Chapitre 21: 4
Chapter Four:
Calista was running over a field of broken glass. She could hear the crunch of it beneath her weight, felt shards slicing the bottoms of her feet, but she was blind to the pain.
She twisted her head, looked over her shoulder – no. Bellatrix was closer, so close that Calista could feel the iciness that seemed to surround her.
Calista tore her eyes away from the figure of her mother, looked instead at the ground of broken glass.
Except, she wasn't running over broken glass. She was running over bone. Thousands and thousands of fragments of human bone, oily-slick with blood but still jagged and sharp enough to cut into her feet and ankles as she ran.
A hand reached for her ankle, pulling her backwards – no! Calista struggled to pull free, looked over her shoulder again.
And then she fell. Panicked and twisting, Calista looked towards her now-throbbing ankle, held in a death grip. It wasn't Bellatrix holding her back, but a skeletal hand, rising from the pile of bone she had been running across.
The hand was holding her fast, and more of them were rising up, gripping her wrists, her legs. One hand snaked up and grabbed her neck, and she couldn't breathe…
Reducto! She thought frantically, but it was no use. She didn't have her wand.
A rolling, hoarse laugh invaded her senses, and she forgot, for just an instant, to panic because of the bony hand encircling her throat.
Instead, she panicked because Bellatrix was hovering over her, wand pointed straight down to where Calista was held captive.
Crucio, Bellatrix mouthed. Calista couldn't hear her voice, but she knew the form of the incantation on her lips all too well.
There was pain, and it was so consuming that it overpowered everything else, and Calista was no longer aware of the skeletal hands holding her fast, of the cuts and scrapes on her feet, of anything but Bellatrix's madness.
Calista heard one string of a whisper, and it came from faraway but it was in Bellatrix's voice.
You are mine, Daughter.
Calista woke up screaming. She pressed her hands to her mouth, at first afraid that she would be alerting Bellatrix to her location, and then, as the reality of where she was sank in, afraid of waking up the other girls in her room.
She looked about, expecting with a sinking heart to see all of the girls bolt upright, staring at her like she belonged in the insanity ward of St. Mungo's.
It was quiet in the room, except for her own panicked breathing, and an occasional snore from Portia. Slowly, the realization came to Calista that she hadn't screamed aloud – haven't even made a sound.
She choked on a bitter laugh. Even in her sleep, she knew that crying out would only enrage and encourage Bellatrix.
Knowing that sleep was lost to her for the night, Calista slipped silently out of bed, and crept down the hall to the common room. She opened one of her textbooks almost at random, and forced herself to read even when the lines blurred. Anything, to keep sleep, and Bellatrix, at bay.
o-o-o-o
As Calista sat, morosely picking at a bowl of porridge topped with raisins, she could find nothing to be content with, except that it was Friday.
Her only class this morning was Potions, and since she was now dead tired after having been ripped from her sleep by another of her dreams, and spending the rest of the night studying, she was at least thankful for that small allowance from fate.
It took Olivia three tries to catch Calista's attention and remind her that they had to get to class.
"I don't think Professor Snape will tolerate anyone being late to class, not even you," she said tartly, "So let's be on our way, shall we?"
Calista only nodded, not having the energy to speak, and gathered her cauldron and Potions book.
Only moments after Calista walked into Potions class, she knew she'd have to recant her gratitude for it being Friday, and thus an easy morning.
Her father – Professor Snape – had transcribed an ingredients list on the chalkboard at the head of the room for a Draught of Drowsiness.
It was a very mild sleeping potion that Calista had never made, but had taken plenty of times as a younger child, when she was too frightened by her nightmares to sleep, but her father had thought it unwise to give her anything stronger.
"You will work with a partner today. You have the length of the class period to complete your draught. I understand that none of you have other classes today, so if I were you I'd pay careful attention to detail, because anyone producing anything short of perfection will be remaining after class."
A flurry of whispers broke out between the students.
