Chapter Thirty-Seven | Lord, Save Me From Myself
It's one month down the line when sleep finally takes her.
She'd spent the entirety of her stay in the Dream learning. Talking. Spending as much as she could enjoying every conversation she could take from Melodie and avoiding Gehrman like the disease he was.
He knew. She knew. They both were aware of the slowly building hate between the two of them, and Catherine reveled in it. Took joy in the anger shining in his eyes as he wheeled about the workshop, how his lips would pull into a sneer if he so much as trailed his gaze over her form. If the very matter of her existence spited the man, then she would live until the stars winked out of existence and all warmth seeped from the universe.
But, she had mostly spent her time remembering what it was to be human, fraying as she was. Shadows moved in the dark, whispered in her ears, and things looked out at her from nowhere and everywhere, sending her into rambling fits, screaming her horror at the sky above.
Her eyes had been opened, and with it her mind. It broke, shattered, smashed to pieces upon her arrival to this place, once more as she had died and been reborn, again as she took Djura's throat in her teeth and tore, and here - now - after Rom had dashed it against a wall and let the crystalline fragments scatter every which way, she had finally begun to put the pieces back together.
Like glass, her fingers were cut by the shards of her psyche, bit by bit calluses forming and the glue she used to bind those fragile slivers of her being holding together, just barely.
The Catherine that came out of that, put back together with twine and plaster, was different, and yet the same. Something cruel had settled inside her belly, to roost alongside the madness that had long claimed its territory.
Kindness was a feeling and urge she still knew, but the Catherine who looked on the unwitting cultists of the Church felt no pity, nor compassion. Not anymore. Instead, she was driven by the urge to peel their eyelids back and force them to gaze out at the destruction their priests and scholars had wrought. The children of Death Eaters, Draco and his ilk, only sparked within her the need to bind them in rope and dunk their heads in a pensieve, make them watch as their fathers bowed to a madman who stood on the grave of own maker and would wish himself a god, spiteful and full of wrath.
Once, she had considered letting Umbridge live. In misery and squalor, undoubtedly, but live all the same.
Now?
If she so much as toed out of line, thought about doing as much, she would meet a grisly, painful end.
The prying, sticky fingers of guilt had wrapped themselves around her heart and squeezed it so tight that it stuttered in her chest, skipped beat after beat and left her feeling dizzy as her body fought to catch up. How could she stand before her friends, the family that she had chosen (had chosen her) and speak with them, knowing deep down that the things she had done would make them quake with fear and disgust?
Even Hermione, if she were to know of her single-minded slaughter of that village in the woods would no longer be able to turn a blind eye to the horrors that Catherine had enacted with her own two hands.
And that's what it was. A blind eye. Either that, or willful ignorance of what had become of her closest friend and lover in all but the most physical sense of the word.
Dumbledore would understand. She could see him now, only kindness and misery in his eyes as he watched her succumb to the plague of conscience (or lack thereof) that Yharnam forced upon its inhabitants. The blood and destruction it sowed among its people, leaving them no option but to be raised within an environment more likened to the nightmares of a dying man than any place within the lurid grasp of reality.
Its horror knew no bounds, and thus it had turned her to its ways through demands of survival and her own, stubborn drive to leave no stone unturned.
Not that that would have saved her from witnessing Rom deep below the lake, in a gilded cage rattling with her spawn and the withering curse of her very existence.
Kos - Kos - the god that lived in her mind, had been quiet yet gentle, a compassion in her every word and intangible motion that left Catherine feeling pitied, yet understood.
A curse had been laid on her brow at a year of age. Tom Riddle, dragged into this place by a god unknown - not Kos, the god herself had argued, long having lost interest in her dabblings with humanity after they had found her and ripped her unborn child from her belly - to meet who knows what end? If he had witnessed Rom, or seen past the illusion and scampered fearful into the belly of the beast… it was no small wonder the man turned out as he had.
Did he fear death if only for the fact that if there was something waiting on the other side, it would be a beast he had slain only for it to live on in the stars and inbetween, a place no human could ever venture?
