Summary:
Hogwarts, and everything related to it, belongs to me.
Literally.
I am the heir of Slytherin. The only descendent left of the four founders. These walls here, they're mine. The grounds, mine. The underground bits, too. Especially the basilisk. Following such logic, all the people aren't mine, but I should know about them. They are, in fact, mere visitors in my castle. I am not just entitled to their knowledge, I am supposed to know what they know.
Nyathera is no different.
I will find her out.
I will uncover her mysteries.
After all, it does belong to me.
Chapter One: Every Word Like Winter
I don't know if she tries to stand out ever so defiantly, or if she just honestly prefers pants. Leather pants, most of the time, but pants regardless. They're black pants, all the pairs she keeps for classes are black. Therefore she isn't breaking a Hogwarts rule or the Dress code.
I'd like to say it's just odd of her, but she is the actual, physical embodiment, of odd.
She tattoos her skin, then uses magic to wash it all away.
She pierces parts of her body, then uses magic to heal away the holes.
I shouldn't be staring at her, especially during a Slug Club meeting. But she's wearing pants with some new sort of fabric, much less the ridiculous print. She's slapped her hair up at all angles. She's pierced the bridge of her nose and tattooed roses and tulips and vines all over her collarbone. It's rather difficult to not stare at how she's decorated her new skin.
She stared back at me for several minutes, creating an awkward tension in the room.
I looked up at her and met her gaze. I quietly cleared my throat to scare off the beginnings of cottonmouth. "It must hurt to have to clean your skin just to tattoo it again."
She shrugged, stared off, and then drew in a deep breath. "It's more like painting than tattooing. It hurts, but that's the point."
I scoffed while the others chuckled, Slughorn's discomfort obvious.
"That sounds more like pointless suffering than anything else."
She stared right back at me. "Suffering is like bleeding, Tom. Sometimes it stops with a bit of pressure, sometimes you just bleed out until you die. It doesn't matter how you bleed, because it happens to all of us. You can't escape the bleeding, you just have to fix it when it happens. And sometimes you can't, so sometimes you die."
She obviously doesn't understand me. I don't blame her, though; it's difficult, basically impossible, to understand a god.
A/N: Please review.
