Chapter Sixty | To Be a Kelpie
A thousand years in the depths. Choking. Wrapped in icy, bloated flesh, and an entire generation of silken decay.
Her mind had returned to her what felt like eons ago - fragments of it at the least - Catherine unable to so much as shiver beneath the weight of the water, so much she felt her eardrums crumple like paper, a rush of liquid cold hammering at her brain before it was forced out as her body stitched itself back together.
Trapped, in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Her lungs were packed full, swollen with it all. Every so often they'd tear, blood and filth pouring from her mouth to drift yet further down in gelatinous clumps. A perpetual haze of pinkish smoke surrounded her, drifting in the soft undercurrents.
Eventually, she began to claw her way up, pushing past the exhaustion that wracked her weary bones - the drain of being repurposed, a hardly living, never breathing Ship of Theseus.
Catherine didn't know how long it had been, buried beneath the muck, when she brushed her hand against a familiar chain, the very one that had ferried her to this unending hell.
She couldn't see a thing, couldn't hear, couldn't smell, nothing but saltwater and death forever on her tongue. But she felt the chain, and began to drag herself up, shouldering past the drifting bodies - inferi - grime-slick corpses that now thought her one of them.
Might as well have been, as she pulled herself out of the lake and onto the shore, a fountain of filthy water and thin chunks of jellied flesh streaming from her mouth, ebbing from every pore.
Hacking, wheezing, and still choking on her own lungs, Catherine began to crawl her way across the crystal floor, the locket wrapped around her wrist - knotted and trapped between sheafs of steel - clinking against it with every haggard motion.
A trail of blood was left in her wake, spotting the grayish filth that dripped from her clothes and lingering atop its surface before drifting off in little, rusted clouds.
Her head cracked against the door, no light to guide her way, and Catherine spat at it. It soaked up her blood before grinding open, the rumble of it tingling in her bones.
It felt as if she was seeing light for the first time in her life, the faint glow of the moon suffusing the small entryway to the cave and all but blinding her. She blinked wearily as she continued to drag herself forward, glasses long lost in the lake and the way before her nothing but a smear of bluish-gray. All she could do was map out the world she saw like an amoeba, following the light to wherever it so led.
Slow as she was, the door closed behind her just as she passed through, barely missing her ankle and what would have been yet more pain.
Heaving, she rolled onto her back and stared at the sky. Her wand was dragged from out of her pocket, a jerky wave conjuring up another pair of glasses that she just managed to cram onto her face, scratching her cheek in the process.
Never had she been so happy to see the moon. The stars. The cosmos as it stretched on and on.
Wild laughter erupted from her, thick with bile and punctuated by wet coughs, more specks of filth and other detritus flung out above her to fly in lazy arcs before splattering across her face. A blood vial was dragged out of her jacket, a clump of something sliding off of it as she wrestled with the cap.
Her fingers were clumsy from disuse, still numb from the cold and her heart beating a slow, slow pace - one that would leave anyone wondering if she was a sleepwalking coma patient.
Eventually she succeeded, very nearly pouring the vial's contents over her face as she leaned with all her might - head barely pulled away from the rocks - and greedily drank from it. Unnatural as it felt to drink ice-cold blood, she still noticed as an unnatural warmth began to drip down her limbs and linger in the taut wire of her muscles.
The fog began to clear. Slowly, at first. Hysterical giggles still burst from her lips now and then, joined by sobs as the adrenaline rushing through her started to hitch. Sparks flew, a jolt of electricity thundering across the ever-winding pathway of her nerves, and clarity finally, miraculously, returned to her.
"Oh god," came Catherine's raspy whisper, ragged with gravel and the lingering salt.
She turned over onto her side, groaning with effort, and tried to push herself up on one elbow. It ended in failure, Catherine collapsing back to the stone with a weak murmur, another cough pushing the last dregs of the lake from her lungs, some of it bubbling out of the corner of her mouth before it popped, dribbling down her chin.
The locket once more clinked against the rocks as Catherine scrabbled for another blood vial, humming a disjointed tune as she drank it down.
