In the morning, Calla could hardly drag herself out of bed. The reminder of the night before seemed to have been burned into her, all that rage and pain and that explosion of power; and now, the feeling as she slipped her feet into slippers, shivered in the cool air of her bedroom, that it was all a dream and she really was nothing but a little girl.

She was shaking as she made her way downstairs. Her cheeks burned in embarrassment at her outburst and shame at her behaviour. The reaction had been extreme, and she knew it wasn't the way to handle it, to handle anything. There was a part of her that knew she needed help, that knew that whatever she had done to make her feel better, she was still drowning and she needed something to hold her, to drag her to the surface. It had felt good in the moment. She knew it couldn't last. Nothing did.

Remus and Sirius greeted her with uncertainty. They hadn't called her out of her room last night, and though Molly had tried to speak to her, Calla didn't want to talk. She wanted to be alone in her self-pity and self-loathing. Actually being alone, in the darkness later on, had felt wretched, and she'd wanted to scream and cry and break things all over again. But that time, she had held it in, held her knees close to her chest, and gone to uneasy sleep.

The morning was even more difficult to face. She took the piece of toast Sirius offered her and sat down, not meeting their eyes as she spread butter on it. There was jam on the table but the thought of anything sweet turned her stomach. "I, um," she started, clearing her throat, "just wanted to say I'm sorry. For um, the way I acted. It wasn't very nice and I-I think I might have gone a bit overboard and I really don't - don't know what I was thinking." She winced. "It just... You know." She shrugged, staring at the table.

"It felt good," Sirius said evenly. She nodded, cheeks flaming. "You were angry, yes?" Again, she nodded. "At the Order?"

She didn't like the way he asked the questions, like she was a little kid being interrogated by a teacher because someone had said she'd stolen a pencil. "Yeah," she muttered. "I guess."

It wasn't the full truth and she knew it. She had a feeling Remus and Sirius knew it too. But it was convenient.

"You know taking your emotions out like that isn't healthy."

"Yes," she snapped. "Of course I do, I get that, I said I'm sorry."

"That's not what we're worried about, Calla," Remus told her gently. Like she was a child. "We're worried you're not coping with your emotions well."

"You think?" she asked shrilly. "You're always telling me that I need to channel my emotions into my spells and I did! I did it well!"

"And today, you're shaking," Remus noted.

She dropped her toast and clasped her hands together. "It's cold," she mumbled. It was a feeble excuse.

"Calla, you've shown you're powerful. You've shown you're capable of getting over this block You-Know-Who has placed on you. You need to control it, too."

"I can control it."

"Can you?" She didn't say anything. "Calla, we're just worried. Everyone is."

"I know." She closed her eyes, wishing it would all go away. Her scar flickered with the remnants of last night's pain. It had woken her from a nightmare full of falling lights and crashing waves. "I know, I get that."

"You can talk to us."

"I don't need to," she said, even knowing it was a lie. "I can handle it. I can handle myself."

"There's no shame in—"

"I can do this," she cried. She knew if it was Harry here they wouldn't have this problem, that he would be the model Defense student, that he would be brave and capable and everything they wanted her to be. They wouldn't be talking to him like he was a child who had had a tantrum and needed to be wrapped in a blanket. "Last night was a one-off. I'll write to Kingsley and apologise for my outburst." She took a bit of her toast. It tasted like sawdust in her mouth but she needed more. "It's okay. I'm okay."

She was not okay.

After breakfast, Calla went right back into her lessons. For Charms, Remus insisted on a theory class, which was infuriating. It was like he didn't trust her. Her power and anger had both ebbed overnight, but the latter kept flaring up, the longer she was stuck in the study, writing about the effects of Cheering Charms, as if it wasn't obvious. Remus gave her a practice exam paper to work on, too, but she already knew most of it. It wasn't the theory she needed to understand and it never had been. He was avoiding her magic, and that frustrated her.