Kos was dead, that she knew. Yet, Kos still lived.
These gods were not bound by the laws of mankind, nor the laws of the universe itself, it seemed. Planes of existence fashioned from thought alone, one she stood in, spent her days puttering away and reading, practicing spellwork, and trying desperately to push away the flickers of an undulating corpse, flesh like living ink as it sparked and sputtered, leaving trails of shattered time in its wake.
And Rom was barely a god. Hardly a god.
Bound to one realm, Kos had explained. Bound to Her earthly body, indigent and so very, very alone.
Catherine had plans. Plans to destroy the Church. To find Mergo, a child spoken to her in a dream (not a dream, so real, too real) by a woman in her wedding garb, stained in blood and inhumanly beautiful. A Pthumerian, she had realized in her readings. The civilization long buried, although that had always been the case, living in ostentatious caverns that the scholars of Yharnam had written of, traveling deep below the city and exploring the ruins of what came before, only to find the dregs of an empire still wandering the crypts nestled beneath their roots.
Tall, strong, and with flesh a mottled blue, bordering on gray, Pthumerians still lived on, if only as an echo.
Was that Yharnam who had come to her? Her ghost? Or was it simply a hallucination borne of her broken mind, pumped full of adrenaline and the urge to bash her head against a wall until her nightmares came spilling out and drenched the earth with their poison?
The messengers had returned to the dream after a few days, bringing with them a key and an eye, two objects of which she had no knowledge of, nor their use.
Of course, the key was understandable, but the question was what exactly it would unlock. The eye? The eye shone with the Blood, the pupil but a splash of ink and the petrified flesh that it rested in was pocked with disease.
Blood-drunk, it was. A key as well, most definitely.
But again, a key to where?
To the realm of my undying child.
Oh.
"His Dream?"
His Nightmare.
And god, didn't that just make her tremble, cold sweat on her neck and imagination running wild with whatever other horrors she would willingly step into.
"And… where, exactly, would I gain entrance to such a place?"
Whyever would you do such a thing?
"To save him. To save the both of them."
To what end?
"Because," she stated, finality and a deep, unseated anger in her voice. "They destroyed you. Took everything from you. What better way to spite them than to put your child to rest?"
Catherine felt the hesitation, the sigh of… something, resigned, furious, as it coursed through whatever connection the two held, before in a quiet, resolute voice, Kos spoke.
Search you may, but passage comes at a cost steeper than you are willing to pay.
"How much?"
Everything.
Letting out a breath of frustration, Catherine tucked the eye into her pocket, next to the indestructible coil of what she was beginning to believe was godflesh. Hardly a sliver, all but dead, but enough to scorch her mind when she had laid eyes on it in the waking workshop, and still now beat an unsteady rhythm against her heart.
She found herself thankful that she had only glanced at it, refused to look any longer out of fear and pain. If only she could have done the same with Rom.
Taking a step, Catherine stumbled, putting her hand out against the wall and balancing against it.
No. She wasn't ready yet. Still taken by fits, delusions, visions of a thousand stars bursting in front of her mind's eye and shadows in the dark, speaking to her with the voices of those she had slain.
Even now she could hear their whispers. Gascoigne calling out for his wife and daughters, never to see them again. Djura, raging at her slaughter of the beasts he had fostered and named himself protector of. Amelia, prostrated and singing praises in her name, Slayer of Gods and the chosen, blessed Prophet of the Great Oedon.
They chorused and screamed and rallied against the confines of her soul, echoes trapped in her blood, memories that yet lingered now given voice by the insanity that clutched at her spine with jagged claws.
With her thoughts brought to them, they shrieked louder and louder still, faint flickers of their ghosts appearing in the corner of her eye.
Blinking harshly, Catherine tried to steady herself. Deep, controlled breaths filling her lungs and gusting out of her with shaky precision.
"No, no no no." The words spilled out of her like rusted nails, sharp and acrid across her tongue. "Please, no. I can't- I can't go see them, not yet. Not like this."
