cxvi. though hate were why men breathe

"We don't have to go, you know. We could stay with you."

Elara had been repeating something similar for the duration of the week leading up to Hallowe'en. She repeated it again now and still Harriet shook her head and repressed the morose little sigh trying to escape her middle as she watched the other students march by Filch and file out the door.

Harriet wanted to go to Hogsmeade. She wanted to go just like everyone else, her entire class fit to burst with excitement over the prospect of visiting the Wizarding village, but she couldn't. She hadn't given the permission slip that came with her Hogwarts letter this summer much thought, considering she chose to pretend her real, legal guardians didn't bloody exist most of the time—but without the slip, Harriet couldn't leave the castle. She'd asked Professors McGonagall and Dumbledore if they'd sign—if anyone but the Dursleys could sign—but both had gotten a curious, unsettled glint in their eyes when they said they couldn't sign and that it'd be best if she stayed in the castle for now.

Harriet knew she had moments of stupidity and dense-thinking—she was thirteen, it came with the territory—but she recognized lying well enough when she saw it. Something went unsaid in her professors' answers, a reason for why they didn't push and prod at the rules to give Harriet a bit of leeway. She wasn't looking for special treatment necessarily, but she hadn't seen the Dursleys since she was ten and imagined popping by for them to sign a magical permission form wouldn't go over well—not after leaving a few dozen snakes in their foyer. The professors preferred Harriet remain at Hogwarts and she wondered why.

It also didn't help that the permission slip had burst into flames when she tried to forge Aunt Petunia's signature, putting paid to that idea.

"No, I'll be fine here," she said to her friends, smiling as best she could. "I might work on Transfiguration homework—or my map."

Hermione fussed with the fastenings of her cloak. "Don't experiment with that Charm while no one's here," she warned, holding a finger up. "According to the books, the Protean Charm can react unpredictably and potentially spark fires if overheating occurs—."

"Yes, I know, Hermione. I won't try it."

"But maybe we should stay. It's not fair to you—and it's just a silly village, after all—."

Hermione's statement ended in a yelp when Harriet pinched her side. "No, go to Hogsmeade and stop dithering. Get me something from that candy-shop everyone's always talking about."

"Honeydukes?"

"Yeah, that one."

Elara fidgeted with her robe pocket and pulled out a slip of parchment and a small pencil. "What do you want?"

"Oh, um. Chocolate Frogs? And one of those nice gift assortments—you know the ones the pure-blood families always use for their Yule gifts? It'd be great to not have to owl order this year."

"There's usually another Hogsmeade trip before Yule."

"And they'll be sold out, knowing my luck." Harriet snorted. "Could you get some Cauldron Cakes, too?"

"Mhm."

"And some parchment? I'm almost out. And quills. And—."

"Mhm."

Elara dutifully wrote all of Harriet's rambling down. "I don't have my money on me, I have to pop back to the dorm—."

"It's fine."

"But I—ow!"

Harriet jumped when Elara flicked her between her brows. "I said it's fine."

"Girls!" came McGonagall's firm reprimand, the professor having appeared at Filch's side. Harriet guessed she might be there to make sure she didn't slip out. Not that Harriet couldn't; she'd found a classroom on the upper floor with a wonky window opening onto an eave she could, theoretically, slide down into the tree growing below it. She could cut across the grounds easy enough—but she'd never get past the bloody gates, even with her Invisibility Cloak. She couldn't fathom the kind of trouble she'd be in if a professor caught her. "Miss Granger, Miss Black, are you heading to the village, or are you staying behind?"

"Going, ma'am."

"Then hurry yourselves up."

Harriet hugged her friends one last time and saw them to the door, watching as they caught up with Terry Boot and Anthony Goldstein and turned just once to give her a wave. Harriet returned the motion, then allowed her face to settle into a frown, crossing her arms against her middle. "This is bollocks."

