May 18th, 2008: Third Year

The thing about being Azula's brother was, Zuko was always waiting for the other shoe to drop for something. There was always something hanging over his head, and when there wasn't, there actually was, he just didn't know about it. So when they stepped out of McGonagall's office that day back in second year, Zuko had waited, barely breathing, too busy wondering how Azula would react to the news that You-Know-Who was their father to really react to it himself.

But she didn't react to it, not then. She had walked down the hall, eyes straight ahead, face wiped free of any expression except her usual self-assurance, as if she hadn't heard anything of any importance. She turned down the corridor to the dungeons, and walked away without even looking at him, as if she were all alone. Zuko had let her. He hadn't wanted to remind her he existed, and give her a target for whatever storm of feeling was gathering within her. His feet had carried him down the hallway, past the kitchens, to his own common room, and he had flopped down on his sofa. Second years didn't have their own sofas that no one else sat on no matter how crowded the common room got. That honor was reserved for seventh years, prefects, quidditch captains, and other important people. Zuko got one two months into his first year, because he was just so special.

He had folded up the note McGonagall had given him, the one saying that he was excused from classes for the rest of the day owing to his need to "process", and stuffed it in his pocket. He had wanted to curl up into a ball, but he had known that if he did that, he would forget to uncurl, and someone would walk in on him like that.

Later that evening, Toph had skipped dinner and raided the kitchens, plopping herself down next to him and passing him a plate full of sponge cake with strawberries and whipped cream. He remembered she had also told him she would pick it up and throw it at him if he didn't eat it and enjoy it. He'd told her he thought she might be doing the comforting thing wrong, but she had told him to shut up and eat.

And then, after that, he had waited, and waited, and waited for his sister to react, to talk to him about it, or yell at him about it, or find some way to blame it on him, or to make him feel worse about it than she did, or something. But she didn't. He waited the next day, and the next, until the days became weeks, when the vague dread escalated to panic, and he couldn't seem to think about anything else. The longer Azula waited to blow up, the worse it always was, so Zuko waited, on pins and needles for the storm to break.

Then, the weeks faded into months, and a desperate kind of hope had slowly built within him that this was too big even for Azula, and that there was no storm coming. They had left for the summer, and still Azula had said nothing to him about it. They went back, and still nothing. It wasn't like he was starting to feel safe. There were so many other things Azula had hanging over him, so many other bits of misery she has to inflict, but he had stopped really thinking about You-Know-Who being their father, or, well, no, he thought about that part a lot, but about being afraid of what Azula would do about it. Besides, there were just so many things in between that Azula made him pay for. It was just so easy to forget old worries, when there were so many new ones to replace them.

All this was why at the very end of third year, two weeks before they were supposed to leave for the summer, when he awoke to the unpleasant sensation of his sister's knees jabbing into his ribs, he wasn't thinking about their father being You-Know-Who. Fleetingly, he wondered if this was about getting that question right in Charms that she had missed the period before. "I'msorryIdidn'tmeanto," he began on reflex as he opened his eyes.

"Oh shut up, Zuko." Azula sat down harder on his chest, knocking the air out of his lungs. Then, she just... stood up. Zuko's eyes followed her, peering into the dark, empty common room. She had a book in her hands, with one of her fingers thrust between the pages as a bookmark, and she seemed... It was like she couldn't stand still. She paced back and forth across the floor in front of his sofa, alternately clinging the book to her chest and clenching her hand around it and holding it stiffly down at her side as if she didn't really want to be touching it. Zuko didn't say anything, letting her work out whatever nervous energy was driving her. It was probably better not to interrupt her, lest she turn it on him. Abruptly, she stopped in front of her brother, flipping the book open to the page her finger had marked. "Read this."

"It's two in the morning." As soon as he said it, he knew it was the wrong thing to say. Azula's face twisted into a snarl, and he could see her teeth glinting in the darkness. This right here, this was the reason he had his own sofa in the common room, under which his trunk and Druk's terrarium lived. Azula figured out how to get into the Hufflepuff dorms three weeks into first year, and it only took his former roommates a couple of times to realize they didn't want Azula anywhere near them while they slept, and if Zuko slept in the common room, Azula wouldn't bother with the dorms at all.

They had a VCR and some Muggle VHS tapes at the orphanage, and Uncle set up movie nights during the summer. Last year, he showed them Jurassic Park. The bit with the goat tied up in the T-Rex enclosure felt really familiar.

Zuko swallowed, and groped around under the sofa for his wand. When his fingers brushed it, it rolled a little further away from his hand, and before he got a good grip on it, he was afraid it was going to roll off the top of his trunk and into that gap between the trunk and the wall, and then he would have to get up and crouch down on the floor with his back to his sister while stood there with her wand. But then his fingers closed around it, and he pulled it out. "Lumos," he whispered, as Azula held the book impatiently.

One of the pages had a suspiciously rust colored blotch in the corner, and now that his face was close to it, he could smell the book's faint odor of rot. It turned his stomach. "Where did you get this?"

"It was in the restricted section, Zuko, honestly." He could practically feel her rolling her eyes. "Just read it."

"Yeah, I figured that out," he said tartly. "How did you get it to stop screaming?"