Not an episode. Not now.
"Not now, please, not now. Please, god, please-"
Melodie found her, hunched and shaking, her shoulder against the wall and hands trembling violently as she attempted to control herself.
"Catherine, listen to me-"
"I can't go back. You don't understand. I'll destroy them. They won't know, can't know, can't know they can't know what happened-"
Pressing her hand to Catherine's chest, Melodie hummed slowly, the messengers appearing at their feet and pawing at the hem of Catherine's trousers. "Breathe. You must breathe. Their ghosts do not haunt you, the gods do not look down on you with anger. You are safe, Catherine. You are safe here in this Dream."
"They're not!" She choked. "I'm all wrong, all jumbled and scrambled up! I'll die before I hurt them. I'll do it myself!"
"Wait here. Please."
With that, Melodie disappeared, only to resurface a few moments later with a vial in hand, a thin, bronze liquid sloshing about inside. Without ceremony, she took Catherine's jaw and opened her mouth, flicking the cap off the vial and tipping its contents down her throat.
Gagging on the bitter substance, Catherine tried to fight it, but she was far too weak, too haggard to do anything as it slipped into her veins with brazen confidence. In an instant, she felt her eyelids drooping, a muted sense of betrayal brimming inside her as Melodie looked down with as much fear as she could comprehend in herself - emotions still a tenuous, clumsy stumble through the dark.
"It is time. You must return. They will help you, far better than I can in this stagnant place."
"I can't-"
"You must. That is your home, Catherine. Not here. Come back to this Dream rested and hale. I shall be waiting for you."
"Don't leave me with them, please. They scream so loud."
"You are never alone. You are touched by the gods, yes?" Melodie asked, brushing her finger against Catherine's scar. "She stays with you, always. Now rest, please."
"Can't-"
"Rest."
Her eyes slipped shut, heart still hammering as the void took her.
-::-
Heart pounding, Catherine silently shot up, clutching at the sheets of Hermione's bed as she forced herself back into her body, into reality.
Quietly, but hurried in her every motion, she removed herself from soft, grabby hands, and stumbled out of the common room, still wearing the clothes she had slept in so many months ago.
Hogwarts looked foreign to her as she walked, trembling through the corridors, portraits casting wary glances in her direction as she stumbled and shivered, no matter the warmth of the castle itself.
Feet pounding, not the whisper quiet stride of a hunter but instead that of the scared young woman she was - because there was no way she was a child after all that she had done and seen. No, no longer was Catherine a girl stricken with fear, but instead a woman with the world on her shoulders and madness drumming in her skull. The naivety that claimed her being had been shed to reveal a jaded core of unstoppable violence, an entity of pure destruction no longer fettered by the chains of sanity or conscience.
In the blink of an eye, she was outside the castle walls, driven with single-minded purpose towards her little tree by the lake, hands itching to rip and tear at her own flesh and unmask the bitter fury that lay within. To let it out, to bare all to the world and scream her madness into the ether.
Chest heaving with every breath, Catherine practically threw herself to the ground, knees drawn up to her chest and chin resting atop them as she murmured lowly, trying her damndest to drown out the raging voices of the dead and damned whose blood had been spilled by her filthy, stained hands. Evermore would the mark of their demise be emblazoned into her soul, and to eternity would their suffering follow her every step.
"It's all too much," came the murmurs from her ragged throat, the sound of two rocks ground together in such a way as to imitate human speech. "It's all wrong."
Soft footsteps met her ears, and she turned to see Dumbledore rushing towards her, still in his nightrobes - a maddening purple that shimmered with every movement, sparkling softly in the moonlight, something she felt blessed to find was the familiar white of a moon untouched by the anathemic magic of Yharnam, soft virgin skies unmarred by any god or being who wished to exert their dominance over the primates scrambling below.
"Catherine," he panted, light dancing at the end of his wand. "What happened?"
