Author's Notes:

I'm very on the middle in regards to this chapter. I don't think it's terrible or anything, and I liked the idea for it when I outlined this chapter, but I just felt like I couldn't pull the execution off. It's why I just capped it off at 8k words. Hopefully you like reading it more than I liked writing it.

Chapter 13

Second Guessing Herself

Unknown.

The silence.

It wasn't what woke her, but what kept her from going back to sleep. There wasn't a single sound in the dormitory outside of her own breathing. There would normally be something, whether it was the other girls breathing, the wind outside rolling against the windows, a fire crackling, the turning of pages.

There was nothing.

Iris opened her eyes blearily. After lying in bed for a full minute, letting herself wake up, she did a mental check. It was Tuesday, the tenth of January, and she had Potions at nine o'clock. Judging by the empty dormitory, she gathered she was already late. She glared at Hermione's bed as if the bushy-haired witch was lying in it.

Why had Hermione not woken her? Did she anger her yesterday? As Iris couldn't even remember leaving the Room of Requirement, she began to wonder just how stoned she was the night before. Had she been so much so that she had upset Hermione in some way and could not remember?

But now that she really took the time and effort to listen, really listen, it really was too quiet. She glanced over at the window nearest to her, craning her head to see behind the curtains, and was startled to see that it was night. She had assumed the lack of light in the room was due to all the curtains being closed.

Had she slept through an entire day? She hoped not. She had Snape and McGonagall today, and missing both was something she was unwilling to do, even if she had stopped caring about the consequences. She might not be expelled, or care about house points, or attend any detentions, but McGonagall and Snape would both seek her out and she'd have no choice in listening to them yell at her. Not unless she Stunned them.

She slid her legs off her bed and stood up. Then she saw that she had robes on, which was strange, because she barely wore her school robes to class, much less out of class, and especially not when she went to sleep. She looked over to her dresser and saw her wand. She picked it up and immediately felt — or rather, didn't feel the magic she was supposed to from her wand holster when she was attempting to will her wand to holster itself. As she patted both her arms, she learned it was because her wand holster was gone.

Iris Transfigured Hermione's entire mattress into a hair tie, tied her hair into a bun, and placed her wand into it; she had always been quicker on the draw with her wand in her hair than in her robes.

There was a creaking sound, like a door slowly opening. She turned to look at the door leading down to the common room and saw it was halfway open. What lay beyond was complete darkness. Nothing odd, as the dorm itself was rather dark, but what really unsettled her was Crookshanks. He was standing still, stiffly, staring directly into the black beyond the open door.

Iris walked slowly to him. "You alright, Crookshanks? Where's Hermione?"

Crookshanks didn't respond. He just continued staring. Iris used her foot to lift Crookshanks up slightly and turn him around. It was as though she wasn't there; the cat merely turned back around and continued staring.

Iris had to admit it — she was slightly disturbed: she swished her wand once and the door shut close — another quick flick and the door was locked. Instantly, Crookshanks looked at her with an almost frightened expression, his ears flat against his head. Then, without so much as another glance at her, Crookshanks sprinted to the other side of the room, on top of a dresser, through a curtain, and out of a window that was apparently open.

Iris stared. Truth be told, she was fairly certain Crookshanks would survive, as she had accidentally blasted him out of a window before, but the way he did it… the zero hesitation… it was as though the cat felt it was trapped in the room… as though, by closing the door, Iris hadn't kept out whatever Crookshanks was staring at, but rather locked it in with them.

In a matter of seconds, the fireplace and all the candles were lit, giving the room an orange glow that felt more eerie than it did comforting and cozy as it usually did. She would have conjured a ball of light or two as she had done so in the first task, but in an enclosed space like this, it was more likely to blind her than help her see. There was also a niggle at the back of her mind, a certain amount of trepidation, that held her wand — what if the ball of light disappeared into the shadows as it did in the Forbidden Forest? Or the Chamber of Secrets?

"Not many people who try to scare me," Iris said steadily. "But out of the ones who've tried… one was burnt to ash… one torn from his body and forced to live as a wraith… and — well, that's it, really. Most are smart enough to not try. I'd sooner blow up this entire room than give in to fear, so come out."

Silence.

But then, after a moment of it, Iris heard something. From the closed door, slow scratching noises came.

"Whoever is behind that door has five seconds to tell me who they are and what they're doing," Iris said. "Five — four — three — Bombarda!"

There was a faint flash of light and the door exploded outward, swinging loosely on one hinge. Maybe her fear had gotten the better of her and caused her to overpower the spell. But still, there was nothing on the other side, unless whatever it was had tumbled all the way down the stairs, but Iris doubted this — she would have likely heard it, as the stairway wasn't exactly short.

