Hogwarts, December 1939

The first quakes of war was loud and resounding, like claps of portentous thunder. A British passenger ship was sunk by a German submarine, and a thousand souls drowned with it. In turn Great Britain and all her sisters in the commonwealth declared war all at once against their aggressor. For a few days, the tall corridors of Hogwarts were contaminated by such mania as though the submarine had demolished the Quidditch pitch and taken the lives of two whole house teams; everyone felt that platoons of Grindelwald's Freimagier might apparate into the Astronomy Tower or the Great Hall at any moment, and everyone really believed that they, with their schoolyard jinxes and corridor curses, had a chance of fighting back. There was even the bizarre fear that the German muggle Nazis would fly their bombers, supposedly enchanted by Grindelwald himself to become immune to magical repulsion, over Scotland to drop the same metallic death that had vanquished thousands of Polish muggles, nearly the entire magical population of Britain, just a few days ago.

Warsaw, a city of over a million people, fell before the end of the September. It seemed that both Grindelwald and Hitler (it was unclear whether the two were of one party, or only incidentally in collaboration) were unstoppable. Where would they go next?

They stopped.

Poland was taken with a rapidity the likes of which had never been seen before, according to both muggle and magical commentators. But as though they themselves were recuperating from the unexpected dynamism of their success, the Germans stopped. Then, it became clear that an imminent German attack on Hogwarts was more a fantasy fuelled by gossip than a credible threat to lose sleep over. What began as a series of menacing thunderclaps faded into a gentle, distant shower, albeit one still girded by ugly grey clouds. Indeed, while the Freimagier disposed of all magical authorities in Poland, and the German muggle army rounded up masses of 'insurrectionists' to execute wholesale, they were still far from Britain. A fishing trawler was captured and sunk by another German submarine, which was then apprehended and sunk by three destroyers of the Royal Navy.

It rather reminded Mary of a game that was played at Wool's, one which she and Tom had even at times indulged in—battleships. Though the world had slowed down, every moment was fraught with passive tension. Anything could happen, at any moment. The sense of possibility was, of course, an essentially fearful one. What will happen to us? It was exemplified best by the unusual excitement the students showed. Indeed, every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, everyone flocked to their house tables readily and quickly—for the newspapers.

Two weeks before the Christmas break, Professor Dumbledore disappeared. Though they wouldn't admit it, Mary knew that neither the Headmaster nor the other Professors had been forewarned of this. A handful of seventh-year students took his place in teaching the first through fourth years, where the other professors cooperatively sought to fill his shoes for the fifth through seventh years; none of them said a word on who was to truly succeed him.

When the term ended, Mary went with the other girls down to Hogsmeade station, to bid them goodbye. Returning to the castle, she found it utterly silent, eerily so. Last Christmas, twenty or so other students chose to stay—this year that number had diminished by threefold. The families of the muggleborns wanted their children to come home to them, so that they might be together during the war, even if not safely so. As Mary slowly and solitarily walked through the corridors of the castle, not quite with any direction in mind, a sense of piercing loneliness overcame her. Her dormmates talked of distant but indulgent fathers, strict but compassionate mothers, myriad foreign cousins, and of weddings and balls, while all she had was a single twin brother—one who betrayed her and was still remorseless for it.

Indeed, Tom was not apologetic whatsoever for turning Ilaria against her. She told him that it wasn't only Ilaria who he roused against her, but rather, the majority of all the older Slytherin girls. "I know," was all he said.

Yet, Mary knew to be reasonable. She did not wish to become the sort of witch whose distress superseded their capacity to think clearly. Tom betrayed her, yes, but his intentions were good. He had only betrayed her once. He would never truly hurt her, not unless it was for her good. In fact, she knew with certainty that he would never betray her again, if she remained as faithful to him as he was to her. After all, where she pined after Arcanius Fawley and savoured the affection of many other boys, he was nothing but courteously indifferent to all their housemates of her sex.

Tom only means well for me, he can only mean well for me. Mary sat on the floor, curling her legs so that she could rest her chin on her knees. A ghost, as quiet and slow-moving as the midday wind, floated over her. So why does it hurt so much? She thought she might cry—perhaps the ghost would console her.

"Mary …"

As though she were sleeping and somebody had thrown her from her bed, Mary jolted out of her thoughts. Something had hissed her name, very quietly—it was not the ghost—and she could not tell from where. She jumped and drew her wand.

"Mary …"

She spun on her heel. Facing her was a snake, of a glaringly unnatural shade of green (it was dark, yet bright and soft, like still-wet paint), with an even more unnatural sheet of silver for its underbelly (glowing and metallic). It was the snake of the Slytherin crest, conceivably conjured by a formidable serpensortia.

"Are you … Mary?"

Mary lowered her wand, sighing in relief. "I am. Tom sent you?"