"Work with me, Calista," Olivia whispered, just as Calista had turned to her other side to ask Emily Yaxley to be her partner. Emily was better at Potions than Olivia, and Calista was so exhausted and anxious that she'd feel better if she had a partner she didn't have to watch so closely.
Calista turned away before even opening her mouth, and nodded to Olivia. Even this far into the school year, she knew which of her fellow students to remain on good terms with.
The week prior, Portia had offended Olivia somehow and was still shunned at mealtimes by the rest of the first-years. Calista had found cause to disagree with Olivia on a number of occasions, but each of them concerned something so minor that it had never outweighed the risk of becoming the outcast again.
Across the room, Percy Weasley had already been cajoled into working with Oliver Wood, who was solidly at the bottom of the class.
There was a whirl of a cloak, and then Professor Snape faced the class again, almost as an afterthought.
"I will assign partners," he said softly.
He assigned Emily with Lucas Slater, a Gryffindor, but then paired most of the rest of the students with members of their own house. When the last four students left were herself, Olivia, Wood, and Weasley, Calista was glad she hadn't snubbed Olivia to ask Emily to be partners, since they'd be paired together anyway.
"Mr. Wood and Miss Avril will work together, I think. Calista, you are paired with Mr. Weasley."
Calista nearly dropped her cauldron on her foot in her shock, but recovered just in time. She looked up at her father, but his eyes were utterly unreadable, his expression grim.
Percy crossed the room and spread his ingredients out on the table, looking no happier with the arrangement than she felt about it.
Deciding to just ignore him, and ignore the fact that her father had paired her with him for this assignment, she set to chopping her dandelion roots in precise, even pieces.
Beside her, Percy methodically ground trolls' teeth into a fine powder. For several long moments, the only sounds between them were the steady chop-chopping of her knife, and the hushed grinding sound between Percy's mortar and pestle.
Calista cleared her throat, and set her knife down, turning to Percy.
"My cauldron is better quality," she said, "It'll distribute the heat more evenly, so we'll use it for our potion. But can I use yours to stew the dandelion roots in?"
Percy blinked, and then nodded, pushing his cauldron from his far side to the space between where he and Calista worked.
"Of course, help yourself."
Calista used her wand to fill the cauldron partway with a jet of clear water, and put the cauldron over a flame. Since it was a magical flame, and she was only heating water and not volatile or temperamental potions ingredients, the water boiled within a minute.
She selected a small mesh bag from her potions supplies and stuffed the dandelion roots into it, cinching and tying off the top, and then dropped the bag into the water, leaving the end of the string dangling over the lip of the cauldron, like a teabag.
"Thanks," she finally remembered to say, belatedly, to Percy. It felt awkward, to thank a Gryffindor for anything.
"Oh, you're welcome," Percy said automatically, glancing up. He caught sight of her dandelion teabag and glanced around the room, ascertaining that they were the only pair with such a setup.
"That's a good idea," he offered, and Calista thought he still sounded too eagerly friendly, "Since it preserves the roots in a more pristine condition until they're added to the rest of the draught."
Calista cut him a sideways look.
"I know what it does," she said shortly, "I'm the one that did it."
Percy looked wounded, and then he turned back to his troll teeth, which were already ground quite fine enough. Sighing, he set the powder aside, and began slicing mayweed stems lengthwise.
While the dandelion roots stewed, Calista took it upon herself to prepare the rest of the ingredients, besides the trolls' teeth and the mayweed.
As she prepared the final ingredient, four sopophorous beans, by crushing them with the flat of her blade, Percy was left with nothing to do.
He made to lift the dandelion roots out of the cauldron to check on them, but Calista glared at him in a manner so reminiscent of her father, that he couldn't help but glance around the room to make sure that the professor still had an alibi.
He did, and it involved glowering over the cauldron that Olivia Avril and Oliver Wood were sharing, and denouncing the way their roots were handled, as well as the way their mayweed was sliced.
