ad astra per aspera ; through adversity to the stars

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Melina had been a sickly child.

She was born too early in the month, and was too small to survive on her own. The hospital had aided with that, and when she was older she would find that her half-year of life was spent there, being fed by tubes and visited by her parents daily, where they would peer at her through a small glass cage that prevented her from outside harm.

When she came home, she was quiet. She didn't cry or scream, she sat still when her mother dressed her, stared blankly when spoken to, and slept soundly at night. She was the victim of many illnesses that threatened her already weakened system; respiratory infections mostly, that always threatened to become something more severe. And as a result, Melina was in and out of hospitals until she began to retain things for herself. Being ill was one of her earliest memories.

Her illnesses were perhaps only a part of her difficulties; her weaknesses ensured she couldn't walk alone until she was three, and she couldn't grasp the concept of speaking way past two, which was months following the usual range. But despite the sickness that plagued her constantly, once she finally got the hang of things, there was no stopping her.

Her mother, a woman named Odette who worked in a nearby bakery, and her father, a man named Leonardo who worked in the Italian Embassy of Paris, had never been so grateful that they had been granted a chatty child. They had suffered in her silence for so long, petrified that she would remain as such for the rest of her life, but to hear those babbles slowly but surely turn into coherent sentences was perhaps their biggest dream come true. They had prayed and hoped tirelessly for their daughter to get better, and it had appeared that God had answered them and helped them in a way they had always believed he could. It had paid off, and the couple were eternally grateful.

No longer did Melina require semi-regular hospital visits, nor was every cough and cold so detrimental to her health to the point it was a threat to her life. No longer did she sit in silence, unable to go to school and lacking the confidence befriend others. Now, she could hold a conversation and was singing and dancing to the radio that played whilst her father cut up the vegetables to roast for their lunchtime soup, sending her running down the sun-lit hallways outside their peeling crimson-painted door to pick up a baguette from Odette's work, or she could hold her mother's hand and a small wicker basket in another as they decided to take the métro to surprise Leonardo with home-cooked Italian food for a picnic dinner after a particularly hard week.

Now, she could skip her way up the centre aisle of their nearby church dressed as Angel Gabriel come Christmas, could wear the pretty blue plaid pinafores that were the uniform of her new school. She could stand during hymns, kneel during prayers, and run around in the snow hand in hand with her father until she was dizzy after service, whilst her mother caught up with her friends and not worry about her catching a cold. She could join her parents in travelling to Odette's hometown in the south-east of France for their Christmas Eve meal without worry of danger.

She could sing in the end of year showcase, could play in the river, and, most of all, could live alongside every other child without the possibility of it ending it in peril. Melina could be like every other child in her neighbourhood, and so she would do.

Melina was a friendly, sociable girl when she finally began attending school after years of home schooling. It was lucky that it hadn't held her back. She made friends easily, the type to invite the quieter kids into their playground games. Weekends were punctuated with birthday parties,  after school spent walking home with her closest friends. She went to summer camps and liked walking along the Seine, and was the type of student to be constantly told to stop talking all through the school day. She did her work though, and she did it well, a natural intelligence mixed with the loquaciousness.

Once she left primary school and then middle school of course she ended up in high school, which was where this only became more prolific and evident in her life. Melina was what the teachers liked to label as 'the nice one'. She was academic enough to keep up with her studies beyond the expected point, but flourished amongst her friends and soon found herself drawn into a long-established culture of slipping out at night, smoking and drinking. It wasn't dangerous - no, it was just something to enjoy and laugh about the next morning in the middle of mathematics when someone remembered through the blear something particularly stupid they had done.

Of course, like every other teenager of the time, this meant a lie or two to her parents, who really loved to pretend like they knew nothing was wrong, and never ever mentioned when they were awoken in the middle of the night by the crashing and whispered swearing. Odette and Leonardo promised to step in if it ever got too much, but Melina knew her limits. She was a good kid, and as long as she returned home with everything in place and was bubbly enough for rusks and coffee before church on Sundays. They didn't mind, because she was happy, and like herself, and not the sickly child she once was.

Melina was just being a typical teenager. It was expected of her, and unlike some of the horror stories that Odette heard from the mothers she had known since her daughter was just a toddler, and the men at the embassy who often described their family life as tumultuous, Melina was exactly the same. She was sweet, didn't abandoned her old mother and father in favour for some party, and never complained when asked to retrieve groceries, or pick up a package, or to use several weeks of her summer travelling to her grandparents. That just didn't make sense to her.

And as long as she achieved the grades needed of her and didn't end up dying or anything, then she supposed everything would be alright. Except there was some sort of clause in her agreement as the perfect daughter that meant that when it came to big decisions that she disagreed with, she only disagreed to a point.

