A/N: Happy New Year, everyone, and hope your holidays went well! Sorry for the slight delay (but hey, if you could wait for a year, I'm sure the last two weeks passed by in a jiffy, right?). This chapter was a bit hard to write, and I still think it could be better, but I wanted to put something up soon. So here you go, a shiny new update!
Trivia: So I decided to make Alison MacDougal a pure-blood, yeah? I didn't know whether any MacDougal family actually existed in the Potterverse, so I thought I was making the name up. So today when I was going through the page on Pure-bloods on the HP wikia, I found that there actually exists a pure-blood MacDougal family in canon! Imagine my surprise, lol. that was a hell of a coincidence.
Review responses:
juneb: Thank you so much! Hopefully you wont have to wait much longer for the epilogue, heh.
Anne Trent: Percy would probably kill her if he got his hands on her. You would too, probably, when you find out Clara's reasoning. And yes, Clara is definitely going to Azkaban.
Guest: Omg, thank you! I squeed so hard when I read your reviews, I showed my sister and boyfriend immediately. I'm so glad you decided to keep reading after you found out about the James/Lucy ship. I tried to keep the shippy-ness to a minimum, and focused more on the case and the emotions rather than the chemistry between the two, cause I assumed that might make people more uncomfortable than they already are, lol. Thank you for your compliments on the characterizations; I was so worried that I would mess them up. While the Next-Gen characters are a bit easier since I can make them up as I go along, the adults are already very well developed and I hoped I could do them justice. I'm glad you think I wrote them well :). And I'm so happy you caught that red herring! I was hoping people would catch that, heheh. And thank you so, so much for your lovely words. I hope you enjoy this chapter as much as you did the others :)
Right. Time to get on with the story. Standard disclaimer: I am not JKR, her characters are not mine, though mine are. So here's the official last chapter of Never Let Go where I wrap up all the loose ends (hopefully) and answer the questions of how, why and when (again, hopefully). We're just left with the epilogue. Enjoy!
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: VERITAS
A year ago:
"You like someone, don't you?" Clara asked her cousin as they sat down in Alison's room one day during Christmas break. "I can feel it, you seem to be in such a good mood these days."
Alison nodded, looking down at her hands, which were resting on her lap, fingers linked together. "I do, I really do," she admitted, and Clara squealed.
"I knew it! So, who's the lucky bloke?"
Alison blushed. "You know the Ravenclaw in my year I sometimes study with? Zachary Williamson?"
Clara stiffened slightly, but nodded. It can't be him, can it? No, it must be his friend or something, Alison couldn't have fallen for him -
"It's him, Clara," she said, confirming Clara's fears. "He just kissed me outside Charms last week and it was absolutely amazing." She felt as though someone had doused her with icy cold water. "Said he's been meaning to do that for a while and then asked me to go to Hogsmeade with him after the holidays. It's brilliant, isn't it? He's just so handsome. I've always had a crush on him, and he actually feels the same way! Can you believe my luck?"
But Clara wasn't listening. No, she thought wildly, unable to breath. Zach couldn't do this to her, could he? He couldn't possibly -
"I - I'll be right back," she managed to choke out somehow, jumping off the bed and dashing out of her room, and somehow she made it to the bathroom. She locked the door and leaned over the sink, taking deep, shuddering breaths as hot tears rolled down her cheeks. There was no way Zach could have cheated on her. No way. Alison was mistaken. Zach couldn't have betrayed her.
She wiped her eyes carelessly with the back of her hand, and stared at herself in the mirror, trying to steady herself. She had to talk to Zach. She needed to talk to him. She had to ask him if this was true. But an owl would take too long. She hastily decided to Floo over to his house and ask him face to face.
She exited the bathroom and ran down the stairs to the living room, where the fireplace was. Thank Merlin her uncle was a wizard; Clara's parents were Muggles and they weren't connected to the Floo Network. She had no time to lose. She took a handful of Floo Powder from the crystal bowl on the mantelpiece and threw it into the already raging fire, prompting it to turn green immediately. She stepped in and, the soot irritating her already sensitive nose, choked out, "Wi-Williamson Residence!"
