PAPER CONFINES.
24. / Right Where You Left Me
✶
In the steep dark of the great staircase, Nadya waited. Olive Hornby, who was not a Knight but followed too close in their footsteps for comfort, made little effort to watch after herself as she stepped off a settling stair and into the second floor corridor. Seconds after the blue vignette of her wand-light vanished, the staircase returned at Nadya's feet.
There was nothing in sight when she reached the precipice of the corridor but a pathetic vestige of cordons dangling from one of the walls. Malfoy must have taken his post nearer to the lavatory, then, if it was still his turn on watch. Nadya was surprised Dippet had allowed only a single patrol at the scene of his own ruin—not a professor, not even a prefect—but that was how the ruin had left him as of late. The headmaster's already cobwebbed hair was reduced to a sparse few strings curling from the rim of his hat, ashen-faced and angular and such a recluse that Nadya hadn't been to detention once despite spending the last three weeks following the Knights and their acolytes in places neither of them should have been.
This night, despite how it looked, Nadya could assure was in the plan's best interest.
She followed the soft sphere of Olive's light down the corridor. It was indistinguishable from the rest of the castle; the same same stone walls, the same cold floors. Nadya wasn't sure what she was expecting of it, but there was something sour in thinking this was the last place Banks was known to have been and there was nothing at all to prove it.
She stumbled at the end of the corridor when she heard an angry hush and saw the distant glow of Olive's wand snuffed out. Her head peered from behind the corner just enough to see Malfoy press Olive against the wall, barely visible in the almost-dark.
"Told you to be discreet, Liv." Malfoy's voice had the same congested savour as the old snobs who raised him.
"Lighten up, no one followed me."
"Oh my god," Nadya mumbled inaudibly, rolling her eyes.
"As far as you know, and you don't know much, do you?"
Olive smacked him in the arm, but the distinct croak of her laugh was a slap in her own face. Nadya was reminded of Sachiv Purandare's hands pulling Vrushika Acharya's hair in the school corridor, and how she always giggled, and always forgave him.
"Neither do you if you're letting me in on this little secret," Olive said, "Bet your darling Dolohov wouldn't approve."
"Then it's a good thing you're going to keep your mouth shut."
Olive motioned locking her lips and throwing away the key, and Malfoy's hold on her loosened.
"Is she in there?" she went on.
"She's quiet tonight."
Malfoy knocked on a door that could have only been the girl's lavatory, and Nadya's chest seized up. It was quiet, like he said, but she held her breath.
Olive snickered. "If you wanted to get me alone, you could have come up with something better than a fake g—"
Something spilled through the door like a blue fist that had missed its mark, and retreated so quickly Nadya thought she imagined it.
Olive screamed for barely a second before Malfoy's hand was covering her mouth.
Someone in the lavatory started to cry. There was the quick sound of wind, a whirring that went from one end to the lavatory to the other, and closest behind the corner where Nadya hid, she could hear the sobs like her own breath. They were trebled and sunken, but steeped in something hard that Nadya had never heard from a voice that could not belong to anyone but one.
Death had made Myrtle Warren angry.
Malfoy's grip squeezed Olive again, one arm holding her against the wall. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
Olive wrenched his hand away and Nadya squinted, her own hands trembling, trying to make out how in the imperceptible gleam of the wall sconces, Olive looked like she was crying. She scrambled for her wand and the corridor was bright again. Malfoy cursed, reaching for it. Nadya was still. Olive was actually crying.
"I thought you—w-were joking," she choked.
"I told you I heard her."
"I thought you were joking!"
"Shut up!" he hissed, and Olive cried harder. He shook her by the shoulders. "Go back to your dorm then. Go to bed, and when you wake up, Liv, you're going to call this a bad dream. You're not going to tell anyone."
Olive was staring somewhere over his shoulder, at that spot in the door where Myrtle's translucent fist sought the twin blue of her cry-bully's robes.
Nadya sunk behind the corridor wall and started to walk backwards in her slip-shoes to the great staircase, in the slow, steady way she'd learned to escape people like this some decade ago. A whisper found her ear before she was far away enough to miss it.
"Please, Liv. Don't tell anyone."
It was barely dawn when Nadya arrived breathless in the library and jumped into the seat across from Colette's. "I have to tell you something."
Colette wiped the corner of her mouth with her thumb, a drop of tea clinging to her lip that Nadya had smelled three shelves away from the alcove they'd claimed all week. Lemon and chamomile today. Steam still swirled from the cup. "Hello?"