Taking her time, she pulled herself along the rocks over to the nearest wall. Slowly, laboriously, she began the task of sitting up, shoulder pressed against the stone and small grunts escaping her with every push. Eventually, she'd achieved verticality, rapping her knuckles against the wall before punching the air, letting out a quiet "Hooray!"
She laughed, again, this time at her own insanity. "Lost it completely now. No Gods, just a whole lot of corpses."
For a brief moment she wondered if she'd developed a fear of water, before writing it off with much aplomb - or, at least - trying her best to pretend she hadn't added another trauma to the list. A list that seemed to never stop growing, and she thought were she to have ever gone to a mind healer they would toss her out of the room, citing no manner of treatment nor discussion would ever leave so much as a dent in her psyche.
More laughter.
Pointing aggressively at god knows what, Catherine drew her finger back and scraped it against the stone, grinning at her own antics.
She laid against the wall for hours, occasionally knocking her head against it and humming at the dull throb it brought.
Pain was familiar. Pain was what kept her going. Pain was something that, were someone to pry out her heart with their bare hands, she would only find it in her to curse them rather than scream.
Pain was adrenaline and with it, life.
Her clothes had begun to dry by the time she'd finally dragged herself to her feet, swaying with one hand against the wall and looking, glassy eyed, as the ground seemed to shift beneath her. A faint touch of nausea pricked at her throat, but she swallowed it down, not wanting to dirty herself anymore than she already had. Not that sick would do much to affect the stench that clung to her, nor would it even remotely compare to the strings of decaying flesh she found herself plucking off her leathers, flicking them away with a mild look of distaste.
Wand all but dancing, she began the process of drying and cleaning herself, siphoning the filthy water from her armour and scattering it towards the sea. Then she began to clean, removing all traces of blood that had been left in her wake, leaving no sign that she had ever come to this place bar the locket that still hung from her wrist.
Fiddling with it, she began to work out the kinks in the chain, slowly unknotting the locket until it was wrapped around a single finger, swaying softly in the wind.
It felt of nothing.
No rot. No rank stench to accompany its very existence. Simply an innocuous, well-crafted fake.
Her eyes burned as she stared at it, as if to set fire to the thing with her gaze and gaze alone. Eventually, she fiddled with the clasp and pried it open, revealing a small, crisply folded sheaf of parchment that was ever-so-slightly damp from the humidity of the cave. Enough to seep through the cracks, but not enough to stain the lettering written upon it.
Catherine read the note, both impressed and more than frustrated at whomever had taken it upon themselves to search this place out, most likely dying in the process.
Was it they who had dragged her down? Their corpse burdened by the curse of their once master and forced to reside, evermore, in that cave of dread? But another tally on the list of Voldemort's slain, repurposed for his own ends.
R.A.B.
Not enough to go on, but her nose said otherwise.
Black, perhaps? Or was it just wishful thinking that Grimmauld did, in fact, hold a piece of Voldemort's soul?
There was only one way to find out, but, once more - Catherine would rather see the inside of Hogwarts before she would come back to that place and, inevitably, be forced to explain herself. Or, at the very least, have a conversation that would no doubt end in harsh words and bitter tears.
Not that she would allow herself that much, stoicism now so wholly ingrained in her being that one could draw tears from a stone before Catherine would so much as reveal her innermost thoughts to another person. The dead, on the other hand, were another matter entirely, and she'd come to enjoy her conversations with Gascoigne.
Speaking of.
"Well, that was something, wasn't it?"
He inclined his head, mouth drawn into an expression implacable. "I take it back."
"Take-" Catherine smashed her fist against her chest, wheezing as she cleared her throat. "Take what back?"
"Your world hides its terror well. It is… concentrated, in a way. Never before could I have imagined such a horrid place. A concoction like the one you drank."
"Yeah, well, that's Tom for you."
Gascoigne nodded along as she stretched her arms out, neck cracking loudly as she jerked her head from side to side. "Have you seen, or heard of worse?"
