PAPER CONFINES.
29. / Nothing Speaks to You in the Night
✶
Amoret had the most absurd thought as she started dying for the second time, which was that perhaps on the other side of the horcrux, in a bed like the one Tom was setting her down on, her mother was dying at exactly the same time. That the wrongness of that death, the entitled sin of any god to take her, had found Amoret across the universe and said, come with me. Shrunk to a child again, she remembered thinking sickness was love, and she could feel herself smile through the worst of it.
Maybe if she couldn't save her, Amoret could at least die with her.
But then there was Tom's voice pulling her back, and she floated in that odd half-alive place she had drifted to once so long ago.
Her father steered in the sea of it, rickety sailboat swaying on glowing white waters. Amoret watched him sink, and she was calling for him in a younger voice, and the calls turned to screams, and the screams turned to sobs.
Years ago, on a morning in June, she had found his body at the front door.
She wasn't sure she had ever stopped finding him. She wasn't sure time had really gone on since.
"Amoret," Tom said on an echo. Her name on his lips, again and again.
"...Tom?"
"Stay still."
Amoret drifted in the water, struck by flotsam in the big waves; trinkets from her mother's childhood, heirlooms of faeries, the snarling leaves of Bibi's greenhouse. Her head plunged under and came back up for air. The sea sucked her in. Her father waited for her in the deep, but she couldn't beat the current to get to him.
Two arms reached out from the surface and took her by the waist. She thrashed in the hold of them, but they refused to let her go.
She was pulled into a dark corridor where the candles flickered at each one she passed. In the shadows there was growling, grated on the wet sound of froth, a tongue licking hungrily over teeth. She started to run. She could hear its tremendous size, could recall the tall, lithe shape of it, its big claws and milky eyes.
Two arms reached out from a classroom and hid her in the darkness.
The Cat Sìth prowled on for a better hunt.
The door opened and she found him again; the stink of ale, the clothes spilling from his suitcase on the stone, the sound of her screaming, and Reid rushing down the stairs calling her name.
Two arms reached out, but they were not her sister's.
"Get out," she rasped in a new place. The words cut her chest like she was coughing up salt.
"I've already seen it, Amoret," Tom said. "I know."
She could barely feel the tears slip before he was sweeping them away, thumbs soft on the fine skin beneath her eyes.
She was here with the living, and she knew it like the air Tom had brought back to her lungs: her mother was with them too. Amoret wouldn't have come back if she wasn't. They would have gone together.
"Sit up." Tom uncorked a potion and poured it into a glass.
Amoret took in her surroundings; belts of moonlight were wrapped in diagonals around the hospital walls, stained violet by the blue and red windows. One of the cupboards looked like it had been carelessly ransacked, and Tom was sitting by her legs on the bed, haloed by the light, still stained with blood she had spilled.
The dry, tight feeling on her skin told her she was too.
She tried to sit up. The old blood crackled at the flexing tendons of her neck, and all her body protested vehemently.
"Are you going to let me help you?" Tom asked dryly as she slumped back with a groan.
Amoret's head was pounding, and all she could do to show her displeasure was grit her teeth and shake her head. "What are you giving me?"
He looked offended by her mistrust. "Invigoration draught. I've used a stamina charm and silver already but you're resisting."
"Silver is—" She coughed, a brutal, dry sound— "A sealant."
"I'm aware. I've used it safely as a base in my own potions before, and as I haven't exactly had time to brew—"
She pushed up from the pillow and gestured feebly for the draught. "I can do it."
Tom watched her struggle with that movement alone, and slid closer.
"Stop that." He reached out, slowly, scowling, as if he was waiting for her to cut him again, and then cupped the nape of her neck. Amoret didn't think she could cut him, so she didn't bother trying. His fingers twined a handful of curls as he inclined her head to drink.
She looked away when he held the rim of the glass to her lips and tipped it down. She stared when he wiped a spilled trail from her chin, and his palm moved languidly from her neck to set her down again.
"What's happening to me?" she asked in a weak voice.
