III. off with her head
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She woke up that god forsaken morning, staring at the ceiling. Her head hurt.
The figure she had sworn to see in the corner of her eye so often melted as the curtains moved with the wind. There were worse things than going insane, like Dark Arts in an hour, or her own solitude.
Voldemort wasn’t after her. Leaving had left a cruel gap nothing could fill. She no longer had a purpose, a gap left for only her to be consumed by. The war had gone, and so had the fire. What remained was a gaping maw of wrath and grief—hers, his, it didn’t matter anymore. All of which emotions she was sure were a sick deflection of his own. An eye for an eye. How long does it usually take for the hero to become the villain? She didn’t need to ask; she could feel the silent drip of it, stretching her out too thin, too long. She was quite sure she was dragging it by its silent, dripping ends out too long for a cause that wasn't hers to withhold in the first place.
To be crushed under. To sacrifice generations for. Sacrifice the sheep, then sacrifice its lamb. And to no help of her own people. She’d been laid at the altar of this war, an offering without her consent. Dumbledore had smiled as the blade fell, all honeyed words and illusions of salvation. She can’t remember Dumbledore as the god-like figure she once saw him to be. The hourglass wasn’t speeding up as he said; she was just a doll in the bottom of it.
The hourglass on the side table stared at her and hissed as the grains rushed, each grain a scrape of what had been lost, a reminder of the truth. The object mocked her, of what's been lost, what will be lost when she no longer has the hunger to fight anymore. To kill her hunger, turning her inside out and putting her back together like a used doll. It was a game they were playing as casually as kids with a skipping rope. Each death she carried was treated as a scrape to the knee and a sugary treat to soothe. Only she wasn’t thirteen anymore, and those sugary words, dripping with corrupt promises, no longer appeased her.
She was starving for a fight she was never permitted. Permission was such an ugly word. It rotted her teeth to match her brain. She supposed she wouldn’t need any of that anymore, the dilution of her fire. I mean, wasn’t she known for it? Marketed for it? Sold for it? Ravaged for it? Whether to the public or Voldemort, the details had long slipped her mind. Catching sight of her now oh-so-familiar frazzled reflection, covering the hourglass to silent its sound, and turning back under the cozy covers was the best she could do.
The classroom smelled faintly of damp stone and old parchment, a scent that clung to her like decay. Harri stepped inside, dragging her presence like a shroud. The room seemed to exhale as she entered, the torches dimming just enough to turn their flickering light into shadows that crept along the walls.
Her seat, far in the back, awaited like a tombstone. She slid into it without a word, ignoring the way the wood groaned under her weight. The desk was etched with the scars of generations—names carved in shaky handwriting, desperate pleas for freedom from a life none of them understood yet. Harri traced a gouge with her fingertip, feeling the depth of it. She knew the name. Regulus Black. He drowned for her fight. One side considered him a waste of a title, the other a waste of talent. Neither once considered him nor the weight of grief that sank him deeper than any lake ever could.
The professor—tall, composed, and unnervingly serene—entered with the kind of grace that suggested he floated rather than walked. His presence was magnetic, but there was something about him that felt wrong, like a photograph where the subject’s eyes didn’t quite match their expression.
She didn’t like the way he carried himself, but she could respect it. He almost carried himself with that respect, like he absorbed it—definitive in his movements. Not to be questioned unless hell fell through. Tongue against her cheek, studying him as though deciphering a riddle.
He addressed the class with the precision of a scalpel, his voice slicing through her ears. Her spine stretched.
The lesson began, a lecture on identifying and dismantling enchantments meant to ensnare the mind. Harri had given up on the meaningless noise. Her mind drifted, her interest slipping to the cracks in the walls, the spaces where the stones seemed to bleed shadows, the figure appearing again. She stood.
A sharp sound—chalk snapping against the board—yanked her back. The professor had turned, his dark eyes scanning the room and, as if knowing she wasn’t paying him mind, said,
“You,” he said, tilting his head in her direction. “Miss Potter. Paying attention?”
A dismissal, all the same as a beckoning.
“How could I not, sir?”
He didn’t hold her frustration, almost amused.
He stepped closer, slow and deliberate, his footsteps echoing like a heartbeat. “Tell me,” he said, “if you were ensnared by an enchantment designed to feed on your deepest fears, how would you escape?”
An itch began, like bugs in her brain, scratching and scraping.
Bastard.
He turned to look at her. His eyes unreadable, too calculating. A giveaway to the force he was putting on her brain, trying to tear his way in.
“Not only do you believe attention to be in vain, but time.”
Not a question, an invitation. Certainly not one to her brain. She felt her own teeth grinding in her skull.
“I have time. And in that time, professor, I would let it consume me, that is. Feed off me until my hunger was all that was left.”
There was a subtle change in his posture—an infinitesimal shift, something that might have been satisfaction or perhaps curiosity. She couldn’t tell. The air was cold.
“Sit,” he said finally. “The rest of you, focus on her. Fear is not something to conquer. It is something to understand.” He sat on the edge of her desk.
“And if the hunger never went away? If it tore at you forever, never letting you rest, never letting you escape? It has a known tendency to do that.” He asked softly. His voice was like velvet-a thirst of his own, but there was something venomous under it, uninviting.
“That would be the point, I assume. Fear cowers to hunger. I suppose if you would like to test my theory, put the Ministry and money in the same room.” Her words were raw, as though they hadn't been tempered by any civility.
A few students laughed. There wasn’t a joke. “And why is that, Harri Potter?” Her name was a shove, a dig to the itch in her skull.
“Voldemort…” her bones began to itch, like he was scraping his way into them next, “…would sooner rip your families to shreds before they’d give it up.”
The laughing cut like a chord too tight. Their eyes felt like they burned the mush in her skull.
His rough hands traced Regulus’ name on her desk, digging into it with a slight smile for her to see before taking his former place at the top.
Turning, staring where her ghostly figure had been, a mockery as if he had seen the proof of her madness.
“The stage may be set, the play acted, but the twisted truth is woven in the corners where light dares not linger.”
The class was dismissed.