Hogwarts, Scotland, December 1938
The weeks of the semester passed quickly. Winter's first snow came in October, and before anyone knew it, Hogwarts and its environs were entombed in pure white. The courtyards, gardens, and wide lawns beyond the castle were no longer frequented so much; the Great Hall and the library became busy round the clock. On the weekends and at nights students wore scarves and heavy caps; at meals there ate stews and pies. Hot chocolate was served and consumed in abundance on Fridays and Sundays. The first-years had to wear special coats when going to the greenhouses for herbology.
Most of the older students were no longer invasively curious of the twins, as they were during the earlier weeks of semester: they had resigned to a distant but still-intrigued respect, which Tom and Mary appreciated. Some few among them, however, either by jealousy, fear, or some uncouth mixture of the two, decided to align themselves against the twins, though Tom in particular—it went unsaid that it would be unbecoming, for pureblood boys to pick on a girl, though there were no stipulations on picking on her brother. Indeed, though most had accepted that Tom's unclear parentage gladly allowed for the possibility of his being at least a half-blood, there were some who insisted he was a muggleborn. A mudblood.
At any rate, though Tom had enemies, they did not bother him beyond the occasional insult muttered in the common room or shove of the shoulder in the castle's corridors. This was in part owed to Mary, who had gained the affection of so many important older students that none dared to truly hurt her brother. Indeed, where Tom's charms lay in impressing his professors and instilling fear and inspiration in his peers (all of whom were only first or second year Slytherin-boys), Mary endeared a handful of venerated older students, whose self-conceptions as noble scions sharing their knowledge and grandeur with a poor-but-brilliant muggleborn girl, and as wizards who were desirable to a precocious young witch, she simultaneously indulged with ease.
Finally, the Christmas break came. Both the twins had been intensely longing for it.
"Will we sleep in your dorm or mine?" was the first thing Tom asked during the breakfast of their last day of semester. Most of the students were leaving on the Hogwarts Express in the afternoon.
For a moment Mary did not answer. Then, her dark eyes expanded in a familiar manner which Tom loved dearly—it was as though her head impelled her eyes to bulge forth as much as they could from their sockets, as to imitate a cat looking upon the juiciest, biggest fish it had ever seen in its life. She looked impassioned, beautiful—though if this expression were on the face of someone not as comely, it would be deemed a physiognomy of someone demented, dangerous. It was one of Tom's expressions, too—it was something the twins mutually possessed, among being beautiful, being well-spoken, and being superior to all the others in magic. They made it whenever they comprehended a new spell, or the logic behind some lore—it was a physical reflex that came whenever they realised their magical power, by virtue of the acquisition of knowledge, had just grown.
"You can choose, Tom," she said as her face settled into a wide smile. "We can swap between them."
"Yours," Tom decided. "Since the other boys would only be too happy to know that you spent Christmas in their dorm."
"Well, that's exactly what'll happen with the girls — at least Florence and Lucy." Mary spread jam over a slice of toast and placed it on his plate. "But I won't tell them."
"Lucretia Black fancies me?"
"You're not the only boy she fancies, but certainly the one she fancies the most."
And so after an idle half-day of classes, an exchange of goodbyes with his housemates, and a dinner of no more than a twenty students (most of whom were muggleborns; there was only one other Slytherin apart from the twins), Tom got to see the first-year Slytherin girls' dormitory for the first time.
It was arranged differently from the boys' dormitory; it was smaller, but more recently furnished. All of the studies doubled as dressing-tables. However this difference was very slight compared with the other characteristics of the room. Though all the girls except Mary were gone, the air was heavy with the scent of their perfumes. Some of the bedsheets were patterned with flowers that were enchanted to move, as though blown by some gentle wind. On one of these floral beds there were arranged nearly a dozen pillows.
"That's Lucy's bed," Mary pointed out.
"Fit for a well-groomed kitten." Tom recalled the oversweet, soft-spoken girl.
