"There is a time and place for everything."

Cassie was not stupid because she knew better than to believe that the world had been unkind to her. She embraced her fortune and showed her gratitude by never wasting a day of her life sad. She planned to make sure people felt the same elation she did on a daily basis. She worked hard to be an optimist. Her strength to be happy came from her father's stories about Adina Rose from his mother and her grandmother, her namesake Cassana Rose. Cassana or the "Cass Master Granny" spoke of how her mother, Adina. had bravely pushed away her only child, the love of her life, all for them to live and be happy and threw away herself.

That's what love was, Cassie was told; to love others more than yourself. The love a mother felt for a child was that, the love a father felt for child was the same too; the love a mother and father (or sometimes mother and mother or father and father or gender fluid parents) was of putting their partner's well being before their own. That was what love was, Cassie was confident in that definition.

The way that Cassana felt for Gabriella had always been mixed.

Naturally she loved her because they were family, but their relationship was an in between one. They weren't too close, they weren't too distant. They kept up with each other, joked with each other, and signed their letters with affection. Except, those were what most of their interactions were: letters. Letters of love were sweet, but Cassie couldn't help to feel as if whenever the subject of their parents were brought up between the two in the letters, the subject was strained. However, Cassie was a boundary respecter; she knew that if Gabriella wanted to talk to her about it then she would. The times she did try to bring up her sister's strange responses when Cassie tried to delve deeper into their terse relationship were always brusque and odd. So she stopped trying and left it at that.

At the age of six, her sister left for Hogwarts, left for England. It was far from the ideal sibling relationship and it took a while but soon the two fell into a pattern. Cassie couldn't go so far as to say that her and Gabriella were best friends, but they were just the under the amount of closeness for sisters (ex: they didn't share shoes, ask for advice, sleepover in each other's rooms and giggle about boys). It always left Cassie uncomfortable, but for the sake of familial obligation she pushed the feeling aside.

At six her powers begun, Gabriella had started school and Cassie threw a tantrum because she had taken to becoming her sister's shadow throughout the years. Gabriella would snap, chastise, and push her away, but Cassie came back. That was probably where some of the space that Gabriella needed came from. Regardless, at the age of six Cassie's magic had done an impressive feat; she cast a nonverbal summoning charm on her sister's childhood blanket that she didn't go anywhere without. After her sister's first, lengthy letter (hidden somewhere in Cassie's childhood bedroom) about her first two weeks at Hogwarts, Cassie let go of her attachment.

At ten, she was accepted into Tituba's Academy for Gifted Children. In America there was basically no concept of blood purity, but they knew about the things that had gone on before her time; she knew about the Wizarding Wars, knew about the crazed man, knew about the blood purity issue. At Tituba's there was no care for that. For they'd all suffered under the same torturous experience at one time, a black hole in the magical history of witches of their time; the Salem Witch Trials.

In some ways it was unifying, and some could never understand why it had been so scarring to the descendent witches. However, it was always compared to the Holocaust and the Jewish genocide; to be persecuted for something you could not control. In some cases, some of the victims simply suffered abnormalities. They had done nothing wrong and it burned in Cassie's heart to know that people had died in history for being who they were.

Being an optimist in a world full of pessimists was the only thing Cassie could truly love about herself.

Because of this love for herself and the world she never suffered the effects of hopelessness or depression.

It came mildly in her teens.

At fourteen she had her first kiss, a sweet pressing of lips to each other with a boy four years older than her. Her parents, although not prejudice in anyway, had wanted her to have the same luck of marrying a pureblood. The boy she kissed was not who her parents wanted her to marry. That guy was inside, talking and schmoozing her parents with fancy words and long eloquent monologues about life in - uh - wherever he was from (yeah that's how much he meant to Cassie). The guy that she did kiss, Erick, she remembers this part was a good friend of her's. He was a funny lad, mature too, but appreciative of her maturity despite their age difference. She had sat on the back porch playing with her wand when Erick made flowers bloom for her.

