Five:
The Invisible Rest
I
Harriet was the last to enter the classroom despite being on time according to her planner, dumpy rows lined with carefully arranged desks already filled with students she could almost taste the vitality of on the tip of her tongue. The teacher, Professor Parker, as was written across the white board at the top, had his arched back against the small throng of students, scribbling on the board. He'd lost his expensive coat across the back of his own desk chair, plush looking compared to the students' whose were made of hard plastic, his crisp shirt sleeves rolled up to elbow, and as the door to the classroom shut behind her resolutely, he glanced over his raised shoulder her way.
His smile was much as it had been back in the auditorium. Large, bright, full of teeth, carrying the phantom of a house and screams and a midnight massacre. All of Harriet's decidedly not-favourite-things.
"Ah, Miss Lenoir I assume, glad you could join us. Take a seat."
Harriet's fingers tightened around the strap of her satchel. Apparently at the Salvatore Boarding school lessons starting at eight meant, really, ten-to-eight. She'd have to remember that for next time because as luck would have it, or no luck at all for Harriet, the only open desk left was right at the fucking front.
Brilliant.
Bloody brilliant.
She took it anyway, shuffling into her seat and unloading her bag below, pulling out a pen and notebook to sit on the scratched face of the table. Through the windows the sun's polished rays brought light into the room. For a moment, the birds, perched on the tall trees just outside the class, chirp to a new morning song. If Harriet squinted, she might, just might, be able to pretend she was back at Hogwarts.
"Welcome to Ethics of Magical Application."
Professor Parker said in lieu of introduction, finally turning from the whiteboard, kicking back against the wall with a sling of crossing his arms and dashing the marker onto his desk. Harriet stared resolutely down at her now open notebook, fighting the urge not to fidget. An hour. That was all. She just needed to sit in this classroom for an hour, packed with these people who death clung to, and then she could take a break outside away from all the noise.
"Now can anyone tell me what the difference between morality and ethics are?"
Some plucky Werewolf from the second row behind Harriet piped up.
"Ain't they the same thing? What do you call it?... A Synolimb?"
So Werewolf-boy was gutsy but not very smart. Good, Harriet thought. Smart people saw things better left unseen. Maybe she'd get away with this sham after all. Picking up her pen, Harriet began scrawling on the blank page she flipped to in her notebook, drawing doodles and noodles and lines that knotted in on themselves.
A bit like her own thoughts recently, really.
Professor Parker chuckled somewhere out of her direct line of sight, unfurling one arm to waggle his finger.
"Synonym, and no. They are not the same. Similar, but not quite. Anybody else?"
The birds outside ostensibly chirped louder in the reverberating quiet. Harriet imagined the Professor scanning the group, perhaps searching for the next plucky pupil, maybe doing eenie-meenie in his mind.
"What about… You."
It took all of five seconds of lingering silence on the tail end of the Professor's voice for Harriet to peer up curiously when no reply came, only to find said Professor Parker staring squarely at-
Her.
"Josie! Yoo-hoo, Lizzie?"
She nearly snapped the pen in her grip at the blitz of bits and fragments of death and decay that came barraging in her mind, the feeling of thunder outside, an axe scraping floorboard, the smell of copper tang in the air. A woman begging Please, Kai, please, don't do this-
Harriet shrugged noncommittedly. If she kept her head down low, scraped by in her classes with grades just good enough to get through the semester without undue attention, before Harriet would know it she'd be back home with Sirius and Remus and Teddy.
Professor Parker, nevertheless, seemed to have other plans as he didn't turn his attention away from her, didn't go searching for someone else to answer.
"Go one. Give it a try."
He prodded. Perhaps a change of plans then. Give him what he wants, a small little answer to a very-not-important question, and he'd buzz away like everyone else did, wouldn't look twice again.
The white of his shirt made the blue-grey of his eyes seem warmer in the dusting of sunlight. No less intense, just heated.
"Morality and ethics loosely have to do with distinguishing the difference between 'good' and 'bad' or 'right' and 'wrong'. Morality is simply the personal normative of which we as individuals base those assumptions on, whereas ethics is the standard structure of 'good and bad' by which a certain community or social setting constructs."
There was that grin again, teeth and terror, and Harriet had to grind her own together behind her pursed lips at the sense of blood on a mouth, down a throat-
Vampire.
He was still a Wiccan, however. Harriet can smell it on him from a mile off. Something sticky and heady with a bang, like wild violets, warm pancakes, and something a little like black gun powder.
Fucker was a hybrid.
"Fantastic. Good choice of word with constructs. Want to explain that one?"
No, Harriet didn't. She'd answered his question, he should move on. That's how it worked normally, wasn't it? Teachers had to give fair attention to the whole class.
But he's still looking dead at her, and the students are too, peering, scrutinizing, ready and waiting.
