PAPER CONFINES.
12. / I Do

✶

       Amoret cried over the grey light trickling through the windows of the Great Hall. It had been raining for five days, and all that was left was a damp fog across the courtyards, ants flooded out of their burrows, mosquitoes whizzing for blood. She'd carved X's in the swollen bites on her legs, and then A's, B's, and awkward stars. She'd rummaged every dormitory for fresh clothes and found them finally in a Slytherin boy's mahogany credence. Strange, dull uniforms, in a strange place. The trousers were fitted for men, and fell slanted on her hips. The stiff collar itched at her throat. Amoret went to Nadya's dormitory and stretched across her empty bed, though they were all empty, and cried again. The same meals sat unattended on the House tables when she left in the morning: porridge, milk, breadrolls, black pudding and cawl. Pauper's fare. She took modest spoonfuls of the last, and spat out a bleeding tooth, and fell asleep on fine china. The silence when she woke felt like something once-full that had been gouged empty.

After seven days, she went looking for answers.

Her pewter chair yawned as she sat at her desk in the library, but it showed no trace of her ghost—the outline Nadya had laughed at her for leaving behind. Amoret read until the horizon was black, but the clocks were odd and time was uncertain. She traced the lines of her stack of books, murmuring the words under her breath. Immortality, mutilation, rudimentary body. Horcrux. They formed milky clouds in the cold. Sleep blanketed her shivering body.

She shook awake from a nightmare. She read again. She left notes in the margins.

The body bound by a horcrux could not be destroyed. It would, instead, linger in spirit and soul. Amoret dipped her quill in the ink.

Linger how? she wrote. What form would it take? What would happen to someone trapped in one?

It had never been done. Her cursive sagged.

She dug through the restricted section again, but as she knew, details on horcruxes were almost impossible to come by. Even the darkest witches and wizards were wary of toeing the line between life and death. Branches of necromancy were the most unpredictable sort of magic. They stole what death was not ready to give, and death was an unforgiving power to usurp.

The mechanisms of sacrifice had too many faults: love interrupted, magic barricaded, survival instinct drove death backward. Those who wanted to live weren't defeated easily.

Amoret only had it in her to laugh under her breath and wince at her sore lungs—precisely why he picked you, you sorry girl. She was chosen to live for the same reason he'd chosen Ruby and Myrtle to die.

Amoret left her books scattered on the desk.

The Room of Requirement hadn't changed since she left it. In nearby corridors, the serpentine voices still murmured her name, still drawled out the syllables and then slithered into the cracks. The rose-and-thorn door loomed in passing. Amoret waited for it to transform. She called on the familiar black panels and the golden flower handle. It remained the same. It asked to be fed. She wanted to be pricked by it, and bleed, and watch the rose vines fill red like intravenous tubes.

The want frightened her. She walked away, and the voices didn't follow.

Amoret filled a bag in the afternoon. From the kitchens: a canteen, a steak knife, two dishrags, and a paper roll of saltines and meat. From the dormitories: a thick woollen coat, a lantern, and a change of socks. From the hospital wing: bandages, Skele-gro, and a blood replenishing potion she'd left on the nightstand during her first night. Her coat pockets were already full of little vials of dittany and dragon's blood and rue from the top of Slughorn's cabinet, and admittedly, she might have been going overboard. It was only a night trip. As far as she could go past the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest until she reached... what? An invisible border? A door back home? An endless replica of the world with no one else in it?

She had no idea, but she needed to find out.

In an hour, she was trekking along the wall of the woods downing her second swig of Skele-gro that day. Her bones were still aching where they'd been cracked and bent stumbling down the hill of Tom's meadow, and now she crept sorely up another. The liquid burned her throat and sizzled in the pit of her stomach. She kept on, and by dusk, arrived at a long, colourless pasture. Hogwarts was a vague cluster of ramparts and towers against the purple sky, and Amoret sunk to the grass to watch night fall.

She wondered in the dark about Scotland, and Greenock, and redcapped faeries who could smell wars before they came. Sometimes Amoret still smelled war too. She wondered about all the blood fields, about how they dried, how deep the red ran, how many unnamed carcasses scattered the soil. She imagined ants weaving through orifices in lungs and skulls and blood-brothers joined at skeleton fingers, buried together. She imagined they built castles. She imagined Morrìgan, washing the dead, pink foam bubbling and wheezing under her cloth. It all belonged to creation—as in larva and corpse, as in river and rain, as in moon, Mother, Maiden, Crone; as in death fertilizing life. Amoret wondered about birds, but there were none here.

She ate the meat and the saltines and stretched to stand.

Her lantern guided her in the dark. She trailed sleepily beside the Forbidden Forest with her free hand around her wand, and for a while, there was only grass and sky and a disconcerting quiet that seemed absent of all life, until the leftover fog thickened to white mist. Amoret squinted at the light, but light didn't feel like the right word. There was no glow. No golden sheen of sun warming her hands. No moonlight kissing her blue or fire flickering in the dark. It was just white, growing, swallowing, hungry. It felt light under her feet, and her shoes scratched it like pen on parchment. The quiet was different here. Flat and long, instead of round and hollow. Wax dripped from her lantern and stained the whiteness gold like a letter seal.

