A/n: For any who are waiting for some Harry/Tracey romance, I'm afraid that you are going to have to be patient. A romance between them can't spring out of nowhere. I want them to have a sort of tentative sort of understanding and a bit of acceptance of one another before any such thing can occur. And considering Harry's prejudice, and Tracey's inability to really trust, they have a bit a ways to go. To not do so would make the story feel rushed, the character's to ring false and writing to seem poor.

As always, thank you everyone who is reading and a special thanks to you who take the time to express your thoughts, feelings and even criticism. It is very much appreciated. :) And I'm really sorry for the long wait for this update... life as always presented obstacles.

Prompt: Reconstitute (#93)

"Words like violence break the silence,
Come crashing into my little world.
Painful to me, pierce right through me
Can't you understand?"

-Anberlin, Enjoy the Silence

"What do you think she's doing in there?" Ginny asked after dinner, pausing on the landing and staring towards the door at the end of the hall.

Harry, Hermione and Ron followed her gaze towards the door, behind which the could hear the sound of light feet and the shuffling of objects.

Ron shrugged his shoulders carelessly, while Hermione frowned in concern. She'd been the one Mrs. Weasley had sent to fetch Tracey for dinner. However, when Hermione had knocked on the door of the Slytherin girl's room, it was to be met with the resounding sound of the lock bolting on the door. No words were ever uttered, but Hermione had been bright enough to interpret the sound for all the response that she would get.

"She's probably up to something," Ron uttered suspiciously. "She's pretty much been locked in her room the whole day. She was only with us cleaning a little while this morning... and then she'd only showed up for lunch and never came back out since Snape left."

"Maybe Snape made her upset?" Harry asked, unable to help feeling that perhaps for the first time, Tracey was acting like a normal, broody teenager. In a way it was as mind-boggling as it was comforting. So there is an actual person beneath the eternally bored, generally unconcerned, sarcastic Slytherin?

However, perhaps that was a bit unfair. After all, hadn't Tracey proved that... no matter how deeply buried, there might be a nobel person underneath all the indifference? Hadn't she tried to diffuse the situation between Sirius and Snape? Hadn't she attempted to alleviate his concern for her wrists as well as his discomfort that his godfather had harmed her?

Harry shook his head, telling himself that perhaps he was seeing things that weren't there. After all, she hadn't done any of that for his benefit. In all likelihood she simply hadn't appreciated what she thought to be pity... and she was probably concerned for her own godfather- as odd as it might be to him the idea, no matter how abstract, that anyone could possibly care for Snape.

"What?" Harry asked when he realized they were all staring at him. "Snape can get under anyone's skin."

"You're right there, mate," Ron conceded as they proceeded to move towards the stairs and head up.

~X~

That night found Tracey once more seated in the dark before the tapestry of the Black family tree. She sat on the floor once more, with her knees gathered to her chest and with her arms draped over them as she stared darkly and yet blindly towards the general location of where the Lestrange name was written.

As she continued to stare unseeingly at the tapestry, she ignored the pressure she felt in her chest... that had refused to lessen since earlier. As much as she tried once more to erect her walls once more, she was having an increasingly difficult time with it. Even practicing Occlumency hadn't worked and she was frustrated but also... something else. Something with a sharp edge that she was afraid to put a name to. She wanted to call it simple apprehension, but she knew it was more than that. So much more, so much deeper.

The word fear bounced around in her head. It seemed whispered from that voice from earlier and echo eerily through her ears; that voice from earlier, that seemed to give life to thoughts she refused to acknowledge the last couple years. But now that the box had been opened, she seemed unable to pack everything back inside and lock it back up.

Running her fingers through her hair, Tracey took a deep breath before withdrawing her fingers.

Severus had, however inadvertently, prodded at a fissure in her wall. A fissure that had cracked open and expanded with the aid of Blaise's news and Daphne's gloating letter. And now, her wall which had been so carefully constructed... that had become such an integral part of herself that she no longer knew where it stopped and where she began... that wall was now falling to pieces and the pieces seemed to be raining down on her from the heavens above and Tracey wasn't sure how to fix it.

And here she sat now... completely exposed. Made vulnerable without her wall... the wall that had been such an invisible barrier that Tracey had almost fully believed that it didn't exist and that she really didn't care.

But now it lay in ruins, perhaps only semi-erected, but at present too weak.

That wall isn't your friend, the voice whispered to her. In fact, it keeps all those that would be your friends at bay.

Tracey perhaps would have been afraid of the voice being further proof of her lack of sanity, if she weren't so convinced that everyone had that voice. The one that contradicts you at every turn, makes you second-guess your choices... the one that fills you with doubts, but so to at times seems to be your champion in all things.

It protects me and it's who I am, Tracey argued. She knew she was just arguing with herself, and that it was silly to do so... but that was human nature. Isn't it?

Tracey wasn't really sure. The wall seemed to be there for as long as she could remember... she couldn't even recall a time before it's existence. Though she knew that apathy was a learned way of living, that it didn't run through all the way to her core, she knew that it ran more than deep enough. Enough that it was as much a part of her as her dark auburn hair and jade-green eyes.

But just like that, it isn't all that you are, the voice argued and Tracey didn't have a response to that.