For so long he had been saying she needed to use her emotions in her magic, but now that she did, it was wrong. Why? She wanted to know. Was it because it wasn't quite the way he wanted her to do it, because he didn't like that she was angry? Calla felt she had every right to be angry, but Remus for whatever reason, didn't. He'd always been the one on her side, the only adult who she actually trusted to stick up for her. Not for the first time, she contemplated whether he would have preferred her to be more like her brother. Braver and better and stronger.

During their tea break between lessons, Calla tried to put it out of her head, concentrating on drinking the tea as quickly as possible and straining the leaves. The main feature was a triangle, signifying stability, which she thought must be a lot of nonsense. She was reading it wrong. Also next to it was an open bag, a symbol of escape or freedom. From what, she wondered. At the bottom of the cup sat a bow, meaning reunion. She supposed there had already been one of those, though.

Sighing, she drained the tea and swapped Charms for Transfiguration and Remus for Sirius, who closed the door behind him and sat down opposite her. She glared across the desk but he spoke first.

"Personally, I thought you were brilliant last night." Calla blinked. "Really. I hadn't quite expected that reaction, but hey, it's progress."

"Remus seems to think it was a disaster," Calla muttered. "I don't think he thought I could actually do anything."

"Don't be stupid," Sirius said, and she was glad for the lack of gentleness in his voice. At least he wasn't patronising her. "He's worried about you more than anything, about what prompted that reaction."

"He said that wasn't the way to do it!"

"He meant," Sirius said heavily, "that's not the way to deal with your emotions. Which, I get it. Remus doesn't like anger and violence much, for his own reasons, he's always avoided taking it out on other people. Sometimes it stops him from dealing with his feelings entirely. That doesn't mean what you did last night was a healthy way of getting out your anger, but at least it was on inanimate objects." He shrugged, looking distant. "I was angry when I was your age too. At a lot of things. I get how it feels, to just want to get that feeling out of you. And last night it worked to your advantage. It unlocked something, but I know you're feeling the effects this morning."

She nodded, throat dry. "I don't know why."

"You exhausted yourself, and I'm not surprised. You need to work on controlling your magic, and your emotions, but you've proved you have the power. That you can access the power." He leaned over the desk, eyebrows raised. "When you were cursing that dummy, were you thinking about You-Know-Who?"

A shiver went through her. "Yes," Calla replied.

"Good. See, Calla, that power you used? That's yours. Not his. You proved that, too. You took it back from him in your anger."

"I don't understand how that works."

"Who understand how anything works?" was his answering question. Calla grinned. "Likely it's something to do with your mind, breaking through some block. You let your anger override your fear."

She thought about it for a moment in silence and then said, "No. I mean, I got rid of the fear but I think — I felt powerless and I just really, really wanted to prove I was powerful." She stared at her feet, resting on the carpet. "So I did? I mean, at the end, I definitely felt powerful. I had actually managed to do something."

Sirius steepled his fingers in concentration, brow furrowed. "I see."

"I know maybe it doesn't sound great—"

"I'm not judging you," he told her. "Remember?"

Her cheeks flushed. "Yeah." She tapped her fingers on the edge of the table. "But Remus is."

"Remus is just worried," he told her. "He's always worried about you, Calla. He didn't expect what happened last night to happen."

"Because he didn't expect me to be able to," she muttered.

"No." Sirius' voice was kind but there was a definite firmness to it. "Because he didn't anticipate that you would have such a reaction as you did. He feels bad about it."

"Oh, poor him."

"Calla!" His voice was almost warning now and she glared up at him.

"Yes?"

Sirius winced, massaging his temples. "What do you want to do?"

She stared over the table at him. "What?"

"What do you want to do? Do you want to go in circles about this, or do you want to practice?"

"I don't know!" At Sirius' dubious look, she snapped, "I guess I want to practice!"

"Good." Sirius smiled tersely over at her. "Now. Switching Spells."

"I hate Switching Spells."

"Exactly why we're working on it." Sirius grinned. "Come on. You've proven you can get to your power. I know you're tired—"

"I'm not tired—" she lied.

"—but that's okay. Now you have to figure out how to channel that feeling you had last night. Switching Spells require power but they also need precision. Duelling spells and the like, they involve a lot of instinct, intuition, to guide the magic. This needs control." Swallowing tightly, Calla nodded. At least he wasn't telling her she was wrong. And control was important to magic too, she knew that.

