Chapter 27: 10
Chapter Ten:
During the Easter break, more of the students remained at the school than had remained for Christmas break, but Calista didn't have the luxury of enjoying the expanded opportunity for company.
Instead, she was summoned to her father's office every single day of the recess, for stretches of four, six, or even eight hours at a time, to suffer Occlumency lessons.
Originally, Calista had enjoyed the subject, but it was a draining and expansive field of study, and the further she progressed, the more difficult it became.
It was unlike the rest of her lessons, because it couldn't be divided into units, and there was no stopping point. True, there were no essays, but it required a mental concentration so great that it drained physical energy from her.
Severus was convinced that Calista's dream had been an instance of Bellatrix trying, and nearly succeeding, to enter Calista's mind again. If Calista had thought him a demanding tutor before that pivotal dream (she had), it was absolutely nothing compared with what he demanded of her in their lessons now that he feared she was under attack again.
She wasn't even certain anymore how to gauge her progress, especially when there were no other students to compare herself against. She felt, at the end of each lesson, that she had progressed from the beginning of it; yet the beginning of the next lesson almost always made her feel inadequate, because as soon as she had grasped something, Severus pushed her relentlessly onto the next thing.
Calista slowly came to realise that her Occlumency lessons over the summer had been child's play. Before, she had thought that she was at least partially successful at keeping him out of her mind during their lessons; now she saw that he had never really been trying to enter before, must have left her to her privacy deliberately.
It was a gesture she appreciated, belatedly, now that she was faced with the reality of her father's abilities. His skills, as she now saw them, were very nearly immeasurable by Calista's standard.
It was hard to judge for herself whether she was making progress or not, because whether he deemed her attempt pathetic or promising, he was able to sweep aside her protective barriers as if they were completely insubstantial.
He had told her before that he was even better at Occlumency than he was at Legilimency; if this was so, then Calista couldn't even fathom the true level of his skill, because as a Legilimens he was able to overpower her without any discernible effort.
Calista had intended to spend her free time during Easter break researching the spells on the list of jinxes, hexes, and curses that she'd compiled from the fifth-years, but by the third day of the recess, it was clear to her than any allegedly free time she came by would best be put to use by sleeping off her exhaustion from her father's lessons.
In truth, she was surprised that he even allowed her to sleep without a potion that would ensure dreamlessness, because seemingly overnight, he had become obsessively convinced that Bellatrix was trying to attack her again. His second deepest conviction was that Calista was not yet strong enough to defend against her mother. The culmination of these convictions led ultimately to Calista's newly gruelling schedule.
For her part, the young girl did understand the grounds for her father's concern; she too believed that her mother was attacking her again, but faced with the prospect of having to learn an extraordinary skill in precisely no time, she felt hopeless.
Still, she hadn't had any dreams to speak of since the night she'd been caught out of bed by Filch, and she knew that each night that passed uneventfully into the next day was another opportunity for her to hone her feeble skills, in the hopes that she would be prepared for Bellatrix's eventual onslaught.
o-o-o-o
Severus knew that he was demanding an awful lot from Calista, but it was a calculated sacrifice he was extracting, and he fervently hoped it was one that would prove fruitful.
When it became clear that Bellatrix was a lot closer than he had previously thought to making a connection with Calista again, he had cursed himself for not insisting on a more rigorous schedule of defence lessons before. He had hoped (foolishly, he now thought) that he could allow her the luxury of some semblance of a childhood first.
In order to facilitate her training, he had taken a gamble on her reaction to his unleashing the true extent of his ability on her mind. He had reasoned that a child of her age with her traumatic experiences was likely to respond in one of two ways to a Legilimens of his calibre. Either she would shut down completely and retreat into the recesses of her own mind, hoping that the intruder would leave her sanity intact when he was finished, or she would read his intrusion as a challenge, and place everything she had into fighting back.
He knew better than anyone that Calista was fiercely stubborn, and proud enough to continue to fight someone against whom she had no real chance of winning. It was in this regard that he knew he was walking a fine line, because there was a possibility that, in making himself enough of a threat to inspire her to work her hardest to learn to fight him, he would lose her trust. It was the reason he had so carefully protected her privacy before, but he wasn't certain that there was still enough time to train her using the gentler approach, and that wasn't an issue he was willing to gamble on.
Severus knew that he was pushing Calista harder than was probably fair, knew that she shouldn't really be expected to hold up against this kind of rigorous training for very long. And yet, so far, she was. She was exhausted almost to an unreasonable level by the end of each session, but so far she had kept returning the next day to try again.