"A flower for the pretty girl?" He offered, and she smiled before striking up a conversation with him. Erick was the 'suitor's' brother and evidently his caretaker. He

The kiss was sweet, but also very awkward. It had tried to progress to more, probably a hearty make out however, it was just too uncomfortable. Cassie chose to forget about that part. She also chose to disclose the fact that when she tried to be coy by leaving him with a flirty remark she ended up tripping over the last step and with an ass coated in dirt. She chose to forget the fact that she hexed him with the nastiest hex she knew when he laughed at her (it wasn't that bad, just a stinging hex that left his hand twitching the entire time they sat awkwardly in the living room as his brother tried to convince her a marriage would work). So it wasn't that Cassie lived a perfect life full of fairytale moments, she just chose to forget the less than pretty moments.

It was the curse of being an optimist.

The bad memories weren't forgotten actually, just pushed into the farthest corner of her mind and titled as so she'd only access them if she felt too conceited or too vain. It was a humbling move she made in keeping those memories. The best bad memories included: her first failed duel (first of six out of her twelve, that left her with a bruised tailbone and tears that wouldn't stop for a week), her first lost friend (an international girl who backstabbed her by telling all her friends wicked lies that resulted in Cassie having to quietly retire to her books for that entire week), her first fight with her parents (her mother had screamed and cried before storming out of the house, the tense magic swiveling in the air like unspoken heartache), the first rejection (her writing had been all that she was when she was fifteen and to have the paper call it "cliche, underdeveloped, and disappointing" had deeply wounded her), and worst of all was her first heartbreak.

Once more, Cassie believed that love was to put your partner or intended love's needs above yourself.

Her first heartbreak was about two years ago and it had her heart still smarting when she felt that pit-pat in her heart of an attractive male (attractive males who didn't intimidate her that was).

Now, when she was sixteen she met Thomas Selkins. Thomas Selkins was as lovely as he was rude. Tall and intimidating, witty and intelligent, and as brash as the ugly truth that the devil was indeed beautiful. For the first months of her sixth year he would tease her ruthlessly, dark eyes shining with excitement that confused her and left her curious. It left her knowledge hungry and she can confess that the few times she tried to flirt with him had ended disastrously (he ended up with a mouthful of her unintentional fist, she ended up with a completely burnt tie, they both ended up with bruised foreheads and he left cursing her existence, etc.). In the end of their sixth year, he kissed her with sort of passion she felt in movies.

It left her hungry for more kisses and pretty soon they were just casual kissers.

Then the beginning of their seventh, after a summer that had fleetingly left them both in bonding under the stars, they were officially boyfriend and girlfriend. It was tumultuous and full of all the sweet, glucose filled lovestory sappiness that every girl yearned for. However, in retrospect it wasn't all that perfect.

Cassana should have seen it, because all the events had just fallen into place for them to break up.

Thomas and Cassie had simply stopped speaking, they stopped sharing laughter, they stopped bantering, they had ended in an unnecessary break up. When she looked into those dark eyes, she had felt not the same splurge of excitement and it worried her. So she tried to make it work; tried to make them fall back into the people they once were. It had ended with her slapping him, him calling her a possessive, clingy pig unworthy of any male and her heart in pieces on the night of their Graduation.

It was no wonder to her parents when she begun scouting her magical colleges, her dreams of being Mrs. Selkins gone. She had liked the idea of marriage, of two separate people binding to be one, but along the way she had stopped being Cassie. She had stopped being smiles and jokes, stopped being kindness and courage; she had became recluse, became witty to only those who cared to know, became less of who she was. In turn, Thomas had become happier, had become kinder. In their two year relationship (she counted that year of interest and flirting oh yeah because that was year that she had devoted to her conflicting feelings for him), they had became more than just people in love. They had been each other; in each other's head. They had become engulfed in the picture-perfect love story that all teen girls wanted.

She drowned in the sorrow that the reality of all picture-perfect love stories left once they ended.

That was something Cassie had learned that was very important that she would carry on forever. Everything ends eventually and to make the moments that one had living were what life was all about. All throughout her schooling, she would fall about, flail about, be a menace on legs to those that knew her, but when she entered a Potions' classroom there was a sort of refinement to her. Her fingers took on lives of their own, her feet were solely on the floor, and her concentration was always on the task at hand. It was the one thing Cassie was confident in.

So when she received her acceptance letter into Merlin's she had made a good self-realization.

Her life is a big picture. There were pieces that were meant to fit at certain times in certain places created by certain people. There were pieces of her lost to different people in order for her to become who she was. Every bad moment she lived, all of the moments of her life were just fragments.

Pieces that fell into place.