CHAPTER NINE

When I returned to the hospital wing, the nurse glared at me from her office. I ignored her: I had more important things to do, and no nurse was going to prevent me from taking care of them.

As I lay back in my bed, which was close to the fire, I began retracing my conversation with Snape. He was right: My behavior had been off-the-wall, and I internally scolded myself for being so childish, especially with my vow of silence.

But then I realized the cold truth about my actions: Even if I was an adult on the inside, I was trapped in a child's body and a child's world. I didn't know how to act like an adult because I'd sheltered myself from them. And I didn't know how to act like a child either: My childhood ended the day I realized I was stuck in this time loop, and I secluded myself from the children around me for both their protection and mine.

I knew there would be consequences to breaking this curse despite the immense advantages. I might suddenly be the woman I was supposed to be, but I would have the personality quirks that would be expected in a wild child, or someone that had been raised outside of normal human society for most of their lives. In many ways, I am a wild child, but in other ways I wasn't. I was highly intelligent and reformed, and I had great abilities, abilities that only a strongly trained and cultured witch would have. The tests I took proved it: I was brilliant.

But that was my own doing. I thought of all of my hours spent studying upper-level magic instead of the magic of the second-years. When I had mastered those lessons and discovered my American abilities, I focused on them, fine-tuning what powers I had while discovering new ones in the process.

I was a prodigy, whether I was stuck in a child's body or not. I was an amazing British witch, and an amazing American witch. I was the perfect combination of both worlds, curse or no curse.

But no one knew aside from Severus and the portraits. I immediately thought of the care-free Amelia, a Slytherin from many years back. She had achieved greatness while a student here, and she had achieved her dreams. She was my idol, yet now she sat on a back hallway with little to no traffic. Her laughter had caused everyone to turn from her, and I knew I was one of her only friends.

I was also just like her friends. The other portraits were frozen in time, stuck within their frames and the frames of the portraits around them. No matter how much they wanted to escape, they'd never be able to. But none of them wanted to escape: They were happy to be immortalized. They could never be forgotten while they inhabited their frames, even if I, a student frozen in time outside of a frame, could be.

"Forgotten" was a word that haunted me. As soon as this curse started, I had a new identity, my old one gone. As I told Snape during our meeting, I quickly went internally to find my real identity. If Hogwarts and its curses couldn't identify me, then I'd do it myself, and I'd been successful, if you gauge success by twenty years without me cracking up.

Recently things had been different though. As I lay in the hospital wing, deciphering my own thoughts, I could hear movement throughout the castle. It wasn't the ghosts or professors making safety rounds: It was the people going to check on each other and exchange stories. I hadn't seen any newspapers in decades, but I knew that whatever was going on now was terrifying people. If Amelia and the portraits were concerned, then things were getting ugly again.

Suddenly, my head clouded. A picture of rain and storms filled my mind, and I knew I was having a premonition. A storm was coming, and someone would be caught in it. I knew it wouldn't be me: I'd learned my lesson. But the figure seemed so familiar, almost too familiar for me to accurately identify.

When the picture faded, I found myself staring into the fire. Another set of footsteps passed outside, and the nurse closed the doors soon after. She noticed the increased activity too, I thought, as I settled deeper under my covers.

Whether it was the premonition using up what little power I had or the deeper message behind it, I was suddenly deeply cold, and deeply terrified.