The first snow of winter graced Hogwarts, and soon its courtyards, lawns, and scenic environs were entombed in a blanket of thick, pure white. It was a sight Tom had never before beheld, for in London, snow went as quick as it came. As the spaces of recreation were transformed into austere, pure landscapes, the populace of Hogwarts took refuge within the warm halls of the Great Hall and the library during their hours of recreation. Increasing numbers of students began to don thick scarves about their necks and fur caps upon their heads (Tom, who had never seen Mary wear a scarf before, spent entire minutes wondering that such an ornament somehow further accentuated her already precariously thin neck). Pies and stews were served with increasing frequency during dinners, and hot pumpkin juice began to replace its cold variant. During the long hours of History of Magic, Tom often found himself gazing out the windows, pushing snow off the towers of the castle through sheer concentration.
The older students, who once gazed upon the twins with curious eyes, now held a more reserved but still intrigued regard. But some among their ranks, driven by jealousy or something more uncouth, aligned themselves against the twins. It was Tom who bore the brunt of their abuses, for it was deemed inappropriate for pure-blood boys to pick on a girl, though no such restriction applied to her brother. Indeed, while for most Tom's unclear parentage gladly allowed for the possibility of his being at least a half-blood, there were some who insisted he was a muggleborn. A mudblood.
But though Tom had enemies, he went unmolested beyond the occasional insult muttered in the common room, or shoulder bump in the castle's corridors. He had Mary to thank for this; that she had won the fondness of so many older students meant none dared to truly hurt her brother. Indeed, where Tom's charms lay in impressing his professors and instilling fear and inspiration in his peers (all of whom were only first or second year Slytherin boys), Mary had a throng of admiring older boys, whose self-conceptions as noble pureblood scions she indulged with ease.
Finally, the Christmas break came. The first thing Tom asked his sister during the breakfast of their last day of semester was, "Shall we slumber in your bed or mine?"
For a moment Mary did not answer. Her dark eyes expanded in that wild manner that Tom adored—she looked like a cat looking upon a defenseless garden bird.
"You choose," she replied, a wide smile spreading across her face. "We could even swap between them."
"Yours," Tom declared firmly, his tone brooking no argument. "I can't abide the thought of those boys discovering that you had slept in their dormitory."
Mary chuckled softly, spreading a generous dollop of jam on a slice of toast and placing it on Tom's plate. "I could say the same of the girls, dear brother, especially Lucy and Flo. But do not fret, I shall keep our secret safe."
Tom made a look of disgust. "Lucretia Black fancies me?"
"You are not the only boy to have captured her affections, but you are certainly her favourite."
So, after a peaceful afternoon of classes and a farewell dinner with their housemates, Tom was finally able to view the first-year Slytherin girls' dormitory for the first time. Despite its dimensions and furnishings being exactly the same as those of the boys' dormitory, it differentiated itself from its counterpart in every other way possible. Each of the desks served double duty as a dressing table, and even in the absence of the girls themselves, the air was heavy with the fragrance of their perfumes. Some of the bedsheets were adorned with flowers, enchanted to sway softly in an imagined summer breeze. One bed in particular, covered in floral sheets, was littered with nearly a dozen pillows.
"That must be Lucy's," Tom observed, his tone dripping with disdain. "It would be fit for a litter of kittens."
Mary merely smiled, her eyes dancing with mischief. "Or perhaps it would be fit for us," she suggested playfully.
By the bed nearest the door, there stood a grand poster, its black letters aglow, spelling the name "Les Détraqueurs Délicats." This inscription hovered above a female figure, garbed in tattered black attire, whose countenance was at once both terrifying and beautiful, albeit more the former.
"The Delicate Dementors," Mary explained, her voice tinged with a hint of annoyance. "Florence can't stop talking about them. They're her favourite Quidditch team, you see. Most of the players are from the Belgian national team, and they became a league team after winning the 1931 World Cup. But with all the chaos that Grindelwald has been causing, their sponsors have scarpered, so they're only playing two games this year."
Tom was unimpressed. He drew his wand and flicked it at the frightful woman. "Celare!"
The poster was soon consumed by black liquid, as if splotches of ink had coalesced upon it.
"You better know the countercurse to that."
Later that evening, as they prepared for bed, Tom and Mary faced a quandary. In London, they had always showered together; but it had been three months since their arrival at Hogwarts, and during that time, they had only washed alone. Sharing the spacious bathtub in the Slytherin girls' dormitory would have been an intimate experience, to say the least. Tom, eager to renew the closeness he had shared with his sister, was keen to try it, but Mary was more hesitant. Having grown accustomed to the privacy of washing alone, she gently told him that she would bathe alone. And so, he bathed after her.