She was sixteen when her father came home with a beaming smile on his face, pressing a kiss to his daughter's head as she leafed through one of the catalogues she had taken from the corner of her school's common room that afternoon before turning to his wife, handed her some elderflower wine and announced that he had received quite the interesting call at work earlier that day.

It was then which Leonardo told his wife and daughter that he had been called by his father, which was unusual because his father knew how improper it was to call the embassy as opposed to waiting until he returned home, but the news was so exciting that it couldn't wait. Apparently, a nearby villa in his hometown was looking for a gardener and handyman. And before Leonardo began his work in diplomacy, he had spent his days doing just that. And what would you know it, there was a housekeeper position available as well.

Not even the hum of quickly-paced French radio could break the silence that had fallen in the kitchen. Odette had paused, placed down the knife in her hand and asked Melina to leave. And after retrieving a couple of books the girl did just that, humming to herself as she sat on the steps several feet from their apartment door, listening as her parents discussed, shouted, and finally invited her back in.

It seemed Odette and Leonardo had come to an agreement. If they could manage to organise an appropriate tenant for the apartment they had spent the best part of eighteen years in and Odette could see this villa they would be living in and it was deemed up to par, then they would move. And the daughter, despite her mumbled protests about her friends and her entire life being there, wouldn't be able to change their minds.

Within two months their apartment was packed up and sent in a back of a van. Their visas and permits were granted and sped up by Leonardo's job before he left with their furniture, and Melina and Odette were on their way to the small countryside village that Leonardo had grown up in through the use of their family car. This was following hours upon hours of goodbye parties (Melina's final one had been just the night before them leaving and granted the large pair of sunglasses perched upon her nose) and many tears shed and numbers and new addresses exchanged as all promised to keep in touch.

Melina was rightly cautious about moving to Italy. She had not yet seen where her father had grown up - when it came to seeing her paternal grandparents, they always made a point of coming to Paris as opposed to the three of them making the journey, especially when she had been so sick - and although she didn't doubt that it would be a lovely place, she had grown up in a city, and that was what she was comfortable with.

But she knew why her parents had moved there. It was good pay, amazing if you consider where exactly it was located, as well as the actual house that came with the title. And there were many more opportunities that came with it. For starters, they were closer to where her maternal grandparents lived, and although she spoke basic Italian from practising with her father, she had always wished to progress her skill further. She wasn't reading the self-teaching book on language amongst her many other books for no reason during the drive down.

They reached the village at sunset. Customs hadn't taken as long as expected, and they had left early enough in the morning to ensure that they could have several stops for toilet breaks, stretching legs and food but not have to drive in the night.

Melina could remember her first view of it perfectly. The church and small scattering of shops around a town square was the very centre of the community and as their car bumped over the cobbled streets she was greeted by the sight of a market being cleaned up, a smiling woman waving as she spotted her curious eyes. They had been driving through nothing but small towns and countrysides for over an hour, but nothing quite seemed to compare to Verica, with its surrounding farms and vineyards and fields and fields of green grass and Biunda cows (she had come to sit with her father once they passed customs, wanting to get a feel to the place where he grew up and finding out more about it, which ended in many announcements in brash dialect).

It was pretty. The small neighbourhoods of homes in the same sandstone bricks as every other building, the green-painted front of the greengrocers, the feeling of it being close together yet spread apart over short distances of bumpy roads - it was new to her, but she couldn't dismiss it. She had grown up in the city, and this was strange to her. She would have to get used to it.

Her grandparents, Marcello and Carmela, were waiting for them at the villa when they finally, finally reached their new home. A dirt road and a gently swaying brass sign tilting it as 'Villa Misapinoa' greeted them initially, track surrounded by overgrown trees and other life that she would never have found in the city. The villa itself wasn't gigantic. But it was pretty, as was the small house also on the estate designed for the housekeeper and gardener to stay in.

The insides of the house were just as charming as the outside, as seen in the early mornings of the next day when Odette awoke her daughter to find that the former housekeeper had stopped by to show them around and how the place worked. Fourteen rooms, marble floors and terracotta tiles, frescoed ceilings and so insanely romantic that Melina didn't quite know what to do with herself.

It was something out of one of her books, the type of place where people in songs fell in love. And it was then that she decided that she liked Verica and wouldn't mind staying there. She could go back to Paris when she was older if she wanted to, but for now, she would attend school in a town a twenty-minute bus journey away, attend Sunday Mass, and learn to play piano on the one tucked away in the corner of the drawing-room.

It had been later that night when Melina was unpacking one of the many boxes filled with her possessions that she noticed something the former housekeeper had omitted entirely from their discussion.

She had never once mentioned the owners.

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a/n
i'm not personally religious, however
i have quite the education in it and realised
that seeing as majority of my characters are
wizards (and non-religious by proxy seeing
as i have no idea how that would work seeing
as plenty of religions don't agree with it) i
thought i would develop melina and
her family a little more by introducing this