Disclaimer: If I was the real author of Harry Potter, I would not be putting my work on a website with the word fan in the name.

A/N

Go ahead and hate me, but I'm still not ready to update Nightmares Under Purple Skies, just yet. The next chapter is actually pretty long and need rewriting, and I'm lazy. Sorry. Like I said, I don't blame you if you hate me.

Now, for this story. Out of all the fanfiction I've ever written, this is probably my favorite fic. I don't know why, but there's just something about it that I really love. I wrote it almost two years ago, now, all the way back in the summer of 2009, and I've been avoiding typing it up because I had to be really careful about proper grammar, since there's no dialog. I wanted to have it beta'd, but I'm honestly too impatient for that. So, if you see any grammar issues (that aren't part of the letter, because that's for effect), tell me through a review, please, and I'll fix it.

Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi…

I see the gibberish writing on the top of the framing. I am both unbearably curious and horribly fearful of what I will see when I gaze into the mirror itself.

Erised stra ehru oy…

Your heart's desire…

No.

I close my eyes and turn away before I catch even a glimpse.

I do not want to see it. I do not want to know.

But I have to look. I have to know just how selfish I really am.

Your heart's desire…

Your heart's one, true desire. Just one.

I turn back to the mirror, but close my eyes even more tightly.

Don't be a coward, I tell myself. Just look.

I open my eyes. It takes me just a moment to see the difference. Well, three differences. All from one wish.

First, I am in color. My long hair is brown and my robe is deep blue. But my skin color is very nearly the same. I am still dead. Second, I am inside the stone coffin that my mother was ultimately buried in. And, finally, there is no knife wound on my breast. No blood staining my robe. Instead, there are five large, deep violet bruises on my face, and six on what little I can see of my chest and arms. I do not want to move my sleeve to see more.

So I am not quite as egotistical as I had feared. My reflection is not old and it does not have the diadem. My heart is realistic. I realize I have spent years subconsciously trying to figure out a path that could have given me everything I wanted. There had been no escape. I realized that, now. A millennium later, I had stopped wishing I could have gotten away. I only wished I had picked the other alternative.

I long ago learned that spirits cannot cry. Until now, I did not realize how horrible that was.

The thought of even that is too much to bear.

If—if I had never stolen the diadem…if I had not gone to it for guidance, I never would have run away. I still would have died, but it would have been much slower and more painful, and much sooner. The diadem told me how to extend my life. I only wish it had not done so.

If I had stayed with the man my father had wanted me to marry, I would have honored his dying wish. I would not have disappointed my mother. I would not have committed the sin of thievery that caused me to fear the next life. I would have moved on. I would have died with a mother who approved of me. I would have had a funeral. My body would not have been left to rot in the cold, lonely Albanian forest.

And at a small price, I would say, now. Ten meaningless years of my pathetic, lonely life and a longer beating from the Baron. A few more hours of physical pain….I knew that morning when I snuck into my mother's chambers that I was in danger. I would not have put it on if I had not been afraid. I knew something bad was about to happen. The diadem only confirmed my suspicions. When I became defiant toward him, again, three weeks later, and I saw him snap, I knew that was it. I could either take the diadem and run, or die.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have thanked him and taken the beating with a smile.

It is not as if I ever really had a realistic chance of escape. At my birth, my mother chose three suitable candidates for my husband. My father was supposed to chose which of them I was to marry when I turned thirteen, so we would have two years to get used to each other before the wedding. But, when I was only ten years of age, he was struck ill. It soon became apparent that he would not survive to my thirteenth birthday. The three young men were brought in front of him. He chose the Baron, saying that a strong hand of authority might be able to tame my unruly mouth. He died two hours later, while I was receiving my first beating. Upon his death, I was bound by law to marry the man he had chosen for me. No matter what.

He had meant well, my father. At the time, a woman who disobeyed a man was considered evil. I could have been arrested for telling my husband 'no.' He had only wanted me to be happy. He had known an occasional slap from my husband would have been much better than what the guards did to the criminals in prison. He had had no way to know just how abusive the Baron would be.

By the time I was thirteen, he had broken seven of my bones and knocked me out six times. My mother knew everything, but her hands were tied. She would have been arrested for trying to get me out of the wedding. I was trapped.