A choked sob leapt from her throat, wide eyes watching the dark as it shifted around her. "I killed it. I killed it and it broke me."
The man knelt in front of her, placing his hands on her knees. "Killed what, my dear?"
"A god, Albus. I slew Her in Her home, and still she took everything from me. My mind, my body, my soul… she stole it all away."
"I don't understand- I'm sorry Catherine, but I don't understand."
With haunted eyes, she stared into his eyes and beyond, into what made him, him.
A man who had seen far too much, had the world foisted upon him all for the sake of his talent, knowledge, and ability to kill far with far more grace and panache than any of his compatriots. Every mage had sung his praises, every muggle unwittingly offering thanks on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, at the eleventh hour, to one they would never meet nor ever know of.
He had all but conquered the planet if only for the sake of being the one who would put down his most trusted confidant, the man he had once offered his heart to only to have it crushed before his own eyes, to lose himself in his rage and take his sister with it - never knowing for sure whether it was he who had cast the first spell.
It was.
She knew all this and more, gazing into the threads and knots that made up the man named Albus Dumbledore, and the Truth pouring into her quaking mind left her reeling, shaken with the power of it.
To Know. To See.
Rom had twisted her into a being of knowledge, a hundred thousand thoughts flitting through the mass of meat and lightning that was her swollen brain, all of which came not from her, but somewhere far beyond.
"There's so much more, it's so much worse than we ever thought it could be." Blood trickled from her lip where she had bit it, her fangs easily piercing the soft flesh. "Gods are real, Albus. Gods are real, and I killed one."
His eyes widened with understanding, yet none at all, so wholly unprepared to tackle the concept that, even though they had come to accept that there was something out there dictating Catherine's journey, they had never expected to run across it, nor its brethren. "Good lord."
"She hid it all, she hid the Truth. Kept me blind, kept us all blind. But now it's all out there, it's out there and it's- it's- it's always been there, waiting for me. I was marked, I was marked and this was always going to happen."
"Marked?"
Catherine brushed away her fringe. "Do you see it? Do you see his mark?"
"Your scar? I don't understand, Catherine."
"It never was a lightning bolt, it was always this," she growled, wand swishing through the air and carving the unholy symbol in the sky with fire and brimstone. It lingered, flickering, crackling and casting a sharp orange glow across the field. "Always a hunter, always have been. I can't escape it, no matter what I do. It will follow me everywhere, even after I'm done with Yharnam and far, far away."
Dumbledore's eyes wavered, pupils expanding and contracting rapidly as he carried his gaze from the burning symbol to that same mark on her forehead, a horrified gasp escaping him as the Truth made itself known. "May I look…?"
Scrambling away, Catherine barked out a frantic, "No!"
"No, no, you can't- don't! You can't look. It will break you, it will change you. You'll never be the same."
Trembling, the man reached out a weary hand, before clenching it into a fist and leaving it hanging in the air. "I would allow myself that suffering Catherine, even if it offered no help or solace. I would do it just to share in your pain, to not leave you alone in this."
"You don't understand. I was- I was practically born for this and I can barely handle it. I've had this mark on my forehead since that night in Godric's Hollow, and it's changed me. Let me soak up the blood of Voldemort's demise and all else that perished near me." Her shoulders trembled as she reached up and took his hand in both of hers, squeezing it softly. "I spent two months in the Dream, one lost to myself and time. The other, I spent remembering who I was. Even if you want this, I can't let you. I won't."
The man did something she had never seen him do before.
He cried.
His chest, always rigid, sturdy, now gave with a long, slow breath, collapsing in on itself and followed by the shaking of his hands as he shifted theirs about, softly pressing Catherine's between his own and laying his forehead against his knuckles, frantic puffs of hot air warming the joints of her fingers as he gasped out, "I'm so sorry, my girl. I'm so, so sorry."
That was enough to bring Catherine back to reality, her demons leaving her in an instant and her only urge being that to comfort her grandfather in all but blood. "No- no, don't apologize."