"Two points from Slytherin, Miss Potter," scolded Professor McGonagall. "You need to keep your language, and your temper, in check."

"Yes, ma'am."

Sullen, Harriet shuffled away from the entrance hall, taking the steps into the dungeons. She had to duck into an unused classroom when she heard Professor Slytherin come stalking past, not at all inclined to explain to the wizard why she wasn't in the village with everyone else. When he disappeared farther down the corridor, Harriet continued to the common room and slipped inside, slumping over to her preferred table by the window.

"I don't want to do stupid schoolwork," she grumbled at the textbooks they'd left behind before Elara and Hermione departed. Harriet stuffed her unfinished assignments away in their proper folders, then shoved her books into her bag, staring glumly out the window into the depths of the lake. A fish swam through the scraggly reeds and paused to look her over, then went on its way.

All right, Potter, Harriet told herself, heaving a large sigh. Time to stop brooding, lest I turn into bloody Snape.

Like last year and the year prior, Hallowe'en had proved a difficult day for Harriet to endure. She felt morose—and sore, because though Professor Slytherin's new curriculum meant he'd stopped hexing her into the floor or the desks, Flint and the Quidditch team seemed to be personally affronted by her perceived weakness after the Dementor incident and had taken it upon themselves to toughen her up. It was either that or they'd decided to pound her into a pulp one Bludger at a time.

Stretching, Harriet cast a look around the common room. She was the oldest student present, naturally, and the second-years were taking full advantage of their seniors' absences to crowd near the main hearth, taking up the best armchair and chaise. Harriet cast her gaze toward the other end of the dim room and spotted a few first-years milling about. A particular pair caught her attention, as the shorter boy was trying to grab his book while the other held it out of reach. Harriet pushed herself to her feet and wandered over.

"—give it back, Mullins!"

"You're making a scene, Flourish. Don't whinge like a mutt—."

Having walked up behind the one called Mullins, Harriet snatched the book from his hand and whacked him in the back of the head.

"Ow—! What the hell, Potter!"

"Stop being a prat," she told him, shoving the first-year Transfiguration textbook into the hands of the shorter, red-headed boy.

"Mind your own business, half-blood!"

Harriet snorted. "Yeah, I'm real scared. Bugger off, smart-arse." Mullins' mouth popped open in a way eerily reminiscent of a certain pompous pure-blood prat in her own year, and Harriet was quick to cut him off. "Before I go get Snape."

"You can't! He's in the village today!"

"Slytherin, then."

The boy paled, his skin gone blotchy behind new acne. It'd only been two months, but the first-years already knew better than to bother the Head of Slytherin with trivial matters. "You wouldn't."

"I just might." She wouldn't, actually. Calling on Slytherin was like playing Muggle Russian roulette; at times, the wizard almost seemed to care about his House, moments of chilling competency hinting at a calculating mindset Harriet would never truly understand—and then he did things like hex his own House members and laugh when third-years broke down in tears before their worst fears. She'd rather smack Mullins in the mouth than go to Slytherin—and she really didn't want to do that either.

Mullins hesitated, then decided his pride wasn't worth calling Harriet's bluff and stomped off to join his mates by the fire. The other boy—Flourish—clutched his book close and gazed up at Harriet with a suspiciously dewy-eyed look that made her uncomfortable. "Y'know, next time, you can just get a prefect—or, well, bugger there's none here—or just, I don't know, kick him in the shins. Don't let him walk all over you is what I'm saying."

"O-okay. Thanks, Potter!"

"Right."

Harriet quickly scuttled from the common room after that, feeling self-conscious and not wanting to get in another tiff with Mullins. Without anything else to occupy her time, she journeyed deeper into the dungeons to avoid Slytherin lurking somewhere around the Great Hall or his office, and took one of the Moon Mirrors she memorized to a higher floor. Her foot caught on the gilded frame and she toppled to the corridor floor in a graceless heap.

