cix. in want of happiness

In hindsight, they should have expected the staring.

For the most part, Harriet and Elara had enjoyed the anonymity of the greater Wizarding quarter since they first heard news of Sirius Black's escape. No one in Diagon Alley or Trefhud knew of Elara's connection to the convict—but the same could not be said of those at Hogwarts.

They raced to the platform, dodging through the Muggles going about their business, and just barely managed to cross the brick barrier before the clock struck eleven in the morning on the dot. The scarlet steam engine let loose a billow of steam as the whistle trilled and they ran again, the Weasley parents shouting their love for their children, Harriet dragging Elara along even as the other witch wheezed for breath.

"Merlin's beard," Harriet panted once the train doors came sliding shut behind them. The train had already begun to move seconds after they arrived, the brakes releasing the wheels, the fixtures rattling, but now it heaved itself into proper motion and pulled from the station. Straightening, Harriet looked at Ginny. "Does this happen every year with your family?"

The Ministry cars had arrived promptly at ten to take the group to Kings Cross Station—but another round of misplaced possessions and last-minute packing delayed their departure from the Leaky Cauldron until half-passed the hour. From there, they'd hit an inevitable wall of traffic even the magical vehicles couldn't squeeze around. They'd hit the parking lot not five minutes ago and had to sprint the whole length of the station. Harriet hoped the Ministry had someone on hand to Obliviate all the Muggles who heard their group shouting about familiars and letters and spellbooks.

The redhead snorted. "Feels like it," she replied, running a finger over a large scuff on her trunk. It was second-hand and had already seen better days, and yet their mad dash had managed to put a few more marks on it. "We never seem to be on time for anything."

Smirking, it was then that Harriet finally noticed the whispering, the half-veiled attempts at subterfuge as faces peeked from their carriages and stared not at her or at Ginny, but at Elara, who leaned against the wall in an effort to catch her breath. Harriet scowled at the watching berks and straightened to her full—and rather unimpressive—height. "C'mon, then. Let's find our seats."

They hurried along the narrow corridor down the train. Ginny's brother and Longbottom had gone ahead or had jumped on at a different entrance. Percy would be in the front compartment with the prefects. The whispering swelled around them like a fat souffle waiting to collapse, joined by laughter and nervous, frightened tittering. People shuffled bags onto unoccupied seats as they neared, not that Harriet had any intention of sitting with those people. Numpties, the lot of them.

"That's his daughter."

"The Madman's Daughter, that's what they call her—."

"Can't believe they let her come to school this year—."

Elara's cheeks grew progressively pinker the farther they went, her eyes glassy and her fists tight at her sides. A Hufflepuff second-year had the gall to pop open his door to stare at her—until Ginny flicked him right between the eyes.

"Oi! Bugger off, Williams!"

Williams did, in fact, bugger off, and the brief show of violence prevented any other curious students from stepping out into the corridor for a look of their own. Still, Harriet couldn't help her sigh of relief once they found Hermione and Luna and slipped into the compartment.

"What took you so long?" Hermione demanded, already dressed in her Slytherin robes. "I thought for sure you'd missed the train!"

Ginny hefted her trunk into the overhead rack with Harriet's help. "Listen, Granger, you can't say that being punctual is really a trait in my family…."

Harriet slumped into the seat by the window and Elara sat across from her, rigid as a board, settling Cygnus' cage next to her. "All right, Elara?"

"I'll be fine," she snapped.

Whether or not that was true, they'd have to wait and see. Harriet didn't dare ask her again.

The train rolled on into the English countryside and London's boroughs dwindled in the wake of its sooty plume. Elara was quick to cross her arms, lean back, and doze in her seat while Hermione and Ginny argued the chances of perpetual tardiness being an actual human gene. Luna had a pad of parchment and a collection of pencils she shared with Harriet, who used them to pass the time by doodling and sketching. She wished she could use Livi as a model and draw him, but the Horned Serpent was tucked into her shrunken trunk still—and all the surlier for it. She did have Kevin in her shirt's front pocket, not that'd she'd ever get him to stay still long enough to draw him. Plus, Ginny and Luna didn't know about her Parseltongue ability and it'd be awful hard to explain why she'd got a snake in her pocket like a lucky Sickle.

The muffled sound of Exploding Snap emanated from the compartment behind her, laughter shaking the divider. People kept passing by trying to peek inside, but Ginny nipped that in the bud when she jerked the curtain closed over the window. The trolley came by around one o'clock and they stocked up on sweets for the remainder of the journey.

"Hermione?" Harriet said after a time, the other witch looking up from the book splayed in her lap. Outside, the landscape had grown wilder and the sky thickened with encroaching clouds.

"Yes?"

"What kind of magic is it that would show you people in an area?" Harriet kept her voice light as she worked on her sketch, using her thumb to smudge the graphite. "I know there's Tracking Charms and stuff, but those only track one person at a time, don't they?"

"Usually," Hermione replied. Her mouth formed a slight moue of thought. "There's a host of tracking spells to suit different needs. Hunters can track animals of a specific age and genus—and Aurors, when they're looking for someone and can't resort to—um—Darker spells, can utilize a reactionary trigger that pings or hums when in the vicinity of someone matching their query. Spells that track specific people over a distance are almost entirely unheard of."

"Hmm." Snape had managed it somehow, though Harriet guessed the fewer questions asked about that, the better. "But what about something that could show you everyone around you or in a certain place?"

For once, Hermione appeared stumped. "Well, I—. I'm not sure, actually."

"Hypothetically, then? If you had a spell that could do it, how would it work?"

"Hypothetically, it wouldn't. There's no—." Hermione huffed and her brow lifted as she shut her book. "I wouldn't use a spell. You'd have to tether the magic to each individual and it'd be draining—not to mention pointless. I'd use a ward."