"Hi. I barely slept last night, so—"
"I see that." Colette took Nadya's restive hands in hers as evidence. Their trembling ceased, but Colette never held on too long anymore. Nadya wished she would.
"How are things?"
"How are things? Ehm, things are good. I don't suppose you want to talk about things now."
No, she did not. "The plan is good?"
Colette frowned, tapping her quill against the table. Nadya didn't mention the dots of ink she was staining the wood with.
"Well," she said, "it's good, yes. There is just—Slughorn was discussing the dinner in Potions today, and you know he can be quite loud?"
"Yeah, always."
"And he kept mentioning the meal he had planned for me; l'escargot, vraiment... so assumptious. And he was saying how he cannot wait to finally have me attend after that horrible foie gras the last time."
"Presumptuous. He said that about the foie gras?"
"No, no, I'm saying that. But Mulciber and Dolohov were listening to him being so loud, and they know he is expecting me. They know that I said yes."
Nadya was mimicking her frown now.
"Should I go, then?" Colette asked tentatively. "There is risk to the plan if I don't, isn't there? Claude has accepted an invitation too; if we're both absent..."
What were the Knights of Walpurgis if not massive fucking inconveniences?
"We'll figure it out."
Colette pivoted from the topic with ease. "What about you? What do you have to tell me?"
"Oh. Yes, that. I have a slightly unrelated second plan."
"Nadya."
"It's a good plan! It's complementary! It isn't even a plan, really, it's more of a source of information."
"Nadya, if it involves poison or broken bones or anything sharp at all—"
"It doesn't, it's just... it's a long shot and if it's even possible I'm concerned about the ethics."
"Ethics? I don't like that."
Nadya threw her arms up in yielding. "It's about Myrtle."
Colette's expression softened, and pinched together again in a way that spoke of a thousand reservations. Her lips parted and Nadya could already hear them.
"I know how it sounds," she protested preemptively, "but Malfoy's been patrolling the second floor corridor this week as one of Dippet's volunteers."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I've been following the Knights from their classes for the past three weeks."
Colette leaned in and hissed. Her mother tongue made her very good at it. "Nadya, do you know how dangerous that is?"
Nadya thought of Dolohov's threat and looked away. "Of course I do. And I thought it was all for nothing, until two days ago, when I heard Malfoy in DADA telling Olive that he heard her crying."
"Heard Olive?"
"Heard Myrtle. Even then, I wasn't sure, until—"
"Until," Colette sighed, head falling on the desk between the soft cushion of her wool-sleeved elbows. "Always until with you."
"Until I followed Olive last night—" Nadya ignored Colette's groan buzzing the whole table—"and I heard her too."
Colette worried on her bottom lip. It was deeply red, an amaryllis or a poppy, and Nadya wondered if it was from all the worrying or the hot tea or if there were still traces of her lipstick that hadn't come off on the rim of her mug. It was probably too much thought to be put into another person's mouth.
"But if Myrtle is really still in the lavatory," Colette said, "wouldn't the Ministry question her ghost? Or Dippet himself? Would they not have seen her, at least?"
"Not if she's been hiding. Or refusing to talk. You can't exactly punish a ghost."
More of the biting. Her lips were certainly red from the biting. "So what do you want to do?"
"I believe in your plan, Colette. I know we're onto something with that book, but I want assurance that we have something else. Myrtle could be the only person who knows exactly what happened that night."
"She is also the last person who will want to talk about it."
Nadya slouched in her chair. "I know. But I have to try."
"Do you want me to go?"
Nadya shook her head immediately, and it was nonsensical. Colette was the natural choice; she was born to her kindness, had trained it to remain when others sought to tear it out of her, had maintained it even when Nadya could see that rare glint in her eye, bright and angry like the quartz her white-knuckled hand would wrap around. Colette remained composed. Colette kept a gentle touch. The glint was there; a reminder akin to a soft, sweet animal growling at a crossed boundary, which was a reminder that even a pet bred to docility had the evolutionary instinct to bite. Colette's virtue was that she never gave in.
Nadya did. She always did. Her teeth may as well have been filed for it. And still she shook her head. "I have to."
"Morning," Claude said, appearing from behind a bookshelf in a cable-knit jumper and trousers which were, for once, not marred by even a dot of paint. He pulled a paper sack from his school bag and placed it on the desk. "Figured you two would skip breakfast again."
