Chapter 128 - Shedding Skin — Tears Unshed

Easter was almost here. Pansy and Daphne had both received Easter eggs and a pile of hot cross buns from home.

The eggs and buns were piled on the table. Daphne picked through the heap and pulled out a few purple and deep blue ones.

They were painted with silver and gold speckles, each one looking like a fragment of a night sky.

With siblings, it was always like that, equal parts annoyance and love.

Daphne grumbled about her little sister the whole time she was sorting, and kept picking out the eggs Astoria might like anyway.

Pansy grinned at her. "Hey, big sister Daph — why not just go teach your little sister a lesson? Too soft-hearted?"

Pansy always went straight for the throat.

"Teach her a lesson?" Daphne snorted, her voice going mock-sweet and sharp at the same time. "Then tomorrow I'd get a letter from Mother, telling me not to bully her precious little Lia~"

She had quite a few grievances about being the elder sister.

"So," Praeris said, tossing an Easter egg high into the air and catching it clean, "did big sister Daph go settle accounts with Warrington? I ran into him in the hospital wing when I went to visit Montague."

Warrington was not there to visit a teammate.

Slytherin friendships always swung between deep loyalty and cold convenience. Which one applied depended entirely on the situation.

Warrington was there to receive treatment.

Magic was a remarkable thing. A tall, broad Quidditch player, pinned down and given a thorough going-over by the seemingly delicate Daphne.

Physical advantage counted for very little in the face of magic. Daphne had made Warrington swallow a bitter loss and smile through it.

When Praeris had offered her perfectly polite, entirely insincere concern, Warrington hadn't dared breathe a word of the truth. He'd insisted, jaw tight, that he'd just taken a tumble during Quidditch practice.

Daphne rolled her eyes with great elegance. "Does my sister need someone else to put her in her place?"

The "lesson" Warrington delivered had ultimately landed on Grace Jones, yes. But at the root of it, he had still gone after Astoria.

Did Daphne tolerate that? She did not.

Warrington could have gone straight to docking points from Jones and Hufflepuff. Had he done that, Daphne might have applauded him for the efficiency.

But he'd used her name to bully her little sister. Using her name was riding her coattails. And bullying her little sister was bullying her.

Pansy and Praeris looked at each other.

So you won't do it yourself, and you won't let anyone else do it either.

Meaning nobody gets to touch your little sister. Is that it?

"Twisted," Pansy said.

"Contradictory," Praeris agreed.

Daphne raised one finger and pointed it squarely at the two of them. "Aren't you two twisted? Aren't you two contradictory?"

Pansy slowly turned her head away, raised her hand mirror in one hand, and began admiring herself in it.

Praeris silently lifted the tarot reference book that had been sitting on her lap and held it up in front of her face. Her lips moved.

Daphne slapped the table and stood up. One against two, she went for both her roommates' ribs at once.

Five minutes later, all three were breathless, waving each other off.

"I can't. I can't." Praeris tilted her head back, catching her breath through her laughter. "My stomach hurts." Then she remembered something. "Actually — Millie, haven't your eggs arrived yet?"

The Bulstrode family's eggs weren't homemade. They came straight from a shop. Look closely enough and you could still see the label stuck to the shell.

But there had always been eggs in past years. This year, not a single one.

A holiday gift sent from a Slytherin student's family couldn't possibly fail Umbridge's inspection.

"My mother is busy," Millicent said quietly. "No time to prepare Easter eggs."

Praeris blinked. "Millie," she said, her tone perfectly easy, "then this year you'll have to join me in raiding these two. I recommend Pansy's family's — they're chocolate."

Traditional Easter eggs were real ones. But some families had started using chocolate instead.

"Excuse me?" Pansy's voice went up sharply. "Who schemes a robbery out loud in broad daylight like that?"

What Pansy had actually been about to ask was something else entirely: what could a widow who didn't work, who lived off ancestral wealth and inheritance, possibly be busy with?

But Praeris nudged her under the table.

Pansy swallowed everything she'd been about to say and let herself be steered into bickering with Praeris instead.

Not long after, Daphne gathered her chosen eggs and went to find her sister. Pansy set off with the portion Mrs. Parkinson had prepared for Draco. That left only Praeris and Millicent in the dormitory.

The room went quiet. The only sound was an egg rolling slowly across the table.

