"Rose is dead," came an answer from the other side of the room. Gideon Caulfield had snuck into the infirmary unnoticed. His abrupt appearance wasn't too suprising. Quiet and stealthy, the boy was like a ghost everywhere he went.
Just then, the room started to grow cold. Not just from the chill that came from the rain outside, but by the responses that materialized on every person's face.
"What..." Natasha Daggerman started, "what do you mean Rose is dead?"
"I mean precisely what I say," he replied back to the Vulpes with no drop of emotion, "Rose Aguillera is dead. I hate to say it so lightly, but the funeral service for her and Bobby Burkinson are going to be held tomorrow afternoon in the courtyard. The Headmaster's been all in a tizzy, what with two deaths in one day. It'd be best if we all paid our respects."
The girl's eyes narrowed. She was skeptical - clearly skeptical. "No, no, no..." she choked on her words, "no, I was there with her when the ship first got attacked, she couldn't have-"
"I was walking outside when the battle came to a close," he snapped back, "a Death Eater must have gotten the drop on her, because as I walked towards the docks, there she was...her body completely buried in the mud. I checked her pulse. There was nothing there, and there was nothing I could do. I'm sorry."
It was in that moment that Natasha Daggerman's face returned back to how it had been when she had lost consciousness. There was desolation imprinted in her eyes. She was in shock, but her aura was still sentient, still listening. Gideon pitied her. Being ravaged by dementors must have been easier than taking in this horrific information. After all, the girl was Rose's closest friend.
He stared at Abraham. Then Stephen. Then Waylon. Then finally, the floor below. He let out a sigh, and realigned the vetebrae of his spine. This was going to be excrutiatingly difficult.
"I have something to tell you all," he said, "something that I feel only you four should know." He paced the room, his hands trembling behind his back. There was a sort of whirling sensation that attempted to sweep him off his feet. Still, he had the strength to continue.
"I watched you fight on the docks this morning. None of you are like the rest of the lot that attends this crappy rubble of a private school," he said, "you know your stuff. You've done your research. If not for certain circumstances, you all could have picked off the entirety of those brutes one by one. You could snap them in half like toothpicks if you wanted to."
He was silent for a second, letting his words soak in. His head began to spin faster.
"I'm not going to say I was entirely innocent in the events that occured today," he said, trepidating fingers stroking through the back of his shaggy scalp. "However, I will say that I was completely unaware of the fact that they would take place on the ship. You see, I have, well...let's call them extended family in the terrorist group. They know me, and I know them. I am not affiliated with them, and they are not supposed to be affiliated with me. Today, they broke that rule..."
He pulled down the sleeve of his shirt, revealing a leather bracelet wrapped tightly around his wrist. On it were two milky-white charms. One was a full moon, the other, a skull.
"My parents were smart, y'see," he said, "they made a damn Unbreakable Vow with those radicals all the way back when I was a first-year. They made their friends swear not to harm me, or else they would suffer the penalty of death. Of course, that's what happens when you disagree to the terms of an Unbreakable Vow..."
He unlatched the bracelet from his wrist, holding it up for everyone to see. Although there was little light in the room, the charms gracefully glimmered as though they were made of sugar cubes.
"This is proof of the deal. The signature, as I like to call it. My parents have been making me wear it ever since that day so that I'll never risk getting caught in their crossfire...and now, well..."
He stared at it meticulously, as if looking for something that had never been there in the first place. Gideon gave a small shrug, and walked towards the foggy window pane on the other side of the room. He hastily opened it, let the bracelet dangle in the wind for a moment or two, and then let go, watching it as it dropped down into the bushes below.
He turned back to the four of them, a smirk on his face. "Now I'd rather take that risk so that I'd have reassurance that one of those bastards would meet their untimely demise."
He pulled out two wands from his back pockets. He tossed one to Stephen, while the other he threw in Natasha's direction.
"Found them on the docks," he said, "I confronted the teachers, and I believe those are yours. You'll need them," he said, "because I have a tremendous favor to ask the four of you."
Natasha's eyebrows furrowed. "What do you want?"
