These Violences We Crave

Synopsis

In this dark retelling of Hogwarts Legacy, Sebastian Sallow embarks on a dangerous mission to save his sister and acquire the cursed relic, Promissum Mortis. Sebastian crosses paths with Livia Novik, the enigmatic new Ravenclaw student that possesses a sinister gift. Bound by their shared purpose, they become allies, their fates intertwined as they unravel the secrets of the Collector, the dark presence that lives in the Room of Requirement and feeds on intense emotions. Forced by the Collector to endure unimaginable ordeals and even to lure and torment fellow students, Sebastian and Livia tread a treacherous path in their pursuit. As they navigate a realm of arcane might and hidden horrors, the sacrifices demanded are only the reflection of the innermost violences they both crave.

Release schedule: Updates daily.

Disclaimer: "These Violences We Crave" is a dark retelling of the events of Hogwarts Legacy. The plot, characters, as well as the lore of the Harry Potter universe, have been altered to adapt the story to more mature audiences and to serve the theme. New additions will be listed and explained in the story notes.

The Harry Potter universe belongs to JK Rowling. The character of Livia Novik, as well as other original characters, are my own. Their opinions do not reflect JK Rowling's opinions. Warning: This is a work of fiction borne of my twisted mind merely to entertain myself. As such, it is not suitable for all audiences.

If any of the following are something you cannot contend with right now, please refrain from reading and think of your own mental heath first (this list will be edited as the possible triggers are encountered): death, cannibalism, taboos, gore, torture, violence, sex, psychological trauma, drug use.

Song list: We Are, by Hollywood Undead.

Ominis | Hogwarts, Early October, 1893.

The Room of Requirement has many seams, all of which Ominis spoors with the tip of his wand first, then with the pad of his fingers.

Aside from the standing mirror—that he is careful not to touch, for he knows this is how the entity gathers precious information on his marks—the room harbors a timeworn mahogany wainscoting, curls of flaking wallpaper and a kingdom of cobwebs lorded over by broods of scuttling spiders.

Cleaving through the stringy meshwork with his wand, Ominis searches and prods and pricks for a loose stitch in the Collector's cunning tapestry.

Soon, Sebastian and Livia will return from their trip to Hogsmeade and Ominis isn't eager to confess his solitary visits to the Room of Requirement.

Three he has made so far. Not only to poke holes in the veil of ignorance, but also to find a way to prevent entry to the Collector's twisted realm altogether.

If the entity can spin a nightmare on the loom of bliss, what can it weave with more sinister emotions?

For an hour, the Slytherin follows knots in the wood to inevitable dead ends; presses against the weathered paneling in search of a hidden contraption that could shift the walls; gropes his way along barbed edges and errant splinters, sighing in annoyance at his lack of success.

And when he is ready to surrender and plod back to the dungeons, his wand pierces through a crumbling plank and hits something with a thud.

Ripping chunks of decaying wood from the wall by the handful, Ominis digs until his fingers land on the spine of a book. His heart caroming in his chest, he pulls it from its improvised shelf, then sits on the floor, peeling it open onto his lap, his wand roving about the page.

Nothing.

His wand pulses feebly against the virgin surface, revealing no etches in the pulp, no pen grooves.

The book is misplaced. Has it been planted there by the Collector to toy with them?

Dragging a thumb along the leather, Ominis quests his mind in search of an explanation, but his conclusions are scant.

Livia described the drove of fingerprints staining the mirror's surface, and it is obvious other students brushed with the Collector the same way they did, which tells Ominis the sundry might belong to one of them.

But it also begs the question: who else at Hogwarts—or beyond—knows about this entity?

Ominis uproots himself from the dusted floor, then ambles out of the room, making for the dungeons with the strange book in tow.

He will stuff it under his pillow and, when the time is right, will interrogate the Mimic at length about it.

But for now, he walks back to the dungeons, his thoughts astir, scrolling by clumps of students and meandering ghosts and flocks of birds as they settle in the eaves for the night.

Outside, the storm is hollering, lapping at the sashed windows, and when Ominis makes it back to the shelter of his dorm, he settles before his desk, then scrounges through his drawer for a curl of virgin paper he endeavors to smooth before filling with letters.

Dear Mr. Dovetail,

My name is Ominis Gaunt. I am an eighth-year student at Hogwarts.

My friends and I gained access to the Room of Requirement through the method you described in your book. Within, we have encountered a sinister entity that branded itself as the Collector.