"I'm not sure I can."

"You said that about everything." Sirius raised his eyebrows. "Whatever other worries you have about your magic, or about Remus, put them out of your mind. I'll get props."

He left the room and Calla sighed to herself. Her head pounded and her scar burned, only a little, but still. She recited to herself the passage from her Transfiguration textbook that focused on Switching spells, one of the most core forms of Transfiguration.

"The definition of a Switching Spell is a spell which replaces one item, object, or property with another pre-existing item, object, or property," she recited from memory, tapping her fingernails impatiently on the table. "A successful Switching Spell requires medium intent but precision of will and clarity imagination. Incantation must be spoken clearly and with appropriate force to the weight of the sum of the two objects' masses." That was the tricky part. How on earth was she meant to know the appropriate force? Everyone liked to say words had weight, but Calla knew that they did not have mass.

"You have to say it with oomph," Sirius said helpfully as he entered the room again, holding two glasses; one with water, one with orange juice. He set them both down in front of her.

She scowled at the two glasses and picked up her wand. "If this doesn't work, can I just dump the orange juice in the water glass?"

"I suppose, but what will you do about the water?"

Calla huffed. "I can just switch them around."

"Then do it with magic!" His smile was almost giddy. He looked almost excited.

With a great sigh, Calla tossed out her hair, rolled her shoulders back and pointed her wand between the two glasses. "Ritetuo!" she said, and moved her wand in a figure of eight between the two glasses with great flourish. As predicted, nothing happened, though the orange juice did sway a little. She didn't know what she was doing wrong. Was it just her? Was last night a one-off? Knowing her luck, she'd probably managed to accidentally turn herself into a squib for the rest of her life with that outburst. "Ritetuo!" she repeated. The water glass teetered. "Ritetuo!"

"You're flourishing too much, I think," Sirius told her and she scowled.

"How can I flourish too much? It says I have to flourish as much as I possibly can!"

"Yes, but not that much."

"Well, if I don't, then nothing happens at all! Ritetuo!" The glass of orange juice skittered away to the edge of the table, only just avoiding falling over. "Ugh!"

"It's about control, remember?" Sirius asked. "Control and power. Are you thinking about last night?"

"You basically just told me not to!"

"I told you not to worry about it. But you have to connect with your feelings. Which feeling made it click?"

At first, the word anger alighted on her tongue, but that wasn't quite right. And when she stared down at the table, she knew it wouldn't be productive anyway; how could she be angry at orange juice? Instead, she said, not quite meeting Sirius' eyes, "Powerful. I wanted to feel powerful so I... Forced myself to be, almost."

"Right." Something like unease flickered in Sirius' eyes but then it disappeared. "And you want to still feel powerful, yes?" She nodded. "Channel that. Prove to me that you can have power over the world. And that you have power over the orange juice."

Calla almost laughed at the absurdity of that last statement, but restrained herself. This was about power, she told herself, even as the thought dredged up something uncomfortable in her.

She pushed the thoughts aside. She pointed her wand directly between the two glasses, imagining power flooding her as her anger had last night, imagining her head clearing of pain and nerves. Calla held it as carefully as she could, imagining the colours switching first, then flavour, consistency. She felt power moved through her and then she said as clearly as possible, "Ritetuo."

Control, she reminded herself, moving forward slightly, letting power run over her skin and through her veins, crackling around her, all the way through her arms and hands to her wand. Then pale white light slipped from the end, wrapped around the glasses so quickly she might have missed it had she not been so caught in the moment, and then, with a slight shudder, the liquids inside the glasses faded into one another and switched.

Her heart pounded. She felt almost numb with the shock of it, that she'd actually managed to do it. Her shoulders and arms trembled and she set her wand down. "Oh my God."

Sirius was grinning. He held up his hand for a high five and she hit it feebly, still staring at the two glasses. A smile started to bloom over her features, plucking the edges of her mouth. "Jesus Christ, I did it?"

