Liz jumped at the pulse of frigid magic suddenly slashing through the room, skin skidding against porcelain and water sloshing over the sides of the tub, reflexively summoning her wand — she lost her grip on the spell as she was suddenly struck with smooth, cool calm, the familiar blueish-silver magic resolving into the shape of a deer, standing in the middle of the bathroom.
Her wand was already in mid-air, though, arced down to clink against the rim of the bathtub, spinning away to clatter against the floor. Oops...
Distracted following her wand with her eyes, she twitched again as the Patronus spoke in Severus's voice. "There is an Auror here who wishes to ask you a few questions. We are in no particular rush, come out whenever you are ready." Its message delivered, the construct unravelled, taking both the pleasant calming feeling and the unpleasant burn of light magic with it.
Liz let out a long sigh, sagging against the surface of the tub, the back of her head propped up on the rim keeping her face above water. This was going to be a fucking pain.
Miraculously, she'd managed to avoid talking to anyone about much of anything so far. Tamsyn hadn't been lying when she'd said the landing would be rough — it'd dumped her in slightly the wrong place, a few metres off, and she'd come out with enough momentum that she'd slammed right into the bottom of the stands. Hit her head pretty bad, and she thought she'd broken her wrist trying to catch herself? She'd felt something pop, at least, and it'd fucking hurt. She'd been dazed enough that she hadn't been able to make much sense of her surroundings, but she did know it'd been very loud.
She had no idea how long she'd disappeared for. A few hours, at least? There would have been house-elves floating over the maze filming the whole thing, so, everyone would have seen the Cup take her away, but not drop her right in front of the judges like it was supposed to. She expected people must have been freaking out about that, it'd been long enough that she wouldn't be surprised if the DLE had already gotten on trying to find her some time ago. There'd been a lot of people around, shouting, but she'd really only been half-conscious at the time, delirious, she hadn't taken anything in.
The healers had taken charge, thankfully, and bundled her off straight to the recovery rooms. A couple of potions had healed the concussion enough she could follow along — still got a terrible headache for her trouble, of course — and from there she'd managed to convince the healers (Pomfrey and a stranger) to knock her out before getting to the rest of it. She did mention she had burns in, er, sensitive places, and Severus had put it on her...file? or something to keep her unconscious for certain kinds of procedures, so, it was surprisingly easy to talk to them into it, she'd expected to have to argue more.
When Pomfrey woke her up afterward, she'd felt much better. She still had a little bit of a dull, vague headache, and her hip was a bit sore...and she'd suddenly been very uncomfortable when she realised she was naked under the blanket. But, well, they would have had to undress her to take care of everything, and she had told them to knock her out first — she trusted Pomfrey to be professional about it, and she'd stop the other healer from doing anything shitty, so. Pomfrey had given her a quick overview of what they'd done, some instructions for her recovery, and then she'd suggested Liz clean up before leaving her alone.
There was a squirming, hot, sticky, sick sort of feeling in Pomfrey's head the whole time, and she paused at the door on the way out to give Liz a very odd look — she had no idea what that was about.
Liz had been feeling pretty gritty and gross, and there'd still been a little bit of goopy healing stuff on her, so she'd gotten up to make for the bath right away. She couldn't say she was entirely surprised when Nilanse popped into existence practically the second she stepped into the bathroom. Not surprised, but she honestly kind of wished she hadn't — Liz had been completely naked. Her heart suddenly fluttering hard and fast in her throat and her fingers, she'd flailed for a towel, scrambled to cover herself...and then they'd proceeded to have a very awkward conversation, Liz red-faced and stammering through the whole thing.
She could have just ordered Nilanse to leave, but, well, she was only worried — Liz had just been kidnapped, so. Would have preferred her not to come barrelling in when Liz wasn't covered by literally anything at the time, but she couldn't really blame the silly girl too much. She'd ended up promising to show Nilanse the memory of the whole thing, but parts of it were a secret, so she couldn't tell anyone. She really was okay though, honest.
Oh, as long as Nilanse was here, could she bring Liz some clothes...?
She'd been in the bath ever since. It hadn't been very long, she couldn't have been awake for longer than a half hour. She didn't know how long the healers had kept her out for, or how long she'd been gone — but she didn't think it was morning yet? It was probably well after midnight by now, though.
Honestly, she'd expected she'd be interrogated practically as soon as she got back. That was unusually considerate of the Aurors, she thought, but she still couldn't say she was looking forward to it.
Liz had a truce to keep, after all — and she couldn't count the times she'd been told she was a shite liar.
Nilanse had brought her lazy comfy clothes, apparently assuming she wouldn't be doing much for the rest of the night. There were a pair of the loose, tied-closed linen knickers that'd almost entirely replaced the old cotton muggle ones she'd used to wear, for Seer reasons — she still wore the muggle ones occasionally, when she felt especially anxious about something and didn't want the distraction — as well as a pair of the leggings she wore sometimes in place of the muggle cotton ones Hermione had gotten her. The disadvantage the linen ones had was they were thinner, not as insulating, but Liz had enchanted them for warmth herself — the Seer-friendly linen clothes she'd been buying lately tended not to have much in the way of enchantments on them, and often none at all, she assumed to reduce potential issues for Seers with different sensitivities. Though, on the other hand, the magical ones also mostly went all the way around her feet too, so she didn't have to bother with socks. Then there was a plain long-sleeved dress, which wasn't very substantial, especially without a vest underneath, but Nilanse had also brought the jumper Tracey's mum had made for her ages ago, which would do the job just as well.
The jumper was noticeably smaller on her than it'd been back when she'd first gotten it back on Christmas of '91...but it honestly wasn't that much of a difference. Honestly, why did she have to be so frustratingly tiny...
Once she was dressed, Liz paused a moment to look over herself in the mirror. Some things were easy to heal, but others were rather more difficult, the benefit not really worth the effort: pale reddish-purple bruises were still showing, darker around her right arm below her wrist, a bit paler in a blotch over her right eyebrow, one edge of it curling down toward her cheek. (Bloody portkey...) She could speed up the healing process with some cream she had back in her bedroom, but even that might take a day or two, depending on how bad they ended up being. Also, the deep reddish, raised slash on the inside of her left wrist was still there — Pomfrey had mentioned that the wound was cursed, they hadn't been able to remove it. She had confirmed that her blood alchemist would be able to take care of it, so, Liz would be rid of it in a few weeks anyway.
Just thinking about the upcoming procedure had a sudden tingly surge running through her, her lips twitching. It was so close, made her almost twitchily excited whenever she was reminded.
Her hair had been a total loss, of course — instead of bothering trying to get all the twigs and leaves and dirt and blood and whatever else out she'd just chopped it all off. She looked fucking strange without her hair. She wasn't, like, completely bald or anything, little curly wisps a few inches long left behind, but... Well, most of the time, it didn't really occur to her how much of the volume she took up was just hair. She did notice she seemed a bit smaller, when she did the potion treatment to make the frustrating trash behave, pulled it into a plait and stuff, but it just being gone made it even more obvious. And it wasn't just how she looked, she felt...weirdly lopsided? Which didn't make any sense, it's not like her hair was heavy...
Also, the back of her neck felt cold, her skin prickling, almost like eyes on her. It was uncomfortable.
Sighing, rolling her shoulders to try to shake off the feeling, she left the bathroom. The rooms were sealed from the common room, but the wards weren't that solid — she could feel the pressure of minds on the other side of the door, a little sizzling of energy, but it was distorted too much for Liz to even count how many there were. She began to reach for the doorknob, before hitching to a halt. She did kind of look a mess — with her hand held partway out to the door, she was reminded she was missing multiple false nails now — maybe she should go back and throw on a few quick glamours?
Or maybe it would be better to seem a bit beat up and pathetic, so whoever this Auror was wouldn't keep her too long. If she was going to be stuck being tiny, she might as well take advantage of that every once in a while, when it suited her. She had just won the bloody Triwizard Tournament, though, so who the hell knew if the Auror would really believe she was just a poor little girl who should really be left alone.
Oh well, she didn't think it made that much difference — her leg was still a little sore, and going back to the mirror to set the glamours would take more walking, so.
A couple steps into the room, Liz froze, blinking around. She recognised Rufus Scrimgeour — the Chief Auror, Emily's uncle — who wasn't a big surprise, since he'd interviewed her once before around the whole Chamber of Secrets thing. No idea why they bothered having the Chief Auror deal with her, maybe just Girl Who Lived, Lady of the Wizengamot stuff? Severus being here also wasn't a surprise, and she wouldn't have expected Síomha to tag along too, but she guessed that wasn't too out there. But for some reason there was a second Auror, and Professor Flitwick, and even fucking Dumbledore.
Why the hell did they need so many people just to ask her a few questions?
"Elizabeth." Severus was standing nearest the door, turned around as he heard it click open. He walked closer, sharp enough his robes did the snappy sweepy thing, and then stopped a couple steps away with a funny lurch in his head, almost seeming to freeze in place. For a moment, he just stared at her, dark eyes steady and sharp, thoughts sizzling away just out of reach. Despite the noise going on in his head, feelings prickling at her hot and sharp and clingy, when he spoke his voice was still perfectly level, cool and calm. "Are you all right?"
Frowning up at him a little (he was acting weird), Liz nodded. "Sure, I'm fine. Still a bit sore, but."
She could immediately tell that Severus didn't believe her, which was mildly irritating. Of course, he'd be able to feel it if she were lying — but she was aware that Severus didn't necessarily trust her ability to evaluate her own well-being. In retrospect, sure, she tended to be pretty good at telling when she hadn't been doing well after the fact, but not in the moment. Part of what made it annoying was that he wasn't even necessarily wrong, just, she was fine now, and there wasn't any way to get him to believe her. Especially not with half a dozen other people around — that was the same reason he wasn't interrogating her claim she was fine, knew she wouldn't feel like opening up about it when they weren't alone...
Speaking of other people, "And what's with the crowd in here? Last time you interviewed me," she said with a little nod at Scrimgeour, "it was just you, me, and Severus in the room."
"I'm afraid I am not the one conducting this interview." Scrimgeour was the only one of the group who was actually sitting down, settled in one of the armchairs with his legs crossed at the knee — probably didn't like standing around if he could help it, what with the injured leg he had. His occlumency was good enough that she could barely feel the warm sizzling from here, his irritated mood almost more obvious in the way his foot jiggled in the air, the fingers of one hand tapping at the head of his cane, his thick orangish eyebrows slightly furrowed. "Miss Síomha, if you would care to explain."
Liz wondered why the hell Síomha was explaining what was going on, but she got her answer when she started speaking in Gaelic — she'd guess certain people in the room wouldn't understand it, so it was more private. "To put it shortly, politics. A few Lords demanded the First Auror put this other Auror here in charge of the case. He insisted on having the old man along for the interview, for reasons he didn't explain. Your father was unhappy about this — for reasons he didn't explain, but are clear enough to guess — so he insisted on bringing myself and the little one, as a show of force on your side. We didn't expect the First Auror — he suspects the old man asked those Lords to put the other Auror in charge in the first place, and doesn't appreciate the meddling."
...That was fucking ridiculous, but okay.
For a moment, Liz considered pointing out that Severus wasn't her father, but it didn't seem important just now, especially since most people here wouldn't have understood that anyway. (And she was starting to get the feeling that arguing about it whenever someone said something like that only made people think about what was going on between them more than they would have if she just ignored it — and what she wanted was for people to mind their own fucking business, so drawing attention to it was counter-productive.) She rolled her eyes with a heavy sigh, exaggerating the gesture to make sure it'd be clearly visible to everyone in the room. "Fine, whatever, let's just get this over with..."
The sofas and chairs had been rearranged somewhat from what Liz remembered, moved over to the sides to fit a plain wooden table ringed with padded chairs in the middle — dragging her fingertips over the wood, she could tell it was conjured, a faint prickle of magic against her skin. She immediately realised they were taking sides, Dumbledore and the vaguely familiar black Auror on one side, Liz and Severus and Flitwick across from them, the unhappy Chief Auror at one end. Síomha didn't move to sit at all, standing behind their side of the table, still and expressionless, eyeing Dumbledore and the Auror. As they were settling in — the two men at her left and right, which she realised was meant to be, like, supportive or something, but honestly just made her feel kind of surrounded, with Síomha behind them and Dumbledore in front — Flitwick smiled up at her, with something rather less than his usual bouncy energy. "Good evening, Miss Potter. Congratulations on your victory in the Tournament."