"I want an end to this suffering caused by the Death Eaters. I want an end to it before it even begins. And I want the four of you to come along with me. I want you all to at least consider it..."
He put one arm around Abraham, while the other he draped across Waylon's shoulder. "I think it's time we let the two of them rest." he said. "Besides, we have an interesting opening ceremony to attend. Best not be late..."
Gideon gave a small nod to both Stephen and Natasha before dragging Abraham and Waylon out the door. Once the walls of the infirmary were far away, he slammed it shut, and started to walk down the stairs. Of course, before he was gone, he had one final thing to say to the new prefect and his head boy companion.
"I don't like to beg but...please consider my offer," he melodically whispered, "if not for Rose's memory, then for yourselves."
And with that, Gideon Caulfied flew down the stairs, leaving Abraham and Waylon alone to themselves.
When she was very young, Natasha had found a way to sneak into an amusement park through a chink in the metal fence that seperated the parking lot from the premises. There was this roller coaster that she always rode by herself whenever her dad was far away from home and she had the oppurtunity to live alone for a couple of days. The name was hard to remember, but the experience was not. There were so many corkscrews and vertical loops in the metal contraption that it was possible to completely lose yourself in the high-speed journey. One day, the ride had a technical malfunction, and the passengers got stuck upside-down. Natasha was one of those unfortunate passengers, and although the torture didn't last very long, it was still painful to feel all the blood escape from her body and sit in her head as though her cranium were a coconut filled with water. Now she was feeling the same exact thing as she tried to process the fact that her best friend had been horifically slaughtered by brutal Death Eaters without her protection.
Her hands started trepidating. The smile she had shown before now shrank back within her, and that dreaded emptiness began to spread again. The dementors were far away, but it felt like they were still there, floating above her.
There was a cooing sound coming from the opened window to her right. There, drenched in the rain, stood a snowy white owl that Natasha knew all too well.
Her lips began to quiver. Ginger stared at her as though she had taken the place of the creature's previous owner. How the bird had escaped its cage, she would never know, but she did understand why she had appeared in this place. It was something she didn't want to think about at the moment. She would just go take the bird and put it in the owlery or something. She would get Ginger out of the rain...
Slowly, her battered boots touched the stone floor. She was strong enough to walk, but not strong enough to keep the soul-sucking emptiness out of her stomach. A whirlpool of rage stirred within her mind, and every small step she took, the more violent it swirled. There was a prickly sensation forming behind her eyes again. She put one foot forward, and then another, and then another. By the time she was halfway to Ginger the owl, the weight of world had decided that it would no longer support her shaky balance. She slumped to the floor, her knees touching the ground, her weak fists pounding into the stone, and a loud cry of defeat penetrating through her dry lips.
And then it all came out. All of the despair she had been supressing throughout Gideon's entire conversation. A waterfall of tears exploded through her eye sockets, running down her cheeks and onto the floor. Her nose gushed a violent red color, and her hair started to frizz. This girl breaking down in the infarmary was completely different from the smiling, insensitive metamorphmagi people had come to know and love throughout the years. Her pettrifying wails filled up the entire room - they were loud enough to echo throughout the whole castle if the doors had not been shut.
"I'm sorry, Rose," she kept muttering through staggered, tear-stained breaths, "I'm so, so sorry..."
Her face buried itself into the ground, where the last of her sniffles and sobs disentigrated until they were barely audible. The bird in the windowsill just continued to stare at her, none of her howls seeming to make an impression on the creature's one-track mind.
Time slowed. The sound of rain filled the room again. Wheezing the last of her immediate emotions, Natasha Daggerman unsteadily sat herself upright. The way she still slumped, it almost appeared as though she would topple over and land in a makeshift fetal position. However, it seemed as though in that moment, she was being suspended by invisible strings.
She stared into space. Space, in all its cruelty, did not stare back. There was a void, and it completely consumed her.
"...I swore to protect her," she silently muttered, "I swore that I'd keep Rose safe. I swore that no bullies or enemies would ever harm her. Her life was so cold and dark already...she didn't need any more torture..."
The way her eyes were trained on the wall, it was hard to tell whether or not she was speaking to Stephen, or thin air.