"Looks bloody like it." Sirius was beaming at her. "I said so, didn't I? Told you and Remus! Oh, old McGonagall will love this." She choked on a laugh. "Try the reverse now."

Calla tried to steel herself but she couldn't help her smile. She didn't quite understand it, but looking at the two glasses, however insignificant they were in the grand scheme of things, they proved something. They proved she wasn't completely incapable of magic. They proved she was better than she — and most people — thought she was.

And, with that feeling warm in her chest, Calla waved her wand, and slowly, allowed the spell to move through her again. She imagined the world unfurling, just ever so slightly, enough to allow for the change. She imagined herself pressing that cavern open, and felt a rush of power.

"I don't understand," she said, staring at the two glasses, now the way they had been originally. "How did it suddenly... Work?"

Sirius grinned. "Sometimes," he said, "when things click, they click. And sometimes, once you know you can do it... You can't forget."

She swallowed, the rush fading, warmth giving way to a small shiver up her arms. Part of her wanted to cry, even if that was stupid.

"Cool," she said instead, voice strained. "That's cool."

At that, Sirius just laughed. The look on his face was such that Calla couldn't help but smile and fill with warmth when he said, "I'm proud of you, kid."

Sirius made her keep trying, this time with more solid objects like books, which were tricker to switch. She was frustrated that she didn't manage these, but Sirius said that was only natural. "You know you can do it," he told her as they finished up, hearing Molly Weasley arrive at the door, "but you still have to work your way up. Either way, it's good. Last night certainly helped something along."

"Yeah," Calla muttered, "I just don't want to, you know, accidentally do something that stops it? I mean — it's not like we know exactly how it works, there are still risks. What if this is a fluke?"

Sirius closed his eyes, thinking. "Then we'll deal with it. We'll work with it, around it."

"Yes, but." She winced and then lowered her voice, hearing Molly go past. Fleur's voice floated out from the hall, joined by a laughing Bill and then the sound of someone crashing into the hatstand which was, presumably, Tonks. "It's unpredictable. Who's to say that Voldemort won't be able to use this, too? Use my emotions? I felt so tired this morning and I'm better now but that doesn't mean I'm always going to be!"

"Calla," Sirius told her gently, "you have got to stop worrying about what if."

"But I can't!" she insisted, feeling her words stat to clog her throat. "Don't you see, I need to worry about these things!"

"I know that," Sirius told her. "But you need to focus on what you can do, not what you might not be able to do. The stronger you are, the more difficult it is to take your power from you."

"Yeah," Calla muttered, not inclined to fully agree, "or the harder I have to fall when he does."

Sirius' mouth thinned into a hard line. "Like I said," he told her, standing up. "Focus on what you can do. I get the worry, I do, but if we don't know what we're up against, then we have to assume that strength is what we need. I'll speak to Snape." His lip curled even as he said the name. "He might be able to help prevent the sort of curse Voldemort put on you from being put on you again. Or at least, help you manage it. Preserve your strength."

She nodded, though she couldn't shake her worry that Sirius was wrong. She couldn't get the whispers from last night out of her head either; mine, that voice had said again. It was impossible to escape it. Somehow, now, it felt even worse.

Xx

Snakes covered her body. They wrapped around her arms and legs, not squeezing, but still heavy and cold enough that she could feel them. The forest around her was dark, some place she did not know. Thunder cracked above her. Calla wasn't in her own body, but that of a woman perhaps a half dozen years older than herself. When she spoke she didn't know what she was saying, but she could feel it all the same: the fear.

Let go, let go, let go.

She could feel this woman's fear as strongly as if it were her own, reaching across time to her. It was all-consuming, made her heart pound louder and louder in her chest. Her words were a confused cry for help, but there was no help coming. There was never any help coming for her.

The man slipped out from between the trees. Pale face, dark hair, red eyes. He was the sort of fellow who may have once been handsome, but now his veins stuck out too prominently, his skin was paper-thing, and there was something inhuman in the way he moved, something distinctly monstrous about the sharp curve of his smile. He spoke with poise, and though it was recognisably English, Calla couldn't quite make sense of it. When his blood-red eyes locked upon hers she felt the familiar trickle of fear followed by a tidal wave that hit the back of her knees, made her fall to her ground.

