I'm getting a dreadful feeling that at some point in part 3 Cloud is finally going to reach his breaking point and is practically on his knees begging for Sephiroth to kill him.
Upon witnessing the vulnerable state that Cloud is in, it would have been easy for Seph to finally be rid of him right then and there, only to feel hesitation for the first time in so long.
This moment is definitely going to give Seph a reality check and have him finally realize that he never actually wanted this at all and would slowly begin to sever his ties with Jenova as this is what she had planned all along.
Well... In starting i didn't even know what angst was actually 🤣🤣
I simply didn't get the actual definition of angst, i searched the internet and there were tons of different answers (i still don't know the proper definition)... So in Whispers of the Unforeseen, I dropped a chapter, apologising in starting that this chapter was pure fluff, because I thought, scenes which doesn't progress stories are called fluff. And everyone in comments were like "why did you lie? It's the angstiest thing I've read 😭" and I was like "ah, THIS is called angst"
So, as you must have gathered, that I write angst without even knowing what it was.
I just simply put emotionally constipated characters who would kill for each other but would rather kill themselves than to show their emotions in impossible situation where there are no good or bad choices, but survival.
<chapter 11< | >chapter 13> • story on ao3 • masterlist
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Dear Cedric,
Your mother would have wept. I am not too proud to admit I came close myself when I heard they read your name from that goblet. Hogwarts Champion. I daresay you're the first Diggory in three generations to amount to anything at all, and here you are.
I want to hear everything. How did the Weighing of the Wands go? Did Ollivander say anything about your wand? I remember seeing him myself when I was a boy, and he hadn't changed a bit since then.
Write back the moment you can. I'm telling everyone. Everyone in the office. The bathroom attendant. The cat, though she seems unmoved.
Best,
Your Dad,
Amos Diggory
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Dad,
The Weighing of the Wands went well. I met the girl I'm going to marry.
- Cedric
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Dear Cedric,
The fame has gone to your head. It had been two weeks and you already think you're too good for full sentences. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, I suppose.
Who is she? I need details, my boy.
I remember when I met your mother. In Feldcroft, the summer after I graduated. She was arguing with a market vendor about the weight of a fish. Very convincingly, might I add. I knew she was the one within five minutes. So I understand the feeling. I do. But I also wasn't about to compete in a dangerous international magical tournament at the time, so my circumstances were somewhat different.
Is she from Beauxbatons?
Best,
Your Dad
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Dad,
Liesel Ollivander. She was the one who actually handed the wands at the weighing. Her grandfather let her do it, which apparently is not standard practice, but she clearly knows what she's doing.
It's been decided, and I am to face her in the dueling finale in a week. Don't worry, I won't go easy on her.
I miss mother dearly. Give Mittens my best.
- Cedric
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Dear Cedric,
She's a Slytherin, isn't she?
I'm not saying anything about the house. I shall let you discover that yourself… But all of this. The Triwizard Tournament, Crossed Wands, school… Don't you think it's too much? I surely hope your pursuit of this girl doesn't complicate things further.
Be safe during the duel. I don't need my Hogwarts Champion in the hospital wing before the First Task.
Is she good to you?
Mittens is stepping all over the parchment, which I assume means she would like to say hello.
Best,
Your Dad
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Dad,
I lost the dueling finale. You should have seen it, though. I thought I had Liesel in the third round. I'd been told she holds to specific combinations, which she absolutely does not, and then she disarmed me and followed it immediately with a blast to the chest. I was on the floor before I understood what had happened. It was fantastic.
I asked her to the Yule Ball and she said yes. She's been teaching me to dance, which has been an experience for both of us. She's ruthless about the footwork. Completely merciless. She stomped on my foot every time I stepped on hers, but called it even after the second time. I think that answers your question about whether she's good to me, or perhaps it makes it looks worse.
I'm starting to think you and mum should have taken me to the Ministry Galas after all.
-Cedric
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Dear Cedric,
The two left feet are entirely from my side, I'm afraid. Your mother had beautiful footwork. Light as anything. She used to dance in the kitchen when she thought no one was watching.
Going to the Yule Ball together does not mean you need to buy a ring, remember. I'm glad you're happy. I'm glad she said yes. I'm glad she stomped on your foot, because you probably needed it.
Focus on the first task.
Best,
Your Dad
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Dad,
The heart wants what it wants.
I know you're right about the tournament. I know I need to focus. But I'd like some advice, if you have any.
I don't know how to explain it properly. She's very composed most of the time. Very precise, and then occasionally she laughs and the whole room lights up.
I'd like to make that happen forever.
What did you do with Mum? In the beginning, I mean. When you knew.
-Cedric
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Dear Cedric,
What I did with your mother was make a significant fool of myself for about six weeks. I'm not sure that's advice as much as a cautionary account.
Your mother wasn't very easy to get to know. She let you in slowly. I learned fairly early that the best thing I could do was show up consistently and not make a production of it. She didn't want to be pursued. She wanted to be met.
If Miss Ollivander is anything like her grandfather, it may be unpredictable. But I think you already know how to do this. You've always been good at paying attention to people.
Also: Don't step on her feet.
Best,
Your Dad
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Dad,
The Yule Ball was last night.
I'm fairly certain she had a good time. She laughed at least three separate occasions and one of them was a real laugh, not the polished one. I know the difference now.
I kissed her at the end of the evening, in the corridor outside the Great Hall. I don't know if I handled it well. I'm a bit worried I made a fool of myself. The dancing was much better than the lessons suggested it would be, and Liesel said I'd improved, but when the moment came I think I may have fumbled my speech.
She kissed me back, though. That part I'm sure of.
But I keep thinking about the dancing and the fumbling and whether she went to bed thinking well of the evening or thinking I was an idiot.
- Cedric
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Dear Cedric,
Your mother stayed married to me for seventeen years with both my left feet and every foolish thing I've ever said, of which there were many. She found them endearing. Or she pretended to, which amounts to the same thing in practice.
Stop worrying about whether this girl likes you. She went to the Yule Ball with you, and she kissed you back. That's all the answer you need. You need to focus on the tournament. The second task is coming and I'd prefer my son to be cracking that egg rather than the alternative.
Jokes aside, I'm happy for you, my boy. I mean that.
Best,
Your Dad.
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(a/n: double chapter release! enjoy :)
I'm always open to discussion about this work. Please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments!)
<chapter 10< | >chapter 12> • story on ao3 • masterlist
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There had been three meetings of Dumbledore's Army, irregularly scheduled and rather spontaneous, before the morning her grandfather arrived on Hogwarts grounds. Liesel found herself mentally surveying each and every one outside the Headmaster's office as she waited, listening to the muffled shape of an argument she wasn't yet a part of.
The first meeting had been mostly chaos disguised as structure. Harry stood at the front of the room, his hands always moving in random circles as he restlessly attempted to explain basic stances with a group of people who hadn't used magic outside of classrooms. None of them knew the pressure of the duel, the kickback of certain spells, and none of them trusted each other enough to experiment. She remembered Neville's wand slipping out of his grip twice in ten minutes and the way nobody laughed at him for it, which she'd noted with some surprise. The Slytherins certainly would've shared a few glances at the very least. Gryffindors had a reputation for bravado that didn't always extend to kindness, either, but this room seemed to have agreed, without discussing it, that everyone present had walked through the same door for the same reason. This counted for something. Especially for Liesel, the outlier.
She remembered Ginny finding her near the back during a mid-meeting break that first week, dropping down beside her with an awe-struck smile on her face at the pure adrenaline of the magic. None of the Weasley siblings rambled on much, only speaking when they had something to say (which was often, but Liesel tried not to judge), and Ginny held to that. Without any preamble, she turned her head to the Slytherin and said that she was glad Liesel had come.
Glad you came.
It had startled Liesel, the directness of it… the way Ginny said it without any clear reason or cause. After it was said, she waited for the redhead to continue with a "but…" or "You're useful…" or something of the sort. It never arrived.
Luna had attached herself somewhere during the second meeting, simply sliding into proximity the way Luna adored to insert herself unapologetically. She didn't ask permission, and assumed a closeness that most people would spend months earning. By the third meeting, Luna had started narrating things to Liesel in a low voice during the lulls, containing eccentric theories about which students had Wrackspurts clouding their aim, a complaint about the how the acoustics of the room interrupted the energy that seemed, on reflection, seemed to be planted in truth even if it sounded ridiculous. Liesel had found herself listening properly, the way she listened to her grandfather discuss wand cores. Luna was a lot like Garrick Ollivander in many ways. The madness of the two of them. They would get along well.
What she noticed most, as she adjusted her position on the bench, was the shift in how people looked at her. Somehow, some way, these students treated her with more respect than fear, as most staff and students in her own house would since the incident with Theodore Nott. Hannah Abbott had asked her opinion on a wand grip without flinching at the answer. Ernie Macmillan had deferred to her correction on a wrist angle without the visible annoyance he hand held the first week, when listening to Liesel seemed to physically pain him. Even Zacharias Smith, who disliked her on principle and said so frequently, had stopped saying the quiet part as loudly.
People were actually looking her in the eye.
And Harry.
Liesel kept circling back to this, the pure concept of it feeling estranged in her mind. The way Harry looked at her during the meeting… It wasn't necessarily different from how he looked at the others, not in any way she could point to and name without sounding foolish, but there was something peculiar in the way his eyes found her first when he scanned the room to see who needed help, the way he asked her opinion on pairings and drills as though her answer mattered more than confirming his own instinct. She had spent the past months being looked at, being handled as if she would shatter if they did something wrong. Harry looked at her like she could only do right.
"ABSOLUTELY DESPICABLE!" Her grandfather's voice boomed through the door.
Garrick Ollivander did not raise his voice often. In the shop he moved quietly, spoke quietly, and handled everything with reverence as if the objects themselves were sentient. When he did raise his voice, such as in this moment, it rattled the walls, sounding like it had been building pressure for decades and had burst.
"Headmaster, I ask you plainly," He spoke, "How could you allow this to continue?"
Liesel looked at the floor, noting the uneven levels of the flagstones from centuries of use. She traced the edge of one with the toe of her shoe.
Professor Umbridge's voice came through next, clipped and high and entirely self-possessed, "Mr. Ollivander, your granddaughter broke another student's ribs and his nose in the Great Hall in front of five hundred students. We must have no favorites. The Ministry has granted me full authority to discipline as the situation requires, and I exercised that authority appropriately--"
"Appropriately…" Garrick's voice dropped dangerously. The drop was somehow worse than the volume, "You dare stand in front of me and use that word…"
Dumbledore began, "The High Inquisitor's methods are--"
Garrick interrupted, his voice carrying through the wood clearly, "I will tell you what I found on my granddaughter's hand… I will tell you exactly what I found… and then you will explain to me which word you would like to use for it."
Silence from Umbridge's end. In fact… there was silence from everyone in the room. Liesel half wondered if her grandfather would've dragged Umbridge across the Great Hall table just as she had Nott.
"If I find…" Garrick continued, each word deliberately chosen to punch in his point, "that another mark has been put on that child by any instrument in this school, I will withdraw the Ollivander name from every outstanding Ministry contract. Every wand order. Every consultation, every agreement, every courtesy." His voice gradually began to rise in volume. "And when Liesel inherits the business-- Which she will and which will occur whether the Ministry finds it bloody convenient or NOT-- I will ensure that the first entry in the new ledger is a formal and permanent refusal to conduct any business with the Ministry of Magic whatsoever. I will put it in my will if I must! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!"
Dumbledore said something, low and measured. Garrick responded to it with something Liesel couldn't fully make out, but he had made his point extremely clear.
Then, the door opened.
Her grandfather came through the threshold, still carrying the momentum of the argument, his breathing still faster than usual and his silver hair completely disheveled. Though… his hair didn't often find itself anything other than disheveled. Liesel almost giggled at how Harry and her grandfather could bond.
