PAPER CONFINES.
36. / Cassowary

✶

       Colette's hair was waist-long and brittle the summer she turned fifteen. It was three hundred and seventy-nine days since the bomb, her cake was blue and plummy, and the yard was infested with gnomes again. Evangeline and Ephriam, who Colette never called aunt and uncle, brought the cake out from the kitchen and served it to her in bed. She ate it and felt nothing.

That September she would go back to school, half-learned in English and two years forsaken.

Evangeline did Colette's hair in ribboned plaits that last morning, lightened by lemon juice and many afternoons in the yard. Her stomach felt equally knotted. She was perched on the velveteen edge of her great aunt's ottoman, variegated in the light and kaleidoscopes of a dozen rainbow suncatchers dangling from the curtain rod. The wallpaper, verdant and floral like most of the furniture, clung in a strange way, peeling where a plaster wall met a stone one. Names and heights were smudged at the archway. This was the bedroom Evangeline and Colette's mother grew up in, and remnants of better childhoods were ample.

She asked to take the Floo to London alone. Evangeline and Ephriam's reluctance flickered away in a green blink.

Colette didn't think she was ready to return to school, but she did think, with enduring emptiness, that she would never live again if she didn't try now.

Alone for the first thirty minutes of the train ride, she was eventually joined by wandering first years who appeared even more lost than she must have. They differed from her by chittering in excitement and pointing at the rolling plains and mountains of Scotland, gargantuan storm clouds forming in the peaks.

The gamekeeper at the train station seemed unsure of where to put her—fifteen and antithetically new—but decided on the carriages rather than the boats, and Colette remarked after a strained conversation drowned in rain, with invisible horses clopping in the mud, that Hogwarts was different from Beauxbatons in many more regards than she had once thought. It was beautiful, she would relent that; the castle's architecture spanned an array of towers that varied curiously in height and width, dusted in a fine glow that couldn't be attributed to the orange slots of candlelit windows. Flowers spattered the grounds, water cupped in the petals. It appeared, in the distance, a beacon of warmth in a foreign cold.

But Colette felt unchanged even inside. People whispered as she was sorted. Beads of rain clung to her hair and uniform. The walls were an old stone like her father's wine cellar or the house in Ottery St Catchpole.

She had expected the dull sting of the last two years would not unfurl at once—in truth, she expected it never would. The honest kindness of her new house, she had not, but even that was double-edged.

Bellefeuille had been a second home at Beauxbatons. It was Nathalie's house, it was Colette's music and jewellery and three years of Halloweens, it was where Faustine had taught her useless charms and shades of lipstick. She didn't want to learn anew. She didn't want to abandon anything else.

Her one soupçon of solace was the quidditch pitch. Smaller than the open arena that was the grounds of Beauxbatons, but space enough to fly and forget as she often had the last two summers, she took to it within a week of arriving. A boy named Alex told her that it was empty on Thursday afternoons, just after Defence Against the Dark Arts, and so she'd lugged her broomstick between classes to bring it down the hill as soon as the bell rang. It reminded her of nothing, flying; the only guilt was in the come down, when her feet touched solid ground and she was reminded again of who she walked without.

Better yet, the pitch did not stay empty.

Colette wondered at first if she was imagining the tiny figure in the stands, blurry through wind and squinting eyes as she circled the pitch, the swing and snap of her bat diverting her attention back to her bludger before she could decide. She didn't stay long to see once she was finished, and the details of the shape were impossible to make out from the ground. Colette ascertained the next Thursday by flying irregularly slowly and squinting even harder than usual that the figure was not hallucinatory or inanimate. It had thick, black, wind-blown hair veiling a face bowed over a book, and wore a dark coat over the Hogwarts uniform to further confuse her eyes.

She had made friends, she supposed, in five weeks. Alex was kind, and a boy in Ravenclaw named Claude had taken to sitting with her in Charms, but the emptiness was there, situated and still beneath every glimpse of something more.

Colette didn't want to make friends with the figure. She wanted it to go away.

The next Thursday, she planned somewhat of a speech, and ended up floating dumbly alongside the stands not saying any of it.

"Can I help you?" she—the figure—asked, hair fanned back by the burst of wind brought in by Colette's broom.

