PAPER CONFINES.
21. / The Martyr's Knot

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Amoret laid buried in her covers wondering how she was going to get out of the mess she'd made. It was two days after a second lesson with Tom and her skull thrummed with the headache that came every time she thought of it. Had she needed legilimency? Enough to gamble the bridge between healing magic and transfiguration by placing it Tom's hands? It was a gamble reliant on that information never leaving this place, and that would never happen while he could build castles from rubble and she still felt sick after a trip from Ravenclaw Tower to the dungeons. Yes, she answered every time. To escape his soul, she needed his mind.

Yes, and she wanted it too.

She climbed out of bed with haste and dressed in her usual trousers and button-down, which she had cinched with a quick charm to fit her better. She still found them awkward on her, and disliked how the men's fit of the shirt broadened her shoulders, but imagined Nadya dusting them off and saying with a grin, "if they're made for men, why do they suit us so well?" And that was the end of that.

She found the Room of Requirement and it spited her with its familiar black lacquer. After all these weeks, it no longer hid in the camouflage of the wall, but it was as sentient as an animal and equally as untamed. To all but its domesticator, to whom its loyalty remained unchanging.

"Can we be done with it?" Amoret asked. "Or is this a game you never bore of?"

The door changed with a flash, thorns whipping forth like an angry mouth to catch her wrist. Amoret shrieked as the teeth sunk down more viciously then they ever had before.

An animal indeed.

No games, hissed the roses as they filled with blood. No quips from your forked tongue. No games, none.

Amoret stared, breaths laborious as she struggled to fend the shock off her face and compose herself. Even then, the urge to press was an easy one. Her forked tongue? she would have said, when the Lord of serpents crossed their foothold every morning and every night? Priceless. And annoying.

She instead walked into the meadow without another word.

It was as cold as it had always looked now, like it knew December was almost upon them, even though it was an invention of the Room, even though it needed not abide any laws but its own. Wet earth had turned white around the big oak tree just to the shore of the lake. The water whipped against the slowly spreading ice like the rim of a glass, and made a sound like a mark tree on each percussive strike. It was as if winter had started to grow from the oak's roots into the veins of the meadow.

Amoret made her way down the hill and sat at the frozen trunk of the tree, contented by what was all but music splashing under the silence. It almost filled her disappointment as the thorn-wound on her arm stopped bleeding and she felt nothing about her awareness change.

She hadn't seen a vision of Tom's childhood since the first, and with his easy dismissal of every shove she made for the bed of his mind during their lessons, she was antsy to see the things he was hiding. A prick of the thorn-and-rose door was worth his memories, but they wouldn't come, and Amoret was beaten. It could have come only from pure goodness. It could have come only from self-preservation. But Amoret was patterned for loss as of late, and she was beyond pretending this particular aspiration wasn't stained with another sort of wanting.

She glanced up as the shadow of a bird cast over the first fall of snow. Her gasp caught one of the snowflakes. If she'd thought the glowing starlings looked like angels, then the wide, white wingspan of her House's symbol was Mary's own. An eagle.

It dove for the lake and a spurt of blood flew from the decollated neck of a fish when it rose again. In the blur of holy white, Amoret was startled by something so primitive as an animal's snapping jaws, but then she remembered how the flies had vanished into their own light, like the boy in the woods and the spider eggs, and could not comprehend where the bloodshed came from. Her eyes darted to her own hot wound, surrounded by four more puckered scars from the last times she paid her dues—a wild guess, but it made sense—and felt ashamed. It prickled her whole body like guilt in a red-handed child. You have no idea what you owe, the roses had told her. You have stolen more than we could ever take back. Was her flesh their flesh? Was her blood their blood?

Amoret's fingers lurched for the pocket where she kept her wand, and wrapped around the pommel of Tom's dagger instead. As if something was going to jump out at her and demand another payment. She had no time to consider why her instinct was to cut it back.

"Do you insist on coming here because of that door?"