Upon seeing Liesel, the fury on his face didn't leave as much as it did push down and reorganize itself into his set shoulders. Garrick crossed to the bench, sat beside her, and took her left hand in both of his as if she were one of the prized wands he weighed the year before. The two of them needn't speak words to one another to understand the desperation they both held to their connection. The only family they both had.
Her grandfather lightly pulled the wrappings from her hand and looked at the jagged edges of the words, his lips retracting into his mouth so hard Liesel thought it might draw blood.
He sighed, speaking softly, "Everything is alright now, little bird."
Liesel believed him. She didn't know if it was true, but she believed it. That had always been her grandfather's special gift… the ability to say anything in a way that made one feel like he was speaking it into the universe.
"Does it hurt?" he asked, placing the bandages back over her hand.
"Sometimes," Liesel mumbled, simply appreciating the warmth of his hand on hers, "I don't know, I think I'm getting used to it."
He looked at her hand for another moment, then nodded, refusing to release his grip immediately.
"Do you know," Garrick said, "I went to a Muggle school before Hogwarts. Just three years, but I remember it clearly." He turned her hand over again, studying the wrist and arm with the same attention he gave his woodwork, looking for any signs of abuse from the school's new punishments, "There was a teacher there. A cruel woman that looked like a banshee woke up on the wrong side of the bed. She kept a ruler on a desk in case some young foolish boy pulled a girl's braid-- which I did, of course, because I was eight and stupid and completely in love with her-- she would have you put your knuckles on the desk and would bring the ruler down on them."
He brought one of his hands up and slammed it down three times softly, stopping before he hit her hand. "Whack. Whack. Whack."
Liesel looked at his face, a slight smile appearing, "Grandfather…"
"I cried," he said plainly, "Bitterly. Like a little baby."
Liesel couldn't help but let out a giggle at her grandfather's usual chatty demeanor and held on tighter to his hand in hers.
"The point," he said, with a whimsical air to him that she hadn't seen moments ago, "is that this is an old tradition everywhere… the inflicting of minor suffering on students for the sake of inflicting it. It changes shape, uses different instruments… But it is a very old and unimaginative tradition." He finally set her hand down, gently, on her own knee, and placed his hands between his own knees as a young child would. "The question I have for you is… did Theodore Nott cry?"
"When? In the Great Hall?" Liesel asked.
Her grandfather nodded with a light mhm.
A bright shame flooded onto the girl's cheeks, "I-… I don't know. I couldn't really see his face-"
"Ah, ah. Did he cry like a little baby or not?"
"… Yes."
Garrick's expression didn't quite change, but there was a spark in his eyes; an unexpected satisfaction that Liesel never expected from him, considering he was a large lover of life, the founder of their family's ranch. The man wouldn't hurt a fly.
"Good."
Liesel laughed then, a real one, out of utter shock, and he laughed with her.
Umbridge came through the door approximately four minutes later.
She had recomposed herself fully. The cardigan was straight, as was the clipboard in her hands, and the stiff smile on her lips. She paused when she saw them sitting together on the bench, Liesel still with the tail end of the laugh on her face, and Garrick sitting with his hands foolishly folded between his knees. Umbridge raised her chin by a fraction, assessed the scene before her, and then continued down the corridor without a word, her kitten heels clacking rhythmically on the stones.
Severus Snape came through the door next, lightly closing it behind him. He looked between the two wandmakers with an analytic expression, squinting his eyes and twitching his nose. Something in his expression made Liesel believe she might be in a worse position than her grandfather thought.
"How are we." he said. It was not quite a question.
"I will be wonderful, Severus," Garrick said, standing up to be face to face with the professor, "when the school stops inflicting torture on my granddaughter."
Snape accepted this without flinching, his familiarity with the Ollivander family throughout the years on display, "I attempted to arrange an alternative. I initially requested that she serve her detention in my classroom. Cauldron scrubbing. I made the case at some length this time." He paused, "Once again, the High Inquisitor declined to allow it."
Her grandfather sighed, "The Headmaster was not particularly helpful, might I say."
Snape was quiet for a moment. "The Headmaster's position is more constrained this year than it has been in some time. The Ministry interference is significant. He is managing several competing pressures and some of them are not visible from the outside." He looked at Liesel directly: scrutinizing, scolding, a glare a father would give his daughter when she misbehaved, "What she did to Theodore Nott was grounds for expulsion. You are aware of this, yes?"
Liesel's face turned into a shocking bright red, her head nearly feeling dizzy from the embarrassment.
"I am aware."
"The fact that she is still sitting on this bench rather than halfway back to London is not the result of inaction. I want that understood," Snape said, "Miss Ollivander must learn to control her behavior."
Liesel wanted to disappear into the bench.
Garrick looked at Snape for a long moment. The expression had in it everything that their long acquaintance since that fateful night at the Malfoys' Gala when Liesel's mother and father were taken by the Ministry. The trust, yet disagreement. The exasperation, yet the absolute comfort. He nodded, "I know it, Severus."
Snape gave a stern nod back, "I will keep an eye on her, Garrick."
"You always do," Liesel's grandfather mused.
Snape looked at Liesel one more time. His dark eyes held something that wasn't quite soft… but wasn't hard either. Then, he turned and walked back in the direction of the dungeons, his robes settling into their usual authority behind him.
The old man watched him go. "That man, little bird…" he said, "has been keeping an eye on you since you were a child, and that eye shows no sign of tiring."
A small, breathy squeak came from Liesel's throat, "I know."
"Don't make it harder than it needs to be."
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The corridor inside the Defense Against the Dark Arts tower ran itself into several different staircases and floors, sporting windows that looked out over the edge of the grounds and the late afternoon light came in at a sharp angle, making the stone floors look warmer than they were. Liesel walked through with her head slightly down from the pure embarrassment of the meeting earlier, her satchel strap worn tightly across her chest rather than hanging over one shoulder. She heard voices.
Ginny and Luna were standing near one of the window alcoves. Luna was in the middle of a sentence about the new Charms module Professor Flitwick had introduced that week, her voice carrying the unhurried, slightly meandering quality it always had, as though the words were finding the path as they went instead of following a meticulously filtered plan. Ginny simply leaned on a pillar, head leaning against the stone as she listened to Luna's rambling as if it was her lifeline. For a moment, she interrupted Luna's speech to reach up and readjust her butterbeer cork necklace.
Liesel attempted to walk by without being seen, but, unfortunately, she stole the moment from them.
"Ollivander," Luna said, looking over at her.
Liesel stopped, "Hi Luna. Ginny."
Ginny straightened slightly, turning her nose up and pushing her shoulders back, "Liesel. We- um… Is it true? Your grandfather is here?"
"He came to discuss my detentions.” Liesel shifted the strap of her satchel, "He's not particularly pleased with the school's disciplinary approach."
"I'd imagine not. My mum threw a fit when she heard Fred and George went through it," Ginny said, "Is he going to do anything about it?"
"My grandfather made his position very clear." The Slytherin girl cleared her throat, unwilling to go further. The sight of her grandfather in such distress brought up some emotion within her that she didn't want to expose, "Are you both coming to the DA meeting tonight?"
"Wouldn't miss it!" Luna exclaimed, twirling her hair by her shoulder, "Ginny told me that Parvati said that Neville said that Harry said we'll be covering Expelliarmus again today."
"Good. Everyone could use the practice," Liesel noted, "It's more useful than people give it credit for."
Luna tilted her head to one side with a dreamy smile playing on her lips, "Professor Flitwick says the same thing, actually. He says the theory is in the gesture, not the words, and most people have the gesture wrong before they're even-"
Something moved at the edge of Liesel's vision.
She turned her head before she fully decided to, the same way Luna talked without an exact plan, the way one would do instinctively.
Down the corridor, where the architecture curved toward a staircase in the corner and the light from the windows didn't quite reach, there was something suspended in the air Liesel couldn't identify. It was small, no larger than a closed fist, and it moved with a lively nature, with charming blue flames flickering in every direction, but in the way a conjured flame couldn't possibly mimic.
Then came the noise. A very faint chirping sat on the border of what would be considered audible, the kind of sound that forced the hairs on Liesel's arms to stand up before her brain even processed the threat. Beneath the chirping was a dry, papery crackle. Like stepping on dead leaves in a silent room.
A sickening shudder started at the base of her spine, a sensation exactly like the dozens of needle-thin legs skittering upward, climbing her vertebrae one by one. The blood in her veins plummeted in temperature, as if the icy fire before her tore into her body.
But the blue flame remained in its position. It stretched, elongated sideways, pulling its edges out into a shape that didn't exist. A flicker, a reach, a withdrawal. If the light caught it just right, it looked exactly like a skeletal arm. A slow, patient extension.
Come…
There were no words. There was only the gesture, repeating over and over, the flame pulling forward and retreating with a type of agony Liesel could only feel in the tingling of her own fingers, as if the fire had been waiting decades for this moment.
"What is that?" Liesel murmured, completely entranced.
Ginny tried to follow her eyeline, but found nothing, "What is what?"
Liesel pointed. The flame hovered in the gloom, pulsing.
Ginny looked. As did Luna. The both of them stared directly into the shadowed corner cooperatively, then turned their backs with blank faces.
"I don't see anything," the Weasley girl said, with furrowed brows and a softness in her now-worried shoulders.
"There." Liesel took a step. The skittering sensation up her spine flared, forcing her legs to move. The flame drifted backward… Not necessarily fleeing, but maintaining the distance. It floated deeper into the alcove, the beckoning motion never stopping. That reaching, pulling shape.
Come…
Come…
"Liesel," Ginny called, stepping after her, "What does it look like?"
"Fire," Liesel whispered, her feet carrying her to the steps. "Blue fire."
She followed it to the stairwell's hollow, low archway of raw rock that bordered the steps upstairs. The wisp drifted to the railing, pulsed once, and then floated toward the back wall behind the staircase.
Except it wasn't only a wall. It was a massive wardrobe shoved deep into the stone recess. The wood was nearly black, its surface entirely swallowed by intricate, interlocking clockwork gears and sharp geometric lines that refused to form a coherent pattern. It looked almost industrial.
The wisp pressed itself into the gears and the astronomical markers. The blue light finally vanished, fading into the dark grain like a dying star.
The corridor went completely still. The crawling sensation beneath Liesel's skin snapped shut, leaving her with a hollow exhaustion.
Liesel stood inches from the wardrobe. Out of curiosity, her hand drifted up, her fingertips brushing the carved gears. The wood was freezing, having sat in the dark so long it had no warmth of human touch The edges of the gears were worn smooth either by time or, perhaps, by desperate hands. She traced the channels between the metal0like carvings, feeling the eerie wrongness of the design, the way every gear was just slightly offset from where they logically should have been.
She let her arm drop.
Ginny and Luna came to a halt behind her.
"It's a wardrobe," Ginny offered, "Fred and George have been trying to get into it since their third year. They're convinced there's a room behind it. Nothing's worked."
Liesel looked at the carved surface, unsure of how to continue, her mind continuously running over the flame.
"What you saw," Luna placed her hand on Liesel's shoulder, "If it was blue fire… That sounds like a will-'o-the wisp. They're native to Scotland, you know. They appear near water, mostly, but they'll go wherever old magic is."
"There's no such thing," Ginny sighed, but she said it without her usual full conviction, which was more honest than full conviction would have been.
"The Kelpie is native to Scotland, too," Luna said serenely, "and no one argues about those."
"That's different."
"Is it? A Kelpie is just a will-'o-the-wisp that decided to be larger," Luna's voice began picking up speed, "They show people things. That's what the old stories say. They show you where to look… Whether what you find when you look is good or bad depends on a lot of factors."
Liesel stood before the wardrobe, only half listening to the debate behind her. She thought about Umbridge's office and the drugged tea, and the voice she had heard that wasn't Umbridge's. She thought about the frost at the windows of the Hog's Head, and the twisting and turning of her vision.
"I… think I must've imagined it," Liesel muttered under her breath, "Magic can do strange things."
"It can," Luna agreed, absentmindedly smiling at Liesel with her trademarked wondrous eyes, "Though imagining is a form of seeing too, really."