"I wish I could do something, anything, to aid you- but I know that I've failed you once more. If things are truly as you say, I fear this is beyond any of us, beyond comprehension as we know it."
She could not lie to him, so she did not. "It is."
Dumbledore crumpled, looking every bit his one hundred and fourteen years of age. "I'm sorry, Catherine."
"This isn't your fault. It's his. The prophecy, his madness, all of it boils down to Voldemort. You didn't do any of this."
"I could have stopped him when he was young. I should have known."
"No one else did. Why blame yourself?"
"Because I should have known better."
"This isn't-" she stifled a gasp as the ghost of Gascoigne appeared above Dumbledore, his hand resting on the man's shoulder and a knowing look in his eyes. "This isn't on you. This isn't on me. This is-"
"Please, do not comfort me so, Catherine. I am not the one who needs it."
"You were crying."
"I've cried many a time in my long, long life. But these tears I shed not for my sake, but for yours." He detached himself from her, brushing away the salt-water that clung to his cheeks. "What's happening to you?"
"I… I see things. I know things. The Truth bled into me after I killed Her. The people I've slain, I can see them." She glanced up, Gascoigne still looking at her with that wry smile on his face, eyes hidden behind frayed bandages stained a crusty ochre. "They speak to me, just as Kos does, the god who lives in my mind."
"You're not… stable, then."
She barked out a laugh, the sound far too cruel for someone so young. "Not even close."
"Do you need time? Time to stay away, to better yourself?"
"I need calming potions and as much training as you can give me. And I need you to keep Umbridge far, far away from me if the two of us aren't alone together."
"You would kill her? In front of the other students?"
"In a heartbeat."
He nodded shakily, brushing grass and nightcrawlers from the hem of his robes. "No witnesses, then."
"No. No witnesses. If it… were to happen."
She knew Dumbledore would understand, but this was beyond her.
Why?
"I can't say it pleases me, but- a woman that repugnant, so alike those I fought in the wars. Well, even a self-imposed pacifist such as myself sees red at the thought of an adult torturing students for the sake of their own, oxymoronic prejudice."
"I'm sorry to have forced you into this. To have made you as violent as me."
"Ah. I was always violent, Catherine. I just so happened to quell the beast, out of a fear for myself or others I do not know. The carnage I wrought during the war with Grindelwald only brought with it praise. No matter how many men I killed, or how sickening my methods. It was only once I'd reached him, standing in a bloodsoaked field outside Berlin, that I looked into the eyes of a man that had once been the closest thing I could find to sunlight and saw my own, bitter rage reflected therein."
"You never should have been roped back in."
"The moment Tom Riddle became Voldemort, I was already fully invested in the coming wars. Let me repeat what you just said to me." He placed his hands on her shoulders, squeezing them firmly. "You are not to blame for his actions, nor my own. I've made the decision to help you of my own free will, consequences be damned, and if there's any good thing I can do in the last years of my life, it would be to get you out of this war unscathed. I may not be able to do that, not now, but I can make sure that your path is clear, and your travels easy."
"The Ministry-"
"-and their ilk are naught but braggards and bigots. Oligarchs lounging on thrones of sand, touting their blood as an example of status and strength when it all stains the same shade of red. I have worked with them for decades, nearly a century, and not once have I cared for their whims or wishes. My only purpose had been to guide the hand of history towards something better, a future not plagued by indecision and remnant tradition that begs its practitioners to torture those they would consider lesser. Make no mistake, Catherine. Birkenau would be nothing but a nursery compared to the horrors that Voldemort and his followers yearn to bring to reality."
"I… but-"
He shushed her quietly. "No buts. Now, come. I fear I won't sleep tonight, nor do I believe you so eager to return but an hour after your escape from that dreadful place. Come to my office, please, and rest for a moment while we figure out where to go from here."
"O- okay. Yeah. Alright."
So Catherine followed the Headmaster back inside the castle, the shadows seeming just a bit dimmer, and the ember glow of the sun as it began to peek over the horizon that much brighter.