Seven Years: Year 2, Part 1.
Beta Reader: Chocolateowl.
Merula found the summer cooped up in her room boring, especially since nobody had bothered to bring back Cloak to bring her company. Apart from the occasional Quidditch game she attended with her family and the afternoons she spent flying around Malfoy Manor to prepare for Quidditch tryouts, summer had gone swimmingly, so much so that the nightmare she had suffered had drifted into distant memory.
When she was really bored to tears, Merula went back to the summer homework she had been assigned, even though she had finished that in the first three weeks. She found that, even with several rounds of revision, the substance of her work remained the same.
And that left Merula with little to do, right up to when Lucius came home one night with a large pile of books that he left at her door.
The prospect of simply having something to do excited Merula, so much so that she leapt at the books, and was finished with the first few by the time dinner had rolled around; though, she had found the stories within the books about as outlandish as Quirrell's stories of an African prince and a vampire. The books were so disappointing that she found her Christmas gift of socks to be of far more interest than the children's stories that the books contained.
"Father," Merula asked when dinner had started. "Why was there a pile of fiction by my doorstep?"
Merula was surprised when she heard her father choke on his drink, and she jumped to her feet even as she noticed him wave her off.
"Father?" Merula asked, suddenly nervous at how red his face looked. Suddenly she was worried that she had said something out of line, something that a good pureblood shouldn't say.
Instead, however, she heard a weak, hoarse laugh as Lucius wiped his face with a napkin, and she let out a sign of relief. If Lucius was cross with her, then that left nobody at the table she was willing to have a conversation with.
"Fiction as it may be," he said, a smile on his lips. "You will be expected to memorize it for your classes."
"But are you sure that's how you're supposed to deal with ghouls? Couldn't you just… hit them with a stunner jinx?"
"I suppose you can," Lucius said, pausing for a moment as Merula felt interest rise in her chest. "There are a number of… darker spells you could use, but I believe that you are too young for them, for the time being."
Merula felt disappointment as she sank into her chair. "I see."
"Perhaps in the future," he continued, sharing a look with Narcissa.
"Father," Merula asked suddenly, noticing for the first time the swelling around one of his eyes. How did that happen? "Your face-"
"A result of an interaction with Arthur Weasley," Lucius replied, the name of the filthy Weasley spat with as much venom and hate that Merula knew her father was capable of. "Truly a waste of wizarding blood."
Merula wished she hadn't asked the question, for now there was no good topic to talk about, and she sank back into her seat slowly, having lost her appetite, not that the badly made meal made her very hungry to begin with.
"Father?" Merula asked, rising from her chair. "Punish Dobby for me, please. I'm going flying."
"Merula?" Lucius called back before she could bolt for the door, his voice surprisingly smooth despite his rage mere moments ago. "We decided to get presents for you."
"Presents?" Merula asked, an idea coming to mind within seconds. "Is it a-"
"You'll find out," he said with a smile and a wave of his hand.
Merula raced over to the front door, her eyes scanning the area for anything different. It took a second, but the brown wrapping paper around what looked like a broom caught her eye, and she leapt at it.
There were two brooms, and the wrapping paper on one already had her name on it, so Merula went for it, tearing off the paper with reckless abandon.
She was rewarded with the sight of smooth, polished wood, and a small gold plate that had her name stenciled in. It was a Nimbus 2001, the newest and fastest model to hit the market, first used only weeks prior by one of her favourite teams in Quidditch. And better yet, it was superior to Potter's broom in every single way.
"Be back before dark," Narcissa called from behind Merula, and she tightened her hands on the broom.
She hadn't spoken to her adoptive "mother" since the incident, not alone anyway. To her relief, however, Narcissa had shown little attention to her, instead, as Lucius had said, focused her energies on Draco, who seemed to be doing something every other day.
"I will," Merula promised as she sat down to try to find a pair of clean shoes. To her surprise, she couldn't find any apart from the cursed "gift" from the Mudblood. "Where are my shoes?"