She whizzed past various grates, and after a dizzying few seconds, finally landed at the Williamsons' living room fireplace. She clambered out, coughing, brushing soot out of her jumper.
Zachary had been lounging on one of the sofas, reading a book, leaning against one of the arms with one leg draped over the other arm while the other leg was dangling off the edge of the sofa. When he heard the commotion, he looked up lazily, and sprang to his feet the moment he saw Clara.
"The fuck are you doing here?" he hissed, striding up to her and taking her by the arm, looking furtively around. "Are you off your trolley, woman? What if anyone sees you?"
She tugged her arm away and stared defiantly at him. "Merry Christmas to you too, sweetheart," she said dryly, glaring at him.
He ignored her. "Why are you here?"
She couldn't believe how rude he was being. "Did you kiss Alison?" she spat, her voice wavering slightly.
He didn't meet her eyes when he said, "Who told you that?"
"You - you don't deny it?" She asked, trembling slightly. This can't be happening. She felt herself going numb. She wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and never come out. "Answer me, Zach!" she shrieked, grabbing his arm and shaking him when he didn't reply. "Did you kiss my bleeding cousin!?"
"So what if I did?" he snapped angrily, shoving her away roughly, and she staggered, steadying herself before she could fall to the floor. "I like her, I kissed her, and I'll bloody well do more than that if I want to."
She ignored the ringing in her ears as she stared at him, the boy whom she believed she loved. Tears threatened to spill down her eyes again. "I-I am your girlfriend, Z-Zach!" she choked out. "How could - how could you do this to me?"
Zach huffed, turning away and crossing his arms across his chest. "Not officially you're not. I never told anyone and neither did you."
She strode over to stand in front of him again. "Cause you told me not to! You told me your dad wouldn't be okay with you dating a Muggle-born, so you wanted to keep it a secret!"
"Well it's a good thing, innit?" he said, the corners of his lip turning up. "We'll just go our separate ways and no one would be the wiser."
Clara was stunned into silence. This was the boy she'd been head over heels for? This insensitive piece of filth? "Why?" she finally managed.
Zach looked confused at her question. "Why what?"
"Why are you doing this to me?"
Zach shrugged, looking into her eyes as he spoke this time. "I'm just not interested by you anymore, Clara." Oh, how he just said it so easily.
"You decide that now?" she demanded. "After everything we've been through?"
"What everything?" Zach sneered at her. He laughed a little at her incredulous expression. "Oh, you mean the shagging? Well that was all for fun, wasn't it? I needed a few quick releases, you were the only one up for it. I told you a few sweet stuff, added some lovey-dovey words. thought it might persuade you to spread your legs a bit further -"
He never got to finish the sentence, for Clara had punched him squarely on the nose. "Fuck you!" she screamed at him, the anger finally overpowering the feeling of helplessness. "You knocked me up, you fucking piece of shit! I had to steal a load of abortion potion from the Hospital Wing because of you, because you didn't want the baby - and after all that trauma you put me through, you now have the gall to tell me you don't want me anymore?"
Zach clutched his nose, howling in pain. "Ugh, you bitch!" he moaned, his voice a bit warbled. "Have you gone nutters, you bleeding cow?"
"No, I was nutters for believing you, for actually thinking that you're a half decent bloke," she said. She wasn't going to cry anymore. Not for trash like him. Anger coursed through her veins, filling her with nothing but hatred for the grousing teenager in front of her. "I'll go and tell Alison what sort of a cheat you are. She'll never have you."
Zachary snorted, with a bit of difficulty, though, which gave Clara a bit of vindictive pleasure. "I don't think so," he sneered.
"You'll see."
"No I won't. You won't tell her anything."
Clara crossed her arms across her chest. "And just why not?"
Zachary simply pulled out his wand and said, ignoring the restriction on underage Wizardry, "Accio Clara's pictures!"
A few pictures zoomed into the room and into Zach's hand, who threw it at Clara. They scattered to the floor; a few hit her on the face before joining the others on the ground. She looked down quizzically. When she realised what they were, she gaped at him, horrified.