She spun around. Tom was at the bottom of the hill, crossing the path and the snowdrops to where Amoret sat at the stirring lake with her heart halfway out of her chest. A month to the date they'd arrived and she still hadn't grown used to the way he appeared like a spectre wherever he liked.

"The door?" she asked with a heavy breath.

"The one that demands your blood upon entry."

She frowned. "Did I tell you that and forget or are you looking in my mind all the time now?"

He pointed to her arm. "No, you're bleeding."

She was losing her wits. Her eyes scanned the sky for the eagle but it had vanished.

"And the roses like to tell me things."

"Tell you things," she repeated, rolling down her sleeves.

"Unfortunately, yes—Amoret visited again, Amoret fallen down the hill, Amoret the fool, pricked by our thorns, my Lord. They don't like you very much."

My Lord. Amoret thought of his conversation with Dolohov and cast her gaze away. "Why would I come back because of the door?"

He sat at the angel oak tree and leaned back. "Because it shows you parts of my mind you're not yet able to see on your own."

"You're always so presumptuous."

"You always evade my answers when you don't like them."

Fuck him.

"Okay—singular rule of my lessons is you not being intolerable the whole time, otherwise I won't be a forgiving teacher. Better yet, I won't teach at all."

He looked terribly like he wanted to protest, but probably decided whatever he had to say would fit Amoret's criteria of being intolerable, and nodded instead. "Fine."

She took the dagger to the root of a snowdrop and sliced it in two.

Her very temporary hope was that practicing on plants would be different enough from flesh and blood to divert Tom's attention from the magic he really wanted to learn. Considering that ugly scar on his face, it would, in theory, take weeks for him to master binding so complex.

"Here," she said, dropping both halves at his feet.

He leaned forward and picked them up with a captious glance in her direction. "Quite the instruction."

"My rule, Tom."

"Yes, of course. My apologies." He managed to say it without sounding remotely sorry.

"Do you remember our Transfiguration lessons before all this?" Amoret felt tempted not to palliate this and call it the betrayal it was, but dared to extend the courtesy of being civil for the sake of avoiding another duel.

"I do."

"You asked me to mend your book of rhymes and I did. You called it brilliant. Did you mean it?"

The answer came in a lazy finger tapping at his temple, where his chin rested on a knee-propped palm. Amoret knew what he meant, and with slight apprehension, stepped clumsily into the door Tom left open in his mind. His yes was instantaneous, and it swam in a sense of honesty she felt as if it were her own.

Why tell me here? she asked.

Because you wouldn't believe me if I told you anywhere else.

"Good. I assume that means it's not something you've ever done."

His posture stiffened. "It's a very uncommon form of transfiguration, not many can ach—"

"But I can."

Amoret was pushing him, she knew, but it was too gratifying not to when she'd felt so far behind him lately. His bitten tongue doused her in neglected pride.

"I want you to mend the flower as I mended the book," she said. "I imagine it's a good first step before moving on to anything more advanced."

"And how would you encourage that?" he asked with what looked like great pain.

"Make the magic your own."

And great pain was quickly a searing recognition at his own words thrown back at him. Amoret imagined he wasn't feeling as inspired as she had when he'd said them to her.

"Where do you draw from?" she continued. She had sworn a vow, after all. "What source makes you the strongest—what brings you results?"

"You'd call me intolerable if I answered truthfully."

"Answer anyway, just this once."

He sank into indifference again. "If I'm presented with enough information, Amoret, I admit few concepts have the ability to stump me. I learn and I do. My strength seems to be a well that draws from itself—power has always been self-fulfilling to me."

It was exactly the unencumbered arrogance she should have expected of him. He made it sound powerful, but if she thought about it it really just seemed lonely. To be both a source and a result was to never need anyone else.

"So why not this?" Amoret asked, swallowing her distaste for his answer. "I assume you've tried, and I've seen you in Transfiguration; you're as good as me. Good enough to teach me."

"You hardly need to know something to teach it. Kolgrim's Charms class is evidence of that."

