Hogwarts WW2 Gen thoughts
Eileen was not the name her parents gave her
Eileen was the name used by her great-great-great aunt (or perhaps the terrible old lady was a cousin removed several times and ranked somewhere far from first, but the old woman insisted on “Aunt” as an honorific and the girl who wasn’t supposed to be Ileana anymore complied)
Her parents sent her away to England when she was seven.
They’d said there was a bad wizard, practically a monster, and that she would be safe in England. They couldn’t go with her, there was some complicated problem with past alliances and allegiances and pacts and family ties and protecting the dragons from Grindelwald and it would be dishonorable for them to flee to safety. But they could send her away. No one could blame them for sending her away.
They sent her away to England and told her there would be no bad wizards, no monsters with the face of a man, there. Hogwarts, they said, could provide a mostly acceptable education.
Aunt Agatha was not “a bad wizard” but she certainly wasn’t good. The old woman was a veritable hermit, shut-up in her sprawling, dusty, dilapidated house; bitterly parting with trinkets from her hoard to afford her daily bread and ruminating over her every misfortune.
Agatha Prince had no money, at least, no money she would deign to spend raising some child of distant relatives. She blamed her long-dead squib brother’s existence for her failure to secure a wealthy spouse and the life of leisure she deserved. Aunt Agatha often raged that neither the main branch of the Prince family nor the French line had the decency to provide for a poor spinster relation.
It offended Agatha’s every sensibility that the Prince family fortune should remain with little Gloriana, the last of the main branch in England, and then go to her daughter Augusta who wasn’t even born a Prince. Surely Agatha, as the eldest living Prince, should have control of the vault. Surely Agatha, as the eldest living Prince, should not be left destitute. Why, she’d sold the House Elf long ago, tearing out the very soul of her childhood home in the process. She needed her uncle’s gold if she was ever to leave the husk she’d made of her house.
Beneath Agatha Prince’s thumb was a not a very nice place for a child to grow up.
Eileen-no-longer-Ileana Prince personally would’ve preferred the distant terror of (and eventually death by-) Grindelwald and his forces over her life in the stranglehold of Aunt Agatha’s petty tyranny.
Ileana learned the English she needed to become Eileen by eavesdropping on muggle radio broadcasts.
Mimicking the radio voice was easier than trying to talk to one of the muggles in the village that still anchored Agatha’s home. Ileana, like her mother, had been born with her mind too open and external thoughts were always trying to get in through her eyes.
Aunt Agatha wasn’t interested in conversation. She told Eileen what chores to do (the chores a House Elf would’ve completed in a twinkle, had Agatha not been so foolish as to sell off her estate’s genius loci manifested) or she criticized Ileana for not being a sufficiently obedient Eileen.
Aunt Agatha demanded eye contact when it was time for a berating and Ileana-Eileen often went to bed with her head achingly full of Agatha Prince’s cruelest thoughts.
The radio didn’t have eyes.
Eileen Prince was sorted into Slytherin much to Aunt Agatha’s disgust.
Agatha assigned a malign influence to the Carpathians to explain why Eileen, unlike every properly English Prince, had fallen into Slytherin instead of rising up to one of the two tower Houses. It was then that Agatha realized how wise and right and justified she had been to refrain from offering any form of affection to the girl— for it was quite true that a serpent’s tooth was not as sharp as a thankless child.
(Long ago, Phineas Nigellus Black, by then engaged to Ursula Flint, had coldly rebuffed Agatha Prince’s attempts to secure his invitation to dance. She had nursed that grudge with more tenderness than she would ever show to a child in her care).
Gloriana Prince’s daughter Augusta, two years older than Eileen, was deeply suspicious of the girl claiming to be some third-cousin or something from the eastern branch of the Prince family. Augusta had met her Prince cousins from the French line, and Eileen didn’t look a thing like them (Augusta did not acknowledge just how much she looked like Eileen).
Eileen, very sensitive as she was, picked up on Augusta’s opinions before they were voiced and made a point of avoiding her cousin.
It was easy enough, the Gryffindor tower was far from the Slytherin dungeon and there were only a few Inter-House clubs that might’ve encouraged students to mingle.
Abraxas Malfoy, prefect and co-captain of the Hogwarts Inter-House Gobstones Club with his Gryffindor friend Septimius, tended to come off as a bit of a pompous twit. But even if he was a pompous twit, he was a pompous twit that made a point of looking out for the awkward outsiders and the shy children and the students without the support system of a well-established family name. Maybe it was a Machiavellian move, collecting the lonely and obtaining their loyalty for the low price of a bit of attentiveness, but if that were truly the case then surely he should’ve aimed for a higher goal than the perpetuation of the school Gobstones Club.
Tom Riddle politely scorned Abraxas’ attempts at protection and informal adoption via enrollment in the Gobstones Club (Tom could appreciate the aesthetics of chess even if he didn’t like it when the pieces expressed their opinions but Gobstones were frankly disgusting) and so Abraxas Malfoy subsequently lost interest in the younger boy.
When Eileen Prince started school in the following year, Septimius was quick to spot the girl’s potential and Abraxas immediately designated her as his protégé and eventual successor.
