tw:self-harm

Three. Flesh Weaving Thread

𓃵

                             The next morning, she followed a pack of second-year Ravenclaws into the Great Hall, looking instinctively at the enchanted ceiling as she entered; it was a miserable rain-cloud grey. Very rarely did she make an appearance at breakfast; she would often roll out of bed fifteen minutes before her first class of the day, lazily running a hairbrush through the nest on her head, and challenge herself to pull on her uniform in forty-five seconds. Today, however, was different. She'd promised to meet the Macauley siblings (her new pets, she cruelly thought) in the Great Hall at eight. 

          Circe tossed and turned until around two wondering what to say, how to explain the current grim mood at Hogwarts, and how to avoid coming across as unpleasant, as she usually did. Mika, she'd decided, was somewhat coquettish, lithe, with bouncy blonde curls, a distinct scent of roses and a dreamy languor. Circe thought she was probably a little ditsy, if not crazy. Karl, on the other hand, was like a storm in a teacup. He was a mongrel of English and German ancestry, with the features and boy scout attitude to prove it. They sat together at the end of the Gryffindor table, whispering in foreign tongues and giggling.

          "Morning," Circe said, as she sat down.

          "Hello," said both Mika and Karl together.

          "Do you always do that? Talk at the same time?"

          "No," said Karl. A thick German accent and the kind of low-pitch that comes with the first few days of a cough. "You're late, by the way."

          Circe stopped buttering the slice of toast she'd picked up and frowned. Before she could answer, however, a tall black girl with long braided hair had marched up to Karl.

          "Hello," Angelina Johnson said briskly, "you're Karl Macauley, aren't you?" And without waiting for an answer, "I've heard from Professor McGonagall that you were captain of your team at Durmstrang."

          He beamed at her, perhaps pleased that she was aware of his accomplishments.

          "Yeah, well, tryouts for the Gryffindor team are on Friday at five o'clock. We're down a few players for this season. Will you come?"

          "I'll check my diary."

          Angelina nodded and departed.

                   "Hand turns loom, spool of white, spool of black. Flesh weaving thread ... Father hands daughter knife, but it is cousins who slice ..."

          Circe stared at Mika in disbelief as her misty voice trailed away delicately. Mika, she corrected her past self, was most definitely crazy, but it was all right if she was; Circe was a little crazy herself, though not in any complicated way like Mika seemed to be. She was like Regulus: cryptic muttering in what would otherwise be silences.

          Karl, who watched the back of Angelina's head with the admiration of someone who'd just been offered a thousand galleons rather than an unconfirmed position on the quidditch team, didn't react to his sister, so neither did Circe. Instead, she peered upwards as hundreds of owls came soaring in through the windows. They descended all over the Hall, bringing letters and packages and showering the breakfasters with droplets of water; it was clearly raining hard outside. Mercury, Circe's owl, was nowhere to be seen, but she was hardly surprised; she doubted her family would have anything new to tell her after only a day apart. Karl, however, had to move his pumpkin juice aside quickly to make way for a sodden copy of the Daily Prophet.

          "What are you doing with that?" said Circe irritably as Enyo plonked herself down next to Karl without invitation. "It's a load of rubbish."

          Enyo, shrugging, unfurled the newspaper. "I like to see if they mention Sirius."

          Karl frowned. "Who is this Sirius?"

          "Nobody," she said briskly, rolling up the newspaper and laying it down by her plate. "Nobody at all. Unlike you," she added, an intrigued smile tugging at her lips. She must have thought him handsome. "Who are you?"

          "Karl Macauley. My sister, Mika."

          Enyo paused, then her face lit up. "Your father's in the Order."

          Circe dropped her fork with a clatter. "You know, it's not going to stay a secret much longer if you keep talking about it."

          Enyo gave her cousin a fleeting glare, but Circe didn't have time to retaliate: Professor McGonagall was now moving along the table handing out timetables.

          "Double Potions, History of Magic, Divination and double Defence Against the Dark Arts with that Umbridge hag."