"Ugh, don't remind me — everyone's going to be a bloody pain about it. I wasn't even supposed to be in this stupid thing..."
Flitwick let out a low chuckle, with a bit of a goblin-ish curl to it. "Ah, yes, I imagine that might be frustrating. People do seem to seek out reasons to trouble you, but it's hardly the worst of them — at least this one is something you actually did. Winning the Triwizard Tournament against such stiff competition is quite impressive, at your age."
For a moment, Liz just blinked over at him, surprised. She honestly hadn't realised Flitwick understood her that well. They did spend a fair amount of time together, what with team practice and club meetings, but still...
"Yes, congratulations, Lady Elizabeth." That was the other Auror, sitting straight across from her. His attention wasn't actually on her at the moment — he was setting up for the interview, pulling from a bag to lay down a folder with some papers, a self-inking pen, a long scroll. He was vaguely familiar, she was certain she'd seen him before — there weren't a whole lot of black people in magical Britain, and probably even fewer people with piercings, the gold ring through one ear was very eccentric by magical standards — but Liz couldn't quite place him. "I expect you've had quite a trying day, but it is best to get down whatever information we can as soon as possible, before it can fade into memory. I will try to make this as quick and painless as I can. Besides, at this hour, I'm certain all of us are looking forward to getting to bed soon."
Scrimgeour scoffed. "Speak for yourself, Kingsley — after something like this, I'm not getting home until tomorrow evening, at the earliest."
...Liz felt the oddest impulse to apologise. That was silly, it was hardly her fault she'd been fucking kidnapped.
The Auror grimaced a little, but he didn't respond to his superior's interruption at all. "Unless anyone has any questions or concerns before we get started?"
"One small manner," Flitwick said, raising one pointy-nailed finger. "I'd like to call the elves to bring up a snack quick. I'm afraid Miss Potter here missed dinner."
"It's fine, I'm not hungry."
"Miss Potter, regardless of whether you feel hungry, you do need to eat something. A trial such as that Task would be bad enough, but healing can deprive the body as well. You may feel quite ill later if you forgo food now."
...That was a good point. "Fine. Just, I don't know if they'll have anything I can eat without tripping my Seer shite..."
It turned out, the elves were actually ahead of even Flitwick on this one. At the same time drinks and biscuits were sent up for everyone else, Liz was given what was obviously meant to be dinner, if a relatively light one. There was a plate with some kind of vegetable mash (hard to tell if it was actually potatoes or not) topped with some baked beans and mushrooms, a single sausage curling alongside — not a huge portion by any means, less in volume than she'd normally be sent for dinner, but she wasn't feeling particularly hungry at the moment, so this was about perfect. There was also a little cup of ice cream, a wafer biscuit of some kind sticking out of it, and...ooh, one of the spiced mead things Severus had apparently started buying specifically for her, it...
She had the sudden feeling that this — or the ice cream and the mead, at least — had been prepared specifically to have after the Task. That would make sense, you know, celebrating that it was fucking over. Right, made sense that they had something all set up already, then.
Liz quick tagged the ice cream and the mead with a cooling and warming charm respectively, so they'd stay at their proper temperatures long enough for her to eat the rest. As she mixed up the mash and the beans, she caught very clear flares of disgust and creeping...something from the minds around — except Flitwick, interestingly — but that wasn't really unexpected. She was well aware that other people found her taste strange, but this stuff looked and smelled great to her, so, they could just tolerate it, she guessed.
There was a bit of idle chatter around the table between the adults for some minutes — a couple times someone would say something to her, but she really wasn't paying that much attention, focussed on her food. The moment she got the first bite of sausage in her mouth she suddenly felt very hungry, so, she guessed Flitwick had had a point. As polite and bland as everyone was being, the mood around the table still felt somewhat tense. She was already aware from the time she'd met Scrimgeour back a couple years ago now that he didn't like Dumbledore much, and on top of that he was annoyed with him over sticking his nose into Ministry business, irritation and displeasure and frustration simmering over at that end of the table, Scrimgeour's fingers tapping at the table and intermittently glaring over at Dumbledore.
Also, sitting in the middle, it was very obvious that the Aurors and Dumbledore didn't like Síomha, and that the feeling was mutual. But she was in a nationalist militia and everything, so that made sense.
The unknown Auror waited until she'd finished her plate, moving on to the ice cream, before turning to her again. "If everyone is ready, we may begin?"
Liz shrugged. "Sure." Oh wow, this shite was great — the elves must have taken the low-sugar recipe they'd copied from Fortescue and made it with her Seer-friendly stuff...
"Very well." The Auror tapped his wand to the quill, balanced it at the top of the scroll. "Mark tone red. This is Auror Kingsley Shacklebolt, conducting a victim claim with Elizabeth Potter. Mark tone violet." He nodded at her.
She quick swallowed her sip of mead. "Present."
"Lady Elizabeth is protected under trusteeship, and is accompanied by her guarantor, Severus Snape. Mark tone black."
"Present."
"Also present as an expert informant, at my invitation, is Albus Dumbledore. Mark tone silver."
"Present."
"Present as a supervising interviewer is First Auror Rufus Scrimgeour. Mark tone gold."
"For the record, I object to Dumbledore's interference in these proceedings, and will begin an investigation into possible subversion at the Department as soon as I return to the office."
Dumbledore turned to glare at Scrimgeour, vivid blue eyes practically sparking behind his glasses, but the response actually came from Kingsley. "Rufus, given the circumstances, that seems to me to be something of an overreaction."
A bright, hot flare of anger from Scrimgeour, he hissed, "As you are my primary and sole suspect as his agent within the Department, Kingsley, you will keep your thoughts to yourself if you wish to continue wearing the red. Albus Dumbledore is no longer the Chief Warlock, he is a private citizen who has absolutely no standing to interfere with law enforcement affairs — considering the revelations over the last two years concerning his management of Hogwarts, he is extremely fortunate to not be in Azkaban right now. If I find that you have inappropriately subverted Department activities at his direction, I will personally ensure that you are put in the cell right next to his. Have I made myself clear?"
(Liz covered her smile with a sip of mead — it was always very entertaining to see other people yell at Dumbledore.)
Dumbledore seemed tense — glaring over at Scrimgeour, his fingers tight on his mug of hot chocolate — but the Auror hardly even blinked through the whole lecture, his voice still deep and cool and calm. "Very clear, Commander."
"Good." Relaxing back into his chair a little, Scrimgeour gave a dismissive flick of his fingers. "Continue."
Kingsley glanced down, eyes trailing over multicoloured mess scrawled across the first few inches of the scroll. "Also present, at Mister Snape's invitation, is Filius Flitwick. Mark tone blue."
"Present." Flitwick also seemed vaguely amused by Scrimgeour's brief tirade, his goblin-smooth mind bright and sparkling, a subtle curl to the corner of his lips. Which, she hadn't realised Flitwick disliked Dumbledore at all, but it wasn't as though she'd ever asked.
"Also present, at Mister Snape's invitation, is Síomha Ailbhe." Kingsley's pronunciation of the Gaelic name was close to correct, enough it could be passed off as a dialectical difference...except he'd forgotten the Ní, so. He glanced up at Síomha, and then down the page for a second. "Mark tone green."
"Present."
Kingsley looked over his collection of papers for a moment, nodded. "Before we proceed, I wish to remind you, Lady Elizabeth, that you have certain privileges both due to your status as a Lady of the Wizengamot and due to Mister Snape's continued guarantorship. You are not obliged to answer a question if you do not wish to, or you may have Mister Snape speak on your behalf. You or Mister Snape may end these proceedings at any time — though, of course, the Department will have greater difficulty pursuing those who harmed you this evening without your cooperation. If you have no questions for me, we may begin now."
...Well, that made it a lot easier, actually — she hadn't realised she was allowed to not answer things. Still had to worry about possibly coming off suspicious, but. "Sure. I mean, we can start." She remembered Scrimgeour telling her last time that they preferred full sentences above yes or no statements, for clarity and translation reasons. Both Cambrian and Gaelic just didn't have a simple yes or no, so, that made sense.
"Very well. We suspect that whoever was responsible for your abduction earlier this evening was also responsible for entering you in the Tournament in the first place. First, for the record, do you know how your name was entered into the Goblet?"
"I mean, I guess? Anyone who was old enough to pass Dumbledore's age line could have just written my name down on a slip of paper and walked right up."
There were flickers from various minds around, different colours of irritation, but Kingsley just nodded. "Do you have any ideas as to who was responsible?"
Liz hesitated for a second, thinking very very quickly. The truce didn't obligate her to protect 'Barty', whoever that was, but he would be working closely with the Dark Lord, so tipping the Ministry off might lead them to him eventually. But, the Dark Lord had said Barty was believed to be dead, and they'd already be setting loose the real Max Ollivander, so... "It was Professor Ollivander." A wavering surge of confusion on the air, she added, "I mean, the man who was impersonating Professor Ollivander. I, um, I recognised his mind, but he looked different. I don't know who he really was." And that had the benefit of being true.
For a moment, everyone just stared at her in dumb silence, their eyes cold and sharp on her skin. Finally, Dumbledore said, "Severus, have you seen Maximillian since Elizabeth disappeared?"
"No. I have not." Severus's voice was low and quiet and flat — but his mind had gone harsh and sharp and cold, terribly cold, like a blade made of ice, the way it did when he was seriously angry. That is, violently angry. She suspected that Severus was contemplating hunting down and messily murdering not-Professor Ollivander right now.
(That was probably a weird thing to feel all warm and fuzzy about, so Liz made sure to cover her smile with another sip of her mead.)
Scrimgeour's wand was suddenly in his hand, she twitched a little at a crackling cold flood of light magic, resolving into a Patronus hovering over the table in front of him, um, a swan or a crane or something? "Proudfoot. We have reason to believe Maximillian Ollivander has been abducted and replaced. The culprit is a suspect in the abduction of Elizabeth Potter. Investigate immediately, starting with his rooms here, tap an officer to interview the family. I will contact you shortly." A flick of his fingers, the Patronus stretched in a smear and disappeared. "Proceed."
"Very well." Kingsley was in the middle of scrawling out a note on one of his papers, turned back up to Liz once he was finished. "If we assume the goal was for you to win the Tournament, anyone who offered assistance may also be involved. We may assume, for now, that your classmates had no involvement — did you receive help from any adults?"
Liz shrugged. "Well, yeah, but, the only one I think had anything to do with it was Ollivander — he warned me about the Eighth Task ahead of time, at the Yule Ball."
"I would prefer to know who else helped you, to confirm their innocence."
Fucking pointless, but fine, whatever. "Severus tried to get information about the Tasks, and helped me practise for the healing one. Sirius helped me pick up some spells and practise duelling stuff, and so did Professor Flitwick — we pretended it was about the duelling team, but we both knew it wasn't, really." Flitwick's mind sparkled a little with amusement. "Dumbledore slipped me a couple hints about the Tasks, and came up with the basic idea of using projected illusions for the art one. I also got some hints from Zabini, but most of it were things I already knew from elsewhere anyway."
There was a funny little twist in the Auror's head, almost like grabbing on to something. While making a quick, sharp note, Kingsley said, "That would be Mirabella Zabini, the Director of Education."
"Yeah, that's her. I'm sure she didn't have anything to do with it though."
"Pardon me, Lady Elizabeth, but you didn't suspect Ollivander either."
...Fair enough, hard to argue with that.
"Did you have any suspicion that anyone had ill intentions toward you in relation to the Tournament, before this evening?"
"Unless we're including people who were annoyed about me being entered into it, or just hate me for whatever reason, no, not really. I thought it was a little odd at the time, when Ollivander came up to me at the Yule Ball, but." She shrugged. "Honestly, I just assumed whoever had put me in was hoping I'd humiliate myself getting my arse kicked in the Tournament, or something. Guess I was wrong about that."
"You received no hint through the Sight?"
She didn't quite manage to keep her irritation off her voice, still coming out sounding exasperated even to her own ears. "Seers don't know bloody everything, all the time, it doesn't work like that. I was kind of dreading going into the maze, but I'm pretty sure that was because I really didn't want to run into the boggart."
There was a shuddering in Severus's mind, muggy warm and sticky and nauseating — she glanced that way, whatever was going on in there didn't show on his face at all. She kind of wanted to, she didn't know, say something, but this was really not the time. Instead she just nudged his leg with her knee. He twitched, a little, his eyes flicking down to her, the unpleasant shite in his head weakening in favour of, um, something, she didn't know...
