The Heiress of Slytherin

it's giving 🌟trauma🌟

As the class formed a queue down the room to face the beast she found herself walking backwards as fast as she could till her back bumped into the wall, startling her out of her transfixed reverie. She looked about her and saw that she was far from alone in her reaction. Theo, Pansy and Draco were pressed along the wall with her, each of their faces betraying the same complicated swirl of emotions that she had just been feeling.

As she caught sight of Theo's face her heart dropped like a stone. There was no trepidation written into his features, only a cold, white dread. The realisation smacked into her suddenly. She already knew his worst fear. She watched the students at the front of the room step up to clowns, spiders, snakes and more and she felt her brothers pain like a knife to the heart.

How could he stand in front of this room of his peers, who feared such comparatively menial things, and have the boggart transform into his father in front of them all. How could he possibly find a way to make that reality humorous when he still woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, not because of things he feared could happen, but because of the things he'd already lived through.

Ivy grabbed his hand tightly before she realised she was reaching for it and he looked at her with panic deep in his eyes. She nodded to him that she understood and gently tugged him with her to the far back of the line, bringing Draco and Pansy with her as she went. From the shades of light green colouring their features she had a feeling that they were both realising that their boggarts would also be far too rooted in reality to manage.

She placed herself at the front of the group, more willing to have to face her own dreaded unknown than watch her friends face their horrifying realities, but in the end it never came to that point. Harry had reached the front of the line, and he stepped forward eagerly.

The boggart rose and began to swirl into another shape, and Ivy thought she caught a glimpse of a tattered piece of grey cloth before Remus suddenly jumped in front of him, forcing the creature to shift once more.

A sudden, luminous ball of white hung in the room for a moment before their professor pointed his wand and bellowed Riddikulus, transforming whatever had been before into a balloon that whizzed above the classes heads, around the room and finally into the open door of the wardrobe, which Lupin slammed closed after it.

Curious as his fear was, Ivy felt no interest in prying. She had realised in only the last little while an incredibly grave, incredibly important lesson: that the worst fears may puzzle other people, not because they are not terrifying, but because they are born from the private horrors of one's life. That, was not something she had any wish to press any one on ever.

——🐍——

The rest of the day passed about as enjoyably as a funeral for the Slytherin crew. Each of them seemed to understand the gravity of what Draco, Theo and Pansy had been through in class, and all of them tried to do what they could to lift their spirits.

Blaise's arm was all but glued to Theo for the rest of the day, while Selina barely dropped Pansy's hand for more than a minute. Ivy had walked around in a daze for a little while, nauseous at the thought of what would have looked back at her had she reached the front of the line, but she too managed to crawl out of her own head eventually.

They had been eating a very somber, quiet lunch together when she'd happened to look across the table at Draco, who sat unseeingly staring at a bowl of soup that lay untouched in front of him. He really had changed so much over the summer, and in so many ways he looked more grown up than he had before, but in that moment Ivy saw the boy who had sat crouched on the astronomy tower last year with a letter clutched tight in his freezing hand.