          Mika gave Circe's timetable a reproachful look. "My father doesn't like her, either," she said matter-of-factly. "She's authoritarian."

          "He works at the Ministry, doesn't he?"

          "The Department of Mysteries."

          Circe rolled her eyes. "Be serious."

          "I am!" Mika removed a folded-up piece of parchment from her breast pocket and handed it, triumphant, to Circe, who screwed up her face in confusion.

          "I can't read this, it's not even English."

          Mika snatched the letter back and explained, "That's because it's German." She used her index finger, the nail painted perriwinkle, to point out the only discernible words in a language Circe could understand: Department of Mysteries. She put a hand on Circe's shoulder as she edged closer to give her a better look, and the latter wondered why Mika did not consider it an invasion of personal space to be touching her. 

          But it had already been done. The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star.

          "You can jest all you like," murmured Mika, pocketing her letter, "but you don't mean it."

          "She does," Enyo interjected, eyeing Mika and Circe beadily. "She struggles with it, the kindness thing."

          Circe bristled. "Says who?"

          "Says me. And Draco."

          "Draco wouldn't know kindness if it hit him in the face. In fact, I remember he came out in boils when he had to wish me a happy seventh birthday," she said remmiscently.

          "That's because you put Bulbadox powder down his pants," said Enyo disapprovingly.

          "Oh yeah ... I'd forgotten ..." A lie. This was actually one of Circe's favourite memories, seeing Draco hop around clutching at his backside. "Anyway, I better escort my protege to our first lesson of the day. Coming, Mika?"

          Enyo watched Circe set off towards the dungeons with Mika trailing along a few steps behind. She did not wait for Karl to begin speaking to her, but rather fled the Gryffindor table for the History of Magic classroom, leaving behind an untouched plate of bacon and eggs.

          History of Magic was by common consent the most boring subject ever devised. Professor Binns, the ghost Professor, had a droning voice that was almost guaranteed to cause severe drowsiness within ten minutes, five in warm weather. He never varied the form of lessons, but lectured his students without pausing while they took notes, or rather, gazed sleepily into space. Today, the fifth-years suffered an hour and a half's droning on the subject of giant wars. Enyo heard enough within the first ten minutes to appreciate that the subject was mildly interesting, but then her brain disengaged, and she spent the remaining hour and twenty minutes trying not to succumb to the obsessive gaze that seemed to be trained on her.

          Michael Tallis: olive-skinned and Machiavellian, with a dubious bloodline and an aspiration to become this fear-inducing creature of pure rationality, or whatever his overbearing father wished. Michael, with his razor-sharp wit, who toyed with people whenever he felt like it and pickpocketed younger students' gobstones. Very brilliant, very charming and enigmatic. He was a chessboard brought to life─a bittersweet, sly, uncontrollable creature against which nothing can be done. But Enyo quite liked that.

          You see, Enyo was the type to have read Nabokov's Lolita once and felt a certain way about it. She had read it, in fact, two winters ago and was haunted by all those twisted ideas of love. She liked to dress up in skirts, high socks and ribbons; she took ballet classes thrice a week in the summer; she was a fan of the phrase Sacrificer a Venus; she liked to talk with her eyes rather than her words; she liked attention from boys, older boys like Karl, any type of boy so long as she was the centre of somebody's desires. A man like Humbert with all that apparent adoration and tenderness would have seemed like a blessing to somebody like Enyo, whose father preferred to largely ignore her, pained by her resemblance to his late wife. 

          Like many before and after her, her parents were the root of almost every misfortune she'd encountered.

          "You're so lucky," Daphne Greengrass told her, as they left the classroom for break (Binns drifting away through the blackboard), "having an aunt like yours."

          Enyo agreed, but privately thought that she'd rather have her mother watching over her than her younger, untalented sister. 

          "So she can't do any magic at all?" asked Daphne inquisitively as she looped her arm companionably through Enyo's. "Like, if she had a wand, what would happen?"

          "The same thing that happens to you."

          "Which is?"

          "Not a lot."