And she didn't have time to figure it out, because Kingsley was talking again, drawing her attention back to him. "I'm aware the Sight can be unreliable, but I thought I would ask. Moving on. The Cup was meant to be a portkey, but it seems as though the destination was altered — perhaps by whoever has been impersonating Ollivander. Did you recognise where you were brought to?"
"No. It looked like a graveyard, but I don't know where it was." There were some murky dark reactions in a few people's heads at that, which was odd — it was just a place, it'd been pretty enough.
"If you feel you are up to it, may you tell me what happened next?"
"I don't remember." There were some flickers of surprise, even disbelief from...someone — she couldn't tell whether it was Kingsley or Dumbledore — so she added, "They set up a trap hex at the landing spot, it knocked me out right away. I have no idea how long I was out."
"...I see." There was a funny shift in Kingsley's mind, all of a sudden, going all sticky and bubbly and sick — it didn't touch his smooth façade at all, but. He wasn't the only one either, similar unpleasant feelings surfacing from Severus and Scrimgeour too. He turned back to his papers, shuffling a few things around. Looking down, Liz recognised Pomfrey's handwriting, that must be some kind of medical report. He was writing a note, hesitating a couple times, as though unsure how to—
Abruptly, it clicked. She couldn't actually read Pomfrey's handwriting from here, or Kingsley's mind, too well closed-off, it must be a moment of Seer insight. Suddenly she knew why Severus, Kingsley, and Scrimgeour — everyone who might have had a reason for Pomfrey to talk to them — was acting all weird.
They thought she'd been raped. Or sexually assaulted, at least.
Liz had come back without her pants, she'd told Pomfrey about the burns, but not why they'd been there. Pomfrey must have assumed — it wouldn't even be the first time, there'd been a note about that on her medical report for the custody stuff too...
But Liz wouldn't have had any reason to see the report. And she'd just said she'd spent at least a part of the time unconscious.
They thought she'd been sexually assaulted, and didn't know about it.
She opened her mouth to say something — and then she stopped.
She could use this.
She wasn't going to lie about it — at least partly because she didn't think she could do it convincingly — but, if the implication were there, Kingsley probably wouldn't interrogate what had happened too closely. The way mages could be about these things, especially since she was a Lady of the Wizengamot and whatever, he wasn't going to say anything about it with all these extra people in the room. He'd leave informing her to Pomfrey, or Severus, and just...avoid it, talk around it. She was pretty sure.
It felt kind of...she didn't know, to just let Kingsley and Scrimgeour think that. But she was way more likely to be able to get through this with their little truce intact if there was a reason they didn't want to stick their noses in too far, so. This was good. Awkward, but good.
Except Severus was a problem, though. She thought, since she didn't seem like she was super freaking out, he'd assumed Pomfrey had guessed incorrectly. But he would have been able to feel that she was telling the truth about not remembering — so he was coming to the same conclusion that she simply didn't know about it. The feeling was still ramping up (it'd only been a few seconds), a funny deep cool surprise-like feeling breaking up as some hot thick sticky slimy bubbles started surging up and—
Liz nudged his leg with her knee again. Looking up to find his eyes, she thought loudly, pushing it into his head, I'm fine.
He twitched, blinking down at her for a second. The sick feeling wasn't really going away, there was a funny shuffling...reluctance — she hadn't seen the report, he wasn't sure she'd picked up on what the problem was.
So, reaching over to his mind, she passed over the memory, as clear as she could make it. Waking up in the middle of the graveyard, her pants missing, starting to freak out about that, then not-Professor Ollivander was there, telling her she hadn't been mistreated while she'd been unconscious, Liz feeling the truth, relaxing, it'd just been the enchantments going up—
The stream of images was interrupted by a very intense wave of exasperation from Severus. She'd seriously been enchanting her own underwear?
Liz gave him a mental shrug, suddenly feeling a little sheepish.
Before she could really find out how Severus was responding — it didn't feel like he was quietly freaking out anymore, anyway — Kingsley started talking again. "We have received a report from Healer Pomfrey, as to your injuries when you arrived. She suspects you may have been used as a blood sacrifice in a ritual of some kind."
"Yeah, she told me. That's what this is from," she said, pointing at the angry scar on her wrist.
"So you have no memory of this ritual."
"No, I don't."
"What's the first thing you do remember, after the trap hex knocked you out?"
"I was—" Liz cut off, frowning — she couldn't say she'd been alone when she woke up, she'd already said she'd seen not-Professor Ollivander. "I was lying in the grass, um, Professor Ollivander was shaking me awake. Not— I mean, the bloke who was impersonating him, I guess — faces are hard for me, I tell people apart by what their minds feel like. It was really confusing, he felt like Professor Ollivander but didn't look right."
"Could you describe the man you saw?"
"...Probably not very well, honestly. Like I said, I tell people apart with mind magic. Um, he was blond? Shorter hair than Ollivander, and a darker colour. His eyes were blue? he was close enough I could tell. Um. He might have been in his twenties? or thirties? I don't know, mages age weird..."
"Do you have a name?"
"No, sorry."
"There's no reason to apologise, Lady Elizabeth, I'm sure it was very distressing. Ah. If you saw him again, would you recognise him?"
"...In person, yes. If you mean, could I identify him from a photograph, probably not. You know, faces."
"I see." There was a pause for a moment, Kingsley scratching out another long note of some kind. Liz could feel Dumbledore watching her, which was rather uncomfortable — she tried to ignore it, her eyes on her mead, waiting for Kingsley to move on to the next thing. Eventually, he prompted her, "What happened next?"
"They let me go."
There were spangs of shock from all directions...except from Síomha, interestingly — she had a feeling that Síomha had already worked out what had happened, in the broad strokes. The surprise from Severus didn't last very long, either, after the initial pulse his presence sinking back under the cool, smooth, tingly surface of his occlumency. She couldn't see in there, but she could feel thoughts crackling and simmering away, the echo of the pressure pittering against her skin. That was making her slightly concerned, honestly, she didn't know what was going on in there, and...
As the surprise and disbelief began to soften, Liz picked up on the growing suspicious hostility from Dumbledore, his attention hot and sharp on her. She was suddenly remembering back in first year, the first time the Dark Lord kidnapped her, and Dumbledore had seemed to think she might have been cooperating with him somehow...
He was going to be really annoying about this, wasn't he?
"Excuse me?" the Auror said, after a few tense seconds. "They let you go?"
"Yep. The Cup was nearby, they told me it would bring me back to Hogwarts. I grabbed it, and then I was being dropped back here — getting slammed into the stands in the process, because of course." That was even true, though she was skipping the Dark Lord's stupidly long speech in the middle there.
Kingsley stared at her for a moment, glanced down at his papers. There was an odd cool...hardness developing in Severus's mind, the thoughts there coming to some kind of conclusion — which was continuing to make her a shade nervous, resisting the urge to glance over at him. Dumbledore was still glaring at her, of course, and there was a hint of...not scepticism, exactly. Curiosity? Scrimgeour was definitely thinking something over there, his attention on her about as intense as Dumbledore's, but cooler and more diffuse, watching her but less hostile about it, thinking about something.
She wasn't an idiot, she knew what was going on here: they knew the Dark Lord was back. From as far away as she'd been, it hadn't been super clear, but since the thing was functional now, she guessed the Dark Mark should look the same as it had before that Hallowe'en — given that she had just disappeared, Severus must have alerted people immediately. Their minds were all guarded enough she couldn't really see, but she didn't have to to figure out that they were processing the revelation that the Dark Lord had let her go, everyone having different feelings about it.
Kingsley just seemed confused, Scrimgeour more thoughtful about it — maybe, trying to guess why the Dark Lord would have done that, considering the politics of it, what a different direction might mean for the Ministry's efforts to oppose him this time. Dumbledore felt suspicious, sort of the inverse, the fact that she'd been released without a fight reflecting more on Liz than it did the Dark Lord.
She couldn't tell how Severus felt about it. Which was uncomfortable, Liz trying not to fidget, give away something was wrong...
"Perhaps," Kingsley started, "you might wish to know what we've discovered of tonight's events. We received reports that, shortly before ten in the evening, there was a burst of magical activity within the Dark Marks on the arms of various known Death Eaters. They now appear as clean and sharp as they did when they were first set. Upon consultation with experts at the Department of Mysteries, we have determined that Lord Voldemort almost certainly returned to physical form, earlier tonight." Professor Flitwick and Scrimgeour both grimaced a little at the name, but nobody reacted besides that.
She wasn't really surprised that the Ministry had figured that out themselves — she'd expected Severus would know, and obviously he'd tell someone. And there had to be other Marked Death Eaters out there who didn't want to go back, right? Unfortunately, she had agreed not to tell them anything — not to mention it probably wouldn't be good for her if it got out that she'd made a deal with the Deal Lord — so she had to pretend to act surprised about that. And, you know, scared? But she wasn't sure she could do that, not convincingly. She'd been told countless times that she emoted weird when she was actually feeling things, she definitely couldn't act it out without it coming off wrong, which would just tip people off that she was lying, so.
...But she could pull off confused. Frowning over at Kingsley, she hesitated for a long moment, her fingers tapping at her mug of cider. Finally, she said just, "Oh."
"Given the timing, and the cut on your wrist, we suspect your blood was used in the ritual to bring him back. Any information you have could be very useful."
"I don't remember any ritual. Um, I must have been out for that?"
There was a flicker of exasperation in the Auror's head. "So you've said before. Was he there when you woke up? Did he speak to you?"
"What does he look like?"
Surprise ringing in the minds around her, Kingsley twitched, leaning back in his chair a little. "What?"
"What does he look like? There were other men there, besides just not-Professor Ollivander—" She picked up a couple twitters of amusement at Liz calling him that, mostly buried by the surprise and confusion and suspicion surrounding her. "—I guess one of them could have been the Dark Lord? But I don't know what he looks like."
Kingsley was just staring at her, dumbfounded, after a few seconds Scrimgeour spoke up. "He doesn't appear human. He's hairless — entirely hairless, no visible eyebrows — his features smoothed down, his skin an unnatural white. If you look closely, you can almost see subtle scaling, like the soft underside of a reptile. His eyes are red — they glow in the dark."
"...Oh. I've seen drawings of him like that, but I thought that was, like, artistic license. You know, making the evil storybook villain look evil."
A bit of a dry curl on his voice, Scrimgeour drawled, "No, he truly does look like that. I've seen him with my own eyes."
Liz paused for a moment, frowning — giving the impression she was thinking about something, while really just stalling for effect. "Well, I didn't see anyone who looks like that. I didn't look very closely, didn't exactly feel like sticking around, but I think I would have noticed some weird lizard-man?"
"You're certain."
She rolled her eyes, turned back to Kingsley to hiss, "Yes, I'm certain. Are you sure you... I mean, I believe you about the Mark thing, but— I guess it'd be a hell of a coincidence, but I also don't think the Dark Lord would just...let me go?"
"...Do you expect anyone to believe that You-Know-Who returning to life and the Girl-Who-Lived being abducted could occur on the same night...by coincidence?"
"Well, I don't know!" she snapped at him, trying to look frustrated — she didn't have to fake it very hard honestly. She slumped back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. "I don't know what else to tell you. I was knocked out, I woke up, I was told the Cup would take me back, so I grabbed it, and I was here. There were other men there, but besides not-Professor Ollivander they were all strangers." That wasn't quite true, Lucius had been there, but the only person who'd notice the lie was Severus.
"Could you describe any of them?"
"They were all further away, I didn't get a good look. Also, remember what I said about faces — I probably wouldn't recognise any of them if you showed me a photograph right now."
"This is getting us nowhere," Dumbledore said. Kingsley had been about to say something, but at the interruption his mouth closed again, leaned a little back in his chair, letting Dumbledore speak instead. "I'm certain you've had a difficult night, Elizabeth, and the hour is late — we shouldn't wish to drag this out any longer than necessary. It will be far easier to get the information we need with a minimum of confusion if you simply allow me to copy the memory."
Liz scowled. "No."
"Do you wish the men who took you to be found? Given your difficulty recognising faces— Is that true, by the way?" Dumbledore asked Severus. "I've never heard of the like before."
