Saturday, 26 February 1994
Gryffindor's Tempering Room
"This," Mary declared, looking over the assembled group before her, "is ridiculous."
"What?" Draco drawled. "The part where… seven Slytherins and three Ravenclaws agreed to undergo some sort of Gryffindor challenge of bravery, or the part where we all seem to be having second thoughts? Because the latter seems eminently reasonable to me…"
"The part where any of you are here at all, when I couldn't get anyone to come last weekend!"
Last weekend, she hadn't been able to find anyone who wanted to explore the Tempering Room with her, and now there were thirteen of them. (Not only had word spread quickly as Mary, Ginny, and Blaise invited their friends to come exploring, but Dave, Alex, Luna, and Aerin, who hadn't actually been invited by anyone, had followed along when the others left the Great Hall under the assumption that whatever they were doing was bound to be interesting.) They had all made their way to the portrait gallery after lunch, and hesitated when faced with the door to the chamber.
"Last weekend we had plans," Lilian reminded her with a teasing grin. Boring plans, Mary thought, but didn't say it, because Daphne was only a few feet away, chatting quietly with Blaise (Theo hadn't come), and she was still loath to offend the socialite.
"Are we going to do this or not?" Ginny asked loudly, gesturing at the door. She and Neville had arrived last, and were thus farthest from it.
The twins broke off their whispered debate with Hermione to answer in their usual irritating fashion: "Of course," "we're going to do it!" "Go on," "open the door!"
Mary was the closest. She hesitated. It wasn't that she didn't want to go through with it, now that she was here, but she didn't want to go first, especially in front of so many people. She wasn't exactly keen on having the whole lot of them see her fears, or whatever would happen when they opened the door.
"Not scared, are you, Potter?"
"Shut up, Malfoy!" Personally she rather thought he would be afraid, too, if he actually understood what the chamber was supposed to do. She was sure he was more of a coward than her, and she didn't think he would have agreed to come if Lilian had told him that they expected it to be as bad as a boggart-dementor.
"Seriously?!" Ginny demanded, pushing her way to the front of the crowd.
"What, you want first crack at it, Gryffindor?" Blaise teased, then flung an arm around Daphne, whispering something in her ear.
The redheaded girl looked around. No one else was volunteering. "Fine!" she exclaimed sounding a bit exasperated. She placed a hand on the door and said "Chivalry!" in a tone that suggested she was not nearly as nervous as Mary.
There were several clicks and a ratcheting sound, before the door gave way a few inches with a small creak. The assembled students stared at it in silence. Ginny extended her fingers, pushing it open.
Nothing happened. It was not a room behind the door, but a passage, its floor sloping upward, the walls lined with what seemed to be charcoal sketches.
"Wait, Gin," one of her brothers said, as she looked about to step forward. His twin nodded. "We'll go first."
She glared at them. "Like hell you will!"
She stepped into the passage.
Still, nothing happened.
It was very anticlimactic.
"Ha!" the young Gryffindor exclaimed. "You were all scared for nothing. Come on!"
She strode off down the passage, and the others followed with varying degrees of excitement and reluctance, until only Mary and Neville were left.
"Coming?" she asked.
He looked terrified, but he nodded and offered her his arm. She took it, suspecting that he might need the extra incentive to keep moving forward. She refused to think about the fact that she might as well.
The door closed behind them with a creak and a thud, cutting off most of the light. It wasn't clear where the remaining light was actually coming from. The white backgrounds of the pictures on the walls, perhaps? Ahead they heard a shout, echoing strangely down the passage, and reflected, nervous giggles. The sketches, more abstract than any other art Mary had seen at Hogwarts, grew darker as they proceeded, more shading, less white – less light. They also grew more… violent, somehow. Bolder slashes against the canvas, sharper shapes, moving (as all magical paintings seemed to do) more frenetically, threatening. The ceiling grew lower as the floor sloped more sharply, and the walls closed in. There was a distinct feeling of discomfort, a repulsion. It was decidedly creepy, like a sensation of being watched crawling up and down her spine. She wanted to go back. It was only the arm under her hand that stopped her from doing so – that and her curiosity about what lay at the end of the passage.
