Chapter 23: 6
Chapter Six:
Calista's first Christmas at Hogwarts was very nearly perfect. It was a pity, then, that the night contrasted so starkly.
She had woken in the wee hours of the morning from the dream of running over a field of bones, Bellatrix in her wake.
It had gone exactly like it had before, except that this time, Bellatrix was inexplicably waving a knife at her in an attempt to curse her with it, rather than a wand.
This time, she had actually screamed aloud, and when tears sprang to her eyes, she wrote them off as tears of relief that she was the only one in her dormitory that night.
She threw the covers off her bed, lit the lamps in the room, and stormed around the dormitory, not sure if she was angry at Bellatrix or at herself.
She was miles and years away from Bellatrix, and yet, in Calista's eyes, her mother was still winning, because even in the privacy of her dreams, Bellatrix was the victor over her.
She was ashamed that she had woken up screaming, and doubly so that the dream had caused her to cry. Why should a bloody dream make her cry, when she had so often endured Bellatrix's cruel treatment with nary a tear shed?
She considered, briefly, sneaking down the hall to her father, telling him about her dream. He would be able to tell her if it meant anything, if Bellatrix was trying to reach her somehow.
Except that, as Calista made her restless rounds about the dormitory, she couldn't stop her eyes from filling with tears. As she ruthlessly wiped them away with the back of her hand, she imagined appearing before her father in such a pitiful state, and thought with only a modicum of sarcasm that she'd rather die.
Instead, she threw herself onto the floor next to her bed, and slammed both of her fists on her mattress so hard that they rebounded nearly hard enough to hit her in the face.
"Leave me alone, you stupid bitch," she said, borrowing language she'd heard from classmates. Her voice was thick with tears. "Just leave me alone!"
Reflecting, Calista couldn't say what made her react so strongly on this night; perhaps it was simply because the prior day had been so categorically perfect; or perhaps this sleepless night was one too many.
It was particularly distressing to the young girl that Bellatrix made her most fearsome appearances in her dreams, a place where she most wanted to be safe.
It would have been a very small comfort to Calista to know that she wasn't the only one in the castle who spent the rest of that night awake and unsettled.
o-o-o-o
At the very same moment that Calista woke up screaming, Severus woke with a start as well. At first, he thought that he had heard a scream for help, and threw his covers off, prepared to leap into action.
Then, he realized that he hadn't heard a sound, but rather had felt Calista's distress in his mind.
It was certainly not the first time that he had been disturbed from his slumbers by a mental calling-out from his daughter, but he still had to calm the beating of his heart just the same.
He analysed the feeling in his mind, and there was now only a small hint of Calista, a ripple on the surface of a great lake on a day with the smallest of winds; she was upset, but he didn't think she was in danger.
Ever since the first time Severus had delved wholly into his daughter's mind, and discovered the alarming quantity of disturbing memories within it, he had been somehow linked to her, able to tell when she was deeply afraid.
Since he had never felt or heard of such a bond between two people before, despite his incredibly extensive background in Legilimency and Occlumency, he wasn't certain if their bond was because of their genetic relationship, or their history, or some combination of factors.
He had never entered anyone's mind in as thorough and intimate a manner as he had Calista's, but then again, he had never performed Legilimens on another person to whom he was related by blood before, so he couldn't say with any certainty what had differentiated their bond.
Whatever the reason, Severus felt that his ability to pick up signals from his daughter's mind without trying was a double-edged sword.
He was alerted whenever she experienced extreme fear; and though he was thankful for the ability in case there was ever an occasion where she was in need of his intervention, the reality was that she was afraid far more often than she actually needed his help, and he was hard-pressed not to run to her in the middle of the night, regardless of the circumstance, and offer his help.
In the early hours of the morning following Christmas of 1987, Severus experienced another instance of the latter circumstance.
He had felt her fear acutely when he was jarred from his slumber, but then she had nearly faded from his consciousness, indicating that she was still upset, but no longer afraid for her life.