Her features were dark, her brows and lips full, her eyes a syrupy brown in the afternoon sunshower. She donned a green tie, which explained her lack of familiarity, and the overcoat she wore was expensively thick and perfectly black.

"I—" Colette was quite good at English for the time she'd been learning it, but she had been nervous enough to approach already and the girl's gaze was striking. "You are—you read?"

She stared through furrowed brows while Colette considered flying away. "No, I just stare at the shapes and hope for the best."

"Ah, no! The—I'm meaning to say you—"

"You're the French girl, right?" she interrupted, seeming to realize her struggle.

Colette nodded profusely.

"I didn't know you played quidditch."

"I did not know the students here... study where quidditch is played," she said carefully.

An eyebrow went up. "Are you asking me to leave?"

"No!"

She was, but that wasn't in her speech.

"What's your name?" the girl asked.

"Colette."

"Colette...?"

"Er—Chapdelaine?"

She smiled in equal parts inauthentic and amenable. "Okay, well, I hate to pull rank, Chapdelaine, but I was here first, in a way, and I for one don't mind sharing—which makes me the ameliorable one here."

Panic seized Colette in midair, her hands tight around the grip of the broom, lashes fluttering against her cheeks as she blinked quickly, and this—on occasion—was what her numbness dissolved to. When the catch broke loose and the pain seeped in, she came back again to the manor in Bordeaux. Maybe that was why every landing felt like crashing; all the ground was still on fire. All the earth felt spangled with smoke.

"Mais vous—you are not understanding," Colette protested, "I... I must have this."

The girl blinked, and in what must have been a reaction to Colette's visible panic, her eyes softened briefly. When they hardened again, it was with too much effort. She fiddled with her fingers as if contemplating something. "I can't study anywhere else."

"But—"

"Look, my house is shit. They're a bunch of pureblood arseholes and this is the only place they don't bother me. Maybe it's the only place they don't bother you, I don't know, but you got put with the nice ones, yeah? So you're... nice, right?"

Colette was still hovering, eyes wide, her mouth open with words she didn't have, and very slowly, she nodded again.

"Right. Perfect," the girl muttered, dismayed by her own outburst and stiffly flipping her book open again.

With a breeze that blew the dark hair back in the Slytherin girl's eyes, Colette took the cue to leave, her bludger wrestling free from her arms as she took position, distinctly less focused.

When the girl left, the last strike Colette took let out a scream from the open catch she kept the pain in.

The following Thursday, Colette ignored her. She practiced miserably and for nothing, one of her bludgers writhing in a new crater in the grass after she'd nearly missed it and offsetted by swinging her bat with so much force it went pummeling into the field. When she did look up, the girl was staring wide-eyed into the pitch like she'd witnessed an animal land the death blow to its prey.

Colette felt embarrassed enough about the encounter that the next Thursday she flew again to the stands with two slices of lemon loaf as a peace offering.

"Hello," she said with a container held out, "Um—you did not tell me your name then. Before."

The girl glanced sideways. "You know there are stairs, right?"

"Yes."

"Okay." She took the container with the apprehension of a stray cat accepting food. "Nadya. Thank you."

"Nadya...?"

She snorted and cracked open the lid. "Sidhu."

Colette anticipated the first bite like she was the one taking it, but Nadya held the slice to her mouth and looked her up and down incredulously. "Are you planning on floating there staring at me, or are you going to sit?"

"Oh."

She clambered off her broom and onto the bench less gracefully than she would have liked.

"So," Nadya started, "You've been here for over a month, and I haven't heard anyone plotting against you, which means you're either a very nice Hufflepuff, or you're a pureblood."

"Ehm... both?"

"A nice pureblood Hufflepuff? That's a shame, you missed Sybil by a year."

"Sybil is...?"

"Banks' sister. Well, they're all Banks, but she's Banks, you know. You know Banks, right?"

"The Ravenclaw prefect, yes?"

"Very good." She took a bite of the lemon loaf and gave a glance of surprise-cross-approval while tucking her textbook away.