          "Oh, shush." But she looked amused as she led the way out into the damp courtyard.

          Drizzle was falling, so that the people standing in huddles around the yard looked blurred at the edges. Enyo and Daphne chose a secluded corner under a heavily dripping balcony, turning up the collars of their robes against the chilly September air and talking about what Snape was likely to set them in the first lesson of the year. They had gotten as far as agreeing that it was likely to be something extremely difficult, just to catch them off guard, when someone walked around the corner towards them.

          It was Michael and, what was more, he was on his own. This was most unusual: he was almost always surrounded by a gang of moody Slytherins.

          Enyo felt her face grow hot. "Hi."

          "You have a squib in your family?" he asked immediately.

          "I do," she replied, trying to grin but failing. "So, did you ... have a good summer?"

          "It was fine." He waited, but she did not say anything more, and he did not have the patience to pursue the subject, so he changed it. "Who's the squib?"

          "My aunt Katherine."

          "On your mother's side?"

          Daphne took on an unnecessarily accusatory tone: "Have you always been curious about squibs, or just since Enyo started talking about it?"

          "I have one in my family, too," said Michael coolly. "Anyway, see you, Black."

          He sauntered away. Enyo waited until he was halfway across the courtyard before rounding on Daphne.

          "You didn't have to be so rude!"

          "What?" Daphne rolled her eyes idly as she took a vial of lip balm out of her pocket and began applying it liberally. "He's a creep who's been staring at you since third-year. I just wanted to give him the opportunity to do something about it."

          Enyo quickly became defensive. "He doesn't—you're being—"

          "Oh, come on, he's so obvious! I'm surprised he didn't ask you to the Yule Ball."

          Daphne did not stop giving her opinion on Michael Tallis' romantic inclinations all the way down to Snapes dungeon, even as they passed Circe on her way to the Defence Against the Dark Arts tower, who perked up considerably at a new opportunity to tease her cousin.

⸻

          Circe was still considering the consequences of Enyo entering a relationship with someone arguably a lot lower than her in the food chain when she entered the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom, where she found Professor Umbridge already seated at the teachers desk, wearing the pink cardigan of the night before.

          "Your teaching in this subject has been rather disrupted and fragmented, hasn't it?" she stated, turning to face the class with her hands clasped neatly in front of her. "The constant changing of teachers, many of whom do not seem to have followed any Ministry-approved curriculum, has unfortunately resulted in your being far below the standard we would expect to see in your OWL year. You will be pleased to know, however, that these problems are now to be rectified. We will be following a carefully structured, theory-centred, Ministry-approved course of defensive magic this year. Copy down the following, please."

          She rapped the blackboard again; the first message vanished and was replaced by a list of course aims. When everyone had copied down Professor Umbridge's course aims she asked, "Has everybody got a copy of Defensive Magical Theory by Wilbert Slinkhard?"

          There was a dull murmur of assent.

          "Good. I should like you to turn to page five and read 'Chapter One, Basics for Beginners.' There will be no need to talk."

          Circe  turned to page five of her copy of Defensive Magical Theory and started to read, but found that it was desperately dull. Absent-mindedly turning her quill over and over in her fingers, she felt her concentration sliding away from her; several silent minutes passed before she looked right and received a surprise: Hermione had not even opened her copy of Defensive Magical Theory. She was staring fixedly at Umbridge with her hand in the air.

          After five more minutes had passed, however, Circe was not the only one watching Hermione. The chapter they had been instructed to read was so tedious that more people were choosing to watch Hermione's mute attempt to catch Umbridge's eye rather than struggle on. When more than half the class were staring at Hermione rather than at their books, Umbridge seemed to decide that she could ignore the situation no longer:

          "Did you want to ask something about the chapter, dear?" she asked Hermione, as though she had only just noticed her.

          "I've got a query about your course aims. There's nothing written up there about using defensive spells."

          Umbridge raised her eyebrows. "And your name is?"

          "Hermione Granger."

          "Well, Miss Granger, I can't imagine any situation arising in my classroom that would require you to use a defensive spell. You surely aren't expecting to be attacked during class?"