In short, Severus ascertained, she had had another nightmare. Part of him understood her desire for privacy, and knew that she would only be resentful if he offered help when the danger was only imaginary.
But part of him wanted to run to the Slytherin dormitories, and pull his young daughter into an embrace, until the fear faded from her mind, and she released her hold on his.
He had gathered from Calista's embarrassment over the subject that her ability to bleed her strongest emotions into his mind was involuntary, and in light of recent events, it alarmed him.
If she had no notion that she was alerting him to her distress, then how could either of them know that she wasn't providing Bellatrix with the same information?
And yet, if she was, if Calista's desperate, unconscious call of alarm was broadcast indiscriminately to both her parents, then Severus was left in a difficult position, indeed.
His choice wasn't much of one at all: He could allow Calista to continue to alert both of them to her fear, which stood a very real chance of allowing Bellatrix to take a foothold in her mind again, or he could train her to block them both out; which would leave him entirely ignorant if she was ever in a situation where she needed his help, and couldn't reach him by conventional means.
Plagued by these thoughts, Severus resigned himself to being awake, and lit the lamps in his study.
The Christmas tree that Calista had put in the corner was still there, although the witchfire lights had faded several hours ago, since witchfire could only remain lit for a set amount of time without being recharged.
He reached for a text on Legilimancy, although he had already read this particular book several times over in an attempt to understand the link he had developed with Calista, and had unearthed nothing of significance.
He was still aware, at the edges of his consciousness, of Calista's distress, and it unnerved him, since he could do nothing about it.
If he had possessed a finer grasp on the nuances of her emotions, he would have felt that she was considering running to him to confess the details of her darkest nightmares, but he didn't; he knew only when she was distressed, not why.
In fact, if he had known that she wanted to run to him for comfort, but was held back for fear that he would judge her harshly because she couldn't stop crying, then virtually nothing would have prevented him from seeking her out and attempting to soothe her nerves.
Inasmuch as an emotional relationship with his daughter was concerned, Severus had taken his cues from her. She had struck him from the beginning as intensely private, and had never responded well to his repeated attempts to understand her. For years, the only times she had allowed any sort of emotional conversation between them was directly after one of her nightmares, and although she was somewhat more open now, there was the constant fear that if he pushed too hard, she'd only shut him out.
She had been understandably resentful when he had seen her darkest memories, and had almost never spoken about them to him; when she did, it was generally in fairly oblique terms, and he had never wanted to push her to disclose anything she was not comfortable with.
As a result, he had found himself in a precarious situation, where he had known the details of the darkest moments of her childhood, but could only guess at how these moments affected her daily life.
It might even have come as a relief to Severus himself to have someone to confide his own fears and secrets in, but Calista was so distant and guarded that he could not envision such a scenario; indeed, in keeping with Calista's evident preferences, he had always kept himself fairly concealed from her emotionally.
When she had come to live with him, Calista had been irrevocably damaged and defensive. Compared with how their relationship had begun, Severus felt that he had made tremendous leeway with her. And yet, she seemed loathe to truly open herself to him, to reveal her emotions.
He had not, of course, had the most exemplary childhood, and he was almost entirely ignorant in the art of parenting, so it had always seemed natural to follow Calista's lead, to reveal only as much of himself as she would reveal of her own emotions.
And so, when she was closed and distant, he had never pushed, knowing that he would be alerted if she were ever in imminent danger, and priding himself on his resistance to invading the privacy of her mind, even though it would have been easy enough for him to do so.
Sometimes, when he had found Calista to be exceptionally unrelatable, he had forced himself to relive those terrible moments of her childhood, as if his reliving her pain could somehow relieve her of the burden of it, or at least help him to understand why she was often so distant.
Embroiled in empathy for his oft-distant daughter, Severus resigned himself to wakefulness for the remainder of the night.
o-o-o-o
When they saw each other again, no mention was made by either how both had lain awake all of Christmas night.