"It's an idea or concept that has been accepted and adapted into a social group. Cannibalism, for example, is widely frowned upon in western civilisation, but some Indian and Amazonian communities practice it ritualistically with their dead. It's a sign of honour to those who pass, now consumed into the whole. Both societies would state they have the 'right' of it, that their view is the truth. Clearly they're opposing views, so the truth is subjective here. They're both working on different social constructs of ethics and morality. Neither one is objective, just different."
"Ah-"
Professor Parker lamented with a smile, coming around his desk to lean back against the edge. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks, relaxes against the wood, looks at home with a hall full of followers hanging onto his word and his voice.
"Someone's read J. L. Mackie, I see. I did not expect a student to be pulling out the 'moral nihilism' card so soon-"
"No."
Harriet barked back too fast, too sharp, too full of something to pass by unnoticed. It catches on Professor Parker's face, strikes in the inquisitive tilt of his head, the squint of his curious eye. She couldn't help it however, the bite, the sting in her voice.
Tom Riddle had been a moral nihilist with a Marxist twist. A man who thought there was no good or evil, only power. Harriet was not Tom Riddle, and she won't, ever, be compared to him, even if someone, anyone, didn't know they were doing the comparison.
"I'm not saying that. There is good and bad, obviously. Murder is typically, no matter the society, thought of as wrong. That means there is some form of basic universal humanity code we all understand."
Professor Parker reached up and scratched at his chin, at the beard lining a sharp jaw, thinking over her deposition.
"Is there? You say murder for example, and yet murder is simply the taking of one's life. Many American States and many more countries still have the death penalty. What differs from the man flipping the switch or pulling the plunger on the syringe from the one strapped to the chair or the table? Does governmental intervention make murder clean?"
Harriet shook her head almost violently. While she'd been… Isolated, she'd had plenty of time to read, small books, big books, old ones pilfered from Sirius's stash from the impressive Black collection or ones Remus had brought her home in a plastic sleeve from the local library they were currently living by in their year on the run. Most of the time, she'd fallen into books of Philosophy or poetry, both magical and muggle.
There was something comforting in knowing everyone else was just as confused about the meaning of life and death and love as she was.
Similarly, it is because of this that Harriet knows exactly what corner Professor Parker was trying to verbally pin her in.
"You can't just throw moral relativism at me and think I won't know the difference. It's a strawman, and you clearly know it. We're not talking about the degrees of which right and wrong fall into, what classifies as murder or what doesn't on a social scale, or we'd be here all day discussing the ramifications of institutionalized racism and its effects on crime rates and arrests, or class wars, or gendered roles and their implications on the quality of life for women. You asked me what the difference between ethics and morality were, I told you the scale of application."
Professor Parker, Harriet comes to see, speaks with his hands when he's getting into the grove of a conversation, long touched sweeps of a palm, the splayed flare of expressive fingers. It's kind of beautiful in a way. Brutal too. The kind of hands that look soft but could feel hard.
Harriet wouldn't know.
She's never going to be touched by another living being again.
"But it has everything to do with objective ethics and morality. If, as you say Miss Lenoir, there is a universal human distinction of good and bad, then your subjective cultures fit into that framework just as everything else will. One is right, the other wrong. They cannot be both in an objective context."
"No. The universal distinction isn't good or bad, it's empathy. We're born to feel compassion for one another. Or, at least, most of us are. It's this empathy that influences our moral and ethical judgements based on what would make us feel guilty or pride, ostracized or communicable. Trying to detached the human experience and feeling from our creation of society is redundant and impractical."
His smile is slower to come this time, less teeth and more treacle, a bit tart like burnt honey, shadowed by the curl of his beard.
"So we have a secular humanist on our hands, do we? How delightful."
His husky voice falls somewhere between mocking and pleased, and Harriet couldn't truly tell which one was more likely, so she snorted through her nose.
"Says the Nietzsche acolyte. Bit ironic that an ethics Professor subscribes to the concept that there is no ethics or morals or values at all, isn't it?"
A dark gleam in his eye sparks, blue in the sunlight, grey in the classroom, dusk all over.
"Ah, but nihilism doesn't state that, only that there is no ethics, morals or values except what we give and create ourselves."
Now it was Harriet's turn to cross her arms over her chest, make a mimicry of his voice, both mocking and pleased.
"You know exactly what I meant and it wasn't the precise description. Now whose playing with values-"
"Professor?"
A voice whistles up from somewhere in the back of the classroom, a blond girl with a hand hesitantly raised in the air, and Harriet jumped a little at the interruption, startled a bit at being reminded she was in a classroom, and Professor Parker seems to come back to himself and the students with a cough in a closed fist.
"Yes, Alice?"
The girl dropped her hand back to her desk with a flop and a frown.