Ginny muttered something under her breath that contained the words 'Loony Lovegood'.
"That isn't a very kind nickname," Luna said, unpleasantly.
"I know," Ginny said, pleasantly. She gave a side eye at the accusatory Luna and smirked.
The silence that followed had Liesel wondering if she should kick the wardrobe wide open and shove the two of them in… or better, hide in it until the exchange was over.
Liesel studied the wooden structure one final time. The gears were still. The wood was dark. Nothing moved. She turned away from it.
Luna reached out and touched the bottom of Liesel's braid lightly, turning the ends over in her fingers, "Has anyone ever suggested two braids?"
She should've locked herself in the wardrobe. It would've saved her from the hex Ginny was surely plotting in her mind.
"Instead of the one," Luna continued, "It would look very nice on you."
Liesel blinked at her. Luna looked back with absolute sincerity, as if she wasn't completely aware of the guard dog she had at her ankles.
The Slytherin thought back to all of Pansy's suggestions. She had made many, but Liesel learned to stop listening the previous year before she turned her into a Pansy doppelgänger. "Er… no. No one has."
Luna smiled, "You should try it. You have the right face shape for it."
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The Room of Requirement arranged itself a bit differently for the DA than it had when her and Harry were initially brainstorming. It was larger, the ceiling higher, The training dummies stood neatly in rows, looking unnervingly like the front lines of an army, but exactly where she had suggested they place them.
Liesel sat on the floor near the far wall while people filed in, resting her spine against the cool stone after many hours of climbing up to the Headmaster's office, down to the dungeons, back up to the Charms classroom, back down to have tea with Professor Snape, and so on. She let the noise of twenty others organizing themselves wash over her. Around her, the DA consisted of the same personalities she had seen the past few weeks: Seamus and Dean bickering like an old married couple, Neville nervously chattering with Fred and George, and Hermione keeping a mental tally of attendees beside Harry and Ron.
Luna dropped into the chair nearest to Liesel, reached into her woven bag, and produced a tortoiseshell comb.
"May I?" she asked.
Liesel looked at the comb, and then at Luna's wide, excited eyes, "You were serious about the braids?"
"I'm always serious." Luna replied, leaning slightly closer, "Even though people think I'm joking often, I'm actually quite a serious person."
Without another word, Liesel untied the ribbon at the base of her existing braid, shaking her hair loose. Luna went to work. Her hands were deft, surprisingly firm for someone who moved through the world with such a sense of wonder. She divided the hair, the comb's teeth cool against Liesel's scalp. The repetitive motion was so unexpectedly soothing that Liesel stared blankly around the room, letting the sensation fall over her.
Across the room, Harry was talking to Ron. He slipped Ron's wand out of his pocket and began drumming the two wands against his thighs, his lips pumping with a beat that clearly gave away his anxiety. When Ron noticed, he yanked his wand out of Harry's hand and whined that he would break one one day. Harry laughed and looked away… glancing directly into Liesel's eyes.
She smiled. Just a small smile. There was nothing to it, really. A smile that one would give someone passing on the street. But Harry's natural response was to warmly smile. He seemed as if he was ready to walk over to her, but Ron pulled him back and began to speak to him one again.
Luna's fingers moved through her hair: Dividing, crossing, crossing, dividing. The room filled with voices as everyone arrived.
The meeting began.
Liesel had cast Expelliarmus thousands of times. She knew the spell the way she knew the wizarding waltz, or the grain of hornbeam wood…. Her body had learned it so completely that a single conscious thought only got in the way. It was natural.
So Harry inevitably asked her to help about 5 minutes into the lesson.
She moved between the pairs, watching their wrists, nothing where the energy of the wands may snag at the gestures. The gesture was the entire trick, just as Flitwick had said, just as anyone who had actually disarmed a determined opponent would know in their bones. Most people, especially a room full of angry children, wanted to throw spells like a punch: all shoulder, no wrist. She corrected them. 'Follow through.' 'Don't stop at the release.' 'You're holding your breath, let go.'
Liesel watched Harry demonstrate for Seamus. He was a far better teacher than he gave himself credit for, which aligned perfectly with how he viewed the rest of his own abilities.
When the session finished, people collected their belongings, chatting loosely with exhaustion.
Liesel crouched to pick up her robes from the floor, placing them in her elbow, and grabbing the leather strip of her satchel.
She stood. Cedric was looking straight at her.
She was standing directly in front of the long mirror she had requested for checking dueling forms. She'd glanced at it a dozen times today and hadn't seen this. Someone had put it there after the session started, or she simply hadn't stood at this exact angle before.
A photograph was taped to the glass. Cedric.
It wasn't a formal portrait, not quite the polished images the Prophet circulated. This photo was candid. Someone had caught him in motion, mid-laugh, with his head turned slightly, the corners of his eyes crinkled. Beside it, arranged with great care, were clippings from the Prophet. She recognized the font, the column widths… Liesel probably could've read them off from memory, as she had obsessed over them all summer.
Liesel stared at the photograph. Cedric's image was still, which meant it was a Muggle photograph. That stillness was somehow worse… somehow better than the moving kind. It was clear it came from Newton Gold's collection.
"Who put this up?" Liesel asked softly, without any particular edge.
"I did." Harry's voice spoke up from right behind her. "We can take it down. I can take it down right now, I just thought-"
"No." She cut him off before he could finish, "Don't." She examined the clippings, the photograph, the deliberate arrangement by the one person who also understood that the why mattered just as much as the what, "You did the right thing. People need to know why they're fighting."
Liesel looked past the photos and past her own reflection in the mirror to look at Harry. He was standing a few feet behind her, his hands shoved into his robe pockets.
She turned around, her satchel swinging on her shoulder. The room was empty except for the two of them. She registered this slowly, absorbing the slight disorder of the wooden chairs, the absence of the chatter they had heard before.
Liesel looked at her shoes. Harry looked at her.
"I'm stuck there, too, you know." Harry broke the silence between the two of them.
The Slytherin girl glanced back up at the Boy Who Lived, "What?"
"The maze." Harry delivered the words as if he had memorized them several times, but failed to remember the proper lines, "I still have nightmares. The same ones, mostly. The same few seconds." He paused, running a hand through his dark hair, a tell that he was working up to something difficult. "If you ever-… I mean, if you wanted to talk about him. About Cedric. I'm… I was there. No one else was. Well, besides Voldemort, and I think maybe no one else-" Harry stopped, "No one else gets it the way I do. That's all I mean."
Liesel nodded, the words entirely absent from her throat. Her gaze dropped back to her shoes as she felt him watching her silently, attentively. Thoughts were racing in her mind, but she couldn't bring herself to speak. Her throat was constricted.
"… Right." Harry muttered. She heard the subtle shift of his boots, the small transfer of balance that preceded departure, the intake of breath right before 'I'll be off then.'
The satchel on her shoulder and robes over her arm hit the floorboards with a dull thud. Harry's attention diverted to the sudden noise as he found himself trapped in Liesel's hands. Right as he was about to say goodbye to his nose, she dragged him in and placed her lips on his.
Harry didn't even have time to close his eyes. The impact of her hands on his cheeks was startling, the rough edge of the linen wrapped around her knuckles scraping slightly against his jawbone. He had spent the entire term observing her from across the crowded classrooms, keeping a careful distance, navigating how to talk to the girl who lost just as much as him that night. Now she was pulling him toward her rapidly, collapsing the space between them before his mind could catch up. Her lips were slightly salty, trembling as they pressed against his with an urgency that derailed the words forming in his throat. The relentless noise of his daily life simply vanished. The dread of the Ministry interference, the nightmares, the constant throbbing in his scar, all disappeared. In its place was the friction of her thumbs resting against his cheekbones.
For Liesel, the action had completely outpaced her reasoning. It was driven by a sudden- feral, even- need to feel something... someone... before the silence in the room could eat her alive. Only their mouths actually connected before the reality of the decision struck her. The stiff wire frames of his round glasses bumped awkwardly against the bridge of her nose, clumsily shoving up toward his eyebrows and brought the identity of the boy she was kissing into sharp focus. He was radiating an incredible amount of heat, from both the activity of the meeting and nervousness, she supposed. She hadn't calculated the angle, hadn't adjusted her posture, hadn't prepared any sort of aristocratic poise that she normally hid behind.
It was messy.
A heartbeat later, Harry's hands found her waist, and he eagerly kissed her back.
For one fractured second, a unit of time too miniscule to name, the hands on her waist belonged to someone else. The mouth pressing against hers felt familiar in a completely different way. The body standing close was taller, and the glasses were non-existent. And Liesel jumped back to look at Harry.
His eyes opened, too. Liesel studied him from this newfound close proximity… The bright green of his irises. The untidy hair. The round glasses. The fading sunburn along his jawline. This was real.
The grief remained. Liesel wasn't naive enough to believe a kiss could unmake grief, and she should've known this would happen. But it was no longer the very first thing… He wasn't the entity that arrived first in every quiet moment, demanding her attention. For the first time since that night by the maze, something in the present stood in front of it.
She kissed Harry again.
This time, the boundaries blurred. Hands shifted, his sliding slightly inward to drag her in at the waist and hers moving outward to wrap her arms over and around his neck.
As their mouths moved together, exploring one another, Liesel once again felt something burst in her stomach.
Burst was not quite the right word. It leaked. A creeping, insidious cold began to seep from the base of her spine, crawling up her vertebrae like frost on a windowpane.
She sensed him. She sensed… it.
Whatever it was.
Liesel felt the temperature of her own blood plummet as she wrapped her arms further around Harry, and as Harry pulled her further into his chest. Something inside of her wanted to reach out, to coil around whatever lay behind his lighting scar, to feed on it. The sensation was clearly wrong to Liesel, but she found it undeniably intoxicating.
Then, Harry pulled away.
The separation was abrupt. His hands dropped from her waist to her elbows, steadying her as he took a distinct half-step backward.
Liesel's eyes fluttered open, her lungs desperately trying to breathe him back in. The sparks within her recoiled at the sudden loss of Harry. She looked at his face, expecting to find the same intoxicating intensity that she felt.
But he wasn't looking at her.
His eyes were focused squarely over her shoulder. She didn't need to turn around to know what had caught his attention. He was staring directly at the long mirror on the wall behind her. At the muggle photograph of Cedric taped on the glass. In the image, Cedric wasn't moving, wasn't watching… He was simply there to bear witness to what they were doing.
Harry shifted his weight, the quiet of the room turning stale.
"Liesel," he murmured, his voice catching in his throat, "I'm not- I don't want you to think I'm trying to replace him. Cedric, I mean. I know I can't. I just… I thought you needed the company. I don't mean to cross any line."
Liesel lifted her hand. Her fingers found his face, tracing the angle of his jaw before she pressed a single finger gently against his lips.
She kept her mossy eyes locked onto his, forcing his gaze away from the mirror and back to her. The room held them quietly. The danger waiting for them outside had not yet vanished. The war was still coming. The Ministry was still prowling the corridors. But here they were.
"He's not here, Harry. You are." Liesel said quietly. She hesitated, watching his lips intently before flicking her gaze back up to his, "I don't need another Cedric."
Harry blinked. He let out a soft, shaky exhale against her finger.
Liesel lowered her hand, her fingers catching the collar of his jumper beneath his robes, and pulled him back in.
When they kissed his time, the hesitation was entirely gone.
The cold crawling inside her chest purred, pressing itself against the humming in his own chest. There was no room for anything but the boy in front of her, and whatever he held within.
<chapter 9< | >chapter 11> • story on ao3 • masterlist
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The afternoon light through the corridor windows shone through the air, coming in sideways and too gold, the kind that made everything look slightly more significant. Liesel walked a half-step ahead of Harry, leading him through the labyrinth of corridors and halls and stairways.
"You could just tell me," Harry sighed from behind her.
"I could," Liesel spoke from across her shoulder, purposefully being vague in light of what exactly she wanted to show Harry.