          "Surely the whole point of Defence Against the Dark Arts is to practise defensive spells?"

          Umbridge smiled even wider. "Wizards much older and cleverer than you have devised our new programme of study. You will be learning about defensive spells in a secure, risk-free way."

          She promptly turned away from Hermione, but now several other people had their hands up, too. Instead, Umbridge decided to focus all of her attention on Circe, who was carving her initials 'CB' into her desk and hadn't looked up.

          "If you are going to continue to deface school property, I'm afraid that will be a detention, Miss─"

          Circe glanced up disinterestedly. "Black," she answered. "Miss Black."

          "Well, Miss Black, if you could be so kind as to pay attention," said Umbridge sweetly. She watched, eagle-eyed, as Circe threw her quill down onto the desk.

          An unconvincing smile stretched Umbridge's wide mouth as she addressed the room: "Now, it is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about. As long as you have studied the theory hard enough, there is no reason why you should not be able to perform the spells under carefully controlled examination conditions."

          Harry's fist shot into the air. "And what good's theory going to be in the real world?" he asked without waiting to be called upon. "What's going to happen when we face ... hm, let's think ... maybe ... Lord Voldemort?"

          Several people gasped but Umbridge did not flinch. She was staring at Harry with a grimly satisfied expression on her face.

          "Ten points from Gryffindor, Mr. Potter."

          The classroom was silent and still. Everyone was staring at either Umbridge or Harry.

          "Now, let me make a few things quite plain." Professor Umbridge stood up and leaned towards them, her stubby-fingered hands splayed on her desk. "You have been told that a certain Dark wizard has returned from the dead. This is a lie."

          "It is NOT a lie!" shouted Harry. "I saw him, I fought him!"

          "Detention, Mr Potter!' said Umbridge triumphantly. "Tomorrow evening. Five o'clock. My office. I repeat, this is a lie. The Ministry of Magic guarantees that you are not in danger from any Dark wizard. If you are still worried, by all means come and see me outside class hours. If someone is alarming you with fibs about reborn Dark wizards, I would like to hear about it. I am here to help. I am your friend. And now, you will kindly continue your reading."

          Umbridge sat down behind her desk. Circe, however, stood up so suddenly it almost felt like a reflex action. Everyone was staring at her now.

          "What are you doing?" Hermione whispered in a warning voice, tugging at her sleeve, but Circe jerked her arm out of her reach.

          "So, according to the Ministry, Cedric Diggory just dropped down dead?" She wasn't entirely sure what she was thinking, what she was saying. Up until this point, Circe hadn't been a hysterical do-gooder but Umbridge's denial of Voldemort's return was making the whole thing more difficult to face. She was reminded dimly of her father, who lost twelve years of his life to Voldemort and his servants, and even more so of her uncle, who wrestled with death and won.

          Umbridge had raised her eyes and was staring at Circe without a trace of a fake smile on her face."Cedric Diggory's death was a tragic accident," she said coldly.

          "Murder!" argued Circe. She could feel herself shaking as better words jammed in her throat. At any other point, she would have wielded her tongue like a sword; she had favourite words like bucolic, palimpsest, nefarious, dusk and denouement. Now, all she had was a horrible bluntness. "Voldemort killed him and you know it. Fudge knows it. You all know it," she added harshly.

          Umbridge's face was quite blank. For a moment, Circe thought she was going to be screamed at. Then she said, in her softest, most sweetly girlish voice, "Detention, Miss Black. Tomorrow evening."

          Therefore, at five to five Circe set off for Umbridge's office on the third floor. When she knocked on the door a voice called, "Come in," in a sugary voice. She entered cautiously, looking around.

          She had known this office under three of its previous occupants. Now, however, it looked totally unrecognisable. The surfaces had all been draped in lacy covers and cloths. There were several vases full of dried flowers, each one residing on its own doily, and on one of the walls was a collection of ornamental plates, each decorated with a large technicolour kitten wearing a different bow around its neck.

          "Good evening, Miss Black."