"What does personal normative mean and is it going to be on the end of semester test?"
There was a murmur in the classroom, an agreeable noise that sees Professor Parker back to the white board with long, sure strides.
"Not this semester's exam, but onto the topic at hand seen as we only have-"
He shot a glance to the clock at the back of the room.
"Half hour left… where was I… oh yes. Can anyone give me an example of a moral belief?"
Thirty minutes… Had it really been thirty minutes? That was, perhaps, the longest Harriet had spoken to anyone other than Sirius or Remus or Teddy since-
For a while.
Thankfully, and Harriet swore she was, indeed, thankful for it, Professor Parker didn't call on her again. Not once. Didn't even look her way for the remaining lesson filled with one boy asking if stealing could be counted as moral, or a Wiccan questioning if it was ethical she didn't like her sister all that much because she kept taking her favourite skirt. And when the bell finally rings, Harriet was the first out her seat, the first with her satchel slung over her shoulder, and the first to swing open the door-
"Miss Lenoir?"
She froze at the threshold, kept her grip on the handle, and glanced back through the curtain of her hair. Professor Parker was behind his desk now, leant back, twirling on the swivel with a grin.
"My office at eight tonight after dinner, if you wouldn't mind. We still haven't had our personal tutor introduction."
Fuck. She'd forgotten about that. Hoped, perhaps, he had too.
Clearly not.
Harriet nods and slinks into the hall.
She still smells black gun power no matter how far she walked away.
II
Harriet spent her afternoon after lessons in the library, prowling shelves and bookcases and the few boxes the librarian had let her skim through in the backrooms. She comes away, like every other time she's gone searching for answers, empty handed. No book, manuscript, or leaflet had any mentions of Mikaelson in any page. A dead end if there ever was one. By the time she decided to head back to her room for a break, Harriet's frustrated and annoyed-
And she saw a shade down the hall. Barely there. Scarcely here, and when she fixes on the top of the staircase, stock still and silent, she spotted Fred's grin bathed in pale light, his clothes exactly as they had been in Hogwarts courtyard before he'd-
Died.
He was speaking but she couldn't hear him, as if he was under water and she atop a mountain, the potion, her potion, was still swimming through her blood, waning if she was seeing Fred at all, or worse, the potion becoming obsolete, her… gift mutating to adapt, overcome, but fortunately, keeping the racket of the invisible rest away. It must have taken extraordinary effort from Fred himself to appear at all, to push through the drug in her system, even as see-through as he was, gauzy like gossamer threads, one foot in the real world and one in the grave, and Fred wasn't one to push so hard on her-
Which meant it was important.
He shook his head when he finally saw he had her attention, face still speckled in his own blood and soot from the wall that had collapsed on him, and he began pointing to the door at the end of the hall, the one he stood by, and with a waver, a flicker that made his outlines seem not entirely solid, he faded from view entirely.
Just a glimpse-
A direction.
Harriet doesn't turn left to her own dorm; she turned right and followed the ghost of a dead friend.
There was nothing on the door, just a number. Fifteen. One of many in the wing of dormitories. Hesitantly, Harriet reached out, took the handle, and gave an experimental twist.
The lock doesn't catch.
The door was open.
The owner possibly didn't believe anyone would go prying into their room. Harriet, nevertheless, wasn't just anyone, and Fred wouldn't show face unless he thought he had to, and so with one last furtive glance down the hall, back up again, clearing empty space, she slipped inside the room, closing the door behind her.
It was much like her own room, boxed with a bed, desk, drawers and closest. On the dresser was a photo of a pretty brown-haired woman and a baby, another with a man and the same child, blond, dimpled. It was the one in the frame that made Harriet hesitate as much as she did, a shot on the steps of a veranda. Perhaps it was the smile on the dark haired man's face, the one in the suit. Maybe it was the way the sunshine glinted off the blond woman's hair. Possibly it was the... Happiness taken, frozen, that seeped from the moment of time captured in glass and paper.
Harriet picked it up, ran a finger over faces, fights down the urge to take the photo with her. A strange urge. Uncomfortable. She placed the frame back on the dresser, tried to forget about it, searches through the ones pinned with tape on the mirror.
The last photo, pinned to bottom, was of Hope and Josie standing together by a palm tree.
Hopes' room.
Harriet was in Hope Marshall's room.
Now why would Fred bring her here?
The shelves only had trinkets on them, snow globes and cinema tickets, nothing was under the bed but a forgotten pair of socks, and the closet, unlike Harriet's with the get-away bag, only housed clothes and freshly pressed uniforms.
And then Harriet stalled near the drawers with the photos again, the one with the mirror-
Not entirely pressed back against the wall. Skirting around the furniture and pushing cheek to painted plaster, Harriet grinned and stretched into the crack between vanity and brick wall, just far enough apart to wiggle her hand in, pulling free a small, leather-bound book flattened and hidden between the two.