"When-when did you take these?" she stuttered, her blood running cold.
For staring up at her were her own naked pictures, some of them of her alone, while in others she was together with Zachary, their limbs entangled. Bile rose up her throat as she struggled to breathe. How and when had he taken these?
"You say one word to that girl," he snarled, advancing on her, "and I'll put these up all over your common room. I'll send them to the Prophet, and I'll send them to your Muggle parents. Your dad's a pastor, aint he? Imagine what he'd do when he sees his sinner of a daughter shagging a bloke before she got hitched."
He wouldn't. She couldn't let him do that. She would be ruined. Her dad would disown her. She'd have nowhere to go.
"What's the matter," Zachary smirked, waving his wand, and the pictures all flew back into his hand in a neat stack. "Kneazle got your tongue?"
"You're a right bastard."
He chuckled. "Get stuffed, 'sweetheart'."
She left without a word.
For the next few days, Clara tried to be as normal as she could with her cousin, hearing her talk about what an amazing and romantic boy Zachary was, and how he was so good at sex. Clara tried to be as upbeat about it as she could while inside she was screaming. She avoided Lucy as much as possible without raising suspicion. When she was free, she was thinking up ways of humiliating Zachary Williamson. They started out rather harmless, like adding Puking Pastilles to his food, to hexing him during a Quidditch match so he'd fall off his broom. Soon, her thoughts turned darker. The day Alison confided in her that she was pregnant, and Zachary actually wanted to accept the baby, was the day she finally snapped. She wanted him to suffer, she wanted him to hurt like she was hurting. She wanted to ruin his life like he'd ruined hers.
And then, one day, while going through a book called Poppy to Picklebush: A Prose on Poisons for Potioneers, the solution hit her like an oncoming train.
Present day:
"I was so angry, I was so mad at him," Clara said, her voice slightly wavering. "Can you imagine? He asked me to kill my baby because he was afraid of the things people would say. And then when the same thing happened to Alison, he decided that he wanted her kid?" She huffed bitterly. "I was Zachary's plaything. I'm a Muggle-born, he was never interested in anything serious with me. He said his father would think that the kid I was gonna have would have diluted magical powers. Alison was a half-blood. Her father was a pureblood while her mother, my aunt, was a Muggle-born. Zachary's father would have been thrilled with the kid. Can you imagine how I was feeling that day?"
Harry sighed. "I sympathise with you, but that is not reason enough to kill someone," he said, though not harshly.
"They ruined my life!" Clara shouted. "I gave up everything for him! My dignity, my OWL grades, everything suffered because of them. Alison was the reason he left me. I needed to do something to hurt them."
"But you can't just kill someone to get revenge!" Teddy said exasperatedly. "You can't take a life just like that!"
"But Zachary decided to kill my baby, just like that," she said, her eyes oddly shiny. Her lower lip trembled. When Teddy opened his mouth, she cut across him. "Don't you dare tell me they're not the same thing, Auror Lupin."
Teddy closed his mouth.
"Miss Stettin," Harry said slowly, willing her to understand. "What Zach did was wrong, and he suffered for it. But killing someone is against the law, as is forced abortion. Did Zachary force feed you the croton oil?"
Clara shook her head grudgingly.
"Then he coerced you?"
She nodded.
"Then you still did it willingly, I'm afraid," Harry leaned forwards. "I'm sorry for what happened to you, but for that I can't ignore the fact that you killed Alison."
"But I didn't want to kill her," Clara protested. "I just slipped the croton oil into her juice every day cause I wanted to make her have an abortion. I thought it'd push her away from Zach so they would have to put up with the pain I felt." She looked at them pleadingly, willing them to understand. "We sat at the same table during breakfast, see. I went down first and waited for her at her table; it was our usual routine that I kept her food ready for her. It was the perfect opportunity for me to spike her juice. But I didn't know so much was going to kill her. I swear."
Harry frowned. "You're telling me Alison's death was an accident?"