However, when it came time to sleep, Tom and Mary sought solace in each other's arms. Three months of being unable to truly hold her had kindled in Tom an enormous appetite for his sister. Indeed, like two passengers on a small ship being tossed about in an ocean at storm might hold each other, the twins interlocked legs and arms beneath Lucretia's scented, enchanted quilt, to soak up all that they had missed of the other since they left Wool's Orphanage.
"If only we could sleep together during the term," Mary said wistfully the next morning.
Tom shared her sentiment, but kept his expression cool as he gently wrapped his arm around her shoulder.
Breakfast was a surreal affair; the Great Hall was now only one small table. The sole remaining Professors—Beery and Merrythought—sat mingled with the dozen Christmas-stayers, most of whom had yet to change out of their pyjamas. While the term breakfasts, lunches, and dinners featured distinctive sets of dishes, at Christmas the elves prepared a melange of everything—there were no rules.
The twins decided to spend the rest of their morning at the library, which possessed a quietness unknown to it during the term. Tom sought a particular kind of book—Professor Slughorn had told him that every intelligent wizard would, at some point in his life, come across a 'treatise' that would change the way they thought about magic and life itself. Tom gathered that these treatises were more akin to prayerbooks or muggle textbooks than spellbooks. Professor Slughorn had also told him that Tom himself would become intensely receptive to one of these books in the 'years to come'—but Tom could not wait. What gave age the right to be a barrier to power?
But while he sat with his sister in the northwestern corner of the library—a very cosy place, with armchairs, desks, a burning fireplace, and a window that afforded them a scene of the castle and the faraway mountains—Tom's hands balled into fists as he read Magicoimmunology: On The Mocifucian Nature of Ritual. He was unsure whether it was even a treatise or not, in Slughorn's sense of the word, but he persisted in reading it simply because he grew increasingly indignant at his inability to comprehend most of what it was saying—at least before he began consulting the muggle Oxford English Dictionary, volumes I through IX, which, surprisingly, the Hogwarts library was equipped with.
As Tom immersed himself in the depths of magical theory, Mary sat quietly at his side, her quill busily scratching at parchment. While her brother delved into the complexities of magical philosophy, Mary's pursuits lay elsewhere. On her side of the desk were dozens of envelopes, mostly from older students, mostly boys, most of whom were the progeny of esteemed purebloods. She composed responses to all of them; but never was she happy with her first drafts—she incinerated more parchment than she would send to the owlery.
"It's all well and good to cultivate connections," Tom said, his tone brimming with censoriousness, "but must you really waste your time corresponding with every boy in Slytherin?"
Mary's response was gentle and mocking in equal measure. She offered her brother a slight smile, her slender, ivory finger wagging in his direction. "You underestimate the value of human interaction, dear brother," she chided. "One can learn far more from people than from dusty old tomes."
Tom's disapproval only deepened. "We've been at Hogwarts for three months, and yet all you seem interested in is idle chatter," Tom accused, pushing forth Magicoimmunology. "Read this."
Mary picked up the substantial volume, twice the height and notably wider than her petite head, and began to peruse its pages. Tom selected a folded sheet of parchment from the table, one of the many letters that his sister had already read and, undoubtedly, already composed a response to.
The script of the letter was so elegantly written that Tom initially surmised it must have been produced by an enchanted quill, yet the font was too stylish and haughty to have been created by anything other than an organic peacock feather. Regardless of its author, they were very eloquent—though not nearly as eloquent or intelligent as the wizard of Magicoimmunology. Tom felt a thrill seeing his sister's name repeatedly throughout the letter—Mary, Mary, Mary—its author obviously enjoying summoning Mary to their thoughts through repeatedly printing her name. Mary, Mary, Mary.
Unsurprisingly, the letter was composed by none other than Arcanius Fawley.
"This is utterly incomprehensible," said Mary, pushing Magicoimmunology back to Tom. "My letters serve me better."
"Burning those letters, particularly the ones from Fawley, would be a wiser course of action."
"But Caney's letters are my favourites!" Mary protested.
"Stop using that ridiculous nickname for him!" Tom snapped.
"Why do you care what I call him, if you hate him anyway?"
"Why shouldn't I hate him?" asked Tom.
"He's an apothecary-grade pureblood," Mary said.
"What?" Tom asked, perplexed.
Mary started to explain, her voice light and playful. "Remember the apothecary-grade potions Professor Slughorn showed us? They were of perfect consistency, flawless. Just like Caney."
"But they were hardly powerful potions, Mary. They were merely apothecary-grade versions of first-year potions," Tom countered.
"True, Tom," Mary admitted with a laugh. "Yet it's apothecary-grade purebloods like Caney that hold Wizarding Britain together."
Tom refrained from mentioning that it was these same people who were also holding Wizarding Britain back. He simply said, "Fawley's got no love for magic."