Then another sound came, something so terrifyingly similar to what she had heard the first time she had ventured into the Chamber of Secrets. A sinister kind of whistling, bone-chilling and spine-tingling — haunting.

The curtains flung open with her wand when Iris was a step away. She took a look outside, and to her amazement, there was a bald man sitting on top of one of the towers, somehow managing to not slide off the cone-shaped top. He was flying a kite. Iris stared at him for a moment, and then a grin appeared on her face, then she chuckled slightly — and finally, she began laughing.

She had definitely smoked too much.

"Find something amusing?"

Iris shook her head at the man. "As cool as I feel smoking from a classic long stemmed pipe, I really need to do it less — or never again."

"If it takes the stress off, why?" the man said, his voice casual and only slightly gruff. Iris took a good look at him. He gave the general appearance of a friendly but average looking man. If not for the somewhat unappealing five o'clock shadow on his face, he would make a decent first impression on Uncle Vernon.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Gaunter —"

"Actually, I don't care. You're not real," Iris said, and she withdrew from the open window, but the man's last comment made its way to her.

"I'm the only thing here that isn't an illusion, Iris."

What was going on? Was this one of those extremely vivid dreams she had read about once? Or was she really hallucinating all of this? Was she staring at the wall of the hospital wing, drooling, Hermine's hand waving in front of her face, desperately trying to bring Iris back to reality?

Iris exited the dormitory at a quick pace, ignoring the dragging sound coming from beneath her bed, made her way down the stairs and found the common room empty. She checked several other dormitories, for boys and girls, and found nothing, not even anyone's pet. It seemed as though Crookshanks had only been there to unnerve her.

As she stood in the common room, trying to stay calm, the portrait door swung open and in climbed a first year she didn't know the name of. Iris let out a sigh of relief. She really was just seeing things before… and hearing things… She was definitely sending a strongly worded letter to Dudley.

The first year didn't so much as look at Iris as she passed by her and up the stairs into the first-year dormitories. Iris had to stop herself from chasing the first year down, grabbing her by the shoulders, and screaming at her that she wasn't some crazy dark witch like the Daily Prophet and majority of Hogwarts claimed. It was okay to at least acknowledge her.

Another Gryffindor walked in then and Iris made her way out of the Gryffindor Tower, down the stairs, all the floors, the marble staircase, and into the entrance hall. She leaned against one of the doors to the Great Hall and began scanning the faces of all the students in the Great Hall. She couldn't find Fleur. This wasn't odd, but what was odd was that no one was looking at her. Over the past two weeks, all she had to do was stick a toe around the corner of this spot and everybody's head would turn.

It wasn't her ego making its presence when she thought about how they should be turning to look at her. It wasn't as though they had many opportunities nowadays to whisper and point at her. She had spent so much time away from everyone that she had missed all the Triwizard Tournament duels between the non-champion students. Truthfully, she wasn't even sure they had started.

Not wanting to ruin her blessing, she turned around and walked off in the direction of the kitchens. She arrived in front of the painting of the fruit bowl much quicker than she had expected; she had likely just zoned out in her walk. She tickled the pear and walked in, hoping to find Fleur on her couch.

But Fleur wasn't there. There were no house-elves there — no house-elves except Dobby. He was in the center of the room, sharpening a large kitchen knife, and breathing heavily.

"Er — Dobby? Where is everyone? What are you doing?" she asked, admittedly a little nervous about Dobby's behavior. "Was Fleur here?"

"Iris Potter should not be here…" Dobby mumbled. "Iris Potter should not be here..."

Dobby shot her a crazed, pleading look, then held the knife low to the ground before throwing it up — the knife flew upward and directly into the ceiling, which was lower than Iris had remembered, and the knife stuck to the top, where well over a hundred other knives lay — or rather, stuck. But none of them were sticking to the ceiling by the sharp ends, but rather the handles. The sharp ends were all facing downward.

Then Dobby pulled out another knife from seemingly out of nowhere.

Iris left quickly. "What the hell — what the hell — what the hell," she kept muttering over and over, running her fingers through her hair as she walked as quickly as she could away from the kitchens and back up to the Great Hall. Something obviously wasn't right. Was the entire school in one some kind of sick joke? Everybody except her? No, Dobby wouldn't do that to her — he, of all people, wouldn't agree to something that would frighten her like this.