Clara nodded earnestly. "Yes. I just wanted her to lose the baby so she and Zach would suffer what I suffered. I didn't know she would die!"
"So when she died, you thought it would be a good idea to frame Zachary," Teddy surmised.
"I was scared," Clara mumbled. "I put a little bit of croton oil in another vial, so that it looked like the oil was spent from there, and then at the funeral when I hugged him for appearance's sake. I put the vial in his pocket."
Harry shared a glance with Teddy. The vial the Aurors had found in Zachary's trunk was tucked away in one of his trouser pockets. Clara's testimony was consistent with the evidence they had from that case.
"But if you were the one who framed him, why did you get him out?" Teddy asked curiously.
"Cause I was an idiot." she scrunched up her face, and her eyes watered. "I went to meet him disguised as his father once, cause I couldn't very well go as myself." Azkaban didn't allow non-relatives to meet prisoners. "Transfigured myself to look like him. I was always good at Transfiguration. Thought I'd go to gloat at him, perhaps make fun of his predicament a bit. But then he told me he was sorry," she sniffled. "And I believed him! he said if he could get out, he'd patch things up with me, he kept apologizing and begged me to take him back, and that if I helped him he'd never leave me again. So I sneaked in a wand transfigured as a letter, which was timed to wear off when he was back in his cell. Zach undid the wards and then he broke out of the prison."
"Harry," Teddy interrupted, looking at his senior. "Don't visitors have to go through magic detectors and other security checks?"
Harry shook his head. "Civilian visitors, yes, but Aurors can bypass the security protocols. Since she was disguised as Williamson, they let her through without checking for any magicked items." Teddy has a feeling the security protocols were about to be updated very soon.
"Go on," Harry encouraged Clara.
"And then he told me he'd let me know when he reached his home in Newquay," Clara croaked. "But then he never contacted me! He never owled, nor did he let me know how he was! And I was so stupid, I was so naive and stupid that I fell for his lies once more," she wailed, folding her arms on the table and leaning fowards to hid her face in her arms. "I deserved it, to be honest, for falling into his trap again," came her slightly warbled voice.
Teddy glanced at Harry before saying gently, "Clara, I'm afraid we have some bad news."
"What?" she asked, her voice muffled.
"Zachary is dead."
Her head shot up, and she looked at him incredulously. her eyes wide. "What?"
Teddy explained to her what had happened, and by the time he had given her the abridged version of Zachary's horrific death, Clara was in tears again, horrified that she had been mistaking his lack of contact for another betrayal.
Ten minutes later, once her weeping had reduced to sniffling, Harry finally asked, "What about Lucy, though, Miss Stettin? Where does she fit into all of this?"
Clara sighed, wiping her nose on her sleeve. Her eyes were bloodshot "Well," she said hoarsely. She cleared her throat. "Since I thought Zachary had betrayed me again, I decided it was time to move on and look at other boys. I remembered that a very long time ago, before I even got together with Zach, I sort of had a crush on James Potter." Harry narrowed his eyes ever so slightly. "Well, I wanted to see whether sparks flew or not. So I tried flirting with him a bit. But he never reciprocated. In fact, he seemed rather uncomfortable. So I wanted to talk to Lucy about what I could do to make him like me. after all, they always hung out together and she was his favourite, so she must have known something.
So I went to talk to her one day. Turns out, she wanted to talk to me as well."
Last February
"I've got to tell you something," Clara said one day when the two of them were alone in the sixth-year girls' dormitory, clambering on to her bed and sitting cross-legged.
"Really?" Lucy said, a glint in her eye as she plopped down on her own. She fluffed up the pillows and leaned back on them, tilting her body so she was facing her friend. "I've got to tell you something too."
"You go first," Clara prompted. She was trying to be a bit considerate towards her best friend. Over the past year, she realised, after the fiasco with Zach and Alison, she and Lucy hadn't spent much time together. Clara preferred to haunt the library alone, making excuses about the upcoming exams and studying for NEWTs. Lucy seemed not to have minded, though, for she spent more times with James, which was a blessing in disguise for her. She was sure Lucy would be able to help her win James over somehow.