          Circe started and looked around. She had not noticed her teacher at first because she was wearing a luridly flowered set of robes that blended only too well with the tablecloth on the desk behind her. Harry, she now saw, was seated uncomfortably in a straight-backed chair at a small table draped in lace. Two pieces of blank parchment lay on the table.

          "Well, sit down," said Umbridge. She was watching Circe with her head slightly to one side, still smiling widely.

          With a massive effort, Circe looked away from her, dropped her schoolbag beside the straight-backed chair and sat down opposite Harry, whose pale fists were clenched. The only thing Circe thought she had in common with him was his temper. People stared and made them both feel silly, but unlike the Boy-Who-Lived, she was powerless because she had no precise purpose like saving the world from a dark wizard. She could not even make herself stretch out her hand to switch on a light; the simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle. She was useless.

          "There," said Umbridge sweetly, "we're getting better at controlling our temper already, aren't we? Now, you are going to be doing some lines for me. No, not with your quill," she added, as Harry bent down to open his bag. "You're going to be using a rather special one of mine. Here you are."

          She handed them each a long, thin black quill with an unusually sharp point.

          "I want you to write, I must not tell lies."

          Circe pointed out, with a creditable imitation of politeness, "You haven't given us any ink, Professor."

          "Oh, you won't need ink," said Umbridge, with the merest suggestion of a laugh in her voice. "Off you go."

          She moved over to her desk, sat down and bent over a stack of parchment that looked like essays for marking.

          Circe sighed, placed the point of the quill on the paper and wrote: I must not tell lies. At once, she let out a gasp of pain. The words had appeared on the parchment in what appeared to be shining red ink. At the same time, the words had appeared on the back of her right hand, cut into her skin as though traced there by a scalpel─yet even as she stared at the shining cut, the skin healed over again, leaving the place where it had been slightly redder than before but quite smooth.

          She looked up at Harry, and saw that he was watching her too. His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle: his heart, pitter-pattering against his chest so violently it could bruise, was a hysterical unreliable organ. With all her jealousy and dislike, she found that she felt quite sorry for that fifteen year-old boy, but of course, she had sympathy for all fifteen year-olds as she, too, had fallen victim to the banes of adolescence. However the problem of pain was that Circe could not feel Harry's, and he could not feel hers, therefore they were free to be brutes towards one another. Her sharp glances were like the thorns of a rosebush, leaving a thousand tiny stab wounds in their wake, and he bled internally. When Circe bled, she bled like a war wound spilling into the Somme's current. They longed to be bandaged, yet all the other could offer was spite.

          She looked back at the parchment, placed the quill on it once more, wrote I must not tell lies, and felt the searing pain on the back of her hand for a second time; once again, the words had been cut into her skin; once again, they healed over seconds later.

          And on it went. Again and again they wrote the words on the parchment in what they soon came to realise was not ink, but their own blood. And, again and again, the words were cut into the back of their hands, healed, and reappeared the next time they set quill to parchment. Circe's insides seemed to shrivel with embarrassment despite the fact that nobody could see them. She wanted to stand up and say something witty and volatile but nothing was coming to mind. Everything in her, in that moment, was humiliation, defeat. Professor Umbridge was her second on her list of most detestable things, before green olives and after her grandmother's portrait.

          Darkness fell outside Umbridge's window. Circe did not ask when they would be allowed to stop; she knew Umbridge was watching for signs of weakness and she was not going to show any, not even if she had to sit there all night, cutting open her own hand ...

          "Hands," Umbridge said, after what seemed hours.

          They both extended their hands, which Umbridge took in her own. The cuts had healed, but their skin was red raw.

          "Tut, tut, I don't seem to have made much of an impression yet. Well, we'll just have to try again tomorrow evening, won't we? You may go."

          The school was quite deserted; it was surely past midnight. Circe walked slowly up the corridor, lagging behind Harry, then, when she had turned the corner and was sure Umbridge would not hear, stamped her foot and let out a furious string of swear words that would have made even Snape's sallow cheeks blush. She looked demented, not like an heir at all, and Harry rather thought he should continue walking. He didn't like Circe very much, but it wasn't his fault; she hated him first.

