f o u r t h y e a r
There's a fire within Adeline's skin. She feels it everyday, growing hotter, burning those who stand too close. It never used to feel so strong, like an undercurrent to who she is. She never used to feel like a taunt rope on the precipice of snapping.
Adeline had once been patient and kind. Now she feels her rage spilling out of her every pore, anything sets her off. Anything can make her succumb to this empty, violent bitterness.
She keeps waiting for the day she'll wake up and it'll be gone just as it had arrived, but the day never comes and she's starting to scorch those around her.
Honey and Ryland try. They try everyday and everyday Adeline pushes them further. She hadn't even realised she'd been doing it at first; the snapping, the snarky comments and unkind words masked as constructive criticism.
"Just trying to help." She'll say; always passive, always uncalled for.
Even when Adeline realised what she'd been doing, she hadn't stopped. Still they stay, they don't waver in their friendship. Not yet.
Ari and Amethyst haven't spoken to her in weeks. It could be blamed on the fear of the family name but Adeline knows they've just tired of her; the mood swings, the secrets, the anger. In hindsight, she doesn't blame them but as it happens there's a new item added to a list of resentment.
She'd been getting into too many incidents, too many problems caused by her own hand. Where Adeline once had been able to endure the words of others, to bite her tongue and mind her business, she cannot seem to grasp onto such talents any further. It needn't matter the world of magic they reside, for Adeline took it upon herself to use her rage to win her battles.
When Hayley Fauns and a group of her Ravenclaw friends called her a psycho slut the day one of the Weasley twins spoke to her for five minutes, just because Hayley had quite the apparent thing for one of them, Adeline had launched. She had clawed out a clump of Fauns' hair.
When the Gryffindor boys starting hitting on her and she had declined, they'd called her easy, asked why they weren't good enough for her low standards, she'd bruised and bloody knuckles and her own broken nose.
When Pansy Parkinson so much as breathed in her direction, Adeline had lost it. She'd yelled and cussed and brought them both down in the middle of the dining hall during a spare period. Pansy had fought back at least, hadn't been all talk, even managed to wound Adeline pretty bad.
It'd been Dean who pulled her off Pansy, followed by Ryland and Honey. Dean had picked her up by the waist and wouldn't let her down until she stopped thrashing in his arms. Ryland had checked on Pansy, who lay bloody on the floor and was being picked up by some Slytherins. Honey had been touching Adeline's face, checking her wounds when Dean finally put her down. Adeline had hit her attempts at comfort away.
"Fuck off." She snapped and Honey flinched. Honey actually flinched away from her.
Adeline straightened her clothes, regained her composure and stepped away from her friends. A crowd had gathered now, the few who had been in the hall to begin had all stopped and watched the brawl. Everyone was silent as they watched her. She could see professors hurrying in, obviously hearing the commotion.
Adeline was going to walk away. She was.
"Fucking psycho." Muttered from besides the injured, a look of disgust and alarm. Draco never had known how to speak up properly. Her mouth was full of blood, lips cut and skin bruised. With heartless muster, she spat down at his feet before she'd been whisked away to the Headmaster's office.
So, it's no surprise Adeline had spent so much time in detention this year; hours cleaning old classrooms and unkempt storage closets, too many nights spent in the forbidden forest, hands cramped from writing lines over and over, headaches after so many of Dumbledore's lectures.
She thinks they're going a little easy on her, to be honest. For a school that wants discipline, that is shaping the minds of the brilliant future and teaching the difference between good and bad, they certainly don't seem to care if students keep showing up to class a little bloody.
Maybe everyone really is too scared of her family. Maybe Dumbledore really just doesn't care at all.
Another new addition to her life is her constant new detention buddy. Dean is always the one who manages to show up when she's serving her time. Always up to no good that kid, or at least just terrible at getting away with it.
He finds the whole thing rather amusing actually, he tells her as much constantly. Their detention usually goes as follows.
"The new Hogwarts' bad girl, huh? What happened to precious little Adeline Levier, wandering off to dance with the fairies and spacing out in class? Did you get bored? Tired of pretending to be someone you're not? I mean, don't get me wrong, I always knew you had it in you but what, pray tell, was your breaking point?"
Adeline doesn't answer, she never does. They're in one of the old classrooms this time, writing lines until the sun comes up.
"Or are you just trying to get the attention of a certain someone? I commend you for your efforts, really, even if they do lack a certain element of subtlety. I don't know if going after his little lap dog is the smartest idea, you could be a little more creative."