Snape wouldn't have sent them into actual danger, would he? Especially inside the school?
The passage ended with a small door – Mary had to crouch to pass through it – which opened onto a round room with a ceiling high enough to stand comfortably, and large enough for all twelve of the other explorers to stand around, shifting awkwardly. Sketches made almost completely of angry black scribbles lined the walls. Mary couldn't make out any of the others' faces in the dark, but she suspected that they were all trying to decide if it was worth it to be the first one to leave. She certainly was, and she had only just arrived. Neville was trembling slightly, and she was clutching his arm far more tightly than was really polite.
"Oh, good, you made it!" Luna said, her cheerful tone distinctly out of place. "We're ready, Desmond!"
Before anyone could object that they weren't ready (for what, Mary didn't know), or ask who Desmond was, there was a strange, lurching, twisting sensation, as though the entire room was rotating. No sooner had Mary realized that the door through which they had entered was now inaccessible than the world around her blinked out.
It was becoming nigh-depressingly common, she reflected, to be wrenched out of her body and thrust into some sort of mental space without warning. In the last year alone there had been Mabon, the Isolation detention, and, most recently, Imbolc. She was almost used to this now (and wasn't that a terrifying thought…) so she did not immediately panic on realizing that she was observing a muggle schoolyard from a rather dizzying perspective that seemed to allow her to see everything at once, from every angle. It was a bit unsettling to realize that the tiny, unkempt child in the oversized skirt and ugly button-up was her six-year-old self, but once she did, she thought she knew what was happening.
A memory was playing out before her as she watched from her intangible, third-person perspective. Recognizing herself helped her focus, and narrow her perspective to a still-odd but less-confusing single point of view – more like watching a film play out with the occasional shift in camera angle, rather than seeing the action from all sides at once.
She cringed slightly as she realized which memory it was: the first time she had seen Dudley and his gang bullying someone else on the playground, in Year 1.
Dudley had only been slightly overweight, then: a stocky, pudgy boy with mean little eyes and hands that liked to pinch and grab things that weren't his to take. She watched, unable to do anything to change the scene, as Piers and Malcom distracted their target, a boy named Paul. Dudley crept up behind him and snatched the jumper he had tied around his shoulders over his head, and ran away laughing. Paul chased him, of course, but Dudley threw the jumper to Piers, who threw it to Malcom as Paul raced futilely between them, never quite able to catch it. He grew more and more frustrated, to the point of angry tears.
Six-year-old Mary watched quietly from her place atop the monkey-bars (safely out of reach of Dudley and his friends) until a teacher intervened and shouted her over.
"I'm telling you, Miss, we was just playin' Piggy in the Middle!" Dudley said, his tone the false-innocent one she knew all too well. "We didn' do nothin' wrong!"
"He took my sweater, an' they wouldn't give it back! Ask Mary – she was watching!" Paul insisted, turning hopeful eyes on her six-year-old self.
"Mary," the teacher said forbiddingly. "Did your cousin take Paul's jumper?"
Thirteen-year-old Mary vaguely recalled the thoughts that had run through her mind at that moment: she had been so glad that it wasn't her in the middle of that little circle of misery, so relieved to have a respite from their attentions, that she hadn't said anything. Of course, she had later realized that it didn't matter what she did or didn't do – she was always going to be a target for Dudley's sadistic boredom, but at that moment, keeping her mouth shut had seemed like the best option.
The small, ragged girl shook her head in a way she had probably hoped looked shy. From an outsider's perspective, thirteen-year-old Mary noted, her face held a mixture of guilt and hope – she must have truly thought that if she defended them, the boys would leave her be. The teacher seemed to read something malicious in her expression, though, or more likely in the fact that she had lied at all (for the fact that she was lying was only too clear in her failure to meet Paul's eyes, or the teacher's, and Paul's shocked reaction to her silent answer). She hadn't noticed back then how the teacher's face had hardened – clearly she had thought that Mary was every bit as bad as the boys – and how Dudley and Piers had grinned at each other triumphantly behind her back, but it was painfully obvious to her now.