"Yess," it hissed. "He isss worried. Return to him …"

"Mary …"

There came another hiss. Then another, and another, until her name was recited in chorus.

"Mary … Mary … Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary …"

Mary found herself surrounded by these colourfully conjured beings; they had been sent to find her and, like ants, the one that found her invisibly signalled to the others to join it. It was all Tom's design.

She suddenly felt ashamed.

She had loitered about the castle perhaps for an hour, revelling in malaise against him; she had been entirely negligent. Of course he was worried that she'd not yet returned. How dare she brood over her lack of a family, when her brother—the most powerful and most protecting boy in the world—was thinking of her welfare? The sense of cold loneliness which had possessed her had by now thoroughly thawed into steaming guilt.

With a swish of her wand, she dismissed Tom's snakes, and burst into a sprint to the Slytherin common room, where she would show Tom that she had not forgotten him. When she found him, she tackled him into a tight, tight hug, burying her face in his chest.

"Mary! What happened? What's the matter?"

He misunderstood. He thought her sudden show of affection signified that she had just suffered some great abuse. Though indeed she had, but this was only half the truth; she endured only the burden of her own guilt.

Tom rather forcefully sat her down on a sofa. "Mary, you must tell me—"

"Nothing!" Mary sunk into the padding of the sofa. "Nothing at all …"

"Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?"

"I lost track of time … I was wandering the castle."

"Did someone hurt you?"

"Say something, please—you've got to tell me what happened!"

She remained silent.

"Mary!"

"Nothing," she repeated in a steady voice. "I walked about the castle. It's so quiet, you know? Even the muggleborns have gone home."

"You're not making sense."

"Sometimes, Tom …" she sputtered and stopped. "Sometimes, I feel so far from you."

"What do you mean?" he asked with mild confusion.

"You hurt me," said Mary, bringing her legs onto the sofa to rest her chin on her knees, "and you don't feel the least bit bad about it."

"You're talking about Fawley again," Tom observed with a frown.

"Caney, yes."

"I see. Do you want me to apologise?"

"I do—though not when you ask me like that. Don't you see? You hurt me and call it necessary, and then you don't feel the least bit bad about it."

"It was necessary."

"Perhaps it was, but that which is necessary can hurt, no?"

"Consider it an act of love." Tom's voice by now regained its usual neutrality. "I discipline you because you refuse to discipline yourself. If you weren't my sister, I would let you fall."

For a moment Mary said nothing, and sat quite still, her unfocused gaze resting on the serpentine mantelpiece of a dormant fireplace.

"You're right," she conceded.

"I often am."

With that, Tom extended a hand to pull her up. It was their first day of the Christmas break; they ought not waste their time brooding over such dismal things.

Later in the afternoon, Tom extended to her a most surprising invitation. "Would you like to go flying?"

Mary knew well that, between the two of them, she was the only one who enjoyed flying at all. Perhaps, Tom meant to console her somehow, without explicitly saying 'sorry'. At any rate these concerns did not outweigh the greatest complication of his proposition. "But on whose broom will we fly?"

"On Florence Travers'."

"Florence?" Mary looked at her brother quizzically. "She left with her broom, did she not?"

"I convinced her to leave it with me," Tom said soothingly. "We intended to give you a pleasant surprise."

Mary said nothing. She did not know what to think; while there was no malice against her in this particular withheld truth, it altered her understanding of Florence's infatuation for Tom—it was a passion which preceded her fidelity to Mary as a friend. Realising this, however, she found no fault in Florence, but rather only in herself, for failing to realise that which should have been obvious. If the price to gain Arcanius' complete devotion was to snub Florence, Mary thought, would I not happily do it?

"Let's go," Tom commanded.

Mary thought that they were due to fly in the same manner that they did last year; out of the castle, with the West Wing courtyard as their takeoff point. Rather, as soon as they left the Slytherin common room, Tom strapped himself on the broom and gestured for Mary to saddle behind him. She did so eagerly. Then, as though it were nothing, he soared in flight up the stairs that they had climbed every morning and deescalated every night of the term.

Rather than fly out the castle, Tom flew about it. It was at once exciting and nerve-wracking; though there was no injunction against it, Mary felt as though she were grievously transgressing some unspoken rule—perhaps this owed to the scandalised yells they were subject to by many of the paintings Tom purposely swerved at—and he flew with such unabating quickness, as though they were in open air, when in reality they traversed the dimly lit, narrow passages of an ancient castle.

Mary screamed, as much in pleasure as in fear, when they rapidly spiralled up the dark stairwell to the Astronomy Tower. There, they were greeted by the austere grandeur of the sunset over December's Scotland, where the setting sun appeared a haughty young princess overseeing the grand procession of her immortal imperial guard—the neverending range of jagged, snow-sharp mountains.