When arrived at the entrance hall once again, she found the doors to the Great Hall closed, with a deathly silence hanging in the air. Even when the doors were closed before, one could always hear the muffled chatter.

But not now.

She needed fresh air. She needed to breathe, because everything around her — the very air, it seemed — was trying to suffocate her. Is this what Dudley had described as a bad trip? Could it manipulate her perception of the world this much? Maybe magic and muggle drugs didn't mix.

She was out of the entrance hall and outside now, attempting to fill her lungs with fresh air as quickly as she could. What was this? A panic attack? Had she finally lost it? Was she really at St Mungo's Hospital now?

Iris noticed someone in the distance, right in the middle of the grounds, and they were digging. Not with their wand, but with a normal shovel. She made her way to this very large person carefully and cautiously. It was Hagrid. He didn't stop digging to look up at her, and he was mumbling under his breath.

"H-Hagrid?"

"Hello, Iris," he said. "How do you like it?"

"Like what?" Iris said, feeling confused and now also slightly afraid of even Hagrid.

"The grave, made it specially for you, Iris," Hagrid said. His voice was calm and collected, and it was not in the way Hagrid spoke; it was perfect English. It was wrong. So completely wrong, this version of Hagrid, this entire thing that kept building up her panic and she now felt as though she was falling apart, as though the world was slipping away from her fingers.

Knowing she wouldn't get any answers out of him, she didn't bother asking. "It's lovely, Hagrid," Iris said kindly, taking a step back. She saw something moving from within the Forbidden Forest, its limbs long, gangly, unnatural. "I've gotta go though, so I suppose I'll see you later, yeah? Right," she said when she received no answer, "I'm leaving then."

And she turned around and walked swiftly back up to the front doors of the castle, not failing to miss Hagrid's last comment: "Oh, no, you're not."

Wrong, wrong, wrong. This wasn't a panic attack, she didn't think — she had one after her second year, after she had woken up from a nightmare about the basilisk; its size had been so overwhelming, and being in her small room at the Dursleys made her feel so claustrophobic and cramped, that she had had a panic attack. But that felt different than this. Didn't it? She had only ever had one before. After the first one in her summer before her third year, she had simply opened the window while she went to sleep and never had a problem again. It was why she had walked outside now, to get fresh air, but now, she was regretting it.

Back into the castle it was. She was at the very top step of the marble staircase when she heard a loud, deep groaning sound. She turned around just in time to see the front doors of the entrance hall close by themselves.

She tried to control her breathing, she really did, but she felt as though she was having some sort of mental breakdown. She had no time to dwell on this, however, as all the light sources in the entrance hall began going out, one by one. Iris was gone by the time the last torch had been extinguished.

The corridor she entered was silent. She was intending to go back to her dormitory, to fall back asleep and hope that when she woke, everything would be back to normal. However, as she walked, she slowly began to come to the realization that the corridor that she was completely sure led to the Gryffindor Tower wasn't in fact leading there.

Halfway through the corridor, every single torch went out. Iris was prepared for something like this: and when her ball of light disappeared into the darkness mere feet from her wand, her fears were confirmed.

Everything was fucked.

She stood in the center of the corridor, too afraid to move, too afraid to try producing another source of light — afraid that if she did so, she would see something standing right in front of her, or perhaps just outside the window next to her.

But she needn't wait long. She could only hear her own breathing, her own heartbeat, in one moment, and a second later there was a flash of light and thunder — and right after, rain: so heavy and fierce it was as though it had already been pouring for the last hour.

In that flash of lightning, the entire corridor was lit. She saw nothing. Somewhat relieved by this, she continued moving forward, somewhat sure that she wasn't having some vivid nightmare anymore. But what was it?

The downpour clashed against the windows, the sounds echoing throughout the long hall. But there was something wrong with it. A similar sound stood out from the rain. It sounded more like quick footsteps.

She didn't think she had truly gone insane. Why would she have? Sure, this year was stressing her out more so than the others, and yes, she was being pushed to new limits, but she hadn't felt as though she was on the verge of a breakdown. And then there was this nudging in the back of mind, telling her that something was off with all of this, that there was a perfectly logical explanation that didn't involve her losing her mind.

There was another flash of lightning, and she saw a ball, the size of a bowling ball, rolling slowly toward a classroom door. She approached it slowly. Whatever this was, she knew she had to play along. What else was she to do? Was she to fall to the ground, wrap her arms around her knees, and cry? No, she would follow through with this nightmare like she had done so with the first task —

Another flash of lightning, the ball now rolling away from the door, and the nudging at the back of her mind became a poke. A growing feeling of dread spread throughout her, boiling just beneath the surface now, causing each hair on her body to stand on end.