"When I was enrolled in the Salem Institute, these girls challenged me to a knife fight simply because they hated me and they hated where I came from, and they particulary hated my powers," she said. "I was just sleeping the the dormitory only to be woken up and stunned right there, in the middle of the carpet. They thought it would be funny to drag me to the dungeons and force me into a battle with the headmistress's daughter. We used these real thin daggers of course...no wands, only daggers for a girl with the unfortunate last name of Daggerman..."
She wrapped her arms around her knees, gradually rocking back and forth. The whole world moved along with her.
"They dragged my friend, Carlie, down there too...she was blind and deaf and I was her friend simply because she needed one. No one understood that even though she couldn't see or hear, she was still a person. I should have known they would drag her into the chaos...the girls had been sending me messages about what was coming for days. There were messages and rumors and other omens...I can't believe I was so stupid not to think anything of them..."
She was choking on her emotions. Soon, another round of tears would be flowing down her face.
"Anyways...when the fight was over, they put a knife up to her neck so that I'd be forced to keep going. I refused, and instead they showed me mercy in the form of trapping me underneath the floorboards for the night. And then when the teachers finally found me in the morning, I was called straight to the headmistress's office. They'd spared my life, but they hadn't spared Carlie's...She had been stabbed multiple times in the chest. In the middle of the night, the girl who fought me had told her mother that I had senselessly murdered Carlie in the dungeons, and then right before I was about to go on a rampage, they had found a way to trap me underneath the floorboards...so that I wouldn't be a threat...so that I wouldn't harm any more people..."
She got up onto her two feet, slowly approaching Stephen's bed. With mirth and dread, she angrily snickered.
"Well of course the headmistress believed that bullshit story...it was made up by her precious daughter. The ministry, however, did not. I went to trial and they found me innocent of all of charges. Still, the headmistress decided to banish me from the grounds even though I had done nothing wrong. I didn't mind being expelled. That was the part I didn't mind...the part I did mind was the part where I had not forseen any of the gruesome events coming, and had been so stupid as to take rapid, unplanned actions...all leading up to Carlie's death..."
Emotionlessly, she sat down next to Stephen. "That's why I chose to be sorted into Vulpes instead of Ferres when I came here...I wanted to be smarter...make better, more intelligent choices...It's something I regret and don't regret at the same time..."
Her hands tightened together to form one big fist that she steadily placed on her knees. Uncomfortably, her fingers twisted and turned. "So when I met Rose and saw the things that she was going through, I knew I had to protect her. I knew I had to make things right for her, because if I didn't, the possibility of something terrible would undoubtedly fall upon her..."
She produced a small sniffle. "And then I left her alone on the boat in order to go save you, and now here we are. My decision, ultimately, has cost me her life. Turns out no matter what I try do to prevent it, my stupidity will always get the best of me..."
Again, she could feel hot tears form beneath the backs of her eyes. She was deadly silent for a few moments, staring at the ground, trying to find the right words in the cold depths of her broken brain to utter next. And she knew what she wanted to say. And she hated what she wanted to say. But she thought that since she had already gone this far, she might as well say it already.
"And you know what's the worst, most terrible, most vile thing about all of it?" she said. Natasha inhaled a shaky, unstable breath. "Despite how much I love Rose and despite how much I wish I could wind back the clock and save her life...I don't completely regret the choice that I made on the ship."
It was in that moment she stared at Stephen with blue eyes that told him everything. Her eyes told him how she looked upon him as though he were a perfect pane of glass, shimmering in the light despite the fact that he appeared fragile. Silently, salty droplets began to pour down her cheeks again. The way her face shined from all the tears, it was though she had been misted by the heavy raindrops that heavily fell outside.
And it was in that moment, while she was at her lowest point, that Natasha rested her head upon Stephen's shoulder. Her eyelids were gently closed in defeat. If not for the dwindling tears, anyone would have thought she was sleeping. She did not know Stephen Schwarz well enough to call him a good friend. He probably did not know her well enough, either. But the fact of the matter remained that she just needed a shoulder to cry on. Because right now, she doubted she could ever lift her heavy head back up again.
RPG