"At the cobbler, dear." Narcissa said. "You've worn the same three pairs of shoes all summer. You need to get them fixed."
Merula looked down at the Mudblood's cursed gift, a spark of annoyance rising in her chest. "Oh, when are they returning?"
"I don't quite know," Narcissa replied, seeming to not notice Merula's discomfort. "Perhaps we could go to the store and check."
Merula grimaced at the idea of being alone with Narcissa, or worse yet, being brought along with Draco. "I have to look over my new books."
Narcissa didn't say anything to her excuse, and Merula was able to slip out of the house with her new broom and the Mudblood's curse biting into her feet. But the pain disappeared when she began to fly, the broom speeding into the air faster than any she had used before.
Merula had previously judged brooms by how fast they allowed her to reach the edge of Malfoy Manor, but the broom under her brought those older brooms to shame, allowing her to land, breathless and grinning ear to ear, a full minute faster than Draco's old broom, which she had "borrowed" during a overnight trip he had taken two weeks prior.
It was when she landed that Merula noticed something fluttering in the wind. From what she could see, it looked like a rolled-up letter, and one held securely under a small rock.
That was certainly odd. Why was there a letter here?
Merula reached down and grabbed the letter from under the rock, breaking the seal without even thinking, and she had to read the first sentence three times to make sure her eyes weren't playing tricks on her.
It was a letter from Ron Weasley to… Potter? What was a letter like that doing in Malfoy Manor? Because Merula was sure neither of them even knew where Malfoy Manor was.
And then an idea hit her, and several pieces of a complicated puzzle seemed to click, one after another.
She hadn't seen Draco all summer, even on days where she was out flying or out of her room. Apart from a few family meals and the occasional outing, Draco had been cut out of her life, and she was fine with that.
She had thought of him as an idiot, wasting his time with his goons, but now she suspected that he had actually done something malicious against Potter and Weasley.
The feeling was confirmed when Merula looked around the tree line. It was a quiet, deserted spot, but easily accessible by broom, and there were many more letters hidden under rocks.
Merula frowned as she crouched down, tearing into the letter closest to her and scanning the first lines. She almost froze in place when she saw her name on it. "Harry, when are you going to pick up Snyde's owl?" Merula read the message slowly, squinting at the awful handwriting and wanting to feed Weasley to Devil's Snare over the fact that he even had the nerve to mention Cloak.
But then a voice of reason got to Merula, stopping her increasingly violent fantasies in their tracks. Someone in the house had stopped the letter from getting to Potter, given the letter had somehow made its way to Malfoy Manor.
Draco's grinning face came to mind, him and his petty, idiotic plans. It was the obvious choice. She could almost hear him coming up with the plan, with his two idiotic goons agreeing with it because their pea sized brains didn't know any better.
But something else also nagged at Merula. Draco couldn't do subtlety if it hit him over the head, and she doubted the two idiots could so much as read, much less intercept owls on what seemed to be a daily basis, given the number of letters she could see around her.
And worse yet, Merula realized a second later, her theory coming closer and closer to collapse with what Merula realized: Draco couldn't cast spells over summer vacation either.
The mental revelation steeled Merula as she tried to think of alternatives to her theory to why all the stolen letters were on Malfoy grounds, but only a single one came through.
As Merula mentally discarded the last of her wilder theories, the idea became clearer, especially when she thought of what Narcissa would do if Draco asked her for help in "pranking" Potter and the hated Weasley.
Merula could see them together now, in the dining hall, coming up with a plan, one with excited smiles on their faces.
Too late did Merula try to tear herself from the scene playing out from her mind, for suddenly Narcissa no longer had her own face, but it was replaced suddenly with Voldemort's own, his black eyes driving a shiver down Merula's back.
The memory of the leering face on her mother's risen corpse flashed to mind, and Merula shivered despite the summer heat, grabbing as many of the letters as she could carry before she ran back toward the house. She was sure that she couldn't fly with a dozen rolls of stolen mail in her arms, though she was also sure her feet were going to be in significant pain by the end of the run.