"I'm keeping track of them," Calista assured him icily, and Percy was taken aback, and huffed in irritation.
Professor Snape chose that moment, of course, to walk by them and inspect their cauldron. Since Calista had several of the ingredients in her possession, Percy hadn't been able to start the first part of the mixture, and their cauldron was empty.
Percy braced himself, but Snape simply moved on, without a word.
Calista extinguished the flame beneath Percy's cauldron, and worked against the clock to get the other steps of the potion completed. If the dandelion roots cooled off too much, they'd be just as useless as if she had let them continue to boil.
"You know, if you'd allowed me to do more than smash things, I could have prepared this part for you, so you could just add the dandelion roots right away." Percy pointed out.
Calista was quiet for a moment, and then she noticed Olivia watching their exchange intently, her own potion momentarily forgotten and decidedly the wrong colour. Wood frantically tried to fix it by dumping more trolls' teeth in, but Calista could tell even from here there were already too many.
"Well," Calista said snidely, cutting a brief glance at Olivia, "I wanted it done right. I'm not going to fail just because I was paired with a bone-headed Gryffindor."
Olivia smirked, looking smug. Calista was so caught up in observing this, and then in Olivia and Wood's potion slowly bubble over the top of their cauldron while Wood frantically tried everything to make it recede again, that she quite missed Percy's reaction.
His face flushed red, and then went pale. He opened his mouth and then closed it. And then he decided that he was never going to try to be friendly to a Slytherin again.
Percy and Calista achieved top marks on their potion, but Percy couldn't even be glad for it, since he hadn't been allowed to help.
Just as they had cleaned up their supplies, and Percy swept out of the room without so much as a backward glance, Calista heard herself being summoned to the head of the room, where Professor Snape stood, supervising the clean-up of some of the more catastrophic mistakes of the class period.
"Calista," he called softly, but in a voice that brooked no argument, "You will remain after class for a moment."
Calista nodded, although his gaze was no longer on her, but on Olivia's retreating back as she left the dungeons, leaving Wood to clean up the mess both of them had made.
When there was no one left in the dungeon classroom besides father and daughter, Severus placed his hand on Calista's shoulder and guided her towards his office. Inside, he closed the door, and took a seat behind his desk.
Calista took the remaining chair, facing him.
"Why did you pair me with Weasley?" she asked, without preamble.
Severus levelled his unreadable gaze at her, and waited an infuriating moment to answer.
"Because he has the highest marks in the class, after yourself," he answered, and he almost sounded tired, beneath the snappish overtones.
"What about Emily?" she challenged, although even she didn't know why she was bothering, since before being assigned partners she had been about to work with Olivia.
"Miss Yaxley ranks third in the class, after Mr. Weasley," he said, and then waved his hand as though it was of no importance. "But it doesn't matter, evidently, who you are partnered with, since you will insist on doing all the work anyway."
"I wanted it done r—" Calista began, and Severus interrupted her.
"I assure you that Mr. Weasley is just as capable of producing a Drowsiness Draught as you are," he said, "Which is precisely why I paired you together."
"If we both could have done it, why make us work as a team?" she challenged. Even as the words came out of her mouth, Calista asked herself silently why she was fighting him.
She didn't really care anymore who she'd been paired with, since the class was over and she'd passed. Why, when it came to her father, did she always want to argue with him?
"I'd assumed – correctly, I can see – that you hadn't slept well last night. I thought you'd appreciate a class in which you didn't have to scrape your friend Miss Avril's mark up off the floor with your own efforts, but I can see that I was mistaken."
Silence.
Finally, "How did you know I didn't sleep well?"
There was no use denying it; whenever Severus professed to know anything, no matter how improbable the knowledge was for him to come by, he did know it. Calista knew this well enough by now.
He looked slightly surprised for a fraction of a second, or perhaps only exasperated.
"You were calling out last night."