Him, she thought in her mind, trying to force the name into being. Vol... She couldn't grasp it. She clutched the grass, but this was not her body, and she did not know what she was saying. Vol — Vol — de — mort.

Pain rushed in to her forehead. The man before her cupped her chin, sharp nails digging into the skin. She did not know his words, but she could hear the venom in them, the calculated coldness.

He brought out his wand, and then an assortment of blades with wrought handles, intricately decorated. The one he held in his left hand had a serpent writhing up the handle, green emerald eyes sparkling as lightning lit the forest around them. He summoned two him two silver goblets, inlaid with those same emeralds. They were expensive looking, something that belonged in a grand palace — but instead here they sat, on a dirty forest floor, held by a man who was hardly human but thought himself king.

Calla — or the woman whose body she was inhabiting — struggled, writhed, trying to escape the bonds of the snakes. One nipped her shoulder with its fangs and she cried out, feeling venom rush through her. The man hissed something and the snakes stilled, each of them turning their eyes directly on her. Fear turned to something greater, as her body slowed, her movements got sloppy. It was certain doom. She screamed, but over the thunder, no one could hear her.

The blade scraped along her forearm. It broke an artery and it began to gush with blood, enough that she could hardly breathe for the sight of it. It spilled into the forest floor and she screamed, trying to lift it, but the snakes kept her down, forced her arm towards one of the two goblets. The blood spilled into it, staining the edges and the rim bright red. She could not fight. Her heart stuttered in her chest and her words were coming out garbled, treading over themselves. She barely noticed the man's actions as he spilled a drop of his blood into the other goblet. Her head was filled with a fog and she could feel her life's force draining away from her.

And then, a snake wound around her arm, and with a wave of the man's wand, the blood flow stopped. She could hardly breathe. The artery closed, bound itself back together by a magic she was sure couldn't be possible, and then the wound, and then her arm was as normal.

That made her scream even louder. She knew what was coming, as the tip of the man's wand pressed into her chest, right over her heart. He whispered something, a spell she did not know and could not focus on, and she felt the strength left her. Felt her life slip away from her along with her will for it.

He clutched her jaw, forcing her mouth to open. She fought it with muffled screams but he was stronger than she was, so much stronger. His eyes flickered with triumph. In the dim haze of the world, Calla's mind said — perfected.

He took the goblet less filled, the one with his blood, and tipped into it a tiny vial of shimmering black potion. It swirled around in the goblet and then, to the woman's — to Calla's — screams, lifted it to her lips. No, she screamed silently, no, no, I won't, but she was powerless, completely powerless. The snakes tightened their grip on her and the man forced the potion down her throat. She retched, but he forced her to keep it down, every last drop, until she felt her heart was going to burn out of her chest. Her eyes made out the symbols on the goblet: mercury, sulphur. Spirit and soul.

She could feel the spirit leaving her already as the potion took hold. The man leaned back and watched his work as she bucked, unable to make a sound, every part of her burning. She clutched onto the ground, trying to hold anything that she could. He sat and watched, fascinated, like a scientist conducting an experiment. Silent screams slipped from her mouth, forced her jaw open. But they were fading. She was fading. Darkness cooled around her chest and got ahold between the ribs. It crushed the life out of her lungs.

The man leaned back and lifted the goblet of her blood to his lips. He tipped it towards her in greeting and it was pure agony as he drank. It had to end soon, she sobbed. All she wanted was an end, a clean death, that was all she asked for. Would he not grant her that mercy?

He took something from the sack at his side, places it upon her head. The cool silver seemed to burn her forehead like a crown of thorns. And then, as he took the final sip of her blood, he smiled in victory. "At last." The words broke through now. "I understand. You have made it clear... This is the best way."

She didn't know why she could understand him now, but suddenly her head was full, brimming with pain. There was a power that flooded through her then, something beautiful but twisted.

She had barely the time to realise it before he pointed his wand once more at her and, licking his bloodstained lips, whispered, "Avada kedavra."

Green light burst through the trees as lightning cracked overhead.