Their flight was exhilarating. If her skin had been a little more tender, Mary was sure that the sharpness of the icy wind would have cut a scar slantwise down her cheek. But where this coldness was unforgiving, it was also intoxicating—it made her feel awake—and it made palpable all the more the warmth of Tom's body, which she quite literally held on for her life.

Evening came with a quickness that would have been impossible in London. It seemed all it took was an interval of ten minutes, for the orange-tinged white sky to become a black one thrung with stars. The twins switched places; Mary steered the broom, and Tom hugged her from behind.

To evade the winds which had so invigorated her earlier in the day, she flew in laps around the very rim of the Black Lake, occasionally swooping sideways to skim her hand against its glacial surface.

"We're family, Tom."

"Indeed?" came his perplexed tone. His breath tickled her neck.

"I was terribly jealous, earlier today," she blurted. "Everyone—my dorm-mates, yours, and all our housemates from the years above—had somewhere to call home, and people to call family, meanwhile all I had was a brother who dobbed on me to the prissy older girl just for stealing her precious little keepsake jewel. She doesn't even deserve it!"

"She doesn't," her brother agreed, "but that's not why I enabled her to recover it."

Mary continued, ignoring him. "Then came the hundred snakes you sent to find me, which was in truth a little bit ridiculous … but it made me realise that that was how it had to be, that that was the best a girl could have. Before, I thought it'd be nice to, like Alphard and Walburga, have a dozen cousins, a dozen aunts, and a dozen great-uncles who rub each other's backs in the Wizengamot—they'd all care for you, and you'd care for them all—now that seems awfully annoying."

"Are you even listening, Tom?"

"Of course, go on."

Mary held her broom with one hand; with the other she slowly waved her wand at the lake, to raise birds made of water to fly along her, their blue wings fluttering droplets of water.

"Alphard and Walburga don't know what it's like to be us. We've nothing, Tom. We've no parents, nor money, nor a heritage to speak of—we own nothing that can't be put in a shoebox. Yet we've everything. Isn't it beautiful, that we're powerful, while having nothing to our name? We move so lightly. Do you think Alphard and Walburga can fly as lightly as us? We understand the wind because we grew up with it. This wind, I mean—feel it caress your face."

She had by now raised a small flock of water-birds; these flew with them, and droplets of water fell onto her head.

"Does my sentimentality annoy you, Tom?"

"No," he said at once. "Not at all. You recall me to our first night of our first year. I told you we'd always be together—it was not only a promise, but an observation of nature. Of our nature. We fly higher than all of them because our inseparability is a pair of wings."

"At the same time it makes me afraid," Mary murmured. "As these proverbial wings grow larger, so do they become more liable to disagree with each other."

Perhaps there was some merit to what she said, for Tom was silent for a moment. Then came his voice in its usual ironical register to say, "you've made my metaphor utterly absurd."

By the time they flew back to the castle, it was very late into the night. Dinner was over, but Professor Slughorn petitioned that the twins return to their common room, where he would have the elves prepare a suitable supper for them. They were bought apple pies with fresh cream. As flying all day long left their bodies terribly cold and sore, they chose to sup while they bathed together.

As Mary sank into the foamy bath of Tom's dormitory, it was as though her entire body moaned in pleasure. The hotness of the water at once dispelled the stabbing coldness of her skin, and all her aching muscles were simultaneously massaged. There was not a single trace of tension in her body; it was as though she returned to her mother's womb—apt, she thought, as her legs interlocked with her brother's. "This feels so good," was all she could muster to describe.

Tom wrapped a tight arm around her shoulder for his hand to stroke her forearm. "You feel so … soft."

Then, it submerged further to rest on her ankle, only to slowly glide up to her knees.

"What are you doing?" Mary murmured.

"May I?"

She said nothing. Her brother's eager hand remained on her skin, but he would not go further against her will. Yet should not their wills be the one and the same? Mary recalled the gut-piercing loneliness she felt earlier in the day; she could not stand to be herself, all alone. Tom was a part of her, and her, Tom—any other arrangement was misery. Plus, his touch made her skin tingle.

"Yes," she said in a hoarse voice. "You needn't ask."

Tom slyly delved to stroke the underside of her thigh. His hand came in slow, repeated motions, as though to scratch her. The tension came back to her body in full force; she felt all her muscles contract as though she were encased in and being lifted up by a very large fishing net. But it was a delightful tension, a tingling one; it made her feel light and wet, as though her body might dissipate into a puddle of sparkling blue water at any moment. She panted in pleasure.

Then, just when she thought that she could not possibly feel more blissful, for the gooseflesh on her skin was on the verge of evaporating into a great cloud of perfume, Tom kissed her on the neck. He kissed it again, and again, hungrily, as though it were the most delicious thing in the world—it was so ticklish that she could not help but send forth a dissonant giggle. She wondered if he was imitating what he saw the older boys sometimes do to their girlfriends in the common room, late at night; surely he was; and though she did not know whether his imitation was any 'good', like one's wand movements for a spell might be good, she knew that it did what it was meant to do—make her believe that there was such a thing as Paradise.