She had noticed how Paul's mouth had dropped open, as though he had truly thought she would support him, and she had failed him, but she was pretty sure she had missed the hatred that bloomed in the wake of her lie, now directed equally at her and Dudley's gang. That more than anything made her want to wince at the memory: it was suddenly much clearer why not even Dudley's other victims had wanted to associate with her in school.
More memories followed, mostly from her early years: lying to Petunia about her marks (better than Dudley's) and where she had been all afternoon while the chores went undone (hiding from Dudley) and what had happened to her aunt's new trousers (the rear seam 'inexplicably' weakened one afternoon after a particularly long and awful lecture on how much she owed the Dursleys for taking her in); lying to teachers about how she was treated at home, and why her homework wasn't done, and why she had missed another day of school; lying to the neighbors about why she was always the one doing the garden work, and how she'd got the latest bruises on her arms, and again about whether the Dursleys treated her well.
That one was probably the most vile, in hindsight. She wondered how different her life might have been if she had only been able to bring herself to tell someone, two or three or five years before the Hogwarts letter arrived, that she lived in a cupboard and was treated like her relatives' servant-girl at best. She had thought that things would only get worse, but maybe she had been wrong. Maybe it would have made a difference, and she wouldn't be wondering about it now.
She saw herself filching food from the school kitchens on the days when school lunches were her only meals, and railed against whatever intelligence was directing the process: You don't understand! I was hungry!
She had no excuse, though, when it showed her stealing money from her aunt's purse, just to hide it, buried in an old coffee can in the back flowerbed. Her eight-year-old self had planned to use it one day to run away, though she had more often used it to buy herself food when she missed too many meals in the summer. She wondered belatedly if Aunt Petunia had ever done any gardening after she left, and if so, whether she had found the thirty-odd pounds Mary had squirreled away over the years.
The memories grew clearer as she, the Mary in them, grew older – sharper. And then something changed. Instead of just observing, she was thrown into the mind of the person she had wronged, feeling the blows she might have prevented by interceding rain down on the head of a younger boy – something Carter; Mrs. Putnam's guilt at not being able to do anything for her, because she simply refused to speak up; the embarrassment Aunt Petunia had felt when she split her pants in front of all of her friends, and when she was five quid short at the grocer's because Mary had liberated a note from her that morning; the helpless confusion and rage the youngest cook at the school experienced when he was fired because food was going missing on his shift.
Mary hadn't even been there when that happened, but she knew it was a direct result of her actions.
She wanted to say better them than me, but with the echoes of their experience resonating in her mind, she couldn't quite justify it. The fact was, she had lied, stolen, and stood by when she could have chosen not to, and in so doing, had made other people's lives harder. Worse.
They had suffered so that she wouldn't.
I can't do anything about it now, though!
The Chamber had an answer for that, though.
It began showing her more recent memories, of her lying to Lilian about her relationship with Snape; hiding the Evil Undead Grandfather Thing from both her and Hermione; not quite finding the words and the nerve to defend Neville from his grandmother and Draco, at the dueling club meeting only three weeks before; refusing to go into the Chamber of Secrets after Ginny, valuing her own life over the younger girl's.
It wasn't a difficult message to comprehend. Stop lying. Stand up for others.
Still, she felt that she was justified in keeping some things, like the Evil Undead Grandfather Thing, to herself – or at least mostly. And she had stood up for Dave against the other Slytherins, hadn't she?
The chamber switched tracks, abruptly. At first Mary didn't know what was going on: Snape seemed to be sitting in his private chambers (or at least she assumed they were his private chambers, because she doubted he ever looked so relaxed anywhere else), drinking whisky and staring at a basket of scrolls as though they had threatened his life, or mortally offended him, or possibly both. Looking closer, she realized that he was reading her essay on the Veritaserum conspiracy. Guilt and anxiety leached through her as he rubbed absently at his left forearm. Had something she had written disturbed him? Was it trying to tell her that he had been upset because she had told him she no longer trusted him?
Are you telling me it was wrong to tell him the truth, now?! Mary thought at the room.
It showed her an image of Snape sitting by her hospital bed after her duel, waiting for her to regain consciousness, and the Professor after the dementors attacked the Quidditch match. She felt Remus' and Snape's anger and worry and hatred and… fear? as they fought over access to her unconscious form.