Through the cool, hard, tension which had overtaken his mind, Liz picked up a simmering of irritation. "It is a rare phenomenon, particular to childhood legilimens and certain classes of Seers, but it has been documented in the past, yes. Elizabeth has never mentioned it to me before, but I am not surprised, given how visibly disoriented she becomes whenever her mind magic is somehow interrupted."
"Honestly, I just didn't realise faces were how people tell each other apart until, like, second or third year or something? They don't look that distinctive to me, voices are better, at least."
"That is not unexpected. You may wish to integrate an image of everyone important to you, as a precaution."
...Capture their likeness with an illusion, then put it in a reservoir and subsume it, he meant. (Subsumption was a Dark Art, he'd avoided using the term in front of the Aurors.) That way, she'd always remember what they looked like, in case there was ever some emergency where her mind magic wasn't working...but that didn't seem super likely? It might be a neat magic project, though, so she'd think about it.
"Then, all the more reason to copy the memory, so others may identify whoever might have been present. Don't you agree?"
Glaring across the table at him, Liz said, "No, I don't."
She tried not to grimace at the sudden up-tick in the hostility focussed on her, the suspicion in Dumbledore's mind crystalising. "Whatever reason could you have not—"
"I have a pensieve, Dumbledore, I know what it feels like to have a memory copied — I know you get an echo of it in the process, I've done it before. Waking up in a strange place with a bunch of strange men, and noticing my pants were missing, was extremely fucking unpleasant, and I'd rather not, okay?" That wasn't even a lie either, copying it for Nilanse later was not going to be fun. Might take one of her drug crystals first, honestly.
Dumbledore was sharply taken aback by that, a cold shuddering lurch going through his head, jerking back in his seat, his eyes going wide and— Oh! Of course, he wouldn't have seen the medical report from Pomfrey, and she...shouldn't have talked to him about it, anyway. He probably hadn't known about that detail.
There was also a similar shivering twisting sticky outburst from Flitwick — after a second, there was even a light touch on her elbow, making Liz twitch, Flitwick's hand retreating again, as though burned. Um, oops? She hadn't meant to make Flitwick worried about her...
While Dumbledore was still dealing with the implications of that little revelation (Liz trying not to react to Flitwick right next to her feeling...things), Scrimgeour said, "That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, Lady Elizabeth. It will be difficult to find those who took you without it, but I won't press the matter."
"...That's fine," Liz said, forcing a little sigh. "I'll just...try to be more careful about touching things, I guess. Honestly, I never would have been caught this time if the bloody thing weren't supposed to be a portkey..."
Scrimgeour's lips twitched, a little flicker in his mind, but he kept that thought to himself. "It may also be wise to perform an annihilation as soon as possible, as a precaution."
She didn't know what that was, but Severus said, "I plan to, immediately after this interview."
"Very well. I—"
"We cannot simply..." Dumbledore trailed off, seemingly scrambling for some solution to the problem Liz had just given him. "Whatever information we may glean from your memory could be very valuable in the war to come. You... It may be possible to...prevent any emotional difficulty by giving you a calming potion beforehand."
She should have guessed Dumbledore would be stubborn about this, but it was still irritating. "There was no weird snake-man there, and it's not like they told me their plans or anything, what are you even going to learn? Besides, that charm is complicated, there's no way I can do it while high on calming potion."
"I could perform the charm myself."
Feeling herself stiffen, the back of her neck prickling — not an act, actually unnerved by the thought of Dumbledore doing that — she snarled, "You're not putting your wand anywhere near my head."
He had the nerve to actually be offended, spanging across the air between them, "Elizabeth, I don't—"
Scrimgeour said, "The matter is closed, Mister Dumbledore."
"I understand this is difficult, Rufus, but we must—"
"I said the matter is closed," he growled, his voice low and threatening. "Unless you would prefer that I charge you with subversion of an official investigation and threatening to assault a Lady of the Wizengamot."
Dumbledore immediately shut up, the parts of his face she could see past the beard and the bushy eyebrows turning pink, mind hot and intense and sharp and furious.
"That's what I thought." Scrimgeour turned to Kingsley instead — Liz didn't think he realised how very angry Dumbledore was, by how dismissive he was acting, but he probably didn't care either. "I think we're about done here, Kingsley."
"I suspect we may be as well," the Auror said, looking over his papers. Turning back up to Liz, his voice going soft and smooth and warm, "Unless there is anything else you wish to tell me. More privately, perhaps."
...He was offering to get the sexual assault part on the record, without having to talk about it in front of everyone...or possibly about her making a deal with the Dark Lord, if he'd read between the lines enough to figure out that much. Interestingly, she noticed Dumbledore glance at Kingsley, a flare of irritation that wasn't directed at her or Scrimgeour this time — he'd apparently picked up on the suggestion that he wouldn't be in the room either. At least it seemed like Kingsley wasn't so thoroughly Dumbledore's man that he'd let it interfere with doing his job properly. "I can't think of anything. Like I said, there just isn't much to tell."
Thankfully, without any more arguing about it — and it did seem like Dumbledore wanted to — Kingsley took the quill off the scroll, passed it around to have them all sign. (Even Flitwick and Síomha, who Liz didn't think had spoken a word the whole time?) Kingsley talked her through what the process was going to look like from here — though that was somewhat complicated, since they were pretty sure the Dark Lord was involved, and they have to be very lucky to catch him anytime soon. Or take him alive, Liz guessed. The real Maximillian Ollivander might or might not be able to help them identify who'd been impersonating him, who would seem to most likely be directly responsible for...a lot of shite that'd happened this school year, honestly. Since she was also a victim of at least an associated crime, she'd be getting updates from the DLE about that in addition to the investigation into her abduction — and since she was a Lady of the Wizengamot, she could also write directly to get copies of certain reports (though they might be redacted), or even just show up at any time and ask questions. That seemed a little absurd to her, but she guessed it made sense that the nobility would have written in a rule for themselves that said they could get involved in cases where they were the injured party, backwards aristocratic hellhole, whatever.
He also told her how to contact him if she thought of anything else, or decided she wanted to go through the ordeal of providing them the memory, but she told him not to expect her call. She'd already told him she didn't know anything...
That wasn't even a lie, when it came down to it — it wasn't like the full memory would give them any useful intelligence when it came to what the Dark Lord would do next. Honestly, it was like they thought he was some absurd villain from an old book or film or bloody childrens' cartoon who was going to ramble on about their plans right in front of people for no fucking reason, come on. She wasn't withholding the memory just because it would incriminate herself, there was really no good reason to give it to them, she didn't know anything meaningful.
Which made it easier to lie about, of course.
His papers bundled up, Kingsley swept out of the room first. It seemed like Dumbledore meant to linger and press her some more about getting the memory, maybe say some more...direct things he didn't want to out in front of Scrimgeour — but Scrimgeour had paused on the way to the door himself, glaring threateningly back at Dumbledore. Liz heard a snappish, sharp conversation going on as the two men left, growing increasingly muffled as they continued down the hall outside before finally fading out of earshot.
"So!" Flitwick chirped, trying to force his usual cheer — he wasn't fooling Liz, though, his smooth metallic goblin-ish mind still churning warm and twisty with...some kind of unpleasant feeling, couldn't put a word on it. "I'm sure you've had a...very difficult day, it's understandable if you can't make it to the team meeting tomorrow afternoon. Or, this afternoon, I suppose! It is terribly late, isn't it?"
"No, I'll be there." Mostly they'd just be talking about the summer tournament at the beginning of August, but there was also some business related to the team for next year. The duelling club had held the normal end-of-term tournament, but this time they'd opened it up to the foreign students at the Castle — there'd been enough of them in the junior bracket that the tournament they'd gotten really hadn't been helpful for choosing the new members they'd need to replace Katie, Gladwin, and Chelsea. They had one pick they were pretty sure about, but they still needed to finalise the other two. Liz had already talked about it with Cedric — he was going to be the senior team captain next year — and he'd agreed they could throw some little tournaments and stuff in the first couple club meetings, which would also work as a good opportunity to show off how fun duelling was for the increased number of people just getting to the right age. (The first generation of the baby boom would be third-years next year, just old enough for consideration for the junior team.) They'd be talking about important stuff so, since she would be the junior team captain next year, Liz really should attend, they could hardly even do it properly if she wasn't there.
"If it's too much for you so soon aft—"
"Professor." He cut off, blinking at her. Blinking up at her, actually — Flitwick was one of the few people around she was actually taller than, which was always somewhat odd to notice. Honestly, Flitwick was even short by goblin standards — it was pretty common for them to be, like, shoulder-height on her, but the top of Flitwick's head was halfway down to her elbow — despite only being part-goblin, she was starting to wonder if there was something going on there. Anyway, that wasn't important just now. Trying to sound reassuring (no idea how well she did), she insisted, "I'll be there."
Flitwick watched her for a moment, bushy eyebrows angled in a frown, his attention prickly and warm. Then he forced a smile — still worried, she thought, just coming to the conclusion she didn't want to be bothered about it. "Good, that's good. I'll see you tomorrow then, Miss Potter."
"Good night, Professor. Or, good morning, I guess."
"Morning, indeed! We could all stand to get ourselves to bed, I believe..."
Once Flitwick was through the door, there was a tingly flicker of wandless magic brushing past her, and the door gently swung closed. Severus waited for her to look over her shoulder before saying, "Come." He turned toward the door to Liz's recovery room, quickly enough his robes snapped a little. When did he change into robes anyway? She was pretty sure she remembered him wearing normal people clothes at the start of the Task. "We should perform the annihilation immediately."
"What is that, annihilation?" She didn't wait for an answer before following him anyway — if Severus thought it was important, it was probably worth just playing along. Síomha followed along behind her, silent and thoughtful, apparently trying to be unobtrusive.
"You'll recall that I asked you to tell me if you had reason to suspect someone may have taken your blood."
"Well, yeah, but I'm pretty sure they didn't keep any of it."
"It is wise to take the precaution regardless." Inside the bedroom, Severus conjured a small, square, waist-high table with a swish of his wand. "With a simple ritual, it is possible to destroy any blood outside of a person's body. At a later date, I will teach you one you may perform on your own, but for tonight I wish to be certain it will take. Come here, please. Síomha?"
The door closed with a quiet click, Síomha standing just on this side. To stop anyone from barging in, maybe — people could be very silly about blood magic sometimes, and interrupting rituals was generally bad. While she approached the little table, Severus started sketching over the surface with a finger, leaving behind trails of glowing greenish-blue, forming Egyptian glyphs. "I'm guessing the version you're going to be teaching me isn't going to use this neat rune-casting stuff."
"No, this is somewhat above your skill level, as yet." Severus finished drawing what was clearly a spell circle of some kind, a glowing ring centred on the middle of the table, Egyptian text surrounding it. She did know some Egyptian now, um...sympathetic magic, definitely, and she thought those ones just there meant "ash", and, um... "Your hand, please."
Liz held her hand over the table, then twitched a little as Severus took her wrist, his mind suddenly slamming against hers. He was still mostly contained behind his occlumency, smooth and cool and hard and reflective, though she got a prickle of feeling slipping past, pins and needles crawling down her spine. His wand in his other hand, he cast a spell she didn't quite catch, though she could guess in retrospect what it was: when he sliced open her palm, she didn't feel it at all. He waited a couple beats for blood to pool up in her palm, before dabbing his fingers in it, and painting another glyph inside the ring.
"The one I will be teaching you," he said as he worked, tracing over the lines again and again to smooth them out, "will have to be done entirely in blood. It does not require too great of a volume, but if you are feeling unwell afterward you may come to me for a replenishing potion." He'd ended up drawing three glyphs with her blood in the middle of the design, when he was done fixed up her hand with a couple quick healing and cleaning charms. "This is going to feel a little peculiar."
"Right. Wait, um, this isn't going to damage the Dark Lord's new body, will it?"
Severus's attention snapped up to her, suddenly hitting like a slap, she grit her teeth. He, just, stared at her for a moment, Liz trying not to fidget. "...No, it should not. One moment." Surprisingly, he pressed his open palm down directly onto the glyphs done in Liz's blood, whispered a single word. The other glyphs flared brighter for a blink and then abruptly vanished, Severus lifted his hand off the table and—
She noticed that her blood was glowing, a faint blue-ish colour, little rainbow sparkles flittering through it — that was surprisingly pretty. Severus rattled off an incantation — or a litany, she guessed, but they were basically the same thing — in what she suspected was maybe Greek. Maybe a couple sentences long, as he reached the end his hand suddenly caught fire, vivid greenish flames licking over his skin, here and there little flickers of orange and blue and white and violet, and a wave of prickles swept through Liz, magic not seeming to come from the outside so much as rising from inside, little hot-cold tingles spreading out through her middle and from head to toe—
And, abruptly, it was done — the prickles faded, the magical flames went out, and everything was back to normal. Except for the glyphs burned into the wood of the table anyway, fuck...
