PAPER CONFINES.
31. / Divinity and Damnation

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       Myrtle laid there like a shot doe.

The forest, full of new life, chirred on birdsong and wind, and the needles blew sundried from the branches. Light clung to the gust. The smell was still sweet despite the corpse. The corpse was still alive despite the dying.

Amoret tried to reason, thinking of the big white star that was the edge of the world, how it had waned and spluttered over the months; how the animals had grown, sound and orbit at last filling a once-empty, stagnant world. She reasoned it made sense to come to this—a bigger body, a greater life—and reasoned very little else because there was nothing reasonable about it at all. Her mind went flat and static as she looked upon the body.

"Oh my God," she whispered dumbly, and her hands went up to her face, cupped over her mouth like a prayer. "Oh my God." The words were muffled.

Tom, recovered sooner, inched toward the body like a hunter assuring his bullet had aimed true. It was too true a comparison—he had killed her. Perhaps in the wake of his failure he would do it again.

Amoret was nauseated out of her shock.

"Don't touch her," she gasped, shoving him aside. It did very little in her weakened state, barely knocking him back a step, but it turned his attention toward her, and with a scowl and narrowed eyes he at least stopped moving.

"What do you imagine I'm going to do?"

"You killed her! You—am I the mad one here? Of the two of us, am I fucking mad?"

He looked flatly between her and the body. "And you'll carry her back to the castle, too, will you?"

"I'll do anything if it keeps her away from you," she spat.

Amoret knelt shakily at Myrtle's side, the faint glow of white skin vanishing at the sharper contours of her face like the bones had cut the light away. The stringy black hair blew from her eyes, and Amoret put a hand carefully to her cheek. She was expecting the cold feeling of death, and had felt it before, but the simultaneous burn was severe, rendering her arm sluggish, frozen and aflame at once. Amoret yelped and stumbled backward off her knees.

Arms came down behind her to steady her fall.

"Don't do that." Amoret wobbled onto her feet and shoved him again. "How is she here?"

He took her charges with ease, capturing her balled fists in his hands. "I don't know, Amoret."

"Either it means she's still alive, or we're both dead."

"Don't be impulsive."

"Don't be fucking calm!"

His fingers twitched over hers and she wrenched them free.

"You killed her," Amoret said again, this time with a quiet sort of shock, like she'd forgotten it after all this time. "Feel something about it," she pleaded, "Shout, or cry, or curse a god you don't believe in. Be proud. Be honest about it, at least. Aren't you proud, Tom? Look at her. It's not a silver platter but she was delivered to you nonetheless."

He did. Myrtle was a slump of gangly limbs and bruises, his metaphorical bullet in her chest, and there was only the tell of his lips dipping at one corner to indicate he had any thoughts on the sight at all. Then he looked to Amoret. Stiff upper lip. Even eyes. "You know what I am, Amoret; don't let your sentiment usurp your sense." It was an awful kindness, a monster warning that it was a monster. He said it again to be certain. "You know what I am."

There was the familiar snag of grief in her chest, caught on a rib on its plummet down. It disarmed her. She had no haughty return, and nothing true to say that she wanted him to know, so she stood shivering with the cold sweat of her fever and the murmur of the invigoration draught in her blood, and faced Myrtle again.

She cleared her throat. "If you're so composed, give me an explanation."

"An explanation for something like this takes—"

"Time?" Amoret laughed despairingly, gripping her head in her hands, fingers gliding up the temples and burying themselves in curls. "I'm forbidding that word. I never want to hear it again."

She could see Tom turn to her in her periphery. "Ages, then. A while. Days. Weeks. Longer. Seasons, skies, eternity. Call it what you like; it passes either way."

"Don't—" She coughed— "philosophize. I'm not feeling forgiving."

"I might be able to understand sooner if you'd let me near her."

She spun to him so quickly it made her dizzy. "No."

His eyes flitted off in frustration and returned a grade sharper. "You're an inventor, are you not? You practice healing? And yet you'd neglect the importance of variables because you distrust me that badly? We need to know if I react to her the same way you do."

