*I don't usually like First person stories (especially female, can't relate), but this one is pretty good*
Latest Update:ONESHOT
Summary: Five times you understand power, and the one time you let it understand you.
A Muggleborn witch at Hogwarts and the three years it takes to begin understanding herself.
(spoilers for the entire game)
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45400675
Word count:4.8k
Chapters:1
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fear
Your first taste of power is this:
It is a sweltering mid June afternoon in your family estate and you are fifteen, fresh out of your education. Your skirts are laid out gracefully around you despite the sweat pooling behind your knees and at your chest, corset laced extra tightly this morning by your lady-maid. Your parents have courteously let you have a moment of privacy with your newly betrothed. You do not doubt they linger like shadows just outside the parlor doors, counting down the seconds until they deem it appropriate to flutter back in and resume signing the contract for your hand.
You are not to marry for another several years--at least five, your mother had said, we do not want her to seem desperate--but the man before you is already grown and educated in both the standard Oxford curriculum and the wider, wilder ways of the world you are not allowed to explore. There is a bead of sweat gathering on his upper lip and he dots it away with a monogrammed handkerchief in one hand.
His other creeps up your knee, slithering over the fabric of your skirt.
You've known the game that men play since you were small and sat at your own mother's knee. The game that all fathers, brothers and sons born into respectable society partake in: the bartering of their daughters and sisters amidst tobacco smoke and raucous laughter, in gentlemen's clubs existing as forbidden frontiers for the ladies in question. Your own father had come home from such an outing just recently, chuffed with self-satisfaction and declaring to your eagerly awaiting mother that your hand has been sought for and a ring potentially acquired. She had covered her mouth with delight and whisked him away, whispering between themselves as you stood there, watching the remnants of your short lived childhood depart.
The hand at your knee has crept midway up your thigh and it makes you ill to your core. You've been told he is a man of good breeding and honor, and you suspect he will not dare take certain liberties with you until your wedding night (not mentioning the liberties of other women, of course; you are a girl, not a naive son of some well-off-to-do-man-or-another). It does not do much to lessen the sickness you feel churning in your belly and the growing urge to upend your breakfast all over his tailored shirt and vest. A lightheadedness has set in, bolstered by the hot summer air coming in from the open windows, and you think you hear a whisper crooning in your ear. A hallucination, surely, but you latch on to it like a flung rope to escape the indignity of what is being done to your body. The one whisper grows into two then into four and then into countless, women's soft crooning like the rustling of bird feathers, like crows taking flight outside your bedroom window. You commiserate with these women murmuring in your ears, imagining them to be your long-lost-now-old-and-bound compatriots against the men whose eyes and hands rest at and take that which does not belong to them. You listen to them cry with you and think it will happen, finally, and can clearly visualize it in a moment of panic-driven clarity: the lovely scones your cook had prepared this morning appearing as violent mush against your betrothed's fine clothes; the look of immediate disgust on his face as he springs away from you and begins yelling. You can see your parents running back into the room from their feigned retreat just outside, apologetic–-your mother–-and apocalyptic–-your father, at you-–as the fine young gentleman with his hand currently where it does not belong angrily demands they fix their sickly, rude daughter before he takes her at the altar.
What happens outside of your head, which you do not recognize and will never fully remember, is instead this: your eyes flicker blue with unholy fire and the fine gentleman leans closer, off guard and eager. His hand, now in dangerously impolite territory on your leg, stills and abruptly leaves with a hiss of pain escaping his lips. Your skin has burnt him even through the layers of fabric you wear, as if that same unholy fire rages within you. There is a moment of stillness which even the breeze does not dare intrude upon, and then your anger and dread catapult and spill as if a tsunami out of the container of your body: an explosion of blue light invisible to the naked eye, rolling over the man in the parlor and your parents outside and the staff even further out all eagerly awaiting the tightening of the noose around your neck. Even the contract lying at the table before you, your name signed and his glaringly empty as he deliberates his approval of you, is not spared. All in your near vicinity is consumed and baptized in the flames of your fear.
The whispers in your ears settle. You can breathe again, and find yourself short of it; you gasp, once and quietly, and look around for evidence of your previously consumed scones. Your betrothed blinks at you with guileless, empty eyes, mouth agape like an unattractive fish, and then–-
It all becomes a blur, really. Your parents rush in and rush out with the fine gentleman they sat before you not even an hour ago. You catch snippets of their conversation as they go, your mother's girlish tittering about your youth and potential and leaving the nest, your father's gay laughter in agreement and your betrothed–-you strain your ears-–laughing his agreement alongside them.