"A ward?"

"Yes. Witches and wizards set up all kinds of barriers over their homes or businesses—you know this. Hypothetically, the wards of your projected area would have all knowledge of who passed in and out of them. You wouldn't need a spell that tracked people—rather, you would want one capable of reading and interpreting the information already stored in a ward." Hermione looked rather pleased with herself for figuring this out—then shot Harriet a suspicious look. "…why do ask?"

"Just curious, I guess."

"Harriet, what kind of trouble—."

"Really! I promise, I'm just curious." Harriet wouldn't—couldn't—tell her about Fred and George's map, but the more thought she'd given it, the keener she had become on getting it. Worse come to worse, if she couldn't follow the Moon Mirrors and couldn't fulfill her bargain, maybe she could talk her friends into making their own version of the Marauder's Map.

Harriet set down the pencil and turned the drawing over, showing Cygnus his slightly lopsided likeness. "What d'you think?"

The owl screeched and buried his head under his wing.

"There's no need to be rude. Ruddy bird."

"I think it's lovely," Luna said, inspecting the picture. "You captured his off-centered eyes perfectly."

"Don't let him hear you say that. He'll claw my face off at breakfast, just wait and see…."

x X x

The clouds Harriet first noted outside London followed them like a bad mood, and as night approached and became an imminent threat, the clouds let loose a deluge of cold, lashing rain that painted the train's windows and plunged them into darkness. Harriet couldn't suppress a shiver and found herself thinking with longing of her four-poster bed beneath the Black Lake, or the comfortable stuffed ottoman by the fire in Trefhud. She wrote a letter to Mr. Flamel—and didn't censor her questions about the Marauder's Map quite as much as she had with her friends.

They changed into their robes as they neared Hogsmeade and Hermione layered them all in Impervius Charms. The Charms lasted once they reached the station but started to degrade with frightening speed, the rain coming down too fiercely for the magic to keep up. Hagrid and Professor Sinistra could barely be seen beneath the former's large umbrella, Hagrid's booming calls for the first years to join them competing with the thunder's lowing. The older students ran for the Thestral-drawn carriages, several people sliding and slipping into the mud, elbows getting thrown as they competed for the closest carts. Harriet—as short as she was and blinded by the bloody rain—got shunted toward the back and separated from her friends in the confusion. She wound up in a carriage on her own and sat on the padded bench dripping, shivering, and eager to get on with the rest of the trek.

The wheels clattered and wobbled through the mud as the carriages meandered toward the castle. Harriet could just barely make out the welcoming glow permeating through the mist, her Threstral flicking its wings out every so often, just enough so she could spot it through the window. Harriet gripped the edge of the bench and sighed. Her breath escaped in a puff of white.

So much for it still being summertime.

Judging by the thump of droplets hitting the roof, she thought the rain might have abated—somewhat lessening from a barrage to a pelting, though that might be because of the thick tree limbs arching over the road. She could see the gate now, the individual posts tall and unyielding, each flanked with a torch doused in Ever-Burning oil. Sometimes Harriet wondered how long those torches had been burning—if, perhaps, one of the Founders had fixed them there and lit the match that would still illuminate the grounds a thousand years later. Hermione would probably tell her she was silly, though, since she doubted Ever-Burning oil had been invented back then.

The carriage slowed and came to a stop.

A minute passed, and then another. Puzzled, Harriet leaned in her seat to look out of the window belonging to the door on her left, but she couldn't see much from her vantage aside from the shape of the gates and the back of the carriage in front of her. The Forbidden Forest hemmed both sides of the road. Maybe one of the carriages had gotten stuck—a broken wheel, or perhaps a fallen Thestral. They appeared rather sure on their feet—err, hooves—but Harriet knew the mud got treacherous on the hills and slopes around here.

She shivered harder, teeth chattering.

Suddenly, a shadow fell across her and Harriet started, a vague, looming shape approaching the right door. It threw itself open, the carriage rocking, and a monster filled the entrance.

Harriet couldn't rightly name the feeling that came over her as the cloaked figure lowered its head and leaned in close. The hand it had braced on the door's frame belonged to a withered, dead corpse—the puckered limb of a clammy body dredged from the bottom of a salted mire. Dust desiccated its cloak like an ancient funerary shroud. A sound came from the black hood—a heinous, forced rattling—and as it sucked, it seemed to pull in more than just air.

She wasn't afraid. It struck her as odd, because in that instance, Harriet thought she should be fucking terrified. Instead, a hard, frigid chill settled in her chest and circulated through her blood, and Harriet felt only a sense of detached horror, a buzzing numbness striking her with a painful, unshakable rictus. Every bad thought she'd ever had welled and bobbed to the surface of her mind until she drowned under a cresting wave of grief and hate and anger.

Somewhere in the distance, Tom Riddle stood over her, the echo of her own tortured sobs bouncing on the stone walls, and he hissed, "Did you like that, little girl?"

Quirrell kept mumbling, "M-master, M-master," while the Dark Lord whispered, "What Voldemort takes, he can return," and Harriet suffered again and again in the knowledge of her own weakness, her own temptation, her disappointment.

Worse of all was the chilling passivity of a summer's day in which she was again nine-years-old, hungry, tired, sprawled beneath a hedge and thinking it might be better if she simply ceased to exist.

"N-no," Harriet stuttered, hand clawing at the door, her back pressed to the glass. Ice crawled over the lenses of her glasses. She'd never been so cold and empty in her entire life. "Stop it!"

A white fog descended. Far away, a woman was screaming, pleading. Harriet just wanted it to stop.

Her fingers spasmed against the door—and then she fell, soaring down, down into the dark until it swallowed her whole and Harriet knew no more.