She stared at him and then the body. It might have been her wide-eyed gaze or the fact that she couldn't seem to blink, and it might have been that she was five paces off the bridge to insanity, but she could feel the tears start to well, furious, for too many reasons to count. Unfathomably, she nodded. There was an insistence in it. She was worried she'd change her mind—such a fickle thing it was now.

Tom understood, and she hated him more for it. He should have been disturbed by her agreement for how unlike her it was.

He stepped toward Myrtle and knelt down, pressing a palm to her cheek. Amoret forced herself to watch even as her skin crawled, and she was glad she did. Tom didn't flinch or fall back, but he was frowning.

A million assumptions enclaved her mind, like a flower wreath swarmed by wasps, a boy swallowed by summer leaves. She shredded them with all the other useless thoughts she had these days, but— "Does it hurt?"

"No."

Then why was he frowning?

He stood up. Relief softened her strained nerves until she saw the look in his eyes.

She was startled by the newfound fear in them. Tom was never afraid. He turned it into anger, and anger into purpose.

"What?"

"We should bring her to the hospital wing."

"What is it?" she insisted, "Tell me."

"You're the healer." He scowled, and she blinked at the confirmation of his fear as it slipped. He channelled anger once again. It terrified her how weak it was. "She needs attention. There's nothing to be done here."

Amoret nodded with more reluctance. Steady, thoughtful, herself, in a flash of lucidity that made her sigh. Her body still warred with her mind and the draught's quick thrum; wit could only triumph over ailment for so long. She'd watched her mother stumble through her sickness for two years, only forty-six and contending the lethargic terror that came with feeling your body die. There were some things that tried harder than others to strip personhood from those with so much of it, some conditions that were crueler than most: timesickness, cancers, prolonged torture, isolation—and Amoret thought the last two might have been the same. They ate away, slow and precise in their slaughter.

Amoret wondered what effect death had on a person who escaped it. If a horcrux had done this to her, what had it done to the subject of its power?

Tom raised her at a distance by the end of his wand. Her black hair spilled down like thick, torn seams of a curtain, body a slender arc where her arms hung limply at her sides. Amoret walked beside her, still shivering in the heat as they made their way up the hill.

Sunrise rose in a purple fog and burst across the horizon. The stars were new. Amoret didn't recognize them.

When they arrived at the hospital wing, the sky was blue, and Tom lowered Myrtle into one of the unused beds.

Amoret's was in a state of disarray from how she'd stormed off earlier, and she was distracted momentarily by both her messy quilt and Madame Codde's marauded cupboard. Fluid silver spilled like unicorn blood on the stone, bottles were shoved to one side of the shelves, and something trickled down the side where a tealish draught had cracked down the middle.

It bewildered her to think of Tom in such distress.

Then she returned. She cleared her mind. She imagined the composure of a graduated mediwitch, and made it hers. She thought of Tom's Occluding, and hoped she could take it like a thief rather than a pupil.

"Check her breathing again," she instructed, rummaging through the mess of potions Tom had left behind.

"I thought you didn't want me to touch her."

"Tom."

A few seconds later, he said, "It's shallow."

Amoret pulled a bottle from the shelf and unstoppered it. It smelled strongly of lavender. She marched to the side of Myrtle's and administered it through a syringe so not to wake her. Even standing close made her feel uneasy.

"What is that?" Tom asked, but his brows furrowed quickly with recognition.

Anyone who'd been in the hospital wing overnight knew the scent and shade of Dreamless Sleep.

"I don't think she'd want to dream," Amoret said tonelessly, "do you?"

He looked at her with the new tension of someone who had just been accused of something untoward. It made her feel better.

Amoret pulled a chair beside Myrtle and sat. She watched her for a long time in silent contemplation, watching her breathing stabilize. It wasn't a symptom of dark magic then, or even death. She had been in shock.

"How did you do it?" Amoret asked, "With the basilisk? She has no wounds and the others were petrified." She tried to remain clinical but it was strange. Strange, imagining Tom behind such a mythical reckoning. Centuries-long and symbolic, she wondered whether the kill had been gentle somehow. Quick. Sleep-like.