As she neared the ball, her wand lit and its light covering only a foot or two of distance, she heard the damn thing bounce. It might have been the size of a bowling ball, but it certainly didn't have the weight of one. They were soft, the bouncing noises, and when she was finally close enough for her wand light to reach it, she saw that it was rolling back and forth, to the door, back away, and back to the door again.

The apprehension of what was coming grew even more. It was frustratingly strange too. Why? Just why was a ball bouncing back and forth, defying the law of gravity — well, most magic defied the fundamental laws of physics, but why did it have to be so unnerving?

The ball bounced against the door again, staying perfectly flat on the ground, and the door opened slowly. The ball rolled away, stopped, and it was ready to roll into the open door now.

"Finite Incantatem!" Iris whispered, pointing her wand at the ball. Nothing happened. The ball rolled back toward the door, through the doorway, and just before the sound of rolling stopped, Iris made out the details of the ball, which wasn't a ball, maybe not before or maybe just not now: it looked like skin, and there two sunken in holes like eyes, a slight protrusion like a nose —

Iris stretched out her arm to give whatever was inside and the ball of skin itself more light, and to her panic, she saw two unnaturally long arms reach out from the darkness, grab the ball, and lift it to where the head of this person — this thing — should be —

And from where the head should be, a large centipede-like creature also emerged from the darkness, as though it was floating, dozens of spindly legs protruding from its sides. It wiggled, as though it was a tongue.

That simmering feeling of dread hit her in full force as more of the creature began to be revealed. It felt as if something was trying to unmake her and she was no longer able to breathe, staring at this creature, no longer able to even move out of complete and pure fear. A part of her screamed at her to run, to leave, to never come back, to kill herself to escape what was coming. Whatever feeling of trepidation she had felt when she had heard the basilisk roaming the halls in her second year, it was nothing compared to this.

The centipede-like tongue reached out like another limb, coiling and twisting, until it was inches from her face.

It touched her. Oh, she wished it hadn't, not only because touching it put it so out of focus, so out of concentration that she was too distracted to dodge the swipe of its arm and therefore was sent into the wall… No, she had felt something very wrong when it had touched her, something otherworldly, a feeling that she couldn't make sense of. It was as if she was a two-dimensional stick figure suddenly thrust into a three-dimensional world, and she was unable to wrap her mind around just what this thing really was.

And suddenly, Iris didn't want to know the rest — she got up and bolted.

It was only upon reaching the end of the corridor, barrelling through the door, and locking it that she realized she wasn't in any pain from being thrown against the wall. She found herself in the same room Fluffy had been in once she sat against the door for a few minutes, catching her breath and trying to calm herself. The trapdoor was even there. She Summoned the entire thing, causing the hinges to explode outward as her spell forced the wooden door up.

Something slammed into the door behind her.

Stupid as it might have been, as creepy as she thought it was to travel deeper within the castle in this horror, she jumped. Air rushed past her ears as she fell... and fell...

"Arresto Momentum."

Relief and panic washed over her as she landed — relief, because she had indeed landed safely — panic, because there was no Devil's Snare this time; what if she had not used a spell to slow herself down? But why would there have been? Surely the teachers would have removed it by now.

But there was something, she noticed as she lit her wand and observed where she was. Though the creature above hadn't jumped down, was silent in fact, it seemed as though this nightmare wasn't ending just yet: her wand light refused to shine far, as it should.

There was Devil's Snare, only not where it was three years prior. The long tentacle-like tendrils lay a few feet away, growing larger the further she walked alongside them. As they grew to the girth and size of her own body, she stopped. She could have sworn she had seen one twitch, and she was close to the center now, she thought, where the bundle of tendrils, creepers, and vines intertwined and lay together like a tangled up pile of string should be.

But then she noticed something. The ground, it was oddly reflective a few feet in front of her. She took a step closer, crouched down, and held her wand out further. It was water.

And with a sickening realization, she jumped back.

It wasn't Devil's Snare.

They weren't tentacle-like, they were tentacles. And at this sudden understanding, maybe because of it, the tentacles began withdrawing into the water. They didn't pay her any mind. As they were bigger than those of the giant squid in the lake, she was thankful for this.

As the tenth and last tentacle slid into the water, that nudging-turned-poking in the back of her mind got stronger. There was something she was missing, but she could not figure it out. It was as though she was running into small clues that, if understood correctly, would help her piece together the puzzle.

"Perhaps you should follow."

Iris had never spun around so quickly in her life. Her wand was pointing in the direction of the voice, so familiar, and she had a spell on the tip of her tongue.