The house falls silent, as if following the shocked inhale of your breath. You hold it for a count of seven, not daring to believe what you've just experienced, and let it out slowly: the house breathes with you, and takes all your anger and shock and fear, because you are only fifteen and only a girl. You are not ready-–and frankly do not wish to–-discuss the intricacies of married life and how to best serve your husband in a Godly way, how to provide him with children and act the doting, loving wife-accessory-creature society will expect you to be.
Life, inexplicably, moves on but you do not, not when your parents and staff are suddenly doting caricatures of their former selves. When strange men in strange clothes appear outside your house, clearly looking for something, you shy away from them and try to pay them no mind. When a strange man with strange clothes appears at your doorstep, and is rushed in to your father's study with you being called for afterwards, you remain in that frozen stillness of your parlor and a man's hand on your leg, broken only by the old man's curious eyes and even curioser words of magic and witch and never seen this before, surely, a mistake must have been made at the Ministry–-
(Your father does not take well to his daughter being accused of witchcraft. There is a piece of wood in the visitor's hand and suddenly your father is all smiles and laughter, welcoming him as a gentleman friend and there is a pool of dread in your stomach as the now-gentleman-friend turns to you, winks and says,
It's rather easier this way, isn't it? I'm afraid your parents would have made this quite difficult otherwise, my girl, yes, quite difficult, and I'm sure you are eager to attend the academy with your peers, now that you know you are a witch. Not to worry, he won't remember a moment of this conversation about your magic. Obliviate is so charmingly helpful, isn't it?
(Muggleborns are accepted but barely so, their Muggle parents not at all, curiosities and inconveniences to the modern witch and wizard. It will be many years yet before Hogwarts professors will deign to sit patiently in Muggle living rooms and explain the intricacies of magic and turn into cats like some cheap magicians all to convince poor, confused parents.))
Oh, you think, past the cold stone in your stomach, past the distaste at this stranger treating your parents like misbehaving pets, as you unknowingly begin your descent into the blue warmth licking at your soul,
This is power, isn't it?
.
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guilt
You ask Sebastian Sallow to teach you the torture spell (you think to yourself, not bothering to hide the disgust on your face: all the magic in the world and wizardkind chooses this? though you are, admittedly, not entirely surprised and instead put another observation into your mental "just like other humans" column) but demure on the actual casting of it. Were you to be pressed–-and quite hard, you pride yourself on not breaking your composure easily–-you would admit you hold plenty of hatred for your unfair world in your heart. But is it enough to mean it, as the spell demands, to inflict sheer torture on your intended victim? You prefer to think better of yourself, but also fear finding out if the answer is that you're not. And an even smaller part of you thinks of how you can maybe practice it yourself in the privacy of the Forbidden Forest first, perhaps on those grotesquely large spiders you see skittering about. You pacify yourself with these thoughts, telling yourself you are full of fury, yes, but also wonder and pain and curiosity, you only-human-girl, you, and face the Slytherin boy with an encouraging smile.
(You are not entirely familiar with boys, but not exactly unfamiliar with their kind, either. Education at Hogwarts is not what you expected, what with the freedom to mingle with the boys in your classes and out and about, wizardkind seemingly offering so much more freedom to women and girls than your Muggle life ever did. The boys know how to make you blush and you throw yourself into mastering your body with a ferocious stubbornness, determined to overcome this unexpected but not unwelcome development. One day you hope to be the one making them blush as easily as they do you, and Sebastian Sallow is an easy to get along with, if rather bullheaded boy. You do not fear the meaning behind his flirtatious words and charming smirks because beneath it, you see him for who he is: young and only now discovering the unfairness of life that one can find themselves saddled with. He makes you a little sad, but you are a girl brought up to defer to his sex, and more than anything it makes you angry.)
You think–-with all the overconfidence of only fifteen years of life under your belt, no matter the circumstances you have been brought into, a silver spoon in your mouth to boot-–that you can handle the pain. What is a passing moment of physical torture when you have spent years being told and mentally preparing for losing what little autonomy you have? You think, surely, surely, nothing can be as bad as knowing your fate and walking to your gallows nevertheless.
You are wrong, of course. It is a moment for the curse-caster and somehow an eternity for you. When the Crucio hits you, it is with the force of burning spiders with steel-sharp legs skittering about in your veins, thunder under your skin and blood in your mouth from where you've already bitten your tongue in your thrashing about. It is torture in the most basic breakdown of the word, a uniquely painful experience, all your sanity and ownership of yourself flying right out the window in the seconds-eternities you are under his spell.
There are two sets of hands pulling clumsily at you, one moreso than the other. Ominis, you gather through the fog in your brain, the tag-along boy you don't quite know what to make of, except that he seems painfully willing to accept whatever reasoning you give to excuse his best friend's behavior. But when you come to enough to see the look in Sebastian's eyes, oh, it almost makes it all worth it. In that gaze you think there is another sort of power you could have, in the guilt that seeps out of him like vapor, in the awe at your sacrifice and even a hint of-–dare you say it?–-ownership at having caused such pain, in the harsh clench of his jaw. There is potential growing dedication to you as a result of your folly. Not quite the dedication his poor, ill sister demands of him in his head, of course–-no one could compare to her, you think both selfishly and sympathetically, for this other girl locked in her own cage–-but you wonder if in time it could be grown, in its own special, quiet way. A dedication all to you, the knowledge of just how far you are willing to help him, and as such shouldn't he in turn feel the same towards you?
Is this what friendship with boys is like? You wonder. You are, still and before all else, a creature of your upbringing and the dark sinkholes you choose to step into in your own mind.
.
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devotion
Sebastian has killed his uncle and it horrifies you. You've felt no small amount of negative emotions for your parents over the course of your life, but enough to kill them? To look into their eyes and say two words you know with surety, with surety, will end their existence?
You do not think you could do it. Others, perhaps, if they seek enough to harm you, for your own self-defense, then maybe, maybe, but your parents who are not all good but are not all bad either?
You try to cast it out of your mind. The darkness inside Sebastian appears to be even darker and more full of hatred than your own. You examine this part of you sometimes, now that you are more willing to accept it is there, wreathed in the ancient-blue of fire and primordial magic. It is still enough to scare you, to make you unwilling to look close enough to unlock the intricacies of your own person, so you cast it all aside in favour of choosing Sebastian's fate. You, who has known him for only barely a year, and not his sister? Not his best friend? But the both of them are overcome with their grief and turn to you, the outsider, for direction.
"I had to do it," your friend pleads. To himself, you think, though it took worryingly little for him to start down this path of Dark Arts. All he needed was a little push from little old you, who came along at this darkly serendipitous moment with your wide eyes and breathy wonder for magic and all it contains. "For Anne's sake."
"Maybe she will forgive you in time," you placate him. She won't, you suspect: female anger is a blazing inferno and you've seen it in Anne's own eyes, while she sits quietly, without a choice, as her uncle and brother scream about her life before her. "Just give her time, Sebastian." You press a hand to your chest, beseeching and entirely genuine. "I will help find a cure for Anne, I promise. No one deserves to have the fate that she does."
You hold Sebastian against your chest as he collapses against you, anger overcome with grief then grief overcome with anger. You fear him now, perhaps, after seeing how far he is willing to go. You think of your own parents and staff in the next breath and of that day in the parlor, and the way they have still not quite returned to their former selves, remaining as eager as ever to please you. Is it not its own little death, you let yourself ponder, to have changed them so fully that even I no longer recognize them?
There is a chill in your breast as you hold your murderous friend and wonder if you are, perhaps, not that different after all.
When Sebastian has composed himself, and apologized profusely for making a mess of your robes and his lost composure and charmed your clothes clean, you let him take your first kiss. You let him take your second, and your third, and then your fourth and your fifth, but do not let him go further. The grip he has on your waist is not entirely unwelcome. It is not the hand at your knee, slithering higher as you daydream of spewing your breakfast, but it is not entirely what you want, either.
The issue is, you don't quite know what you want after all. Power, yes, and letting your friend kiss you in his grief and shame as he turns to you as his only pillar of support is something new and exciting and enticing, but what is it that you want beyond that? If not a husband and a household of well behaved children and society invites, what do you want for yourself?
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love
It is a year before you start to better understand. With your life moderately more settled–-your ever doting parents, the professors who praise your achievements with delighted surprise for someone starting school so late, Sebastian's guilty-awed eyes as he teases but never pushes further than you let him–-you have a better opportunity to come into your own. You explore the avenues, as limited as they are, in the wizarding world: knowledge and the Restricted Section and the pitying look on Professor Weasley's face as she admits, with shamed-but-not-enough-to-do-something-about-it reluctance, that your Muggleborn status will not get you a job at the Ministry. You explore romance and what it feels like to kiss different boys, and even a girl or two, always appropriate and never taking it farther than a tongue in your mouth and hands groping over your clothes. You explore the thought of travel and never settling, and you explore the thought of buying a modest cottage in a nearby hamlet and doing precisely that: settling.
In the end, you explore the thought of Isidora Morganach and her desire to help the world.
You never got the chance to speak to her, to see beyond her few memories and comparably more memories of her from the Keepers. Their group remains a point of contention for you, nurtured when they refused to answer your questions:
What is this magic? (A great mystery which must be protected.)
What was Isidora doing? (Something beyond her ken and the ability of mere mortals.)
Why did it fail? (Do not concern yourself any longer with the past, young Keeper. You must focus now on how you will ensure this secret is kept.)
How do I wield it? (Carefully and with reverence.)
And the one you never dared ask, confined only to your own head:
What made her desire so horrible to you?
You begin to think that you see yourself in Isidora, or perhaps, Isidora in you. The kind of power that you realize you want is nothing that a man can give you: it is not children, and it is not fine clothes, and it is not social status. You are hungry for it, this nebulous promise, absolutely stark raving ravenous: you crave freedom and the world at your whim. There aren't many whims, if you are being honest with yourself, and they are not bad. Freedom is surely not a horrible thing to wish for, is it? And neither is peace. And happiness. And a bit of vengeance, for yourself, and for all the other girls stuck in their gilded cages with doors that creak open far too slowly. Older now-–a whole sixteen! (A mere sixteen)--you pay more attention to the whispers of the girls in your year and higher, who lament or rejoice in betrothals and promises of homesteads and mansions and children. You do not understand the girls who vibrate with excitement for this future, but who are you to judge? Perhaps they want their husbands and their households with the same fervor that you want your freedom. Perhaps they want it with the same fervor–-perhaps it is a decidedly feminine fervor and desire, in the way men assume some things of the world are-–that Isidora simply wanted to help heal the hurt.
You procure a pensieve of your own and learn to deposit your own memories into it, watching your memories of memories. With no threat of impending goblin rebellion and more time to examine the tangle of hurt-anger-desire in you, you begin to wonder if Isidora's fate would have been different, had someone only better listened to her. Listening to a woman is difficult for men, you know, but the disgust rises in your breast nevertheless as time after time you watch her be dismissed and patronized. You wonder about the could have beens and a world where instead of dismissal, she received guidance; where instead of distrust, she received colleagues–-a mentor, perhaps-–to steer her away from the dangers of singular experimentation and instead, helped her learn.
A woman's desire is always hard for men to understand, you commiserate, staring at the walls of the Undercroft. Your pensieve stands empty beside you (sometimes the Room of Requirement feels as if it is judging you for your efforts, or perhaps, it is just the warm ambiance at odds with the heaviness of your heart). Feminine emotions, you've come to realize, men view as beneath them–-despite in their own lifetimes having had to rely on them, having been protected by them, been nurtured by them-–and a desire of love and protection and recognition for those near and dear to a woman's heart, well…
They become dangerous. Somehow, a woman who wished to make the world better for those suffering in it, became a danger to society and deserving of an Avada Kedavra by a colleague to her chest. You do not deny her overstepping the bounds of others in her single-minded focus, but her goal, you think, was genuine, was good. If only she had someone to listen to her.
It itches at you. It burns at you, ancient blue and glorious. You wish to change it, change this whole world–-for girls like you and girls like Anne, for women like Isidora who loved her father enough to drive herself into madness–-and so you make plans to start.
One demure, pretty look and charming smile at a time.
One powerful, slithering touch of primordial magic at a time.
You'll take what advantages in this world you can get, after all.
.
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recognition
In your seventh year, you find yourself cornered in the darkness of the Undercroft with Ominis Gaunt towering over you. You never did quite decide what to make of him, this friend of Sebastian's with his own demons. You were too busy dealing with Sebastian's more murderous ones, and so two years have flown by with you in the orbit of Ominis Gaunt, friends-brought-together-by-circumstance but never quite as close as the others you've kept. The boy had never indicated his desire to befriend you, and had always kept a polite distance and decorum around you so you just… let him. You've been busy smiling prettily and working to change the world, one feminine-primordial-magical-touch at a time.
The issue, you now realize, is that your pretty face and artfully guileless eyes do not work on someone who cannot see them, and has relied all his life on reading people and their intentions through other, more subtle means. You may have, you think, forgotten a few factors in your grand plan.
The hand that has been pressing half moon accents into the soft skin of your wrist moves slowly to cup your jaw. It is not a tender touch, with his fingers holding you hard enough to bruise. Your wand is out and pressed against the side of his torso, glowing cold and ready at the tip, but you are held back by your curiosity at the sudden mystery that is Ominis Gaunt. Caustic and quiet and blind Ominis Gaunt, who now has you quite literally by the throat in a dark and secret place where no one, save one, will even know to look.
You are riveted–-and trapped–-and isn't that in itself a surprise?
"Now what have you been up to," Ominis speaks slowly, an idle curiosity belied by the ferociousness of his grip. He has grown so much taller than you, as most boys in your year have, and his sightless eyes certainly do not seem so sightless as they focus directly on your face. "Sneaking about at all hours of the night, trading secrets, disappearing into unknown places…" He leans closer to you still, the tip of his nose softly brushing the tender skin of your exposed neck. "And if the snakes are to be believed, absolutely reeking of powerful magic?"
Your heart is as fast as a rabbit's in your chest and you do not doubt that he can hear it. You had stopped the sneaking about after fifth year, when Professor Fig's excuse of secret tasks no longer held water. Seventh year had brought it back, and with it the art of coy laughter and gossip and the descent beneath Hogwarts where the last container of Isidora's magic pulsed its blue-fire life, one you desired to almost consume.
A Parselmouth, you remember belatedly about the man holding himself above you. And with that realization you remember all the snakes scattered throughout Hogwarts, their stone motifs watching you as you moved past them, watching you as you said the right words to the right person, watching you as you pushed the limits of the magic burning bright within you.
Your heart rockets up a beat and plummets both at once. Fascinating, you almost breathe out. Show me more of you.
You do not. You are entirely captivated by the revelation that is Ominis Gaunt before you, who keeps himself as secret and as socially appropriate as you do. A fire of an entirely different kind–-no longer blue, but perhaps red, and just as hot–-comes to life within you.
You tilt your face towards his at your neck, as much as his grip will allow you. "I am changing the world," you breathe against his skin, so close that you can almost taste it. And when his grip at your jaw shifts and his thumb presses harshly against your lips, you do.
His mouth, when he comes up to face you again, is pulled into an easy smile. "Are you, now?" He muses. You find yourself wanting to taste the truth behind that smile and all the secret thoughts he's ever had. "And how do you plan to do that?"
You strain against his grip. "However I must," you breathe out, and watch his smile stretch and stretch as finally, he laughs.
You do not watch for long. His mouth is on yours between one moment and the next and you think to yourself, in this moment in time: trapped, fifteen again with a man's hand where it doesn't belong, pressed down into your skin. But unlike before you suddenly think, with Ominis' hand wrapped around your jaw:
But what if it did?
He's laughing again when he pulls back, quiet and deep. "I see you," he whispers against your lips. "I see you for what you are, and you cannot fool me."
A dormant part of you, one that you fought to never acknowledge, flutters. Yes, it whispers, not girlish or young as you once thought of it as at all, but simply human. See me. See me for who I am.
"Yes," you echo it, breath mingling with Ominis'. "See me."
You can taste it on his lips when he kisses you again, tender for a moment before turning bruising and desperate. See me, see me: and you do, in him, like calling to like, the anger and the fight and railing against an unjust world.
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bonus
Later, at some point in time:
Idly, you trace your fingers up the pale and curse-marked skin of Ominis' back. "Ominis," you say his name sweetly, truly and enamored, watching as the muscles in his back flex as he turns to look at you over his shoulder. "What else do the snakes in the castle say about me?"
His mouth stretches into a lazy grin. "Sneaky," he murmurs. "Powerful. Ancient one." Your skin burns under the force of his milky gaze and the secret, orb-shaped power cocooned within your blood and bones. Ominis twists to face you fully, and grabs the hand lingering between you two for a tender kiss on your knuckles.
"All-mother," he whispers. Reverently, lovingly.
You do not wish for a husband, or for a household full of children, or for society's attention. All you wish for, in the end, is freedom and the power to obtain it.
You press your smile into his skin.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45400675