Harry went completely quiet for a few seconds, monitoring the weight of the girl's sarcasm, and what Liesel estimated to be the duration of his patience before he tried again, "At least give me a hint. Floor number, maybe."
Liesel began ascending one of the many staircases they had seen that afternoon, this time located in the astronomy tower, "We're going up."
"That's not a hint," Harry glanced at the staircase she'd just turned them onto, the one that spiraled all the way up into the open Hogwarts sky and hesitantly continued following her, cursing under his breath, "Liesel… If you're taking me up to the Astronomy Tower to throw me off of it, it'd be nice to know. I'd like to leave my Firebolt to Ron in my will."
Liesel glanced over her shoulder once again with a smirk pulling at the corners of her lips, "No one is being thrown off of the Astronomy Tower anytime soon, I'm afraid."
"Brilliant. So where are we going?"
"Harry."
"What?"
"Stop talking and walk faster."
He did, falling into step beside her rather than trailing behind, and Liesel graciously left him space. The corridor narrowed as they climbed, developing into newer stones that very clearly shown the centuries it had taken to complete the castle in its entirety. She was aware, in the particular way she had become aware of most things since she found herself silent during the summer, of the small distance between them and the way it rapidly adjusted as they walked. Harry walked similarly to the way he flew. It was responsive, yet slightly unpredictable, occupying space without performing it. It was rather irritating. Liesel had been raised to walk into rooms and own them, to meet eyes and hold them, to meticulously monitor her speaking and never open her mouth without filtering her words for fear something may be given away. Around Harry, she found herself doing what her parents would consider most undignified: letting words fall out of her lips, noticing her own hands, glancing at him and then finding something else to look at quickly.
She was not accustomed to bashfulness. She had no programming for it in her soul… and no patience for it, either. Yet here it was, following her up the staircase like something she that had clung to her from Grimmauld Place. The truly inconvenient part was that, underneath the bashfulness, there was something else, something that had nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with the specific and unrepeatable fact of Harry Potter, himself.
He make her feel more awake than she had in months. It wasn't exactly the raw, electric shockwaves of her grief… She knew that kind, had lived inside it for months, and felt trapped by the sharpness if provided her consciousness, to the point it left her bleeding on the edges of ordinary tasks. This was different. Cleaner. It pointed somewhere other than backward.
Harry didn't tiptoe around her the way everyone else had learned to do. He didn't lower his voice or look at her the way the professors and members of the Order did, like she might tear herself apart without their direct supervision.
He had been there. He held Cedric in front of the maze while the band abruptly silenced themselves and the stars in the sky dissipated, and the world conjured a line between Before and After. Liesel understood that Harry carried it the way she did, something she simply knew; the way one would know which staircases moved and which portraits were worth speaking to. He understood her without requiring her to explain herself, and she had not known until this year how much of her energy had always gone into the explaining.
Liesel decided enough was enough, and to give him an actual hint, "There's an advantage to having one of the oldest wizarding bloodlines in Britain. We know just about everything about this castle."
Harry considered this, and nervously chuckled, "That sounds like something your lot would say right before the floor opened up."
Liesel smiled without a response, which made Harry slightly nervous and caused him to watch his feet a bit more closely. He was quiet again, but she could see him working something out from the corner of her eyes, that small crease between his brows that appeared when he was thinking rather than reacting. Two different expressions. She had catalogued both.
"Speaking of blood…" Harry began.
Liesel raised her eyebrow. What a fascinating way to start a conversation, "Yes?"
"I've been meaning to ask you something," Harry fiddled with the sleeve of his Gryffindor robes, something born out of habit due to being undersized, "You're a half-blood."
"That I am."
"But the Ollivanders are in the Sacred Twenty-Eight."
"They are."
Harry huffed, "Those two things are famously in contradiction."
The Slytherin girl tilted her head, watching her feet similarly to how Harry was. However, she wasn't looking for traps, but observing her feet to make sure she didn't trip in front of the Chosen One, "My great-grandmother was a bit of an enigma. She arrived at Hogwarts in her fifth year. No record of where she came from. She never told anyone, never wrote it down."
She thought, briefly, of the woman she had known only through other people's descriptions of her: quick-handed, unconventional, deeply private, utterly certain of her own worth in a way that had apparently not required external confirmation. Her grandfather spoke of her rarely and always in the same register, somewhere between admiration and bafflement. Liesel had always strived to be exactly her.
"So she was hiding something." Harry suggested.
"Possibly. Or she simply didn't think it was anyone else's business," Liesel paused at a landing, choosing to enter the left corridor over the right by something that looked like instinct, but was clearly years of being taken through this castle by someone who knew it well, "Some people believed she was a pureblood because she was such a powerful witch."
"People say my mother was a powerful witch. She was muggleborn," the boy noted, "So's Hermione and she's absolutely brilliant."
"Well, some others took the secrecy as proof of the opposite. I'm not sure my grandfather even knows. He's never confirmed anything either way, and I learned young that there are some questions you only ask him once."
Harry thought for a moment, his thinking crease deepening, "What do you think?"
"Quite frankly, I don't care," Liesel glanced at him, taking in the crease, his set jaw, his crooked glasses, "I think even Draco has Muggle blood somewhere in his family tree that has probably been buried. Blood purity is just a story people tell themselves. Magic doesn't particularly care where you come from, and a thought like that could make the Malfoy dynasty completely collapse."
Harry let out a short breath that was close to a laugh, though heavily diluted by the panting from climbing the staircase a moment ago, "You'd get hexed if you said that in your common room."
"Hexes get cast around for much less in our house."
Liesel stopped. They were standing in front of a long blank stretch of wall, the kind that populated the upper floors in numbers with no documented purpose and no portraits and nothing to suggest anything had ever happened in front of it. However, on the opposite wall, was a particularly fascinating portrait of Barnabas the Barmy teaching trolls ballet in bright pink tutus, "I want you to pace back and forth in front of this wall and think very specifically about what we need. A space large enough. Hidden enough."
Harry looked at the wall, and back to Liesel, "You let me all the way up here to make a fool of me? Brilliant."
"Just do it, Potter."
He held her gaze for a long second, clearly on the edge of arguing, and wondering if he would've preferred the trip off the tip of the Astronomy Tower instead. Then, he apparently decided that she had yet to actually lead him wrong, which was generous of him given the available evidence. He started walking. Three large steps to the left, three large steps to the right, his brows drawing together.
"Focus." Liesel murmured.
"I'm focusing."
On the third pass, a door materialized. It was a dramatic appearance, but it was as if the door had resolved itself out of the stone, coming out of hiding. The door was entirely unremarkable from the outside, which was precisely the point.
Harry stopped walking and make a double take toward the door, "That wasn't there."
"It comes when you need it," Liesel crossed the corridor, took the handle, and pulled it open, stepping aside so Harry can enter first, "After you."
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Liesel stood in the Transfiguration courtyard and five minutes past midnight, her cloak pulled close at both shoulders and her back pressed against the solid stone next to the trick door next that led to Central hall. The trick door that, upon trying to open it, it would seem as if it's locked, but when you walked away, it would swing open, sometimes clipping your heels. To get through the door, one would need to trick the trick door, pretend to turn around, and sprint through.
The castle held an eerie quiet in the early hours that she had noticed every time she stepped outside the common room at night. It wasn't simply the absence of sound that scurried the halls, but more like the castle was reserving its energy for the next day. The castle itself slept along with the students.
The courtyard torches had burned to their last hour and the light they gave was a warm amber, letting the shadows deepen around her.
She heard his footsteps before she saw him. It wasn't a careful, deliberate creak that she expected to her, but the loose and easy stride of someone who found nothing complicated about sneaking around at midnight. Cedric Diggory came around the far colonnade with a light jog, now changed out of his bright yellow Hufflepuff tracksuit from the dueling finale and now in his Hufflepuff school robes. His hair was cleanly fixed from the earlier events, swept elegantly to the side.
Upon seeing Liesel, he let out a breath he was holding, "You came."
"You asked." Liesel felt a blush creep up onto her cheeks, "Where are we going?"
But Cedric didn't answer. He stepped up to her and caught the hood of her cloak, drawing it up over her curls with a confidence that belonged to someone who had known her much longer than he had. Liesel simply giggled at this action, the cloak's hood slightly covering her eyes, as if they had known each other for years, "Cedric, what are you doing?"
"You must be cold, birdie!"
"Oh, Merlin!" Liesel laughed, pushing the hood up so she could see, "Don't call me birdie. And I'm fine."
Cedric craned his neck down to see eye to eye with her, the hood still obstructing his sight due to his height, "That's what your grandfather calls you, isn't it?"
"He calls me Little Bird."
"Right… Well," Cedric playfully rolled his eyes and pulled the hood down over her eyes again, "You need to keep your hood up. Just in case."
Liesel nodded with a giggle, then looked at his appearance upon freeing her eyesight… At the bright yellow of his Hufflepuff tie, which caught the last of the courtyard torchlight with an enthusiasm that was difficult to describe as anything other than visible from space, "And what's your plan, exactly? Filch will be able to see that tie from the greenhouse."
Cedric grinned. "I'm a prefect. A golden boy. Completely above suspicion."
He pressed one finger to his lips to silence her, his eyes shining. His hand caressed her shoulder and then reached down to grab hers only to turn around and rush into the dark, crouching lightly.
The castle at midnight belonged to a different world than in the daytime. The sleeping corridors gave off a low constant frequency after the sun dipped behind the highlands, resonating in the teeth rather than heard. As if the sting of a harp was plucked and required to ring forever.
Cedric weaved Liesel through the corridors fluently, one hand trailing the stone wall at turns, taking routes that avoided Filch's patrol seemingly without much thought.
"Do you sneak around often like this?" Liesel asked quietly on the fifth floor landing.
"An excellent wizard never reveals his secrets."
"That's the second time tonight you've said something that sounded profound that contained absolutely no substance."
Cedric laughed…a real laugh, one he had no mechanism for suppressing, one that was entirely too loud for a castle at midnight. He clapped his hand over his mouth immediately, his eyes creasing in amusement above it. She watched the smile reach the edges of his hand. Liesel pressed a hand over her own mouth, letting out an excited giggle.
They were about to step onto the Astronomy tower stairs once again, moving through the deep shadow between two wall sconces, when Cedric stopped.
He put a hand out, catching her elbow, and she stopped as well.
Down the hall, where a side passage branched off toward the east wing, two figures were moving with the self-conscious stealth of people who believed themselves to be invisible. One of them, catching a slant of torchlight, was wearing the heavy dark-skirted uniform of Durmstrang. The other had Gryffindor red at the collar.
Liesel and Cedric looked at each other, eyes wide. As he shoved Liesel behind a statue in the hallway, Cedric's expression cycled through several things in rapid succession, landing somewhere between duty and amusement, with duty winning just barely. He straightened, and the transformation was instantaneous: prefect badge, Triwizard champion, the whole package.
He stepped forward into the torchlight, "Do you two have any idea what time it is?"
The Durmstrang girl went rigid. The Gryffindor boy, which Liesel recognized to be Lee Jordan in Cedric's year, turned approximately the color of his tie.
"Cedric! Look, mate…" Lee glanced between the prefect and the girl, "Pretend you never saw us and I'll give you three galleons."
Cedric raised an eyebrow at Lee's attempt to charm him and the girl next to him, "I'll pretend I didn't see you if you return to your dormitories right this instant."
They went. Quickly. The Durmstrang girl had the presence of mind to look dignified about it, but Lee simply did not. The Gryffindor scrambled out of the corridor, leaving the other far behind.
When both of them rounded the corner and their footsteps faded, Cedric turned back to the shadowed alcove where Liesel was pressed against the wall, and she came out from behind the statue of a one-armed warlock. They looked at each other for one silent second before breaking into giggles once again.