So, three years after my father's death, I snuck up to my mother's chambers and put on her diadem. That was my first mistake. It helped me see the situation logically. I knew as soon as it touched my head that I had to get myself away from him. Far away. But I did not want to disgrace my father by rejecting the choice he had made for me on his deathbed. I tried to stay. I tried to obey him. I tried to gain some control over my own actions. I tried not to give the Baron a reason to hit me again. In a way, that was mistake number two. If I had not done that, my life's story may have been almost the same length as it eventually became, but with the happier ending. Perhaps the three weeks without beatings had made us both anxious. If life during that time had not been any different, maybe that one beating would not have been so severe. Maybe that beating had not been so severe, it only seemed so because I had become accustomed to painlessness. That is something I will never know…

My third mistake was losing control of myself that one snow Saturday evening. Because I was the daughter of one of the schools founders, I did not sleep with the other girls of my house; I had been given my own room. As the future son-in-law of one of the school's founders, the Baron had also been given a private bedchamber. He knew my password, but I had not been permitted to know his. He would come and go as he pleased. It had never bothered me too much. He rarely hit me in there. He had really been, in all honesty, quite smitten with me. He had often told me that I was the smartest, fairest woman he had ever seen. Most of the time, when he came into my chamber, he would do little more that watch me study. But that time was different.

As soon as the door had swung open, I had realized something was off. He had never come to my bedchamber so late, before. He had normally been asleep for at least an hour by the time I got into bed, and I had been about to change into my pyjamas. As soon as he greeted me, I realized he was drunk. Immediately, I began trying to think of a way to distract him and stop him from doing what I knew, instinctively, he was planning. When he grabbed my wrist and tried to push me down onto my bed, I tried to calmly tell him that I was not ready for that, that we should wait until after the wedding, in case I were to become pregnant, but he was so intoxicated that nothing short of screaming would have stopped him. So I closed my eyes and tried to wait until it was over. I told myself that it was bound to happen eventually. We were, after all, to be married in only two years. I thought I could handle it. I thought I could manage not to fight back. But when I felt his usually able and sure hands fumbling to untie my corset, I lost what little control I had been able to maintain.

After I had tried talking calmly, I braced my self for impact and yelled at him to stop. I hoped that, at the very least, he would be so angry that he would forget his intentions.

Twenty minutes later, it became apparent that his drunkenness was preventing him from seeing the extent of the damage he was causing to my body. If I did not try to get away, I knew I would die. My brain had already begun feeling hazy, like I was not far from unconsciousness; and I knew that, once I had been knocked out, there would be nothing to let him know when he had gone much too far.

That was when I made my fourth and worst mistake of all; I gritted my teeth and ran away.

I pull myself out of my reverie to look into the mirror, once again. I wonder if it shows the absolute truth, or merely what my subconscious believes the truth to be. If the bruises I see on my reflection are there purely to show why I would have died, or if they truly would have been exactly as they are shown on the mirror. I float closer, to get a better look, and realize two things.

First, that the reflection is not of me at the age of twenty-two year-old I had been when I had died; it is of me at the age of thirteen. I had forgotten I had done most of my growing when I was much younger than the average girl. I had attributed the two inches of height difference to the height I was floating and the angle of the mirror. The second thing I notice is that the bruises are familiar. I recognize them. Or, at least, I recognize most of them. With shaking hands, I reach up and pull down the top of my robe, revealing two very familiar, oddly shaped bruises just above both of my breasts. They would have been full handprints if my stiff corset had not protected me when the Baron had shoved me onto the bed.

I examine the battered face of my reflection more closely. There are five bruises, four of them are familiar to me, and one is not. The only one I do not recognize is the one on my left temple.

I do not want to think about it any more deeply than that. I go back to my memories.

The Baron was normally much faster than I. I had been afraid he would catch me, and whatever he would have done after than, I was certain I would not survive. But his drunkenness slowed him down; he was stumbling and confused. I managed to make it to the top of a staircase just before it changed destinations, preventing him from following me up the stairs. This bought me some time, as he could no longer follow a direct path to me. I rain to my mother's chamber. She was not there; I realized she must have fallen asleep in her office while she was grading papers, again. I grabbed some parchment and her best quill and quickly began scribbling. The words of my letter have always remained seared in my memory.