This was the end, and it was never-ending.

Amoret took careful, breathless steps backward, and had never been so relieved to feel the dark embracing her again.

She couldn't sleep the next morning. Nadya's blankets curled around her but wouldn't warm, and Amoret couldn't stop thinking about the blank pages surrounding the castle. She rolled in bed. Back and forth, outstretched and fetal, until she tossed the quilt to the ground and groaned into her palms. She didn't have it in her to cry anymore. She drew A's and B's into Nadya's pillowcase and laughed at the trinkets in her drawers. Butterknives, wishbones, earrings bent to slash, a bottle of firewhiskey, and about fifteen sugar quill sticks tucked back into their wrappers. If she could, she'd tell Nadya she was going to get bugs if she didn't clean up her mess.

Amoret swelled with guilt, and then longing. She missed her.

The Black Lake glimmered like dozens of emeralds through the window. No fish swam in its waters. Nothing seemed to live here that was bigger than what could be put under a microscope. She'd thought about it—dwelled on the possibilities every time she noted a new insect. Little white moths, mosquitoes, ants, and more damselflies than she'd ever seen at Hogwarts before. Nymphs, larvae, hatchlings. They waded the lake, and lived where they were usually swallowed by fish or frogs. Amoret had a few bold theories on why they were here, only she wasn't bold enough to trust her intuition, so she let the ideas slip away.

She was coming to realize there were too many questions she couldn't answer. Not on her own.

Her fingers found the firewhisky and rapped on the glass in consideration. If she could hear her father now, he'd be using all the words that sailors often did. If he were corporeal, tangible, he'd put his ivory hand to the bottle and pull it away. But she couldn't hear him, and she knew she'd never feel him.

Amoret said sorry and took a long sip. And another. And another.

Her drunken thoughts were too big to dissect. They swirled and spread her thin across Nadya's bedsheets. The intricacies of the ceiling spun like jackstones, metallic in the candlelight, jagged as her childhood when she still tossed handfuls with her sisters in the bedroom. And yet, Reid was quiet in her mind, her mouth zipped closed. Sybil's hands were tied. Bibi's violin sat collecting dust where she couldn't reach. And Mum... Mum was as grey as Amoret's paper-world, and her voice was so tight in her throat, and she was too sick to move. It all spun; the river current, the summer pixies, the flasks of mead and funerals with no cadavers and a family bound by death. Without them, the only voice Amoret could hear as she drifted into nauseated sleep was her own.

Up, it said, out of your self-pity. Crawl from it if you have to. Just get up and do what you need to do.

Consciousness struck her like a slap in the face and hurt just as much.

Nine days. Her head throbbed with the forgotten ache of a hangover, but she leaned over and carved the ninth tally in the olive wallpaper.

Up, you stupid girl.

She got up.

The whispers found her before she arrived.

Amoret stood defeatedly at the wall to the Room of Requirement, and swore the door tutted derisively at her presence. Did you really think you could avoid us forever? crooned the roses. Did you think you could figure it out on your own? mocked the thorns. She bit her tongue, extending her hand for the doorknob. The vines hissed and wrapped around her arm, and Amoret cried out as the thorns pierced her skin without pause. But the roses said again, be still and pay your due. And so she was still, eyes glossy as her blood crept up the snaking vines to an oak-carved flower in the centre of the door, like veins to a beating heart. The thorns curled back into the fretwork. Amoret felt weightless.

The door hummed open, satisfied. Fierce wind blew in from the meadow.

Amoret swallowed, and crossed the threshold.

The wet grass licked at her ankles. She rolled down her trousers and buttoned her stolen coat. Her gauzy shirt clung to her torso in the gale. Everything looked the same as it had last time—the green hills too grey, the woodland a spidery mass of autumn trees, and the angel oak glimmering like an ice sculpture beside the snowy lake. White flowers brushed against her heels, whistling, demanding to be seen. She looked down.

Her golden coin sat at the top of the hill.

Nine days, it had been. Even if Tom needed her alive, she had a mind enough not to doubt he'd consider killing her just for this.

That was all right. She wasn't feeling very forgiving either.

She bent down and glanced at the coin. The dragon imprinted in its side roared. The coin itself seemed to smoulder, as if it could tell she'd arrived and was waiting to burn her for what she had done.

Her mind wandered back to the Transfiguration exam, and then all of the clandestine studies in Tom's library, his hand grazing hers, her mouth dry in wonderment. Something angry thirsted in her too.

Amoret cast the spell.

There was a still, sorry moment when Tom Riddle transfigured back into himself. The wind stopped. He groaned, hissed, snakelike into his body again. His eyes met hers without a moment of pause—and he was a disheveled, sad looking thing. She'd struck him. He was realizing it by the inch. Up his serge breeches and past his throat. A deep cut through his brow down the length of his cheek, staining him crimson as blood bloomed in the cashmere neck of his shirt. Down the inches again as it slavered. His clothes were otherwise torn, his hair in damp waves over his forehead. He winced, that lost look in his eyes settling to ire as he closed in on her.