This laughing was surely the result of the adrenaline rush. The kind of laughing that could only happen in places you weren't supposed to make noise, which meant it had nowhere to go and turned itself inside out trying to stay quiet, shoulders shaking, hands pressed over mouths. Cedric recovered first, grabbing Liesel's hand once again and pulling. She followed him down the corridor with a controlled stumble, both of them still fighting the laughter.
He stopped short at the next turn and looked back they way they'd come, listening. She watched his profile; the laugh lines still at the corners of his eyes, fading now into the composed and attentive expression she had usually seen from him.
"Clear," he murmured.
"You," she said, keeping her voice low, "are the best prefect I've ever seen."
"Is that sarcasm?" He looked down at her, that quiet amusement still flickering beneath his composure, "Don't answer that. Come on."
With the same natural, unhesitant certainty he'd used to pull up her hood earlier, he reached out and took her hand. His grip was warm, safe. Liesel stared at their joined hands for a fraction of a second, then shifted her gaze to the empty corridor ahead, saying absolutely nothing.
Cedric stopped her before a stretch of blank sone, directly opposite a painting of trolls in ornate pink tutus. He released her hand, rubbing his palms together with the anticipation of a magician preparing to perform a card trick, a comparison that Liesel later discovered was much more accurate than she had anticipated. "I need you to walk back and forth in front of this wall three times."
Liesel stared at the blank stone, and then blankly back at Cedric, "I beg your pardon?"
"Trust me."
"You are going to have to give me considerably more than that, Diggory"
"Walk back and forth," he instructed, adopting a patient cadence, "And think about what you want. A room to dance in. Large… Private, preferably."
Liesel studied him. She had humiliated him in a duel in front of three schools, and he had simply brushed off the dust, asked her to the Yule Ball, escorted her through the midnight castle, and handled rule-breaking with the effortless authority of someone born to it. Whatever else might be said about Cedric Diggory, in the span of a single evening, he had earned her cooperation.
She began to pace.
Three passes. She focused on the cold stone and thought of music, of a proper, polished floor, and of the fact that she had promised to teach this boy how to dance before he turned December into a catastrophic social event for them both.
A heavy wooden door materialized from the brickwork.
Liesel stopped dead and turned slowly toward the newfound door. Cedric was leaning against the opposite wall, arms crossed, wearing a terribly satisfied expression at her awe of the castle's magic.
"What is this?" She asked softly.
"They call it the Room of Requirement… Some call it the Come-and-Go Room." He tilted his head at Liesel, "My great-grandmother told me once, when I was very small, that there was a room in this castle that appeared only when you truly needed it. She used it to hide animals from poachers when she was in school."
Liesel smiled, "Poppy."
Cedric nodded, smiling, "A certain Slytherin named Dorothea Sparrow showed it to her. The room gave them what they needed and asked for nothing in return." He paused, letting the silence settle.
The name stuck Liesel's chest long before her conscious mind could process the impact. It settled deep into her ribs. It was a name she had never expected to encounter outside of her family's old ledgers or old antique papers in the restricted section. Her great-grandmother, the enigma. Dorothea in particular belonged to a part of her lineage that seemed to be more myth than fact.
Before she could do anything embarrassing, Liesel pressed her lips into a thin line and pivoted toward the door. Cedric reached past her shoulder, the warmth of his breath landing on her neck, and pushed the doorknob forward.
The room waiting for them was not massive, as it didn't need to be. The floor was a sea of pale hardwood. Against the far wall, the magic had conjured a vintage gramophone. It sported a fabulous dark, polished mahogany with a gleaming brass horn that caught the candlelight around the room and cast it back in a warm amber glow. The floating candles hovered low, creating a ceiling of light above them. Liesel was slightly worried Cedric's head might bump one of them.
"It always knows," Cedric said, now leaning lightly over her shoulder from the back, "Whatever you need. It's never wrong about it."
Liesel turned her head toward him, jumping at his proximity. But she didn't move away. She simply couldn't help but have a gentle smile approach her lips as she drank in his profile, and then his lovely hazel eyes when he also turned his head. On his neck, there was a faint smear of chalky dust along his pumping artery that he hadn't noticed.
"You have-"
Without consciously deciding to do it, Liesel reached up and brushed the dust from his neck with her thumb. His breath caught, stopping for a fraction of a second, and she could feel his racing heartbeat.
Liesel dropped her hand instantly, feeling a brutal heat flush her cheeks as she turned briskly toward the gramophone, "Right. Well, we can't be here all night. Let's get started."
Cedric chuckled lowly as she turned on a three-beat tune, following her across the floor, "I want to be fully transparent with you, Liesel… Perhaps we shouldn't start with the waltz. Your toes will be sore."
"Sounds like we'll have to make some guidelines, then," Liesel smiled, walking up to Cedric as the gramophone spun a melancholic mid-century waltz, "You step on my toes, I make sure you can't walk for the first task." She placed her hand on Cedric's chest as they wrapped up in each others arms, prepared to dance.
He laughed, and this time, she felt it more than she heard it. The rumble of his chest against her hand awoke the butterflies in her stomach and caused the contagion of laughter to reach Liesel. When the giggles faded between the two of them, they were still standing close. Far closer than the waltz strictly required. Neither of them made any move to correct the distance.
He stepped on her toes twice. Both which ended with Liesel stomping on the offending foot.
"I warned you," she pointed out.
"You made it sound… manageable," Cedric replied, an edge still buried in his voice from the pain.
The gramophone kept spinning. The candles kept their low, protective height above their heads. The proximity between the witch and the wizard provided them the warmth they needed in such an old castle, energy passing between the two of them with every step.
They couldn't pinpoint exactly when the dancing dissolved into talking. Liesel only know that at some point, they were sitting side-by-side against the far wall. The brass horn was still humming softly, their shoulders were pressed together, and Cedric was telling her about the summer: The Quidditch World Cup, his father's ridiculous hat, and a comment Fred Weasley had made about the Bulgarian team that required a much more diplomatic phrasing to sound even a fraction less offensive.
Liesel watched his profile as he spoke: the slight, expressive waves of his hands when he rambled on, the way one stubborn piece of hair kept escaping from its gelled position and falling onto his forehead no matter how many times he pushed it back.
At some point, she stopped observing him and just started looking at him. Simply looking at him. A terribly different action. She noticed the difference between the two, mentally noting the vulnerability it required, and did absolutely nothing to stop it.
It was nearly six in the morning before they had gained enough sense to go back to their common rooms, but Liesel didn't want to. She held the thought in her mind, turning it over and over: I do not want to leave him.
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The Room of Requirement had understood Harry's need for something rather different. It offered space where the other room had given warmth, height where the other had kept them sheltered. Light came from no discernible source and filled every corner without shadow, and the walls had arranged themselves with low platforms and a wide open stretch of floor that felt purposeful rather than merely empty.
"How did you know about this place?" Harry asked.
Liesel looked around at the room, at this version of it. "Cedric showed me." She said it the way she sometimes managed to say it… without the catch in it, flat and simple, the way you might point at an object and name it. "Fourth year. He knew the trick of it."
Harry was watching her when she looked back. He had the expression she had started to recognize, the one where he was deciding between the careful thing and the honest one.
"He'd have liked this," Harry said, looking up at the ceiling, "Knowing the room was still being put to use."
It was the right thing. She didn't know how he kept finding the right thing to say. "Yes," she said, "He would."
They let it sit for a moment without either of them rushing to fill it, which was rarer than it should have been and worth noticing when it happened.
Then Harry looked at the open floor and said, "This is perfect," with the same directness he applied to everything, and the weight of the moment shifted, and they set about working.
Liesel walked the perimeter, thinking aloud about the platforms, and Harry followed at her shoulder asking the useful questions rather than the polite ones: where would observers stand, whether there was room to rearrange if the group grew, whether a dummy positioned there would block the sightline from the entry. She found she liked talking to him while she was thinking. He didn't wait for her to finish a thought before understanding its direction and asking the next one. It was an efficient and quietly pleasant way of working, and she had not had many occasions to notice how much she had missed working with someone rather than beside them.
"There," Liesel huffed, stopping at the center of the floor. "Leave that space open. It reads better for large groups."
Harry walked to the spot and stood in it, turning to look back toward the entry. "You're right."
"I usually am."
"You know, you could just say 'yes' and leave it there."
"I could. What's the fun in that, Potter?"
He smiled at the door and she looked at the side of his face, the line of his jaw in the sourceless light, and also smiled, privately, before turning to a training dummy that had somehow magically drifted two feet from where she'd intended it.
They moved it together, one on each side, and set it back. When they straightened up they were standing closer than the dummy's width had strictly required. Neither of them moved immediately.
The angle of his weight, slightly forward. The way his eyes had gone still on her face. Liesel became aware of Harry's state incrementally out of the corner of her eye.
She held the look. One second. Two.
The room was quiet in a way that felt chosen rather than empty. The light didn't move. Neither did either of them… not quite.
But when Liesel turned her head to look at him, it was different. Not a thing she could have named if asked. It was less like seeing and more like the sensation that preceded hearing, that slight change in air pressure that meant something was about to arrive. She didn't move her eyes from Harry's face, but the edge of him: the line of his shoulder, the side of his head, the angle of his jaw against the light… began to shimmer in a way that her eyes registered as wrong, such as one would register half-awake dreams as wrong.
It was blue. She couldn't tell if it was a crisp sapphire of a levitation charm or the harsh, blinding flash of something she'd use on the dueling catwalk. This was older, an uncategorized color. The best metaphor she could possibly use to describe the hue was a feeling, a concept. It was the final, fading light inside a dying star that was burning simply because it had forgotten how to extinguish. It was static at the very edge of his silhouette. If she looked straight at it, the color vanished. But looking straight at Harry, the edges of his skin in her periphery, the light bled like spilled oil.
In focusing on this glow, Liesel couldn't help but look straight at Harry's forehead, her gaze snagging on the lightning bolt etched into his forehead. It wasn't a conscious choice. Her focus drifted toward the mark the exact same way a compass needle twitches north, pulled by a magnetic current that predated human decision.
Describing what she felt from the scar… no, what was under the scar… was impossible, because it lacked any kind of geometry. Not round, not blunt, not dead, not sleeping, not restless. The wrongness in its nature bypassed Liesel's logic and shocked her straight into her bone marrow. It was as if, whatever was there, was sealed sight witht eh assumption that it would remain undisturbed for centuries.
And the magic within her withdrew.
Recoiled was the wrong word. Words clearly weren't Liesel's strongsuit at the moment. The magic backed away the way a hand instinctively jerks from a hot stove.
The axis of the room tilted. Slowly, sickeningly, like she had felt in Professor Umbridge's office during detentions. A high, whining frequency pitched in her ears.
Liesel ripped her eyes away from his forehead, gripping the wooden shoulder of the training dummy before her.
"Liesel? Are you alright?"
When she glanced back, the blue static was gone. Or perhaps it had faded moments ago and her brain was simply lagging behind the reality of the room. She couldn't tell. She was too occupied with the overlapping sensations inside her own body: the flash of her own magic, and the dread sitting behind Harry's skin.
Liesel pushed it down. The suppression was becoming muscle memory, like a daily exhausting chore one would do. She had done it in the offices, in the Hog's Head, and in the dead of night when her own power woke her in a cold sweat from a nightmare. She was mastering it, or so she convinced herself. The crawling in her skin yielded, leaving behind only the ringing in her ears and numbness in her fingertips.
"Sorry…" Liesel murmured, blinking, "I got lightheaded for a moment. It's…"
She wanted to say it was nothing, but she couldn't quite lie to him.
"It's perfect," the girl said, simply echoing his earlier words, "You should go spread the word."
Harry was still looking at her. She felt the gaze without meeting his green eyes. She didn't know what exactly he had caught, whether it was the hesitation, the hand on the wood, the glassy stare… Perhaps nothing.
"Are you coming?" He asked.
Liesel finally met his eyes. All she saw was a boy with messy hair, a faded burn along his jawline from quidditch practice, and dorky-looking classes upon his nose. Harry Potter… not quite the Chosen One.