Severus was present in the Great Hall at breakfast the following Monday, and since there was almost nobody at the Slytherin table, he had shafted protocol and simply sat with his daughter.
"How have you been sleeping?" It was a leading question, because Severus already knew the answer; if he had been a bit more finessed in the art of concern, then perhaps he would have opened with something slightly more unassuming.
"Fine," Calista answered automatically, and Severus nodded, although he was plagued by a hidden, inner conflict: Why wouldn't his own daughter gift him with her honesty? Why did he always have to resort to prying?
"Did you have any strange dreams?"
It was Severus' best attempt at fatherly concern, given that he knew damn well that she'd been awake most of Christmas night following a bad dream; and yet, Calista misread him as simply nosy.
"No."
"Well," he said, admittedly at a loss. He had been so disturbed by her distress the previous night that he felt he needed to discuss it, and yet Calista was solidly denying that anything had been amiss. Had she suddenly become emotionally infallible, or did she simply mistrust him, event still, after everything they'd gone through?
"What?" Calista asked defensively, perhaps sensing that he knew she was not being truthful.
"Nothing," he said, abandoning his efforts, and then, "Seek me out this afternoon. We're going to take a brief excursion out of the castle. And wear Muggle clothes."
Calista couldn't begin to guess at what he was playing at, so by afternoon her curiosity was piqued. She was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved top, and carried her winter cloak over her shoulder.
Once they were off the grounds, Severus took hold of Calista's hand and Apparated both of them. They landed behind an old factory building with boarded-up windows. It looked like no one else had been in this particular spot for ages, which led Calista to wonder how Severus had known to land in exactly this spot.
The area was fairly run-down, but after walking a short way, they came to a row of shops.
"What are we doing here?" Calista asked, and then amended, "Where are we, anyway?"
They walked past a used-clothing shop and a window display of mostly broken children's toys before Severus answered.
"I'm sure there was a closer place for this, but this is the only one I know of."
They had stopped walking now, and Severus nodded towards the door of the nearest shop. It was a jewellery store, and a large sign in the window advertised ear piercing.
A slow grin spread over Calista's face. She wasn't much into jewellery, in fact had owned exactly none of it until a few days ago, but she'd always liked how earrings looked on other girls, and now she wouldn't have to explain to Olivia why she wasn't wearing her gift.
Intentional piercing was one of the strange quirks of the wizarding world. It was nearly as common among witches and wizards as it was among Muggles, but they didn't have any businesses of their own that catered to the trend.
Some people used a Puncture Spell to do it, but even with such a mild spell, there was the risk of accidentally injuring someone permanently – a severed earlobe would not grow back.
As a result, most witches and wizards simply went to Muggle shops to get pierced jewellery.
As he had told Calista, Severus knew there were probably a lot of places closer to the castle that she could have gotten her ears pierced at, but he didn't exactly take strolls through Muggle neighbourhoods for fun, so he had taken her here.
If he hadn't been with Calista, there was another stop he would have made, but she was exiting the shop with little silver studs in her earlobes and a grin on her face, so he was out of time.
In that moment, it struck Severus that Calista had no problems showing him some of her emotions – he had seen both happiness and pride on her face on more than one occasion. Why, then, was she so loathe to let him share in her sadness and fear, too?
o-o-o-o
When term started up again, Severus made a decision that Calista would resume weekly Occlumency lessons. He'd held them with her only sporadically since therm had started, but she was acclimated well enough, now, and the lessons were important. She was to report to him on Saturday mornings, although he did concede the days on which Quidditch matches were held.
Now that she had a new set of Gobstones and a willing opponent in Emily Yaxley, Calista spent a lot of time playing, and slightly less time with her nose buried in a book, although Olivia found both pastimes to be distasteful and boring.
Emily was actually very skilled at the game, and just as pleased to have someone to play with as Calista was. She taught Calista several ways to improve her technique, and was probably more talkative when playing the schoolyard game than at any other time.