None of that was my fault!
The next scene was of Mary brushing off one of her many close calls to an anxious Hermione and Lilian, followed by a snippet of her apologizing to Daphne. The combination of memories repeated twice, spelling out a message it was difficult to misinterpret.
Fine! I'll apologize for worrying them! – But it still wasn't my fault!
The next one definitely was her fault, though: Catherine and Aunt Minnie were sitting in a parlor with Mrs. Urquhart and Madam Urquhart. The tension and guilt and anxiety was nearly enough to choke her. A letter arrived, delivered by an elf from wherever the owl had landed.
Aunt Minnie read it aloud, her voice strained. "'Dear Professor McGonagall, I am at the Grangers' house. I broke an arm and maybe cracked a rib in a flying accident, but other than that, I am safe and well…' It's not her handwriting, Morgana! It's not – I have to go. I'll send a message when I know more."
She apparated to the Grangers' and Mary was assaulted first by the Professor's worry and guilt, and then her anger as Dan refused to fetch Mary, and Dan's fear and anger at the witch invading his house, and the Professor's offense when Dan threatened to throw her out of the house.
Before those sensations completely faded away, she was sitting in the Grangers' car, at the beginning of the summer, as she and Hermione recounted their adventures to the Doctors Granger, this time feeling their horror and revulsion at the dangerous antics Mary had involved their daughter in over the course of two years.
Mary herself felt ill: it was only a matter of time until they realized what Hermione had been up to this year, and she couldn't help but feel ashamed at the part she had played in encouraging Hermione to begin over-using the time-turner, facilitating her Dark Arts research. After all, half the questions she was researching had to do with Mary and her predicament.
A sense of satisfaction rolled through her, as though the chamber itself was saying yessss… now we're getting somewhere.
Another montage: Colin Creevey, astonished and terrified to be dragged up before the professors; too many proud, awestruck girls called some variation of Mary; the Headmaster, anxious and desperate as she rebuffed him at Christmas second year; Draco Malfoy on the train, horribly jealous and longing to impress her; Ronald Weasley, embarrassed and angry when he realized she had lied to him just for her own amusement, first about her name, and then about what had happened at the end of their first year.
A seemingly endless parade of her fellow Slytherins, torn between admiration and feeling terribly, terribly threatened by her defense of Dave in the Commons and in her duel with Bletchley; hating her, almost palpably, for being both the Girl Who Lived and the Heir – thinking her unworthy, thinking you don't belong; envy as she made the Quidditch team only slightly tempered by their subsequent success; fear and hatred and jealousy swirling around her as she walked through the halls second year.
Draco Malfoy, nearly shitting himself with fear as a snake wrapped around his neck, poised to strike; Hagrid's unrecognized discomfort as she hissed soothing words in Parsel to Norbert the Female Dragon in her first year; Colin Creevey again, and his little Gryffindor friend in the stands after he nearly killed her, running from her in terror as she apparently lost her mind; Chelsea Miller shivering at the unnatural sounds as Mary completely and blatantly ignored the fact that she was terrified of snakes.
Stop! Stop it! Mary begged silently, drowning in negative emotions. Please! I get it! I – I'll apologize! I'll – I'll pay more attention to what I'm doing – how my actions affect others! I swear! Just – stop it! Please!
But it didn't: the next horror was the heart-stopping moment when Cadmus Thorpe felt his balance go, when, through her (and Lilian's) machinations, he thought he was plummeting to his death. As soon as the impact of that emotion started to fade, she was hit with the full force of the pain he had experienced as his bones shattered on the unforgiving stone floor and his pelvis was re-grown in hospital – exponentially worse than when Madam Pomfrey had done the same for Mary's arm.
The look of satisfaction on Flint's face as he received Snape's confirmation that the match was re-scheduled was uncomfortably like that on Dudley's when she had lied about Paul.
This was followed by an endless recap of the actions of the Veritaserum Conspiracy, from the point of view of their victims: fear, helplessness, hatred, confusion, self-doubt, directionless anger. The Room forced her through their experience more effectively than even Snape's detentions had managed to do. She hadn't thought that she could feel any worse about that, but apparently she could.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found herself developing a hatred toward her younger self and the choices she had made, only reinforced by the presentation of each image, each emotion.