Dear Mother, I had scratched, writing so quickly that the words were barely legible, I have to leave. He's going to kill me if I don't. Please don't look for me, that way you won't be punished for hiding me if I'm found. I won't hide myself so well that I'll never be seen again, I promise, but I can't stay here, anymore. I have to take some of your robes. I'm sorry. I can't get back to my room to get my own. You can't protect me from him while I'm here, but you can protect me if I leave. Don't let him drop out of school to look for me. And after he graduates, make sure he stays to be a professor, as you promised he could. Don't let him look for me, I beg you. You have the authority to keep him here. That's all I ask of you. I started a new paragraph.

I have to take some of your books. I'm sorry, but you have money to buy more, and I have nothing. If I'm going to survive on my own, I'm going to need to know spells and brews that I've never even heard of, before now. If I didn't have to take your possessions, I wouldn't, but right now, there is no other choice.

I love you, Mum. I really do. I'm sorry to have to burden you with this.

Love,

Helena

After I had finished writing, I took a deep breath and tried not to break down. I knew I needed to keep it together, for now. There would be plenty of time to cry once I was out of danger.

It was then that I realized that I needed to take something else. That was my fifth mistake; I knew I needed the diadem. It was the one thing that she owned that I knew she would not forfeit to help me, and I knew it. She had worked for twenty years to make it and she needed it to teach Astronomy. Without it, she could not tell one tiny little dot in the sky from another. I was not even supposed to know where she had kept it. But I was selfish. I probably could have survived without it, but I knew for certain that I would survive if I took it. With it, I would know where, in the wilderness, I would be safest from predators, and where hunting for food would be easiest. I had been so selfish that I was ready to sacrifice the education of hundreds of children and steal my mother's most prized and treasured possession, just to make my life minutely less challenging. I should not have done it. I should have only taken what I really needed and been happy because I knew my mother would not have been angry with me for taking her clothes and her books. But I was too spoiled and selfish to see that blessing. I just wanted more, no matter what the consequences were for anyone else. So, I wrapped the diadem in her softest silk robe, put it into the bag with everything else I was taking with me, and I ran.

I look into the mirror, once again. At the handprint on my teenage reflection's dull grey face. Five mistakes, that is all it took to turn my dead-end life into a dead-end eternity. If I had made the other choice for any one of them, everything would have been so different. If only I had not been so selfish, so stupid, the bruised and beaten dead girl who I see in the mirror could—no would—have been real. I would have died at the age of thirteen—or, at the very least; I would not have died thinking that all the afterlife held for me was the burning pits of Hell. I wanted nothing more than that. Nothing…

Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi.

A/N

Like I said, this is one of my favorite fics, so I want reviews even more than I usually do. And that's saying something.

Before someone asks where I got the idea, it is actually mentioned in SS/PS that Harry passes a female ghost in the library when he's on the way to the Mirror with Ron. I would love to give you a quote and a page reference, but we had a tornado watch earlier today, and all my Harry Potter books are packed safely away in a closet so they'd be safe in case we actually got a tornado, and I really don't feel like trying to dig it out to quote. I read somewhere that it's generally accepted that that was the Grey Lady, so I don't know...

On an unrelated note, it's actually pretty impressive that I got up the motivation to type this up at all. I'm on another one of my other fandom binges, at the moment. Earlier in the year it was Kim Possible (yes, it is still good, even though I'm a lot older, now), and a couple of years ago it was Twilight (*shudders*), but right now it's Yu Yu Hakusho. In the last week I've watched episodes 1-109, and I have episode 110 open in another window, right now. It's on the other half of the screen as I type this up. When I binge on other fandoms, it's rare that I have the mind to even think about Harry for more than thirty seconds at a time, yet I managed to type this up. I don't know. I might actually branch out and write some fics for some other fandoms some time in the near future, I'm not sure. *shrugs*

Anyway, don't forget to review! Even if it's only to tell me that the story is total crap, I want to know it. If I don't know it's bad, I won't know I need to fix it.