Tom placed the glass on the nightstand and his eyes sought an answer, solemn as they shifted over her face. "I don't know."
Amoret thought she despised when he knew things. She was even more unnerved when he didn't.
They sat in the hospital in a long, strange quiet. His scar marred them both.
The invigoration draught began to set in, a hollow energy like caffeine, too fast to seem remotely natural. It fizzled through Amoret's bloodstream and she pushed up against her pillow feeling suddenly too aware of her body. The sickness and fragility was still there, only now she felt somewhere outside of it, knocking on a door to herself begging for it to be opened and let out. Inside, she couldn't hear. She was trapped on either end. It was a horrible way to be awake.
"I need a cloth," she declared.
Tom conjured one from nothing.
Amoret took it from him as if he were withholding it instead of offering. She didn't think it was an intentionally cruel display of magic, or even derisive, but he was always cruel, wasn't he? She was on the cusp of death and he had never been stronger. She couldn't think of anything crueler than that.
With her wand, and great effort, she wet the cloth and started to wipe away the blood from her jaw, scouring the skin to her collar.
"I could have done that," he told her.
But you wouldn't, she wanted to say. He'd condemn her for asking. He'd mock her with intimacy.
And yet his perfect composure was restored, and she wanted with the same fervour she scrubbed at the blood for him to let go of it. There were degrees of Tom's calm, and she'd come to understand that he only seemed this impossibly sedate when he was trying not to appear otherwise.
She put the cloth in his hand and closed his knuckles over it.
"Clean it off," she beckoned, eyeing the red streak smeared down his face. It looked like a tear in the wrong colour, and then she considered never having seen him cry. It was another ludicrous thing to want. She didn't have it in her to dwell on the reasons why.
Tom's eyebrows knitted together for a second in a way that almost made him look sad. "You never stop hiding, do you?"
There it was. "Don't fucking pity me now, Tom."
"You ask too much of me."
Amoret ripped the cloth back and leaned in furiously. Everything felt duplicated—every atom of her that made up veins and ligaments and skin that brushed strands of hair and lungs that brushed breath, the fabric of the bed sheets and him—his face in her hands as she scraped at his bloody cheek, erasing something that couldn't be erased because his scar marred them both. It was dealt by her hand. It was given by his knife. Nothing was his, nothing was hers; it was all theirs.
Tom wrapped a hand around her wrist, and the point of contact sung like a bow to a string. "You should rest."
"I should go home," she spat, dizzy for a moment as she stood from the bed.
He followed her down the hospital aisle to the doors she panted to pry open, repeating her name like she was an indignant child. The draught seethed within her, foam at the shoreline, a corpse sent to sink, and she sprung down the corridors with near-drunken abandon. There wasn't enough air. There wasn't enough of anything anymore.
"Amoret," Tom called after her, and she figured she had gone mad to think to herself that he could have stopped her if he truly wanted, that there was a puny mercy in whatever will she had left.
She stumbled up the staircases in a button-down that was slipped halfway off her shoulder, trousers tucked into her shoes so she didn't trip on them. The stairwell was an abyss and the candles were dim. The animals that had spawned were still only outside, and the castle was as dead as the day they arrived in the lavatory. There were spiders, at least—spiders and her—food for serpents.
The wind billowed like a wispy veil at the top of the Astronomy Tower. Amoret hid within it.
She could finally take a breath that felt almost worthwhile, exhausted at the lip of the tower where the brass railing hummed under her fingers and the constellations of an erstwhile night peppered the horizon.
Tom was behind her in the navy dark. The colour was the same as his eyes.
She looked away from him and sunk to the floor, cradling her knees in her arms, staring at a sky she had once mapped like an archipelago, one she knew by every cluster of stars, every blink of Saturn, every half-stamp moon like Professor Dumbledore's glasses.
And what did it count for? What had it gotten her?
"Do you miss anything?" Amoret asked wearily.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, did anything in your life even matter to you? Because I miss... I miss all of it. I miss it mattering. I used to be able to come up here and feel something, but it's just a sky now. They're just stars. They're not even really there, we're just looking at graves."