Of course, Merula was right. By the time she reached the front door, her ankles hurt, as well as her squished toes and aching soles, and she kicked off the cursed boots quickly, making sure only to check she had all twelve pieces of stolen mail before she ran off to her room, ignoring Dobby's annoying cries of pain.
"Serves him right," Merula growled as she shut her door behind her, flickering on the light as she tried to make sense of the dozen or so stolen letters.
In the weeks leading up to school returning, Merula finished every one of her books in advance, though she thought less and less of the grinning author whose face marred every single book somewhere, tossing each finished book over her shoulder to be forgotten once she finished. She kept clear notes, clear enough that any question of relevance could be answered.
But what really drew Merula's attention were the letters Potter and his two friends shared, and Merula felt sick when she realized the emotion that was bubbling in her chest when she read the stolen mail, none more so than when she pushed through the last of the letters the day before she was to return to Hogwarts.
Somehow, some way, she was jealous of a Mudblood and a Blood Traitor, of which she wasn't sure which was worse.
For all she had over them - a honourable bloodline that stretched over four generations in Wizarding Britain and many more in Norway, where her ancestors hailed, money beyond belief, and influence - Potter had chosen them over her, and the knowledge was a very bitter pill to swallow, especially with every letter she had torn open.
And the fact that she couldn't even say anything bad about Potter made things really worse. Not one of the letters had reached him, and none of the letters had been penned by Potter himself. The letters either had the Mudblood's excellent handwriting that rivalled Merula's own, or the chicken scratch that belonged to Weasley.
For the first time that summer, she wondered how he was, and what he was doing. She didn't care for the other two, but Potter intrigued her. It was mostly because Merula wanted to check up on Cloak, but also because she was genuinely curious about what he was doing over the summer.
There wasn't much news from other people about their own summers, apart from letters from the recently graduated Bartleby Lee that Merula had never asked for.
Worst yet, Lee had been the only student from Hogwarts that had sent her a birthday present, though she wasn't sure she wanted a store-bought card from Romania that she couldn't understand.
When Merula tore open a letter talking about the fun things Weasley wanted to do with Potter, Merula saw red, and three sentences in she tore the letter to shreds, almost pulling her wand out to burn the little pieces of paper before the logical part of her mind reminded her of the law and the problems that breaking them would cause.
So Merula headed back to the house, flying quickly and storming through the hallways to the fireplace, where she could watch the letter go up in flames. She was so intent on burning the letter, and the plans Weasley had with Potter that she didn't notice Dobby until she had tripped over him, landing on the floor with a yelp.
Mercifully, by her standards, and only because she was more angry at Weasley than the useless House Elf, only kicked Dobby a few, heavy times before she stormed off, not even bothering to order him to punish himself.
The fire was good, burning strong even at midday, and she enjoyed the sensation, watching the shredded letter curl up and blacken.
But then the letter was gone, like a joke that had fallen out of favour, or like Potter's chances of winning the House Cup once she joined the Quidditch team.
Merula was tempted to burn the rest of the letters, to wipe all trace of them from the world. It would be petty, and it wouldn't ruin Potter's friendship with either of his friends, especially since Potter, despite receiving a great deal of mail, had never sent any back, but setting the evidence alight seemed like the right thing to do.
But then Merula mentally did the maths. The letters, while highly flammable, would be difficult to destroy on a large scale, and she couldn't carry them all in one go, while setting fire to the letters as they were might also damage the Malfoy estate.
All in all, destruction of the letters without getting into trouble would be difficult, and she had played the role of dutiful, studious bookworm for far too long to give it up for a few burnt pieces of paper.
But still, Merula reasoned she could get away with feeding a few more pieces of mail to the fire, if only to annoy Narcissa in the process. So much effort into collecting stolen mail, and so little success actually keeping it in one place.
Merula returned outside again, grabbing her broom before she stopped, noticing an owl descending from above.