It was easier to picture Ruby.

Amoret had seen war and understood its grotesque animality, the blood and dirt and politics. She had seen Billy's rabbit slit and hung in Tom's memory, her father's pale, clammy corpse in the sunrise, bullets through soldiers. Ruby was young, and the gore was novel; that had made her different, but not incomprehensible.

Blood was blood. Myrtle was something else.

"Her eyes," Tom answered.

"Like the Gorgon," Amoret whispered, stunned. It wasn't her father's mythos but it was familiar.

"I didn't understand with the others," he added, brows furrowed like the matter still stumped him. "She roamed as she liked once she was freed. She spoke to me in the walls. And she begged to kill. I was curious—I did not wish to deny her."

He was clinical too. It didn't appear to require nearly as much effort as it took her.

"But students were being petrified for over a month, not killed. Why?"

"Reflections, I'd assume. Indirect contact; what luck."

"Bad luck for you," Amoret said, gaze dropping to Myrtle and back. "You couldn't get the job done, even now."

His jaw flexed slightly.

She enjoyed him too much for her own good. "What is your hypothesis, then? I saw your face before. I know you know something, or think it at least. You're always eager to tell me when you do, so why haven't you?"

"...It's unsavoury."

"Unsavoury," she laughed.

"You infuriate me."

Amoret thought, of all the times she'd done so, this one was particularly abrupt. It gave her pause for a moment. "I'm aware."

That was a stiffer response than it was witty. She rolled her shoulders, but the tension was summoned immediately back at the gravity of Tom's expression.

"I was right," he said finally. Rarely did he say anything that sounded like he had to force it out, and I was right was the last thing Amoret expected to hear in that tone.

"Perpetually. What about, this time?"

"I was right that death feeds the horcrux," he explained, "but you were right that the light at the end of the forest is made of life."

She frowned. "How could both be true?"

"The law of cycles and opposites."

"Tom, that's—"

"You kept track of the insects, and I told you the flies made the starlings. The starlings made the fish; the fish made your eagle. Only the cycle didn't start with the flies; it couldn't have. This... place was empty before we came. It was likely born of our arrival."

"So...?"

"So where did Myrtle come from? She appeared at the border of the forest, stumbling very conveniently from the direction of the light. It blew away in the wind, it had been stuck to her. Or," he said gravely, "It was made of her."

Amoret considered it and swallowed. Her heartbeat rose like a drum, under the rap of knuckles to the pounding of fists. Sometimes the body knew something terrible was going to happen before it happened.

"All right. So the light was her. Why did she appear now? How? Why the animals first?"

"Because she couldn't have come from nothing—everything feeds, everything eats. The life accumulated and grew, but only because it had something to take from."

Something had grown hollow inside her over the months, so slow she'd had no reason to notice it—not like the tallied days or the insects. Now the hollow swelled, empty pressure bursting to a stop.

Tom's gaze was vivid across the bed. She blamed it on the potion; she could see every midnight in his eyes.

"It's you, Amoret," he said, as gently as a thing like that could be said. "The death forging life is yours."

The world went quiet, cotton-thick in her ears. Tom said something else but there was only the shape of a riddle left under her pillow that she'd forgotten last October. She forgot the rhyme of it, but the words were there: I am the cage from which you cannot be free.

Amoret shook her head. "No."

"Your sickness worsens the more alive the horcrux becomes. You can't touch Myrtle without hurting while I can, the meadow demands a cost upon your entry but not mine, your magic—"

"Stop it."

"Amoret—"

"No." She stood up, weak-kneed, the sterile scent of the hospital suddenly too strong, too obviously a place where people went to die.

Tom muttered something in Myrtle's direction before following, longer-limbed and steadier in all ways besides. He stopped Amoret before she could start. All it did was prove him right, and she went angrily to move past him but he took her hands again and then she was spinning—a big shadow enveloping her until her dizziness was nausea. It was black as night. Starless. She wrapped her arms around Tom to stay standing. The spinning stopped.