The presence asked to feed on our emotions in exchange for granting us an object we covet. Once, it has fed on our bliss, leaving us relatively unscathed, but despite the outcome of this first trial, I doubt the entity's motives are benevolent. My friends consider partaking in the leechings, but I know dabbling with this Collector is perilous.

I do not know what I expect from you, Mr. Dovetail, but if you have any information on this Collector, I would be indebted to you if you could share them with me.

With my sincerest regards,

Ominis Gaunt.

* * *

The storm has long thinned into a mizzle when Sebastian makes it back to their dorm. He brings with him the smell of sodden wool, the funk of soot, and a scud of bitterness that fogs over the room.

"How was your jaunt?" Ominis asks him, aware of Sebastian's festering mood.

A cloak puddles onto the floor; a sigh strangle out of a cinched throat. "You invited Livia to the ball."

Not a question. A statement. The kind meant to bludgeon.

"She said yes," is all Ominis offers as an explanation. "If she was yours, she wouldn't have accepted."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means she can make her own decisions," Ominis points out, his mood putrefying likewise. "She doesn't belong to me—or to you, for that matter—if she asks me to release her from her promise, I will, but if she won't, I'll go to the ball with her."

"I knew something happened during the leeching," Sebastian says, releasing, at last, the chimeras he gave shape to in his mind from their bony prison. "She was part of your bliss, wasn't she? Why?"

How Ominis aches to tell Sebastian what it was like to hold her in his arms, or share a slice of peace with her under the celestial canopy of the forsaken garden, or feel the silk of her skin against his palm, but instead he shakes his head, a gossamer line running across his forehead. "Why was she part of yours, Sebastian?"

"Don't deflect the question back to me. You always wiggle out of confrontation because you can't stand the fucking heat."

"What is this truly about, then?" Ominis snarls, the delivery resolutely sharp. "Let me paint the picture for you, Sebastian." He tilts his head, contempt bleeding through his features. "You're scared I have a chance with her, so you show some teeth the minute you feel her slipping away from your grasp. Am I getting hot?" He doesn't wait for an answer before notching another arrow and letting it loose. "You saw us at the lake when she peeled the shirt off my back. You heard her joke around with me in the Undercroft. You're angry I got closer to her than you ever did and now you pathetically ask me to back down. Well I won't."

Sebastian gives an arrogant scoff. "You're wrong on that account, Ominis. I kissed her today, and she reciprocated in full."

The blow lands.

It isn't the hurt that knifes right through Ominis' heart, it's watching the handful of elated memories rot and fall away from his clutch.

Was their time at the lake a lie?

Livia's touch on his skin felt real enough.

Was their moment in the derelict garden a ploy?

Her smile did blossom under this touch.

Was her answer to his request just another falsehood?

Her consent was eager enough.

His jaw tightening, Ominis shakes his head. "You're petty, Sebastian. Imelda was right about that."

"Then join the fucking club," Sebastian bites out, before setting to rummaging through his sundries.

There is the sound of mistreated leather as Sebastian yawns his trunk open, then the hiss of clothes being wrested from a dresser. Books are piled. Drawers are plundered. Hangers are stripped.

He is packing.

"Where are you going?" Ominis asks.

"Why does it fucking matter?" Sebastian shoots back.

Ominis knows he should be pleading with his friend.

But he is spent; smoked to cinders.

For once, he doesn't want to bend to the Slytherin's juvenile impulses.

For once, he'll let him go.

Sebastian lugs his trunk to the door, then yanks it open.

Before he can exit, Ominis angles his face to him, his anger still smoldering behind his cheeks. "I won't be participating in the Collector's other leechings."

He has toyed with the notion for many nights now, laying awake in his bed, tearing scenarios asunder.

If he is ensnarled in the Collector's schemes, he won't be able to pull his friends from its skein.

No.

He will hunt for answers in Hogwarts' murkiest corners.

Sebastian stops under the threshold. The words he serves Ominis are sharp with disdain. "Not even to protect your new flame?"

"I can protect her through other means," Ominis retorts. "Sometimes it's not about indulging someone, Sebastian. Sometimes it's about making the right decision for them."

"How chivalrous of you," Sebastian derides. "But I think you misunderstand her, Ominis."

"Enlighten me."

"She isn't the fragile little thing you think her to be."