"Riddle—"

"You were taught by your own emotional drive, Amoret. Endless desire for endless approval. I inspired it because I knew it was your source, and you knew it too, the moment you chose to turn that book into your sister's violin before anything else; the moment you sought out an impossible muggle science within a form of magic practically untouched to save your mother's life."

"As you studied a form of magic even more alien, more corrupt than any other, to save your own. One day. Forever."

"Yes, I did."

His own source and result.

"So then draw from power if you want. Heal for fear of dying." She sounded slightly frustrated. "Or, mend because it's the one thing you don't know how to do and I do. Do it because you have no natural gift in this. You have to learn for once to draw from something other than yourself, the bruise to your ego should motivate you enough to get it done."

Tom seized the halves of the snowdrop and had them levitate to do his work, but Amoret quickly grabbed them and put them back in his hands, a look on her face like this was the most disbelieving thing she'd ever seen him do. Was he so far-removed from it all? Could he not even imagine the simple, human wonder of holding something in your hands just to feel it on your skin?

"Just—" she couldn't fathom trying to explain something that was meant to be naturally known— "Just hold it. It'll be easier."

He looked almost amused at her display. "What happened to making the magic my own?"

Amoret scoffed, taking her hands from his with a smack. "You thought of the stupid words, I only said them back."

"You liked when I said them."

"That tends to happen when someone inspects you obsessively to learn your every weakness," she said, exhausted. "All your words were made to win me. I have no shame in it. But you should."

"Hm," he breathed, a look of consideration smoothing over him. Amoret wondered as his lack of response lingered if there was something he wanted to say but remembered not to be intolerable, so he instead focused back on the snowdrop and closed his eyes.

His jaw flexed as the flower wedged together, messy as a child might string daisies to make a crown. Amoret observed every minute detail of his work. It was a rare thing to witness Tom Riddle fail at anything, and she could tell he was. By the furrow of his scarred brow to his fine one, it seemed like he knew it too. But his eyes stayed shut, even as the snowdrop became one again. It would appear simple and done to any witch or wizard older than eleven if he'd done it with a mending charm like Reparo, but to do it with transfiguration was a feat in and of itself. It didn't surprise Amoret that Tom could. Still, she could see the two ends fighting their union as though they hadn't been a singular force moments ago, joined in the earth—as if it wasn't inevitable to join again. A bead of sweat formed on Tom's brow. The snowdrop recoiled; its healer had no care but his own, and so as the stem formed tighter it became a tangled knot, and with a sharp nod of Tom's head as his embittered eyes shot open, it snapped apart again.

Amoret said nothing.

Tom looked like he wanted to murder the flower. It appeared already dead.

The meadow—the Room of Requirement, she had to remind herself—heard his wish and blew the twisted, broken halves from his palm to wherever the wind led them. They disappeared in the accelerating fall of snow, like Amoret's eagle and fish, and all the other animal things in this sentient place.

"A worthy exchange," she said then of their vow. "I think the only thing worse than being bad at something is having my only witness be you."

Tom couldn't smile. His ego bruise was swollen and stuck in his throat, but he offered her a glance that seemed to understand, and she'd expected far less.

She stood, her arm stinging as snow wet her wound. "Give it time."

And he laughed, sitting neither stiff nor arrogantly perched by palm and chin, and somehow he still wasn't really smiling. "Time." He pondered it. "All right. We have no shortage of it."

━━━━━

Nadya was in the nook of Slughorn's cabinets again, wrestling delicately with a lidded salver upon which rested the soft, white brain of a sloth. This, she was sure would be noticed going missing. There was only one other, and if Nadya remembered her curriculum right, the two would be used and divided among both N.E.W.T classes for the final project before winter break. She hadn't decided yet whether it was safe to rely on Slughorn's generous appraisal of her character or if planning some sort of framing would be necessary.

It was a worry for December. For now, she slipped the brain into a paper bag like she used to carry her lunches to school in, and thought of the precise way her father used to fold the open end shut and seal it with wax like a letter of great importance. In fairness, when she was a girl, everything her father did seemed of great importance.