"Thank you." Colette smiled, pressing an appreciative kiss to the knuckles of the hand he'd rested on her shoulder. Nadya stared at that hand for a long while without blinking, and then grabbed the bag and sat quietly eating one of the pastries inside.
"How was Dippet last night?" Colette asked.
Claude slumped into a seat. "Awful. I have no idea where he went after dinner but there wasn't a sound in his office for hours—and then he came stumbling in when I was nearly asleep, mumbled and paced for at least another hour, and then Yves came in through the fireplace again."
"Productive night for all of us," Nadya mumbled, stretching across both chairs on her side of the table. "Did Yves have anything to say that wasn't so cryptic it'd have to be deciphered by Sherlock Holmes?"
Colette had finally taken notice of her spilled ink and peered up in confusion from where she was trying to rub it clean from the wood. "Who?"
"Detective from a bunch of muggle books."
"He wasn't too cryptic, but still Yves," Claude said, "I think that boy Dippet was talking about was a Ministry intern. Someone on a low branch, at least. Yves said the boy's facing an inquiry on top of getting sacked, which must be why Dippet's been particularly..."
"Unhinged? Senile? Bald?"
"All very apt descriptors, Sidhu, yes."
A charm from Colette's wand washed the last of the ink away. "What was he trying to do? Surely he cannot have believed he could interrupt the Ministry's investigation with one boy."
"I don't think he was trying to interrupt it, I think he wanted an in. Someone close enough to the aurors and the Wizengamot to get information back to Dippet, but low enough on the ladder to even consider working for him in the first place."
"He was probably a student here," Nadya mused.
"And he'll probably be arrested soon."
"So then what?" asked Colette.
"Then Yves went on about that case in Siberia he's contracted to and how he can't risk his career knowing it's only a matter of time before the Ministry finds out Dippet is interfering with a murder investigation and sacks him too."
"Did he quit?"
"Vaguely." Claude reclined, plucking fluff on his rolled-up sleeves and looking almost apprehensive, which didn't suit him at all.
"What, Ozanich?"
"He gave Dippet a contact, and said if he's really desperate, there's one person he knows who'd be willing to take this case no matter how legally complicated it gets."
"Who?"
"Reid Banks."
Reid. Nadya remembered her as distantly as anyone could. Reid had always seemed so far away, some glittering unknown that came and went through a magnified lens. All braided hair and big doe eyes that could turn stern in a blink. She was the first kindness Nadya had found at Hogwarts, ever so skilled in reassuring smiles and winks behind the backs of her professors, ambitiously devoted to her house and proud to shun the plague of blood purists that stained it to whatever punishments her role as prefect allowed. She was an older sister to all the first-year Slytherin girls, but Nadya supposed that was where the hurt of her own sister stemmed. When Banks needed her most, Reid had packed her bags and boarded a train without looking back.
"What did Dippet say?"
Claude shook his head. "Nothing."
Nadya leaned into her clasped hands, index fingers tapping quietly against her teeth.
"Would that be bad?" Colette asked, "Reid might be helpful. She is trained for situations like this, and she knows Banks."
Knew her. Nadya was not remiss to forget how much Banks had changed in her sister's absence.
"You're on Dippet-watch tonight, Colette?"
She looked up as Nadya stood and collected her bag, stealing one last pastry from their missed breakfast. "Yes?"
"Okay." Nadya nodded, and then said with immense gravity, "Then, um, I'm gonna go to the lavatory now."
Claude appeared incredibly confused. "Have fun?"
Colette sighed, ushering Nadya away with an uncertain smile. "I will explain it to him. Be safe."
"Safe?"
"Yes, Ozanich, I run a secret duelling club in the girl's lavatory. Last week I used Melofors on a first-year and she smelled so badly of pumpkin that Madame Codde said—"
"Nadya, go," Colette groaned.
"I'll meet you at five."
"Be safe, Sidhu!"
Nadya flipped Claude off as she walked away. The pumpkin story was half-true, anyway—only it was four years ago and to call it a duel was to imply the girl had enough decency to warn Nadya before she'd fired the first curse.
She arrived at the great staircase again and halted on the step before the second floor. Her hands felt unjustifiably empty for a thing like this, and she found herself, without thinking beyond the surge of sickness that rose in her stomach, turning around and going one floor lower. A brief and uncomfortable encounter with Alexander Zippel, which was mostly the two of them staring at each other until he finally let her in the Hufflepuff common room, ended with an array of accompanying stares as Nadya reached into one of their many flower pots and stole a handful of lilies, fleeing without so much as a thank you.