He slid in beside her and sat. "Nihilism doesn't suit you."
"Because you're such an optimist."
"In certain regards."
"How's that?"
"I can't seem to let you die."
She glared at him. His expression didn't change. "The reaper persists, and I deny him each time. Haven't you noticed?"
"You want me to be your accomplice in insurrection."
"I'm optimistic."
"You are aware your entire belief system is rooted in nihilism?"
"More reason to appreciate your apparent exception to my rule."
Amoret sighed, staring off at swarms of luminescent moths and damselflies on the water. "You never answered my question."
"You'll have to be more specific," he said listlessly, "I don't keep a list of your many inquiries."
She scoffed. "Maybe I should keep a list of yours. Amoret, how is love the root of healing? Amoret, have you heard of the law of cycles and opposites? Amoret—"
"You could stand at the brink of death and still find time to waste being snide."
"Oh, Tom, time is no issue. I think I could be pushed off the brink and still live. After all, you can't seem to let me die."
There was a new chill to his tone. "Ask what you're going to ask, Amoret."
"If we can kill each other," she prospected, unperturbed. "You just spun it how you always do. You never answered."
"Your fixation on my death is distressing."
"I'd argue it's the least distressing thought I have nowadays."
"Perhaps." He took her in slowly, eyefuls of what was certainly ghastly, greyish skin and men's clothes drowning her silhouette. "Perhaps it's more distressing the way you enjoy making me bleed. You know you can't torment me if I'm dead, don't you? You know you can't rationalize the gratification it gives you forever."
Amoret swallowed, scratching at the sore skin of her neck from the cloth.
"What is that?" Tom asked abruptly.
She looked up at him. His gaze was fixed on her shoulder, the skin made bare by her slipping collar. It took her aback in a warm, foreign way, and then she realized he was looking at the exposed edges of a jagged old scar.
She adjusted her shirt. "Nothing. Another childhood story I'm surprised you haven't invaded."
"It must be buried deep."
"I remember little of it."
The wind intensified. It was a cold summer night, and Amoret inhaled the earthy balm of the air, the wildflowers fanned across the hills, the pine trees keening west for the starlings.
"I don't miss anything," Tom said.
She frowned.
"Don't pity me now, Amoret."
"Don't quote me," she grumbled.
"You do like to ask questions and then immediately dismiss my answers, don't you?"
"Don't pretend you cherish mine."
"I don't claim to."
She huffed. "Go on, then. I'm curious. You don't miss your glorified servants? You don't miss playing God?"
Lightning crackled over the forest, and Amoret flinched.
Tom's eyes didn't waver from hers. "I can play God however I like. You'll find it grows tedious without a cause."
"And you don't think it'll grow tedious with one?" she challenged. "An eternity of it, Tom... If you don't miss it now—and I mean all of it, not just aggravating me and plotting destruction—do you really think you'll be satisfied? Have you honestly conceptualized what forever might look like?"
"Did you, when you wished for it?"
"No, I didn't." She sat with that for a while and couldn't make anything of it. "Are you afraid?"
He stared off where Amoret had been watching the bugs. "Of dying?"
She held her knees tighter to her chest and nodded.
He shook his head.
"Then what?"
"I'm resolved."
"Resolved... All right. That's completely pretentious."
"I have no doubt you think so. I have desires that can't be effectuated in a single lifetime. If you would call conviction fear, then call it fear—perhaps that's what it is for you."
Amoret shrugged. "I don't believe you. This can't all be because you've convinced yourself you serve some greater purpose."
"Someone has to," he said disdainfully, "Who else might exact change? Theirs is an idle, anachronistic world, Amoret. Little of it would deserve your mourning."
"It's the only world I have," she spat.
"A well-designed adversity," he parried, "They cast your family aside and guided you through the outskirts like it wasn't their reprobation that put you there. You're grateful to be a shell of yourself for them."