It took her a moment of processing, of remembering that she hadn't made a sound, to realize what he meant.
Calista scowled and focused her gaze on her fingernails. "I wasn't trying to."
"I gathered that," he said, outwardly emotionless, "Which is why I didn't storm the Slytherin dormitories to make sure you were all right."
In that moment, for no reason she could name, Calista felt like crying. It would have been such a relief, like peeling the dead skin off an old wound, but she wouldn't. Not in front of her father, who she knew placed such a high regard on self-control.
"So," Severus said, after another long silence, "Are you all right?"
She briefly considered lying, but he would know, so there wasn't much point other than further antagonizing him.
"I had another… dream," she said haltingly, "But… truly, just a dream. You don't need to worry."
"Are you certain that's all it was?"
"Yes," she answered too quickly.
Severus raised an eyebrow, and Calista was obligated to elaborate.
"It wasn't like… before," she said, unwilling even to verbalize Bellatrix's attack on her mind, "It really was just a nightmare."
Severus fixed his eyes on Calista's face for a long moment.
"I am not going to force you to tell me about your nightmares, if you don't want to," he said at last, "But when you have a dream that seems unusual, or that you awake from and still feel that something isn't right, you must tell me, immediately."
"'When'? Don't you mean 'if'?"
"No, I don't," Severus answered, smoothing a small stack of papers on his desk, "Bellatrix will attempt to harm you again, whether it is tomorrow or in ten years' time. As long as she lives, you are in danger."
"Can't we just kill her and then I can stop worrying?" Calista muttered.
Severus made a rude noise and disrupted some of the papers on his desk.
"Do you think, if it were that simple, that it wouldn't already have been done?"
Calista shivered, because something in her father's tone reminded her of how he had met Bellatrix in the first place: they had both been part of the Dark Lord's inner circle. Which meant, she thought, her mid racing, that her father was just as capable of torture and murder as her mother was.
Her eyes wandered from his face to scan the shelves of books behind him. Half of them were tomes of Dark magic. On the shelves of her father's personal library, Calista imagined she could find the methods to kill Bellatrix a thousand times over.
Or to kill anyone, really.
o-o-o-o
The truth was, Severus had never wanted Calista, at least not in the abstract sense.
If he had known, when he serviced Bellatrix as a lover, that their union would produce a child, he never would have done what he did, and he would have been doubly loathe to it if he had truly understood the cruelties that Bellatrix would impose on that child.
It had been shortly after his initiation into the Dark Lord's circle, and only almost as shortly after his fateful argument with Lily Evans.
He had been hurting, metaphorically licking his wounds, because all of his attempts to reconcile with Lily had been fruitless. It had seemed, even from that early stage, that she was cutting her ties to him completely.
Bellatrix was beautiful in those days, and evil or not, she had always been magnetic. She had been twenty-three, and everyone knew she was dissatisfied with her new husband. She was cold and cruel, but she was a very talented witch, and had brains to match her exquisite figure.
At sixteen, resentful after his first true heartbreak, and already far too deep in a dark organization that he could never safely back out of, Severus had felt overwhelmed. He was talented, brilliant, and corruptible. And to Bellatrix, who seemed determined to prove to Rodolphus that she had no love for him, Severus was also easy prey. That their affair continued even after her husband's death was perhaps the most surprising aspect of it all.
Bellatrix, who at first was intoxicating because of her madness, soon became tiresome and frightening because of the very same thing. She and Severus had only carried on a handful of times, over a span of perhaps three or four months, before she had moved on, and he had left her bed feeling quite possibly worse about himself than ever before.
He had stopped trying to reconcile with Lily after that. He had felt, somehow, that he no longer deserved her.
But it wasn't only himself. Bellatrix had taken so many lovers during that time that when she became quite obviously pregnant, it hadn't even occurred to Severus that the child could be his.
