Teddy Lupin’s Cool Aunt Jay and Uncle Jacob tho. Imagine the possible shenanigary when either or both of them are on babysitting duty
I don't think Jay would be a very shanenigan-y babysitter, but certainly shanenigans never shanenigone for her. I imagine, after the wizarding world war, she finds it difficult to find a place to call home. Eventually, she will settle back to her abandoned childhood home. I imagine it will take a long time for her to go through things and make the place hers, not just a museum for memories. I made a little drabblet of Jay, Jacob, Jay's adopted child Romion and Teddy, whose visiting for a few days. Straight from the stream of conciousness :3
It was one sunny and warm day. Perhaps the only one for the whole summer. Jay had insisted on trying to get the overgrown garden back into shape. Without any magical tools, of course, because nana had insisted nothing tastes the same with magic involved. Jacob had insisted on, well, definitely not doing that.
“I’m boooored.” Teddy was slouching in the garden chair, which was still slightly damp for having been drenched in rains for what felt like months.
Jay scoffed. Had Romion been complaining, she would have answered with a condescending tone, “When I was a child, I didn’t get bored.”
“Jacob”, Jay called out, short on patience,
“Get the kids something to do.” She continued pulling out the brambles from the patio by hand.
Romion looked at Jacob, who looked at him, rolling his eyes swiftly at Jay. Romion knew it was one of those moments they just let auntie Jay do whatever weird shenanigans she had currently been lost in.
“Alright kids, time for a break and a snack”, Jacob left the book open on the table and rolled out of the dusty sun chair.
When they had arrived in Britain, they had to pull out a whole rug of brambles off the front door that was blocking the building shut. Romion had been thinking the nature was different and interesting. Then they spend a day indoors, keeping cover from pouring rain. And now that they finally went out, he was quite fed up with nature in half an hour.
He followed Jacob and Teddy inside. The air was still quite cold and damp. With the flick of a wand, some wood was added to the coals. Something Jay was also not a fan of, given she wanted everything to be done the grandma’s way. And grandma had been a muggle. Which must be why she took in the most un-magical boy like Romion.
“Let’s watch a movie. This one!” Teddy held up a childish cartoon. The younger child was easily entertained by moving pictures. Romion could’ve been entertained by just watching Teddy’s hair change colors like a mood ring. It had brightened up yet again, having faded in the boredom of watching weeds grow.
“I’ve already seen all of these movies”, Romion said. In the weeks prior they had been locked up inside the house, he had been dying of boredom. He had wished they would have figured out something fun to do as friends. But he couldn’t be friends with a baby. Teddy was basically a baby, so much younger than Romion. Jay had sold the idea of Teddy staying a few nights as a fun sleepover, like an adventure from the cartoons. Couldn’t have been further from the truth.
“Oh, you have?” Jacob said. He had fallen asleep early on the sofa, when Romion and Jay had watched the last one together. The Star Wars trilogy’s last part. The one that made his aunt cry. It seemed like most movies made her cry, silently, but he was still quite sure she was crying.
“We can watch the series again, starting from the first one”, Romion suggested.
Jacob didn’t seem too interested.
“There’s a book case in the upstairs corridor. Romion, how bout you go grab a couple VHS cassettes from there, while I make us sandwiches.
It seemed adequate. At least he’d get to watch something new again.
He just hadn’t been upstairs yet.
When they arrived, Jay had been cleaning the years of grime and dust without rest. The first day, it was mainly just changing sheets, having a working fireplace and some food to eat before they collapsed to sleep. But not before checking the house for curses. It was curseless, according to Jacob, but Romion hadn’t gotten the idea out of his head that the place could have been cursed.
And certainly, it could have been. The one new thing, apart from their personal clothes, some shampoo and pizza boxes was the big portrait of Jay and Jacob’s father, Leroy. Despite that, that picture, along with most of the pictures of the house were very unmoving for a wizarding house, Leroy’s portrait looked quite cursed. Though the living room had big book cases that were filled with memorabilia and pictures just like it, it was the only one where he smiled.
And ghosts and curses aside, he had seen some huge spiders while Jay was cleaning.
