lxxvi. cleansing
Three days before term ended, first-year Aidan Shafiq came running over to Harriet and Elara in the common room and shoved a note with dreaded, spidery writing into Harriet's open hand.
You and Black are to report to my office directly after dinner.
- Prof. S. Snape
That was not good news at all. "Shite," Harriet whispered, color leaching from her face.
"What is it?"
She handed the parchment to Elara, who didn't pale as Harriet did, but certainly looked disconcerted by the summons.
"D'you think he knows?" Harriet whispered, eyes darting about the crowded common room. No one paid them any mind, and Harriet didn't think the older students chatting around the main hearth truly realized she and Elara were there. Discussions about the upcoming break were loud and numerous.
"I think if he knew," Elara began carefully, gathering their school books together. "He would have dragged us out of here by our ears in a high temper, don't you agree?"
"…probably." Harriet cleaned her quill and capped the inkwell. "Dinner's soon, isn't it?"
"Yes. Come on, let's find Hermione…."
After sorting their things away into their school bags, the two witches went in search of their friend, but they didn't manage to find her until they reached the Great Hall, and by that point, Hermione was deep in conversation with Malfoy. Given the look on her face, Harriet didn't think it was a nice conversation. She continued to argue with the prat throughout dinner, until it was time for Harriet and Elara to drag their unwilling feet back to the dungeons, walking the too familiar path to Snape's office.
The Potions Master hadn't been at dinner, and seeing the light peeking over the threshold, Harriet knew he had to be inside. Glum, she rapped her knuckles against the wood, and a moment later a spell opened the way, revealing Snape seated behind his desk, his attention on his marking. Harriet and Elara shuffled inside—and the door slammed shut. Harriet tried very hard not to look at the portrait hiding the storage cupboard.
"Sit," Snape said, and the two witches did as bid, taking the two straight-backed chairs by the desk. Harriet sniffed and picked up the lingering smell of food, so she guessed Snape had eaten his meal down here with his work. He continued writing, scribbling what was probably a vicious reprimand on some poor sod's essay, then he set the quill aside, favoring Harriet and Elara with a blank, hard look.
"I received the list of Slytherin students intending to stay during the Yule holiday. Neither of you wrote your names down."
Harriet glanced at Elara, puzzled, and said, "…Yes? Sir?"
"Had either of you thought to ask, I could have informed you that you will not be leaving the school for the holiday. You will need to add your names to the list."
Elara balked. "You can't tell me where to go. Sir." She added the last bit when Snape's glower landed on her, as the wizard didn't seem in a mood to be trifled with. The cold settled in without reservation in the dungeons, and Snape's fire smoldered low. Harriet thought she might start shivering soon. "I'm—."
"If the next word out of your mouth is emancipated, Black, I'll ensure you're on the train home and don't get a ticket back." Snape braced his hands on the desk's edge and stood, leaning forward, his eyes dark and grim as Harriet had ever seen them. "I cannot leave the castle during the break, and as the headmaster has seen fit to leave me in charge of your well-being while you're interred at Grimmauld Place, you will be spending Yule at Hogwarts, Potter. End of story."
There wasn't much to say after that. Neither Harriet nor Elara could change the wizard's mind, given it wasn't Snape's mind that needed to be changed, rather Dumbledore's, who Harriet didn't want to bother with something so trivial. Elara wore a peeved expression as they made their way to the dormitories once again, spooking two Hufflepuff first-years who'd wandered down the Slytherin corridor.
"I think that's the Hufflepuff I blasted at the Dueling Club," Harriet muttered, chagrined. "Are you gonna stay at Hogwarts for Yule, then? Or are you going home?"
"Yes," Elara said at last, a muscle in her jaw ticking. "I'm staying, that is. I don't much want to go home, or see Kreacher—but I did have a few things I wanted to research and look into."
"You don't have to stay just for me, y'know," Harriet told her, looking down at her shoes. "Last Christm—Yule wasn't so bad on my own." Really, it'd been awful, as Harriet had been stuck in detention almost every day and Elara and Hermione both knew that, but she didn't remind her.
"No, I'm staying. Snape just aggravates me."
"He aggravates everyone, that's his natural state of being."