Calista was still performing below par in Transfiguration, despite her father's help. She was beginning to lag even further behind in class, which caused McGonagall to assign her even more homework, in the hopes that she'd eventually improve.
It was having the opposite effect, though. Calista was so frustrated with the subject that she didn't think she even wanted to learn it anymore.
She was in the Slytherin common room working on yet another of McGonagall's essays when Olivia sidled over to the chair opposite her at the study table and sat down.
"I'm bored," she complained, taking Calista's essay away from her in one swift motion. She ran her eyes briefly over the parchment, pronounced it boring as well, and tucked in carelessly inside Calista's textbook, closing the cover of the latter.
"You could do the Potions homework," Calista suggested tartly, knowing the other girl hadn't done it and had not intention of doing it.
"What's the point of doing the homework?" Olivia said, "I'll just cheat off you when we have our exams."
She had a nasty gleam in her eye, as if she was daring Calista to refute it.
"What if we aren't sitting next to each other?"
"But we will be. You'll ask your father to seat us together."
Calista laughed. "He already knows I'm helping you, he won't put me next to you at exam time."
Olivia narrowed her eyes.
"How does he know? Did you tell him?"
"No, of course I didn't, but he's not stupid, he can tell—,"
But Olivia wasn't even interested in listening to Calista's response, because something far more interesting to wonder about had entered her mind. A positively impish expression crossed her face.
"So Calista," she said casually, "Where's your mother? How come you never talk about her?"
"What?" Calista was taken aback by the question; she had known it would eventually come, but she hadn't been expecting it just then.
"Your mother," she repeated, in a tone one would use when talking to someone who was quite slow on the uptake, "Is she dead?"
"Yes," Calista answered hastily, reaching for her textbook to conceal her expression.
Olivia eyed her for a moment, and then put her hand over the book, preventing Calista from opening its cover again.
"How did she die?"
"When I was born," Calista replied, trying to pull the book across the table, away from Olivia.
"That's funny," Olivia said, deceptively light, "Considering that a witch hasn't died in childbirth in, oh, a hundred years."
"Let go of my book."
"She was a Muggle, wasn't she, Calista?"
There was a challenge in Olivia's eyes, and Calista could see where this would go; she was trapped, now. If she was to continue the lie that her mother had died when she was born, she'd be unable to convince Olivia that her mother wasn't a Muggle, and she'd be shunned just as badly as Portia; worse, perhaps, because Portia at least was pure-blooded.
Most of the other students in Slytherin didn't put as much importance on blood purity as Olivia did, but Olivia was the ringleader of the first-years, and no matter what her reasons were, if she disliked someone, the other students in the year would follow suit, or at least the girls would.
Calista made a decision.
"No," she said, "I lied. My mother isn't dead. She… she and my father don't get along, and I don't really see her very much."
At least not while I'm awake, she thought bitterly.
"But don't you miss her?"
"No. I don't know. Why do you care?"
Olivia affected a hurt look. "I'm your best friend, Calista. I just want to know about your family. I tell you about mine."
"Well, I don't want to talk about it," Calista said shortly, and gave the textbook a great yank. It slipped out from beneath Olivia's hand, but the essay inside it got rather crumpled around the edges that were sticking out past the pages of the book.
"There's no need to get upset," Olivia said sweetly, as if nothing had happened. Calista didn't miss the malice beneath the tone, though.
She knew Olivia wasn't going to let it drop.
o-o-o-o
They were on the way back to the common room after Potions class when it happened.
Olivia was livid because Professor Snape had made her change seats with Percy Weasley halfway into class, just because he had seen her handing her ingredients off to Calista to be prepared.
She had failed the the assignment, because she had added her armadillo bile at the wrong time, and the mixture had turned black as night and congealed into a solid mass.
She was fuming, and not paying attention to where she was going, and she ran smack into a first-year Hufflepuff girl, sending both of their schoolbooks and potions kit flying all over the corridor.