"That was so cool," Liz breathed. "Your hand was on fire."
There was a quiet, ambivalent, reluctant twitter of amusement from Severus's mind...and a far louder, clearer one from Síomha. "That was a visible aura effect, I'm afraid, not true fire."
"Well, it looked cool, anyway."
"Quite." A final swish of his wand vanished the table, he tucked it away again, folded his hands behind his back. "You lied to Shacklebolt about the Dark Lord."
...That didn't really feel like an accusation. Just a statement of fact, like, but it was hard to tell how he felt about it, too flat and cool. "I did, yeah."
The hard tension that had been lurking in his head since partway through the interview coming closer to the surface, Severus asked, "What did you agree to?"
There was something there, niggling at the edge of her attention, but she couldn't quite pick out what it was. "What?"
"He would not have let you leave without extracting something from you first," he hissed, a flare of irritation tickling her ears. "I want to know what—"
"Oh! I didn't agree to join, if that's what you're worried about."
A deep, cool flutter pattering against her she didn't know how to read, some of the tension went out of Severus's shoulders, letting out a barely audible sigh. "It was, yes."
"Right, no, we just made a truce. As long as I stay out of it, he'll leave me alone."
"...Good." He didn't say any more than that, seemingly thinking about something. Looking closely, both with her eyes and with her mind, hovering close over the iced-over surface of Severus's mind, she couldn't actually see what he was thinking about from here. She was curious, she didn't know what— but if he'd just been worried about—
"You're not disappointed."
Severus was jolted out of his thoughts with a lurch, his eyebrows creasing in a faint frown. "What do you mean?"
"I was thinking earlier, during the interview, that you might have figured out I made a deal, and your mind was going all hard but I couldn't see what was going on in there, and I couldn't ask in front of everyone else, and I thought— But if it was just worrying I needed to, I don't know, agree to become a bloody Death Eater to get out—" She froze as she saw him start to move, nerves—
His hands came down on both arms just under the shoulder, his mind suddenly loud (but still as smooth and unreadable as always), the anxiety bubbling in her throat starting to be tamped down by the soft, warm...something coming off of him. "Elizabeth. Of course I am not disappointed. I want you as far away from the coming war as possible. That you have negotiated yourself out of it before it has even begun is good news." His eyes flicking to the side, he hesitated a blink. "It would be a great relief if, when you transfer away for Proficiencies, I could convince you to remain outside of Britain indefinitely."
"...Oh." She couldn't quite figure out what else to say, her thoughts too...
It shouldn't really be a surprise, she remembered Severus saying he wanted her to stay out of it. But for some reason, when it actually came down to it, she'd thought... That the Dark Lord had killed her parents didn't really mean anything to her — didn't feel quite real, or like it had anything to do with her, just something she'd read in a history book — but Lily actually had meant something to him. He kept quiet about it, most of the time, but she knew he was still holding on to a lot of anger about it, hated a lot of the Death Eater types...while others happened to be some of his closest friends. (Sometimes it was very complicated to be Severus.) He was definitely going to want to fight them this time.
He couldn't do the spying thing anymore, of course, that'd been eliminated as an option...honestly probably the second Liz was Sorted into Slytherin? (It wouldn't have been obvious at the time, but the train of cause and effect that resulted in him ending up her legal guardian had started then.) But that didn't mean he couldn't do other stuff, like, healing and potions, and he was a sneaky bastard, he could probably get around in the seedier corners of magical society where someone like Albus bloody Dumbledore would stick out. So, kind of doing the spy thing in the gathering intelligence sense, and not actually in infiltration — considering he was also a mind mage, he'd probably be very good at that. And he'd probably try to get some of the friends he had on the other side to defect, if he could, and he was a pretty damn good fighter, so.
She knew it was important to him, but she just... It wasn't that she didn't care that there was going to be a war and people were going to die, maybe even people she knew. She just didn't care enough to want to risk herself in it. It wasn't personal, to her, just, a thing that was going to happen, that she could plan around. And, it hadn't really occurred to her before, but when she'd felt his mind hardening during that part of the interview, she'd been worried that...
She didn't know, that he'd think less of her for it, somehow? Which was ridiculous, she'd already been well aware that he wanted her far away from the war, in another country if possible, and he already knew how she felt about this stuff, and... Just her brain being pointlessly neurotic again, sometimes she was stupid and she really couldn't help it.
(Giving a damn what people thought of her was hard.)
"I got you a pardon."
There was a sharp shuddering burst of surprise from Severus, louder than it would normally be, with his hands still on her arms. "What do you mean?"
"When we were negotiating our truce, I, um... He said he won't hunt you down for turning on them, or any other 'crimes' against him and the Death Eaters from the past. If you fight them now, he said he can't promise anything, but as long as you stay out of it..." She didn't finish the sentence, just trailing off at the storm of ambivalent, confused feelings rushing through her, too much for her to pick anything out.
Enough that it was even cracking Severus's occlumency a bit — he let go of her, straightening back to his full height again (tall bastard), but even when he wasn't touching her anymore it was still loud, little flutters of thought escaping. She picked up some of it, confusion about why the Dark Lord would have agreed to something like that, how he might have been changed even since his time riding Quirrell back a few years ago, worry about something, and, and, and other stuff she couldn't quite put her finger on... "I'm afraid that won't be possible."
"Are you sure? Can't you just..." Liz shrugged, didn't know how to put what she was thinking into words.
"Regardless of what either of us might prefer, I am already involved. I have done too much which cannot be repaired, I have... I have friends, on both sides." Severus turned, sank to sit on the corner of the bed. Letting out a thick sigh, he leaned forward, his elbows propped up on his knees, rubbing at his face with both hands — his head pulsing with a mix of feelings too tangled to pick apart, the occasional fragment of a thought escaping, too few for Liz to piece together into anything that made sense...
...He seemed tired. When did Severus ever sleep? She knew he must at some point, logically, but she'd never seen any direct evidence of it. Seemed like he could really use it...and he was probably going to get less going forward, what with the war starting up again and all.
(The thought making her skin prickle, burning in her throat, but that wasn't her fault — they might have used her blood in the ritual to bring the Dark Lord back, but she'd been fucking kidnapped.)
His hands dropping from his face, his arms folding across his lap, he wasn't looking at her, glaring sightlessly at the wall. "After all that I have done in the past, with all that is at stake, I cannot simply stand aside. It..." Severus trailed off, uncertain flickers in his head.
"You would hate yourself, I know." He twitched, his attention on her suddenly sharp and surprised and curious, that she'd figured that out when he couldn't...but she wasn't really thinking about this situation, exactly. It'd been a while ago, she didn't remember exactly when, or what the context was, but Severus had been telling her about some Hogwarts student who'd been being abused, and, how the thought that he'd become another useless adult, like the people who hadn't done shite for him when he was growing up, how much that'd bothered him. She didn't think they were quite the same thing, but there was just something about the, she didn't know, the vibes that'd reminded her of it. "I had a feeling it'd go something like this, I just... Well, I was just hoping, I guess."
She hadn't really expected anything else to happen, but it was still disappointing. She really wished Severus could just... But she realised that was unreasonable, considering...well, everything. So.
(She didn't think she'd deal with it well, if something happened to him. She didn't want to think about it.)
For a few seconds, he just stared at her, thoughts churning away in his head out of reach. "I do appreciate the effort on my behalf."
"...Yeah." It felt like there should be something else to say, or do, but she couldn't think of it, a wordless something hot and thick in her throat. Her fingers twitching, she crossed her arms, tried not to fidget — Severus's attention on her heavy and prickly and vaguely warm, still thinking about something in there. She could practically feel it, something hanging unsaid, but she didn't know what it was, Liz too oblivious and his thoughts too far out of reach to get a hint.
Also, Síomha was still standing over there watching them. She wasn't being especially intrusive about it, but it was still awkward.
"So, um." Her voice came out kind of thick and bleh, Liz cleared her throat. "What happens now?"
Severus sighed, long and soft. He leaned back on his hands, his head tipping back a little — which, sitting like that and with the angle making his hair fall away just made how bloody scrawny he was more obvious, the hypocrite. "That is difficult to say. I suspect both the Dark Lord and the Ministry would prefer to operate in secrecy for a time, to prepare themselves for the coming war without the difficulties that would come with public scrutiny. The D.L.E. has thoroughly demobilised since that Hallowe'en — it will take time for them to build up the numbers necessary, to reorganise such to use them effectively. They have begun that process in response to the...recent intensification around the national question, but it is still early, they are not prepared for a war. But neither, I would suspect, is the opposition. The base of support the Dark Lord once had has all but evaporated in his absence, and will need to be rebuilt nearly from the ground up. He does have his most loyal Knights to rely on, of course, but that will not be enough to support a concerted insurgency. I believe, both will move slowly, and quietly, for as long as it is practical. It is hard to say how long that will remain possible — there are too many actors involved, the secrecy of an effort such as this is too fragile to hold for long.
"So far as this concerns yourself, we will need to implement further security measures."
"What? Why?" Severus's face tipped back forward, turning a raised eyebrow on her. "I mean, we made a truce, remember. I should be safe, right?"
"I wouldn't be so certain. I don't expect a threat from the Dark Lord himself — I do despise the man, but I must admit I have never heard of him breaking his word even once — but we cannot rule out the possibility of any attack from an...overeager admirer. Remember, Elizabeth, he will act quietly, for now — how likely do you think it may be that those sympathetic to his cause may learn of his return without any knowledge of your truce? How many may feel the need to prove their worth, to gain his favour, to earn their place among the Knights? And how many might think to do so by striking against the person widely believed by the populace at large to be his greatest enemy, the one responsible for his defeat a dozen years ago?"
"...Oh." Honestly, Liz hadn't even thought of that. Which was fucking stupid, obviously some of the Death Eater types would still be a problem, it wasn't like everyone had been there at the graveyard...
His tone softening a little, "I don't think it should be too onerous — the wards on your home are thorough enough that you will be safe there. I would ask you take more precautions when leaving home, however. For brief trips, it may be sufficient to simply conceal your identity."
"I can't, though, my hair fights off glamours. I am getting that fixed in just a couple weeks, but I can't, just, not leave the house for that long..."
"Your hair may resist glamours, but your face does not. Your hair is not so distinctive that you may be recognised by it, especially when it is treated and tied back." Oh, right, that made sense, never mind. "For longer trips, where you expect to be in public for some hours — and doubly so for routine excursions, such as shopping for groceries or the like — it would be ideal for you to be accompanied by a sufficiently competent adult. Myself, Black...perhaps Síomha, if she agrees."
Liz glanced over her shoulder — Síomha was leaning against the door, her arms loosely crossed over her waist, quiet and expressionless, her mind smoothed over and unreadable. She didn't seem to react at all to Severus basically volunteering her to, what, escort Liz to the market or whatever, still just impassively watching. "I think that might be a little awkward?"
"There may be some activities you would be more comfortable with a woman along."
...Well, maybe, but the problem with that was that she didn't really know any. Even if Severus would agree she was sufficiently competent, Narcissa wasn't an option anymore...for multiple reasons now, she guessed. "Um, maybe Dora? Dora Tonks, I mean." They were hardly close, but, she was alright, Liz guessed. And she had beaten Quirrell, years ago now, these days she was an Auror and everything.
"Miss Tonks would be acceptable, if she is available." With a little uneasy flicker in his head, Severus glanced away for a second — hesitating, not sure if she was going to like this one. "To be frank, I was never entirely comfortable with you living alone."
"No really? I couldn't tell."
There was a faint flash of exasperation at her sarcasm. "I understand the desire to have your own space, and that it can be quite stressful for Seers to share living space with other people — given how sensitive your Sight has become, it is a miracle you can tolerate living somewhere as psychometrically messy as Hogwarts."
She'd never even considered that angle, honestly. She didn't think, just, wanting some alone time sometimes was a Seer thing? It definitely was sometimes, like when she was having a bad day, but, she also just liked her privacy, was all...