Ominis wants to tell him Livia isn't the one he thinks fragile, but something keeps him from adding another score of blemishes on their bruised friendship.

Yet, the next words that leave him—even though intended to make Sebastian snap out of his delusion—only draw more strychnine from the injured Slytherin. "You're on your own, Sebastian."

"I've been from the start, Ominis," Sebastian spits back. "Your friendship was always conditional."

"And yours dependent on assent."

The trunk hisses out of the room and the knob squeaks softly in its socket. Sebastian lingers for another moment, then parts with two words that feel like a severance. "Goodbye, Ominis."

A period, not a comma.

A cut, not a bruise.

"Goodbye, Sebastian."

A candle snuffed out in their darkest hour.

Author's notes

I'm going out of town for 3 days on a little escapade with my mom, which means I'll be either drunk in a ditch or capering along, so I will most likely not have time to write. I'm coming back on Thursday, however, and I intend on making it up to you by posting our next leeching. 👀

Song list: Confetti (Piano Version), by Charlotte Cardin. 

Livia | Hogsmeade, Early October, 1893.

How breathtaking the pageant of October. As Livia and Sebastian follow the cobblestone path leading to Hogsmeade, fall dons its richest colors; a last gasp of life before the flaying of winter.

The wind is crisp, and the scent of petrichor it carries heralds humid days. Braiding through a milky blue sky, scores of gray clouds coalesce, marching like an army above the emerald hills, rolling on each side of them. There will be rain. The bone-chilling sort. Yet Sebastian walks without a scarf, without gloves, without an ounce of apprehension for the gathering trouble.

"You're lagging behind, new girl," he teases her as she slows her pace to take in the vertiginous spires of Hogwarts in the distance. The lake surrounding the castle is bright as a scrying pool in the watery sunlight, the limbs of the forest encroaching on it, looking charred from this distance.

"One would think sleeping in the same room would award you a less depersonalizing nickname," Livia jests back, passing the Slytherin whose smirk sends a lick of heat on her nape.

He catches up to her in one stride. "What did you expect? Tossing One? Sleeping Beauty?"

The latter blooms in her ribs like a gulp of plum kvass. Her lips curl. "I don't toss."

"How do you know?"

"I slept with other boys, and they never complained."

Sebastian's walk stutters. Livia doesn't look at him, but she can easily imagine his brows meeting in the middle. "Other boys? How many?"

"A cortege," she sneers.

"Are you serious?"

"I thought you picked up on sarcasm, Sebastian Sallow," she replies. "Has the Collector messed with your ability to delight in my japes? If so, I'll have a second request for the Promissum Mortis." She turns to him, her eyes tapering. "How many girls have you had? Or rather, how many girls are still left to go?"

He raises a brow, a half-smile creeping on his chin. "Why do you think me such a flirt?"

Training her attention back on the road ahead, Livia cannot help but laugh. "Deflecting a question with another one. Using my own tactics against me, Sebastian Sallow?"

For the rest of their journey, they ease back into a familiar banter; a slight comfort Livia is eager to shrug into after their time in the Undercroft.

In truth, the night she and Sebastian spent in the castle's entrails still visits upon her its small agonies, tailing her when dusk bleeds into night and night into dawn, and it is as if her brain, in its coveted martyrdom, has set to iterating different scenarios to torture her with.

Sebastian climbing onto her bed, fisting the fabric of her shirt, and pulling her to him until they share a single mouth, or him snaking under her blankets, pushing her legs apart and pulling her close until she sits on his tongue.

And ever since, Livia wakes in her own bed, a snarl of bedsheets grinding between her thighs, wetness puddling in her underwear.

The words the Collector picked for her paddle to the surface of her mind.

The hellscapes your mind designs to torment you are most... singular, Livia Novik.

Perhaps the entity is right in its assertion. Perhaps Sebastian Sallow is just that: a purgatory devised for her—her own personal brew of misery.

Hogsmeade purrs with noises and swells with people, and everywhere Livia looks there is a vendor selling honey apples or mulled cider or cauldron cakes, but she has no appetite for the sweets (unlike Sebastian who stuffs his pocket full of Fizzing Whizbees). Instead, she needles through the clusters of students and village dwellers, bound for Gladrags Wizardwear.

Livia is relieved to leave the bustle and the rain-charged air of the outside for the warm dryness of the tailor, and it's only when she walks up to the counter and asks the shopkeeper for her order that Sebastian understands why he sits on a damasked meridian instead of a barstool inside the Three Broomsticks.