The Hufflepuff girl had gotten down on the floor with Olivia, helping her pick up the mess.
"Looks like one of your phials shattered," the girl commented, lifting a piece of it, "I would've thought they'd do something to it to make it unbreakable, you know? I mean, with everything else that magic can do, why not? I s'pose it's so you'll have to keep buying new ones."
Olivia ignored her, picking individual porcupine quills up off the floor.
"I'm still getting used to all this, mind you – the magic and stuff," the Hufflepuff girl chattered on, "My parents are both Muggles, and they couldn't believe it when we found out about me, that I'm a witch. Did you always know?"
Olivia snatched up the last of her fallen ingredients, and sneered at the other girl.
"Of course I did. I'm not a Mudblood like you."
The girl only looked slightly wounded, perhaps more at Olivia's tone than her words, since she didn't seem to understand the significance of the term.
One of the girl's housemates had approached behind Olivia though, and evidently he did know the severity of the insult, because he leapt to her defence.
"You cow," he said to Olivia, "I'm going to tell the Headmaster what you said."
Olivia laughed rudely.
"Oh you are, are you? Calista's the best student in our year, and she'll hex you if you get me into trouble. You want to be walking around with boils for the rest of the year?"
The boy paled, and looked to Calista, as if for confirmation of the threat.
Calista had, until that point, had absolutely no intention of getting involved in the incident, but it looked as though Olivia wasn't going to give her a choice.
Only, before the incident had happened, Olivia had been ranting at Calista, as if it were her fault that she had moved across the room in Potions, had even been accusing her of getting caught chopping and grinding Olivia's ingredients on purpose so that Olivia would fail the class.
Calista didn't like cheating for Olivia; she took pride in her own work, and was always irritated when Olivia received credit for it, and it wasn't only in Potions. She copied her essays for Charms and History of Magic, too, and yet never offered to help Calista in Transfiguration, which was the one class that Olivia truly excelled in.
She was tired of Olivia always getting her own way.
"You started it, Olivia. I'm not going to hex anyone for you over this."
Both Hufflepuffs looked relieved, and took off before she could change her mind.
When Calista looked back at Olivia's face, she knew her decision to stand up to her had been a mistake for which she'd pay dearly.
"You. How dare you refuse to back me up, after everything I've done for you."
"What?" Calista nearly choked, she was so shocked by Olivia's words. "After all you've done for me? You're the one that copies all of my homework."
"I befriended you," Olivia said, "Even though you're just as much of an ugly little misfit as Portia is. I invited you to watch Quidditch practice, even though no one really wanted you there."
Calista had heard enough, and turned her back, so that Olivia wouldn't see how deeply her words had hurt.
But Olivia wasn't finished. The rage of her humiliation in Potions class, and again in front of the two Hufflepuff students, coupled with the threat of being reported to the Headmaster, had sufficiently loosed the rein she had on her vicious tongue.
"Everyone thinks you're weird, because you're always reading some daft book and you never want to talk to anyone. And you know what else, Calista?"
Calista paused, bracing herself. Something told her that the worst was yet to come.
"You don't fool me for a minute. I know the real reason you took that wretched little Mudblood's side is because of your mother. She was too a Muggle, wasn't she?"
Calista turned around at this, provoked into a furious rage that Olivia would bring her mother into this. Of course, Olivia didn't know the truth, but there was one way to change that.
"You're right, I did lie to you," Calista said, her face full of fury despite her best efforts to control her expression, "But my mother's not a Muggle. She's not even dead. She's in Azkaban, for torturing a couple of Aurors until they completely lost it. Don't worry, though – her blood is probably purer than yours."
The declaration made, Calista instantly wished she could take it back, but it was too late. Instead, she just took off at a run down the corridor, and completely missed the look of utter shock on Olivia's pretty face.
o-o-o-o
Olivia was better than her word. Without her friendship, Calista lost the friendships of the other girls, too.