At last she found the courage to realise her curiosity, too; she skimmed her hand down Tom's lower stomach, to his abdomen, and further still…

Though they slept on the same bed that night, under the same quilt, they slept apart—no hugging nor squeezing, not even hand-holding. It was deeply strange; an hour of haphazard groping in the bath, and they had slated all their bodily thirst for each other.

The following days passed in similar fashion. They would spend entire days either on the broom, or in the library; typically these alternated, the latter serving as both a rest from and preparation for the former. Professor Slughorn gave them early Christmas gifts—a pair of books: Handbook for the Nomad-Astrologer Potioneer, by a confederacy of authors who grandly designated themselves, 'The Travelling Potions Masters'; and The Principles of Change, by an ancient Chinese wizard whose name was latinised into 'Magicius'—so that they might have time to read them before everyone returned to Hogwarts. These they read in the library with intervals of letter-writing.

Mary noted that Tom's letters were always the same; he never used more than a single seven-inch sheet of parchment for any single envelope, but he always filled them to the brim of his margins, which he used his wand to measure exactly every time. Moreover his subject matter was always direct and inquisitive: what can Minister Spencer-Moon do that Minister Fawley can't? Why is it that certain jinxes cannot be cast twice in succession? Does metamorphagi blood truly have medical properties, or is it this a myth?

One day, as she sat in Tom's lap on an armchair in the library while they read together, a revelation came upon her. "You're utterly obsessive, Tom!"

"Excuse me?" he asked in bemusement.

She, unsure of what she was doing herself, leapt out of his lap and jumped at a nearby bookshelf to pretend-skim through an anthology of Herbology reviews.

"Your obsessiveness, it shows in everything. In how you write your letters, in how you meticulously pomade your hair, in how you refuse to turn the page until I've understood everything—you feel obliged to tell me everything you know—it's all rather tiring!"

"You learn as quickly as I do," Tom said simply. "It follows that there's no reason you shouldn't learn as much as I do."

"You see! Whenever you don't like something I say, you start condescending to me in that—that unbearable tone! You don't talk like that to anyone else. You forget that I'm your sister, Tom. Tom!" Mary threw the book on the ground and spun on her heel. Then, her voice suddenly went quiet. "The bitterness keeps coming back to me. The secrets you kept from me, Tom, were deliberate and hurtful … you say that I keep secrets from you, that you don't know what's in my letters—but it's all just rambling! Rambling nonsense! My secrets are in plain sight because they're nothing! Yours … yours—"

Tom's expression and voice remained infuriatingly calm. "Am I not affectionate enough for my sister?"

"What do you mean by that?" Mary whispered menacingly.

"What we do every night, I would never do for another girl—"

"Spare me your tosh! You enjoy it as much as I do—and that there is the problem."

"I only mean to say that I'm more tender to you than to everyone else," Tom corrected.

Mary wordlessly summoned another nearby armchair to sit on, before pressing her wand to her face to cool herself down. She felt the little bit of ice at the tip of her wand melt against her skin, which then trailed down her cheek like a teardrop.

"The tenderness is the problem," Mary said softly. "Before Hogwarts, we were above this—everyone saw us as together. Frightfully together, as though we secretly shared a mind, a soul. That's how we thought, too. We never mimicked anyone in London, we just did what we pleased—but here and now, you rub shoulders with your boys, and I flitter about with my girls—or my girl, rather—Florence is my sole true friend. At Wool's we slept together every night, with none of this … tenderness, and we always knew to rely on each other. We were comfortable and innocent together. We fed each other, dressed each other, and never argued. Now, we've our own beliefs and our own pains—now, we can't see each other naked without blushing."

"You mistake the wand for the spell, Mary." Tom stood up and went to her, to caress her face. "We can be comfortable together and still have our tenderness. It's you who takes this all too seriously. You care about Florence more than I do any boy. But do not think for a moment that I care for you less than you care for me."

"Don't you see the problem?" asked Mary, aggressively seizing his invasive hand. "The answer to these questions are no longer self-evident. We never even thought of them, let alone asked them, when we were at Wool's. There's no way to tell who cares more for who anymore—our tenderness is disgusting."

"Perhaps so. But there's no need to worry about all this at all," Tom reassured.

"And why not?" Mary asked incredulously.

"Because we'll have neither the space nor time to indulge our tenderness once the term re-commences." Tom all but shrugged. "Everything will set itself back in order."

"What an absurd idea, Tom."

The conversation went nowhere, and by the time they bathed together that evening, all was forgotten.