I had to, she told herself, comprehensively failing to accomplish anything like reassurance. I already swore I would never do anything like that again.
She was painfully reminded of Hermione's frustration and her own guilt as she helped Lilian pressure their older friend into using the Time Turner more; the Weasley twins' shocked response to the girls' 'sudden' expression of anger over a transgression they thought had been long forgiven; and the surprised hurt Lilian had felt when Mary stormed into the bathroom accusing her and Daphne of using Mary's fame as the Girl Who Lived.
There was no apparent order to the snippets of memory and emotion anymore, just one foreign, negative feeling after another flowing through her, reinforcing her guilt, beating her down. It was, she understood, rather like rubbing her (figurative) nose in her mistakes, her bad choices, and the consequences of those choices over and over again.
She lost her focus, and the fragments of ill-feeling seemed to close in on her from every direction, as she tried, weakly, to fight back – to think of her happy memories, or why she had done any of it, or even daily life – anything but the things the Chamber was showing her.
It was, in a word, brutal.
And then something within her broke. Her stubbornness, perhaps. The images and their accompanying emotional torture paused, and she experienced a moment of clarity:
I was wrong.
I cannot justify these actions.
I should not have done these things.
I am a horrible person.
There was a frozen beat of mental 'silence,' and then everything changed.
She was back in the stone room, curled up on the floor, hugging her knees. The pictures on the walls – if you could call them that – had stopped moving, their dark lines condensed into a single, humanoid figure. It was walking toward her, slowly, from the background of the picture directly opposite her, bringing with it a sense of foreboding. She looked around quickly, and realized that she was alone. What had happened to the others? Was all this in her head? It certainly didn't feel like it was. The handle of her wand was warm and familiar in her hand, and when she pinched herself it hurt.
But then she tried to cast a spell – Lumos – the easiest of all possible spells – and nothing happened.
The figure seemed to gain substance as it drew closer – in the time it had taken her to try to cast her spell, it had nearly reached the frame, a tall, hooded figure, his features shadowed. Death, maybe?
But no – a hand reached out, curled around the frame, manifesting only feet from her: a grey, scabbed, slimy-looking hand.
A dementor.
She recoiled instinctively, trying her best to force magic through her wand – to cast the Patronus – but she couldn't even find the power within herself, let alone make it take a form that would protect her.
White fog was rising within her mind – she was finding it hard to breathe. Any second now, she would start to hear the screaming…
But she didn't.
The dementor loomed over her (sprawled, helpless, on the floor, but frozen in place by fear, her limbs suddenly too weak to even consider scrambling to her feet).
It inclined its head, as though looking at her – inspecting her, perhaps.
And then it… it turned away.
It turned toward Dave, toward Lilian and Hermione, somehow oblivious to its presence, on the other side of the chamber.
The boy she had sworn to protect and the two people she cared more about than any others. They were just chatting, nonchalantly, as though standing around before class, sitting ducks, and she, paralyzed by her own terror, was powerless to help – to warn them – to stop it.
None of them seemed to sense its approach until it was upon them. They screamed, but they, like Mary, seemed unable to move. It lowered its still-hooded head slowly to each of theirs, and when it pulled back, when it moved out of the way again, and she could see, they stared, blank-eyed – souls gone, she was sure.
She could move again, just enough to stand, backing away, to turn, to try to run: enough to see Remus' soulless stare from behind her, and Catherine's, and the Grangers', standing perfectly still, zombie-like, minds gone.
She shrieked, whirled around in a panic (not a single thought for the reality of the situation – or lack thereof – in her head), and when she did, she found that the dementor was right in front of her.
She couldn't fight it off. Unnaturally strong, dead-looking hands, clammy and awful, gripped her head, ignoring her fingers scrabbling at its own, turning her face upward to meet its own – a sucking maw surrounded by swirling blackness.
That swirling blackness took her over, and she knew no more.