She doubted he'd be pleased to see her now.

Sentimentality held her by the throat and she resented it. She was no child, she had to remind herself. She was not running home crying to her mother that she'd cut a boy, sitting alone in her room and alone in the world for the next seven months until her letter came to tell her there were others like her. How was she to know the ones she was supposed to escape to would be exactly like the ones she'd run from?

She tucked the crumpled paper into her own bag and thought no more of it.

"Is this a plan or a suicide mission, Sidhu?"

She spun, her heart faster than her head. Claude was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed. "Draught of Living Death? Is that really the best you could come up with?"

Nadya soured upon finding her breath again. "You have no idea what I'm making."

"A sloth brain and sopophorous beans? I don't know what else it could be."

"I expect you and Colette are coming up with something just as efficient."

"We're getting there. You would know if you weren't so busy playing hide and seek with Rosier and Mulciber."

She crossed her arms too, and then he stopped, stepping into the room and shutting the door behind him.

"You know," he mused, "you've always been a mystery to me. Oh—don't look so flattered, I don't ponder you often. It's just been strange getting to know you after hearing so much behind your back."

"Lots of people talk about me, Ozanich, you'll have to be more specific about what you've heard."

He shook his head. "I don't pay attention to the whispers of people to whom you're as much of a mystery as you are to me. Well—you're less now, anyway, but my point is I don't like gossip. I'm much more interested in the truth."

"You're so considerate, I'm starting to think you were sorted wrong."

"You're so much smarter than you act, I'm starting to think you were too."

Nadya sunk her teeth into her tongue. It might have been an unfortunate childhood reflex to want to bite him instead. She'd upgraded years ago to bones and fists and letter-openers and hairpins and crystal obelisks and a crucifix, just once, and—not teeth. "I'd love if you could get to your point so I can go do literally anything other than this."

"My point is you're not what they think you are." He pulled a plum from his bag and rinsed it in his hands and Nadya wondered if he shared her habit of purporting to be more nonchalant than he actually was, and if maybe that meant there was an angle she could find to chip away at some weakness similar enough to her own. And if that were true, it might have been worth considering her annoyance toward him was really because of a deeper recognition that they were sculpted from the same clay. Good lord. She was pathologizing acquaintances again. That was her favourite bad sign to ignore. "I don't know if you're what you think you are."

Oh, he was pathologizing too.

He took a bite of the plum, chewed, swallowed, before continuing. "You know, my mum always told me you can judge a person by the company they keep."

Nadya breathed a lengthy, knowing sigh. So that was where this was going. It was even more boring than she'd expected. "Ah, I see. Underneath my cold exterior there is, somewhere, someone as kind as Colette and as remarkable as Banks, and if I only opened up I could accept them as virtues. Is that the speech you're about to give me? I hope I didn't ruin it."

"Actually I was going to say you're the first person I've met to make me reconsider." Nadya clenched her teeth, and Claude snorted. "No, I'm joking. That was exactly what I was going to say, but I didn't prepare a speech. Sorry."

"You make a lot of jokes, Ozanich."

"Yes. It's a coping mechanism."

"You're really good at them."

"You're really good at being sarcastic."

"Right," Nadya fastened her bag to leave. "I appreciate your analysis," (Projection), "but I'm busy."

He placed the plum on a desk and leaned on it. There was a sorry second where not an iota of humour was present on his face. He looked finished with her but not angry. Like he wanted to... turn and walk away? Abandon a lost cause? Tell her to choose her battles wisely? Nadya hated that he had the sort of face that made her actually feel the weight of a look like that, and she hated even more that he didn't seem like the sort of person to even believe in lost causes, and she didn't want to be the exception to that rule. "You might be hard to know," he said, "but I've seen you in Potions enough to know you can do better than a Draught of Living Death. What sort of plan is that, really? Because I don't think you honestly believe it's a good one."