It was a plain looking owl that flew toward her, reminding her of one of the many that she saw at Hogwarts working for students who didn't have their own owls, even more so given that the owl coming closer had a message in its beak.
Merula placed her broom against the house as the owl approached, catching the falling letter before it could hit the ground. It was a long letter addressed to her, from what she could tell, though she couldn't tell who the letter was from, for there was no return address and no name on the envelope.
To her surprise, Merula recognized the letter writer halfway through the first paragraph. It was the young Auror who had been with her that night with the Pensieve.
It was a strange feeling, to be comforted by the words of a trainee Auror, one that, according to his own admission, had only graduated from Hogwarts the year before her first.
But the most surprising thing was his assurance that Voldemort would bother her no more. According to the Ministry, Voldemort had perished in his battle against Potter, and was dead, for certain this time.
Merula wasn't sure about that particular fact, not with Voldemort's six word promise haunting her memories, but she wasn't in a position where she could dispute the Ministry, so she accepted it.
It helped that the Auror promised support from the Ministry if anything else happened, which calmed Merula's fears a little, enough for her to fold the letter neatly back into its envelope and head back upstairs to her room.
But by the time she was ready to go again, Narcissa had returned home and ordered her to the bath, for they were headed to an early dinner with Lucius at a fine restaurant in London.
With the help of a fine Parisian dinner that she was sure would bankrupt the Weasley family, Merula returned home and fell asleep immediately, It was a result of her long day flying and the hearty dinner she had enjoyed, one she was spared the screaming of bumbling Dobby for the first time in several weeks.
Merula woke early the next morning, far earlier than Draco, to ensure that she could finish packing her suitcase. Loudly dragging it down the stairs and waking Draco in the process, was only a bonus.
To her disgust and dismay, Merula realized that she had missed something important the previous afternoon. Her shoes were still at the cobbler's store, waiting to be picked up, which left Merula only with the Mudblood's "gift" to wear.
However, despite her initial complaints, Merula realized the pain she had experienced at Hogwarts had all but disappeared. She even liked the boots for the traction they provided. Perhaps whatever jinx the Mudblood had placed had simply worn off.
If she ever did have to run away from another troll or screaming murderer, Merula felt safe knowing she would have an edge over any other would-be victims, most hopefully, Draco or Weasley.
Kings Cross station was already bustling when they arrived, crowds of Muggles and other wizards passing through the station. Platform Nine and Three Quarters was only a slight bit more deserted, and apart from her adoptive family, only a few early risers were at the platform, making it seem all the more lonely in the early morning sun.
She picked a seat by a window that looked over the crowd, one of the few that weren't occupied yet, looking for enemies she could intercept and promise vengeance. But to her annoyance, only the Mudblood showed up, and in the middle of a large gaggle of other students. She saw no Potter, no Weasley, and certainly no Blaise for the next hour.
Only ten minutes before the train was scheduled to leave did Merula notice Blaise running through the barrier, and they locked eyes for a moment before Blaise disappeared behind a number of parents standing on the platform.
Merula tried to find where he went, but saw nothing until a few minutes later, when she heard a firm rap on her door.
Before she could turn around to confront the newcomer, Merula heard the door open, and she grimaced when she noticed Blaise closing the door behind him.
"Miss me?" Blaise asked with a false sense of cheer in his voice.
"No," Merula shot back, annoyed. "You didn't write all summer."
Blaise shrugged. "I was in Italy. Mum thinks summers here are boring, and I didn't think there was anything of value to write about."
Merula couldn't help but agree as she glanced back out the window. Watching the crowd of strangers might have been one of the most exciting things she had done all summer, only behind the Quidditch matches and her new broom.
"So," Blaise said in his cheerful, nonchalant tone. "Are the rumours true?"
Merula rolled her eyes and sank back into her chair. "What rumours?"
"Weasley was shouting about how You Know Who was back."
Merula grimaced. "Yes."