Severus was determined to push Calista to her utmost limits, in part because he knew that Bellatrix would do her best to get beyond those same limits, and – admittedly – in part because he wanted to see precisely what those limits were. He wanted to know, both as her protector and as the man who had fathered her, what she was actually capable of.
There was another aspect to the rigorousness of their lessons as well, one that was a benefit all in itself. With Calista so exhausted at the end of every day, and retiring from six or eight hours of keeping her mental barrier in place, she fell into a deep, virtually dreamless sleep – and slept with her barriers still unconsciously in place.
There were several mental states which made someone more susceptible to intrusion. Dreaming, intense pain, and painful memories were only a few of the triggers that could lessen one's defences. Bellatrix could hardly inflict physical pain on the child from her cell in Azkaban, and Severus had effectively eliminated the third of those factors when he had entered Calista's mind the previous year and pilfered away the worst of her memories. The combination of exhaustion and vigilance in their Occlumency lessons seemed to be keeping Calista's sleep dreamless, or at least shielded in such a way that it appeared so.
As for Calista's darkest memories, they remained in stoppered vials in Headmaster Dumbledore's office for the time being. In truth, Severus had not anticipated that Bellatrix would try to use Legilimency through Calista's dreams to force her to remember the incident again.
When he considered what might have happened if Bella had succeeded in doing just that, he felt as if an icy fist was gripping his heart. He had rescued Calista from Bellatrix's possession once, and he honestly wasn't sure if either himself or his daughter could persevere through that ordeal again so soon. Furthermore, he had obligations outside of his daughter's protection that stood to be greatly jeopardised if he were forced to oppose Bellatrix twice.
The choice between saving his own daughter's life and fulfilling his obligations to Albus Dumbledore on behalf of Lily Potter's son was not one that he cared to make.
The memories themselves were a cause for concern on Severus' part, because he could often feel Calista's frightened angst when she tried to remember the source of her physical scars and couldn't. However, he remembered with great clarity the horrific details contained in the memories, and he had seen the trauma they'd caused to the girl's young mind.
Since he had liberated them from her mind, she had changed drastically; she had begun to heal from the rest of her mental and emotional scars at a much greater pace, and she had begun to actually connect with others. Before Severus' battle with Bellatrix within the landscape of Calista's mind, the girl had hardly spoken to anyone but himself, had been habitually distant and unapprochable. Now, she engaged in class discussions and had several friends among the other students. Even the fact that she had made enemies with some of the students was an improvement on the child who hadn't even seemed to recognize humanity in the beginning.
Logically, he knew that her memories would have to be returned to her eventually. Emotionally, he wanted to deny that, but to deprive her of them forever would be to send her into battle without knowing the size of the enemy's army. It was another motivator for him to press her still harder to improve her Occlumency skills, because as long as she could hold Bellatrix out of her mind, the battle between them could be indefinitely delayed.
The same part of him that wanted to deny the necessity of ever restoring Calista's memory in full had yet another reason for wanting Calista to become strong enough to successfully oppose Bellatrix. He knew that Bellatrix likely already resented his having fathered Calista, even though he hadn't known that she wasn't employing contraception at the time that they'd conceived the girl. She had made clear enough, during their youth, what she thought of his mixed parentage and his decidedly un-fearsome reputation among the Death Eaters. In hindsight, it became reasonable to assume that Bellatrix had taken assorted lovers with an intention to produce a child. She had always expressed a grudging admiration for his potential, and had only deplored his lack of application.
It would be deliciously ironic if Bellatrix failed in whatever undoubtedly vile plans she had for Calista because of the application of his skills in the very child that he had unknowingly given her for her twisted malpractices. He was the one who had unwittingly delivered Calista into Bellatrix's mad phantasmagoria, and so it fell to him to equip the child with the skills she would need to wake from it.
o-o-o-o
As soon as the Easter break was over, the mood in the castle intensified noticeably as the students prepared for their year-end exams. In between classes, there were hardly any students wandering the hallways, but the common rooms and the library seemed to be constantly full.
Calista grew increasingly frantic as exams drew nearer and she still wasn't able to transfigure anything properly without a reference object to go by. It was as if her brain could only process half of the spell at a time, and her transitions were never complete.
She was grateful for her father's help, but she still couldn't seem to grasp the subject. He kept telling her that she was thinking too much about the technical aspects of the transfiguration instead of the final results. He said her indecision was confusing the spell, and Calista had pretended she knew what he meant by this.
She spent so much time trying in vain to improve her transfiguration results that she rather neglected to study for the rest of her exams until they were only a few days away, at which time she tried to cram as much information into her head as she possibly could, and prayed that she would retain at least some of it.
