13

12.

'Calista'

She is sitting in one of the armchairs in her father's study, a dark-covered volume cradled carefully in her arms. It's her father's book, one of the ones that she has permission to read by herself, but it's very advanced for her and she's having trouble understanding a lot of the words. Secrets Kept: The Lost Art of Occlumency, the book is called.

'Calista'

She hears her name, called as if from a long way off. She tries to ignore it, because she's concentrating on the book. It seems very important to keep reading it, although she isn't sure why. She hunches over it, letting her black hair fall forward, a curtain to shut out the rest of the world. Inside, it's just her eyes and the lines and lines of text on the page.

'Calista'

She starts, lifts her head. Suddenly, the voice calling her is much closer. She turns her head towards the doorway of the study, and as soon as she does, her eyes go wide with horror. She doesn't see the hall beyond, the ancient stone of the castle dungeons, or the light from the kitchen across. Instead, she sees a wide, arched doorway, the dark, low form of a sofa with elaborately carved arms and feet. How can that be? She is here, in her father's study, at Hogwarts castle.

Except that, when she looks down, she finds that she is wrong, after all. She is not sitting in an armchair in a small study at all, and the book in her hands is only her little journal, the one she's always had. She sits on a hard wooden bench, part of a hand-carved dining set made of dark wood that matches the arms of the sofa in the other room. Above her, a chandelier casts a flickering half-light on the scroll-patterned wallpaper.

'Calista'

The voice is very close, now, and there's an undulating singsong quality to it that is probably meant to be cajoling, but instead sounds eerie and foreboding. She feels her heart speed up, and her head clouds with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Something very bad is going to happen, something she already knows all about, except that, at the moment, she can't recall precisely what it is.

A shadow, a breath, and then she is no longer alone. The voice, and the person it belongs to, materialise in the doorway, blocking the sofa from view. Mother. A cold shiver runs down her spine, as she meets her mother's eyes. Instinctively, she empties her mind, imagines a curtain being drawn over her eyes, but her mother, Bellatrix, has no interest in reading her thoughts, today.

Her mother steps into the dining room, takes her by the arm. Her book falls to the floor; she can see it settle underneath the heavy table, just before she is yanked out into the sitting room. Her mother tosses her unceremoniously onto the sofa, draws something from her pocket. She is expecting to see her mother's wand, is already bracing herself for pain, but instead, something silver and shining comes out in her mother's hand. It is a blade, cruel and sharp.

She remembers, now, what is going to happen, and she scrambles up from the sofa, tries to run past Bellatrix out of the room, even though she knows she won't make it. Her mother does draw her wand now, in her other hand, and even though she doesn't say a word, Calista is stopped in her tracks, unable to move. She has fallen to the floor, but her mother picks her up, with the hand that still clutches the knife. Her mother's fingers are twisted in her hair; it feels like its being pulled right out of her head, but Calista can't run away, or make a sound, now.

Her mother thrusts her at the sofa again, slips her wand into her pocket, and fingers the blade of the knife lightly. 'Good little girls stay close to their mothers,' her mother says, her eyes glinting madly, 'But you are not a good little girl, are you? You think I do not see the way you hide all the time? You think, perhaps, that I cannot see the itch to run away, every time I bring you outside?' She licks her lips, presses the tip of the knife into her own finger, and a bead of blood wells up on her fingertip, then drips, heavily, down the blade.

'Mama sees everything,' Bellatrix hisses, 'And just in case you forget who you belong to, in case you do try to run away from me...' She smiles coldly. 'Let's make sure you don't get very far before I find you.' She leans forward, grabs Calista roughly around the neck, and turns her over, pressing her face into the back of the sofa. Calista still can't move, can't scream, but if she could, no one would hear it now. She can't see anymore, either; the rough brocade is black and it's all she can see. She feels her mother's hand twist into her hair again, at the nape of her neck this time, and then she feels something cold and hard run down her spine; it doesn't hurt, but it makes her eyes fill with tears, anyway.

The fabric of her robes falls around her, split from the neckline to the waist. She shivers, and she feels her mother twist her hair tighter, and she thinks it hurts, until the point of the knife sears at her skin without warning, and it hurts so much that she forgets about everything else; how can it be so cold, so hot, at the same time? She is blinded and she can't scream; she summons all of her willpower, tells herself she will break the spell holding her, will run away. She keeps telling herself the same thing, repeats it in her mind, over and over - I will run away now, I will run away now - but she is not able, now or ever, to get away from her mother.

Time flows by, thick and sluggish; pain is her constant. She is cold, so cold, and her whole body shivers convulsively; tears and snot and drool mix into a sticky mess on her face, and finally, she is pulled backwards by the hand in her hair. - I will run away now - and she finds that, at last, she can move again. She stumbles to her feet, struggles against the fingers that hold her fast; she doesn't care about her hair, she'll let it get torn out, just to get away. The room slides into a dim focus; she has seen nothing but black for so long that it takes her a minute to see. The first thing she sees is her mother's white hand, coated with a slick red layer of blood, holding the knife. It is not silver anymore, but dark and shiny.