"If you want out of this madness, you should follow," the voice said again, female, young — like her.

"W-who are you?" Iris asked, grimacing at her own fearful stutter. "What the hell is all this?"

"It's obviously not real," the voice snarked. "And if you truly lived up to your potential, if you hadn't become such a fool, if you didn't let loose, relax, ease up… then you would know… you'd have already figured this out. It's there, isn't it? You just can't seem to grab the information from your own head. Pathetic."

Iris could hear the sneer in the voice, the oh-so-familiar voice.

"If you had let the Sorting Hat place you in Slytherin, this wouldn't be happening. At least, not to this extent. Slytherin would have honed in your skills. But no… instead, you choose Gryffindor… and you've become pathetic," she continued. There was a pitying tone in her voice. "Lazy. Incompetent. What happened to the Iris Potter before she came to Hogwarts? What happened to the Iris that the hat was convinced would make the perfect Slytherin? The resourceful, cunning Iris?"

These insults hardly bothered Iris. What were they compared to what the rest of Hogwarts had been saying? If anything, they were welcome. Without them, she'd be alone and in the dark again.

"What happened to the Iris that the Dursleys created, hm?" the voice said, and it seemed to echo from all sides. "The person she was forced to become to survive? The Iris that placed sleeping pills inside her Uncle's drink so that he wouldn't yell at her later?"

That was it. These words made her sure this was all in her head. She had never told anyone of the sleeping pills.

"Look at you, your hands shaking, scared to move any further — have you actually deluded yourself into believing you're actually worth anything? Has Hermione actually convinced you? Funnily enough, you'd think she'd be here for you now, or recently, if your life actually mattered. I'd say it would if you hadn't gone soft. But you have, and you're afraid of ever going back, aren't you?" The voice took on a mocking tone then, which was so familiar it might as well have been her own voice. "Oh, Dumbledore, how can you be sure I'm such a good person, what about — yada, yada, yada. Don't pretend you believe his reassurances, his false smiles, don't act like you believe it."

The voice was coming closer now. Iris was hardly paying attention to it. Her mind had been trying to play with her this entire time, how was this different?

"Tell me, Iris, what will it take? Because as of now, you are playing with giants. You are stuck between two giants, and each are pulling an arm, and you, tiny, weak, and pathetic, are doing nothing to make yourself one. Do you think snark will save you here? You can leave, you only need yourself — your true self. I was not sent here to help you. I was not put here by the creators of this nightmare. I am here with the answers only because you have the answers, but you refuse to —"

"Yeah, listen," said Iris, "you said go after the large underwater monster thingy? I'm not exactly excited about that, but at this point, it's much preferable to listening to this rubbish."

And she dove into the water, determined to break whatever was happening to her. It was in her mind, all in her head — was it a spell? Some kind of nightmare curse? A mega-boggart? Did those even exist? Probably not. She settled on a nightmare curse. The wizarding world had more than one type of spell that altered the mind, why not a curse that would make her live out a horror movie?

But now, she could no longer control her direction. She was being pulled downward, her frantic swimming doing nothing to help her, as though a large plug had been pulled at the bottom of the lake — and maybe that's exactly what this was.

She did the same as she had done when the basilisk had pulled her into those underwater pipes: she went along with it. Instead of fighting it, she began swimming downward too, and a moment later she was pulled into a whirlpool or sorts — and she was spinning — being thrown around — surely losing all her oxygen — and then she hit something cold and hard.

Coughing up water and shivering, she gave herself a moment to assess the situation.

"What the hell…?"

It was an ice cavern, where the ice was so reflective Iris could clearly see her own reflection. And as she observed the rest, she was sure her own reflections were moving in the corner of her eyes, if only slightly. She would have assumed paranoia, if not for the only just audible whispers that seemed to be coming from these mirror versions of herself.

In the center of this vast cave, a door stood on its own, it and its doorway but nothing more. She entered through it with hardly any hesitation, only to find herself in another cavern, but now, the ice was covered in what was likely blood, and the blood that had begun to pool at the bottom of the ice was slowly making its way toward her. There was another door in the center, also covered in blood, and with the red fluid taking on a life of its own, she didn't hesitate at all this time.

She was thankful that this door didn't lead to the same cavern again, thankful that it wasn't some insane loop that would contain a difference each time she went through, like she had been fearing. She was still in a cave, but this one had no ice, and it was larger. She stood at the top of a cliff overlooking the cave, and the lake down below.