They were in Nadya's dormitory.

The fish, made of Amoret, swam in the lake beyond the window. She remembered the eagle's beak dripping with their blood (her blood?) and stumbled backwards to Nadya's bed. Amoret never bothered to tidy anymore. She landed in a heap of blankets.

Tom looked pleased not to have to ask her to sit.

"You—we just Apparated."

"I've been practicing."

That was almost surprising enough to distract her.

"When?" she gasped, squeezing her eyes shut, bunching the blankets in her fists. Her stomach was churning.

"You spend half your time sleeping, Amoret."

"You said I was in no state to fly," she said weakly, and her throbbing head fell in her hands. Her thoughts were askew. Nothing made sense. "I'm not dying."

Tom paused. He sat on the chest at the foot of the bed and responded only to one half of what she said. "You're in no state for anything."

"I'm not dying," she repeated.

"Maybe not. Something is trying to kill you, though."

She practically sobbed, but her eyes were dry. "Why? What?"

"It must be the horcrux. Something in the ritual was left unfinished—I imagine it blames you."

He spoke of it like a living thing, but then, they were here, weren't they? The horcrux held room for spite as much as it held room for love.

"I didn't do anything."

"You grabbed my diary that night in the lavatory; you intended to take it from me. But you said it yourself, you didn't know what it was that you took."

Amoret was panting now. She stared at the ceiling and tried to focus on something that would keep her calm. The walls were etched in tallies and the reminders of Nadya were only reminders of what she was losing. There was no sky in the dungeons, and what if there was? Not even the stars soothed her anymore. "I had to stop you."

"A noble pursuit. Only you weren't stopping me, you were stopping the ritual of the horcrux: untethered yet, still not realized by Myrtle's sacrifice. You took it and did not claim it. I assume it remains untethered, souls suspended."

"I don't understand."

"Such magic demands a cost, Amoret. You studied it, you should know. A life for eternal life."

"But you killed Myrtle! You touched the book at the same time I did!"

"I made it," he said obviously, "I wanted to protect it."

"You wanted to stop me."

"It seems that's being taken care of now."

Amoret tore her eyes from the ceiling and glared at him with wet, vicious eyes. "I'm not dying here."

"No," he said quietly, "I should hope not."

"How?" she cried. "What could you possibly know?"

"I don't know, Amoret," Tom hissed, "I assume, based on my understanding of an unascertained dark magic, that there is always a way out, debased and atypically forgiven as it may be to those less eager to dirty their hands. You'd have to abandon what's left of your righteousness, and if that's the case, I might as well put you out of your misery myself."

"You claimed to know me. You think I wouldn't?"

"You claimed to be unwilling to make a horcrux."

Amoret went as still as her body allowed, but the trembling never ceased.

"How else do you suppose to solve the problem of an incomplete sacrifice but to complete it?" he reviled. "Claim it. The remnants of Myrtle's life, the diary I attached my soul to. I may have made the horcrux but it calls to you."

"Placing your hand on a book doesn't grant ownership of someone's soul. Magic doesn't work that way; not even horcruxes."

"You refuse to hear the truth of it because you don't want to know it. Do you ever tire of doing that?"

"So what?" she shouted, "I-I claim the book as mine? I profess it to the skies?"

"You take your life back from the one who stole it."

He couldn't be suggesting what she thought he was.

Amoret recoiled. "You're wrong."

He scowled, and she could see the judgement in his eyes, how weak he thought she was. How it plagued him to watch her resist the ruthlessness he viewed as strength. "Life demands sacrifice."

"We haven't tried everything yet."

"Look at yourself, we don't have time to try everything."

"There's something else!" she exclaimed, "Even if I haven't figured it out yet. I will not use her life to keep mine."

"And your mother's? Would you do it for her? You were willing once, when you had no other options. Whatever illusory version of Myrtle exists here, it cannot undo death. She might be stuck somewhere between, her soul caught on a loose thread, but she's still gone. You would have it be for nothing?"

She had nothing to say. Her throat prickled. Tom sat closer. "Don't you see it now?" he asked plainly, "See how eternity delivered her to you. You were made for it, Amoret. Like I was."

