In a Manner of Speaking, a Harry Potter fanfiction by LullabyKnell.
Post-DH, Pre-Cursed Child, Two Shot, Crack Fic.Excerpt:
In April of 1999, the widow Euphemia Rowle had a sudden heart attack and died at the age of 77 years old. Trusting solely in the supposed superiority of one’s natural “pureblood” magic and the spiritual properties of cursed rocks to see oneself healthy, it turned out, was a terrible replacement for actual medicine and regular check-ups.
The few people who had experienced Euphemia Rowle – for Euphemia Rowle had been an experience, something to endure rather than enjoy, unless of a precisely matching temperament – didn’t do a very good job of pretending her death was some sort of great loss or unexpected event.
Her only close living relative was her son, Thorfinn Rowle, whom she had hated with every spiteful bone in her embittered body with the same determination she had put towards being unpleasant, judgemental, and condescending to everyone she had ever met. It could be presumed that upon receiving news of his mother’s death, Death Eater Thorfinn Rowle had spat upon the floor of his prison cell and declared good riddance.
Good riddance to a puritanical woman who had decided long ago to be terribly unhappy and to blame the rest of the world for making her unhappy by not conforming to her ideas of what was proper.
The rest of the Rowle family was a gallery of distant cousins, who all were not pleasant people either but concerned enough about appearances to make a relatively decent showing at being as “demurringly and not openly purist, just able to see all sides of the issue” and “of course we hated the Dark Lord but we were afraid of defying him” as possible. Great-Aunt Euphemia Rowle had chased the most of them off decades ago. She had been the sort of obvious zealot that made a respectable family of purebloods look bad, especially considering the result of the war.
The Rowle Family put a notice in the Daily Prophet of Euphemia’s death and organized a brief memorial service to make appearances at before her will was read, as was expected of them. Besides that, the Rowles neither felt nor were prepared to accept that there might be any other interruption to their own lives. Not beyond, of course, any desirable bequeathing dictated in the will.
Therefore, none of them were quite sure what to do when the lawyer in charge of Euphemia Rowle’s affairs, serving as required the memorial and reading of the will, turned up with three unexpected items.
The first: an extraordinarily bewildered expression pointed towards…
The second: a nervous house elf acting as nanny to…
The third: a toddler who couldn’t be more than two years old.
Chapter Two (Fic Complete!)
Excerpt
“You swear you’re not having me on?”
“If I were having you on, I’d be having a better time.”
In a Manner of Speaking – Chapter 1 – LullabyKnell – Harry Potter – J. K. Rowling [Archive of Our Own]
Published
Cheloneuniverse 