"Stupid thing…." She winced at the resounding ache throbbing in her sore knees. "Shit…."

"Ha—? Miss Potter?"

Harriet rolled to her side and spotted Professor Lupin stopped on his way to his office, carrying what looked like a towering stack of student essays. She got to her feet and gave a hasty greeting.

"What are you—?" He gave the mirror a baffled look. "How—? Why aren't you at Hogsmeade with your friends?"

"Oh, um. I'm not allowed." Harriet brushed the dust from her robes and winced when her fingers probed another bruise. Ruddy Flint. "My rel—guardians didn't sign my permission slip."

"Why ever not?"

"They—. I don't know, you'd have to ask them, Professor," she fibbed, shrugging. "D'you need any help with those?"

Blinking, he let several of the loose scrolls in his pile spill into Harriet's arms and she followed him to his office, dropping the stack off on his desk. "Would you care to join me for tea, H—Miss Potter?"

"Okay, sure."

The professor went about ordering a fresh pot from a helpful house-elf while Harriet settled in the visitor's chair. She grimaced at the hard seat and stiff, wooden backing, guessing the chair was a holdout from Selwyn's time in residence. She'd never visited the office before, the wooden shelves mostly bare aside from a few tattered tomes left here and there. There were no framed photos on the wall or on the desk, the simple mantel above the cold hearth left empty except for a few candles. She hoped the professor wasn't thinking about leaving. It hadn't been very long, but Harriet liked Professor Lupin. His lectures had leveled out from the initial, nervous rush to a more sensible stream, and he did his best to engage them in fun, history-related activities.

"You can call me Harriet if you like," she commented, eying the scarred wizard. "Since you've almost said it a couple of times now."

Lupin flushed and fidgeted with the cups as he poured the tea and slid Harriet's across the desk. She accepted it—and dipped her Erkling spoon inside when the professor looked down to doctor his beverage, just to be safe. "I apologize. I don't mean to make you uncomfortable. I—." He cleared his throat and folded his hands around his teacup, eyes on the amber liquid inside. "Well, I was…friends with your parents in school and—after. It seems like only yesterday to me that you were born."

"Really? You knew them?" Harriet asked with a sudden smile.

"Yes. James more so than Lily. I only got to know her better when they married."

"What were they like?"

Something in the eagerness of her tone gave Professor Lupin pause, but he sipped his tea and forged ahead. "They were good people. Honest and—very kind. We were in the same House—same year. Gryffindor. I imagine you already knew they were Sorted there."

"…yeah."

Remus set his cup down. "They would have been happy to see you doing so well in school. Professor Dumbledore told me you were in the top ten of your year last term."

A soft snort escaped her. "Hermione and Elara were first and third, and I was only ninth. They're much cleverer than I am."

Emotion flickered over the professor's face, gone as soon as it appeared. "Yes, well…."

They chatted for a time, enjoyed their and eating the chocolate biscuits delivered with the tea service. Harriet didn't want to reminisce about her parents overly much—not today, not when the memory stung deeper than usual—and so she moved the conversation away and asked Professor Lupin if he enjoyed teaching so far.

"I like it very much," he said with a smile. "I always wanted to teach, but I feared I wouldn't have the constitution for it. I get sick rather often, you see."

"I'm sorry. You're much better than Professor Selwyn. He was a bit of an ars—not nice bloke?"

Remus chuckled. "So I've been told. His lesson plans alone have given me an unfavorable impression of the wizard. Truth be told, though I wanted to teach, I never saw myself as a History of Magic professor. I would have preferred Defense."

A muscle twitched in Harriet's mouth and she swirled her cooling tea around the dregs in the bottom—thinking about Professor Slytherin and Divination in equal doses. Slytherin had moved on from boggarts in September, but the thought of the cupboard still lingered in Harriet's mind like a splinter in her skin. It didn't bother her for the most part, but sometimes it caught and pulled, resulting in a nasty sting. "Professor? D'you know anything about boggarts?"