They went to the dorms, then doubled back when they failed to find Hermione, though Harriet stopped to smuggle Livi out under her shirt. Elara tutted, but said nothing else. They went off in search of the library and took a wrong turn somewhere on the second level, where the halls sometimes liked to intermingle or pretend to be somewhere they're not, and they wandered past a familiar, faceless bust asking funny questions. "Here," Harriet said when she spotted a portrait containing a gaggle of geese. "I know the way from here."
They went around the long way, and they did find Hermione and the library eventually, the former at their favored table near the back, grumbling darkly into a thick book about Charms. A thin monograph tried creeping away from her, but Hermione smacked her palm down flat on the little booklet, and it whined.
"What were you arguing with Malfoy about?" Harriet asked.
"Never you mind," Hermione quipped—and realizing she'd snapped at the younger witch—she lowered the dusty book and grimaced. "I'm sorry, Harriet, I didn't mean that. He's—absolutely impossible, if you must know. I told him I'm going to be spending the hols with my parents, and he keeps telling me how terribly insulting it is to Lucius and Narcissa that I refuse their invitation to their Yule celebrations."
Elara rolled her eyes as she sunk into a chair. "Heaven forbid Lucius and Narcissa be insulted."
Hermione scowled, shutting the book hard enough for the binding to give a warning yelp. "You don't understand," she insisted. "My place at Hogwarts isn't as secure as yours or Harriet's! If they so chose, Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy could have me removed from school—or transfer me to a different family, who might not let me go to Hogwarts at all, or I might be expelled from the Wizarding community altogether—."
"All right," Elara said, placing a placating hand on Hermione's arm. "All right, I get it. That's not going to happen."
Hermione gave her a dubious look, and Harriet pretended she couldn't see the faint gleam of tears highlighted by the Charmed candles.
"Even the Malfoy family understands the importance of family, Hermione. They won't begrudge you your time with them."
A tense moment passed between the trio as Hermione sniffled and quickly dabbed her nose with a handkerchief found in her robe pocket. "I'm being silly, I know. I—I love my parents very much, you see, but…but sometimes I—." The handkerchief turned into a wadded up mess, balled between Hermione's nervous, fidgeting hands. "Last Christmas was…was difficult. They're very sensible people, my parents, and magic can so often be…."
"Insensible?" Harriet supplied.
"Exactly." Sighing, Hermione shoved the handkerchief away into her pocket once more. "They don't understand it, and it's not their fault—but it's all very frustrating. Oh, never mind. Don't listen to me. Tell me; where did you two head off to after dinner?"
Scowling, Elara crossed her arms and looked out the window, leaving Harriet to explain their meeting with the Potions Master. Hermione was sympathetic—and then got a curious, speculative glint in her eyes, and started tapping her chin with her index finger. Harriet knew that look, and she felt a mite nervous to ask what the older witch was thinking about.
"The potion," Hermione said, still tapping at her chin, a loose curl bobbing by her hand. In the distance, Harriet could hear Madam Pince moving about, shelving books and shooing students off to bed, and she knew they needed to get back to the dorms soon or risk Professor Slytherin's wrath. "This might be a blessing, really. The potion's going to mature near Chris—Yule. It would hold fine until we returned in the New Year, but its efficacy would go down, and there'd be a much higher risk of something happening to the cauldron or the potion being contaminated without one of us coming by to properly check." Hermione stared at Harriet as she spoke. "But if you lot are staying, you can finish it, Harriet."
"Me?" she sputtered. "I couldn't do that!"
"You're perfectly capable."
"I'd make a mess of it!"
"No, you wouldn't," Hermione asserted. "You're much better at Potions than you let yourself believe, Harriet. Besides, the most difficult aspects of the brewing process are over. You need only wait for it to mature, fold in the bicorn horn with the proper number of stirs, and then simmer."
Groaning, Harriet looked to Elara for assistance—but the other girl shook her head. "I'm not touching it."
"And if I bollocks it up?" She hadn't touched a potion nearly as complicated as Polyjuice before. Sometimes she diced ingredients for Hermione or checked the cauldron's temperature, but she never worked with the concoction itself. The bespectacled witch rubbed nervously at Livi's scales through her shirt. "What then?"