"So I should risk the little I have to see a few suffer, without any regard for the ones who don't deserve it? To live in the aftermath of your unsparing revenge fantasy?"
"You would be spared."
She struggled to withhold a laugh. "I would be yours."
"Yes, you would."
Amoret pushed herself from the floor hastily, and felt the lingering static of her shirt, of his eyes, of lightning on the horizon. The draught made everything electric.
"Don't talk about my family," she said quietly, exhaling into the dark. She was gripping the railing with taut hands.
Tom's mouth twitched. "Fine."
Mist rolled off the hills in the distance and curled clouds around the moon. The wind tugged at the trees and they chattered like teeth, the forest a mouth, its creature a beast.
Amoret speculated for the first time on whether the magic of the horcrux could eventually extend to the in-dwellers of the woods; werewolves and centaurs and thestrals. She wasn't sure what it would mean if it could. She hadn't even discovered where the smaller animals were coming from. Surely a being of greater size and intelligence couldn't just be swept from the real world and taken here, and if that were true, maybe none of it was real. Maybe it really was just her and Tom and a hundred blank pages, and the rest was a hallucinatory symptom of dark magic.
They were going mad together, studying skies and wasting crooked hours on legilimency and flowers.
"I think we can kill each other," Tom said carefully.
Amoret faltered at the suddenness of his answer. "I know."
"Then why are you asking?"
Because I beat you, she thought, because I can trick you now, because if I wanted you dead, you'd be dead.
She deflected. "Why are you telling me?"
He stood up beside her, leaning against the railing. "Because I no longer believe you need the threat of our connection to refrain from killing me."
The veil of the tower pulled free, and it felt like watching the last thing that belonged to her float away. It was a figmental comfort and still Amoret was struck by the cold as it departed as if it had been real.
Tom was right. It was a terrible thing to admit. If she wanted him dead, he'd be dead—and here he was alive.
"Well," she mumbled, standing up straighter, "since you haven't attempted to kill me in some time, I see no reason to rush killing you."
"How pragmatic."
"Don't sound so surprised."
"It isn't often you say such kind things to me."
"Your standards are horrifically low."
"Only because you debase me."
She glared at him again. He was smiling in that smug, noncommittal way he always did.
"So, what now?" she asked, in part to stop him from smiling and in part because she actually wanted to know. "We keep at the books and the lessons? We ignore whatever is evidently wrong with me?"
His expression flickered away, and they both looked off at the grounds. "I'll brew more invigoration draught."
"For how long?"
"Until we find a way out."
"If."
Nihilism did not suit her.
She saw him glower in the borders of her vision. His tightened jaw, his glacial stare, details she knew by now to expect when he was just bothered enough not to hide it. A degree of calm easily dismantled.
"Slughorn's stores are ample and I have the ability to conjure—"
"You can't conjure ingredients! It's dangerous."
"As far as we know, my magic here is functionally limitless. I hardly think conjured dittany will be what kills you."
"I would kill you if it was."
Tom veered the conversation. "I'll check the light again in the morning."
"To watch it move another inch?"
"Enlighten me with your brighter ideas, Amoret."
Amoret snorted, and then genuinely laughed. It was ridiculous to have a conversation this way. She was sure they cycled between arguing and genuine discussion at least twenty times whenever they spoke. More often than not, she made it so. It drove her mad, and she didn't know what else to do.
He stared at her. "What?"
"You're checking the light in the morning and you want me to enlighten you? With a brighter idea?" She snickered again. "It isn't possible to make so many jokes accidentally."
"Evidence of the contrary," he said in rather mirthless self-reference.
Amoret started to object, but down from the border of the forest came a new light in the dark, and she discarded her words off the edge of the tower like they'd caught flame on the way out.
"What is that?" she breathed, leaning onto the railing.
At this distance, it was nothing but an amorphous glare, the sun risen too early on the hill. But where the damselflies dotted the lake like salt, the shape at the woods stood tall and walked.