"Boggarts? Yes, a fair amount. Why do you ask?"

"Why would a boggart become something that wasn't…scary?" She set her finished cup down on its saucer and gripped the edge of her chair, taking a moment to think of the right words. "My boggart—well, I'm not afraid of it, at least I don't think so. It could have become something a lot more frightening and I guess I just don't understand."

"You didn't ask Professor Slytherin?"

Harriet choked. "Have you met him? Sir?"

Professor Lupin conceded her point, leaning back in his more comfortable chair, elbows on the arms, hands clasped against his middle. "Most people have uncomplicated fears. They fear things with tangible presences: insects, spiders, dogs, snakes. But other fears are less tangible: a fear of heights, deep water, darkness, etcetera. In an effort to match your worst fear, the boggart must become something that best symbolizes it, and the more abstract the fear, the odder the boggart's choice may seem." He sighed and unlaced one of his hands to idly rub at his scarred cheek. "I knew of a man who…lost a child in a fire. His boggart became a pile of ashes."

"That must be terrible to see."

"I imagine it is. My point, however, is that this man didn't necessarily have a fear of ashes or even of fire, but still the boggart became exactly what it needed to become in order to evoke his terror. A trigger, you could say."

"Oh." Harriet again pictured the cupboard in her mind, the angular door with the brass vent, the dusty, unfinished underside of the stairs. If she closed her eyes, she could almost see herself there; the stuffy darkness, the smell of pine cleaner in her nose. Hunger rippled in her middle and somewhere overhead Dudley sat in his room playing a video game, the controller rattling in his pudgy hands, the sound drifting down the stairwell. Aunt Petunia walked by, heels clicking on the floor.

But what did it mean? She didn't care about the cupboard, and the Dursleys—she wasn't afraid of them. She was a witch, for Merlin's sake, and she wasn't afraid of being locked in the dark when she knew how to open a door and how to make light, and she knew no one would ever make her go back to Privet Drive. If Uncle Vernon ever laid a finger on her again, Livi would eat the bastard alive. So why did the boggart choose the cupboard?

She guessed, like Professor Lupin had said, the cupboard itself was just a symbol—inconsequential in and of itself. Ashes were just ashes, but they spoke of a ruin once belonging to something precious. As Harriet thought about her relatives' house, the image of Uncle Vernon looming overhead flickered in her mind, the man's face beet-red, walrus mustache bristling as he hissed, "There's no such thing as magic!"

Harriet shivered. That would be a nightmare worthy of a boggart. Maybe it was selfish or foolish, but the terror of Voldemort and Riddle or any of the monsters she'd come against so far paled before the horror of somehow waking up alone in her cupboard and realizing all of it—Hogwarts, her friends, magic—had been a dream. She would much rather be here, fighting adversity and facing danger, than back at Privet Drive, suffering under the heel of normality.

"Thanks for the tea, Professor Lupin. And the information."

"You're quite welcome, Harriet."

x X x

Elara and Hermione returned from Hogsmeade with the rest of the school minutes before the Feast was due to begin, which meant they only had time to drop their belongings off in the dormitory before they were all escorted to the Great Hall. Harriet's mood remained strained, but she brightened when greeted by her friends, and they told her stories about the shops and landmarks dotting the village and its exterior setting.

"It's one of the only fully magical villages in the kingdom," Hermione explained as she spooned yams onto her plate. "So there aren't roads, really. The streets meander a bit back into the mountains—there's farmland back there apparently utilized by the school to help procure meals—."

"What she means to tell you," Elara interjected. "Is that the village streets loop back upon themselves—all bordered by the Forbidden Forest, the Black Lake, canyons, or sheer rock face. It can't be approached on foot or by car by Muggles."

"Yes, that," Hermione said with a nod. "It's rather fascinating to see, really! Magic being used openly without the thought of hiding it. It reminded me of Diagon Alley—but more domestic, and a bit tamer in its approach."