"I was willing to allow it last summer, with some conditions, but in the dangerous times we are soon to find ourselves in it...becomes more difficult. I understand it may be impractical to find someone who may live with you full-time, and unreasonable for me to demand it, but I would feel more comfortable if you were not alone for such long stretches of time."
...She guessed that wasn't totally unreasonable. When she thought about it, she was kind of relieved he was letting her stay at her own house at all, and not making her move in with him or Sirius or someone. "If we're not counting Nilanse — she's pretty much always at the house when I'm there — then, I don't know, I can have people over more often, or something. And, Sirius was over a lot last summer, I guess... Just, he sleeps around a lot, and I don't want him bringing strangers around my house, is all."
"A perfectly understandable preference," Severus said, with a flash of exasperation. Not directed at her, of course — she was aware he didn't actually like Sirius much, just played nice about it most of the time.
"Yeah. But, anyway, I'm not going to want people around all the time. I don't think that's really a Seer thing, but maybe it's related? I don't know. I can ask friends over more often though, I guess."
"That would be ideal. And of course you will alert me if you notice anything out of the ordinary, even if it is only a peculiar feeling. Your Sight may warn you of potential threats before they come to pass, which may allow us opportunity to prevent it."
"Right, I can do that." From what she understood of this stuff, the things she picked up should be echoes from things that were likely to happen, not that necessarily would happen. When picking up echoes from the future, anyway — the past was set, but the future was not. The point was, if she got a warning about something — like she did with running into a boggart in the Final Task — there was still theoretically time to avoid it before it happened. Sirius was pretty sure she cheated with Seer instincts in duels all the time without noticing, so...
And now she was remembering the boggart, and... Severus would have seen that, and, neither of them had mentioned it — but then, it would be an odd thing to bring up out of nowhere, since they had other important things to talk about. (And also Síomha was right over there.) Even if she wanted to talk about it, she wouldn't know what to say? She kind of felt like she should, though, like there should be something... She didn't know, but thinking about it was suddenly making Liz really uncomfortable, not making it any better when Severus noticed something was going on, one of his eyebrows ticking up a little...
"If it helps any—" She jumped at the unexpected voice, glanced over her shoulder. Síomha had left the door, walking this way — her step hitched when she noticed Liz's rather startled reaction, attention brushing over her, a mix of uncertainty and awkwardness slipping past her occlumency. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt."
"It's all right, um, what were you saying?"
The obvious unease in Síomha's mind faded away, but by the faintly tingling feeling of her eyes on her, Liz suspected she'd just firmed up her occlumency, was still feeling badly about interrupting. Not like she'd actually interrupted anything, Liz didn't think she ever would have managed to figure out what to say anyway. Walking the rest of the way over to Liz and Severus, Síomha said, "I was thinking, I could speak leis na Comhairlí about keeping an eye on Elizabeth while she's in town. I also have friends and relatives in a few different priesthoods, I can slip them warning that she might be in danger."
"And they would care?" Like, the priests and shite had made a point of trying to include her in...stuff, with like the blessings and whatever around Samhain and the Feast of the Mother — and she expected she would have been invited to something for Lúnasa, if she wasn't already going to be in Sicily at the time. But, including her in cultural shite and going out of the way to look out for Death Eater types or whoever were very different things.
There was a dark, cool fluttering in Síomha's head, but it was too subtle for Liz to figure out what that was supposed to be. "It would not look good for us if something happened to you sna hAnacal — Saoirse Ghaelach has an interest in keeping you safe while you're at home. And the priests, well, I'm sure you've noticed how religious people can be about you."
"Ugh, yes, don't remind me..."
Her lips curled in a smirk, a faint flicker of amusement slipping past the solid smooth surface of Síomha's mind, but her attention was drawn by Severus before she could say anything else. "I would appreciate that, Síomha, thank you. Now that you've mentioned Saoirse's interests, I have to wonder...?"
Síomha shrugged. "The Knights of Walpurgis are a British matter. Na Comhairlí have already discussed the possibility of the Dark Lord's return, and they've decided to avoid becoming involved."
There was a deep, lurching flutter in Severus's head, the echoes pulsing across the air pattering against Liz's skin like warm feathers. As unexpectedly intense as his reaction was, it didn't really show on his face at all — a little bit of unnoticed tension might have gone out of his shoulders, but that was it. With a slight nod, he said only, "Good. That's good."
Liz frowned for a second, confused, before it clicked. "Oh! I speak Severus," she said to Síomha, "that means he loves you and doesn't want you to get killed by racist bastards."
That got a sudden roar of prickly irritation and squirming discomfort, Severus actually frowning at her a little bit — but at the same time she got a twittering of amusement from Síomha, her lips twitching. Switching to Gaelic, she said, "Thank you, fhéileacáin, but I caught that much myself. You didn't need to embarrass your father."
"I kind of did, though." Liz hesitated for a second, before adding, "Also, he's not my father."
One of Síomha's eyebrows ticked up. "Isn't he?"
...Um, no? obviously?
Before Liz could figure out how the hell to respond to...whatever that was just now, Síomha turned to Severus, switched back to English. (Belatedly, she wondered if Severus understood Gaelic well enough to have followed that.) "Was there anything else you needed to talk about tonight? It is very late, I think we should all be in bed about now."
Severus let out another long sigh, rubbing at his face with one hand. There was still a bit of simmering discomfort at Liz blurting that out a minute ago — she probably shouldn't have done that, couldn't help herself — but he was clearly deciding to let it, just, pass without comment. "Nothing else is coming to mind. We may need to speak more soon about safety precautions for the summer, but that can wait until the weekend. Unless you had any other concerns?" he asked her.
Liz shook her head. "No, I think I'm good. And also tired — how long was I out for?"
"Less than an hour, I believe. That is hardly enough rest, especially given healing stress — and you will have a somewhat busy day tomorrow, between the duelling team meeting and the award ceremony."
She groaned. "Ah, fuck, I completely forgot about that. And I even won the fucking thing too..."
"Yes, my condolences on your victory."
Crossing her arms, she glared at Severus, trying very hard not to pout — by the twitters of amusement she picked up from both Severus and Síomha, she probably failed. "Shut up."
"I should be on my way regardless. I will need to—"
"—go to bed."
Severus twitched, glanced over at Síomha. "Excuse me?"
"You hardly slept last night already. Whatever business you feel you need to attend to so early in the morning can wait until tomorrow, or the next day. Or even longer — you said yourself things are going to move slowly for the time being."
For a moment, he just blankly stared at Síomha, irritation and reluctance and...something else prickling away in his head. "True enough. But there are hardly even three, four hours before I will need to finalise the year-end reports regardless."
"And you'll spend those five or six hours in bed — those reports aren't going out until tomorrow, you don't need to be awake that early."
"I have—"
"Or I can knock you out and levitate you downstairs, if you prefer."
Severus didn't respond, just stared at Síomha, Síomha staring right back. Both of their minds were all smooth and cool and crackly, and the air was heavy — faintly reminding her of meeting Sarah Selwyn, like there was a gravity to it that was threatening to draw Liz in, but...more tense than that, somehow. It was honestly hard to tell if they were annoyed with each other or not? She wasn't reading much from either of them, focussed and unyielding, something simmering just out of view...
...Could Síomha actually do that? She remembered Severus suggesting that Síomha was the better fighter between the two of them — Severus was pretty damn scary himself, yes, but he was primarily a healer and an alchemist, while being a badass battlemage was kind of Síomha's job. She probably could, just, knock Severus unconscious and float him down the halls to drop him in bed, which was a funny mental image.
In fact, a snort of laughter ground its way out of her nose before she could stop it. Severus and Síomha both turned to look at her more or less simultaneously, Liz gave them a helpless shrug. "What? You two are funny."
(She could have said "adorable", but she didn't — she thought she'd embarrassed Severus in front of his girlfriend enough for one night.)
Severus and Síomha left pretty quickly after that, with a few good nights and stuff, blah blah. There was a moment where Severus hesitated, giving her a look — she wasn't sure what kind of look, the warm lurch in his mind too difficult to read — but after maybe only a minute they were gone, Liz left alone in the room. "Nilanse?"
There was a sharp little pop, and Nilanse appeared a couple steps away, oversized vivid red eyes blinking up at her. "Hello, Liz. It's being late, I thought you were going to bed by now."
"In a little bit — I said I would copy the memory of what happened tonight for you, remember?"
Nilanse perked up a bit, her lips curling and her eyes going even wider, the funny glassy feel of her mind taken over with colourful crackling. "Oh! Okay. We are going down to your room then?" she asked, holding one of her long-fingered hands up to Liz.
...They probably expected her to stay here overnight, but she didn't really care. Liz set her hand on Nilanse's, and with a quick snap they were standing in her dorm room. "Luceat." Shaking off the crushing jolt of... Well, it wasn't exactly apparation, it felt different, the popping thing house-elves did. The pensieve was sitting on the top shelf of her desk, she walked that way, Nilanse pattering along next to her.
...Was it just her imagination, or was Nilanse taller? When they'd first met, Nilanse had been noticeably under Liz's hips — house-elves were tiny — but now the top of her head was, like, around Liz's waist or so, maybe slightly higher. That was actually a little tall for an elf, adults were normally only around two, two and a half feet tall — Nilanse was definitely well more than half of Liz's height now, which, granted, wasn't exactly a lot, but still.
They were around the same age — Liz guessed Nilanse had just gotten more of a growth spurt than Liz had. Honestly, she'd barely gotten a couple inches taller over the last couple years, it was ridiculous...
Anyway, Liz moved the pensieve down to the floor. She retrieved the envelope of crystallised drugs from her bag, quick popped one under her tongue — she expected extracting the memory from the graveyard to be unpleasant, if she wanted to get any sleep at all tonight (or avoid nightmares) it was probably better to be high for it. While she'd been doing that, Nilanse laid a couple thick blankets down on the carpet to either side of the pensieve. "I'm not going in with you, I should get some sleep. I did want to check something else quick first — after I look over a different memory, then I'll copy the ones from today, and leave you to it."
"Okay. Am I coming in for the first one, or are you looking alone?"
"...Well, I guess you can come if you want? It's not private. It is a secret, though."
A flicker in her head, Nilanse's head tilted, quick and bird-like. "I won't be telling anyone."
"I know you won't go telling people secrets," Liz said, taking a stab at what that flicker had been (elf feelings were hard to read), "but you have to know they are secrets first, right?" She sank down onto her knees on one of the blankets, brought her wand to her hand with a flick of her wrist. "Okay, give me a second to copy this..."
It took a moment for her to bring the memory forward clearly enough for the charm to copy it — she'd spent so long trying not to think about it, it was honestly hard to remember it very clearly at all. It didn't matter how badly she remembered it, though, the pensieve would reproduce it with (more or less) perfect accuracy, because scrying was neat like that. Once she had it good enough, she cast the charm, her wand drawing out a string of funny blue-silver memory-stuff, colours and images flashing behind her eyes, gritting her teeth as stale remembered panic and confusion spanged through her.
Moving to tap the memory dangling from the tip of her wand into the pensieve, Liz shivered, slimy pins and needles crawling over her spine. "Ugh, that was unpleasant. Good thing the drugs will have kicked in before it's time to do the other ones."
"Didn't you say you weren't hurt?"
"I wasn't hurt, but it was still scary at times. Come on, let's go." Liz laid down on the thick, fuzzy blanket, took a second to settle in a more or less comfortable position — then she reached over to dip her fingers in the pensieve, seeing in her peripheral vision Nilanse doing the same at roughly the same time.
A sharp tug — almost like the pull of a portkey, but she realised now it was mind magic, the part of her mind that took in sensory input yanked over to connect with the pensieve's enchantments, not a physical motion but a perceptual one — and after a moment of falling through twisting blue and silver mist, she thumped to a landing. It was her dorm room, mostly identical to the one she'd just left...in the furnishings, anyway. Liz, just, owned more things now. Back in second year, she hadn't had the collection of cosmetics and potions for her hair and false nails and shite on one of the bookshelves, or the extra hooks put into the walls to hold up clothes and her broomstick. Lily's jewellery box and the thing of enchantments and potions and stuff she'd prepared for Liz weren't here. Her desk was rather more busy these days, with tins of beaded bracelets and rows of potion bottles and enchanting tools and whatever else. She didn't know what all, there were a lot of things, her dorm room way back in second year seemed kind of plain and empty by comparison.