Adding to her nerves, as usual, were Olivia and Portia's antics. She was particularly on edge because she had absolutely no idea what Olivia's angle was anymore – the other girl had been curiously courteous of late, offering to save Calista a seat at dinner and even lending her a quill in History of Magic when she'd misplaced her own.
Calista was used to Olivia's meanness, and she found she didn't know how to react to her sudden change of heart. At first, she had assumed that Portia had managed to slight Olivia more than Calista had, but the two were still thick as thieves. Olivia and Portia weren't friendly to her, exactly, but they seemed…respectful, oddly. It left Calista with a decidedly uneasy feeling, because now she had no frame of reference to brace herself for whatever attack she knew Olivia must be planning.
She had also assumed that her father would ease up on the Occlumency lessons to allow her time to study for exams; he did not. In addition to her Saturday lessons, which had now been expanded to fill at least four hours, she was expected to sit in Severus' office while he corrected papers on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. While he did at least allow her to work on other homework during that time, he would keep probing her mind at random intervals, testing her ability to hold a barrier up while concentrating on other tasks.
She had ceased trying to gauge the progress of her improvements in Occlumency, and instead concentrated only on forcing herself to retain some semblance of a mental barrier at all times, since she never knew anymore when her father was going to surprise her with an unannounced test of her abilities
Between studying for exams, Occlumency lessons and surprise tests, her level of vigilance in regards to the other Slytherin first-years, and the numerous hexes and jinxes she had to research to keep the older Slytherins interested in her conversation, Calista was thankful to collapse into her bed every night, and slept so deeply that if she had dreams, she could not remember them in the morning. As each exhausting day crawled by, she found it harder and harder to get up in the morning, and twice she overslept and barely made it to class on time.
She fell asleep in Astronomy one night, and was mortified to have been woken by Professor Sinistra, in full view of the rest of the class. She had heard more than one barely concealed snigger at her expense.
Since she didn't care much for Herbology to begin with and it happened to be an early morning class, she was often exceptionally snappish with Professor Sprout. When the professor finally grew exasperated enough to assign Calista to detention, the girl had nearly burst into tears, because she didn't know how she could possibly make time to serve the detention without cutting into her already short sleep schedule.
Of course, crying in public was the absolute last thing that Calista wanted to do, so she'd asked to be excused to the hospital wing, muttering something about a headache and disappearing before the professor could question her further.
As soon as she arrived in the hospital wing, Madame Pomfrey had ushered her into an empty bed.
"You just lie down, dear," she said firmly, and a few moments later she presented Calista with a goblet filled with a sleeping potion – the same one, in fact, that her father had given her on the night that she'd tried to sneak to his office.
"I—I have to get back to class," Calista protested, feeling vaguely unsettled – there was something she was supposed to be doing just now, wasn't there?
"Nonsense," Madame Pomfrey said, pushing the goblet into the young girl's hand. "You need to sleep. It's the pressure of the exams, they work you children far too hard this time of year. It can be so trying, especially on you young ones. Now, just lie back and get a few hours kip, that's a good girl."
Calista allowed herself to be mothered into drinking the potion and was asleep as soon as she lay down.
When she awoke, it was late afternoon. Warm sunlight streaked through the narrow windows at the far end of the chamber, and Calista realised with a sudden jolt of alarm that she must have slept through some of her classes.
"She's awake now," she heard someone whisper from her near left, and then three forms came into view. She hadn't even realised that she had visitors… and once she saw who they were, she wished she didn't.
"Olivia." Calista said flatly, her eyes sliding to Portia's plump form and Emily's slight one behind the ringleader.
"Are you feeling much better, Calista?" Olivia asked, far too kindly.
Calista narrowed her eyes. "What d'you want, Avril?"
Malice flew across Olivia's features so briefly that someone less perceptive than Calista might not have caught it; Calista herself might even have missed it had it not been for her restorative sleep. Almost as soon as it appeared, it was replaced with a stiff, sweet smile.
"I – that is, we – just wanted to see how you were doing. We were worried about you."
"Since when do you care about how I feel?" Calista asked, not bothering to hide the suspicion in her voice.
"That's not a very nice way to treat your friends," Olivia started, and Calista cut her off with a harsh, awkward laugh.
"You're not my friends," she said shortly.
Olivia's nostrils flared briefly, but her wooden smile remained in place. Portia tugged Olivia's elbow. "Let's go, 'Liv," she said, "I don't get why we have to w—,"
Calista saw Olivia's leg twitch, and then Portia winced like she'd been kicked.
"Of course we are," Olivia said easily, "Aren't we, Emily?"