Harriet, who'd already seen several Wizarding villages on her trek across the country, hummed in agreement and stuck another spoonful of potatoes into her mouth.

"Hey, Potter," Malfoy said from his spot next to Hermione. Harriet wondered why he was sitting there when, in the past, he'd stuck his nose in the air and claimed he couldn't be bothered to join such company. "Why weren't you in the village?"

"I got in trouble over the summer," she said. After leaving Lupin's office, she'd gone off to the library to poke about and had time to imagine a better story for her absence. "They punished me by not signing the slip."

"That's barbaric. What did you do?"

"I—err, set my uncle's trousers on fire."

Malfoy snorted and returned his attention to his food. Hermione arched a brow in question and Harriet shrugged. "It actually happened once."

The Feast ended when the final dish of treacle tart was swept away and tired students toddled off toward their common rooms. The trio of witches stopped at their favored table, the same table by the window Harriet had glared out of that morning, and they delved into the veritable hoard of sweets, confections, and necessary stationary Hermione and Elara had dragged back with them.

"What did you two do, buy out the store?" Harriet asked around a laugh as she surveyed the mountain of boxes. She swore she was too full for another bite—and yet she unwrapped a Cauldron Cake and ate it anyway.

"Close enough," Elara admitted. "You did have a point about it being easier to buy the gifts now rather than wait and order by owl. Those there are mine, so keep your sticky fingers to yourself."

"What kind did you get?"

"I said don't touch—."

"Honestly, Harriet, we just ate…."

They wandered to their beds not long afterward and, in the quiet of the unlit dorm, Harriet laid on her back and stared at the canopy above her, listening to the other witches breathe evenly until they dropped off into sleep one by one. Livius crawled his way up from his nest beneath the bed's skirts and made himself comfortable under Harriet's body, hissing soft, nonsensical things in her ear as he dozed.

"That boggart's an idiot," Harriet murmured to herself, eyes sliding shut, heavy with lethargy. "Magic's real…."

She would have joined the others in slumber—if not for the door coming open with a sudden, forceful bang, Prefect Farley standing at the threshold, illuminated by the dim silver lamps flickering in the corridor. "Up!" she shouted. "Up, now! We need to report to Great Hall, immediately!"

The prefect disappeared before anyone could ask a question, already throwing open the door to the next dormitory. Startled awake, Harriet hurried to her feet and pulled on her dressing gown, her heart thumping in her chest, her hand sweaty on the handle of her wand. Already the sleepy calm that had settled upon their room shattered, replaced by a high-strung tension mirrored in the echoing shouts of Prefect Farley moving farther away.

Parkinson dragged herself out of bed with a reluctant cry. "I swear this stupid holiday is cursed!"

It just might be.

Tight fingers clasped hold of Harriet's forearm, and she followed the arm up to Elara's pale, stricken face. They moved into the corridor, and from there into the common room, the Slytherins little more than dark shapes moving under the doused lights, muttering and rustling. Unease prickled in Harriet's neck. Was it possible she was asleep already? Merely dreaming?

"What's going on?"

Motion stirred in the darkness of an open door and stepped forward, Harriet balking and almost tripping over Hermione in her rush to move. There stood Professor Slytherin, red eyes gleaming, the wizard a pale and ghastly figure framed in the black of night. His smile was wide and almost manic as he looked upon the three witches.

"What's happening?" he repeated in a soft, sibilant voice. He turned his eerie gaze to Elara and held it there. "Allow me to spoil the surprise. It appears your father has come for a visit."

A/N:

Remus: "Harriet's so quiet and studious, just like her mother."

Harriet: [topples out of strange mirror, swearing.]

Remus: "Welp, never mind."

Chapter title is from E.E. Cummings' poem "My father moved through dooms of love," about a father who, despite the hatred, hardship, and evils of life, lived true to himself and his own convictions.