbow. “Besides, I thought you wanted to live?” He made a conscious effort to relax, though he was still chuckling.

Miranda couldn’t help but grin at her husband’s suggestion. In his ear, she once more whispered “I do,” before releasing her arm and the tight grip with her legs. Slowly, they untangled themselves from one another, and once he’d extricated himself, Ignan offered her a hand. Once more on her feet, Miranda could feel the heat in her cheeks as she smiled up at Ignan. His jacket was crumpled, and tie skewiff, a situation that she moved in to remedy.

Rather uncharacteristically, and perhaps caused by the adrenaline and the ridiculousness of the situation, Miranda couldn’t stop laughing. She rested her head forward against his chest, muttering at she chuckled. “My secret’s out.”

“It was a secret?!” Her husband exclaimed. His dear wife forgot a curious husband could very easily locate her on a 1981 examination ledger. He wrapped his arms around Mira’s small form, so very glad of a moment of misbehaviour amidst a hideously restrained day. “But outstandings across the board otherwise,” he recalled, “on all the more important subjects for a future top healer.” Not that Ignan wasn’t ferociously proud of Miranda’s professional achievements. Her secret troll for one NEWT showed she was human.

“As you’ve said before, my words do a good enough job.” Miranda said, pulling her head back. She was pretty skilled at taking most witches and wizards down a peg or two with a simple look; words if necessary.

“We should go downstairs.” Unfortunately, they’d been up there for plenty long enough. On her tiptoes, she pressed a lingering kiss against his lips before pulling away and snatching up her shoes to pull on.

The couple made their way down the few flights of stairs, Ignan trailing behind Miranda. When she stepped back into the living room, conversation stopped and all eyes turned on her. Three sets accompanied bright and knowing grins. 88 year old Jacob Carter? He couldn’t quite meet her gaze.

“Ahem, glad you found her, Storm.” Jacob managed, sounding rather choked, and staring down at the couple’s feet.

"Pretty sure they just desecrated her childhood bed, dad." Alec announced, a shit-eating grin spread across his face.