She woke in her cupboard, curled up on her now-cramped pallet, too cold and hungry to keep sleeping, even though she was exhausted, and wanted more than anything to slide back into the dream she had been having. She wanted to cry for the half-remembered life that seemed to have been snatched right out of her grasp. It had been such a good dream, right up to the end, with the soul-eating monster, but now she was awake, and she knew there was no such thing as magic. Her parents were not magical, any more than she was. The details were fading away, now, but she knew she had no other family, no friends – there was nothing special about weird little Mary Potter.
She still lived in a cupboard under the stairs. She was still small and skinny for her age, bullied and unpopular. She still wore glasses and was the bottom of her class, and spent every moment she could out of the house, because even though Dudley was off to Smeltings and not around to bugger it up, Aunt Petunia still, somehow, managed to come up with an endless list of chores for her to do every day.
She had thought that life might get better when she started at Stonewall, but after two years and a bit, they were just as bad as ever. Worse, maybe, because the guidance counselor wouldn't leave her alone at school, and the other girls in her year seemed to somehow have decided that she was the scum of the earth, and were determined to make her realize it, too. (Not that she hadn't got the message from the Dursleys loud and clear years before, but she was having a harder and harder time pretending that she didn't secretly believe them.)
None of the teachers had cared, when she started skipping classes – leaving before the last one, and then at lunch, and then not bothering to go in at all, one day a week or more. She just… didn't see the point. She had spent the last three days wandering around town, moving on whenever anyone seemed to take notice of the fact that she was thirteen and it was a weekday, and shouldn't she be in school?
The same thought plagued her as she went through her day on autopilot, getting on the bus to school, and then turning around and walking away from it as soon as she arrived, only to go sit in the library, or the freezing park, killing time to no end. It wasn't as though she had anything to look forward to. The life she lived – this horrible day-to-day existence – paled in comparison to even the few details she could recall from her dream – a castle, friends, magic – she had been a witch, and she hadn't lived with the Dursleys!
It was just a dream, though.
It wasn't real.
There was no such thing as magic.
She was worthless, friendless trash – an ugly, skinny freak of a girl, hated by everyone, even herself.
She was so tired.
She dragged herself through her day, wishing she could just give up – just lie down somewhere and sleep forever, but when she finally finished with her chores, so very late, when she finally crawled onto her pallet, she couldn't. Sleep eluded her completely.
For the first time she could remember in… well, she didn't know how many months – she was angry. Mostly at herself.
All she wanted was to sleep – to have that one chance to see the other world again – to be the person she had imagined she was…
She crept out of the cupboard and into the bathroom, returning to her bed with Aunt Petunia's sleeping pills and a glass of water.
The first one did nothing to ease her insomnia. Nor did the second. To her frustrated, sleep-deprived self, it made sense, then, to down all the remaining tablets, thinking as she did so: what's the worst that could happen? I did want to sleep forever…
Finally, her mind slowed, consciousness fading, but not to the comfortable, comforting darkness of sleep.
It was cold, she realized, from a sort of timeless haze.
Wet.
She couldn't breathe – she needed air!
There was a light somewhere above her.
She clawed her way toward it, awkwardly, painfully, never seeming to get any closer. Her lungs burned with the need to inhale, to refresh themselves.
She held it off as long as she could, but she was still so far from what she thought – hoped – was the surface when she couldn't any longer, when the last bubbles escaped from her nose and water rushed in to take their place, burning cold, stabbing at her lungs, like nothing she had ever felt before.
She felt her will to reach the light fading, her limbs growing heavier as the water weighed her down from the inside, breath gone, sinking down and down to the crushing depths as her vision failed. Even the terror she felt at the unknown lurking on the other side of death could not spur her to save herself.
[WAKE UP!]
The order jolted through her unconscious mind, startling her to alertness as effectively as any ennervate.
"Hu-wha?" she said intelligently.
:You were too hasty, my queen,: Tom Riddle hissed, speaking to the enormous serpent coiled around her, the one which had, she realized, nearly just crushed her to death.
:She is a traitor to the blood of Slytherin! She is not worthy of the name! She deserves to die!: the basilisk protested.