She went to protest.

He raised a brow. "What'll you do, kill them? Put them in a sleep like petrification? In the first case, you'd be arrested before you could get a page into Tom Riddle's book, and in the second you'd be arrested the moment they woke up."

"So what!"

"So are you trying to save Banks or is this an excuse to martyr yourself and get back at them at the same time?"

Nadya paused; irritated because yes, damn him, maybe it was. Maybe she wanted revenge so desperately that whatever the cost was had stopped mattering to her.

"My old school was owned by Catholic missionaries," she said after a while, "Martyrdom might as well have been an accredited class."

Claude's eyes found his shoes as he smiled. "Well, forget everything they taught you. I'm not an expert in religion but I don't think you're God."

"Jesus," she amended.

"Of course."

"I could be God though. I was never cast in the Nativity plays, so I've no role I'm particularly attached to."

"Mm, it would be embarrassing to be God in Azkaban though. That is suited to Jesus. Very martyr-y."

Nadya gave a dry laugh, and then the moment had settled.

"I'm sorry for the other day."

She must have looked confused, because Claude appeared more eager than she'd ever seen him to explain. "I got frustrated. I was up all night transcribing and I knew you were up to something too, and I wanted you to admit it. To her, especially." Nadya felt like a fool for the way she tensed at the mere mention of Colette. "We are working on something, you know. A good plan, too; you should be a part of it."

"I told her I'd come if she needed my help," she dismissed, but felt the wrongness of it.

"It's an insult to make her ask, Sidhu, it's the most obvious thing. Of course she needs you."

My help, Nadya wanted to spit back, because the truth was a detonating bomb. My help, not me. She fumbled with the wires. Her eyes went to Slughorn's cabinet and back to Claude, her face  as resolute as her next words. "I'm getting Banks back. I'm getting the book—whatever that means, whatever I have to do to get it."

There was more she wanted to say. Some of it she wanted to scream: she was not going to wait and she was not going to stop, not while every day that passed the chances of her still being alive felt like they'd been severed in two, and that she thought of her being the body found instead of the one to find it. She thought of her dead too often when she needed her to live. She need her to live.

Claude nodded. Nadya didn't think he could ever understand. "We're getting her back. But we're going to do it right."

"What is right? Listening to the bug in Dippet's office all night waiting for Spyros Yves to show up with news? Waiting for a perfect moment that's never going to come? What is it? What is it that I'm doing wrong?"

"I don't think I'm the person you need to be asking that."

She hated the involuntary breath that rose in her lungs. Hated that she knew he could see it on her face. Another childhood reflex: before the violence, when she was still allowed to be a girl and not a weapon—to shrink and shake her head and whine, no. No, for no good reason other than it was too hard, and she didn't want to.

"She's damn smart, Colette," Claude said, bridging the silence, "And just because she's kind enough to give you space doesn't mean she can't see what you're doing to yourself. I mean, don't you think you've had enough now? Space? You two have had more space than I can see through a telescope."

Nadya chewed her lip and pushed her shoulders back, tried to stand taller and be big. Like he didn't see through her regardless. Where an X-ray saw deformities and broken bones, Claude Ozanich apparently saw truth. That made him exceptionally easy to dislike.

"Please," he whined, "I can only console her for so long before I run out of speeches."

"I thought you didn't prepare speeches."

"No, I didn't prepare one for you."

Nadya's head fell in her hands. She groaned. She wanted to cry. She did neither.

She collected herself and swept past Claude.

"Is that a yes?" he sang as she approached the door.

She turned the handle and didn't glance back. "Yes."

[ . . . ] wish i could gaslight the way tom riddle does so i could convince everyone i didn't take two months to update after promising to post regularly. just PRETEND... also! i swear the lack of colette povs is not on purpose. i wrote half of hers with the intention of making this chapter all three povs and making it 6k words but it started getting ahead of me and i liked this ending so i'm putting it in her own chapter instead. will be worth it i promise /  word count. 4216

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