Emily nodded, glancing almost apologetically at Calista.
"I don't trust you," Calista said baldly. Olivia flinched.
"Well," the fair-haired girl said, casting around for something to say, "I took notes for you in Binns' class, on the goblin rebellions, anyway. I'll let you copy them once you're out of here."
Calista smirked suddenly.
"No thanks," she said, "I'm not a cheater, despite what you told McGonagall. I think I know what this is about now, though. You're worried you're going to fail the Potions exam, aren't you?"
"They're notes, Calista, not my whole bloody essay," Olivia said coldly, in a tone that Calista was much more familiar with, "And this has nothing to do with Potions. I'm insulted. I tried to be nice to you, and help you out, and you repay me by being perfectly wretched."
"Yeah," Calista said impassively, "I am wretched. Now shove off."
"Come on, Calista," Emily spoke up finally, from behind Olivia. "Olivia just wants to make peace, all right? It's not… she's not planning anything, I promise. Let's just get along again, please?"
Before Calista had decided quite how she would answer, Madame Pomfrey bustled over and told the girls they had to leave because they were disturbing the other patients.
"Not you, dear," Madame Pomfrey said, putting her hand on Calista's shoulder as the girl made to leave as well. "I want you to stay the night, just in case. We want to be sure you're not really ill, don't we?"
o-o-o-o
Calista never said in so many words that she would forgive Olivia and Portia, or befriend either of them again. She simply tolerated the other girls' attempts to be kind, although she still regarded both with a wary eye. In truth though, she was too exhausted from studying to look the gift horse too closely in the mouth; for the moment, Olivia and Portia simply became another potential complication that Calista didn't have to concern herself with.
Far sooner than she would have liked, exams began. Kimberly, Conor, and the rest of the fifth-years barely spared her a word or a glance as they all undertook their OWL testing, but Calista was swamped enough herself, and didn't really mind.
Calista thought she had done well enough in Herbology and Astronomy. She surprised herself during her Defence Against the Dark Arts exam; she had expected to do well enough, but the subject hadn't stood out for her particularly well during the course of her first year, and she didn't think she'd do any better than average on it. In the end though, when the bell had rung signalling the end of the testing period, Calista had looked up with a dazed feeling, thinking that the hour had only just begun, that the exam couldn't possibly be over yet – and when she looked down against at her parchment, and then glanced across the aisle at a few of the other students, she saw that she'd filled the page with paragraph upon paragraph describing spells that weren't even in the curriculum for her year, and had written at least twice as much as anyone else.
She felt pleased after the first few days of testing, particularly given the amount she had found to write for her DADA exam. She hadn't realised that all those discussions with the fifth-years had sunk into her mind as well as they had, and it had made up for her lack of formal studying in the area.
It was Transfiguration she was dreading though, and with good reason. The exam was a practical one, and consisted of turning a mouse into a snuffbox. Not only did Calista's snuffbox have whiskers in the end, but it still had a tail.
Discouraged after her poor performance in Transfiguration, Calista had been listless and inattentive for the first portion of her Charms exam. She supposed part of it had to do with weariness, but she knew part of it was that her self-confidence had been effectively shot. Towards the second half of the exam, she picked herself up and managed to perform a very neat Flame-Freezing charm. At the last minute, she changed the colour of the flames from blue to pink as well, hoping that the added complication to the spell would earn her back some of the points that she'd undoubtedly lost with her less-than-exemplary dancing pineapple. She hoped Professor Flitwick hadn't noticed that she'd only managed to make it walk in circles for the first thirty seconds of the charm.
By Friday, Calista was both disheartened and exhausted again, but the Potions essay was one she could have written in her sleep by that point, and although she wasn't the first to finish her Forgetfulness Potion, she was the first one to complete it correctly, so that was well enough.
She had been half expecting her father to give her an exam on Occlumency too, but mercifully he didn't, unless another random swipe at her barrier during dinner on Friday counted.
When she felt him brushing at her barrier, after a week of demanding exams, she couldn't help but feel quite snappish.
Sod off, she growled mentally at him. When she glanced up at the staff table, she could have sworn she saw his mouth twitching rather as if he were trying not to laugh.
Calista allowed herself a tiny smile, too. She could afford to; her blasted exams were finally over, and it was almost time for the summer break.
o-o-o-o
It was strange to be packing up her belongings to be going somewhere other than Hogwarts. After all, Calista had only lived in the South London flat with her father for one summer; before that, she had spent quite literally the better part of her childhood in the castle. It didn't feel like she was going home so much as it felt like she was going on holiday somewhere for the summer.