:She is mine, my queen – as much as you are mine. She will be brought around to my way of thinking in the end.: He smiled sharply at Mary. :Won't you, my heir?: he asked, before turning back to the snake. :She has already begun to follow in my footsteps, after all…:
:I haven't! I would never!:
:Cadmus Thorpe?: Riddle grinned. :Veritaserum? Taking what you want – what you need – always an admirable quality. And the allies you have already begun to draw around yourself? The houses of Urquhart and Granger, your professors McGonagall, Lupin, and Snape? Powerful, devoted, loyal 'friends' – even Moon, Lovegood, and Weasley have their uses.:
:I am nothing like you! I don't hate muggleborns! I don't want to hurt anyone!:
:Silly child – whoever said I hated muggleborns? They were convenient, like the Jews… And as for hurting people, well… what about Sirius Black?:
Anger flared within her, and he grinned again, knowingly. :That's different!: she objected
:Is it? Are you sure?: Her doubt must have shown on her face, because he laughed, a high, cruel sound. :Face it, granddaughter – you and I – we share more than the blood you would deny.:
:I should have thrown your book in the lake!: she scowled, fighting against the fear that she was, in fact, like him in any way that mattered.
:Ah, but you didn't.: he chuckled, then turned on his heel. :Come, my queen,: he ordered the snake, striding toward one of the empty portraits on the walls. :Granddaughter,: he threw over his shoulder, :When you are ready to seize the power that is yours by right, I'll be waiting.:
He vanished, then, effectively giving himself the last word, and Mary realized that she was back – or still – in the Tempering Chamber, surrounded by blank canvases, lying on the stone floor, gasping and panting for breath. She was alone again – still? – There had been others, hadn't there, with the dementor? (It was all muddled, like a swiftly fading nightmare.) But she was not alone for long, because more figures were forming on the walls – faces this time: her friends, looking down on her with scorn.
Lilian was directly in front of her, now, in the frame through which Tom Riddle had left, sneering at her. "You know I've just been using you. Why would I truly want to be your friend?"
Mary felt the rejection hit her like a physical blow. She turned away, only to come face-to-face with Emma Granger: "You've been putting our daughter in danger – it's your fault. You're a bad influence, and we won't have you around!"
On the other side of the circle, Remus was speaking almost too quietly to hear: "You're not them – the more you remind me of them, the more I'm going to want my real friends back – James and Lily, Peter and Sirius… You took them all away from me – you and your bloody prophecy – 'Chosen One'… You ruined my life, Mary."
Neville glowered from his sketch: "I can't look at you without seeing my parents' torturer. Just… Just leave me alone, okay?"
Hermione was nearly crying: "They like you better than they like me; I hate you! I never should have asked you to come home with me!"
Catherine had a look of pure disdain: "You won't even put in the barest effort, so I don't see why I should continue to waste my time with you! Good riddance!"
It was, perhaps, Snape's portrait's rejection that hurt the most, though. "I'm your Head of House," it drawled. "It's my job to babysit your tedious self. You didn't think I truly cared did you? If you had never been born, Lily never would have died, and I will never forgive you for that. Winning your trust and repeatedly dashing it to pieces is simply the most effective torture I can conceive for you without causing lasting physical damage."
And Mary finally understood – truly and deeply comprehended – what Remus had meant when he said that one's fears grew worse the more one dwelled upon them. She could not imagine anything worse than this – than the voices of everyone she trusted and cared about, raining words of rejection down on her, speaking the secret fears that she knew were false. Alone, they were little more than dark murmurs at the back of her mind, but here, together, in the open…
She shuddered, turning from one face to the next, trying not to hear them, trying not to believe them, until finally, finally, she could not take it any longer.
"I don't need your protection," Dave's face scowled. "Did you even think how patronizing it sounded to offer? Why would I want to be associated with the Girl Who Lived?"
"Enough!" she shouted, loudly enough that the sketches on the walls actually stopped. "No more – no more!" Her face was wet, and she didn't know when she had started crying, but clearly she had, because she sniffled as she tried to say, "It's not true! I won't believe it! I won't!"