"Okay," Lucy said. Clara noticed she had a faint hint of a blush on her cheeks. Lucy took a deep breath before saying, in a bit of a rush, "James and I are dating. We've been together for nearly two years."
Clara froze.
"I know he's my cousin but it's all right!" Lucy protested, mistaking Clara's expression for antipathy. "It's not like he's my sibling, so it's not incest. It's not even illegal to marry your cousins in Britain."
Clara barely heard her. Not again, she thought. This couldn't be happening again. Why did this always happen to her? Why couldn't she ever have a chance with any of the boys she liked? First Zach betrayed her twice, and then, when she finally wanted to move forward, her fate decided that she was just fine where she was. She was stuck, and she would always be stuck in her past.
"Wow," she heard herself say. "That's great."
Lucy seemed relieved. "I'm glad you don't think it's weird."
"Of course not." She spoke as if on autopilot.
"So then, what did you want to say?"
"I forgot."
"Oh. That's a shame."
Present day
"And then, three months later, she asks me to go with her to Madam Patil," Clara spat venomously, her eyes hull of a deep-seated loathing. "And I found out that she was well knocked up by James Potter. And I just knew that he'd accept her wholeheartedly. I'd seen how he looked at her, as if she were his light in the darkness, his solution to every problem. He loved her, I could see it in his eyes, and how I wished I could just see that same look in someone's eyes for me, just once."
Teddy sighed. Jealousy. Envy. One of the seven sins. This was her downfall.
"So you killed her," Harry concluded.
"I'd killed once," Clara shrugged, not a bit of remorse showing on her face. "I killed my own cousin, didn't I? I could kill again. So I did. I filled her Ferrosophoric potion with every bit of croton oil I had. Then I went up to James' dormitory one day when no one was there and just dumped it in his open trunk. It worked once, didn't it? Framing the boyfriend? It was just so simple.
"Everyone was so happy. James would have accepted his baby. He was what Zach never was. Zach never accepted my child, but James Potter would have accepted Lucy's. it wasn't fair." There was a crazed look in her eye, and not for the first time that night, Teddy wondered whether she was mentally sound. He doubted it. "Why, why did Lucy get so lucky? Why did James love her so bloody much? Why? Why?" she demanded shrilly. "I couldn't handle it. I can't handle it anymore. Why was she so lucky? She was a bleeding pure-blood, who could have her perfect pure-blooded bastard child who would be so loved by its father, while I was a Mudblood who's pure-blood boyfriend didn't want her half-blood child - it all boils down to blood status, doesn't it? They both deserved to die - her and her bastard. Just like my baby had to die!" she cried, slamming her hands on the table.
Teddy's fingers curled instinctively around his wand under his jacket.
"You - " she pointed at Harry - "might have killed Voldemort, but you can never wipe out this blood purity claptrap that is so deep-rooted into this society. It destroyed everything for me. Lucy got lucky cause of her blood. No one should be so lucky. So I made sure her luck ran out, just like mine." She grinned, her eyes manic.
Harry had had enough. "Thank you for your testimony, Clara Stettin," he said loudly, his face hard. "Your statement has been recorded. You will now be escorted to Azkaban to await trial in front of the Wizengamot for your crimes. Thank you for your cooperation." He stood up, and the blue quill, which had been recorded every single word so far, skidded to a half and dropped on the parchment with an air of finality.
This is it, Teddy thought, as he and Harry walked out of the interrogation room, leaving behind a hysterically laughing girl. Harry instructed the two Hit Wizards standing guard outside to accompany her to the Wizarding prison. All that was left to do now was complete the paperwork for the case. They'd caught the culprit. Lucy would finally receive justice. The case was finally solved.
The nightmare was finally over.
A/N2: So that's that! Clara is off to Azkaban. I hope I've answered all your questions, but in case I missed anything, feel free to review and ask whatever you want. I won't say no to some comments and criticisms either :D. I love hearing for you guys!
Only the epilogue left, people. Hopefully it'll be up by next Friday.
Review review review!
-Nadia