Calista's grey cat, Yellow, wound herself around the ankles of all of the girls in the dormitory as they packed up their things, purring in a manner that was somehow more demanding than complacent. The cat seemed to be as confused by the activity as Calista herself felt.
"I'll write to all of you this summer," Olivia promised, and Calista toyed for a moment with the idea of telling Olivia not to bother, but when she was honest with herself, she was rather tired of arguing all the time with the other girls in her year.
"Me too," Portia echoed, ever the follower. Calista smirked into Yellow's fur under cover of kissing the cat's forehead.
All too soon, the girls were standing amidst a sea of other students in the Great Hall, saying their final goodbyes for the school year.
On the Hogwarts Express, Calista chose the company of her fifth-year friends over her roommates. They might never get around to calling her by her given name, but at least she had a vague idea of where she stood with them, and she felt it was preferable to be a younger-sibling-like hanger-on to Kimberly and her friends than to try to traverse the conversational minefield that Olivia Avril always seemed to be at the centre of.
"Don't you have friends in your own year, Ickle Snapey?" Peter Boyle, the ginger-haired lad asked her when she entered their compartment but Kimberly had waved his concerns away.
"She's all right," the older girl had said, "We're not going to see her for the whole summer. Don't you want one last chance to corrupt her young mind?" Kimberly grinned, straightening her shoulders so far that they curved backwards, in a poor imitation of her rival, Elyse Briggs.
"Speaking of Elyse," Conor had piped up, "You staying with Ethan's kin again this summer?"
Kimberly had glanced at Calista, and then nodded. "So who's up for a game of Exploding Snap?"
Calista raised her eyebrows at the sudden change of topic, but knew better than to say anything, especially once Peter cut her a warning glance.
After the train had pulled into King's Cross and the students had poured out like prisoners being freed from Azkaban, Emily had pulled Calista aside, just before Calista met up with her father on the platform. Severus didn't take the train, although Calista wasn't sure exactly how he did get to and from the school.
"Calista," Emily said quietly, once they were away from the rest of the students. "I wanted to invite you to come and spend part of the summer holiday with me. Mum doesn't much approve of Olivia, so I couldn't ask when she was around, but…" the slight girl smiled shyly, "I figured maybe we could play a few games of Gobstones this summer. I don't want to get rusty."
Calista blinked in surprise, and then allowed herself a small smile "What – really? Er, yes, of course – I mean, I'll have to ask Father, but I'm sure it will be all right."
"Do you have a minute to meet my mother?"
Calista glanced over to where Severus was waiting for her. He didn't appear to be in a particular hurry, so Calista agreed, and followed Emily to a similarly built, brown-haired woman in a very smart outfit.
"Mum," Emily squeaked, as the woman pulled her into an embrace, "Er, this is my friend I told you about. Calista Snape."
Emily's mother released her hold on Emily, and smiled to Calista. "Hello, dear. It's so nice to meet one of Emily's friends. You'll come and stay with us this summer, won't you?"
"Uhm," Calista said, "I have to ask Father, but I… I think I can."
She felt a sudden, light pressure on her shoulder, and then her father was standing behind her. "Ah – Hello, Ferada," Severus said, inclining his head slightly in Emily's mother's direction. "I trust you are well."
"Well, it's certainly been awhile since I've seen you, Severus," the woman said, "Although I heard from my Emily here that you were teaching at the school. And you have a daughter in Emily's year." Her voice lifted at the end of this sentence, even though it was not a question. She sounded surprised, Calista thought.
Severus nodded curtly, a clear indication that he had no further comment on that particular matter. "Emily is a decent performer in my class," he said, and Calista had the distinct impression that he was trying to change the subject.
She was still considering whether or not her feelings were hurt by her father's obvious hesitance to discuss her with Emily's mother, whom Calista had not even known until this instant was acquainted with her father, when Emily's mother – Ferada – spoke again.
"Well, I was just informing Calista here that she's welcome to come and visit Emily over the summer," she said, "Provided that's fine with you, of course."
Severus nodded again, not quite so shortly. "I'm certain something can be arranged," he said.
"I'll write you," Emily promised, and Calista nodded slowly, still feeling slightly displaced by the twin revelations that Emily wanted to see her over the summer, and that her own father appeared to be at least fairly friendly with Emily's mother, and she had never known it.
As Calista and Severus left the station, Calista found herself filled with the distinct feeling that her summer was likely to turn out a whole lot better than she'd anticipated it would even a fortnight ago.
"I'll carry your luggage to the Floo Station," Severus said darkly, "if you'll carry that wretched cat."
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone