Calista slept for hours. After ten hours, he checked on her to make sure she was still all right, that she hadn't had an adverse reaction to the potion. She was still sleeping peacefully; he eased out of the room, closing the door most of the way behind him.
Finally, after a full eighteen hours, he heard her stirring. It was nearly lunchtime; he had given her the potion mid-evening the night before. When he heard rustling coming from her bedroom, he went to the kitchen and brewed some coffee.
By the time Calista appeared in the doorway, he was sitting at the table, two mugs ready, waiting for her. She looked at him for a moment before crossing the room to sit across from him at the table.
Her mouth opened slightly, and for a second he wondered if she was going to say something to him at last, but then she gave a wide yawn, and rubbed her eyes with tiny, balled fists. Apparently, she had not completely shaken off the effects of the potion.
"Did you sleep better?" he asked, looking into his mug to keep from startling her. He didn't think he'd ever get used to speaking to someone who would not answer back.
She looked up, sleep still clouding her eyes, and nodded up and down.
Her eyelids were still half-closed, and she drained half her coffee mug in one sip. Severus was once again struck by the thought that it probably wasn't very healthy to have a six-year-old downing coffee, but he wasn't ready to pick that fight just yet; they had bigger problems.
"Good," he said finally, "I'm glad that it helped."
He knew his voice sounded strained, but he was in uncharted territory. He couldn't be himself with the child, because he was still trying to get her to open up, to trust him. It was unnatural for him to walk on eggshells in conversation, but if he spoke to her like she was one of his students… he didn't know if she could separate dripping sarcasm from plain dislike, so for now, he would be careful.
Giving Calista a drop of Night Blossom Draught at night became as much of a routine as their morning coffee, and Severus knew that he would eventually have to wean her off the potion, and that it wouldn't be easy, but for now he was just glad that she was sleeping.
Already, she looked healthier, her eyes not so shadowed, and she had more energy. She still wouldn't communicate beyond nodding yes or no, but she had all but ceased to leave the room when he entered it, and if he asked her a direct yes or no question, there was about a fifty-fifty chance of her responding.
Soon, the school year really began to pick up, and with it, his workload. When winter was just beginning to thaw, the OWL and NEWT students demanded more of his time, and he often only saw Calista twice a day for any length of time, when they had their coffee and at dinnertime. He was in the habit of checking in on her between classes, but that hardly counted as spending time with her, especially since she never said a word.
Strangely enough, the less he was around, the more time Calista spent in the same room as him. She began to linger after dinner, sometimes following him silently to his office, where she sat in the spare chair while he graded papers.
She was always so quiet that he sometimes forgot she was there, and he'd be surprised to look up hours later, and see Calista's dark eyes watching his quill move across the lines of another student essay.
One night, after setting the last of the graded papers aside, he looked at Calista, who looked as though she was about to fall asleep in her chair. It was well past midnight, and the little girl had been awake since dawn. He should give her a drop of the potion and send her to bed… and yet…
"Calista? Would you like me to read to you from that book before bed?"
He'd never had any luck with this before, but she'd just willingly spent hours in the same room with him; perhaps there was a chance, this time.
There was a moment where he thought she might leave, but then she nodded her head, tentatively, up and down. Yes.
He retrieved the book from his study, sat back at his desk, and began to read. It was much like before; she kept her eyes down, although he could see that her ears were perked, so she was listening.
And then, when he reached one particular passage, suddenly she was eyeing him intently, visibly attentive to what he was saying. He tried not to let on that he had noticed, as he read:
"There have been several recorded examples over the centuries of Squibs and non-magical persons related to a witch or wizard performing feats in this branch of magic. Of course, successfully brewing a potion requires extensive knowledge of the magical ingredients used, but if a well-schooled person of non-magical blood finds the right ingredients, it is not impossible for them to follow a recipe and create an effective potion. Most recorded examples of this are concerned with simple potions, such as a draught able to cure boils or irritate the skin, but precious few have achieved success with moderately complicated potions. Most of these were marketed in the sixteenth through nineteenth century as 'Miracle Elixirs', sold at high costs to Muggles with no knowledge of the wizarding world. Such potions often claimed to restore hearing to a deaf person, or return mobility to a handicapped person, but the vast majority of these Elixirs were merely All-purpose vigor-inducing potions, that would occasionally increase auditory or muscular function, but the effects of these potions seldom lasted more than six hours. Purveyors of these rudimentary potions were ironically referred to as "witch doctors". Thus, it is the field of potion making that has the distinction of being the only branch of magic that does not necessarily require wizarding blood to perform."
He could see her fighting back a yawn. Her jaw clenched with the effort of hiding it, but it prompted him to check the time. It was well after midnight, now. Time for both of them to go to sleep. He closed the book, set it down on his desk, and rose, reaching for a little bottle on one of his shelves. A week ago, he had mixed a very mild Drowsiness Draught with just a small amount of the Night Blossom Draught added to it. It was definitely a much safer option long-term, but he still wanted her to be able to sleep without it.
(¯ˆ·.¸¸.·ˆ¯)
The next day, while on a two-hour recess between classes, Severus retreated to his workroom to experiment with variations on a Catseye Concoction, something he'd been working on with his sixth-years. The potion, named for its key ingredient, would turn the drinker into a cat for a few hours, and he was curious as to whether the potion could be adapted to affect other transformations.
So far, he had no luck using a bat's eye or a newt's eye, but he was interested to see what would happen with a rat's eye. As he worked, he faintly heard small feet coming down the stairs; evidently, he had not locked the door behind him. Still, perhaps it was for the best. While her wouldn't have wanted her wandering down here on her own, he was actually pleased that she had decided to come down; could it be that she actually wanted to spend time with him?
He decided to keep working, and pretend he hadn't noticed. Within moments, he had acquired a small, dark-haired shadow at his side, and she watched him stir the contents of the cauldron.
He listed each of the ingredients aloud as he added them, for her benefit. She was silent, as always, but he could feel the rapt attention of her gaze on him while he worked; why had he never thought of this before?
He was nearly through with the potion when he realised he'd left one of the ingredients he needed in his office. He should have a larger jar of it down here somewhere; he scanned the shelf behind his worktop to see if there were any there. "Terag leaves," he mused, "Six months wilted"
There was a jar of fresh ones to his left, which was what the potion actually called for, but he'd found that by allowing the leaves to wilt in an airtight jar actually made the potion more stable, and able to be bottled longer before being used, so that was his habit now. He usually had some aging down here, at the bench and in the little storeroom.
As he looked through all of the jars that were within reach, still stirring the cauldron with his other hand, he sensed that Calista had wandered away. He glanced back to see where she was, afraid she would find something dangerous down here.
She was in the storeroom, perusing the jars. He was just about to call out to her when she picked one off the shelf, and headed back towards him. She stepped right next to him, held the jar up. It was precisely what he'd been looking for. Underneath 'Terag Leaves' on the label, he had handwritten 'Aged beginning' and a date several months prior.
Calista actually smiled when she held the jar out, and he was so surprised and disarmed by it that he nearly dropped the jar on the floor as he took it from her. He saw that she was quite proud of herself, too, for finding the right jar so quickly.
Here, at last, was some kind of real progress. He smiled back at her, thanked her for bringing him the jar. Behind him, the potion threatened to boil over, so he turned his attention back to it, stirring it down quickly before adding the leaves Calista had brought over. She returned to watching him silently, but he noticed that she was standing closer to him than she had ever done before; if he'd thought it wouldn't send her scurrying again, he could have brought his arm around her shoulders.
The next time, and the next, that he went down to his workroom, she followed right behind him, and watched him, only a pace away. When an ingredient he needed wasn't right nearby, she disappeared into the storeroom to find it for him, seeming to enjoy the challenge of finding the correct jar or vial. Not once did she bring him the wrong thing.
Typically, Severus didn't like anyone rummaging around on his shelves, but in this instance he was glad for it; it felt like a breakthrough. As soon as he unlocked the door to the basement workroom, Calista would come, within moments, from wherever in the flat she'd been hiding, and follow him down. He began to brew extra batches of potions he didn't really need, kept the Hospital Wing incredibly well-stocked, just so she would spend time with him.
He asked her at dinner nearly every night if she wanted him to read the red book to her, even though historically, she nearly always said no. Once they had started spending time together in the workroom, that changed, too. Slowly, she began to nod yes more and more often, until they were reading from it nearly every night.
One afternoon, after Calista had brought him every single one of the twelve ingredients needed for a potion he would be teaching the fourth years in class the next day, he glanced down at her while he was stirring the cauldron. Her eyes followed him keenly, and he saw that she stood on her tiptoes, stretching her neck, trying to see the contents of the cauldron.
"Would you like to stir it?" he asked, pleased to see her engaged in something, anything with interest.
She nodded her head, yes, as eagerly as he had ever seen her do anything. His eyes swept over the room, quickly. He didn't have a step stool, or anything she could stand on to reach the worktop.
"I'm going to lift you up, so you can reach the cauldron," he said, setting down the wooden spoon he was using to stir it.
Before she could change her mind and run away, he plucked her up off the floor, and held her high enough so that she could reach the worktop. Predictably, he felt her stiffen, her heart racing. He held her in front of the bubbling cauldron, and murmured in her ear.
"It's all right, Calista. I've told you, I won't hurt you. Go ahead and stir the potion."
She reached out and picked up the wooden spoon from the worktop, and swirled it around inside the cauldron, watching the bubbles grow smaller. She imitated exactly the way he had been stirring it, and after a few moments he felt her begin to relax slightly as she stirred the potion, heartbeat returning to a regular pace.
When Severus judged that the potion was finished, he set Calista down carefully, and extinguished the flame beneath the cauldron with his wand.
"I daresay you've done better than most of my students will," he said wryly, "And they've got about eight years on you."
A tiny flickered across her features, the second one he had seen from her.
(¯ˆ·.¸¸.·ˆ¯)
Every two weeks, he mixed a new batch of sleeping potion for Calista, each time lowering the amount of Night Blossom Draught he added to it. Finally, in his latest batch, he had put none of it at all. It wasn't a potion that anyone should take for longer than was necessary, especially bot a child. He had been careful, and she was not experiencing any dependency or ill effects that he could see, but he was glad she was weaned off of it, now.
But a few days after changing the potion, she began to look tired again; the dark circles reappeared under her eyes, and she was back to two cups of coffee a day, where she had previously been having only one, in the morning.
He asked her, several times, if she was sleeping all right, and each time, she nodded that yes, she was.
Five days after he had stopped giving her the Night Blossom Draught, she was sitting in his study one evening after dinner, while he was in the opposite chair, reading to her from the same red book; they were nearly finished with it, now. There were perhaps thirty pages left in it.
For a while, she'd been actually looking at him while he read, cocking her head while she listened, appearing interested. But tonight, it was as before: her eyes were cast down, fixed on her hands in her lap. Only the set of her shoulders, the way her ears perked slightly in his direction, told him that she was listening at all.
He sighed, and closed the book after perhaps a quarter of an hour. It had felt, for a while, that they were making progress, and now it was all slipping backwards.
He looked at her, still holding the book on his lap.
"Do you trust me, Calista?" he asked suddenly.
She seemed jolted by the question, and looked up. Her expression was wary, but she did meet his gaze. He waited; she didn't indicate a yes or no answer, just stared at him.
"I want you to trust me," he said earnestly, not knowing precisely why they were slipping backwards, but wanting to stop it from getting worse, "I wish you would speak to me. If you would just tell me what's wrong..."
But of course, she wouldn't; she looked at him a moment longer, then rose from her chair and left the study. He sighed, then stood and reshelved the book.
He had a feeling that she was having trouble sleeping again, that perhaps her nightmares had even come back, but how could he help her overcome her fears, her bad dreams, if he didn't know what they were? She wasn't going to tell him; that had been blindingly obvious over the last several months.
The next night, as he passed her bedroom door on his own way to bed, he heard something coming from her room; it sounded like she was whimpering. He pushed open the door, lit his wand.
She was asleep, but she was clearly having another nightmare; there were tears shining on her face, and her eyes moved rapidly back and forth, behind her closed eyelids.
He laid his hand on her shoulder, and called her name a few times, but she would not wake up. He shook her gently, calling her name louder; she cried out in her sleep, but still didn't wake.
"Calista!" he said urgently, loudly. Her eyes snapped open, and he was again immediately drawn into a stream of wild fear and anger, her emotions practically rolling out of her in waves.
This time, he could not restrain himself. He had to know; enough was enough. He had tried for months to earn her trust, to ease her into telling him what had happened that had her frightened so badly, why she felt that she couldn't speak.
She couldn't take sleeping potions forever; if he was going to truly help her, then he needed to know what caused her nightmares, why she was so silent, what was behind the furor of emotions he knew swirled within her mind.
He sat down on the edge of her bed, locked his eyes onto hers, prepared to see at last what she was hiding. She shut her eyes, turned her face away from him, but this had gone on too long with too little progress; he was tired of seeing her look so haunted and not understanding why.
"Open your eyes," he commanded, in a tone he had never used with her before, "Look at me."
She obeyed, perhaps simply because of his tone. But even as he watched, a familiar transitioned occurred within her eyes. As if she had thrown a switch, a carefully blank look came into them, and he sensed a barrier sliding over her thoughts.
However, she was only an untrained child and he was very skilled in this art; he pushed through her barrier as easily as one could sweep cobwebs away from a window.
Once again, he was caught in the seething stream of anger and fear. He was startled to find that he could not immediately focus; the sheer strength of her emotions overpowered anything else, and he had to navigate his way carefully through them to find out what was causing them.
He had never entered a the mind of a child so young before, and he found that, even though her mind still had that pull of familiarity to him, it was also completely alien.
Where searching an adult's mind was a matter of finding pictures, sounds, and feelings that connected, Calista's young mind was at once more simplified and more complex; when the furor of her motions faded enough for him to concentrate, he found himself envisioning a dark, circular room which he stood at the perimeter of. In the center, an image of Calista sat, with her knees drawn up under her chin, and her arms wrapped around them.
The image cut out abruptly; the real Calista had snapped her eyes shut again. But he had already made his choice; he had entered her mind already, and she knew it. It would be a waste to possibly squander her trust, and still know nothing from it. He placed his hands at the sides of her face, used his thumbs to open her eyelids.
They locked eyes again; this time, he anchored himself in her mind, so that she would not be able to shut him out if she closed her eyes again. He let go of her eyelids, but kept his hands cupped gently around her face.
The circular room swam back into view. He could a vision of her again, in the center. He tried to walk towards her, but he was bombarded suddenly by streams of vibrant colours weaving all around him. When he focused on one blur of colour, he realised that all of them were actually words; each stream of colour represented a phrase, or a sentence, that he found he could actually hear, if he focused on them.
The red and orange ones, when he focused on them, were spoken in a variety of different voices. There were some that he thought he recognized, some he did not.
Some of the voices seemed as if they must have come from the orphanage:
"Freak. Why don't you talk? Are you stupid?"
"I don't think she understands much of anything."
"No one's ever going to adopt you, freak."
"I'll do whatever I want. What are you going to do, tell on me? Oh, that's right, you can't talk."
"She's not very bright, I'm afraid."
And then there were other voices, that must have been from before she was in the orphanage.
"We can't keep her here. Having her here puts us all at risk."
"She's only a child. I couldn't just leave her there."
"She was using Unforgivable curses on her own child...and if she's Bellatrix's daughter, then she's related to me, too. It's my responsibility to help her."
There was a heartwrenching moment, for Severus, when he heard the echo of Lily's voice:
"Something's wrong with her. I think she might be ill. It's unnatural for a child to be so quiet…"
Another blur of colour came at him, still reds and oranges, but these ones were all in the same voice. It was as if Bellatrix was there, in her mind, her haughty, cold voice echoing.
"Look at them; they are dead, as they should be."
"I will not listen to so much as a whimper of protest from you. You will learn that little girls do not question their mothers and go unscathed."
"You will serve the Dark Lord; it is what you are born to do."
"Say it! Say it, or I will turn the wand on you."
"Give Mama the wand. Pick it up, do it now!"
"If you fail to please the Dark Lord, I will kill you myself, make you a sacrifice. It will be a small loss."
"Idiot girl! Crucio!"
On and on these streams of colours and words went, all in the same vein. With some of them, he saw flashes of images; saw Bellatrix aiming her wand, saw the light go out of the eyes of a stranger, as life left him. It was like being a Death Eater all over again, seeing all the things that Calista had witnessed.
Finally, the reds retreated, faded. He found that he was closer to the center of the room now, that the reds and oranges still echoed and swirled all around the room, but they were behind him. Now, the colours were shades of blue. The voice was a child's voice, very soft and utterly unfamiliar. Still, he knew in an instant that it was her voice, Calista's voice, that he was hearing.
"No, I won't do it. I don't care what you say."
"If I can't do anything, then at least I can't do something bad."
"Stop, please stop!"
"Stay away from me!"
"Go on and kill me, then."
"Leave me alone."
"You'd hate me too, if you knew..."
"No one can find out, it's not safe."
The longer he listened, the more words there were, as if her mind had been filled to the brim with all of the things she never said, and the pressure was being released just in time.
He focused on the blue streams of colour, and the words kept coming.
"I'm not stupid!"
"I don't believe anything you tell me anymore."
"Lies. Everything you say is a lie."
"I hate you! Go away!"
"I don't want to be like you!"
Like before, the words kept coming, on and on. When they finally faded, he found that he was even closer to where the image of Calista sat, huddled, in the center of the room.
A final rush of colours came streaming at him, these ones greens and yellows. He was startled to hear his own voice in all of these streams, repeating all the things he had said to her over the last few months.
"I won't hurt you."
"Would you like me to read to you from the book again?"
"I will give you something that will let you sleep without dreams."
"I would like you to ask permission before taking any more of my books."
"Would you like to stir the cauldron?"
"I wish you would speak to me."
"Do you trust me?"
"Calista."
"Calista."
"Calista."
Her name, spoken in his voice, echoed all around him, slowly quieting as he passed through them. Finally, all of the colours were swirling around behind him; he was very near to the center of the room now, and he closed the short distance now between him and the image of Calista.
His dream-self, if that was what you would call it, lifted the child's chin, cupped her face, and peered into her eyes, the same way he did with the flesh-and-blood Calista that was before him.
Here, another layer into her mind, there were thick threads of emotion, each anchored to an imaginary ground at one end, the other ends floating free, weaving in and out of each other. He reached for the closest thread, found that it consisted of that terrible, cold rage that he had felt roll off her when she first woke from both of her nightmares. As he held into that thread of emotion, it revealed memory after memory, each of them interlaced with that rage, and most of them with knots of fear, too.
"Stupid girl. Useless child. The Dark Lord will never be impressed with you, the pitiful way you act." Bellatrix's eyes glared, glittering with certain madness. "I don't want to impress your Dark Lord," Calista replied hotly, and before the words had left her mouth, Bellatrix had slapped her across the face, hard enough to send the child stumbling backwards. Her cheek ached and stung, but she would not give Bellatrix the pleasure of seeing her cry. She set her jaw firmly, screwed her eyes shut against a threatening flood of tears, and imagined returning the strike, leaving her own mark on Bellatrix's pasty cheek.
Calista was crying; Bellatrix grabbed her roughly, forced her to look down. "Look at them," she commanded, "They're dead, as they should be." Calista didn't want to look, but Bellatrix slapped her. When she tried to turn away, her mother's hands were on her again, forcing her to look. "They'd take your magic if they could."
The helpless man writhed in agony, as Bellatrix pointed her wand at him, her eyes dark with concentration, her face contorted by a frighteningly cold grin. A few times, she shook the wand in emphasis, and the man screamed, splitting the still night sky with sounds of sheer agony. Calista wanted to look away, but she knew it would make Bellatrix angrier, would cause worse visions than she would be spared by turning away. Calista's stomach felt hollow and her head swam as Bellatrix turned, and placed the wand into her own small hand. "I will cast the spell," Bellatrix said, "You point the wand. Point it at the wretched filthy creature. Calista's eyes locked on the man, and he stared at her with wide brown eyes. "Please… help… me…" he beseeched, and Calista was frightened and disgusted by the sight of him, the spittle dripping from his chin, the way he crawled on the ground. Then she looked up into her mother's face, and she felt sicker. The eyes glittered with a malicious pleasure, and her face was lit by madness. "Point the wand," Bellatrix urged, "Do it now." Calista closed her eyes and yanked her hand away from her mother's icy grip. She couldn't stand this, any of it. She hated her mother, she hated the pathetic man on the ground, she hated herself.
Calista sat hunched over on a small, uncomfortable bunk, a book cradled in her lap. She was so absorbed in what she was reading that she was caught off-guard, didn't notice the two light-haired girls tiptoeing into the room, until it was too late. One of the girls grabbed a fistful of Calista's dark hair and pulled as hard as she could, and the other girl spit in Calista's face as she was pulled backwards by the first girl. The first girl shoved the book aside, and Calista saw, as if in slow motion, the book's pages separating from the cover and settling in a disorganized pile on the ground. "Freak!" the taller of the two girls, both of whom looked older than Calista, shrieked, "Stupid dirty black-eyed freak!" The second girl stomped on Calista's hand and leaned into her face, yelling along with the first girl. "Why don't you talk, freak? Why don't you tattle on us? Are you too scared? Are you scared they'll kick you out of here and make you live by yourself on the street, where freaks belong?"
"Look at me, you wretched child. Look at me, let me see what traitorous thoughts are in your head." Bellatrix leered at Calista, pushing the small child against the wall and staring into her eyes. Calista shut her eyes, and Bellatrix slapped her, sending her head reeling against the wall. She saw stars, felt herself fight to stay conscious, but she knew she had to, if she was to keep her mother out of her thoughts. She concentrated on clearing her mind, on keeping all of the things she wanted to shout at her mother behind an imaginary shield, schooled her expression into remaining blank. She must have done a good job, because Bellatrix loosened her grip and stalked away, leaving Calista feeling weak and drained from the effort of maintaining her mental barrier.
Severus was finding it exceedingly difficult to wade through horrific memory after horrific memory, all in a row; desperately, he seized on a tendril that waved nearby that seemed gentler. He didn't know precisely what to describe it as; it wasn't an emotion so much as it was a bittersweet, melancholy sort of confusion.
A table swam into view, a round wooden table, and around it were familiar faces. Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, James and a pregnant Lily Potter all stared at Calista. Each wore a grim expression, and Potter raised his voice slightly as he addressed Black. "She can't stay here. She's got to go back to her mother. It's too risky to keep her with any of us, it could lead Voldemort straight to us." Black slammed his fist on the table, and snarled at his best friend. "She's related to me, too, and I can't just let Bellatrix torture her. She's still a child, James! We can't just give her back." He glanced at Calista, who was intently studying the tabletop, for fear of revealing her expression to any of the strangers who sat there discussing her as if she wasn't in the room. Lily leaned towards Calista and asked softly if she was hungry. Even though she was, she didn't trust herself to answer without suddenly crying, and she didn't want any of these strange people to see her cry. Lily kept speaking softly to her, and Calista stared at her rounded belly. She heard Lily talk about expecting her own child, and Calista suddenly wished strongly that this pretty, soft-spoken red-haired lady was her mother, instead of Bellatrix. She had no siblings, and her mother never spoke to her kindly, never asked if she wanted anything, not like this lady was asking. Calista was certain that this woman would never torture a man to death, would never hand Calista her wand, insisting that she do the same. Then the black-haired man with glasses that sat next to her said something to the lady, and she turned away. Soon, she put Calista to bed on a sofa in the next room, expected her to go to sleep, even though Calista was scared and hungry, and she didn't know where she was or who these people were.
Severus felt, suddenly, exactly the same as the emotion this memory had been tied to; a melancholy confusion, a hollow yearning for this to be something more than what it was. He knew what it was to want Lily, when she was wrapped upon her own separate life, even if he had wanted her in an entirely different way.
He had to move on, though. Regretfully, he let the image go, searched for the next important-looking thread; there. It was a thick tendril of emotion, and it weaved in and out of almost every other thread he could see. Smaller threads branched off of it, touching nearly all of her memories. He took hold of it, followed it.
This was different; Holding on to this thread was encapsulating, all-invading. Here was the sense of animal fear that he had glimpsed behind her eyes, in the way that her body would alternately go rigid, or tremble uncontrollably. This was an instinctual, persistent sense of terror, and the images it revealed were far more disturbing than he ever could have imagined.
They were different in another way, too. Where all of the memories he had seen so far had a logical, picture-like quality to them, these came in jolts and bursts, many without real words or pictures at all.
These memories were raw and wild, and they connected in a brutal, forceful way.
Cold hands wrapped around hers, forcing her to hold the wand; "Crucio!" and now the man was writhing, screaming, his eyes bulging. Her vision blurred with tears; her mother paused, released the spell long enough to make sure that Calista was still watching. The man begged and pleaded, but Bellatrix turned the wand on him again, anyway.
"See what happens when you don't mind your mother? You see? You're next, you're next, and I will offer your blood to the Dark Lord in sacrifice if you don't learn to love him as I do…"
"He will use you, no matter what you say or do. He will use you alive, he will use you dead. That is what you are here for. That is why I gave you life."
Disobey. She disobeys again because she can't do it; can't do what it is that her mother wants her to . She lifts her wand, and the little girl's world turns black and red, pulsing violently.
Screaming, but it won't stop. Agony, everywhere. Her eyes, her hands, every nerve in her body is on fire. She feels a thousand hot knives stabbing her, twisting serrated blades into every muscle, every bone.
She wants to sleep, she wants to die, but the agony is in control, won't release her. Cannot stop it, her throat raw from screaming and now her mouth is open but there is no voice left inside of her. It hurts, it hurts so badly…
The flash of a silver blade, and her feet won't carry her away fast enough. The searing of fire, white-hot. Anything, anything but this.
Cold hands grip her, slap her, press into her skin hard enough to leave marks, but it doesn't matter; she must run away anyway, no matter how angry it makes her mother. Except, she can't move, now. Paralyzed, and then something like ice but a thousand times more painful, cutting into the skin of her back; she snaps out of the spell, tried to run again. Cold fingers dig into her shoulder, another curse comes. Then, the cold pain again, and again, and again.
Heat spreads across her back now, too; she gets free again, turns her head, and then she screams. She can see blood, her blood, in big drops all over the floor, all over the white skin of her mother's hands.
And that was where this thread of terrible fear ended; here, in this memory of pain and blood. It was a good thing that he had reached the end of it, because he didn't think he could bear to see any more.
Slowly, he rose from the depths of her subconcious, until he stood again in the little room just behind her feeble barrier, the outermost layer of her mind. He was still kneeling in front of the image of his daughter, hands on either side of her cheekbones; he dropped his hands from her face, and his dream-self that he had projected into her mind pulled the dream-Calista close, wrapping her in an embrace.
He ignored the trembling of her body, continued to hold her close even when she tried to run away. He simply held her tight, wordlessly, and used the power of his own mind, his legilimency skill to create a small, tight barrier that shielded them both from the dark memories beneath the surface, Then, slowly and carefully, he let the projection of himself fade from her mind, withdrew the anchor he had placed. He left the barrier, and then he pulled a tiny tendril of her into his mind, so that he could stay connected, could keep that barrier intact. It was like taking her dream-self's hand, holding onto it.
When at last Severus emerged from her memories, his hands slid down her face, her neck, and then he pulled her tightly to him in an embrace, much as he had done with her inner self, inside the outer layer of her mind.
Just as she had done in her mind, she trembled and strained to pull away, but he would not let her go. He held onto her, and when tears began to fall involuntarily from her eyes, he laid her head gently against his shoulder, and he held her there until the tears subsided, and neither of them spoke for a long time.
Gradually, the tension left her body, the trembling subsided. He didn't know if she had stopped being afraid, or if she simply didn't have the energy to fight him anymore.
Once she was calm, he loosened his grip on her slightly, and peered over her shoulder as he pushed the material of her nightdress aside, revealing her back.
He dreaded what he would see, but he forced himself to look, to find the spot that had bled and felt cold in Calista's darkest memories.
There, halfway down her back, he saw that someone had hacked at the child's skin, had used a blade to carve a crude replica of the Dark Mark across her spine. Perhaps, to an uneducated eye, it would have been difficult to make out the image, but he had the Dark Mark permanently branded into his forearm; he deciphered the pattern cuts and slashes for what it was instantly.
This was worse than he ever could have imagined. With the Dark Mark carved into her skin, even a counterfeit one, it would not be difficult for Voldemort to use it to find her, if he ever returned to power and decided to take Bellatrix up on her offer of a sacrifice. And even if he didn't, even if he never came back, but Bellatrix did, she'd still be in danger. Bellatrix had done exactly what she'd set out to do, by carving this mark in her daughter's skin; they were connected, now. If Bellatrix ever managed to get out of Azkaban, she'd be able to find her daughter for certain.
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