Roll. Roll.

The egg Pansy had left for Millicent wandered across the table until it bumped against Praeris's divination book and stopped.

"Millie." Praeris picked it up and held it out. "Arithmancy class has been covering tarot interpretation lately. Do you want to try?"

Millicent looked at her. Her first friend at Hogwarts. Her good friend, still.

A few seconds passed. Millicent closed her eyes and nodded, a slow, deliberate movement.

---

People always said that life held infinite possibilities.

But standing at the crossroads, most people didn't even know where to begin choosing.

Time pushed you forward regardless. You made choices in the middle of the indecision, choices that barely counted as choices, choices you couldn't know the rights or wrongs of.

Those fervent, passionate days of shouting yourself hoarse over the dream of becoming a commentator. Those noisy, sensitive, ever-shifting days of friendship. All of it would soon be like snowmelt running off the Scottish Highlands, racing down the River Tay toward the North Sea.

Gone and not coming back.

---

Quick! Quick! Quick!

Move faster, damn it!

Tonks fired a rapid chain of spells at the door lock, smashing through the sealing charms one by one, glancing back in a panic between each cast.

This was the first time Tonks had ever seen this particular blood relative of hers in the flesh: Bellatrix Lestrange.

And that aunt was currently focused, with full and devoted attention, on tearing Lupin apart.

Soon, that same dark magic would turn toward Tonks.

Red light. White light. Flaring behind her in rapid alternation.

Lupin was blocking blow after lethal blow from Bellatrix, buying every second he could.

Bellatrix hadn't been out of Azkaban long. Her spellwork hadn't fully recovered to where it had been over a decade ago. That was Lupin's only edge.

His Defense Against the Dark Arts was genuinely strong. But Bellatrix was vicious in a way that technique alone couldn't answer. That was the nature of dark magic, the more a witch or wizard took pleasure in killing and pain, the sharper their offensive power grew.

Bellatrix laughed, a sound like something tearing. Twelve years of compressed malice, finally free.

Under that relentless pressure, Lupin had nowhere left to fall back to. He held the line. If he broke, the young Tonks behind him would die with him.

Stop getting distracted. Tonks screamed it at herself.

If she couldn't crack this lock and get the hostage out, she'd have nothing left to do but pray this deranged aunt of hers would find a shred of mercy and leave them with intact corpses.

She forced her breathing steady. Pulled every scrap of focus she had left and drove it into the lock.

BANG!

Tonks kicked the ruined door open. "Mrs. Purnell!"

She grabbed the woman — pale, barely conscious, crumpled just inside the doorway — and hauled her upright. "Lupin, let's go!"

In the instant she turned her head, Tonks saw it. On the half-collapsed door, around the lock, the wood bore the distinctive pitting of potion corrosion.

No time to think about what that meant. Tonks activated Side-Along Apparition, and she and Mrs. Purnell vanished.

CLINK!

A potion vial, no bigger than a thumb, dropped to the ground and rolled.

---

Hogwarts. Slytherin girls' dormitory.

Millicent reached out and drew 3 tarot cards.

The first card, upright: the Three of Swords. The image showed a heart pierced by three blades. It meant unavoidable sorrow.

Not the kind of grief that arrives suddenly. The kind that comes from problems long suppressed, long left unresolved.

"The Three of Swords upright speaks of pain — but also of reshaping and rebirth. Sorrow is unavoidable. Only by facing the problem directly can you truly move past it. The swords pierce more than the heart. They pierce the illusions we build to protect ourselves."

Millicent had been carrying illusions for a long time. She'd kept imagining that one day Mrs. Bulstrode would turn around. Would look back at her family.

She'd imagined Mrs. Bulstrode finally understanding that her daughter was no magical prodigy, not the kind of material that belonged in the Dark Arts.

She'd imagined Mrs. Bulstrode gathering up the broken pieces of her love and doing something with them. Imagined her one day seeing clearly: that it was her devotion to Voldemort that had killed Millicent's father. That had torn this family apart.

With Voldemort's resurrection, that possibility had grown smaller and smaller. Until it was nothing.

The second card, upright: the Eight of Cups. The image showed someone turning away from eight stacked cups and walking into the mountains.

"The Eight of Cups upright means leaving behind what you have and walking away. The cups are what you possess. The staff is your courage. The hazy mountains in the distance are an unknowable future."

The figure walking away wasn't only Millicent. It was also her mother.

Mrs. Bulstrode had abandoned her family and gone back. Willingly. Resolutely. Back to the Death Eaters.

The third card, reversed: the Moon. The moon shifted downward, away from its place in the sky.

"When the Moon reverses, the fog clears. Hidden things surface. Whatever has gone unresolved will come back to you. The time to face your fears has arrived."

The things Millicent feared would come back. The difficulties she had once believed impossible to face, impossible to survive, they would show her their true shape.

But that same emergence was also a chance to overcome them.

Like a Boggart. While it was still inside the wardrobe, the not-knowing made your mind run wild, conjuring something worse than anything real. But when it finally stepped out in front of you, when you held your ground, kept your head, and cast Riddikulus, you'd find that the terrible thing wasn't invincible.

It never was.

3 cards. Past, present, future.

Praeris sat on one side of the table. Millicent sat on the other. Between them lay the 3 tarot cards, a bridge stretched between the two friends.

Something unspoken passed back and forth across that table. Thoughts and feelings that didn't need words, finding their echo on the other side.

Was Millicent conflicted? She was.

Mrs. Bulstrode was selfish. Millicent was willing to admit her own selfishness too. For better or worse, they each had something they were reaching for, and neither of them could give ground for the other.

Millicent wanted a mother who could understand her. Who could love her. She also wanted her own dream. And those two things were pulling in opposite directions. Mrs. Bulstrode wasn't going to turn around. Following her mother meant abandoning everything else, it meant graduating and becoming, by degrees, a Death Eater.

The time for choosing had arrived.

Was Praeris conflicted? She was.

She argued with herself constantly. Held a position, then tore it down, built something better out of the pieces. It looked, from the outside, something like a fractured mind, past-Praeris committed to one view, present-Praeris dismantling it, future-Praeris already moving toward something new.

She'd gone from refusing to believe in divination at all, to being shaken by what the Diadem had offered her, to arriving here: genuinely using tarot as a working tool, something that could help her and the people she cared about.

Arguing with other people and knocking down their views was a reliable way to damage the relationship. Arguing with yourself, circling around your own old positions, examining them honestly, revising them, avoided that problem entirely.

People were always contradictory. Daphne Greengrass was contradictory. Pansy Parkinson was contradictory. Millicent was contradictory. Praeris herself was no different.

And so what?

That was simply how things developed. Contradiction was the engine of it. You went through affirmation, then negation, then the negation of that negation. Round and round, each loop carrying you somewhere new.

Praeris pushed the 3 cards across the table toward Millicent. The smile on her face was quiet and steady, her answer to them both, without needing to say it aloud.

To struggle through contradiction and still make a choice, that was a snake shedding its skin.

It was always hard. Always painful. But it was also exactly what growth looked like for a Slytherin.

A snake that couldn't shed its skin had only one fate. A Slytherin who couldn't shed theirs would never become what they were meant to be.

---

Bellatrix's eyes were dark and wild. She swayed as she walked back into the Death Eaters' temporary base.

Mrs. Bulstrode smiled and moved to meet her. "Done watching that old rabbit who can't even kick anymore?"

SLAP!

Bellatrix's hand connected hard across Mrs. Bulstrode's face.

Mrs. Bulstrode pressed a hand to her cheek, fury rising. "What is wrong with you?!"

Then, the moment after she said it, the answer landed on her. Bellatrix was a madwoman. Had always been a madwoman. Was there ever a shortage of this from her?

"I don't care what your problem is," Mrs. Bulstrode said coldly. "You were given the opportunity. Just make sure the rabbit didn't manage to kick you first."

Bellatrix's mind was even more disordered now than it had been in Azkaban under the Dementors.

The master had use for Brown, that traitor, and the traitor had only come crawling back because Mrs. Purnell was taken in the first place. If Mrs. Purnell died, it didn't matter. The traitor wouldn't know the hostage was dead.

That gutless rat would never dare make a move. Certainly not after the master's return. She wouldn't dare betray him again.

But if, when they eventually faced the Order of the Phoenix, Mrs. Purnell was standing on the other side...

Bellatrix walked deeper into the base.

She had to tell her master the truth.

She wasn't asking for forgiveness.

Only punishment.

➤ Next: Steadfast Will