She'd struck him and she'd done on purpose.

It was hard to tell who fired first.

Amoret shrieked as sparks flew past her cheek, slicing into the door, which split and closed the way a wound might form and heal. The thought crossed her that it might have been her blood that had done that, her due, but maybe the door was alive enough on its own. She leapt behind it and countered Tom's frenzied curses.

"Stop!" she screamed.

A green flash of light.

Stubborn, stupid, murderous bastard.

"I could have killed you!" Her voice was rough. She hadn't spoken aloud in days.

"You should have," Tom hissed, and another spell struck the door. Her back felt like it had kissed flames.

"I could change my mind," she spat, "or you could swallow your pride and let me explain why I didn't."

One of the sparks like knives dug into her spine. She fell to her knees at the impact.

"Go on, then," he said, turning the corner.

Amoret still held out her wand, and Tom's fury was practically tangible. "Neither of us can," she panted. "You told me as much. You know it's true otherwise you wouldn't be hesitating."

He said nothing, his face snarled and his chest heaving. She stood warily. They orbited each other in violent quiet, the same way they had in the woods nine days ago. Amoret didn't expect that to change anytime soon.

"I could have left you here and brought you back to the Ministry in my pocket. You can't be stupid enough to think I would turn you back unless I had no choice."

His lips turned, and it could have been a smile or a grimace for all Amoret knew. "You can't figure it out, can you?"

She clenched her teeth. "Can you?"

"With time."

"I don't have time."

"You don't have patience."

"No," she said spitefully, "I don't have time. You don't care about anyone so you wouldn't understand that, but there are—there are things I have to get back to."

"So you need me. I told you you would."

"And you need me," she protested. "That doesn't make us friends."

"I never wanted us to be friends."

She ignored that. "We have one thing in common, Riddle, and that's getting out of here. Don't push me."

"Well, Banks, I'm curious to hear to your solution."

"I'm beginning to reconsider it."

"Are you?" He was smiling again, licking the blood off his teeth. "What, are you thinking of taking the chance and killing me instead? Are you going to best me in my own soul? You're smarter than that."

Lightning struck, and Amoret glared at a new red blaze in the sea of trees. A string of smoke followed, and Tom looked too proud for the state he was in.

"That'll scar," she said. "I wonder if I'd prefer you dying slow from an infection or withering away at the hands of the Dementors. Maybe I'd let Nadya have you. So many options."

"Is this your attempt at antagonizing me? You do a poor job, but then again, I didn't have all the time with you that I wanted. I suppose we have plenty of that now."

"If it should impress you, I'll happily take an eye out next time. I don't suppose you need both."

His eyes trailed over her like an artist over his unfinished work. "You found my coat."

Amoret blinked. How funny that that would be the thing to take her off guard. She shook off the coat and threw it at him. Tom caught it in his spare arm.

"I need your library."

He glanced up from where he was dissecting his coat like it might have been cursed. "My library or my information?"

"I'd much rather read it myself than hear your interpretation."

"So you propose a truce?"

"I didn't say that."

"But it is what you mean."

She watched the forest again, and the fire was gone. "That's hardly necessary, don't you think? We have a shared interest. The truce goes unspoken, if you haven't been so rotted by your own deceit that you assume I'll turn on you like you would."

"I like to make my vows formally, Amoret. You could say I'm traditional that way."

"I'd say you're a liar, actually."

"I'd say the same about you." He held out his hand. "I think there's more you'll be willing to do to get home than you yet realize."

She took it with reluctance. "Say what you want, if it's so damn important to you."

"An alliance," he said, "until we've figured out how to get back. You're held to no obligation of mine after that, and I am held to none of yours."

When this is over, he meant, you're as good as dead. Unless she killed him first. Unless she had any semblance of sanity left when this was over and made him into a pretty little coin for the Ministry to keep.

"Fine. Likewise."

He shook his head. "I'll ask you to vow, Amoret," he said sternly, "to keep your word to me, as my ally, to not Transfigure me, curse me, scar me, kill me, or otherwise harm me until our deal is done. As I vow, as your ally, the very same—no loopholes, no riddles, no hidden text in the margins." The flowers clung to Amoret's heels. "Do you vow it?"

Amoret knew all the voices she should have heard would be damning her now. "I do."

Tom's eyes refused to part from hers. "As do I."

Until the deal was done.

She went to wrench free of his grasp but he held tighter and leaned close. The details of what she had done to him were gruesome up close. "Keep your other vow when ours is broken. Cut deeper, take the eye, and don't feel so sorry for it. Ruthlessness is honed, Amoret, and I know you're a quick learner."

He stepped through the door and disappeared into the castle, and Amoret shivered without his coat.

[ . . . ]  laughing out loud Rofl actually btw. / word count. 3088

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