"Coming from you, she'd be devastated to hear that." Mary laughed.
On the wall facing the closest bed to the door was a huge, ominous poster with enchanted, glittering, bulging black text that spelled Les Détraqueurs Délicats. Behind it was a woman in a tattered black uniform that was at once terrifying, beautiful, and ridiculous—but most of all terrifying.
"The Delicate Dementors," Mary introduced. "Florence's favourite Quidditch team. Most their members are from the Belgian national team, who got together after winning the 1931 world cup. They've only got two tournaments this year — usually they've a lot more, but Grindelwald's antics have made scaredy-cats of the sponsors."
"I hate Dementors." Tom glared at the woman on the poster. "They can't be killed — there's only been more and more of them since the beginning of time, did you know?"
"It seems that you and Florence don't have the same favourite animal." Mary laughed. "But it's a well-made poster. Everything Florence owns is well-made."
"I don't want to see it while I sleep," said Tom, drawing his wand. "Celare!"
Like mist congealing on a window, splotches of black liquid manifested on the poster, which then like oil spreading on a surface permeated and completely covered it.
"I hope you know the countercurse for that."
In like manner to the obscuring charm unfurling its veil, so did the splashing of a small blue gemstone into the bathtub that later contained the huddling twins generate a thick, beachy gauze of foam. As Tom listened to his sister recount her roommates' showering habits, he ran his intentful hands down her legs, feeling how she had grown since she came to Hogwarts, how her flesh had become softer, fuller. In return her own curious hands explored him.
"Let me brush your teeth, Tom," Mary insisted. "You can brush mine too!"
At night when they slept (on Lucretia's bed, pillows shrouding them), Tom held his sister tightly. Three months of being unable to truly hold her had left him an enormous appetite to touch her. Indeed, like two passengers on a small ship being tossed about by an enraged, stormy ocean might hold each other, so did the twins interlock legs and arms beneath Lucretia's scented, enchanted quilt, to soak up all that they had missed of the other since they left Wool's Orphanage.
"I haven't slept this well since leaving London," Tom observed the following morning.
Mary answered him with a kiss on the cheek.
Breakfast was a surreal affair; the Great Hall which the twins had only seen lined with the four long house tables, which were overlooked by the tall staff table, was now only one small table. The sole two Professors Beery and Merrythought sat mingled with the dozen Christmas-stayers, most of whom had not bothered even to change out of their pyjamas. Where during the semester breakfasts, lunches, and dinners contained separate dishes, and were regimented even by days of the week, here the elves prepared a melange of everything—there were no rules.
Some of the older students, despite varying in age, house, and sex, were intimately familiar with each other—clearly, this was not the first Christmas they had spent together. Seeing as they were not Slytherins (the sole other Slytherin, a fourth-year girl named Beatrice Sommerfield, had slept in), Tom and Mary had no desire to interact with them. Moreover this time was precious; the castle was quiet, in a way that recalled them to the colour of their life before Hogwarts—the simplicity of caring about, and for, no one but each other.
They spent the rest of their morning at the library. Here Tom sought to read some of the harder books, not ones on particular spells, nor anything immediately practical, but those which dealt with magic 'altogether'. Professor Slughorn had told him that in the years to come, he could expect, like all intelligent wizards, for two or three of these treatises to truly change the way he thought about Magic, and thereby spur him to new heights—but Tom did not want to wait for the years to come. He wanted to attain new heights now.
Yet as they sat in the northwestern corner of the library, a very cozy place, with armchairs, desks, a large, bustling fireplace and a window that afforded them a scene of the castle and the faraway mountains, so did Tom's hands ball into frustrated fists as he read Magicoimmunology: On The Mocifucian Nature of Ritual.
Sometimes, the mysteries within the book would reveal themselves to Tom, and he would in these moments of revelation feel like God, for each new discovery was an augmentation, albeit an abstract one, of his power—power over not just the millions of useless, miserable muggles on the Earth—but over even his inferior magical peers. But most sentences within it were incomprehensible—at least before he started perusing them in tandem with the muggle Oxford English Dictionary, volumes I through IX.