"I'll stay back a bit," Liesel replied, gesturing vaguely toward the haphazardly arranged dummies. "I want to make sure it's properly sorted."
Harry accepted the excuse with a quiet grace, or an awkward fear. Either way, no probing questions. No demanding to know what's wrong. He allowed her the space she clearly needed, a specific and rare kind of understanding that Liesel was still trying to figure out how to accept.
Harry took a step toward the exit, offering a small smile that lacked his usual self-consciousness, "Thank you for showing me."
She nodded. A simple tilt of the chin that held the unspoken things she couldn't say.
He turned, pulled the brass handle, and stepped out. The door shut with a soft, unassuming click.
Liesel remained rooted in the center of the vast space. The dummies she had claimed to want to organize stood untouched.
She tilted her head back, staring up at the vaulted ceiling. Her mind drifted to a compressed version of this exact room. A gramophone humming through a brass horn. Candles hovering at eye level. Cedric leaning his shoulder against the wood paneling, tucking that same stray lock of hair for the fourth consecutive time.
Whatever you need, Cedric had told her, leaning against that wall, watching her face process the magic. It’s never wrong about it.
I need you. Liesel thought, her fingers once again finding the emerald ribbon on her wrist.
But the room did not change. It could not bring back the boy she lost.
<chapter 8< | >chapter 10> • story on ao3 • masterlist
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The stone of the dungeon corridor always held a specific kind of cold in October. It did not simply chill the skin; it sank into the joints, settling deep within the marrow, creating a constant, aching reminder of the earth pressing in from all sides. Liesel Ollivander ascended the stairs from the common room, the bandages around her hand fresh from yet another grueling night in Umbridge's office, surviving the drugged tea and mocking illusions that her mind conjured. Her leather satchel dug a thin line into her shoulder. She planned to arrive early for Potions, a choice to avoid the press of her housemates in the common room.
She exited the common room entrance and turned the corner near a crumbling mural of a forgotten medieval skirmish, her mind a blank slate, when a figure moved forward from the freezing stone walls.
Ginny Weasley stood with her arms crossed tightly over the front of her uniform. The torchlight flickered across the younger girl’s face, illuminating the stark, white gauze taped over the bridge of her nose. Beneath her brown eyes, the skin had bloomed into a mottled canvas of plum and sickly yellow. Evidence of the chaos that had erupted in the Great Hall three days earlier.
Liesel halted. Her fingers twitched, a sobering ache flaring in her own knuckles. She remembered the blinding momentum of her fist connecting with Theodore Nott’s face, and she remembered the frantic, scrambling bodies trying to pull her away. She had shoved Ginny. She had thrown her aside with enough force to send the Gryffindor crashing into the wall beside the Slytherin table.
"Ginny," Liesel breathed, the word snagging in her throat. She took a tentative step forward, her natural instinct to assess, to heal, overriding her usual guarded demeanor. "Your face."
Ginny did not uncross her arms. Her jaw set into a stubborn, rigid line, her eyes flashing with a spark of resentment Liesel hadn’t quite seen in her friend before, at least towards herself. "It feels worse than it looks, I hope you know," she said, her voice clipped, devoid of the usual warmth she normally reserved for her. "Madam Pomfrey fixed the cartilage, but she said the bruising would take a few days to fade. Said I was lucky it wasn't a clean break."
Liesel looked down at the back of her own hands. Beneath the wrappings, she knew her knuckles were split, the skin red and angry. A hollow sense of shame pooled in her stomach. She had lost control. The pristine, untouchable facade of the wandmaker’s heir had cracked, revealing something feral and unhinged beneath. It was exactly what she was afraid of: Being seen as a successor to her mother's rage.
"I didn't mean to hit you," Liesel said, her voice dropping to a quiet, earnest murmur. She forced herself to meet Ginny’s gaze. "You just-"
"Got in your way of killing Nott?"
Liesel's heart sputtered, ashamed that she might be speaking the truth, "I didn't mean to."
Ginny watched her for a long, silent moment. The anger in the Gryffindor’s eyes flickered, warring with the inherent empathy that defined her family. She shifted her weight, one hand dropping to her side to fish something out of her robe pocket.
"I know," Ginny finally replied, though the edge in her tone hadn't completely dulled. "Harry said you wouldn't have done it if you were in your right mind. He said Nott pushed you over a ledge. Even Ron was on your side, you know. That about made me want to knock him out at first."
Then, Ginny extended her hand, holding out a small folded square of parchment.
Liesel looked at the paper, then back at Ginny’s face. "What's this?"
"An invitation," Ginny said, pushing the parchment closer until Liesel had no choice but to take it. The paper felt rough and dry against her fingertips. "To join us this weekend. At the Hog's Head. Harry and Hermione are putting something together. A new defense group… like a new Crossed Wands, I suppose."
Liesel stared at the folded square. The implications of the tiny piece of parchment cascaded through her mind. A secret society. Rebellion. Gathering in a dingy pub off the main street. It was exactly the kind of reckless Gryffindor behavior that usually ended in detention or worse. Yet, the thought of holding her wand again, of standing on a platform and feeling the pure, clean rush of her magic, sent a thrill of longing straight through her chest. Liesel had forgotten entirely about the Hogsmeade weekend coming up, and she had expected to be spending it carving words into her flesh as a drab reminder of her rage, but the thought of causing a different kind of trouble was thriling.
"Who else is invited?" Liesel asked, her voice cautious.
"People we trust," Ginny stated bluntly. "People from my house. Some Hufflepuffs. A few Ravenclaws who aren't completely blind to what's happening." She paused, her brown eyes narrowing slightly. "None of your lot, that’s for sure. You're the only one wearing green who got a piece of paper."
Liesel felt the familiar, isolating chill wash over her. She was the exception. The anomaly. The Slytherin who was tolerated only because of the boy she had loved and the boy who currently sought her out. She looked at the bruised, swollen skin around Ginny’s nose, a physical manifestation of the chaos she brought with her.
Slowly, Liesel held the parchment back out to the ginger.
"I can't go," Liesel said softly, trying everything in her power to match her eyes, but failing. "No one would want me there. They tolerated me before, but now? Ginny…"
Ginny did not take the paper. She let out a short, humorless scoff, the sound echoing sharply against the stone walls, "Nonsense. Everyone's wanted to smash Nott's face in since my first year. You remember how he tied Macmillan up by the feet in the courtyard and wrote 'blood-traitor' across his forehead with Pansy's lipstick?"
Liesel remembered it well. However, she remembered being more upset about the fact that he used Pansy's lipstick instead of her own. Liesel tapped her foot, deep in thought, and shook her head, "It'll only hurt Harry's chances. They won't trust me."
"That's too bad," Ginny said, stepping closer, her chin tilting up. "Because you are going to be there. Harry wants you there. And frankly, after the way you nearly took my nose off my face, you owe me. So I had better see you walk through the door of that pub, Liesel, or I swear to Merlin, your nose is going to look exactly like mine."
A tiny, unexpected smile tugged at the corner of Liesel’s lips. The sheer audacity of the younger girl was oddly comforting. It was straightforward. It was honest.
"Alright, then…" Liesel murmured, lowering her hand, her fingers curling around the parchment.
Ginny nodded, a curt, satisfied motion, and turned on her heel to head toward the stairs. She took three steps before she stopped. The silence in the corridor stretched for a long, taut second. Ginny turned slowly back around, the bravado fading from her expression, replaced by a cautious, unsettling curiosity.
"Liesel," Ginny said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. "When McGonagall cast the disarming charm… your wand was…" She swallowed, her eyes tracking down to Liesel’s empty hands as her speech trailed off. "…I'm lucky you gave me the elbow instead of whatever was about to come out of that wand. What were you going to cast at him? Some curse?"
The question hung in the cold air, sharp and probing.
Liesel stood perfectly still. She searched her own memory of the Great Hall. She tried to find the incantation that had been sitting on her tongue, the spell she had been pulling from her core. But when she looked inward, she found only a yawning, black void. There had been no thought. No word. There had been no calculated strategy. There had only been a searing, blinding urge to unmake the boy who had mocked the last piece of her first love that she possessed.
The realization of that blankness seeped into her bones. The realization that she could have cast a maiming hex, or a dark curse, without a single conscious thought was a chilling revelation. The darkness her mother possessed, the rot that had sent her parents to an island prison, was not a distant concept. It was alive inside her, sleeping just beneath the surface, waiting for a trigger.
Liesel looked at Ginny, her mossy eyes turning darker by the second.
"I don't know," Liesel whispered, the truth slipping out of her like a sour confession to a priest, as if she were on her knees and going through the motions of the sign of the cross without truly meaning it. "I truly do not know."
Ginny studied her face, reading the genuine fear etched into Liesel’s features. The younger girl gave a slow, solemn nod, accepting the harrowing honesty of the answer, before turning back to the stairs and disappearing into the depths of the castle.
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The trek to Hogsmeade that weekend was a miserable affair. Sleet fell in sharp, slanted sheets, stinging the exposed skin of Liesel’s cheeks, sinking deep into the bandages on each of her hands, and matting her curly hair against her forehead. She walked alone, a solitary figure draped in a thick wool cloak, keeping a deliberate distance from the clusters of students laughing and shoving each other on the path.
The village itself offered little comfort. The thatched roofs dripped with freezing rain, and the cobbled streets were slick with a treacherous slurry of mud and melting ice. Liesel bypassed the cheerful, brightly lit windows of the Three Broomsticks that contained her own friends, turning down a narrow, crooked side street that seemed entirely devoid of life.
The Hog’s Head Inn materialized from the gloomy fog, its rusted sign creaking on loose hinges. The painted boar’s head upon the wood was chipped and peeling, its painted eyes seeming to follow her as she approached the door.
Liesel pushed the door open. The hinges screamed in protest, a long, drawn-out scrape of metal that immediately drew the attention of everyone inside.
The pub was small, dimly lit, and remarkably filthy. The floorboards were coated in a sticky layer of spilled ale and years of accumulated grime. The windows were so crusted with dirt that very little of the grey daylight managed to filter through.
An uncomfortable silence crashed over the room as Liesel stepped inside.
She estimated nearly thirty students packed into the cramped space. They were arranged in loose, informal circles around a collection of rickety tables. The moment they registered the green and silver scarf wrapped around her throat, the murmurs died. Expressions hardened. Eyes narrowed. The suspicion rolling off them was a tangible pressure in the air.
Liesel kept her chin level. She did not allow her gaze to dart around the room like a cornered animal. She walked with deliberate slowness to the bar, ignoring the collective stare of the room. The barman, a tall, gruff-looking man with a great deal of grey hair and a distinctly familiar, irritable face, stared at her with deep-set, piercing eyes.
"Firewhisky," Liesel said quietly.
The barman did not question her age or her request. He reached beneath the counter, retrieved a small, dusty glass, and filled it with a measure of amber liquid. Liesel placed a sickle on the scarred wood of the bar, took the glass, and turned away.
She did not join the gathering at the center of the room. Instead, she moved to the side wall, pressing her back against the damp plaster beside a grime-covered windowsill. She leaned her shoulder against the wood, lowered her head, and brought the glass to her lips. The Firewhisky burned, a swift, harsh trail of heat sliding down her throat, settling into her stomach to combat the bone-deep chill of the Scottish weather.
From beneath the frozen, wet curtain of her bangs, she watched them. She saw Harry, standing near the front alongside Hermione and Ron. He looked nervous, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his coat.
The hushed chatter had dragged on just a fraction too long when a voice cut through the air, louder than he intended.
"I still do not understand why she is here."
Zacharias Smith, a Hufflepuff with blonde hair and a perpetually supercilious expression, was glaring openly at Liesel. When he realized he spoke too loudly, he crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back in his chair with a sneer twisting his mouth. He decided to own it.
"We are supposed to be forming a defense group," Smith continued, his voice echoing in the small space. "Not a recruiting ground for You-Know-Who. How do we know she won't go straight to Umbridge the second this is over?"