A powerful, coppery scent finds its way past the mess of fluids on her face, and she feels her stomach tighten threateningly just as she feels her foot slip on the hard floor. She looks down, sees that she has slipped in a puddle of dark red sticky stuff, and she opens her mouth. This, she knows, is the part where she screams; the part where, once, her mother had slapped her, and then cast a Silencing Charm on her. But not anymore. Now, she knows, if she screams, someone will come.

She remembers this now, too, remembers that the sitting room will melt gradually into rough stone walls, the sofa into a soft bed with white sheets instead of black brocade. And her father will come, and he will tell her that it is over, that her mother is gone, and for a long time she will still smell the coppery blood and feel the chill in her bones and the burning pain of the cuts on her back, and she won't believe him at first, not until his arms come around her, and warm her, and hold her still, but a different kind of still that feels safe and calming, instead of cruel and binding.

She waits for this to happen, but something isn't right, something isn't happening the way it's supposed to. Her mouth is open, but she can't push a scream out. The sitting room doesn't melt away at all, and neither does her mother. Instead, her mother drops the knife on the floor, where it clatters heavily against the wood. She puts her hands, cold, on Calista's face, presses the tips of their noses together, and stares, hard grey eyes, into her own.

'Remember when you said it felt real?' Bellatrix coos, her breath warm in Calista's face, 'It is, dear one. It is real'.

And then, somehow, her mother climbs right inside Calista's eyes, and even though she gets no smaller and Calista gets no bigger, she feels energetic heat under her skin, feels something dark and sinister opening her insides up, finding hollows and crannies to slide into, a fierce, fluid shadow. The scars on her back - or are they fresh wounds, now? - burn like fire, and she struggles to scream, struggles more for this, now, than she ever has for anything in her entire life, because at last, she knows that there is someone who will come, if only she can make him hear her.

She hears her own voice, shrill, echo against the walls of the sitting room, for only as long as a single breath; and then, her hand, her mother's hand, settles coldly over her mouth. I don't think that's necessary, she hears, echoing from somewhere inside of her, inside one of the shadowy hollows. Her body steps forward, even though she doesn't want it to. Her hand reaches out, takes hold of the edge of the heavy curtains that hang behind the sofa, pulls it. The curtain grows, surrounds her, and now she doesn't know whether she is still in the sitting room, or in her new bedroom with its stone walls and it's little blue nightlight (no, that's gone now) or if she is even anywhere at all.

(¯ˆ·.¸¸.·ˆ¯)

Severus glanced up at the clock in his office; it was past midnight now, and he still had one more essay to mark for his morning class tomorrow. He was behind, because he'd taken some time to examine Calista's little book. He knew now what the enchantment was, knew that it was harmless, and he had never felt anything at all like Dark magic in the book, and even though he had already given it back to Calista, something about it was still niggling at his mind.

Was it something he had glimpsed, scrawled across its pages? Or was it something in the way it had felt?

He crossed a line off in the second paragraph of the essay he was marking, wrote a correction in the margin.

Perhaps it wasn't the book at all; perhaps all he was bothered by was the cold, alien flash of something he had felt when he had touched Calista's hand. It was precisely the same as what he had felt the night that he had thought she was crying out for him, when he'd brushed the hair out of her face. And then, when she'd woken up, her eyes had gone quickly, carefully blank.

Blank.

He knew, suddenly, what was bothering him about the book. It was something Calista had said, before handing it to him. Sometimes it's full, but sometimes it's all blank. But the book belonged to her, was charmed to reveal its contents only to her, or to someone whom she willingly handed it over to - so how could it appear blank, to her, ever?

His quill hovered over the essay. He wondered if he should ask her for the book again, tomorrow, to look it over one more time, see if there was another enchantment that he had missed. She wouldn't like it, though, might not even hand it to him a third time. Perhaps if he -

He felt a burst of wild, uncontrolled terror erupt in his mind, and it was like the piercing sense of alarm he felt during Calista's nightmares, only it was a hundred times stronger, a hundred times more desperate. He leapt from his chair, dropping his quill on the floor along the way, tore into his quarters and down the hall to his daughter's room -

And before he had even made it there, it had stopped, abruptly. As he pushed her bedroom door wide open, he was aware, already, that she was silent, even in his mind. It was as if he had never felt it, but he knew he had. He used his wand to light the candelabra in her room, realising that he had not yet replaced her nightlight. She was sleeping, quietly. Her breathing was even, undisturbed. But when he leaned over her, looked at her face, he could see, as before, her eyes darting rapidly back and forth beneath their lids.

"Calista," he said, reaching for her shoulder. He could still feel his own heart racing, so intense had the panicked burst in his mind been. He shook her shoulder with one hand, put his other gently to the side of her face. "Calista!"

Her eyes snapped open, and her hands went lightning quick to his, clawed at them tried to pull them both off of her.

- cold rage and freedom and lashing out and -

He ignored the clawing hands, put both of his hands on her shoulders firmly, pulled her up to a sitting position, locked his gaze on her face. Her eyes were hard, flinty, shuttered, cold, and her face was set blank and stony.

"What is the meaning of this? What's going on, Calista?"

Her eyes narrowed into a glare, but remained impassive and distant. She didn't say a word. He had expected fear, when he came rushing into her room, had expected some outward sign of the terror that had exploded into his mind, but there wasn't a trace of it on her face, wasn't a trace of any emotion at all.

He had not seen her face so perfectly blank in all the time he had known her; at the beginning, she had tried, but never had she looked so - empty.

"Calista," he said, his voice low and urgent, "You don't need to hide. Tell me what's wrong. You're safe."

And then, there was a tiny something, a spark of light in the depths of her dark eyes, and he felt, very faintly, as if from a great distance, a thread of alarm pulsing, pushing its way into his mind - then, her hands were clawing at him again, viciously, and this wasn't the blind flailing she'd done before while in the throes of a nightmare, but a purposeful attack; he had to drop his hands from her shoulders and back away to keep from losing an eye, and still, he felt a sting across his cheek where her fingernails had scratched him good.

She was still flailing like mad, even though he was no longer in reach; her eyes were wide, dark wells, and whatever he had seen in their depths was gone now. He drew his wand from his pocket again, cast a spell that would immobilize her for a few minutes; he didn't want to, but she was not acting at all sane, let alone like herself.

He had promised her that he would not use legilimency on her as long as she spoke to him, but she was not speaking now - and anyway, he had no intention of using it to peruse her thoughts, only to calm her, since he couldn't do it any other way. He put his hands at the side of her face as he had done before, looked directly into her eyes.

He brushed against the blankness behind her eyes, expected it to fall away as it had done before, and was astonished when it did not. He pushed more forcefully, and still, the barrier around the outer edge of her mind held strong and solid. How was this possible, that she had suddenly and without warning developed infinitely more advanced occlumens abilities? It wasn't, because as Severus felt his way along the barrier, studying its nature, it felt, not only impossibly strong, but also partly wrong.

It felt like a barrier of Calista's, and yet, at the same time, it didn't. It felt something like the barrier that he had once created in her mind, to allow her to sleep peacefully without her darkest memories crowding her mind - it felt as if it had been erected in her mind by someone else entirely, but it felt as if they had taken strands and wisps of Calista's mind and melted it into the barrier, somehow.

And then, the binding spell he'd cast on her broke, and she was flailing again, and he let go of her face to grab her wrists, held them fast. She closed her eyes.

Severus had had enough; something dreadfully wrong was happening in his daughter's mind. Something had happened which had somehow triggered - and this was the only explanation he could come up with, in that moment - her magical potential to well up in full force, fuller force than he'd known she even possessed. Had something attacked her, somehow? But no one had entered their flat, he was sure of it, and anyway, nothing had ever caused this iron-solid barrier to go up in her mind before. He didn't think, even though he had felt it himself, that such a barrier could even exist in the mind of a child at all.

He pulled her to him by her wrists, led her out of the room and down the hall, through the door of their flat and into his office. She didn't struggle anymore, nor did she open her eyes, not even when he sat her down in the chair behind his desk, the one where he had so recently been correcting an essay about shrinking potions.

He tapped his wand to the lock on the top drawer of his desk, and it slid open. He reached inside, took out a tiny vial of clear liquid. Whatever the barrier was, he was not going to be able to get through it quickly or with ease, and he needed to know now what was happening to his daughter, needed to know if she was in some sort of immediate danger - and needed to know what the hell it was that he kept feeling, in cold and threatening flashes, when he touched her skin.

He unstoppered the vial. "Open your mouth," he said, but it was as if she hadn't heard him, or was choosing not to. She sat in the chair, with her eyes still closed, and her face set blankly. He set the stopper down on the surface of his desk, and held the vial in one hand while he took her chin and opened her mouth with his other hand. Too late, she realised what was happening, and forced her jaw shut, but he had already gotten a few drops of the potion onto her tongue.

He waited, watching as it took effect. The Veritaserum was a gamble; he knew that his barely-ten-year-old daughter could not possibly hope to resist its effects, but then, he also knew that it should have been equally impossible for the strong, ironlike barrier to exist in her mind. He had to hope that whatever had given her the ability to erect it did not give her the ability to suddenly resist the truth serum, too.

Her eyes opened, and he could see the fog of the serum in them; even though her face was still blank, it was a different sort of blank - like a daze instead of a wall.

"What is your name?" he asked, quietly, to set a benchmark.

She opened her mouth, and he could see confusion in her eyes; another thing that should have been impossible. She should have answered, straight away, or, if the potion had not worked, should have kept the same look in her eyes that she'd had moments before.

"... C… Calista?" It came out as a question - but that meant that she somehow didn't know her own name? Unless, he thought, in a sudden panic, unless something had gone wrong with the potion; he had made it himself, was positive it had come out correctly, but plainly it must not have - but it had, he knew it had.

"What is your surname?" he tried again.

"Le… Lest… Snape?" Another question, and she'd wavered, almost called herself by her mother's surname - how was this, any of this, possible?

"Where are you right now?" he asked, and this time she did answer straight away, without any hesitation or uplifted note at the end of her sentence.

"In the Potions Master's office, in the dungeon of Hogwarts Castle," she said.

"Are you in danger, Calista?" he asked softly.

He felt his heart skip when she answered. "Yes."

"What is the danger?"

"The danger is my moth-" she stopped abruptly, and he saw, again, confusion slide across her features.

"Your mother? How are you in danger from your mother?" This didn't make any sense at all - he would have heard if Bellatrix had been released or had excaped from Azkaban, wouldn't he?

"I…" She trailed off, and he could see a struggle in her eyes to find the answer.

"Calista?" he prompted again, and then she sputtered out a reply.

"She's not letting me talk," she said, which didn't seem at all like an answer to the question he had asked. But still, somehow addressing her by name had seemed to help her answer, so he tried it again.

"Calista, how are you in danger from your mother?"

"She cut me," she said, and it was strange to hear this years-old horror brought up in the flat monotone that went along with Veritaserum, "It was real."

"What was real, Calista?"

"Everything," she said, and he could see the potion wearing off already, see some of the stoniness returning to her dark eyes - but how could it wear off that quickly, unless she was somehow resistant to it?

"How can I help you?" he wondered aloud, and he hadn't truly been speaking to her, but she answered anyway.

"If I give you the book, we can write in it. She… she can't read the…"

"Go on, Calista," he said, and the use of her name helped her finish speaking.

"If it's me, I can read it. If it's her, the pages will look blank."

"What do you mean, 'if it's her'?"

But the hardness had come fully into her eyes again, and she wouldn't say anything more, no matter how he asked. She sat there, in his chair, looking straight through him, her face as impassive as if she were only a statue of his daughter, instead of flesh and blood.

He swept out of the office, locking the door behind him magically, so she couldn't leave it, just in case. He went back into her room, found the journal in the top drawer of her wardrobe. It was blank, but he only had to get her to hand it to him to fix that. He brought the journal back into his office, set it on his desk.

"Calista, will you hand me your book?" he asked, but she ignored him.

He stepped closer to her, leaned forward to look into her eyes, again, put one hand on her shoulder.

"Please," he said, "Calista, give me the book."

There it was again; the spark in the back of her eyes, like a light on the other side of a wide, fog-shrouded lake.

"Need… need a quill," she said, and it came out breathy and gaspy, as if she had been asking from underwater.

He snatched up the one off the floor that he had been marking essays with, pressed it into her hand. She took the book, opened it at random, and pressed the tip of the quill into it, scrawling quickly and purposefully. He could see her hand shaking, and he thought that her skin was somehow even paler than it usually was.

She picked up the book, still holding the quill in her other hand, and he could see her waver; she held the book up, but didn't quite hand it to him - even from here, he could see that it was still blank.

"Calista, please," he said again, lifting her chin lightly with one hand, boring into her eyes with his; the light was getting smaller, further away…

She thrust the book out at him, and he took it with his free hand, just as she dropped the quill and shoved his hand off her face. The light was gone, leaving only a blank expanse of blackness in her eyes.

But he had the book. He looked down, could see a single line of writing on the page that it was open to.

she cut me and she climbed in my eyes and

And that was all it said.

And yet, it was all that it needed to say; something dawned on him with an urgent, menacing horror. The barrier, the iron-strong barrier in her mind… it didn't feel like it belonged in her mind because it didn't, not entirely -

He took hold of her face again, ignored the searing cold fury that touched him as he did so, gazed into her eyes; this time, he lifted his wand in his other hand.

"Legilimens," he intoned, and he went up against the barrier in her mind again, sent psychic tendrils feeling along it; and now that he knew what he was looking for, he found that, even though most of it did not feel like Calista, it did feel familiar, after all.

The hard, strong wall, the chill of icy rage that enshrouded it, pushed itself through the pores of his daughter's skin even now - they belonged, without a doubt, to Bellatrix Lestrange.