Blaise raised an eyebrow, as if she had confirmed a Quidditch score rather than the return of Voldemort himself. "That's all you have to say?"
"I received a letter from an Auror that he's dead," Merula replied. "For real this time."
Blaise raised an eyebrow but shrugged. "A word of advice, Snyde, because you've been so helpful over the last year."
"What is it?" Merula asked.
"Draco blames you for losing us the House Cup last year."
Merula gave Blaise a hard look. "We were up by several hundred when I last checked."
Blaise shrugged. "Dumbledore gave Potter and his little group several hundred points for what they did. Longbottom too, but I'm not sure what he did."
"And that's somehow my fault," Merula sighed.
"Draco found a scapegoat," Blaise responded with a shake of his head. "You know how he is."
Merula sighed and shook her head as she looked back at the crowd, her mood turning stormy when she noticed several red-haired Weasleys rushing through the barrier.
"I'm going to buy the paper," Merula announced to Blaise. "I'm bored enough already."
"Suit yourself," Blaise said as he stood up, walking to the door, but pausing before he opened it. "If you need something from me, feel free to ask."
"Go to hell," Merula muttered when the door shut behind him. "Like that'll ever happen."
Merula found the trip to be equal parts tedious and boring. The newspaper she had bought lasted only the better part of an hour and the few trips she had walked along the halls of the train uncovered only a single interesting fact.
Somehow, despite glancing into every compartment she could find, Merula couldn't see Potter or Weasley at all, not even in the carriage with the oblivious Mudblood or the carriages with other Weasleys.
But what had changed from her previous year was the fact that she was no longer a first year, and thus avoided Hagrid and the unsorted students until she had been comfortably seated at the very end of the Slytherin table.
What had also changed, as Blaise had warned her, was the fact that she felt several pairs of eyes glaring at her from all directions, to the point where she considered running from the Great Feast to get away from it all. She was hungry, tired, and even the best food at Hogwarts seemed like a cheap parody of her previous dinner in Paris.
But running away wasn't an option, not when Merula hadn't eaten more than some candy over the course of the long train ride to Hogwarts. As plain as she remembered the food was, it was better than Dobby's cooking, at the very least.
And yet still, the Sorting Hat began to sing its obnoxious tune, and Merula did her best to entertain herself without losing House Points on the first night.
In hindsight, Merula wasn't sure if it was boredom, curiosity, or the desire to glare down the newest member of the Weasley clan that caused her to look over to the Gryffindor table, but Merula had a double take when she noticed that Potter and Weasley were both somehow missing from the table. The prefects seemed to have overlooked the fact as well.
Immediately, Merula began looking around, suddenly paranoid about the possibility of a large prank about to be sprung on her, but, at least for the moment, the Great Hall passed for normal.
And apart from the missing Potter and Weasley, as far as Merula could tell, Hogwarts was normal. Maybe the kind Auror had been right after all.
And then the Start of Term feast started, and Merula realized her luck had run out.
It was too late regardless, for she suddenly found a cup of pumpkin juice dumped over her head.
She managed to avoid crying out in surprise, but Merula reached for her wand suddenly, ready to hex the prankster into the next week, but already she could hear shouting from the Professor's table.
The next thing she knew, two prefects, one a Ravenclaw girl Merula wasn't familiar with and the other the nice Weasley, had all but carried her out of the Great Hall, pumpkin juice still dripping from her hair. They were talking, but Merula could barely hear their words through her seething rage.
It was then, being marched toward the closest showers that Merula's last hope was shattered.
She had hoped that maybe, just maybe, with Potter and Weasley gone, that she could get away from whatever insanity that the first year had seen.
But even that hope was dashed as the nice Weasley peeled off to attend to Potter and Weasley, looking about as miserable as she was by the doors leading outside.
It was going to be a long year, wasn't it? Merula asked herself as she was led down to the Slytherin showers.
AN: Chapter 15 complete. Bit of a shorter episode, but I suspect that every year except for third year and seventh year will start with a shortened chapter.
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