At first, he had assumed she was pregnant with her husband's child, but when the child was born, the timing didn't quite add up. Others noticed this too, but when called out, she had only said that it didn't matter who had fathered the child; it only mattered that the girl was raised in the proper tradition.
She boasted that her daughter would become the Dark Lord's most reassured servant, but as it turned out, the Dark Lord had no interest in infants.
This had left Bellatrix in a bad position, but she had made the best of it in her twisted way, and taken to raising the child herself, still with the intention of committing the girl to Voldemort's service at the first opportunity.
This was the part that everyone had known.
Once, she had brought the child with her to a meeting of the Death Eaters. She had been punished, since the Dark Lord had already made his utter lack of interest in Bella's baby clear.
It was the glimpse of a small, dark head that first unsettled Severus. If he had begun to suspect at that point in time, that the child might be his, he had not admitted it to himself yet.
Instead, the idea had festered within him for years, a seed of doubt that was nourished even through his darkest times, when he lost the only woman he had ever loved.
He had a dream, only months after the Potters had been killed and the Dark Lord had vanished. In it, he was married to Lily, and they had a child. She handed the child to him, and he looked down to see that it was wearing Bella's face.
The next day, Bellatrix had been apprehended by Aurors, and thrown in Azkaban, To Severus, it felt like it could not possibly be mere coincidence, so he had gone to Albus Dumbledore, and asked about Bellatrix's child. A day and a half later, he met Calista. The instant he saw her face, he knew – because she looked like him, far more than she looked like Bellatrix. She had his nose (for which he pitied her), and his complexion, and his eyes, which was perhaps the most startling thing of all.
When he had asked Dumbledore about the child, he had not intended to take her home. He had only intended to ensure that she was alive, was doing all right. After all, Bellatrix was in Azkaban, and he doubted there was anyone else that would think of checking in on her child.
He had hoped to avoid the question of parentage altogether, because if the child's father was unknown, then she could remain nothing to him; but if he knew that he was her father, there would be a whole new set of decisions to be made, decisions Severus didn't care to think about.
And then he had seen her, and the decision had been made for him. She was most assuredly his, and beneath the malicious hostility in her dark, dark eyes, he had seen in that first instant that she desperately needed him.
He hadn't planned on having children, and he most certainly hadn't planned on being a single father. Almost every day, he questioned whether he had truly done the right thing, because he knew he wasn't affectionate enough, or understanding enough, or even kind enough to constitute a good parent.
Only, as it turned out, it wasn't affection, or understanding, or even kindness that Calista needed. It was acceptance, and persistence, and protection.
Acceptance, because at her tender age she had been terribly scarred, but she didn't have the ability or the inclination to ask for help. Persistence, because she was a prisoner of her own personality. Protection because, as long as her mother lived, she would never be safe.
Now, years later, Severus still didn't want a child. He would never tell Calista, because she wouldn't, couldn't understand. It wasn't because he didn't love her that he sometimes wished she'd never been born; it was because he loved her so powerfully that he could not stand to see her suffer. But then, selfishly, at the same, time, he was glad for the fact that she had been born, that everything had turned out the way it had, because he had her now, and he could not help but remember what Dumbledore had told him - that Calista adored him, that he was her hero - and he had never been seen in that light. Knowing that it was likely true only made him want to assure that it didn't change.
She was far too young to be aware of all the things she was aware of, and he knew that already, she thought of herself as having two possible paths for her life: She would either spend her childhood learning how to kill her mother, or her mother would destroy her first. Severus knew there were other options, but Calista was still young, and she tended to see things in black and white.
If it turned out that she was correct, if she couldn't protect herself from destruction without destroying her mother, Severus did not know which would be worse for the girl's soul. What he did know was that Calista was part of his life now – was, in fact, most of it – and he would guide her towards the path that might at least save his own soul, even if it put both of them at terrible risk.
For if Bellatrix did destroy Calista, he thought it would rend his soul as if he had committed a thousand murders.
État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone