"P-Please, Corwin," the brunette looked up at the boy as her eyes started to water. She didn't know when he had gotten so many secrets, but she could see the way his shoulders sagged with their heavy weight. Hestia wanted so badly to help him, to carry that weight with him and this wasn't the first time she had begged him to let her in. Since the very beginning of their relationship, even in the middle of their friendship, she could always tell that there was something that he was withholding from her.
In the beginning, she was too afraid to say anything, to confront him even in the slightest about what he might be hiding from her, since part of her was convinced that the thing he was hiding from her was the fact that their friendship could have been based on a dare or a prank; their very first interaction had gone so smoothly, and he was so much kinder than she ever thought was possible of a Slytherin, that it made sense to her that she was suspicious.
All thoughts like that, though, had been banished the longer the friendship went on and slowly, ever so slowly, her walls started to come down. She knew that she was in love with him the moment their lips touched for the first time at that Christmas ball, but it would be almost a full year before she would dare to say anything about it, but when they finally came together as she always thought they should have, she knew it had all been worth it.
Now, as she sat on her heels between Corwin's knees, she didn't know if it was worth it anymore. She loved him so much, that hadn't changed, and it never would, but even with all they had shared with each other, he was more of a stranger to her now than when they'd first met.
"C-Corwin!" A sharp exhale passed through her lips and she could feel the tears that had been welling up start to spill over and she wiped angrily at them. "I-I need you to l-let me in, p-please, j-just tell me what's going on," she pleaded. His continued silence was like a knife in her chest and she knew... she knew that she was about to lose him. The only person she had ever loved, that had ever loved her - the only person she had allowed herself to be completely open with - and she was going to lose him.
Though it wasn't physical, she could feel him pushing her further and further away and she tucked her chin down until it touched her chest. It was getting hard to breathe and as she gasped a little, she missed the way his fingers twitched towards her, the only sign he gave that he cared at all at this point. She pushed herself up quickly, her hands bracing against the carpet to propel her up and out of the room - she couldn't stay.
The sunlight betrayed everything that she was feeling inside. It didn’t care one bit that the tears in her eyes weren’t from blinking from the brightness too much. It paid no attention the slow beating of her heart and the way that she picked at the skin surrounding her nails. The paint was chipped and the slight burn of her cuticles were only the result of her picking at them constantly since the--. Her mind returned to the ceremony occurring before her. There was a sea of black clothed people but Tasha felt a bitterness in knowing that really only a handful knew the actual cause of the fire.
The burns on her upper arm and wrist were numb as they had been since she received it. Her doctor had told her that the adrenaline would have worn off but even after all this time they still hadn’t hurt her. One last parting gift from that wizard—though she was sure he hadn’t intended for it to happen. Tasha had tripped as she was running down the stairs and fell into an already burning couch. Everyone assumed that her lack of speaking had been a result of being in the house during the fire but really she had nothing to say. The girl took advantage of the buffer from having to talk to anyone.
In public she was silent and calm, her put together nature deceiving everyone that she was doing as best she could. Yet, when she was allowed to be alone she’d sneak off to somewhere private or abandoned nearby and let go. It was why she was grateful to be wearing pants that covered up the large bruise that was forming from a chunk of drywall flying into her. That had been a particularly tiring session alone. Tasha was certain that if her sister was there she’d have known what she was up to. But the silence after her rash emotional magic reminded her that there was no one left to care for her.
No one she had left knew Natasha completely and the ones that knew her even remotely as well as her family were far away getting ready for another year at Salem. Her aunt had tried to get her to invite a couple of them but the student wanted no one to know. She knew what she was feeling and knew that she wanted no one to see it.
Instead she sat silently with three empty chairs beside her, their lack of color matching with everyone in black. Each chair had a single pink rose which was stark contrast to the bland environment. Natasha had wanted no part in the decision making, having already decided herself that planning the funeral services was more than she could handle. Even standing outside the funeral home had been too much for her and she ended up walking to the nearest coffee shop to waste her time.
Now, sitting in front of three caskets, Tasha felt the weight of everything on her. It pressed against her chest, forcing her to focus on breathing as normal as possible. Her aunt tried once to hold her hand but she kept hers tightly against her lap and shook her head, all while not turning her gaze from the pastor. The chair beneath felt like the only thing keeping her grounded and at some points through the annoyingly long service, Tasha’s hands gripped the edges tightly. As the pastor gestured to the empty seats once more Natasha along with everyone else stared at the spaces left open for her family. She stared, brow slightly furrowed, and felt everything inside her want to burst forth. Yet she held it in.
It wasn’t until after she had spent hours around everyone who had attended the funeral that she finally was alone. The amount of control it had taken for her to not shed even one tear, to avoid from showing everyone in the banquet hall how she was feeling, it boiled and festered inside her. So much so that when she managed to make it up to the room she was staying at she fell against the door and slid down to the ground.
The silence that filled the room was heavy and it caused her breathing to speed up in only a short few moments. The room around her faded away and as she sat curled into herself shaking, Natasha let herself go. All the anger, sadness, pain—all the words seemed to not fit the intensity that she felt—dripped out in tears. They were salty and her voice was scratching against her throat as the sobs filled the room. Her hand went up to cover her mouth, a small part of her mind wanting to avoid attracting attention. As her fingers cupped her lips her hand jerked back and with tears falling from her eyes, she finally felt the pain of her burns in her arm. She wondered if they would heal or if the pain they caused was permanent. She wasn’t able to heal them herself and because the non-magical government had gotten involved, it would be far too suspicious that they suddenly disappeared.
Her fingers ran along the bandages on her wrist and a dark part of her mind told her she deserved this pain. She survived and no one else did. The burns were the least that she could feel. Her family burned alive and Tasha wished more than anything that she could have burned with them.
Cracking Smile, Split Lip || Ted Self Para || Task One
Ted had gotten used to the odd sideways remark, the shoulder checks, and the gaggle of Slytherin girls smirking and whispering loudly behind their hands. It was part of his life, an unpleasant part to be sure, but it was the way things were. He might very well be dealing with the same thing in the muggle world for his skinny arms and flyaway hair, or so he told himself.
He had complained about the bullying once when he was eleven, after a mean spirited third year had made a cauldron of stinging solution dump over his head, and Slughorn had merely offered him an uncomfortable smile and the words Hmph, well uh, there's little I can do without making you even more of a target, Tonks. Unfortunately this is the way of things for muggleborns, it doesn't make it right, but it's the truth. I suggest you grit your teeth and solider through, hm?
So he had.
He hadn't been lying when he told Andy that he wasn't ashamed to be muggleborn, hadn't made an attempt to hide it, even with the trouble brewing. He saw others doing that exact same thing, or quietly leaving Hogwarts. He was frequently scared, even more frequently angry, but he pushed it down and hid it behind a smile, neither emotions would help the situation, and what could he do? When he left school, there would be options, but for now there was no choice but to endure and to swallow down each insult with a smile and a shrug.
Maybe that was why he was targeted, maybe he had, without realizing it, brought this all down on his own head, for not hiding. Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut, kept to the shadows, should have denied his heritage and his blood. But Ted had never been that kind of person- he was the archetype Hufflepuff, loyal and honest to the end. He loved his family dearly, to deny them would be like denying part of himself. He wasn't stupid enough to reveal where his parents and Tommy lived, had never let anyone visit the house, and he was confident that if he was tortured... he could keep them safe. He would die before he talked.
(How ruined was this world when that was how he measured his worth as a man? Weather or not he could die with their names on his mind but never, never on his lips?)
-
It started innocently enough, or as innocently as these things ever start. He received a Howler at breakfast, and as everyone started to whoot and giggle, ready for a show, Ted just stared in confusion. He was muggleborn, who would be sending him a Howler? The instant that he started to suspect something hateful, was the instant that the red envelop exploded into a high pitched voice shrieking "MUDBLOOD." in a ceiling rattling voice. All of the giggling stopped, every last voice in the hall went silent, and Ted was just left staring at smoldering remains of red paper.
He could feel a hot flush spreading across his face but he made a big show of smiling, rolling his eyes and shrugging it off. He didn't eat a bite of breakfast as he earnestly placated those who had come to make sure he was alright, but his stomach had soured anyway. "It's just a word." He told them repeatedly, though small sense of foreboding that told him that it would be far worse by the time all was said and done.
-
A week later, he picked up his Charms book to find that every last word had been replaced with the same sentence, over and over; Go back where you came from mudblood. He sat through the entire class frozen, too proud to ask Professor Flitwick for a new copy of his charms book. He told himself that he didn't want to give his bullies the satisfaction, but honestly he just didn't want them to see how pale his face was- how had they gotten a hold of his book? He begged off early from class claiming illness, throwing his book in the bin on his way out.
-
A month went by before the next incident, and Ted had allowed himself to relax. Two incidents might only be a coincidence, maybe his non reaction was enough to make them lose interest. It was at breakfast again, and he was reading a book on the founders of Hogwarts, squinting slightly at the microscopic text. It was an interesting subject matter to be sure, and he was eating his hot cereal idly, not taking his eyes off a particularly interesting paragraph about the early life of Ravenclaw.
He paid no heed to a muttered spell of a passerby- he was at a wizarding school, hearing spells thrown around was hardly new. The only attention he paid to it was that it wasn't a spell he knew, and he idly wondered what it did. Maybe it was one of those spells witches used for their appearance. He scooped up another spoonful of his oatmeal without looking, not noticing until it was in his mouth that the contents of his bowl had changed.
Ted jerked away from his reading as whatever was in his spoon started wiggling against his tongue and the inside of his teeth, the sweet brown sugar taste of his oatmeal replaced with something foul and rotten. Looking down at his bowl he let out a strangled shout, spitting out what was in his mouth across the table and staggering to his feet, retching loudly and upsetting the bench he'd been sitting at. He put the sleeve of his robes over his nose and mouth and ran for the doors of the Great Hall, barely making it around the corner before he started heaving the contents of his stomach onto the stone floor.
Whoever had passed him had made his oatmeal molding and green, and when he had looked down at the bowl he had seen small white maggots and thick black spiders swarming through holes in the gelatinous mass. Whatever had moved inside of his mouth-. He forced his brain to stop as his retching only intensified. He felt like bugs were crawling all over his skin, and he ended up skipping his first class of the day so he could bathe and brush his teeth more than once, though he wouldn't feel completely clean for a week, and he wouldn't be able to eat anything in the Great Hall for days.
-
After that, Ted didn't let his guard down. On the surface, he was the same Ted. He laughed with his friends, he joked, sometimes in the Hufflepuff common rooms he actually put everything from his mind for a moment or two, but eventually he would come back to it. He had nightmares about Thomas screaming under the cruciatus curse, about spiders pouring out of his parents' rotting bodies, and maggots wiggling under his own skin. His nails were chewed down to bloody nubs, the bags under his eyes were dark as bruises, and in the halls he walked with his hand on his wand. He hated it, it felt like losing. He had let his tormentors change him and steal his sleep.
A small voice screamed that he should tell the teachers, tell Dumbledore, tell anyone, but he remembered what had happened the first time he had tried to tell a teacher about the bullying. He didn't want anyone to think that he was a complainer, or that he couldn't handle himself. He was a Prefect, he had to be strong for the students that looked to him for an example, and he didn't want to show his abusers that anything they did bothered him. He kept an easy, carefree smile on his face, and hoped that it looked real enough to fool friends and enemies alike.
-
When his cat went missing, Ted immediately expected the worst, and so he wasn't surprised when Ringo limped into the Hufflepuff Common Room three days later missing a front leg, shivering, starving, and terrified. In fact, he had just been grateful that the cat had returned at all, in the three days he'd been looking, he hadn't always expected that would be the case. Miri had fixed his missing paw, broken tail, and other minor injuries quickly enough, but the scars of that wouldn't fade easily, on the cat and on Ted, who had rescued the old tom from a shelter when he was a kitten, and hadn't since gone a night without Ringo's purr lulling him off to sleep.
-
It was very telling, that it was that that finally made Ted decide that he would go to Dumbledore. Nothing that was done to him was worthy of the Headmaster's attention, but they had messed with a living creature he loved, and that was where he drew the line. After almost a week of debating, he left the common room and made his way towards the headmaster's office.
The anger and horror he had felt were making themselves known again, and he felt like he had after Miri had finally told him what state she'd found his cat in. He felt like a hurricane- angry, powerful, ready to rage and roar. He was going to march up to Dumbledore's office, tell him what had been happening since the school year started and then politely but firmly demand a change. Who knew who else was going through bullying like this? It was part of the teachers' jobs to fix things like this, magical school or not.
As he was heading up a particularly narrow and twisted staircase, a class full of students seemed to be heading down. Normally, Ted would stand to the side and wait for everyone to pass before he started up again as opposed to going up jostling and pushing by everyone, but not today. Today he wasn't being polite, wasn't offering anyone a smile, or a kind greeting. He was exhausted, anxious, angrier than he had ever remembered being, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. He was through with putting out love and peace and getting nothing but malice in return, for something he had no control over.
"Excuse me." He said tersely as he encountered the throng almost three quarters of the way up the stairs, keeping to the right side of the staircase and motioning that others had better do the same. They could all keep to their side of the staircase like he was and let him squeeze by, he was in a hurry.
"Where are you heading Tonks?" an older boy jeered as he caught sight of him. "Still looking for your cat?"
Ted's eyes narrowed, and for a moment, the normally peaceful Hufflepuff wanted nothing more than to pull out his wand and-. But that wasn't him, and it wouldn't help the situation. However, when he spoke it was in something close to a growl. "No, going to speak to the headmaster about the condition I found him in actually, and now I have a prime suspect. Goyle isn't it? Ultimate, thank you."
Suddenly, a hand, not Goyle's- he was too far away, closed over the back of his robe and tugged. He windmilled his arms but did nothing more than hit several students and cut his fingers on the rough stone wall. He went falling down the stairs backwards, his head and back colliding with the stone steps painfully before he went tumbling over and over again, slamming into the stairs and the wall over and over again with the sound of cruel laughter ringing in his ears.
He must have been helped along with magic, because even though he was sure that he didn't have enough momentum, he made it all the way to the bottom of the narrow staircase and skidded along the floor, the air knocked clean out of his lungs and every square inch of his body aching. He wasn't aware he had lost his bag on the way down until someone he couldn't see threw it at his face, the heavy spellbooks inside making something in his nose snap painfully. Blood started to pour from his nose and Ted couldn't tell what was making his face more wet- it, the ink that was seeping through his bag, or the frustrated tears that were starting to sting at his eyes.
He pulled the bag off his face slowly, sitting up and becoming aware that, insane as it seemed, his body actually hurt more when he wasn't laying on the floor. Standing and walking suddenly seemed like daunting tasks, and Ted hardly noticed the last of the class trickling by him, or whatever thickheaded threat Goyle growled at him as he passed. He got the gist of it- stand and fight and it would only make it worse.
If sitting hurt, standing was agony, and starting his slow shuffle back towards the Hufflpuff common room was pain he didn't know how to deal with, except for to grit his teeth and just keep walking through it. The human body could put up with amazing levels of pain, it's a sort of magic all it's own, he coached himself down the stairs to the kitchens, every new step a new level of misery. Tomorrow it will hurt less, and less the day after that, until this pain is just a memory, and I can hardly remember he feeling of bruises forming, or the feeling of blood on my face.
Someday, I'll fight. After I leave Hogwarts, I'm joining the resistance I'm hearing whispers about- I'll ask Dumbledore. Fighting schoolyard bullies is inane, it'll only make everything worse, but fighting tyrants and bigots- that's the cause I'll dedicate myself too. So Ted told himself, ignoring a part of him that whispered that schoolyard bullies were just tyrants and bigots testing their muscles, and for whatever fine promises he made to himself, he was giving up.
Ted wouldn't fight for himself, but he told himself that he'd fight for future generations of muggleborns, and the people he'd be fighting with. He'd fight for his family, and the children he'd have someday.
The thought was strong enough to get him down the staircase, to duck into a restroom and cast a charm to clean the blood, ink, and tears off his face, and magic away the appearance of cuts and bruises. He'd never been good at healing charms, and the thought of someone seeing him banged up like this made him cringe. There was nothing severe enough that wouldn't heal naturally, on it's own, or so he told himself.
He practiced a smile in the mirror, and limped towards the door. It was still unbelievable pain, but he would endure. It would all be alright, wouldn't it?