It was also much darker in here, the lights out — though it wasn't completely dark, a couple balls of orangish-red magical light bobbing in the air near the desk, illuminating much of that end of the room but leaving the bed side mostly in indistinct shadow. Standing at Liz's bookshelves, flipping through a book, amazement and amusement sizzling in her head, was Tamsyn.
She was recognisable as Tamsyn, though she did look a little odd. Her hair was loose, tumbling over her shoulders and down her back in seemingly random curls — it looked like it hadn't been styled at all, just left to sit wherever it ended up. Also, she was dressed in a skirt and a long, wrap-around sleeveless top of some kind, both of them very plain, in black and without any decoration of any kind. Liz could tell immediately they were conjured, Tamsyn had gone with simple in order to make it easier on herself. This would be only an hour or two after she'd gotten out of that bloody book, she guessed, it wasn't like she'd had a lot of time to go out of her way to pretty herself up or whatever.
She looked a little odd, but she also felt a little odd. Her mind was recognisable as Tamsyn, but there was a jittery, excited energy about her, and... Liz wasn't sure how to describe it, exactly. It was sort of like steam coming off of something hot outside on a cold winter day, a steady stream of thin mist, lifting off of her and being yanked into funny little swirls as it interacted with the ambient magic in the room, glittering as it met the wards. Gossamer-thin, hardly even noticeable, but at the same time brilliantly colourful, shifting and swirling through every colour of the rainbow...
Some echo of the ritual she'd done to give herself a body, maybe? A ritual circle was an extremely magic-dense environment, as Liz understood it it would take time for any product to equalise with the environment — especially one as large and as complex as a human body, she guessed. This seemed like...a little much, somehow, but what did she know, she was hardly an expert with ritual magic. Maybe this was perfectly normal?
Nilanse had appeared an instant after Liz, blinking into existence just at her right side. Minds felt a little different while in a pensieve — smeared and unfocussed, she had to reach through the bit of them in here and out of the pensieve to actually get to their conscious minds, slightly muddled from distance — but it was especially noticeable with elves, Nilanse's presence next to her so subtle as to be almost undetectable. "This is your dorm room? Who is that?"
"That's Tamsyn."
"...Your penfriend Tamsyn?" Nilanse was the only one who actually knew her real name, she handled her post so Liz hadn't been able to hide it from her.
"Yes. This is how we met. It's been on my mind tonight — you'll see why when you get to that part of the memory."
Liz could immediately tell when her past self woke up, because her mind was fucking noisy. She'd already been practically filling that side of the room, but her aura had been somewhat quiet, unfocussed — but when she woke up it was like a sudden electric thrill shooting through it, jolting it into a more rigid shape, tight and intense and loud. Honestly, she didn't know how Severus could stand being in the same room with her, she doubted it would take very long for Liz to give herself a headache.
The first thing she picked up from her past self was confusion — she didn't know why she'd woken up. From this perspective, she thought it was pretty obviously the weird rainbow shimmer coming off of Tamsyn. It was, kind of, sparkling a bit against the wards, and it'd been gradually spreading across the room as Tamsyn stood there. It'd started crossing over into the part of the room that past-Liz's aura was taking up, the magics getting louder and louder until it'd been distracting enough to pull her awake. Though apparently she hadn't been consciously aware enough to pick up on that sort of thing at the time — which she guessed made sense, she hadn't even realised she was a Seer yet back then.
Eventually, past-Liz startled at the sound of a page turning, her far too loud mind jangling with shock, she sprung up to a seat. She spotted Tamsyn right away, confusion and creeping unease slipping through the alarm. "Get out."
From this perspective, she could see the enthrallment crossing the room, carried on her voice in a glittering wave. It did reach Tamsyn, she didn't even try to block it, but the magic had no effect whatsoever, sparking through her mind a couple times before fizzling out. Liz guessed that's what it would look like if she, just, didn't let a compulsion or something affect her. Tamsyn glanced over toward past-Liz, a subtle curl of a smile on her lips — there was a tingle of almost condescending amusement on her mind, like an oh how cute kind of feeling. "Ah, I thought I felt you waking up."
There was a brief second of dumbfounded disbelief at Tamsyn, just, ignoring her, before past-Liz reached out with a much more powerful compulsion, dark and sharp and desperate, lancing in toward Tamsyn's mind. Interestingly, Tamsyn reached out toward it...and...
Kind of sank into it, even as the attack continued on toward the heart of Tamsyn's mind sinking down toward it and pulling it up toward herself, until the distinction between them almost ceased to exist...
Liz felt a prickle of unease at the back of her neck — Tamsyn had possessed her for a second there. She didn't do anything with it, once she had complete control of that part of Liz's mind she simply released it, the mind magic swiftly dissolving away into the environment. But she'd had Liz in an extremely vulnerable position for a blink, and she hadn't even noticed.
Because past-Liz had no sense of what that had just happened, besides the simple logic that Tamsyn must be a mind mage to pull off something like that. The alarm spanging even more intense, copper on Liz's tongue and crackling and clawing hot against her skin, past-Liz lurched forward onto her knees, her wand suddenly in her hand, casting a series of spells — rushed for second-year-Liz, the incantations slurred together, but still very sluggish to her eyes now.
And completely useless, of course. Tamsyn let a binding hex hit her to no effect — from this perspective, Liz could see she'd immediately subsumed it and torn it apart, letting the captured magic fizzle away — and then batted aside a stunning hex with her bare hand, caught a cutting curse with a glittering orange Heliodor Circle, deconstructed a flaying curse with a jab of her wand, the spellglow exploding into a rain of orange and blue sparks bright enough to dazzle Liz's eyes a little. With a shove of her open hand, a prickly wave of some kind of wandless spell raced across the room, tipping past-Liz back to slam against the headboard, making the bedside table teeter, things sliding off or tipping over, a sharp snap of glass as something broke. The shock crashing over past-Liz, her mind already starting to turn sharp and jittery with panic...
...but, honestly, seeing this again only made Liz less intimidated by Tamsyn in retrospect. The mind magic trick was something she could probably do — actually, she thought she had done similar things in her mind magic fights with Artèmi, just by instinct. Subsuming a binding hex was no big deal — doing it that smoothly and quickly was impressive, but Liz wasn't that far behind — and she might have pretty good luck deflecting hexes wandlessly by this point...especially if her opponent's mind was so fucking loud she'd know exactly which hex they were using, so she could pick the right spell to deflect it well ahead of time. That shield charm was one Liz used all the time, dealing with polarised or elemental spells.
Destroying a curse like that wasn't something she could do, but, past-Liz had no fucking clue what it was, and was extra freaked out for that reason...but present-Liz did recognise it. It was the same kind of thing as deflecting spells, but instead of preventing the envelope from triggering correctly so you could redirect it, instead you disrupted the envelope, introducing interference to tear it apart. The curse couldn't trigger without being cued by the envelope, and it also couldn't hold itself together, so once the envelope dissolved the rest of the curse was released as raw magical energy, harmless. It was a flashy trick some duellists would do, but just for show, since dodging, blocking, or deflecting a hex were all much easier and less risky — if you were very clever, you could get the energies to resolve in a way that was very loud and very bright, disorienting your opponent, but that was only even possible sometimes. Sirius had demonstrated the trick a few times in lessons, but it was still well above Liz's abilities at this point, and not really a priority to pick up either. It wasn't useless, since it could be done with 'unblockable' curses, or things like arc spells that couldn't easily be deflected, but for the most part it wasn't worth the time investment.
And the wandless hex, well, that hadn't even been very good? She was pretty sure she could do better than that herself, even. So, yeah, past-Liz was kind of freaking out, but looking back on it she wasn't even that impressed.
"Oops." Something that Liz might call regret simmering in her head, Tamsyn started moving toward the bed. There was a sudden spang of feeling carrying through the dim presence next to Liz, she glanced down and to her right in time to see Nilanse snap her fingers — it didn't do anything, of course, zig-zagging cracks rent through the illusion racing away from her hand, the gap opened up by the cracks silver and black sizzling like television static. The illusion was only interrupted for a second or two before the enchantments smoothed it over again, like nothing had happened.
...She was a little impressed Nilanse had managed to cast any magic at all, honestly — that really shouldn't be possible. Or, it wasn't for humans, she guessed pensieves might interact with elf minds somewhat differently. Reaching over to pat her on the head (noticeably warm on her hand, elves ran hot), Liz said, "It's okay, Nilanse, it's just a memory."
Nilanse twitched a little when she touched her, turning to blink up at her. In here, their minds were too far away, she couldn't feel her reaction at all — even if she could have read the feeling anyway, which wasn't even close to guaranteed. She probably shouldn't have done that, elves had a thing about touching, she just...hadn't been thinking. It'd seemed like the thing to do? It took a couple seconds — Tamsyn reaching the bedside table, bending to pick something up off the floor, past-Liz cringing away from her — before Nilanse said, "I know that. I wasn't thinking."
"Thanks for trying, I guess, but she isn't going to hurt me."
They watched quietly for a moment, as Tamsyn repaired the cracked glass in one of the picture frames — the one with Lily and Cassie Lovegood being silly and kind of all over each other, Severus suffering along as a third wheel — and then summoned a calming potion for past-Liz. She was putting on an act of being a bit exasperated with past-Liz's behaviour, but from this perspective Liz could tell she was beating herself up a little — she had already known that Liz had issues, she should have realised, just, appearing in the middle of the night would have made her uncomfortable, this was a bad idea...oh well, too late now...
Which, that matched up pretty well with what Tamsyn had told her since — the memory checked out so far.
Tamsyn opened up some distance between them again — consciously, to be less imposing — went back to poking through Liz's books while waiting for her to calm down. Watching her, head tilted, curious, Nilanse asked, "When is this?"
"Spring, two years ago. A few months before we met."
"...But you and Tamsyn are being friends now?"
"Yeah. She— Woah..." Liz was struck with a sudden wave of numbness, almost feeling like she was falling away, dribbling out of space. For a blink, she felt both her body outside of the pensieve — warm and smooth and tingly and comfortable — and the illusion of her body in here — normal, but without any of the lingering tiredness and aches from all the shite she'd done today — not so much seeing double as feeling double. But after a second the pensieve's enchantments adjusted, the spinny falling motion stopped, Liz again standing firmly in place inside the memory. "Sorry, drugs kicked in — never done that while already inside the pensieve before, that felt weird. I was saying, um... Yeah, Tamsyn freaked me out at the time, but, she apologised later, and I got over it."
She couldn't get a read on Nilanse, or see her face from this angle, but Liz still had the feeling that she had no idea what to think about that. The memory of the graveyard was probably only going to make that worse, but oh well.
Past-Liz had taken a bit of calming potion, the sharp panic in her mind mostly inundated with cool blue artificial calm. For a moment, she just watched Tamsyn poking through her bookshelves, the potion stopping her from feeling afraid but still plenty confused. Liz couldn't help a little snort of amusement when she caught her past self thinking that Tamsyn was kind of pretty — the hormones hadn't even hit yet by that point. "Who are you?"
"Getting to the proprieties, are we? My name is Tamsyn. I've been meaning to speak with you, Elizabeth."
Apparently this early on she'd already started thinking of "Elizabeth" as the thing that Severus called her, which was honestly kind of funny. "And you couldn't have done that at a more convenient time? Like, not sneaking in while I'm sleeping?" Her tone sounded rather flat, empty, the calming potion preventing her from getting any real heat on it.
"I'm afraid not. I was not in a state I thought it wise to approach you before tonight." Trapped in a bloody book, she meant. "And things are about to become...complicated, in the morning." Which was certainly a way to say the Castle was about to be crawling with Aurors, because she'd just done a murder, honestly, Tamsyn's gift for understatements... "I can't linger here long."
"And what do you want?"
With a too-casual shrug, Tamsyn said, "Nothing in particular. I simply wanted to meet you before I left." Closing the book she was holding, she turned the cover toward past-Liz, her mind sparkling with cool amusement. "Curses with integrated subsuming elements? Someone's a naughty girl — that's a Category Four Dark Art, you know."
It took a moment for past-Liz to respond, her thoughts bouncing down a few tangents — calming potion, made it hard to focus. "What are you going to do about it?"