The angry, scornful, hate-filled faces of her friends unraveled into their component lines before coming together again in the image of a bearded man with hard eyes and long, curly hair. He had a long, twisted scar across one cheek, and looked rather fierce, but he grinned at her with a genuine (albeit somewhat evaluating) sort of expression and nodded firmly.
And then the Tempering Chamber was gone, and she was lying in the clearing in the Senior Woods after her very first Samhain ritual, holding hands with Hermione and Lilian, and she remembered.
She remembered magic, taking her over, moving her, tying her to long-dead spirits for an instant – contact across time and space, moving in concert with a hundred or more other students, dancing together, connected to one another and the universe in a way that was, she felt, truly indescribable.
She remembered her certainty that Hermione and Lilian, who had, somehow, found her in the midst of the magic, would always find her – that they would always stand by her side; knowing that they all knew this – that they shared that same certainty.
She remembered feeling, for the first time ever, that she actually belonged somewhere, and knew, in the same incontrovertible way that she knew water was wet and the sun was hot, that she would always have a place at Hogwarts: magic would never desert her, and it wasn't a dream – she did truly belong here, with these people, in this place, and they thought so, too.
If there was an equivalent of bruise-balm for a fear-wracked psyche, that might have been it, Mary reflected.
By the time the memory faded away, leaving her in the Tempering Chamber once more, her racing heart had slowed, and though she still felt terrible about the awful things she had done over the course of her life, which the Chamber had seen fit to force her to re-live, she was able to look at her friends without feeling undue guilt for her inability to save them from the Dementor, or mistrust for the words their portraits had spat at her.
She was the last to come to, lying in an uncomfortable heap on the floor. All the others were shifting restlessly or whispering in ones and twos, not unlike their reaction to Mabon, their body language screaming of fear and discomfort as they tried not to look at each other in the rather small room.
Luna, of course, was the exception. She met their eyes one at a time, then smiled. "We're done, Desmond," she announced brightly.
The same shifting sensation spread throughout the room again as it spun, and a section of the wall vanished to become an open doorway, light flooding in. The students rushed toward it without a word, spilling out (rather unceremoniously) into the cold, fresh air of one of the lesser courtyards.
They peered at their surroundings and each other for a long moment, trying to get their bearings, still obviously disinclined to speak. Mary, personally, thought that it felt like the mother of all awkward moments, not knowing if or how she had featured in whatever nightmares they had seen. She suspected that she had to have been in at least some of them, as they had featured so prominently in her own.
It was Draco who broke the silence, if not the tension, visibly pulling himself back into the mold of the pureblood prince he normally inhabited, straightening his hair and his robes. He snorted derisively at the others and said, "Well, if that's your idea of a good time, I think I'll count myself out from now on, Moon. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've… well, quite frankly I'd rather do anything than spend another moment in the company of any of you lot, so."
He stalked toward the nearest door without another word, hands shoved deeply into his pockets. Mary wondered what he had seen, and whether they were shaking as badly as hers or whether he was just cold – which, now that she thought on it, she rather was, too. By general consensus, the others followed Malfoy: Hermione, Lilian, and Aerin uncharacteristically silent, and each keeping their distance from the others; Blaise holding Daphne close, her arm wrapped reciprocally around his waist; Dave and Alex trailing behind and whispering to each other so quietly that even Mary, only feet away, couldn't quite make out what they were saying. She didn't try. It seemed rude.
The Weasley twins kept shooting obviously worried glances back at their sister, who was, perhaps, acting the most normal out of all of them. She and Neville were arm-in-arm with Luna. The male Gryffindor looked utterly morose, but Ginny was determinedly making conversation with her year mate (or at least attempting to do so – Luna wasn't the best conversationalist at the best of times): "Who is Desmond, Lune?"
"The Tempering Room, of course," the Ravenclaw answered absently. "I met it last year, and it told me it didn't have a name. I think Desmond suits, though, don't you?"
"I… erm… I suppose?"
Mary left them to it: after escaping the emotional whiplash that was her experience with the – Desmond, she was suddenly feeling rather exhausted (not that she thought she would actually be able to sleep, with those images and memories still so close to the surface of her mind). No one even looked surprised when she excused herself to have a lie-down, and she had a suspicion that most of the group would soon follow her lead.