"Tired of wearing blue?" He asks her when the shopkeeper pulls a bespoke juniper-green dress from a ribboned box.

Standing before the looking-glass, Livia holds the garment against her chest, appraising the needlework on the bust, the rhinestones stitched on her corset, the velvet bows, the layers of green tulle spilling from a tapered waistline.

"Would you like to try it on, Miss?" The tailor asks her, and she looks at Sebastian.

He sits, a leg thrown over his knee, a hail of discarded wax candy wrappings on his lap, his eyes oily with interest. "By all means," he tells her.

So the tailor pulls a folding screen and Livia enterprises to shrug out of her clothes and slide into the dress. When all the ribbons are tied and the tulle smoothed into submission, Livia hails the tailor from behind her screen.

"It's perfect," she tells the man when he drifts within earshot. "I'll take it."

"I want to see it," Sebastian asserts, and Livia bites into her lip when his tone teases the memory of their time in the maze.

The Collector's trial, however, is not the only thing that has her heart in a vise. She has kept her secret about the ball close to her chest, scrounging for a perfect moment and watching it winnow away with the steady beats of student life.

In truth, Livia fears Sebastian's reaction the same way she fears handling her father's glasses. She isn't worried about the cracks she could drive on the surface of their friendship; she fears the leap forward it will inevitably make, for it will be his ultimatum: to cross the bridge or to burn it, and Livia is safer standing in the middle, where the ripples of her life are the weakest.

Taking a deep breath, she steps out of the folding screen's privacy. Sebastian's eyes rim with white at her sight, his lips gaping and his piece of candy suspended in a state of half-nakedness Livia can very much empathize with.

"You know," he says after snapping out of his trance, "for a Ravenclaw, you look awfully good in Slytherin colors." A half-smile careens on his lips. "Remind me to dress you in my cloak more often."

She raises a brow, his brazenness finding the dents in her armor as easily as notched arrows. "Dress me?"

He gives a shrug. "I'll do it, if you ask nicely."

"I wonder if Garreth also has ostentations conditions," she retorts. "I look just as good in red."

Indulging for a moment in the pretty colors she paints on Sebastian's cheeks, Livia finally retreats into the seclusion of the folding screen to change back into her clothes.

When they leave the shoppe, the likeliness of rain has long changed into a promise, cutting their jaunt short, so they set to walking back to the castle.

"I'll take this," Sebastian says before snagging the package from her arms as they cross the bridge.

"If only I had arms of my own," she jests.

For minutes, they walk in peace as two masses of dark clouds tramp lazily towards each other. The air is charged with the wet scent of distant downpours, the spice of saw dust wafting from the mill they pass.

But Livia should've heeded the signs. She should've known that peace is a brittle thing, when Sebastian asks her: "What is the dress for?"

Her teeth skate against her bottom lip. "All Hallows Eve ball."

She sees him struggle with a snarl of thoughts until he dares giving them a voice: "Are you going with someone?"

Livia's eyes train on a single droplet of rain as it careens down Sebastian's cloak. She watches it circle around the embroidered blazon, then imagines herself in the grips of the very same snake as it tightens around her lungs like a deadly corset. "I'm going with Ominis."

Sebastian freezes.

They stand, idle, on a winding path nestled between a sparse copse of trees and a ruined cottage with a crumbling roof. The silence is stuffy with unspoken questions, the mizzle developing slowly, but steadily.

Sebastian's eyes hook on her. "Did he ask you?"

"Yes."

"Why did he?"

The clouds weep their pent up folly now. The rain has fattened so suddenly, Livia walks up to him and wrests the package out of his grip, making for the timeworn cottage.

He follows.

She knew he would.

The floor is littered with mangled bricks where a fringe of wall collapsed and a fireplace stands under the roof, a circle of black grime laying before the dead grate, as if retched out by the chimney. There is a square dining table rotting away, a porcelain sink half-ripped from the wall, a patina of dust on the floorboards.

She sets the package on the table, then stuffs her fingers into her mouth, her teeth ripping at hangnails until the taste of wet copper slides onto her tongue.

"Why did you say yes?" Sebastian interrogates her.

He stands a few paces away, but his anger almost sizzles when a trickle of rain falls onto his shoulder from a hole in the roof.