Then she went to the second floor, and felt only slightly better. On an early Saturday afternoon, Nadya knew from that Malfoy would be in his dormitory with Nott and Lestrange, performing sacrificial rituals and kicking goblet-turned-puppies for fun, or whatever it was they did behind magically soundproofed walls. Unless Dolohov decided to make another surprise appearance, or Rosier had taken Malfoy's post, the path to Myrtle would be clear for a short time.
Nadya opened the lavatory door without wasting a second of it.
It was in a strange, limbo state between disarray and sanitation. The flood Dippet had spoken of had been siphoned dry along with whatever fine-grained grout had surely been pulverized in the fight—and Nadya could see there'd been a fight. Chunks of floor tiles had been swept to the ring of sinks in a pile, toilet stalls were blown in two and left in a stack of water-sullied wood, and the same sad prohibitory tape that had been strung across the corridor was crumpled in several places and desaturated by many muddy shoe-prints. A lazy preservation of a crime scene with not even the joke that was Abraxas Malfoy to play picket. If Nadya wasn't so personally invested, she might have laughed at how unsurprising it was.
Instead her mouth felt dry and her feet stopped moving.
Banks had been here. Banks had been here, and how afraid had she been? How alone? How had Nadya looked her in the eye that day and wasted her breath on I-told-you-so's when she should have been saying 'Come home—don't you know I was only ever allowed to be a girl when I was with you?'
Banks had been here and she was not here now. Everything around Nadya looked less like ruin and more like the lack of her. The lack of her was all there was to look at.
Nadya shut the door. Something splashed in one of the end stalls.
"Myrtle?"
It went terribly still.
"I—It's Nadya Sidhu. I'm in your year, I'm in Slytherin—I used to sit behind you in Charms."
Pleasantries were not Nadya's forte.
"I don't really talk in Charms, so you probably didn't notice me. We, um, we have DADA together, too? And I know you were in Advanced Potions last year, but you must have switched out. That's smart, actually. Slughorn's a pain in the arse."
In the end stall, there was nothing but a small, constant rattle, like someone was standing on the seat to hide from whoever was walking past. Nadya had done that before, but she didn't think ghosts could stand.
"I'm..." she took a breath, and thought of Colette, and a word she was much better at saying. "I'm sorry. For what happened to you." She started to walk down the aisle of stalls. "I remember in first year you were one of the only others who stayed behind for Christmas, and I stayed because—I don't know, really. I was angry at my parents, I think. I fucking hate London; I was so mad at the idea of going back that even though I missed them, I stayed. Felt like I was proving a point or something. Sorry, that's not the—the point is, I think you might've been the first person to ever play me in wizard's chess, on one of those lousy sets the school keeps in the library. I can't remember who lost. I don't think we ever talked again after that. I don't think you really... talked to anyone after that year."
Myrtle, if she was there, had ceased her rattling, and a pitted silence swept the lavatory to its centre where Nadya stopped again. It was no longer a room full of the absence of Banks, but the weight of what remained of Myrtle, like her grief had ballooned in the flood as anything waterlogged would, dripping with that night and incapable of ever drying. Nadya found it hard to speak through the thickness of it. "I need you to know they're going to pay for it. Tom and the others, even Olive, if you want—Myrtle, I promise you they're not going to get away with this."
Nadya ruffled through her bag and pulled out the flowers. "I don't know if you've met him, but there's this half-giant in fifth year who said that apparently ghosts like lilies." She winced, unsure if Myrtle would react badly to being called a ghost. Nadya imagined it would take a long time to fully understand it; sitting on the cusp of life, close enough to reach for it but never to touch it. "I'll, uh, come back on Monday with more. Maybe a vase, too."
She treaded carefully to the lavatory door like maybe discretion would lure Myrtle out—just to see her face, just to feel any less out of her depth than Nadya did right now—but there was only silence.
"I'll come back," she said again, and then Nadya left.
With her recent luck, she was almost expecting Dolohov to be standing there, leering over the doorway in a suit fitted for a formal dinner, ready to threaten her with all the things that could go wrong at the real dinner that was approaching. Nadya couldn't reach the stairwell fast enough to escape the idea, gnawing on images of crushed lilies and ruined plans and Colette needing to be there because of Slughorn's loud mouth—of Colette being there without her.