Tom, who fancied himself a lover of magic, returned to his book. Slughorn was right—the knowledge he studied was far beyond his years, and he was uncertain whether the concepts emerging in his mind were correct at all. Perhaps he misunderstood everything, and was constructing a gross mass of useless falsehoods. Nevertheless he persisted. His train of thought was thus; magic abides by the laws of emotion more so than those of physics, yet still conforms to them with great consequence. How could this be so? The definition of magic ought to be examined more closely, more precisely. Magic is more the study of time than matter. More the imposition of the present upon the future, than energy upon space. Ritual, the magic of "going beyond," is its purest form. Fire is a common aspect in nearly every ritual, why? Fire shapes and sets limits, forges metal, turns water into vapour. An idea suddenly struck Tom, and he grabbed his sister's wrist with great fervour.
"Take care!" Mary exclaimed as Tom's grasp caused her quill to scrape across the page, leaving a trail of ink in its wake. "You bumbling fool! Look what you've done!"
"Listen, Mary. I have a plan to ensure that I could never harm you with my magic, not even inadvertently."
"What?" Mary asked, her eyebrows knitting together in confusion as she allowed herself to be tugged by his forceful pull. "What are you scheming now?"
"It's not a scheme, Mary, but a plan," Tom replied, his eyes gleaming with a maniacal light.
"You're beginning to sound more and more unhinged by the moment. What about my letter—"
"Silence," Tom interrupted, his grip tightening on her wrist.
Tom hastened his pace down the hallway, his thoughts in a whirl as he pondered his next move. Perhaps he might conduct his experiment in the common room, but the idea filled him with unease. He did not wish to be seen, nor did he desire to accidentally ignite any of the important accoutrements of his house's dungeon. Mentally imaging the castle from its lowermost levels upwards, Tom decided on the abandoned classrooms on the fourth floor. They would be quite alone there.
He found such a classroom and pushed the door open, and was greeted by a scene of dust and abandonment. Furniture, draped in yellowing protective coverings, seemed to loom out of the shadows, while cobwebs dotted every corner of the room.
"Marvellous," Mary murmured, her face scrunching as if she smelled something bad. The room was merely dusty; it did not actually stink.
"It is," Tom declared with conviction. "Now, use Incendio on my arm."
"Your plan was to burn yourself?! You blathering—"
"Calm yourself. The aim is to heal me immediately afterward, thus fostering your magic towards me."
"And what if I burned your arm to a crisp?"
"Incendio won't do that," Tom assured her, though he was unsure himself if any spells had strictly limited potentialities. "Now, like I said."
With a hesitation that grated on Tom's nerves, Mary raised her wand, and pressed it against his forearm with a look of apprehension. Tom nodded in encouragement.
"Incendio," Mary whispered.
Her wand flickered and failed to produce any flame.
"Incendio," she repeated, a little louder this time.
A small spark shot forth from her wand, barely registering as more than a gentle warmth on Tom's wrist. Tom knew that his sister was capable of producing much more than this, but her reluctance to cause him harm inhibited her power.
Tom slapped her across the face.
"OW! INCENDIO!" Mary yelled, her wand responding with a burst of flame that engulfed Tom's arm in searing pain. He screamed as Mary, realising the hurt she had caused, immediately quenched her magic. His arm was left blistered and raw, but Tom was deeply proud of his sister's power.
"Tom! You idiot! What've you made me done?"
"You did well," Tom gritted out, his teeth clenched in pain. "Now, say Fervera sanentur and trace your wand over my arm in a sinuous manner, as if drawing a snake."
Mary complied, holding Tom's arm steady with her other hand, and with a look of remorse on her countenance that appeared to enhance her magic, she intoned the counter-curse that healed his injury. In less than a minute, his skin had been restored to its former state.
"Burn me again," Tom ordered.
Mary stared at him in disbelief. "No."
"Would you prefer that I burn you?"
Mary's voice remained steady as she replied, "Yes."
"So be it. Incendio!"
Although his flame was weaker than the one he had elicited from Mary with a slap, it was instantly effective. Mary screamed in agony and grasped her arm. Tom immediately dispelled his spell and embraced her to soothe her.
"It hurts, Tom! It hurts-hurts-hurts-hurts-hurts! Stop! Make it stop!"
A large blister, the size of Tom's hand, with a greyish-red hue like that of a consumptive vagrant at King's Cross Station, had formed on Mary's delicate arm. She trembled, and a tear trickled down her cheek like sap down a young poplar tree. Tom wiped it away, gazing into her teary eyes, and felt his chest constrict uncomfortably.
"We'll stop," Tom murmured. "Fervera sanentur."
As he tended to Mary's wounds, he pondered other ways in which their magic could be made as inseparable as their persons (or as inseparable as they ought to be; once again, he fumed over their impending separation at the next term's beginning).
"We shall intertwine our flames, Mary," Tom declared. "Let us set that chair ablaze."