"Is that what you care about?" There was a strange note in her voice, almost like betrayal. "I nicked a permission slip from a seventh year."

"Oh, okay." At least she hadn't broken the wards on them, or done something else spectacular and amazing that probably none of the professors could have pulled off. She'd just lifted a permission slip. He felt vaguely relieved by that.

"Oh for-" she shook the book. "Just read it."

"It's not going to cast some kind of horrible spell if I do?"

Azula hit him in the side of the head, hard. "If I wanted to hex you, I would do it myself," she hissed. "I wouldn't give a book the satisfaction.

Zuko took the book from her hands and started to read:

Newborns of course have the greatest potential for life, and some of the most powerful rituals of sacrifice take advantage of this fact. The use of newborns as the object of sacrifice is best suited for rituals of rebirth or healing, as the newborn's potential life is traded for a beneficiary. The sacrifice of a newborn is a profoundly unnatural act, and as with much of dark magic, this violation of the natural order imbues it with special power. Because of the magical nature of the parental bond, and because birth itself is a highly magically charged event, sacrifices of newborns are most powerful when performed by the mother.

As newborn sacrifice rituals must be performed mere moments after birth to be fully effective, and most such works involve a great deal of ritual preparation, sacrifice magic of this type often involves rituals performed leading up to the birth, during the pregnancy. One such sacrifice, the Apokatastatheí Pateras ritual, involves a ritualized conception as well. This ritual, designed to resurrect those whose bodies are destroyed or uninhabitable, but who are tied to the mortal plane by magical means, is designed to ensure the birth of twins. This ritualized conception takes place years, or even decades before true pregnancy begins, and as such functions as insurance for the father of the twins. One twin is always male, to house the soul of his father, while the other twin may be of either sex and is the sacrificial victim of the spell. Both twins die as a part of this ritual, though only one is a true newborn sacrifice, while the other is merely forced out of his body by his father's soul.

This ritual has only been performed successfully on two recorded occasions, and there are no other recorded attempts. There are a number of less grisly, and perhaps more importantly, as less time consuming ways to resurrect persons tethered to life by means of a horcrux whose bodies have been rendered unusable. The final stages of the Apokatastatheí Pateras ritual are only performed therefore as an act of desperation when the resources to use other means of resurrection are unavailable.

"I bet you anything our mother read this book," Azula said lightly, when he looked up. "Maybe she even read this exact copy. I wonder if they keep logs."

Zuko shrugged. "She probably did," he replied neutrally.

Azula snatched the book out of his hands and shut it with a soft bang that sent particles of dust and the book's rotten smell into the air. Her lips stretched into a painful smile and her voice took on a worrying sing-song quality. "So Zuko, how does it feel to know you were born to die?"

"Why don't you tell me?" he snapped, rapidly losing patience. All that waiting, and waiting, and waiting for Azula to say something, anything about their father being... who he was, and all that happened was she made him read a really unpleasant book? "You've had longer to think about it than me anyway."

Azula shot him a look full of frustration. "Well then how does it feel to know that you were born to be You-Know-Who's new body?"

Relieved, he didn't want to say, because if his parents had made him to kill him, he was supposed to be a victim too, and he didn't have to feel responsible for what they had done. He wasn't their child, just their ingredient.

"I kind of already figured it was something like this," he told her. She had to have too, right? If she was looking in those kinds of books for the answer. Suddenly, he wondered how long she had been looking. Had she started as soon as they had found out? A flash of what might have been sympathy, or might have been fear for what else she had found in the restricted section while she was looking, stole over him. "I mean, it's Bellatrix Lestrange and Voldemort." He stopped. It was the first time he had said the name out loud instead of just in his head, and he had the absurd urge to look over his shoulder. "She had us in Azkaban. It wasn't like they made us because they wanted to play happy families."

For a moment, Azula's face in the harsh light of his wand looked troubled, almost like she wanted to cry. He wished suddenly that he had the kind of relationship with her that he could hug her, and tell her it was okay. The records said he was born first. That made him her big brother, kind of. It was probably supposed to be his job to do things like that. It occurred to him that he had never... It was so obvious to him that there was no way Bellatrix and Voldemort could have wanted them just because they wanted children. Things didn't work that way. And Azula was so much smarter than he was, so much better at figuring things out, that it just never occurred to him to wonder if she had ever thought about what they were made for, and maybe wish that maybe he could have been part of a family with people like that. He didn't quite know what to do with that thought.

And then another horrible thought hit him, that maybe Azula had known about the sacrifice thing all along, but figured only one of them was supposed to be sacrificed. His sympathy turned into a knot in his stomach. He fumbled for something to say, to make a girl who probably had been entertaining fantasies for a year of him dying as a baby, feel better. "At least now you know they made both of us on purpose. It's not like you were an extra or something."

Zuko only had a heartbeat to see Azula's eyes narrow down into cold, furious slits before her wand came up to rest against his cheekbone, aiming right into his eye. "Azula, wait," he tried, but it was no use.

Afterward, he could never remember what curse she used. He supposed he must have blacked it out. Her words ran together in an ugly brutal stream as fire erupted from her wand. He closed his eyes as the breath left his body. By the time he had enough air to scream, Azula was gone.