As Tom dipped his fingers into the ocean that was magical theory, his sister read copiously, too—and wrote as well. But Mary neither read books nor wrote anything theoretical. Her work was in a domain entirely of her own making—dozens of letter-correspondences, most of which were with older students, most of whom were boys, most of whom were the sons of important ministerial wizards. It seemed that she wrote at least ten letters a day, none of them lacking in length nor quality. She drafted all her letters several times, burning much parchment in this gruelling, compulsive process.
"You needn't write to the whole world," Tom told her. "It's good to have a few important friends — but unnecessary to please everyone."
"I like writing to the whole world, Tom." Mary defied him. "We've postmen, priests, businessmen and prime ministers in the muggle world — I'm learning who the same are in the magical world."
"You'll learn more from this." Tom shoved Magicoimmunology before her.
She picked up the large tome, twice taller and considerably wider than her shapely little head, and began to read. Tom in turn picked a folded sheet of parchment from the table, out of one of the many letters she had already read and likely composed a response to.
The handwriting was so elegant that Tom suspected it must have been written by a self-correcting quill, but the font was too cursive, too stylish, too dripping with arrogance to have come from anything apart from an undiluted peacock's feather. Whoever its author, they were eloquent—though not nearly as eloquent nor ingenious as the wizard of Magicoimmunology. His sentences were long and full of unnecessary description, though Tom perversely liked seeing his sister's name everywhere within it—Mary, Mary, Mary—the writer clearly liked summoning Mary to his mind by means of repeatedly writing her name like his own signature.
Unsurprisingly, the letter was written by none other than Arcanius Fawley.
"This is too difficult." Mary's complaint brought Tom out of his thoughts. "I'm better off reading my letters."
"You're better off burning your letters."
"Oh don't be so glum now! I learn all sorts of things from my dear correspondents — and what's more, I can ask them if I don't understand something!"
"Where do you place Arcanius Fawley, among your 'correspondents'?"
"He's my favourite!" Mary proclaimed. "Think of those apothecary-grade potions Professor Slughorn shows us — how their colours are perfect, how if you shake them in their bottles they move perfectly, not too thick nor too thin — he's just that — an apothecary-grade young pureblood."
"Yet all those apothecary potions were neither powerful nor complex," Tom returned. "Only well-made."
"Exactly. Arcanius is well-made, like a tree — not too tall, not too small, and not lopsided on this side or that."
"He's a perfectly wooden stick," Tom drawled. "Good for him."
"You could say that." Mary giggled. "But it's him, and other apothecary-grade purebloods, who hold Wizarding Britain together."
Yet, Tom felt in his heart that it was the apothecary grade purebloods who were responsible for letting Wizarding Britain become the timid little crevice that it was, of the muggle British Empire. It was their idleness, their comfort, and their fear of true power that left him and Mary stranded, for the first eleven years of their childhood, among swine.
"He has no love for magic."
Tom, who fancied himself a worthy lover of magic, returned to his book and re-embarked on what felt like constructing an intricate, detailed model of a palace in a lightless cave with nothing but his memory and intelligence for support. It went thus: magic was to emotional intention what steam was to water, that much was clear, commonsensical even, but important to always remember. In turn, that which is caused by magic conforms more to the laws of emotion than the laws of physics; yet the two are, in an important way, intertwined. How are they intertwined? Tom furrowed his brow. Magic is also the desire to impose the present upon the future: ritual is thought of as the purest form of magic as such. Nearly all rituals involve fire or burning—why? Fire is what forges and sets limits. Fire makes iron hard, and turns water into vapour.
An idea struck Tom like a cauldron falling onto his head. He took Mary by the wrist.
"Tom! What is it?!"