Mary recoiled, still recovering from the pain of her wounds. "What? Tom, are you mad? This room is full of flammable material."
"Trust me," Tom said, his voice smooth and persuasive. "Together, we shall cast Incendio, weave our flames, and take turns controlling it. Perhaps then our magic shall recognise us as kindred."
"But Tom, surely our magic already knows that we're kin," Mary protested.
"Not well enough," Tom said, pinching Mary's arm where the blister formed, eliciting a squeal, glare, and impressively-cast hex to his chest.
"There must be another way."
"Consider it a practice session for proper magical fire-starting. This room looks as if it has been abandoned since Cromwell, anyway."
"Three, two, one—Incendio!" the twins cried in unison.
The jets of flame that shot from their wands were hot and smouldering, converging into one great flame that engulfed the chair. But before Tom could comment on their success, an unfamiliar voice interrupted them.
"Ho, mischievous elves!" screamed the voice from behind a tall wardrobe. "Dost ye dare mar my cabinet with your impish magic?! For many years have I been lord of this chamber, and none hath e'er dared to— "
It was a painting, and Tom smashed a chair into it. Conceivably a professor from some bygone century, it was now much more fascinating than that; a broken canvas whose colours disintegrated rapidly, like different oils in a pond. It made a noise like that of water going down a drain. The twins watched the dying portrait with exuberant fear in their eyes. Soon enough the man that was once there was no longer discernible at all; the old canvas looked like nothing more than a painter's messy palette.
"Blessèd Salazar Tom, what've you done?" said Mary, excited and appalled at once.
Tom was unperturbed as he exclaimed, "Incendio!" and set fire to the remains of the portrait.
This act of destruction awoke something within the twins, for while students flung hexes and curses aplenty at each other in the halls of Hogwarts, sometimes to bloody effect, it was unheard of for them to attack paintings. Yet Tom, on a capricious whim, had shattered that tradition. He half-expected Mrs. Cole or Professor Dumbledore to jump out of one of the room's dusty closets and him for his mischief, but no such bogies came.
"Incendio! Incendio! Incendio!"
The rest of the Christmas break was spent in similar manner. The twins would spend their mornings in the library, where Tom studied and Mary wrote letters. After lunch, where Mary occasionally engaged in frivolous conversation with some of the staying older boys, whom Tom unabashedly glared at, they would search for isolated paintings to destroy. At night, they would sit on the staircase leading to the Great Hall, the air heavy with the scent of smoke and frost as they whispered idle thoughts to each other that echoed off the tall walls of the entrance hall.
On Christmas day, both twins received more presents than they expected. Mary got a beautiful little trifle from Arcanius Fawley—a golden necklace in the shape of a heart, encrusted with many little gleaming little rubies. Much to Tom's annoyance, she at once took to it and put it around her neck. But he did not dwell on Fawley; instead focusing on his own presents, the first of which was a tome of curses—his inaugural volume on the subject—courtesy of William Wilkes.
At dinner, the table was more animated than usual, but this was not due to the festive spirit of Christmas. News had arrived from Spain that Salazar Velasco, a renowned Spanish Auror who opposed his country's ministry, had pledged his allegiance to the muggle nationalists in their war. The diners were unsure of the implications of this declaration, but Professor Merrythought, one of the two adults present at the table alongside the stuttering herbology professor, Professor Beery, declared that "Velasco is neither for nor against Grindelwald. The question that remains is whether he stands with or against The Statute."
A week later came New Year's Eve, the twins' twelfth birthday. At the top of the astronomy tower they sat on Professor Astrophel's loveseat, from where they beheld thousands of miles of Scottish country illuminated by ten thousand stars. A large wooden tray, consisting of a vast array of confectionery, most of which had been gifted to Mary by various boys as Christmas and birthday presents, as well as smoked sausages, potato crisps, and delicate little cakes, which Tom had commanded the house-elves to prepare, hovered before them.
After indulging in this festive birthday feast, they returned to Mary's dormitory, where Mary inquired of her brother, "Would you care to bathe with me?"
"I would like that very much."
As they undressed, they examined each other's bodies with a newfound sense of curiosity. Every meal at Hogwarts had nourished them, and they had developed in a way that was impossible to ignore. Tom was struck by the way Mary's curves resembled those of a delicate glass vase, and he felt an array of unfamiliar sensations stirring within him. Her skin was so impossibly smooth and soft. Though he kept his thoughts to himself, his body betrayed his fascination.
Their bath lasted no more than an hour, during which they shared stories of their differing habits in the dormitory. Mary spoke of how Florence often tended to her hair, while Walburga attended to Lucretia. Tom, on the other hand, revealed that among the boys, solitude was the norm. As they dried themselves off, the air was thick with unspoken thoughts and unexplored desires. Nonetheless the day had been long, and it took Tom only a few minutes to fall soundly asleep.