The thought that she wasn't sure who she was, seemed to linger around the corners of her mind, but Tracey didn't bother to acknowledge it. Instead, she once more turned to look at the tapestry.

It occurred to her in that moment, that perhaps her wall was a multi-layered thing. That at some point protecting her from others and keeping others from seeing more to her than an unfeeling girl, that it had expanded to separate unwanted feelings and thoughts from her... sectioning off what she deemed as weak or undesirable.

The mercurial Lestrange girl...

Voldemort's rise, Grimmauld place and her residence in it... these occurrences started chipping away at her inner walls. They were the foundation. Severus simply laid to waste, unknowingly, to the outer wall.

I just need to focus... that's the problem. I'm not focusing, that's why it's so difficult, Tracey told herself in frustration, running her fingers through her hair before leaning back and closing her eyes. With determination, she took several deep breaths.

To put those walls up again... to such an extent is a mistake, the voice told her. The voice sounded too much like reason for her liking causing her to let out her breath in a hiss of aggravation.

She was growing extremely weary of all this back and forth. After the overwhelming amount of sentiments that had flooded her, Tracey simply couldn't take it anymore and for a moment, she let it simply rest. Her chest felt tighter for it, and a she stared straight ahead of her through the dark, she knew that tears were gathering in her eyes, creating a film through which the world would have been made blurry if she could see.

The sound of the door opening and steps breaking the silence, hardly disturbed her. But it was a different indifference from the norm. Because even at her most apathetic, Tracey still could muster it in her to raise her defenses. However, in this moment, she couldn't. Mainly because she didn't have them.

"Who's there?" Tracey asked, her voice sounding foreign to her as her smooth sultry voice came out a bit grittier. "I'd really rather not guess," Tracey called with a heavy sigh when the silence persisted.

"Tracey?" Even if the voice came out uncertainly and with much hesitance, Tracey recognized it and sneered ironically.

"Of course it's you, Potter," Tracey muttered from where she sat, but her voice lacked any bite and seemed teemulous.

She could hear his slow steps as he walked around the couch, but didn't bother to turn in their direction. She could hear the floorboards creak beneath his socked feet and closed her eyes as she allowed the moment to come over her and distract her from her morose thoughts.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, his voice quiet and slightly suspicious.

"Can't sleep," she replied simply, once more staring straight ahead, her tone raw from the emotions warring incessantly beneath the surface. "You know what it's like-" Tracey stated suddenly, turning her head in Potter's direction, though she was barely able to make his outline in the dark. "Don't you ever just get so tired and so... angry that for some reason... fate or destiny... has decided that you're not deserving of normalcy?

"And there is nothing you can do. Nothing at all. You are absolutely powerless to do anything about it, because your life is governed by elders who know better. And it is all the more frustrating because you know that their overbearing rule over you, comes out of a place that is well-meaning," Tracey went on, her voice becoming increasingly bitter and derisive as the sentiments overwhelmed her good-reason and her suspicion of absolutely everyone that wasn't Severus and making her completely forget who she was talking to.

"You want to know something funny, Potter?" the thought occurring her, so suddenly and out of nowhere that she felt her heart clench so painfully that she forgot how to breathe. "I've never realized this before..." she went on, now talking more to herself than the still silent and increasingly uneasy boy in the room. "Probably because of the walls," she muttered to herself.

"I think- I hate my life... and I really hate being me," Tracey admitted breathlessly, her throat closing shut and forcing her to take several deep breaths even as tears spilled down her cheeks.

"You think? Shouldn't you know if you do or don't?" Harry blurted before he could stop himself.

Tracey laughed; a bitter sound that made the hairs on Harry's neck stand on end. The tears continued to burn tracks down her cheeks.

"That's the thing, Potter," Tracey stated as she climbed to her feet and surreptitiously wiped her cheeks; feeling suddenly weary to her very soul. Her voice quieted. "When you've spent so long suppressing every feeling that comes up and denying that you even feel, eventually you no longer recognize sentiments... you forget what they feel like, what they mean... until suddenly it strikes you that... the emptiness inside that seems to yawn with every breath you take, is actually a single feeling... festering and growing inside of you until it consumes you.

"I'm starting to think that it might be better to be a Gryffindor who wears their heart on their sleeve," Tracey mumbled as she moved to exit, however, pausing beside the Gryffindor boy. "But... how do you survive every disappointment and break your heart takes?"

Harry wasn't given a moment to react much less think of a response as Tracey swept from the room as if she'd never been there in the first place. If Harry thought he'd previously been perplexed by the behavior of the Slytherin girl, nothing quite prepared himself for her words that for several hours after, he wondered if perhaps the whole thing hadn't been a strange dream.

The feeling that it was all a dream or a figment of his imagination did not abate. Even in the pale light of morning.

Perhaps especially not then, as when he next saw Tracey the following morning at breakfast, the girl was back to being her emotionless self, regarding everyone and everything around her with such complete and utter boredom, that it seemed impossible that the girl could feel anything else. And if she made any note at all, or even realized that he spent his time watching her in puzzlement, she made no outward show of it.

It made Harry wonder if perhaps, he was starting to lose his own mind.

TBC...