          Truthfully, Circe was more concerned about her family than she was Umbridge. She'd only had two detentions before in her life: The first, a misunderstanding that involved Enyo tumbling into the Black Lake and Circe hexing the Black Squid to (apparently) save her cousin's life; the second, a series of late homework assignments from Professor Snape. Her mother was quite severe when it came to academics, disapproving of Circe's lazy habits, and made a point to remind her of her future, which would be considerably harder if she didn't remember how to cast a basic spell. It didn't help that Enyo was naturally gifted at almost everything and outshone her cousin in every aspect, whether it was beauty or schooling; and they were aware of it too, that subtle uneasiness that would only be settled when either took the throne.

          Because Enyo was the only one who could make Circe feel small. She'd had years of practice.

          "Are you─is everything all right?" Harry gave in and turned around. "Do you need to go to Madam Pomfrey?"

          She looked like a deer in headlights. "No! No Madam Pomfrey."

          "You sure?"

          "Positive. I don't need to go to the hospital wing─do you?"

          Hospitalisation wasn't a particularly amusing topic for her to discuss. She felt her insides shrivel up and she longed to hide her burning face in her robes. The day Sirius broke into Gryffindor Tower did it for her. All that nauseous worrying, thinking he'd come to slay his kin. She'd saved the left wrist for one final blow. And then she turned herself in to her mother, who'd come to berate Dumbledore for his failures, covered in blood spatters and bitter tears.

          I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It was all she could say at the time. Sara cried for days and smothered her with love, but there was something exasperated about her demeanour, like she'd given up trying to piece together a jigsaw with thousands of parts. Sirius selfishly blamed himself when he heard. Enyo was awfully torn up about it, and hadn't been allowed to see Circe for a week, with the adults not wanting them inflicting their misery upon one another. Regulus didn't say anything, though he never usually did.

          Their endless company meant nothing. There was just Circe, left wretched in her hospital cot. She wanted to run away from their awkward glances and meaningless words. She refused to speak. She cut her hair up to her chin. She gradually got better, and the scars faded into an obscure nightmare, but they all remembered. They would never look at her the same.

          "No," Harry agreed, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, "no hospital wing."

          He wasn't really sure why they weren't telling anyone exactly what was happening in Umbridge's room. He assumed it had something to do with Circe's dogged nature and his newfound stubbornness, yet he also felt dimly that this was between them and Umbridge, a private battle of wills.

          "What will you say?" said Circe suddenly.

          Harry didn't need to ask what she meant. He hesitated for a fraction of a second, then said, "Lines."

          "Clever. I don't think it's about what we said about Cedric at all, you know," she added without thinking. "You don't think it's strange how a Ministry official starts teaching here and gives you a detention on the first day?"

          Harry opened his mouth, closed it again and nodded.

          "Did you really fight him?" she inquired as they began walking in step with one another.

          He scowled. "What do you think?"

          "I don't know, that's why I'm asking." Circe looked him up and down, pondering. Then, at last, when she appeared to have come to an answer, asked, "What was he like?"

          "The ugliest, scariest, most horrible thing."

           "Nothing too bad, then?"

          Harry appeared quite miserable despite her lighthearted attempt to lighten his mood. She understood the severity of the situation: she couldn't imagine having to face something like Voldemort at her premature age of fifteen. He perhaps deserved more credit for the things he'd achieved, but Circe wasn't going to be the one to give it to him.

          The rest of the walk back to the common room was silent. Harry didn't bother to bid Circe goodnight as he stormed up to his dormitory. She did not, though exhausted, go to bed, but opened her books and began to work on her homework situation, which was already desperate despite it being the second day of term. It was half past two by the time she staggered up to bed, where she fell fully clothed on top of the covers and fell asleep immediately, having dark and sticky dreams. Umbridge had cut her open and was unpacking her organs. She was sewing her initials, D.O, into each of them, then tossing them back inside ...