A small island stood in the center. It was like from the first task, with the horned serpent, but rather than a podium containing a portkey, a mirror stood — a familiar mirror, ancient, ornate, a golden frame with clawed feet at the bottom.

She knew that she needed to get there. For what reason she did not know, but there was nothing else to do. Her only way was forward.

"Accio Mirror of Erised!"

Her first thought was that it would hurt if she couldn't dodge it. Her second thought was whoops; the mirror must have had an Anti-Summoning Charm placed upon it, though she didn't know the charm to be able to suddenly jerk her arm forward — she toppled over the edge of the cliff and fell down into the water — and at the last moment, before the horror could even set in, she realized it wasn't water.

She didn't know what she was to expect, but the fact that it was so easy to swim through it, perhaps easier than normal water, made her want to vomit. When she reached the island in the center, quicker and slower than she would have liked, she could already see her reflection — herself, completely covered in blood. And behind her own reflection, she saw bloodied arms, those of children's, reaching out from under the lake of blood.

Iris looked behind her and saw nothing of the sort. She turned back to the mirror and nearly gasped. Her own eyes were red, the blood gone and her skin pale, and she looked a few years older.

"Figured it out yet?"

The voice she had heard earlier came out from the mirror and she recognized it now. It was her own, but slightly older, and much, much colder.

"Don't like what you see?" her reflection spoke. "This is it, isn't it? It's no longer a dementor, no longer Lord Voldemort, it's this — you — becoming what Dumbledore insists you are not. This is your greatest fear, Iris." Her mirror self sneered. "Figure it out, you stupid girl. If I have the answer to this puzzle, you have it! I can't have it if you don't have it, Iris — I am you! No matter how much you deny it, no matter how many times Dumbledore tells you what a little miracle child you are, the truth is there. No one, no one, can have your history and come out a better person in the end, so — stop — pretending — that —"

The mirror shattered into hundreds of little pieces, and Iris lowered her wand to her side. But the voice didn't leave completely. It laughed, and the laughter echoed throughout the cave, as though a hundred different versions of her were there.

"What are you even doing with your life, Iris?" it spoke. "Have you really deluded yourself into believing you'll have a normal life? A respectable job? What, an Auror? You?" The voice spoke with the tone she so often heard from Snape. "You've let yourself lose your cleverness, I doubt you're capable of becoming the caretaker, much less an Auror."

"Suppose I'll just become the Potions teacher then," Iris said, not able to hold back a smile.

"Ah, yes, your signature sarcasm, as recognizable as Snape's signature sneer. Very clever. If only you could use that wit to figure out why you're here."

Iris growled irritably. "Fine. You win. What do I do?"

And then the voice became silent. Iris almost screamed. What was she supposed to do? Could she even do anything to break this curse? Was it not a curse? She sat down on one of the stones of the island, letting her feet just barely touch the ground, and went over all that had happened.

The blood, there was nothing that she could think of there. Maybe it wasn't a curse but a potion? For something this intense and detailed, a potion did seem more likely, didn't it? A Stunning Spell would knock someone out for a while, yes, but a Draught of Living Death would do so indefinitely, however long it took for the drinker to be given the antidote. Did this potion need her blood, and was this why the ice cavern was covered in it and this pool too?

She thought back further. The large tentacles — the giant squid — no, there was nothing there. The trapdoor, Fluffy, the strange creature that picked up the ball — no, nothing there either, or she didn't think. Dobby's creepy behavior, Hagrid's creepy behavior, the bald man's creepy behavior — none of it was triggering anything in her brain.

She thought back to the Great Hall, when she had looked in. Faintly thinking of it, she couldn't remember any familiar faces sticking out, not even at the staff table. She closed her eyes and reimagined it in her mind's eye, but still, not a single familiar face stood out. But it wasn't as though she had an eidetic memory, how could she be sure there were no people she knew in the Great Hall?

She thought back to as far as she could. After spending time with Fleur in the Room of Requirement, she had… she had what? She imagined she had gone to her dormitory and fallen asleep, and then what? She awoke, she did a mental check —

The tenth of January.

Her own words came swimming to the front of her mind.

If it's not also on the tenth, that might mean the second task, the one we're not supposed to know the date of, will be held around the tenth.

If her duel with Viktor Krum was on the fifteenth, instead of on the tenth like every other duel, than the second task could be around the tenth of January — or on the tenth of January. This was it, it had to be, there was no better explanation. It still must have been some kind of curse or potion, but it was from the — oh, no, they surely didn't, Iris thought, a sudden fiery rage exploding within her.