"I want to never hurt you, Mary." Tom's eyes grew wide and manic. "Not even accidentally — we'll have to practice that."
"Practice that how?" she asked quizzically, though she had assented to his pull.
"With fire."
"With fire?"
"You'll see."
Tom walked quickly. He thought perhaps he could do his experiment in the common room, but he did not wish to be seen. Nor did he want to burn anything valuable and irreplaceable. He wanted to be safe. There were some old classrooms on the seventh floor, surely no one used them…
He found and entered such a classroom. It was full of old dusty furniture, most of which were covered in even dustier, yellow-gray cloaks.
"What a cheery place," Mary remarked.
"Cast a small incendio," said Tom. "Burn my arm."
"What?! What do you hope to —"
"You'll heal me afterwards. Your magic will know that you don't want to hurt me."
"What if I burn your arm off?"
"Incendio can't do that," said Tom. "Now go."
"Are you sure?" she asked with incredulity. "Tom …"
"Do it," Tom said sharply.
She drew her wand and tentatively pressed it against his arm, before giving him a pleading look again. He gave her a court nod.
"Incendio," she whispered.
Her wand produced not even a spark.
"Incendio," she repeated a little more loudly.
A faint flame, like that of a matchstick, spat forth from her wand—Tom felt but a vague brush of painless heat swipe against his forearm. He had seen her create great clouds of fire before, he knew she was capable of it. He hated her inhibition, even if it was around him.
He slapped her in the face.
"OWW! INCENDIO!"
Now it was Tom's turn to shriek. His sister's charm seared his arm with the sharpness of a thousand needles puncturing his skin at once. Seeing the pain she inflicted, Mary's magic took no more than a second to abate; the great flames disappeared as soon as they came. There was on his forearm a great blistering patch of black-purple. In his heart, however, pride blossomed for his sister—if pushed to it, her Magic would never fail to deliver.
"Tom! I didn't mean to —"
"You did well. Fervera sanentur," Tom recalled the countercurse to his sister, while he clutched his arm. "Fervera sanentur."
Mary drew her wand and, with a penitent expression that seemed to aid the efficaciousness of her magic, sang to her brother's burn to dispel it. Her other small, smooth hand rested under his arm, holding it to keep it upright. It took a little over ten minutes for his skin to completely heal.
"Now, Mary, burn me again."
"Are you serious?"
"Would you rather I burn you?"
Her voice did not falter, much to his surprise. "Yes."
"Have it your way then. Incendio!"
Though his flame was clearly smaller than the one he had elicited from her with a slap to the face, it at once produced results. She screamed horribly and frantically clutched her arm. Tom dispelled his spell at once to put his arms around her to soothe her.
"It hurts, Tom! It hurts-hurts-hurts-hurts-hurts! Make it stop!"
There on her thin porcelain arm was a gray-red rash that reminded Tom of the deformed face of a tramp he had seen with the consumption. She swallowed a whimper, and on her face a tear streamed down her cheek like sap down the trunk of a young poplar tree. Tom wiped it off.
"We'll stop," Tom murmured. "Fervera sanentur."
Patching Mary's wounds, he contemplated other means by which their magic could be made as kindred and inseparable as they were (albeit true inseparability was, supposedly, magicoimmunologically impossible).
"We'll blend our fires together," Tom said. "Let's set that chair on fire."
"Everything in this room looks combustible," Mary noted dryly.
"Including us, it seems," Tom drawled. "We'll just have to be careful — three, two, one —"
"INCENDIO!" they shouted in synchrony.
And surely this time, the bursts of flame from both their wands were hot and smouldering. They indeed converged into one great flame upon the chair which was destroyed, but before Tom could say anything further, an unfamiliar, strange voice interrupted them.