Liesel stopped breathing. Half the others did as well at the mention of You-Know-Who
The glass in her hand felt suddenly fragile, like it would smash straight in her palms.
A crawling sensation began at the base of her spine. It was not the hot, blinding flash of anger she had felt with Nott. This was completely different. This was cold. It felt like a thousand tiny insects hatching beneath her skin, writhing their way up through her veins. The edges of the room began to dim, the shadows in the corners stretching, reaching toward her like grasping fingers.
The air in the pub dropped by several degrees. The condensation on the windowpanes beside her began to freeze, a slow, intricate webbing of frost spreading across the glass. The magic inside her did not want to strike him. It wanted to unspool him. It wanted to crawl into his mouth, slide down his throat, and rot him from the inside out. It wanted to collapse his lungs and watch him gasp for a breath he would never catch.
She stood up straight, pushing off the windowsill. The floorboards creaked beneath her boots as she took as single step forward.
The sound of her boot hitting the floor was shockingly loud in the silent room. Liesel’s fingers curled. A low, barely audible hum vibrated in the air around her, a sound felt in the teeth rather than heard. The shadows lengthened across the floor, creeping toward Smith’s chair.
Smith’s sneer faltered. He uncrossed his arms, leaning back slightly, his eyes widening as he registered the possibility that he may be the next one with a shattered nose.
"Liesel."
The name was spoken softly.
Liesel blinked. The crawling insects beneath her skin instantly died away. The creeping, horrific need to spread her own rot evaporated.
She looked up and found Harry’s eyes.
He was watching her, his expression a complicated mix of caution and understanding. He didn't look afraid of her. He simply looked at her, offering a hand in the disorienting storm of her own newfound rage.
Liesel exhaled, a shaky, uneven breath. The tension bled out of her shoulders. She stepped back, leaning her weight against the windowsill once more, resting her head against the cool glass. The frost that had begun to form there slowly melted.
"See?" Smith demanded, his voice pitching higher, betraying the brief flash of panic he had just experienced. He stood up, gesturing erratically toward her. "She can't even control herself! She's unhinged."
"Shut your mouth, Smith," Ron snapped, taking a step forward. His ears were turning a bright, angry red. "She has just as much of a right to be here and learn how to defend herself as you do. More so if you ask me."
"Ron is right," another voice added.
Newton Gold pushed his way through a cluster of Ravenclaws. The broad Hufflepuff boy looked at Liesel, offering her a small, solemn nod before turning to face Smith. "If she was good enough for Cedric, she's good enough for me."
A profound silence followed Newton's words. The mention of Cedric Diggory hung in the air. His presence commanded an immediate, respectful quiet. Liesel's hands folded, her finger findings itself digging deep into the wounds above her thumb to prevent herself from crying, from looking weak, in front of all of these people.
Hermione cleared her throat, breaking the spell of silent grief among the student body.
"Well," she began, her voice a little too bright, a little too hurried, "now that we are all here… we should probably get started."
The meeting commenced much like pulling teeth. Hermione explained the purpose of the gathering, the necessity of learning proper defensive magic in the face of Umbridge’s purely theoretical curriculum. But the students were restless. They hadn't braved the sleet and the secrecy just to hear about educational reform.
"Is it true?" a Ravenclaw boy asked, his voice cutting through Hermione's explanation. "Is it true that You-Know-Who is back?"
The atmosphere in the room shifted instantly. The idle curiosity vanished, replaced by a tense, hungry anticipation. They all turned to Harry.
Harry stiffened. He looked at Hermione, who gave him a small, encouraging nod, and then he looked out at the sea of expectant faces.
"Yes," Harry said. The word was quiet, but it carried to every corner of the pub. "He's back."
A collective murmur rippled through the group. Some looked terrified; others looked skeptical. Liesel watched Harry, drinking up every inch of his emotion toward the return of Voldemort. She wondered what it was like that day, deep in the graveyard.
"How do we know you aren't just making it up?" Smith challenged again, unable to let an opportunity pass. "Dumbledore says he's back, but Dumbledore wasn't there, was he? You claim you fought him. What exactly makes you qualified to teach us anything?"
Ron stepped forward again, ready to fight, but Harry put a hand on his friend's arm, stopping him.
"I'm not saying I'm a trained Auror," Harry said, his voice surprisingly steady. "But I have faced him. And I have faced the things that follow him."
"Harry has done more than just face him," Hermione interjected, her chin lifting defiantly. "In our first year, he saved the Philosopher's Stone from You-Know-Who. In our second year, he killed a Basilisk and destroyed Riddle's diary. In our third year, he fought off a hundred Dementors at once with a corporeal Patronus."
The students murmured among themselves, clearly impressed by the list of accomplishments.
"And last year," Ron continued, his voice fiercely defensive of his best friend, "he won the Triwizard Tournament. He faced a Hungarian Horntail and—"
"I didn't do that alone," Harry interrupted, his voice sharp enough to halt Ron mid-sentence.
He didn't look at his best friend. He turned his head, his green eyes cutting through the crowd, finding Liesel in the shadows by the window.
"The dragon," Harry clarified, his tone shifting, becoming something quieter, something meant just for her, even as the whole room listened. "I wouldn't have survived the first task if it wasn't for Liesel. She trained me for weeks. She taught me how to move, how to think, how to survive it. Everything I did in that arena, I did because she made sure I was ready."
The entire room turned as one. Thirty pairs of eyes snapped toward the dark corner of the pub.
Liesel felt an intense rush of heat flood her cheeks. The back of her neck burned. She was completely unaccustomed to being thrust into the light, entirely unused to being praised in front of a crowd. Anything she did she worked hard for and expected. But this… This felt terribly exposing. She looked down instantly, her hair falling forward to shield her face. She stared at the toe of her boot, tracing the intricate stitching of the leather, desperately willing the attention to drift away.
She counted to three in her head, letting the silence stretch, before she forced herself to look back up.
She ignored the Ravenclaws. She ignored the Hufflepuffs. She bypassed Ron and Hermione. Her gaze locked directly onto Harry.
He was still looking at her. The nervous tension that had plagued him since the meeting began had completely vanished from his features. He looked grounded. He looked certain.
The conversation around them resumed, the topic shifting rapidly from Harry's qualifications to the logistics of forming a secret society, but Liesel tuned it out entirely. The words became a meaningless drone, background noise that faded away until there was only the quiet, intimate space between her and the boy at the front of the room.
She watched him with an intensity that bordered on clinical, yet felt personal. She noted the way his dark hair stuck up in the back, defiant of any attempt to flatten it, how it crawled upon his neck. She observed the exact, vivid shade of his irises, a green so bright it felt entirely out of place in the drab, grey world of the pub. She saw the way his jaw tightened when Smith spoke, a tiny, repetitive flex of muscle. How it made her stomach flip.
She noticed the flush on his cheeks, a residual pinkness from the freezing wind outside. She watched his mouth, tracking the movement of his lips as he answered questions, observing the slight, chapped texture of the skin. He looked exhausted. He looked far older than fifteen. He looked like someone carrying a burden he had never asked for, yet refusing to set it down.
Somewhere in the periphery of her vision, an argument broke out.
"Heliopaths are spirits of fire!" Luna Lovegood's dreamy voice carried across the room. "Great tall flaming creatures that gallop across the ground burning everything in front of them."
"They don’t exist, Luna," Hermione said tartly, her patience clearly wearing thin.
"Oh, yes, they do," Luna replied calmly, entirely unfazed by Hermione's tone.
"I’m sorry, but where’s the proof of that?" Hermione snapped.
Luna's soft tone transformed into something rather aggressive and unlike her, "There are plenty of eye-witness accounts. Just because you’re so narrow-minded you need to have everything shoved under your nose before you-"
Liesel allowed her gaze to drift briefly from Harry. She watched Ginny. The Gryffindor girl was looking at Luna. The annoyance that usually characterized Ginny's interactions with those outside her circle was entirely absent. Instead, there was a profound, quiet fondness in her brown eyes, an affection that softened the sharp lines around the tape on her nose. A smirk played on her lip in a way she had seen in the girls in her house; the biting of the inside of her cheek and licking of lips.
Liesel noticed a movement near the edge of the group. Michael Corner, a Ravenclaw boy who was currently dating Ginny, was watching the exchange. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, his jaw clenching. He looked at Ginny, then at Luna, and a distinct flicker of unease crossed his features. It was a minuscule, passing moment of insecurity, a silent observation that Liesel cataloged and filed away before returning her attention to where it truly belonged.
Hem, hem.
Cho Chang had stepped forward, offering a startlingly accurate imitation of Professor Umbridge’s high, girlish cough. Several people jumped in alarm, looking toward the door, before a ripple of laughter moved through the group.
"Weren’t we trying to decide how often we’re going to meet and have defense lessons?" Cho asked, a smirk playing on her lips.
"Right, well, we’ll try to find somewhere," Hermione was saying, taking control of the meeting once more. "We’ll send a message round to everybody when we’ve got a time and a place for the first meeting."
Hermione reached into her beaded bag and rummaged for a moment. She produced a long roll of parchment and a quill, hesitating briefly before placing them on the table nearest to her.
"I think everybody should write their name down, just so we know who was here," Hermione said, her voice turning serious. "But I also think that we all ought to agree not to shout about what we’re doing. So if you sign, you’re agreeing not to tell Umbridge or anybody else what we’re up to."
A silence descended on the pub once again. The prospect of rebellion was thrilling in theory; putting one's name on a piece of parchment that could easily become evidence was an entirely different matter.
People shifted nervously. Glances were exchanged. No one made a move toward the table.
"Er…" Ernie Macmillan began, looking highly distressed. "I- …well, we are prefects. And if this list was found… well, I mean to say… you said yourself, if Umbridge finds out-"
"You just said this group was the important thing you’d do this year," Harry reminded him, his tone flat.
"I- …yes," Ernie stammered. "Yes, I do believe that, it’s just…"
Liesel pushed away from the wall.
The quiet creak of the floorboards drew every eye in the room back to her. She did not look at Ernie. She did not look at Hermione. She kept her eyes fixed on the parchment resting on the table.
She walked with an unhurried march, deliberately crossing the room until she stood directly in front of the table. She reached out, her long bandaged fingers wrapping around the feathered quill. She dipped the nib into the inkwell beside it, ensuring the ink saturated the point perfectly.
She leaned over the table.
With smooth, elegant strokes, she wrote her name at the very top of the list.
ℒ𝒾ℯ𝓈ℯ𝓁 𝒪𝓁𝓁𝒾𝓋𝒶𝓃𝒹ℯ𝓇
The script was precise, the ink a stark, undeniable black against the pale parchment. It was a commitment. It was a statement. It was a line drawn in the sand, separating her from the house she slept in and aligning her with the boy who had called her out of the dark.
Liesel placed the quill back on the table.
When she straightened up, she found herself standing very close to Harry.
The noise of the pub seemed to vanish entirely. She looked up into his face. He was staring at her, his lips parted slightly in surprise. She searched his eyes, finding the familiar, bright green, tracing the faint golden flecks near the pupil. She looked at his lips again, noting the way his breath hitched imperceptibly in his chest. She saw the rise and fall of his collarbone beneath the frayed edge of his jumper.
It was an excruciatingly intimate moment, stretched out in the span of three seconds. They did not speak. They did not need to. The silent exchange held more weight than an hour of conversation.
Liesel broke the gaze first. She turned, her braid, still dark with the wet of the sleet sweeping over her shoulder, and walked toward the door. She pulled it open, the hinges screaming once more, and stepped out into the freezing sleet without looking back.
The pub emptied quickly after that. Seeing the Slytherin girl sign her name without hesitation had effectively shamed the rest of the group into action. One by one, they stepped forward, scratched their names onto the parchment, and hurried out the door, eager to escape the dingy atmosphere and the weight of what they had just committed to.
Soon, only Harry, Ron, and Hermione remained.
Hermione carefully rolled up the parchment, ensuring the ink was entirely dry before slipping it back into her beaded bag. She let out a long, slow breath, a mixture of relief and exhaustion.