The sweet, glorious relief that should have swept over her as the blood began drain away did not come. She stood up, her nostrils flaring, eyes flashing with fury —

"Took you long enough."

Iris spun around, her wand already up, only to find that twisted, horrible version of herself staring back at her, stepping through the broken mirror's frame. "You!"

"Me," her other self replied, smirking. "You know, ten year old you would have been able to figure this out in half the time. I suppose having such a brilliant best friend can do that, get you lazy and all that. One last thing, Iris," she said, as she too was beginning to fade away, "how do you think they'll be able to score you if they didn't see all this? The first task had hundreds of spectators after all…"

Iris stood from the chair she found herself sitting in, and immediately fell to her knees, breathing hard.

"Potter, are you okay?"

Iris looked up. It was McGonagall. Behind her was Dumbledore, Madame Maxime, Karkaroff, Bagman, Barty Crouch, Moody, and the other three champions, all three looking pale and clammy. They were all in the antechamber just off the Great Hall.

"Can you stand up, Potter?" asked McGonagall. "We were about to end it soon anyway, it was too much, but then you began figuring it out and we —"

"This really was the second task, then?" Iris asked harshly, barely managing to keep her temper down. "This? And was everyone watching like I think they were?"

"I — unfortunately," McGonagall said, not sounding too happy about it either. "It was a potion and a spell, you see, the potion designed to let you into an extremely vivid nightmare of sorts, the spell designed to retrieve what you were experiencing — and then another spell made to show an audience —"

"I don't care!" Iris burst out. "I don't care how the bloody thing worked, what the fuck were you all thinking?! Did you see what was happening? How the hell did you think that was okay? What kind of sick, twisted, horrible people are you?" Iris tried to push past McGonagall to leave, just barely understanding underneath all her anger that she should scream elsewhere. No matter how justified she felt in screaming her lungs out, these fools would still see her as throwing a temper tantrum — they knew nothing.

"The potion wasn't meant to bring out… that!" said McGonagall, though her anger was directed at Bagman and Crouch rather than her. "This task was meant to test the champion's mental fortitude and resistance, similar to what one might need to resist the Imperius Curse. All the other champions had horrible things appear, yes, but nothing nearly as frightening, as terrible — we had to let a lot of the younger years leave, even some your age — they were shaking in fright when that horrible beast —"

"And they saw it all on a screen!" Iris exclaimed angrily. "Do you know how bloody real that all felt? I thought I was going insane! I thought I was losing my mind! They couldn't handle it on a bloody screen, and I — I had to deal with it in person! This was worse than the first task — what the fuck were they thinking?!" Iris was walking up the stairs leading to the Great Hall by this point, ready to blow the entire door open if she must.

She needn't have, as the door swung open by itself; she was certain it was her own magic lashing out; she couldn't remember the last time she was this furious, this disbelieving of what had just occurred… Did they really think this wasn't crossing an enormous line? This was something she'd expect out of Voldemort! Not some tournament designers.

She stepped out into the Great Hall and began making her way past the staff table, where the other professors sat, when she realized the place was completely full. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were staring up at her as she breathed heavily, growing more and more enraged with what had just happened, with how her own privacy and her own fears had just been displayed to everyone like she was some common zoo animal!

"Well, you were in no real harm," said Bagman, following her and looking as nervous as always when Iris was angry, "not like the first task, at least — no physical pain, I mean — it was an elaborate illusion, you see."

Iris gave him an incredulous look. "Oooh, no real harm," she mocked, throwing her hands up in the air sarcastically, "yeah, Potter might never sleep again, but so long as she isn't bleeding to death — well! — what's to worry about then? Did those goblins beat your brain into incompetence, Bagman, or did every tournament designer have to sign a magical contract that forced them to become a complete idiot?!" Her voice grew more hysterical the longer she went, becoming an outright shriek at the last word.

Dumbledore appeared from behind Bagman, looking grave. "Iris, perhaps we should move to this to a —"

"No!" Iris shrieked, turning on Dumbledore now, not caring that many people were watching her lose her mind. "You! How could you approve of this? Do you have any idea what it's like to go through something like that? Where you couldn't even trust your own brain?!"

"Iris, Professor McGonagall was correct, we did not expect the simulation to become as dreadful as it did," Dumbledore said. "The other champions did not have such violent and horrible experiences."

This did nothing to calm Iris down.

"I think she's really having a mental breakdown ," Iris heard someone whisper loudly from the four house tables. She wheeled around, looking quite demented as she tried to find who had said it.