Such extravagant theories professed like truths.

Maybe it was the exhaustion, maybe she couldn't fathom denying it now, but Amoret closed her eyes and let his hand come up to stop the tear that squeezed through her lashes.

The silence consumed them again, and in it Amoret heard the riddle's answer: a body. A body was the cage from which she could not escape.

"I wasn't good," she said to Tom, or the silence, or whatever god might have been listening.

Nothing answered.

"I wasn't."

Tom watched her with furrowed brows, like she'd finally shown him something he couldn't comprehend. She supposed her confession sounded like the inane babblings of a sick woman. She supposed it was. That didn't mean it wasn't true.

"I wasn't," she emphasized. "I was one of them. Or I wanted to be. I held the RRI meetings, I practically resurrected them after Reid left. I smiled at your friends even when I knew what they were, I was kind to them, I mocked Myrtle all the time... the day she died I did. I was never good, Tom, I just wasn't you."

"You're being thoughtless," he said, a dismissal.

"Don't do that. You pushed me here, you wanted me to feel this. You know what I am."

His glare was quick and bitter. "That's nothing. That's a fraction of who you are, and a fraction long forsaken. Don't insult me by reducing yourself; I called you my monster. Don't belittle the intention of my words."

It was a kindness revoked. She knew what he was, but she didn't have the first idea what had become of her.

"Fine." The lake swirled behind him. Tom's eyes glimmered like goldstones, blueish-black, a slate for stars. "You know what I am; I mean my words too, and I don't know the right ones for this. And why should I give them to you? You already have too much of me, and none of it that you deserve. But I like your pain. I like that I gave it to you." She paused with a hopeless, half-laughed breath. "It makes me feel sick. Physically sick, and not for the horcrux. It isn't like me—not like the bad I already knew about myself, at least. Mostly I'm trying to understand what it means to want to be a monster to you without being yours."

He watched her, expressionless, gaze flitting down—to what, she didn't dare think on—and then his fingers spread, spanning her cheek to fit around her ear.

"We speak so often of your disdain, Amoret. Have I ever told you it tires me?"

"Yes," she said on an inhale.

"Should I tell you again?"

"Yes. I'd like to ignore it again." She sounded congested, sniffly. She hadn't even really cried. She supposed all the tears were stuck somewhere with the rest of her.

"You'll die having an awful final conversation."

"If I spent my last breath telling you how much I despise you it wouldn't be a waste."

He smiled. It took her aback.

"What does it make me?" he asked, "If you're a monster to me. What am I?"

Mine, she hoped unthinkingly—and she had tended her grandmother's greenhouse in dry summers before, and knew what it was to take care of something because it was hers and she wanted it to be well; like mothers and daughters or children and pets. Amoret didn't want Tom to be hers like that. She wanted him to be hers like a ghost wanted to possess a house that had once belonged to them.

"I don't know," she said quietly, "What's a victim to its monster?"

After a while, he offered, "Something mortal."

Her mind was elsewhere. Flesh. Filaments. Bones. Human composition. Blood in cheeks and mouthfuls of air and lips—that was what he was looking at, wasn't it? Her mouth, bitten and mauve? Segments of mortality all the same. Hers and his. Perhaps their minds were in the same place then.

Amoret sighed, her fingers shaky as she slipped from Tom's grasp and slumped back on the bed. She wondered how long it would take to feel the sickness turn to rot, and then she really felt like her mother. "I don't know what I am anymore."

Tom nodded. "Live, Amoret," he said, "and let us find out."

[ . . . ]  basically what happened to amoret is like when your computer is updating and it warns you data will be lost if you interrupt the process and shut down but you hold down the power button and do it anyway. except the consequences are much worse. side note! this is maybe my least favourite chapter in a long time. maybe because it's the one i've had written since the start and my anticipation and expectations got ahead of me, but i feel like the characterization is a trainwreck. i tried rewriting it a few times... alas, this is the end result. i hope it worked more for you than it did for me 💔 / word count. 4037

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