"Really, Harriet, the language—if you make a mistake, then so be it. I'm not infallible either, you know. This will be the perfect opportunity; without a lot of students about, the staff will be easier to watch and less on guard."
Elara nodded, obviously seeing the sense in Hermione's idea—but Harriet didn't nod, because it sounded terribly nerve-wracking to the poor girl, who had very little faith in her potion-brewing abilities, or her espionage skills. She wrinkled her nose, face scrunched, and as Hermione and Elara started picking up texts to return them to their proper place, Harriet left the pair there and headed back to the dormitory on her own. Her friends gave her far too much credibility. She just knew she was going to ruin it. Harriet wasn't nearly as talented as Hermione, and Polyjuice was devilishly tricky.
She had traversed only a single corridor when Livi stirred, dry scales rasping against her skin. Harriet paused to soothe the serpent—when a heinous, all too familiar hissing reached her ears.
"Time to kill…kill…mussst find them…kill them…."
A loud chime burst from Livius, and Harriet gasped, startled by the noise, throwing herself against the wall.
"Kill…kill…KILL…."
Oh, Merlin, Harriet thought, breathing hard. Merlin, it's here with me, it has to be here somewhere—. Her eyes darted all about, searching for something, anything, and yet nothing in the dark hall had changed at all. The torches continued to flicker, and the sole portrait on the wall opposite her kept on with his nap. Harriet had to find a professor—or Lockhart, or someone! But where to go? Where would they be? What was she to do?
Livi chimed again and hissed with menace, having slithered out of Harriet's collar to perch half his body on her shoulder. "I will bitesss it," the Horned Serpent declared. "It will not come near Misstresss, I will eatsss it—."
"Kill…kill the filthy onesss…."
Like a sudden ice bath, Harriet realized there was one Muggle-born witch near there, just one corridor over—one witch that the invisible, skulking monster might mean to kill that evening. Harriet hadn't the faintest idea where the ruddy thing was or where she could find a professor, but she knew exactly where Hermione and Elara were; in the library, defenseless, unable to hear that murderous crooning closing in.
She took off running, not caring that the hissing faded, that Livius coiled too tightly about her throat, or that she must look like a madman running through the hall. Her heart raced. She had her wand in her hand, and she didn't remember taking it out. Harriet didn't care about any of that; all she cared about was finding her friends and getting the hell away from there.
Harriet rounded the corner—and tripped. Something heavy and solid struck her shins, and the bespectacled witch toppled, barely managing to catch herself with her hands before she collided with the floor. Livi writhed but Harriet's reflexes spared him from impact, even if she did bloody her knees from the effort. Panting, Harriet rolled to see what she'd hit—and froze.
A ghost hovered in the corridor. Pearlescent and as gray as a winter morning, he drifted several inches from the stones below, and Set pooled around him in a vaporous black veil, a haunting halo of shadow and inky darkness in the encroaching hours of night. Harriet knew the ghost to be Nearly Headless Nick, though she hadn't any familiarity with him; she didn't know any of the undead residents of the castle, and this was the closest she'd ever been to one. Nick hung motionless in the air, staring straight ahead.
There was something behind him, something large, crumpled by the wall. Something shaped like a body….
Hands landed on Harriet's shoulders. Her heart leapt into her throat and she shrieked, terrified—only to look up into the black eyes of Professor Snape as he knelt by her, out of breath, his hair wind-blown as if he'd ran the width of the castle.
"Are you injured?" he demanded. "Are you hurt, Miss Potter?"
"Wh-what?!"
"Are you hurt, you imbecile?!"
Harriet gave her head a jerk to the side, certain she wouldn't be able to find her voice. Together, they turned to the gruesome sight before them, seeing the student sprawled upon the floor, the paralyzed Gryffindor ghost, and the glistening letters scrawled by an errant, irreverent hand upon the stone wall.
SLYTHERIN'S HEIR WILL CLEANSE THE DIRTY-BLOODED.
Harriet gulped.
A/N: Livius - "I'll eat it!"
*Basilisk appears, 50 feet long, big as a bus.*
Livius, narrowing eyes - "I'm still gonna eat it."