Colette sat slightly taller. She had pleaded with the house elves for thirty minutes to convince them to let her bake in kitchens they were remarkably protective of. It was abysmal that there were no classes for such things here; if the Hufflepuff dormitories didn't have a room for music, she might have gone back to the Lovegoods.

"You missed quidditch tryouts last week, you know," Nadya told her, "and you're not bad."

She gaped, cleaved from her previous, lesser grievance. "I am not bad?"

"That's high praise from me, Chapdelaine; quidditch and I don't get along, and I don't make a habit of complimenting its players."

"Still you come here," she challenged.

"Need I remind you it was empty before you."

Colette opened her mouth, a bit put off.

"But," Nadya said, a bit more clumsily, "empty quidditch pitches don't bring me lemon cake despite my... uh... talent for fucking up an introduction? So, thanks?"

"You are welcome," Colette answered earnestly, "I would say though that was not an introduction."

"Yeah, all right, that's fair."

Silence took hold, slightly awkward, filled minutely by the wind at this height and Nadya's quiet chewing. There was lemon drizzle on the corner of her mouth.

Colette knew why she had needed this place, her feet tapping contemplatively on the bench below them, but she had thought only with the limited information she had on why Nadya needed it. It was a guilty distraction, wondering about someone else's suffering. Her desperation had flickered, subdued in comparison to the bleeding wound of Colette's grief, but it was familiar. It omitted truth. She saw now the dim purple of Nadya's knuckles and the premature calluses of her palms. What blows had her hands dealt to earn them? What shovel had she wielded and what had she buried with it? Why?

"Your house is truly this terrible?" Colette asked delicately, pulling her eyes away.

Nadya shrugged. "I didn't come here as often before; usually having Banks around deters them, but I don't see her as much now that she's prefect. Hey—" She turned to face her, a look in her eyes Colette couldn't quite discern. "You're not a frog, are you? Like, you're not some French pureblood spy, luring me in with baked goods so that I reveal my secrets? You're not here to ruin my life?"

Colette didn't know what to make of the knowledge that that was even a thought to cross Nadya's mind. "...What?"

"Okay, you'd have to be a really good spy to fake a face like that. Had to ask though."

She pondered an answer but none seemed adequate. "I will try not to ruin your life."

"Hm." Nadya clasped the container shut and smiled the first real smile Colette had seen. "Likewise."

Two Thursdays later, Colette wrote to Evangeline and Ephriam for the second time since arriving. She told them that Alexander Zippel was lovely, that Charms was her favourite class because of a boy named Claude who could already perform seventh-year spells but only bragged about it when pestered, and to satiate their memories, she spoke of Hogwarts' beauty at length. Her letter stained with the ink-bleed of what she wrote next—a fat, blueish black pearl stuck on the words. She told them of the quidditch pitch and of Nadya's many stories, but couldn't translate the strangeness of her charm or the mirror Colette made of her wounds. She did not tell them that the pain-catch wouldn't shut, but that she had begun to relinquish the guilt of letting it go.

━━━━━

       What she noticed first was that the courtroom glowed with the same numbing pretence as Headmistress Anouilh's office. Dark and ceremonial, it was without Anouilh's trinkets and illusory comforts—there was no cushion on Colette's court seat to swaddle her before casting her out, if that was to be her fate a second time—but it was still the same. They presented injustice just as beautifully. Her life, in some sense, sat in the balance of it.  She hadn't known the extent of how back then, and she wouldn't underestimate it now.

The evaluation of Party B, as the Wizengamot called it, was notably less abrasive than that of Party A. They dissected Colette, Claude, and Nadya's careful interrogations, never straying from the events of Slughorn's soirée, and of that, there was little to tell. Dawlish spoke of memories addled by wine and Living Death, brains skewed by curses and concussions, and of Alex's bedridden testimony. It was all they had. Colette prayed it was enough.

And yet her eyes were pinned solely to Nadya, who stared ahead in frightening stillness. No fidgeting hands. Colette's Christmas ring was stacked untouched over her yellow gemstone.

The second parallel she refused to draw; she would not be spared again where someone she loved was not.

Edicus Gamp stood, and a big spotlight shone down from the ceiling, the filtered wheel of a dozen conjured stars spun like pips on a T-totum. All brightness struck her at once, and then went soft and dim. She blinked through eyelashes cast white until the blindness faded, but none of her fury went with it.