Adeline sends a dagger flying, blade skimming Dean's cheek and lodging itself into the wooden shelf behind him.
Dean stands abruptly, his own pages flying. "Watch your fucking temper, Adeline."
He touches his wounds, winces, fingers coming back bloody.
"Just shut up." She mutters, going back to her lines. "What do you care, anyway?"
"Personally, I don't." Dean says, sitting back down with a huff after picking up his work. "But Ryland does."
The unsaid sits obvious in the air.
"You can't keep fighting your battles tooth and nail. You could start by choosing the right ones. Nobody cares about your bite if you're always showing it off."
"That's stupid." Adeline turns back to face him, his desk steps away. "Every one will stop fucking with me this way. They shouldn't bark if they don't bite hard enough."
"So, what? You're waging war against the weak? Little beneath you, don't you think? All powerful witch." He comments, condescending and pointed.
"Is that why you pulled me off Pansy, then?" Adeline can hear her own snark, feel the annoyance bubble under her words. "Choose pacifism unless the person in front of you could kill you?"
"I pulled you off Pansy because you were going to kill her." Dean snaps, he shifts in his seat. He looks at her as if she's being a child, like she isn't seeing her own stupidity in front of her.
"No, I wasn't."
"No?" Dean raises his eyebrows, leans his elbows against the desk. "You think I didn't see it before I got to you? That anger, that rage? Let me guess, you feel it all the time; the inescapable, the uncontrollable. Probably feel it right now, too." She doesn't say anything, refuses to give in. "I saw it. You were going to kill her, you wouldn't have stopped."
All at once Adeline is back in the dining hall, her hands bloody and Pansy beneath her. "Maybe I was. So what? She's made my life hell for years, exposed my family secrets to the entire school. Let me tell you, mummy and daddy weren't too happy about that when they found out."
"She didn't know what she was doing, you know that."
Adeline hates how reasonable he's being, how he's looking at her like she knows better. Like he knows she knows better.
"And nobody finds that a little odd? Nobody seems to care that a student was possessed for weeks on end? Where's the Headmaster and what's he doing about that? Or is he too busy wrapped up in whatever Potter's problems are?"
Dean looks at her, relaxes back into his seat. Blood pools on his wound and slowly, like molasses, runs down his skin. He sighs, deep and characteristically bored.
"Killing Pansy won't give you what you want." He says, fiddling with his quill. "At the end of the day, she's just a kid."
They don't speak for the rest of their punishment. Silence fills the room as hours tick by, an endless void of sound. Adeline hears Dean's words for the remainder of her time in the room, stuck on the futility of her anger. Just a kid.
So am I.
Professor Mad Eye tortures a spider in front of the entire class. He's the new edition to the Defence Against the Dark Arts professors, since Lupin resigned and decided to take care of Sirius with Arthur instead.
He's talking about the Unforgivable Curses, the three most powerful and sinister spells known to the wizarding world and are tools of the Dark Arts.
"They are the Killing Curse, the Cruciatus Curse, and the Imperius Curse." Mad Eye explains, watching the fear rise on his student's faces. "Cruciatus Curse, which inflicts excruciating pain upon the victim, requires the verbal incantation. The effects of the curse depend upon the desires and emotions of the caster - to produce the excruciating pain implied by the name, one must desire to cause pain purely for its own sake. The extreme pain inflicted by the curse makes it uniquely suited as a form of torture, and was used regularly by the Death Eater's."
"The Imperius Curse places the victim in a trance or dreamlike state, leaving him or her under the complete control of the caster. The experience is described as a "wonderful release" from any sense of responsibility. The victim is calm, from doing things they would be physically incapable of otherwise, to committing horrible crimes, and they obey any order. For example..."
He casts the curse on the spider, it squeals as it's flung and flown around the air.
"Cruciatus means "I torture" in Latin, Imperio for "I command". No one really knows where the Unforgivable Curses originated from, but there's talk." Mad Eye doesn't stop tormenting the creature in his hands, despite the cries of a few students. There's a look in his eye, one far too sinister to be any good, that Adeline notices. "Talk of a family that helped create them. Drunk on power and fear, they turned their own magic into evil that can be used by all."
Mad Eye finally stops, the squealing of the spider halts, a new sound takes over the room. His heavy boots, his jolting steps as he walks toward the back of the class.