"Concentration camps."
Now that she had seen them, through another's eyes, at least.
Oh, Albus' memories were horrid beyond belief, and not something she felt comfortable voicing in detail, nor lingering on.
"Explain."
"They were…" her hands waved ineffectually, lips pulled into a thin line. "Do you remember what happened to Cainhurst? Every man, woman, and child killed?"
"Aye. A horror of man, not of any blood-taken mind."
"Think millions. Millions. Lined up and shot, burned, piled into graves or their ashes dumped wherever they could manage. It's what Tom wishes for. There's no other way for him to reach the ends of his ideals. Subjugation and immortality are all he wishes for, and if he could put the world beneath his heel to do so, he would - unflinchingly. If he has his way - which he won't, not while I still breathe - billions would die."
"That is…" Ever poetic in his words, even Gascoigne was left silent at such a revelation. "Horrifying, beyond words."
"Yeah. No other way about it. And… and I can't even get into his head and understand why. He'd be considered along the same lines of those he hates - or at least pretends to hate, because of his blood. It's all to serve his means, but I can't picture where his lust for immortality ended and… whatever it is he became, began. If he's so scared of death, why not disappear? Not put a target on his back and scream to the world that for all others to survive, he himself must be slain?"
"Insanity, it seems to me."
"I think it would be worse if he was sane. To try and figure out how he led himself down the path he now walks. What manner of justification he holds dear."
"It does not do well to put oneself in the mind of a madman."
"Believe me, I know."
The sound of the sea overtook their conversation. Its perpetual roar, the crash of waves splitting across sharp stones and reaching towards the cliffs edge. Therapeutic, in a way.
Still, she felt foggy. A weariness not just of the mind but of the body, as if she'd slept for far too long and had finally woken to see the sun beginning to set. Quickly fixed with another blood vial, taken from a supply that at this point never seemed to end. Not after picking a hundred dead men's pockets and rifling through every abandoned home she'd passed through in Yharnam.
Blood flowed like water there. A fix-all first aid kid in the form of a simple transfusion. You couldn't walk more than ten feet without stumbling across a body with at least one strapped to their waist.
At least, at the start of the moon's rise that was the case.
At this point she imagined most of Yharnam had been picked clean. Food beginning to run short and real panic settling in as the blood moon shone down upon them all. All of it spoke of nigh apocalyptic tidings, that ember sky an omen unheard of since the burning of Old Yharnam so many decades ago.
Not that it wasn't always there, only Rom to hide the burning gaze of the real, true Moon.
Catherine wondered how Melodie was doing. How she would do, once the final page of her story in that strange, awful world had finally been inked. She supposed she'd have to ask her next they meet.
For now, she had her… vacation to deal with, and Catherine allowed a macabre grin to settle on her face at the sheer irony of it.
Hopefully she wouldn't have to spend any time near deep water in future, no matter how calming the sound of the ocean, untempered and vicious though it may be. At least the ocean displayed its intentions to swallow the world, if it could, not that snake in the grass of an untouched lake.
Only spiders and corpses to be found in such places.
Catherine took one step, body turning, and her next clicked against the solid wood of the Shrieking Shack.
It had been a long time since she'd been in this place, chasing after a rat and so intent on what now felt like the problems of another person entirely.
In fact, she'd all but forgotten about Pettigrew until now, glancing at the debris still scattered about the shack from his escape.
Hopefully, she'd be given the chance to kill him. That would be an experience she'd relish wholeheartedly. No prying him apart like Rabastan. Not after those looks and stern words. This was not Yharnam, and it would behoove her to act as such.
But that didn't mean she couldn't have fun. Wax poetic to a trapped rat and allow the realization that there would be no escape, no chance at redemption nor the plucking of morals no longer possessed. Rules, perhaps, and a doctrine fashioned of guilt, but nothing a sane man would ever venture to name morality.
She mused on this as she began walking through the house, down to the tunnel that led out beneath the Whomping Willow and to Hogwarts' grounds.
It did not seem any smaller than it had in her third year, and she lamented the fact that it had to do with her height, or lack thereof. A strange thing to be self conscious about, especially now of all times, but it felt calming to offer half-hearted bitter thoughts towards something so trite.
A finger pressed to the knot, and Catherine once again ducked out into the light of the night sky, relieved to see little to no windows flickering with candle flame, sans those of the corridors. She didn't know the exact hour, but it was late enough that she could all but walk right into the place unmolested.
It was no wonder Sirius broke into the castle with such ease, she thought, as she journeyed over hill and across bridge and courtyard without a single notion that anyone had even realized she was there. Catherine went so far as to walk straight through the front door instead of skirting around the grounds to one of the many other entrances.
Portraits slumbered beside her as she wandered through the once warm and welcoming halls, steps catlike and, although very nearly silent from practice, were made deathly so through the aid of magic. No rustling of her clothes, no quiet breaths. Only a shadow that moved swiftly and confidently through the castle's many corridors.
Which was why she picked up the steady click of heel against stone as she neared the seventh floor, ready to stun whoever was around the corner with as little fanfare as possible when she lay eyes on Minerva.
"Catherine."
Ah, so the wards did pick her up.
"Professor."
Minerva lowered her arm, letting out a quiet sigh of relief. "I feared someone else had broken into the grounds."
"Aren't there supposed to be aurors all over the place?"
"There were, until Fudge found he couldn't instate one of his own and I took up the role as Headmistress."
"And why, exactly, are you not afraid to see me here?"
"Because I can't find it in myself to be disgusted, nor afraid of a girl who's all but family to me, and has… after Albus illuminated us of the more particular details regarding the place you've been traveling to- Well, with all things considered, you're handling it as best you can."
"You're far too kind."
They both knew it wasn't a compliment.
Strained. Strained was the way she would describe the expression on Minerva's face. Torn between duty and compassion, and unable to bear the dissonance of it all.
"Catherine…"
"Please, Minerva. I'd rather not."
"You haven't even heard what it is I have to say."
"Do I need to, to answer?"
"Tea," she all but demanded, looking terribly unsure for a woman of her age and stature. "Just one cup. That's all I ask."
Catherine's eyes narrowed as she slipped her wand back into her pocket, before crossing her arms. The toe of her boot tapped out a rhythm, a dull noise that droned on beneath their silence, like the ticking of a clock in an empty room.
"Why?" was the only word she spoke, genuine curiosity in her voice.
"Because I want to."
"And there'll be no aurors? Albus won't be hiding behind a tapestry ready to take me back to headquarters?"
"Only the two of us."
A long suffering sigh flowed from her lips, to drip across the floor like tar. After a moment, Catherine inclined her head. "To your office, or…?"
"Albus' office."
Catherine's answer was a quiet hum, before she gestured down the hall.
The two walked in tense silence, only the nearby portraits snoring to punctuate it alongside the click of their shoes against the stones, but a droning to mark the dreary quiet. A whispered word made the gargoyle before the head's office begin its ascent, and no amount of forced disinterest could make Catherine - standing two steps behind Minerva - feel any less dismayed at her decision to say yes.
Instead she stared at the wall as they rose, a single finger trailing along its smooth surface, as she wondered what it was exactly that they would discuss.
Small talk? Catching up? Tearful assertions that she must stay her hand and turn back, away from the path she had chosen?
Not enough time to prepare herself, she noted, as they stepped into the office and Minerva pulled out Catherine's seat for her, a watery smile on her face. No. Only enough time to grow more confused by her sudden circumstances.
"Dobby."
A pop, and he appeared, flinching at Catherine's appearance before turning to Minerva, one ear quirked so he might better hear her. "Yes Miss Headmistress Ma'am?"
"Could you please get some tea for myself and Miss Potter, here?"
Wide eyes blinked, already immense in their emotion, and began to fill with astonishment. "This is- Oh! Dobby is ashamed!" he wailed, tugging on his ears and ashen faced. "Miss Cat! Dobby didn't recognize you!"
"It's fine, Dobby, please," she insisted, holding out her hand, palm up. "It's good to see you again."
"Miss Cat is too kind - too kind! Dobby is very sorry. Never has Dobby been so embarrassed."
"It's my magic, isn't it? Not just this." Catherine gestured to her face after having taken off her mask, placing it on the floor beside herself. "What's it like?"
"It is being…" he quailed somewhat, and she motioned for him to continue, with a muttered 'please.'
Although reluctant, he continued. "It is being very strange, Miss Cat. Not bad, but… very warm. Very bright. But very cold, too. What-" his lips drew up in a way that she knew spoke of tears. "What happened, Miss Cat?"
"That… that I believe the Headmistress and I are about to discuss. But-" she swallowed, smiling wider at him, and hoping it looked familiar even on her scarred face. "Would you be able to get us our tea, please? It's lovely to see you though, Dobby. You're a good friend."
"Dobby is being…? Dobby is being Catherine Potter's friend?"
He all but deflated, at the same time standing ram-rod straight and gawking in such a way that his eyes, already plastered wide, seemed to stretch further until the lids practically disappeared. Dobby quivered with a nervous energy before grinning wider than she had ever seen before, and disappeared with a crack.
Only a second later he reappeared, dishes jingling atop their tray and aromatic steam wafting from the ceramic pot in the middle of it all. A small plate of biscuits nearly wobbled off the side, before being corrected as Dobby tilted the entire tray precariously, sliding it onto the desk and offering her one final grin before cracking once more out of the room.
"He thinks the world of you."
"Many do," Catherine retorted, reaching over to pour the tea. "It's an unfortunate side effect of being famous."
"You know I don't mean it that way."
"I do. It still doesn't change the fact that, even now, there's certainly hundreds out there who think I can do no wrong, and nor shall I ever." She dipped a small spoon into the sugar, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up against the minute crackle as the grains were pushed about. "Sugar?"
"Please."
She continued fixing the tea, handing Minerva's mug over to her and doing her best to ignore the shiver of discontent that worked across her spine when their fingers brushed.
"So? What did you want to discuss?"
"To be honest with you… I haven't the foggiest."
"Well, you already know about my predicament-" Minerva snorted, no good nature or amusement in the noise - only resignation. "-and how that came about. You were at the last Order meeting… I just don't know what it is you want to know."
"I'd like to talk, simple as that, and see where the conversation takes us. Although, I do wonder - why are you here?"
"Horcrux, I think. In the Room of Requirement."
"Ah."
"He told you, then?"
"Yes… after you left Albus had a revelation of sorts. He spoke with us, those that could be considered most trusted at the least - Mundungus and a few others long gone after you'd berated Severus."
"How is he?"
At that Minerva sighed, picking up her mug and taking a long sip. She lowered it, cradling the warm ceramic between her hands, a breath pushing away the steam that wafted up from it.
"As well as one can be when their family walks out the door after harsh words have been spoken."
"Justified words."
"Yes, and no. At least to me."
"I'd say they were dramatic, which they were, but…" Catherine finally decided to taste the tea Dobby had brought, her face scrunching imperceptibly when it tasted familiar, yet wrong. She expected it, but it didn't make her feel any less strange. "...Snape sold out my family and Albus harboured him. For years, over a decade the man walked free for the sake of… of what? He's a spy? Useful, yes, but he still allowed Snape to all but bully children for god knows how long, and how severely, all for what?
"And I get it. I do. It's pragmatic and… in the long run probably a wise decision to make. But he could have at least stopped him. Or tried to make him atone for what he'd done, try to sway Snape away from whatever disgusting obsession he has with my dead mother."
A sad smile crept over Minerva's face and she nodded. "I agree. And if I were placed in the same situation, at your age, I probably would have said much the same - if far less violent."
"Then why the no?"
"While his decisions have been poor and great alike, he loves you dearly Catherine, and what he saw you do shook him." Her hand raised slowly, head shaking as she continued. "It did not shake his love, but the perception of it." Minerva's teeth clicked as she took another sip, baring them slightly against the heat. "You know what happened with his sister, don't you?"