"LITTLE IMPS!" shouted something behind a tall wardrobe. "YOU DARE PLAY ARSONIST WITH MY CABINETRY? FOR DECADES WAS I MASTER OF THIS ROOM, AND NEVER HAS —"
It was a painting, and Tom smashed a chair into it. Conceivably a professor from the sixteenth century, it was now much more fascinating than that; a broken canvas, the colours on it started disintegrating rapidly, like different oils in a pond. It made a strange sound, something resembling water going down a drain. The twins watched this scene with interest. Soon enough the man that was once there was no longer discernible at all; the old parchment looked nothing more than a messy painter's palette.
"Incendio!" Tom set it on fire.
Destroying the painting kindled something in the twins. Often in the castle's corridors students shot curses and jinxes at each other, but no one ever attacked paintings. It was forbidden to destroy the remnants of old, once-great wizards. But they had done it simply out of whimsical irritation—and they would get away with it, too.
"Incendio! Incendio! Incendio!"
A great tide of fire, like a huge snake rampaging in circles, consumed the furniture of the room. The twins took turns directing it. At first the transitions between their control were uncertain and dangerous—but quickly it became as easy as handing each other back and forth a cup of tea.
The rest of the Christmas break passed in like fashion. Between breakfast and lunch they stayed in the library, where Tom studied and Mary corresponded; after lunch they sought out old rooms with isolated paintings to torment and burn, and at night they sat on the staircase to the entrance of the Great Hall, where the air smelled like frost and smoke, and where every whisper they exchanged echoed indefinitely between the monstrously tall castle walls.
On Christmas day, they both received many presents—much more than they had expected. Mary wore a heart-shaped ruby encrusted gold necklace which Arcanius Fawley gifted her. From William Wilkes Tom received his first book on curses.
"He says he hopes I return it to him before the end of next year," Tom read Wilkes' Christmas card. "He has deigned to loan me a book for Christmas."
"The Wilkes haven't got much money." Mary snapped a chocolate frog in two and gave half of it to Tom. "Arcanius said they've always rather kept to themselves."
"It appears they like to keep their spellbooks to themselves, too."
At any rate, Tom was grateful for Wilkes' limited generosity. It did not take him long to find a pertinent curse; later in the day as all the students had a snowball fight, Tom encrusted the head of a third-year Gryffindor boy in ice—he had to be taken to the Hospital Wing.
At dinner on that night, chatter was more excited than usual, not because the students particularly cared about the occasion of Christmas—but because they had received news that Salazar Velasco, a legendary Spanish Auror, had chosen to fight for the nationalists of his country's muggle war. No one on the table knew what this truly entailed, but Professor Merrythought, the eminent authority by virtue of her being one of the two adults on the table (the other being Professor Beery, the Professor of Herbology), declared that "he is neither for nor against Grindelwald — but what remains to be seen is whether he is for or against The Statute."
A week later came New Year's Eve, the twins' twelfth birthday. At the top of the astronomy tower they sat on Professor Astrophel's loveseat, from where they saw hundreds of miles of the trees, lakes, moors and swamps of Scotland, illuminated by a clear sky of a thousand stars. There they sat with a large wooden tray in their laps, upon which was heaped a great variety of confectionery, most of which was given to Mary by various boys as Christmas and birthday gifts, as well as some pastries, sausages, and pudding they took from dinner. Finally and most importantly, they had two small vials, each containing a liquid as purple as grape juice, as viscous as yoghurt, and incandescent as though filled with the embers of a fireplace.
It was Tom's rendition of the Cat's-Eye potion, a disgusting little drink which they ingested to sharpen their sight during astronomy classes. He had, using many ingredients stolen from the greenhouses and Professor Slughorn's stores alike, modified it to greatly amplify its potency. He was unsure of exactly what it would do, but having read copiously on potionlore (a decidedly boring subject) in the past few days, he was certain that it was at least safe to ingest.
"Our first birthday outside of London," Mary observed contemplatively. "We should make a toast — to Hogwarts."
"To Hogwarts," Tom clinked his vial with his sister's. "This — all of this, dear Mary, belongs to us. Let us behold it in all its glory."