Warning for child abuse, non-consent, incest, and suicidal ideation.
She hates the holidays, but can't tell a soul. While her classmates babble of Christmas traditions involving baubles and snowmen and ornate holiday wreaths (and one, oddly, of a 'Christmas pickle'), all Mandy can think of is her own family traditions. Of belt buckles and missing knickers and a circlet of bruises around her throat, fading to dingy yellow and hidden by her winter scarf. Of epithets hissed in her ears and moans caught in her hair as he fills her up and she counts the imaginary animals in the ceiling cracks.
She wants to sign the list to stay at school, but is too afraid to commit to the promise scribbled in ink and family secrets. Morag asks her to come over after Christmas but she refuses, gnawing her bottom lip until it bleeds and whispering transparent excuses. The look that her friend gives her stings like acid, but she can't say anything. The words are locked in her throat, and only her father holds that key.
Every moment that ticks away is another moment closer to home, another moment closer to him, and by the time the Hogwarts Express pulls into the Hogsmeade station, steam filling the grey sky, Mandy is a nervous wreck. She sits alone, perched on top of her trunk, though there's plenty of room in the compartment. That's not the point.
When she steps off the train, he's there, the only person scowling in a sea of smiling faces, and when she hugs him, she feels like she's sold her soul. He ruffles her hair, and the touch burns.
"Come along, Mandy," he tells her, taking her trunk with one hand and her arm with the other, the warning squeeze his fingers deliver enough for her to gasp.
"Yes, Father," she whispers as they Disapparate. She stumbles over their front stoop when they land, her stomach heaving until she nearly chokes. The taste of phlegm in the back of her throat is enough to make her rush to the loo, bending double over the toilet as bile splatters the water. He doesn't follow, but did she really expect him to?
The next few weeks take on the dreamy, surrealistic edges of a nightmare, and all Mandy can think about is Hogwarts. She clings to that ideal more desperately than a drowning victim, though the bruises won't stop flowering on her hips and she can't sit down without wincing anymore. She can't eat anymore without feeling that perpetual salty trickle down the back of her throat, and the thought makes her want to vomit.
"Good girl," he whispers when he kisses her good night, lingering just that moment too long, and she feels sick, hiding underneath her covers the way she used to when she was a child and was afraid of the monsters in her closet. Only now the monster wears her father's face, and she can't escape him anymore.
She dreams of escape the only way she knows how, of stepping off the Astronomy Tower, of slicing her wrists with the carving knife kept in the back of the drawer, of running into the street, into the sea of bemusing Muggle traffic. What would it feel like? she wonders as she curls into the tightest ball she can, as her pillow dampens and her room echoes with the force of her shaky breathing. Would it hurt? How long would it hurt?
...Would it be worth it?
As always, Mandy has no answer.