Most of his previous murmurings were bleary in Colette's memory already. She tried to cling onto them for the sake of her own awareness but it was like staring foggily through the haze of the pitch with eyes thickly-lidded. Awareness was a privilege that, once more, Colette was not permitted. The three of them had been left disregarded as the court deliberated, a bastion of enchanted silence walled between the accused and their judges. She'd watched them pass parchment, raise their hands to opine, glance at Dumbledore between perspectives like he was a determinant in their choice, but never did they glance at her. And when they made their vote, concealed by the silence, it drove her mad.

What they judged was hers. And if it was Nadya's fate alone they decided in temper, it wouldn't have mattered; their fates adhered. That was hers too.

Gamp closed his hand into a fist. The barrier dissipated.

"All rise," ordered Honoria Carrow in her wooden inflection.

They complied, chains of their seats rattling into a dull echo.

Gamp, after a moment of pause t0 adjust his glasses, read from the finalized scroll of the enchanted quill with two unnamed constituents of the Wizengamot beside him. They must have been of some role more important than Honoria and Dawlish to be assessing the final judgement alongside the Chief Warlock.

Advisors? Colette wondered, but wondered it uselessly. This trial was a farce no matter who spoke it aloud; a neatly concocted tool of humiliation and punishment within some proximity of Ministry law, and it was Nadya who took the brunt of it, splayed on the vivisection table and gouged open. It was a bitter told-you-so—a million told-you-sos—without any reward of vindication because Colette had never wanted to be right.

Gamp and company sat, and the room went sharply quiet. Fear dizzied Colette.

"The Wizengamot has deliberated," he read apathetically. "The verdict, with a majority vote of thirty-nine, is as follows: general punishment for all subjects is to be taken in weekly wardings at the Hogsmeade bell tower, wherein reports of beleaguered ghosts taking haunt in the clock chamber should be amended through magical collaboration between both parties. Both parties shall, by decree of this court, meet independently each Saturday at three-thirty and note their findings to Headmaster Dippet. Failure to attend will be penalised under order of contempt. The Wizengamot rules."

The gavel went down. Confusion dizzied her then—it was almost fair. Dangerous to be left alone with the Knights, and she was certain the council knew that, but a recoverable consequence.

Gamp cleared his throat. "Additional punishment for Nadya Jayashri Sidhu, for intimidation and misuse of school property in the form of various hazardous potions, is to be taken in resignation of all cauldron courses. As such, Miss Sidhu is summarily dismissed from her seats in Advanced Potions and Alchemy. She may discuss replacement courses as Headmaster Dippet sees fit. The Wizengamot rules."

The gavel went down. Understanding settled icily down Colette's neck.

To a pureblood, losing a core class would prove a challenge at worst, but to Nadya, it was losing the only future she had in their world. The Ministry was effectively casting her back to the muggles.

In the corner of Colette's eye, the Knights were smiling.

She carved her nails into her palms until the skin pulsed. All of her heart was laid bare before her, and they clawed at it like house dogs sicced, and they were smiling. Flesh was flesh. The Wizengamot knew that, but Nadya was not their own, and so they let their ilk lunge for her throat with all rows of their blooded teeth. Colette wouldn't let them. Eyes glossed over, without care for how, she wouldn't let them.

Court was dismissed.

In the idle aftermath, she realized how unimportant this was to them. Nadya was unmoving, and they were stacking the last of their papers while maundering blithely amongst themselves. They would comment offhandedly about their day over supper that night, smile over wine and roast, and never think of it again.

Colette was burning.

Reid came down from the benches with her lips moving to shape excised sound, and Colette couldn't douse the fire, scalding at the click of black, nimble heels fading from the courtroom to the corridor.

If anyone tried to stop her marching after them, she didn't notice. Her vision was tunnelled on Rosier.

It was her testimony that had nailed the coffin shut, wasn't it? With half a story missing, nameless and faceless and discarded as secondary, Rosier had turned the tide. Colette gritted her teeth; how embittered it made them to know they hadn't destroyed her. What vanity that they believed they could. Worse fates had befelled her. She had died her siblings' death and woken up again when they hadn't.