She whirls, her cheeks feverish. "Why are you angry about this? I don't belong to you, Sebastian Sallow! You don't have a say in who I spend my time with."

He inches closer, his soft brown eyes now coal-black in the dim light of the storm. "Then why did you tell me you saw me in the face of every stranger you meet, Livia? Why did you ask me to stay with you in the Undercroft? Why did you lean into my touch in the maze instead of pushing me away?"

She wants to tell him that everything was a lie. How simpler it would be to slide her knife through the bramble and loosen the vines from her neck.

How simpler it would be to squeeze her eyes shut at night and sleep a dreamless slumber, or walk through the castle courtyard without seeing his face in the puddles scattered in her way, or to forget about their chase in the maze or their night in the Undercroft, where she watched him slide out of his shirt as he thought her asleep.

How simpler it would be if she had not ventured in the dungeons and he had never spoken his name to her.

But things are never simple; their snarl, seldom easy to slip, and in this moment, all Livia can offer in the face of Sebastian's ire is another sprinkle of cynicism. "I thought you weren't yourself during the chase in the maze..."

"Don't change the subject," he bits out.

"You're going with Poppy. What does it matter if I go with Ominis?"

"You're the only one I wanted to go to the ball with!" He snarls, before his voice morphs into bitterness. "Poppy took me by surprise. I was stupid to accept. Now I can't back away without breaking her fucking heart..."

Livia relents a scoff. "Neither can I back away from my promise, Sebastian."

The rain thuds against the windows now. It finds the cracks in the mortar and sidles through the gutted walls.

For what appears like an eternity, Sebastian mulls over his next reply, before his blanched knuckles ease out of their tension and the pleats in his freckled forehead soften.

He errs closer to her. His irises are no longer charcoal-black, his mouth no longer warped in a scowl, his cheeks no longer as flushed.

Sandalwood, bergamot, citrus, amber. A lot of rain. And somewhere, underneath his smell, she finds hers.

His voice is different when he speaks to her. It is imploring. "Would you have backed away if you could?"

"I-" The excuse dies in her throat as soon as he brushes a thumb on her cheek. His touch is warm—scorching—amidst the chill the rain carried along with it. "Maybe."

The hypothesis is enough to soothe his anger, and he draws dangerously close. So close, in fact, that Livia is persuaded he can make the throb of her heart in so narrow a gap.

His fingers slide past her ear and melt into her hair, and she cannot help but ease into his touch. Like in the maze, Livia tilts her head up, but instead of a ravenous entity wrenching him from her arms, she only faces Sebastian's playful smirk. "See?" He teases. "Maybe you do belong to me, new girl..."

She bucks slightly at the pique, but he unfurls his fingers in the small of her back, pressing her closer.

"I don't do well in a cage, Sebastian Sallow," she whispers.

"What if we call it a shelter instead?"

He crosses this inch of distance between them like it is a papery thing, and when he takes her lips, he does it fully.

Hungrily.

Sebastian tastes of sugar and sun, but kisses like the storm, and when she capitulates a soft whimper, he claws her closer, his teeth skittering along her bottom lip.

A coy pain effloresces in her back as his fingers bruise into the gaps in the lace of her corset, and it takes no more for Livia to surrender to this beautiful empire, her arms twining behind his head, deepening their embrace.

Already, the place between her thighs pulses with ache.

Already, she is silky wet for him, and feels as if he will taste the desire on her tongue and know how thin her will is when he kisses his way into her armor, and when she tugs away to crawl back into her shell, he reels her closer as if he wants her to stand in this falling shack just as soulfully naked as he is.

Outside, the storm hisses and growls, throwing blades of water against the windows.

But inside, they contend with a much fiercer squall, and when Sebastian guides her towards the wall and flattens her back against it, his tongue sliding back into her mouth, she knows she would weather his tempest if it meant swallowing another mouthful of this—

Bliss.

Her heart swollen, she smiles against his lips and glimpses a pocket of light; a faint thing that flitters in the tail-end of her eye, out of focus, until it sharpens and she makes a ghostly outline in the dim lucence of the cottage.

A boy with no hair, no brows and burn scars idles in the middle of the room.

Laurence.

* * *

Her brother stands under a curtain of rain. The strings of water fall right through him, pooling on the floorboards.

Livia cannot move, and the second the taste of her desire is replaced with this of fear, Sebastian peels away from her, his gaze roving on her face. "What is it, Livia?"