She found her way back to the Hufflepuff common room without Zippel there to reluctantly let her in this time. Julian Abuyen, who responded consistently well to wasp-related threats, was also nowhere to be found. Instead Nadya slumped beside the door and waited.
It was twenty minutes past when Colette usually returned that she finally did, and Nadya stood and dusted herself off to not appear as if she'd been sitting there for long.
"Nadya?" Colette met her with three large textbooks under her free arm.
Nadya took them with a shake of her head. "Why don't you put these in your bag?"
Colette unbuttoned the clasp of her bag to show four more books inside. God, she was turning into Banks.
"You're early," she said, opening the door. "How... how was she?"
Nadya made eye contact with a group of Hufflepuffs who had been studying in the same spot since she came for the flowers. They glared at her as she went by. "Uh, she didn't say anything. I could tell she was there, you know, hiding in one of the stalls, so I talked to her for a while, left her a lily and said I'll come back."
Colette smiled. Nadya would never get used to it. "You are better with gifts than anyone else I know."
"Lots of people can pick flowers, Colette. You make those fancy jars of tea with the ribbons and the little spoons. Everyone likes them."
"Yes, everyone does. But you do not get gifts for everyone to like, you get gifts for one person to love. Like that soap that smells like marigolds that you gave me—" She laughed— "I have been keeping this small slice of it because I don't want to finish it."
Nadya followed her into her dormitory without a clue how to answer. She settled on an okay and left it at that.
Colette shrugged off her bag and coat. "It's my turn to listen to Dippet, no?"
That was a very Colette way of asking what she was doing here.
"Mhm. I was just thinking about what you said earlier about Slughorn's dinner."
"Oh, and what do you think?"
"I think Dolohov will be suspicious of me over anyone—I almost always go to Slug Club parties and you never do. If you and Claude are there and I'm not, he'll know something is wrong."
"So... we will all go? And the three of us will mysteriously leave together?"
"I—I don't know. No. We'll... one of us will stay." Claude. "Slughorn's Christmas soirées are always more elaborate than any of his other events, and we're six months away from graduation. Knowing him, that means more guests and more opportunities to show off his most prized students. Last year he brought this potioneer from Thailand and said he'd present us as candidates for internships. I guarantee he'll do something like that again."
"Nott wants to be a potioneer."
"Following in daddy's footsteps, no doubt. I think Rosier's interested too."
"So they will be on their best behaviour."
"Right, so... one of us stays." Claude. Absolutely Claude. "And the two of us who leave have to get the book out of Dolohov's dormitory in the small window we have before the Knights show up and try to murder us. Whoever stays uses Slughorn's prestigious friends to their advantage—get the Knights stuck in a conversation they can't run away from, cause a scene, ruin their fucking lives if necessary—it won't keep all the Knights away, but the less of them that are after the book, the better."
Colette collapsed onto the bed with a sigh. "Then what?"
Nadya sat on the edge beside her. "What, then what?"
"Then, when the Knights who do leave find us either in their dormitory or running away, then what?"
Nadya knew it was virtually inevitable. No version of this plan ended without a few scuffs at best. Even if Slughorn had said nothing, if her and Claude and Colette stayed behind while the Knights ate snails and made nice with rich potioneers, there was still Dolohov, who wouldn't in a million years trust Nadya not to use such a perfect night in her favour, no matter what threats lay at her feet. Colette's then what terrified Nadya enough to consider shunning the plan entirely. Resting. Waiting for something easier to come along. But waiting was a greater risk than any of this.
She shut her eyes and tried to breathe in the same rhythm that she could feel Colette breathing beside her. Then what, if came to saving Banks? If it kept Colette safe? Then anything.
"Then we do things my way," she said.
Colette brushed the hair behind Nadya's ear and didn't let her hand linger after. Nadya could feel the phantom of it anyway.
"We," Colette echoed like a question.
Nadya nodded. We, Us, Together: they were all perfect words.
"Then okay."
[ . . . ] nadya and colette will do literally anything but say how they feel about each other like why are you lying side by side and staring into each other's eyes and touching briefly and pulling away nervously and implying you would do anything so long as you can do it together. ijbol... just two girlfailures girlfailing... I mean i think their dedication to being pathetic and embarrassing is genuinely so impressive (me deflecting from how much i hate this chapter) / word count. 4408
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