There was some semblance of sanity, distantly—in that Colette was aware of the sentries still posted and the defence that walked alongside the Knights, but she kept her pace slow and composed enough that Rosier heard her follow, caught her eye, and had the opportunity to make a choice.

They both knew no blood could be shed here, today, and maybe Rosier thought her incapable on any day. Maybe that was why she chose to turn the corner. Maybe that was why Colette turned it too.

When Rosier disappeared into one of the rooms lining the thin secondary hall, Colette was clinging to her anger like it was rope on an eroding cliffside. She wondered briefly if this was how Nadya felt all the time, and then clicked the door shut and shoved Rosier into the tile until one of her heels was dangling for purchase. Colette's leg buckled in pain, instinctively slamming to the wall to keep steady. Rosier clenched her teeth as she glared up at her.

So this was where two years led them.

Colette didn't know what to say, what followed this course of action. All her weight was fury and it was closed in her fist, bunched around the collar of Rosier's dress. She had no words for this. She had no plan—she wasn't Nadya.

"You know, I always knew Sidhu was lying that day," Rosier gritted out, "but we were so merciful, I mean—you didn't really matter, she could've fallen for a troll and it would've been the same, but—I knew she was lying about the potion."

Colette's forearm pressed tighter to her throat, but her entire body trembled. "What are you talking about?"

Her red lips parted to smile. "Didn't she tell you? Wasn't that the reason for your little break-up? To maintain appearances?" Rosier tutted. "Oh, you poor thing, always the last to know."

"...What?"

"Sidhu really thought it mattered. She figured that was why we cursed the bludger: some grand scheme to punish you for loving her back. She was babbling so pathetically when she made it down the pitch, it was almost incoherent; it's a love potion, it's a love potion, I did it, not her! I almost pitied her. If Banks wasn't so important, we would have done it to her years before we did it to you."

Colette's grip faltered. Her body was heavy and muffled, hollow under the weight of herself. She felt like nothing. What had been done to her was not hers, even in this. Rosier and Mulciber had made her an instrument in Nadya's suffering.

Then some rough, uncharacteristic noise slipped her bared teeth and she lodged her cane against the soft pulse of Rosier's neck. Hot tears pearled in her eyes. "You will bleed for what you have done—in some way, in some time—I will see it."

Rosier's lips curled. She didn't believe her.

Colette pressed harder until a choked sound escaped her fracturing smile. "Nadya tried to kill you that day, didn't she? The hospital report was true? She beat the teeth from your mouth? I should tell you, Augusta, I do not live in your world anymore, but I know it well. I know what you endure under the words of your parents, and I know what you've been trained to value all your life. You think your blood matters more than hers—I wouldn't see it all spilled," she promised, "but I would see that yours is the last of it. You will bleed, and then you will live, and in your long life you will see nothing but bars and stone, and you will remember that you tried to destroy me without knowing what I have endured, and you will wish you had killed me instead."

She pulled free with a final gasp from Rosier, who was looking up at her with new eyes.

"You should be kinder in the time you have left," Colette cautioned, teeth still on edge, adjusting her dress, "you will give the dementors less to feed on."

[ . . . ] so.... the beginning of the nadyacolette yr5 diaries + some mild disaster + colette finally snapping. [further analysis and rambling: she makes such an effort to be composed in her healing, but it's so reliant on repeatedly closing that catch on her pain to compartmentalize whenever it gets too much. reconciling with the nuances of her grief has been so difficult that i think even acknowledging the autonomy that's been taken from her and allowing herself to feel angry about her — not in relation to nadya and the anger she contends with, but colette's anger — is such a weighted task after years of pushing through so much other trauma. there's a big reclamation in saying, no, actually, this story is my story and it's so much bigger than this singular chapter you stole my pen to write. and this is only the beginning of that arc for colette. "no one knows the suffering it took to be this kind" and etc.] ALSO! without giving away too much, next chapter has been eating away at my thoughts for weeks. i'm probably looking at another 10k word catastrophe. if it takes me a while, that's why :)  /  word count. 4009

©  Crierayla  ✶  2024