"A family so powerful they could take the magic that runs in their veins and use it for the evil they built their royal empire on." Mad Eye stops at Adeline's desk, occupied only by her. He stars, licks his lips, his eye patch magnifying the twisted curiosity directed at her.
Whispers start, as they always do, students looking at her as the puzzle pieces fall into place. Nobody voices it but the unspoken is understood.
Adeline Levier, school psycho descended from magic so evil the caster is immediately sent to Azkaban if used, curses that have ruined people's lives. Her family has corrupted the purity of magic, created unpardonable sin and impossible salvation.
They'd be right too. Her family had a large hand in the making of such practice, something she'd unfortunately learnt over summer. Lessons with her father, distant and cold, as he had her recite the family lineage, the history and the importance of bloodlines.
"It is time you know where you came from." Her father had said, looking at her like a general would a soldier. "Just how powerful you really are."
Adeline can't say she's particularly proud.
Everyone stares, horrified. Mad Eye walks back to the front of the class and continues his lecture but it isn't much use. No one listens to whatever sadistic lesson comes from his mouth, all too entranced by the ticking time bomb at the back of the class.
The Slytherins don't look particularly phased, but a few move their seats over just slightly, just a little further away. She can't blame them.
He, though, he stares at her for a moment too long. He shows her too much; the anger in his frown, the rival in his stare.
Draco stared at her like she's his competition.
Foolish boy.
The voice wavers, thin and distant. Like a passing thought or a dusty silhouette. Adeline knows it wasn't her own though, she knows the distant pull, feels the need to submerge herself in water to tame the fire under her skin.
Adeline had never really spoken to Neville Longbottom but she'll never forget the way he looked at her when he realised her family had destroyed his own.
During a study period after DADA, Adeline finds herself in the library catching up on some work. She'd lost a bit of her usual time to detention and was beginning to fall behind. Not something she was particularly fond of dealing with if her parents were to find out.
There's quite a few spare seats surrounding her despite the busy library. Word travels fast around the hallways, she's sure more than half the school nows about it by now.
Nobody looks at her in fear she'll tear out their throat but it's clear they all know she's there, all very aware of her presence.
Dean sits down beside her, abrupt and lazy. Adeline can feel the sigh being pulled from her lungs before he even opens his mouth.
"Dean Draguar in the library? Come to burn it to the ground then?" Adeline drowns out the unsaid words of her peers as they take a peak at who would dare to get so close to her.
"That seems like more your thing, actually." Dean comments, witty and bright. Adeline glances at him, at his amused smirk and bright eyes. She thinks he might be one of the few people who isn't afraid of her.
"What do you want?" Adeline says, sitting back in her seat properly and abandoning her attempts at work.
Dean looks over his shoulder quickly before he talks. "What if Pansy was under the Imperius Curse when she outed you? For all of those weeks?"
Adeline had forgotten he'd been in that class, couldn't even remember noticing if he'd shown up.
"You think someone at Hogwarts used one of the Unforgivable Curses to tell everyone about my family?" Adeline deadpans, finding the theory had a few holes. "Why would another student want to use Pansy to get to me?"
"I don't know if you've noticed, sweetheart, but you have a few enemies around here." Dean matches her condescension. He makes a point.
"Doesn't explain why she doesn't remember anything. The Imperius Curse doesn't wipe memory." Adeline counteracts.
"You'd know." Dean gives her a pointed look. "What if they just used a different spell so she wouldn't remember?"
"It's possible." Adeline shrugged. She looked at Dean, who seemed to be deep in consideration, and she seemed to remember who she was talking to. "Why do you care?"
Dean straightened in his chair, smirking slightly. "Don't flatter yourself, sweetheart." He stood, shouldering his bag as he did. "Just need to know if there's a student sociopath wandering the halls and targeting the powerful and gorgeous. While I'm surprised I'm not on the top of their list, I'm sure to be next."
He winked, his lips turned into an arrogant grin. It made Adeline scowl. "You're an idiot."
Dean didn't seem faced, only more amused if anything, when he walked away and left her alone with the withering stares of her peers.
It's after the whole school starts talking about her family's involvement with the Unforgivable Curses that Adeline sees less of Honey. Perhaps Adeline being descended from true, pure evil was her final straw. There's no saving her.
Ryland stays, though. He holds on tightly and refuses to let go just yet. She wants to feel bad but mostly she's just short of grateful, a small part of her still holding on tight, wishing he doesn't let go just yet.