Portia was suddenly Olivia's favourite, inexplicably. It appeared that whatever she had done to cross Olivia in the first place was forgiven in light of Calista's more recent betrayal.
Emily wouldn't play Gobstones with her anymore, because the first time she had after the incident, Olivia had crumpled up bits of parchment and thrown them at Emily until she'd given up and left Calista alone.
Olivia had not been outwardly hostile to Calista, though. It was more that she was pretending she didn't even exist, and though she would resort to bullying the other girls for associating with her, she never directly attacked her.
In fact, if anything, Olivia had been acting like she was afraid of Calista, ever since she had learned the truth about her mother.
It struck Calista as highly ironic that a girl who made such a show about disliking Muggles and Muggle-borns and wanting to hex them would find Calista's being related to someone who did hex and torture them so unpalatable.
Without anyone to talk to, and without a Gobstones opponent, Calista spent nearly all of her time as she had before ever starting at Hogwarts; with her nose in a book, as Olivia had described it.
Mealtimes became unbearable for Calista, because she didn't have a book to hide behind. No one in her own year was speaking to her, and they wouldn't let her sit in her usual spot beside them.
When she had tried to sit with them, they had spent the whole meal discussing the various reasons why they didn't like her, as if she wasn't there. Olivia was nearly always the instigator, but it was ironically Portia that was often the cruelest.
When Olivia commented loudly that she couldn't stand people who didn't properly comb their hair, a few of the second-years nearby had sniggered, and then Portia had said that the reason Calista did so well in class was because the teachers graded her on a different scale, since she was so ugly they must have thought she was the first actual troll to attend Hogwarts.
For Calista, it was just like being back at the wretched orphanage with the Muggle girls who had picked on her mercilessly. She started sitting at the opposite end of the table at dinner, next to some fifth years.
They didn't really want to sit next to a first year, and the boys made this obvious by having very crass conversations in very loud voices. By three weeks into her exclusion from Olivia's crowd, she knew far more about the anatomy of the fifth-year Slytherin boys than she could ever want to.
Between Olivia and Portia harping on her about her appearance whilst simultaneously pretending she wasn't there, and the fifth-year boys having extremely rude conversations over her head, Calista began to feel like she was invisible.
Even Potions class was miserable, because Olivia kept stealing her ingredients when Professor Snape's back was turned, and then glaring at Calista as if daring her to snitch.
It got so bad that she considered moving her things across the room to sit with the Gryffindors, but by that point her constant mistreatment of Percy had gotten her a bad reputation with them, and they were no warmer to her than the members of her own house were.
Her father must have been aware, at least on some level, that Calista was feuding with her housemates, but he didn't really see much of a problem in that, since it meant that no one was cheating off of her in class anymore.
He assumed, in fact, that this was the root of the dispute, and when he had seen Calista sitting with the fifth-years at dinner, he believed that she had simply found students to talk to that were closer to her level academically.
He even dared to hope that they'd be able to help her bring up her Transfiguration marks, which were still slipping, even though he'd been trying to help her improve them.
If he had had any notion of what the fifth-year boys were really discussing in front of Calista, he would have been positively apoplectic, and might have understood how badly Calista's exclusion among the first-years had affected her, that she would choose their crude behaviour over humiliation at the hands of her former friends.
o-o-o-o
She was running again, jagged bones stabbing her feet as she ran. She felt Bellatrix gaining on her, turned to look – and she had a knife, again.
She waved her knife, and Calista was shot through with pain, as if it had been a wand and Bellatrix had uttered the incantation for the Cruciatus Curse.
Calista forced herself to keep running, but her legs were slowing; she was tired, she couldn't run anymore.
Hands were pulling at her again from beneath. She fell down, was face-to-face with a disembodied skull.
It started to speak, and Calista tried to scream but found that she had no voice.
'Your mother murdered me,' the skull rasped, its jawbone clicking, 'She murdered me, and now you have to pay for it.'
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