"Well," Ron said, scrubbing a hand over his face. "That went better than I thought it would. A bit mental, but better."
"We have a lot of work to do," Hermione murmured, though she sounded pleased. She turned to Harry, her expression shifting into one of careful, analytical observation.
Harry was still staring at the door, his mind entirely occupied by the girl who had just walked through it. Hermione slightly smirked.
"Ron," Hermione said softly.
Ron turned to look at her. "Yeah?"
Hermione tilted her head, studying him with a gaze that felt slightly too perceptive. "Did you notice?"
"Notice what?"
"Liesel," Hermione stated, the name spoken with a mixture of curiosity and lingering unease.
"Oh yeah," Ron chuckled, "Doubt Harry, did though."
Harry blinked, turning to his two best friends, "What?"
"The entire time we were talking about logistics, and the meetings, and the Ministry… she didn't look away from you once. Not even for a second."
Harry felt a strange, complicated knot tighten in his chest. He didn't know how to explain the way Liesel looked at him. He didn't know how to articulate the feeling of being entirely seen, of being focused on with a precision that felt both unnerving and profoundly grounding.
"She was just paying attention," Harry muttered, shoving his hands back into his pockets.
Ron let out a short, incredulous scoff. "Mate, she wasn't paying attention to the meeting. She was paying attention to you. It was a bit intense, honestly. I thought she was trying to read your mind or something."
"She isn't like that," Harry said quickly, defending her instinctively. "She's just… observant. She notices things."
Hermione exchanged a brief, meaningful look with Ron before turning back to Harry.
"I'm not saying it's a bad thing, Harry," Hermione reasoned, her voice gentle but firm. "I'm just saying… she's gotten herself into a strange position. The way she reacted to Zacharias Smith… And then you said her name, and she just… stopped. And the way things… change… around her."
Harry remembered the feeling perfectly. He remembered the unnatural cold, the stretching shadows, the creeping sense of dread that had suddenly filled the room when she stepped forward toward the Hufflepuff. And he remembered the way she had looked at him when he called her back, the sheer vulnerability in her dark eyes.
"She has reasons to be angry," Harry said quietly, his gaze drifting back toward the door, toward the sleet and the cold village beyond. "She lost Cedric, too. And nobody ever talks about that."
Hermione softened slightly, recognizing the truth in his words. "I know. I just worry about her. And I worry about you."
"Don't," Harry replied, his voice firmer now. He thought of the elegant, precise signature at the top of the parchment. He thought of the way her eyes had searched his face, finding exactly what she was looking for. "She signed the paper. She's with us. That's all that matters."
Ron clapped Harry on the shoulder, breaking the tension. "Right, then. Let's get back before we freeze to death. I reckon I've had enough secret society business for one day."
They turned toward the door, pulling their cloaks tight against the impending cold. Harry stepped out into the street last, pulling the door shut behind him. The screech of the rusted hinges echoed in the empty alleyway, a final, harsh note marking the beginning of something new, something dangerous, and something entirely inevitable.
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧
1 Year Earlier - After the Dueling Finale.
The blinding flashes of the Daily Prophet cameras were still dancing in Liesel’s vision following her dueling win, creating purple and gold spots that made the shifting crowd look like a kaleidoscope of house colors. She had been passed from hand to hand, congratulated by a beaming Professor Flitwick, stoically acknowledged by Snape, and swarmed by a gaggle of younger Slytherins who looked at her as if she were a conquering queen. The heavy silver trophy was clutched in her hand, the metal now warm from the humidity of the Great Hall and the frantic heat of her own palms.
She was attempting to navigate a path toward the barricades to find Harry once again when a familiar, sturdy presence intersected her path. Cedric Diggory, still looking remarkably handsome despite the singe marks on his Hufflepuff tracksuit, caught her elbow with a gentle, grounding pressure.
"Ollivander," he called out over the din of the celebration. He leaned in closer, his voice low enough to create a small, private pocket of space amidst the roar. "A word on that last combination? I think you’ve just rewritten the standard defensive theory for sixth-year Charms, and I’d hate to be the only one who doesn't understand how I ended up on my back."
He gestured toward a slightly quieter corner near the oak doors in the back, subtly shielding her from a trailing photographer who was trying to get a shot of the winning trophy. Liesel allowed him to lead her away, her heart still hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs.
"It was a pivot," she explained, her voice a bit breathless as they came to a stop in the shadow of a stone gargoyle. She shifted the trophy to her other arm. "I used the kinetic recoil from the Protego impact to bank my weight. Most people wait for the shield to drop before they fire the second volley, but if you time the Expelliarmus to hit the resonance of the shield itself…"
"It shatters the concentration before the physical barrier even fails," Cedric finished for her, a look of genuine, academic admiration in his eyes. He shook his head, a stray lock of fair hair falling over his forehead. "Masterful. Truly. Your wand work is… it’s different, Liesel. It’s more precise than what they teach us. It’s like you’re listening to the core. Wampus hair, right?"
Liesel nodded and felt a flush creep up her neck that had nothing to do with the physical exertion of the duel. "It’s the family business, Cedric. You don’t grow up around thousands of wands without learning that they have a rhythm of their own."
Cedric smiled, but the expression shifted into something slightly more hesitant, a rare flicker of nerves crossing his usually unflappable features. He took a half-step closer, his shoulder nearly brushing hers. "Listen, I actually wanted to ask you something. I was going to do it yesterday when we passed each other in the Owlery, but I figured if I asked you then, you’d think I was just trying to get into your head."
Liesel’s brow furrowed. "Ask me what?"
"The Yule Ball," Cedric said, the words coming out steady but with a distinct weight to them. "I’d very much like it if you’d go with me."
The world seemed to tilt on its axis for a second. Liesel, who could calculate complex arithmancy in her head and disarm a champion in a matter of seconds, felt her brain go entirely blank. Suddenly, she was agonizingly aware of her own state. The absolute perfection she cultivated so carefully had been stripped away by thirty minutes of magical combat.
She could feel the fine sheen of sweat glistening on her forehead and the way her mousy brown hair was escaping its messy braid in frantic, frizzy wisps. She suddenly became awfully aware that was a sharp, stinging scratch along her jawline where one of Cedric’s stray sparks had grazed her, and her dueling outfit was dusted with the pulverized remains of the catwalk. She instinctively brought her free hand up to her face, her fingers brushing the scratch on her jaw before frantically trying to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. For the first time all evening, the unflappable Liesel Ollivander looked completely flustered.
"Cedric," Liesel started, her voice faltering slightly. She let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-disbelief. "I look like I’ve just been dragged through a hedge backward. I am fairly certain I saw a Beauxbatons girl literally faint when you won the first round tonight. Half the castle is currently plotting how to get you to ask them. Why on earth are you asking me?"
Cedric threw his head back and laughed, a rich, genuine sound that made the corners of his hazel, seemingly sun-lit eyes crinkle. He didn't seem to care at all about the sweat, the frizzy braid, or the dirt. In fact, looking down at her, he seemed entirely captivated by it.
"Well," Cedric said, his smile softening as he leaned a shoulder against the stone wall. "They want a winner. And as you so brilliantly demonstrated in rounds two and three, I didn’t win tonight." He reached out, his fingers lightly, almost hesitantly, brushing a speck of catwalk sawdust from the shoulder of her leather-stitched uniform. The touch sent a warm shock straight through her collarbone.
"Besides," Cedric murmured, his voice dropping into a register that made her heart skip an entirely different kind of beat. "So do I. I want a winner."
Liesel stared at him. The sheer, unabashed charm of the Hufflepuff Seeker was notoriously lethal, but having it directed entirely at her was a different experience altogether. She forced her chin up, a familiar, aristocratic smirk finally breaking through her nerves.
"You realize it is a terrible strategic move for a Triwizard Champion to take me to the ball," Liesel warned, her eyes flashing with returning confidence. "I am absolutely going to upstage you, Diggory."
Cedric’s smile widened into a full, devastating grin. "I’d be deeply disappointed if you didn't. Though, if you want to coordinate, I think you should wear something dark. Perhaps maroon. It matches your… competitive streak."
"Are you trying to dress me now?" she teased, arching an eyebrow.
"Just a suggestion," Cedric countered smoothly, taking a reluctant step back into the flow of the passing crowd, but keeping his eyes locked on hers. "So? Is that a yes, Ollivander?"
Liesel looked at him, the heavy silver trophy in her arm suddenly feeling a lot lighter. The Stepford perfection didn't matter. The messy braid didn't matter.
"Yes," Liesel said, her smile genuine and bright. "It's a yes."
Cedric’s expression shifted into something incredibly relieved, the tension in his broad shoulders melting away entirely. "Brilliant," he breathed out, before his easy confidence slid right back into place. "Though, I do have a secondary motive."
Liesel shifted her weight, resting the trophy against her hip. "Oh? Do tell."
"Well, considering the way you moved on that catwalk tonight," Cedric said, his eyes dropping to her boots before tracking back up to meet her gaze, "I'm assuming that someone with footwork that precise must know how to dance."
Liesel let out a soft huff of amusement, her chin tilting up proudly. "I was raised attending boring high-society galas with my grandfather, Cedric. Of course I know how to dance. The waltz, the foxtrot, traditional wizarding sweeps… I know all of them."
Cedric let out a dramatic, exaggerated sigh of relief, stepping just a fraction closer. "Good," he confessed, a self-deprecating grin breaking across his face. "Because I am a bloody awful dancer. Two left feet. It's a genuine hazard. You can teach me."
Liesel let out a bright, unrestrained laugh, the sound catching the attention of a few passing Ravenclaws who stared in surprise as they saw the camaraderie between the two. "The great Cedric Diggory, terrified of a waltz? …Alright. I suppose I can manage a few remedial lessons to ensure you don't embarrass me in front of the entire school."
"I appreciate your sacrifice," Cedric said solemnly, though his eyes were dancing with mischief. "In fact, I think we should start our lessons tonight."
Liesel’s eyebrows shot up. She glanced over her shoulder at the massive, enchanted grandfather clock near the Great Hall doors. The hands were already creeping dangerously close to the top of the hour. "Tonight? Cedric, there’s hardly any time left before curfew. By the time I put this trophy away and wash the explosion residue out of my hair, Filch will be prowling the corridors."
Cedric smirked, a surprisingly roguish expression that looked entirely out of place on the golden boy, but suited him perfectly. He leaned in, dipping his head until his mouth was just inches from her ear. The warm breath of his whisper sent a sudden, electric shiver straight down her spine.
"I know a spot," Cedric murmured softly. "Meet me in the Transfiguration courtyard at midnight."
He pulled back just far enough to catch her eye, giving her a slow, lingering wink. Before Liesel could even formulate a response, he turned and slipped seamlessly back into the loud, churning crowd of celebrating students, leaving her standing in the shadow of the gargoyle with a pounding heart, a battered dueling outfit, and a heavy silver trophy she had entirely forgotten she was holding.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Out of all the things Kiyotaka hates, drugs are nearly at the top of his list. (Geniuses and his grandfather fight for the number one spot) He’s seen the videos in class, of hazy-eyed boys slumped in bathroom stalls, mouths drooling spit with skinny bodies shuddering on the verge of hell. He’s only ever caught one person before, and his vision went so red with fury that he almost slapped Kuwata in the face for trying ecstasy in the school bathroom once. He marched up to the principal's office with a hand dragging Kuwata by the ear, teary-eyed with something far more intense than hatred brooding in his gut. But this somehow, instead of making him shake with rage, twists his throat with misery. He could excuse alcohol (barely), tattoos (hardly), and gangs (how did this friendship even happen in the first place?), but drugs would always come from the Devil. It was the easiest way to betray the life your parents blessed you with, and the fastest way to throw it away. It was not only dishonorable, but idiotic.
Or transactional make-out sesh’s for tutoring turn into one thing or another; Mondo’s shitty apartment is the embodiment of grief and Kiyotaka can’t acknowledge why he's so scared of sex