This rather irked Walburga Black, who had already decided that Eileen Prince would attend on her in return for guidance and advice and an eventual introduction to polite society. Walburga made rather a habit of complaining to her cousin Cedrella, Abraxas’ fiancée by family agreement and arrangements, about Eileen’s involvement in the Gobstones Club.
Eileen was impressed by Abraxas Malfoy’s enthusiasm about Gobstones and the unifying power of an Inter-House Club.
Eileen, who hadn’t played any games since she’d been sent to England, appreciated Abraxas Malfoy for teaching her how to play Gobstones.
Eileen was damn near preternaturally good at Gobstones.
Eileen rather enjoyed Gobstones.
She particularly liked the fact that she wasn’t expected or required to make eye contact with anyone else during a game.
Later on, Eileen would wonder if she should’ve said anything the day she walked into the club room and saw Cedrella in Septimius Weasley’s embrace. At the time, she’d mostly worried that speaking up might ruin the fun times in the Gobstones Club and was glad she’d managed to slip back out of the room unnoticed.
The story went that Cygnus and Walburga Black had come out of the womb each with their little hands around the other’s throat (Eileen believed it and privately wished that the unborn Walburga had had the sense to have used Cygnus’ umbilical cord as a garrote instead). Poor Professor Slughorn had been forced to name them both prefect to avoid granting either one power over the other and so suffered through their sly squabbling at every weekly meeting.
The only thing those siblings could share without complaint was a deep and abiding disdain for their little brother Alphard.
Alphard, for his part, meandered through life with a wistful and vague expression on his face and would prefer to take a twenty-mile detour of avoidance rather than go through half a foot of confrontation or conflict.
Walburga compared him, most unfavorably, to a spineless and brainless jellyfish. Cygnus, less poetically inclined, mostly berated Alphard for failing to live up the standard required for a member of the House of Black.
No one was terribly surprised when old Sluggy passed Alphard by and handed the prefect badge to the half-blood Tom Riddle.
Abraxas was delighted, no, really, delighted, that Eileen recruited Alphard Black for the Gobstones Club (recruited was a bit of an exaggeration, it had been more of a gentle buffeting in the general direction of the club room and holding the door open while the older boy drifted in).
It showed initiative, it showed that she was absolutely prime material for future Captain of the Gobstones Club.
Walburga and Cygnus would probably appreciate any efforts made at giving Alphard some direction, something to do with his life.
Alphard, for his part, was absolutely terrible at Gobstones.
As one of her first acts as Captain of the Gobstones Club, an awkward attempt at emulating the graduated Abraxas’ accepting attitude, Eileen offered to teach one of the younger boys in her house how to play the game.
Rubeus Hagrid was massive, even at age 13.
With his impressive bulk he should’ve chosen to be a brute or a bully; it would’ve made his life so much easier if he could claim that he’d meant to break things and to step on the smaller students. Unfortunately, he had too much of a soft heart to ever intend to hurt anyone and a soft heart paired with an over-sized body had, thus, landed him firmly in the despised category of “clumsy oaf”.
Eileen didn’t mind Rubeus Hagrid too much, he was so tall it was hard to make accidental eye contact and he was always willing to help set up the club room and clean up afterwards.
Hagrid, unfortunately, was even worse than Alphard at Gobstones.
When the Daily Prophet printed a birth announcement for an Ignacio Weasley, it filled Eileen with such pity and she considered writing to her Gobstones mentor.
She wasn’t very good with kind words, she’d rather lacked in an early role model, and she wondered if Abraxas would even accept or appreciate her condolences.
Septimius Weasley’s reputation was quite tarnished and his vault was swiftly drained in an effort to make reparations to his new wife’s family. Cedrella Black was, of course, soon disowned for her breach of promise (after all, her prerogative could not override a contract made by the head of her family house).
The Transfiguration Professor, Head of Gryffindor and immensely biased in Septimius’ favor, said sad things about the difficult course of true love and Eileen loathed him for the twinkle in his eye and his willingness to overlook the double betrayal Abraxas had suffered. Professor Dumbledore’s class gave her a regular headache, even if she looked at his stupid, garish, ugly robes instead of meeting his too blue gaze. It was easy enough for her to hate the professor and his class.
Tom Riddle found the Malfoy-Weasley love-tangle situation immensely funny, and, because Tom Riddle thought Abraxas’ heartbreak and misfortune was a bit of a joke, Rosier and Mulciber and Avery and Nott and Lestrange all treated the situation as a great laugh.
Love, Riddle maintained, was a puerile waste of time and an unacceptably idiotic vulnerability.
Love, agreed Rosier and Mulciber and Avery and Nott and Lestrange, was for the losers of this world.
Alphard Black, who was quite fond of his cousin Cedrella (particularly when compared to his feelings for his siblings) and had some tepidly positive thoughts in Abraxas’ direction, tended to drift out of his dormitory at these times. He challenged Eileen Prince to quite a few games of Gobstones and lost, pathetically, every time.
(He didn't mind, because there was very little he allowed himself to mind, and he was almost willing to admit to himself that he liked watching Eileen win).
Eileen put off writing to Abraxas, letting her doubts delay her day after day and week after week.
Then there was that business with the Chamber of Secrets opening, and Eileen was quite distracted and forgot all about writing to comfort and support Abraxas Malfoy.
Her parents had promised there would be no bad wizards, no monsters wearing a human face, in England.