"Tom, what—"
She slipped as the wind pushed her forward, foot catching between the bottom rail and the brink of the platform, and Tom pulled her back on her belated gasp.
"The reaper persists," he muttered, drawing his hand back from her waist.
She ignored him. "You—do you see that?"
"It's rather difficult to miss. Though perhaps we can use the stairs to identify it rather than jumping off the tower."
Amoret stumbled to the stairs but still found time to argue. "I thought your magic was functionally limitless."
"Do you want me to fly us down, Amoret? Are you honestly in any condition?"
"That could be a person, Tom," she said, not answering his question. "What if the horcrux is taking things in? What if it... absorbs what it comes in contact with?"
They hastened down the corridors and the great staircase. The flames of each sconce leapt at the walls.
"I'm certain we would see far more aurors and professors if that were the case. Or does your next theory presume hundreds of insects, birds, and fish have infested the halls of Hogwarts?"
"It's—" She panted at the courtyard exit— "A hair-trigger assumption. Besides, it could take time. Maybe someone would need to interact with the book for months before anything happened; cursed objects often function that way."
"That's assuming months have passed in real time," Tom countered, "which we have no way of proving."
"Unless there's someone down there who can prove it."
Her heart skipped at the mere thought. Even if it didn't bring her practically closer to escape, getting any insight on the happenings of the real world would be a phenomenal development.
And to have someone else here, regardless of the circumstances that brought them... Uncertainty swilled her fleeting excitement. It was hard to imagine.
She thought of Nadya as someone with ruptured lungs would think of air on each inhale. She thought of Colette when katydid wing-teeth sung in the meadow and Tom skipped musical stones across the lake. She saw Claude in paint-stroke skies and pasture. She missed her mother like a heart. She missed her sisters like limbs.
But for almost a year, there had only been Tom, and someone wasn't Nadya, or Colette, or her family. Someone was a stranger, and Amoret thought three hundred days of this might have made her one too.
"We'll see," Tom said doubtfully.
"Do you have any better ideas?"
"We wait until we see whether it's a person at all."
"It came from the Forbidden Forest," Amoret went on, and was at least self-aware enough to know she sounded on approach to delusion. "It could have come from the light."
Tom strode carefully beside her. "I don't disagree."
His simple accord made her go quiet, and she focused on regulating her breath in the whistling wind.
Summer had left the grass brittle under their shoes as they trudged down the hill to the Gamekeeper's hut, and now Amoret could see the glowing figure staggering by the forest. Like something undead, it dragged along the trees, white limbs clinging to anything it could grab onto. Something dripped from its fingers, glittering wet beads like sap down the bark.
It looked human the way Inferi looked human; still with the shape of one but long parted from any of the things that made one.
Amoret swallowed, hand clasped firmly around her wand. "Tom..."
They both stopped at the bottom of the hill.
The figure's head turned toward them. It went as still as the wind allowed. Tremors ran through it, scintillating flecks falling like a film of dead skin.
When it crumbled to the ground, all its light dissipated in a ring of dust, and vanished into the trees.
Tom advanced with his wand out. Amoret had nothing to do but follow.
She could see on approach the subtle swell of its chest at every arduous inhale, the shaky way the body fought to release the breath, that it was lying there with four very human limbs on the dead soil of the wood, wan and blue like a corpse without its light to shield it. Its face was still covered by black hair in wild, half-damp wisps. It had purple knees and bitten nails like an anxious schoolchild. It wore white socks and a black skirt and a blue and bronze tie, and Amoret tripped backwards before the wind had even blown the hair from its face.
She careened into Tom and this time he didn't steady her. He was staring at Myrtle's body like he'd seen a ghost.
[ . . . ] ending two chapters in a row with character reveals because i'm feeling crazyyyyyyy🧙🏻♀️ ALSO PC NATION WE MADE IT TO ACT THREE!!!!!!!! the end is near! except not really. there's probably another 60k here at least. I'm so excited let's pray it doesn't take me two more years to finish / word count. 4019
© Crierayla ✶ 2023