Catherine's reply was a single finger, tapping against the side of her head.
"Yes. I guess you're far more intimate with that little bit of history than the rest of us. Albus… Albus, I believe, looks on what's happening now as the same as what happened then. An occurrence that he will spend the rest of his life dwelling on the possibilities of, whether he could have done anything to prevent it, or if it was all but fate.
"I've known him nearly my whole life, and while I am a witch it is still a long life indeed. Your words were, and are, justified. Harsh. Brutal, even. But understandable at the very least. I think both you and he forget, though, that you're very much the same."
Her finger trailed over the rim of her cup, Catherine's head tilted and she motioned for Minerva to continue.
The woman went to grab a biscuit but instead retreated, hand hovering awkwardly for a second before returning to the top of the desk.
"You both are influential people with a burden that I cannot begin to imagine the weight of. All your life you've been forced to make decisions of which the consequences are dire, be it via failure or success. Eventually, you can't see the forest for the trees, and you've made many a decision for the forest's sake, haven't you?"
"I have," Catherine conceded.
"And has he not as well? You think alike, the both of you. You're focused on the big picture. What the effects of a decision will be not just now but years later, possibly the remainder of our lives - yet, neither of you ever take the time to stop and think about the now."
"What are you trying to get at?"
"I'm only bouncing my thoughts around," Minerva said, gesturing to Catherine with her cup. "You're both so similar that while you're getting along, you get on like a house on fire. But once you reach a disagreement… the way in which you two see the world is so similar, but different enough that the juxtaposition grates on the both of you something terrible."
She finished her tea, setting the cup down on its plate and gently pushing it aside, so that she could rest both her hands on the desk. "Please, don't mind my mutterings. I want to know… how are you? It's been weeks since anyone has seen you, and… I'm aware of why you'd want to keep your distance, but I can't help but worry."
Weeks?
How long had she been down in that cave?
Yes, Catherine felt a touch… sluggish - more than exhausted once she'd made it to dry(ish) land - but she'd thought she'd only been down there for a day or two at the most. Trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth, only to claw her way through the corpses and laugh at her fate as if it were any other day.
It was, she realized. Only a slightly larger, more ferocious blip on the map of madness that was her life.
She almost found it funny.
"I've been busy," she ventured, saying far too little for Minerva's comfort, as evidenced by her pinched brow. "But I've been content."
And that was no lie.
"Content is all we can ask for, can we?"
"True enough."
It wasn't as if she could say that she was positively giddy over the last few conscious days she'd had. Bent to the same whims of melancholy that had always suffered her, yes, but those were brief and far less severe than any she had felt before.
No more did a weight stand on bent shoulders, heaving with the effort it took for what amounted to a very bitter child to bear it.
A long time it had been since she'd considered herself a child. Beneath a lake, as always.
But that wasn't how Albus viewed her, was it? She could taste his memories and conjure up the pale, miniature thing he'd seen her as since that day she walked from the dungeons covered in the dust of the founders - a cornered animal, and one that just so recently he had seen holding nothing of the tempered fury that now tinged her vision.
Again. That was in the past.
Catherine, different in a thousand ways, was still the same in her mind. Vicious and far too dangerous for one of her age, yet she couldn't focus on that and that alone. Emilie, Melodie, Eileen, Arianna… even that nameless man and the nun that harried her steps with a hero worship not even the most egregious of her home could muster - she'd saved them because that was what she always did. What she wanted to do, deep down, and forevermore.
Hell, she could imagine her friends - former friends, yet still dear - chiding her for such a thing. A hero complex that still lay in the foundations of who she was, rooted much too deep to ever be dragged out.
Not reason enough to be happy. But more than enough to be pleased.
"Yeah…" Slowly, almost methodically, a soft smile pushed its way from cheek to cheek, far gentler than any expression she was wont to wear. "I'd say I'm… content."
And Minerva smiled as well.