Bingo.
A quick flick through the sheets of stained parchment only told Harriet it was a Wiccan grimoire of some sort, part diary too by the looks of it, from someone called Genevieve. There was spells for ancestral magics towards the end, curses and blood hexes dotted between and-
And a note by something called a Harvest Ritual. A small line in the bottom corner. A single word that somehow, someway, grabbed Harriet's attention as she spun through the pages.
Mikaelson.
Harriet slapped the book shut and shoved it safely into her satchel. She couldn't stay long in Hope's room should the girl come back and find her snooping, but clearly if there was one line in this book about the elusive Mikaelsons, there'd be more.
With any luck, Hope wouldn't go searching for her book before Harriet could read it and slip it back into its hiding spot.
Creeping back out the door with a muted Cheers Fred muttered underneath her breath, she'd only gotten seven steps down the hall before Lizzie Saltzman was turning the corner.
III
"What are you doing down here? Don't you sleep in the Elena dorms?"
Harriet shuffled on the carpet and tried to look as bashful as she could, keeping her bag close to her hip.
"Got a bit turned around on the stairs and I've been wandering around ever since."
She felt a little bit sick for the lie, or more aptly, how quick and easy it comes to her now, especially when Lizzie smiled at her pleasantly, vaguely warm, nothing like how her Uncle had smiled at Harriet that morning.
"I was the same my first week. Come, we can walk down to dinner together if you want? I know Josie and Hope were planning on finding you after to see if you fancied coming out on the fields for a bit."
Taking the offer as the get out of jail free card it was, Harriet followed the girl down the hall, waggling the strap of her bag pointedly.
"Just got to drop this off first if you don't mind showing me the way?"
Lizzie nodded and the two began working their way back to the stairs.
"And I might be able to meet up with Hope and Josie later, but first I have to meet Professor Parker in his office."
"Oh?"
Lizzie asked with a pop of a dark brow.
"Not in trouble on your first day, right?"
"No-"
Harriet interjected.
"Nothing like that. It's for my personal tutor meeting. I didn't have one this weekend when I should have."
Whatever Harriet had just said seemed to garner the reaction she'd expected from Lizzie if she told the other girl yes, she was in trouble. There's a twitch of her brows, a frown hooding eyes, a peculiar twist to the corner of her lip as if she were chewing up her own confusion.
"That's strange. Uncle Kai's notoriously bad at keeping up with his personal tutoring. My dad is still on his back to meet with Alice who's been waiting an entire year for her first meeting."
lackadaisical, Lizzie shrugged one arm and beamed at Harriet.
"Sorry, seems you've drawn the short straw. Dad will be pleased to hear Uncle Kai's actually doing his job for once, though."
And Harriet is anything but pleased.
Fuck, she thought. Fuck, because of course Harriet would luck out and get the neglectful teacher as a personal tutor only to get him just as he's decided to be productive. Worse yet is the possible reason for his abrupt efficiency. Either Mr Saltzman had gotten through to him, in which case, Alice would be having a meeting soon too, and Professor Parker was merely doing his job, please let him be doing his job, or for whatever reason, he'd seen or heard something in that bloody classroom that had pricked his ears.
Circe knows how good a Wiccan-Vampire hybrid's senses were. Did he smell something on her? Hear something in her voice? Know something?
That evidently didn't bode well for Harriet.
"Alice-"
She asked Lizzie lazily, or what she hoped appeared lazy and not entirely too fussed, just as they slunk through the entrance of Elena's wing in the Salvatore mansion.
"She's the blond girl who was in my Ethics of Magical Application, right?"
Lizzie nodded with a hum.
"Yeah, that's her. She normally sits with us at lunch and dinner."
It shouldn't be too hard to drop a bland and mild question in Alice's direction about when she'll have her personal tutor meeting. Perhaps Harriet could make it sound nervous, as if her own one creeping up in a few hours had set her a bit on edge, made her wonder what happens in one. It might just earn Harriet enough sympathy to get a straight answer. If Professor Parker had scheduled a meeting with Alice when Harriet had swept out the room, she had nothing at all to worry about.
Nothing but her current little ghost problem.
Yet, even that was looking to be turning around, the grimoire in her book bag sitting cosy with hints to piece together later tonight in the safety of her dorm.
Things were starting to look up.
It was a shame it didn't stay that way long.
A.N: I only received three reviews last chapter, so god only knows if anyone's reading this or enjoying it, but I'm back at it again with my typical nonsense lol. I hope you guys enjoyed the first small meeting between Kai and Effie.
As always, thank you for the follows, favourites and reviews. If you have a moment spare, don't forget to drop a few words in the review box over there, and I will see you all next time. Until then, stay safe! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21