He could see the stairs were slightly dusted, but as he got to the top floor, he started to see the path in dust. There were four rooms, one with a label toilet, then one on that side, then two on the right, and the book case in between them. As he went to cautiously grab a few cassettes, praying not to get tangled into any webs, he realized the last door was open. Jacob must have walked there earlier.
Gentle reflection of the bright sun made the room much less haunted looking. It was quite worn out and empty. The furniture was miss-matched. The bed and the desk were newer than the dark wood cabinets. A few knickknacks like old unwanted toys and useless schoolbooks were still in their place in the room, but it was clear no one had lived there for a while. On purpose. Everything of importance had been stripped away, brought somewhere else from the childhood home.
Jacob had brought his bag in his room and splayed it out on the room, barely dusted the floor and lamp, nothing else. He has probably been sleeping in the sheets that had sat for years.
He grew curious. One of the rooms must have been Jay’s room.
He slowly opened the opposite room. As his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting of the room, he could tell the room was the master bedroom. The curtains had been shut, but so worn thin and colorless from the years of exposure they could as well have had a hole the size of the window. The double bed had no duvets, just a cover blanked for the mattresses. On the side of the dresser was a framed old picture of a married couple. In the dimmed light he could barely see it was of Jay’s parents in the old days. This wasn’t Jay’s room, but her and Jacob’s parents. It was hard to imagine serious Jay as a toddler learning to walk, let alone Jay’s mom Milya anything other than a dried out grandma. He lost interest in the mundane stuff collected over. Surely, a movie was better than 60’s men’s clothes.
Romion went back to the corridor.
Something was glowing from under the door. Perhaps it was just the sun.
He grabbed the handle. It gave him a light spark of static electricity. His breath hitched, but as he was already holding the handle, he might as well satisfy the curiosity.
The daylight was – no, it was not daylight. A warm hued light arose from the desk like a whisper of sun had been collected into a sphere. It was an old bedroom with similar hand-me-down furniture collected over the years as Jacob’s room.
On the desk, there was a locket, lying on a yellowed, crumbled paper, like it had been laying there for all eternity. At least like, 10 years. The lid of the locket had intricate detailing that looked like liquid gold and a sea of shamrocks had joined in union to create the most beautiful golden jewelry. Such a locket would surely have some sort of secret inside of it.
As he grabbed the locket, the letter unfolded onto the table. He twirled the locket and felt the sleep design of the latch. As he flipped it open, the blinds rolled open. The ethereal light was gone. There wasn’t a photo inside, but some tiny Fraktur script.
“Oh, there’s a lot more movies!” Teddy’s voice startled Romion more than the blinds opening on their own. He closed the locket with a loud clack by reflex.
“What are you looking at?” Teddy asked.
Romion pocketed the locket. He would ask Jay later about it.
“Just around”, he shrugged.
Jay’s room was much more lived in. She had left everything behind.The bed wasn’t made, as if she threw the duvet off her just this morning. There was less dust than in the main bedroom, but oddly it was clear Jay hadn’t been back in a while. The bookshelf to the right there were some figurines, trinkets, all in their right place and an empty, open owl’s cage. Some shelves were bursting full of her well read childhood picture books and muggle school books. She really had been in a muggle school before Hogwarts.
Only on the bedside and in a neat pile on the desk there seemed to be a few more extensive books on magic. The left bookshelf was for magical gadgets and supplies of various sorts, categorized alphabetically. These interested Romion and Teddy less. Over on the bedside there was a large pinboard, which had eventually run out of space. The photos, some moving, some still as the dead were a collage of good times. She was younger. Most of the people he didn’t know, some looked vaguely familiar. His eyes wandered onto one of the last additions. In the picture, Jay was alone, leaning on a bag store with her eyes
Teddy snatched a picture from the middle of the board, where Jay was along with friends, laughing, bottles in hands. They were jamming to a music the picture couldn’t relay. Romion didn’t think she drank. He didn’t even think she went to concerts.
“I think this is my mom.”
Romion looked at the picture, and then at the figure who seemed to be having the most fun in the picture. It was not just the pink hair.
“It must be”, Romion agreed. That must be why Jay insisted they would get along with Teddy. But Romion was not like Jay at all.
Teddy let his hands fall.
“Jay liked Star Wars as well, just like you.”
What sort of comment was that supposed to be? They weren’t related. Besides, the movies were just cool regardless.