"Oh, nothing, I just find it curious." Returning the book to its spot on the shelf, Tamsyn started going down the row, pointing at the spine of one book after another.. "The fundamental principles of the Graphic Arts — not illegal, but far above your age level, we didn't start studying this until sixth year. This seems to be focused mostly on the use of runes in low ritual, as well as runic casting — in Britain, those are Class Two and Class Three respectively. They could be rated higher, in fact, depending on what you're using them for. And here, we have an introduction into the practice of sympathetic ritual, which is Class Three, or Class Four if you use blood as a focus. Actually, Class Five, if you use the soul as a focus, but there would be no reason for you to do such a thing — you're a mind mage, you needn't bother with such crutches to accomplish that kind of subsumption."
"What do you care? I haven't actually used any of it."
"Oh, I don't care — not in the sense you imply. I simply find it curious. I wonder, if Dumbledore and his gormless toadies knew their precious little saviour were studying this kind of magic in her spare time... Well, I imagine their reaction would be interesting, don't you think?"
Past-Liz couldn't tell whether that was supposed to be a threat. Which, that was ridiculous, it should be obvious from the glittery, warm thrill on Tamsyn's mind that she had absolutely on intention of, what, fucking over Liz by telling people about what kind of magic she was into? Honestly, had she just gotten that much more perceptive in two years? Even on calming potion, she should have been able to pick up that much...
Tamsyn was about as exasperated with past-Liz for her suspicion as Liz was, which, fair enough. "Come now, don't give me that look. I'm not going to tell anyone. It is truly no business of anyone's what magic you choose to study, or even perform — unless and until you are using it on someone, then I suppose it is that person's business, isn't it? Azkaban is a fucking disgusting institution, and I would not see a young girl sent there simply due to her efforts to ensure her own safety against all the horrors we mages enact upon each other. That is not something I believe is deserving of punishment of any kind. It is simply rational."
Past-Liz was temporally distracted by remembering saying much the same thing to Severus, before wrenching herself back to the here and now. "I'm so glad you approve."
Tamsyn just though the sarcasm was adorable, amusement ringing through the air warm and soft and tingly. "You are not what I expected, Elizabeth."
"And what did you expect?"
"I'm uncertain. The Girl Who Lived, I suppose." Tamsyn was actually slightly taken aback by the question — not directly, her thoughts kind of on a tangent. The stories the Light told about Liz were completely ridiculous, and Tamsyn hadn't really believed there was anything to them. Maybe there could be some lingering effects of some ritual, or divine intervention, or whatever, but those would probably be subtle regardless. What she hadn't expected was for Dumbledore to fuck up so badly, especially after already doing it once with her. The question kind of felt like, to her, without past-Liz meaning to do it, calling out that that was a stupid thing to expect, obviously Dumbledore wouldn't have learned his lesson, she shouldn't have expected any better from him this time.
...There was something about that thought that was giving Liz a very odd feeling.
"Yes, well, sorry to disappoint, but that whole story is total shite."
"Oh, I'm not disappointed. If what I had been lead to believe turned out to be true, that would have been a disappointment. I find such stories, and the characters in them, are almost...aggressively uninteresting. I assure you, I greatly prefer Liz Potter, budding metaphage and battlemage, above Ellie Potter, prophesied saviour and Girl Who Lived."
Wait, how the hell did Tamsyn know about the prophecy? No wait, that was stupid, she'd lied about her involvement with the Dark Lord...but the prophecy wouldn't have been until after she'd said she hadn't had any contact with her creator anymore, so, that must have been a lie too...
"I'm not a metaphage."
"Well, that's a lie. You have fully integrated it — some time ago, it feels like — but these things aren't hard to identify, if you know what to look for. I could be mistaken, but that feels like a human soul — somebody has been very naughty."
...What? Past-Liz thought she was talking about the bit of the Dark Lord she'd subsumed in first year, but— Liz couldn't feel anything off about past-Liz's aura. Sure, she was fucking noisy, so it could be hard to tell, but. Of course, the people who'd know enough to tell would also probably be the same people who wouldn't care, but Tamsyn noticing was still a little unnerving. "That isn't— That's complicated. I didn't kill someone and eat their soul, if that's what you're thinking."
"Mm, I didn't imagine you did. If nothing else, subsuming a human soul is really the sort of thing you need to work up to."
Both Liz and past-Liz failed to quite hold in a laugh — that was just a funny thing to say, okay...
"But, as precious and amusing as I find your fascination with the Dark Arts, this isn't why I'm here. You are not as I expected though, honestly, I am not truly surprised. Dumbledore never learns the lesson he should, after all." That was kind of a lie — Tamsyn thought he truly wouldn't have repeated past mistakes, that even he wasn't that unbending. Though, if Liz were to describe the feeling that came with it, it seemed more disappointed than anything, which was odd.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
Tamsyn's energetic grin — the rainbow energy to her aura not faded at all, feeling bubbly and warm, happy to not be trapped in a book anymore — faded a bit, as she considered just how much she wanted to tell past-Liz. "There was a girl, once. Her mother died when she was very young, young enough she knew her not at all. She was abandoned to be left with strangers, raised at an orphanage with the rest of the forgotten and unwanted. And she did not fit there, not from the beginning. She was different. And ordinary people, they fear and revile that which is different. And so they turned upon this girl. She was dirtied, and humiliated, and beaten, for years.
"Until she learned to fight back. Because this girl, she was different, she was special. She learned to put weight on her words, to make her voice impossible to ignore, impossible to disobey. And she made them stop. And she made them fear her, so her tormentors would never think to harm her again.
"One day, a man came to the orphanage. This man was special, in much the same way the girl was. But he was no different than the others. What the girl had done to the other children, what she'd needed to do to survive, to fight back, no, he did not approve. He threatened her. Using one's power over people to get them to do what one wants is unacceptable, he said — while using his power over the girl to get her to do what he wanted.
"Because she wasn't supposed to defend herself, you see. People like her, the forgotten and the unwanted, freaks like her, they're meant to just take what is given to them, be it good or be it bad. For the girl to strike back against those making her life a living hell — to make it so they could never hurt her again, no matter what it took — that was unjust. No, you're supposed to accept the place you're put in, and be happy about it.
"The girl, of course, made the noises of surrender he wanted to hear, but went on as she had before once his back was turned. And she swore, she would learn anything she had to, of this new world called magic, do as she had to, to never again feel as vulnerable, as helpless as she did in that moment."
That story was familiar, of course — and not only because it kind of reminded her of herself (which was what past-Liz was noticing), but Tamsyn had written to Liz about her childhood later on. She'd left out some of the big details, like the attempted rape and Dumbledore pretending to burn literally all of her earthly possessions, but generally. While none of this was new, Liz still listened very carefully, feeling out the character of Tamsyn's mind the whole time.
True. Tamsyn had intentionally worded things in a way to get past-Liz to sympathise with her more than she might in isolation, but none of it was a lie.
...Well, at least she'd told the truth about that much, at least.
"We're meant to be fated enemies, like out of some stupid fairy tale for children, but I don't believe it. We're too damn alike to be foes dramatically locked in fatal opposition. No... I haven't a clue whether I'll be able to convince the other me of this, but so far as I am concerned—"
Liz felt herself tense, her breath freezing in her chest and her heart throbbing, as it finally clicked into place. We are fated enemies, the other me — the original Tamsyn, she meant, her creator—
Not her creator, now. Her father.
Her feeling earlier hadn't been wrong — she had missed something important.
"Who the hell are you?"
"I told you, Elizabeth: my name is Tamsyn."
"That's not what I'm asking and you know it."
"But it is the only answer I can give you, or the only one that would do you any good in the here and now. It is a more complicated question you ask than you realise. You will know all in time, I believe."
"But not now."
No, not then — now. Liz understood now.
Tamsyn was the Dark Lord. Or, the Dark Lord had been Tamsyn Riddle — at some point after putting the Tamsyn Liz knew into a book, the original Tamsyn had gone on to become the Dark Lord...
...and lose his fucking mind by doing ritual magic badly. So, Liz guessed it made sense that the Dark Lord's mind hadn't really felt much like Tamsyn's — the rituals he'd done had changed the character of his mind enough that they really weren't the same person anymore. Enough that the thought that the Dark Lord used to be Tamsyn just felt...weird.
But she knew she was right. It didn't make any fucking sense, but at the same time was the only thing that made sense, with what Tamsyn had said in this memory, and being the Dark Lord's daughter all of a sudden, and...
I told you then that I would try to convince Melanion that we need not be enemies...
I haven't a clue whether I'll be able to convince the other me of this...
I have no intention of harming you, ever. I'm on your side.
...I must admit I have never heard of him breaking his word even once...
The memory ended without Liz really noticing, finding herself again in her present-day dorm room, lying on her back on the floor. She rubbed at her face with both hands, trying to figure out what to...
Tamsyn had given her past self too much credit — she hadn't actually told Liz that she'd try to convince the Dark Lord they didn't need to be enemies, just that she wasn't sure whether she'd be able to. But despite never giving her word out loud, she'd clearly meant to, and she'd kept it regardless.
And Tamsyn had saved her life tonight...from herself, her other-future self.
She was so confused.
"Liz? Is something being wrong?"
She forced out a sigh, pushed herself upright. Nilanse seemed faintly anxious, her glassy mind jagged and uncertain, her hands fidgeting — whether it was the memory itself that made her nervous, or Liz acting weird when they came out, hard to say. "No, I'm fine, just... Yeah. Er. I should get to bed, I'll, just, copy those memories for you quick..."
Copying the memory from the graveyard was uncomfortable, Liz getting a prickly echo that left her a little twitchy and self-conscious. It wasn't that bad, though, the feeling vague, and it wore off pretty quickly — thanks to the drugs, she would assume, good move on her part there. Nilanse double-checked she was okay — yes, she was fine, honestly — before going back in.
She'd be in the pensieve for a while — time did pass much more quickly inside of the pensieve than outside, but viewing a memory did still take time. Liz had put in her memories of the entire Task, from waking up in the graveyard through grabbing the Cup again, and the interview with the Aurors and talking to Severus and Síomha afterward, so Nilanse would know what was secret and what was okay to talk about. It was hard to say exactly how long that all would take, but Liz would almost certainly be asleep by the time Nilanse was out.
So, she should just...go to bed, then.
Liz got up and started walking toward the closet, pulling her jumper over her head. Hanging it off a hook, she suddenly had a thought. She detoured by her bed to grab a pillow, then went back to where Nilanse was lying on the floor — she shrunk the pillow down a bit, and then tucked it under her head. Since Liz wasn't using her floor blanket, she went ahead and covered Nilanse with it instead.
...She didn't know why she'd just done that. There were a lot of memories in there, just, lying out on the floor that long would probably get uncomfortable. Yeah.
Shaking off her confusion, she stepped outside to go use the toilet, closing the door behind her. (Nobody would be able to come in and bother Nilanse, and it was an ungodly hour of the morning, but it still seemed like the thing to do.) Her tooth-cleaning potion tasted very weird with a little but of her drug-crystal-thing still in her mouth, bleh, rushed back to her room to get a drink of the water the elves left in a pitcher here for her. She undressed for bed, hanging her dress back up in the closet, and—
It wasn't until she was walking over to hang her leggings over the back of her desk chair — she'd only been wearing them for like an hour or two, they were fine to be reused — when she belatedly realised that she'd taken off all her clothes. That wasn't unusual, she'd gotten into the habit doing her desensitisation thing — she didn't sleep naked every night, but it was often enough that it didn't really feel out of the ordinary anymore. But, well, Nilanse was still in the room, right there, and she'd...
Whatever. Nilanse was in the pensieve, it's not like she was looking. Liz didn't really think she had any desensitisation milestones left, but it was probably a good sign that she could, just, undress on auto-pilot, completely forgetting Nilanse was even here. Probably wouldn't have happened if she weren't high at the moment but, you know, still.
Despite how very tired she was — and also high, which helped — she still spent an unreasonably long time lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, dimly illuminated with the low, red-tinted lights. Feeling faintly dizzy even while standing still, as happened sometimes with her cannabis stuff, her thoughts felt spinny too, not really focussing on anything, just going around and around and around on the same few points...
Tamsyn had become the Dark Lord.
She'd gotten Liz a truce, she didn't have to worry about the crazy racist bastard who'd killed her parents hurting her anymore.
Though, he didn't seem so crazy and racist anymore? If that speech was anything to go by.
Tamsyn had been working with the Dark Lord, for who knew how long, without telling her anything about it. And she'd saved Liz's life by doing so.
Because she was on Liz's side — she still felt like a friend, with instinctive Seer shite.
But she'd become the Dark Lord, in another life.
...
Liz had absolutely no idea how the fuck she was supposed to feel about any of this.