"No — don't touch me! — I take back what I said, Dumbledore! I'm done! None of you have any respect for me — none of you! I'm not listening anymore, expel me, kick me out, give me a hundred detentions, take away points — fuck your points, a thousand fucking points from Hogwarts! What?!" she screamed at the students staring at her in fright as she stepped down from the platform where the staff table sat.

"This is what you've all been gossiping about, hasn't it?" she continued. "Whispering to each other in the corridors, pointing fingers — crazy Parselmouth Potter! Don't know why I expected any less from a society that makes love potions and Memory Charms legal, it's really no surprise half of you have siblings for parents — ah, McGonagall, so sorry, Professor! This isn't what you wanted, right? Your good ol' Hogwarts embarrassment making another fool out of herself!"

These last words were shouted as she walked backward and outward of the Great Hall. She didn't have her wand on her, apparently, for if she did she would have used it to shut the doors with an almighty bang.

Her blood was pounding in her ears. She didn't even care if Rita Skeeter had just seen that. Fleur was right. Indifference would claim her, only much sooner than either of the two had thought. It would be more than indifference though. If they thought her crazy and dark, she was going to reap the benefits of it.

Forget denying the claims of her being dark, evil, insane — she was going to embrace them from now on. If playing nice led to this, to feeling as though she really was going insane, then what was the point? If not acting evil caused people to still believe her so, why would she bother following their rules? It wasn't as though they could arrest her if she herself admitted to being dark. Maybe this way they would all stop their whispering and pointing whenever they were nearby, even if it would be out of fear. She didn't care anymore.

"Iris!"

Iris recognized Hermione's voice, but she didn't stop making her way to her dormitory. She was planning on a long ride on her Firebolt — far, far away from everybody, including Hermione.

"Hermione, don't, just don't."

"I'm so sorry you had to go through that, Iris!" Hermione cried. "The task for the other champions weren't nearly as bad —"

"Task?" Iris said, stopping and turning around. "You call that a task? That was cruel, Hermione! That was plain cruelty, and I don't even know how they expect to score me on that!"

"Well," Hermione said, wringing her hands, "they told us about the task before it started. It was meant to test how you react to fear and failure. Only thing is, you didn't exactly fail... I don't know if they'll be giving points or taking away them for that. All the other champions ran into dead ends, ended up getting mauled by creatures. They didn't feel it, of course, but when you have your body torn in half by a hydra and then find yourself back to a previous room alive and dandy, well, you might consider that a failure."

"You're rambling again."

"Right. They scored the other champions by how fast they realized why they were there, how well they dealt with the things they came across, how they dealt with failure, and how they dealt with fear, the unknown, and overwhelming situations in general. It's five judges scoring you like they did with the dragon."

"Well! I'm sure I did great then," Iris said sarcastically. "After mouthing off to Dumbledore, calling the wizarding world a bunch of inbreds, and Bagman an incompetent idiot, I'm sure they'll give me great marks!"

"I think you actually beat the times of all three champions," Hermione said. "Their nightmares were a bit tame compared to yours, so it took them longer to realize what was happening wasn't some joke or — or —"

"One of Hagrid's experiments gone wrong?"

"Yes," Hermione said. "All three ran into some kind of magical creature, things like manticores, acromantulas, hydras. None ran into… whatever it was that thing was, with the long arms and legs and no face —" Hermione shuddered.

"What? No face?"

"Well, you didn't see because you were too busy running from it. You should have heard Professor McGonagall, we could hear her screaming at Bagman and Crouch from in the Great Hall. She was furious. She wanted to shut it all down, but apparently they couldn't because of the magical contract, but it wasn't supposed to be that bad, Iris —"

"Yeah, well, poor Iris has such a messed up mind that normal magical creatures aren't horrifying enough for her, are they? Been desensitized to it all, haven't I?" Iris said. "What time is it? Is it past noon? If they made me miss my incantation, I swear —"

"You've got about thirty minutes before noon," Hermione said.

"Can I use your wand then? I don't know where they left mine — thanks," Iris said, taking Hermione's wand and pointing it at her own chest. "Amato Animo Animato Animagus."

The sudden feeling of having the ground beneath her disappear brought back the recent memory of her falling into the pool of blood.

"Just — just leave me alone right now. I don't want to talk to anyone right now. I'll be in —"

Hermione hesitated for a moment, and then threw herself at her, wrapping Iris in her arms. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for you," she whispered. "I was stupid, jealous, and — and —"

"A bitch of biblical proportions?" Iris grumbled.

"You know I wasn't anywhere near that bad, Iris, be quiet."

Iris breathed in Hermione's scent. "Okay."

And she hugged Hermione back.