Gently, she pushes him aside, then walks to her brother, her hand extending to his cheek.

Her fingers cross right through him. The imprint he leaves on her is colder than it ever was.

"Laurence, what is it?"

His lips part to form words, but there is no sound but this of the rain.

"Who are you talking to?" Sebastian asks, drifting close to her.

She angles her face to him, frowning. "Don't you see him? My brother?"

The Slytherin follows her gaze to where the ghost of Laurence stands, but never focalizes on his outline.

Sebastian doesn't see him.

"Why can't you talk?" Livia presses her brother, as if she senses his presence in this cottage is just as fickle as spider silk. "Laurence, why can't you talk anymore?"

His lips move again, but no sound comes out, and sorrow pulls at his eyelids.

The sight breaks Livia's heart, and she gropes to touch her brother's shoulders, as if she can find her answer in the ethereal shell, but her gesture swirls the mist of his presence away.

Laurence's arms fall, his chest churns into nothingness, his face winnows away...

And just like that, her brother is gone.

A curl of fog. A trick of the light.

A flittering hope, in-between two lashes of thunder.

Author's notes

Song list: Empty, by PVRIS.

Ominis | Hogwarts, Early October, 1893.

A boy is given a memory to cherish. It isn't the kind you trap in a frame, but the kind you water with moments spent reliving it; the kind you prune with care so the weeds won't strangle it.

Yet one day, the boy wakes to an overgrown garden, and amidst the brier and the conquering ivy, the memory is curled onto itself, browned and wilted and dead.

Everything dissipates.

The water in a pond. The pain from a wound. A slab of dark clouds eclipsing the sun.

A memory.

For two days, Ominis only leaves his room to attend his classes, and even then, his body sits on a chair, but his attention meanders to the things he abandoned in the Room of Requirement.

At first, he is angry with Livia for manipulating him into joining the first leeching—for her display at the lake can be nothing else than that. This is now apparent to him. But then, even this dissipates, and ire sublimates into fear.

Fear to forget what it is like to belong. Fear to forget what it is like to see. Fear to forget what Livia looks like.

It is only on the third day Ominis realizes the green in her eyes has desaturated, the darkness of her hair has dimmed, her smile has etiolated.

Now she lives, a mangled vision, in a corner of his brain where she will rot beyond recognition, and one day, the dance with her will be a timeworn tapestry, riddled with holes and torn seams, and she will become an impoverished sensation; a watery afterthought.

Everything fades, and everyone dies twice. First, when life leaves their body, then when memory fails those they left behind.

Ominis told Sebastian about his ordeal. There was no way he'd weather the stubborn Slytherin's inquisition without caving. He would do anything, however, to evade Sebastian's pity, and crawl back into the shell of solitude to lick his wounds, but his friend hauls him along until one day Ominis pretends he is coming down with a terrible headache and cannot make it to Potions class.

And that day is the day Livia Novik also chooses to skip class to visit him.

As soon as he opens the door, he can smell this exhalation of vanilla and blackcurrant, noses the faint scent of dust from the books she read, the heady funk of ink from the quill she held.

"Can I come in?"

Wordlessly, he pivots to let her inside his bedroom, then shuts the door behind them. There is the faint groan of the mattress; the squeak of the hinges on his bed.

He leans against his desk, endeavoring to smooth the crinkles in his trousers as if he is suddenly made aware Livia can—and will—note all of his imperfections now that he isn't trussed in a tailored suit and a silken cravat. "How did you make it inside the Slytherin common room?"

"I used to Mimic. Pointed it at Sebastian and had it tell me the password."

"You're too clever for this world, you know that?"

She sheds a chuckle. "It's my curse, Ominis Gaunt."

His tone darkens. "Yeah, we all have one."

"I'm sorry about it all, Ominis," Livia says, her voice bleak. "I saw what you experienced in the manor. If I knew, I wouldn't have—"

"Manipulated me into doing it?"

An agitated silence cotters between them. It is laced with unease.

How much did she see?

Could she pick apart his desires from the display? Did she eye all of his fears as they hung on the walls of his illusion alongside his family portraits?

Ominis wonders how Livia managed to strip him of both his shirt and his secrets; how deft she is at skinning others while donning a thicker armor.

"We all manipulate," Livia replies, and there is no contempt in her words, just the cold steel of candor. "By nipping my actions in ill-intent, you hope to use guilt to get the truth from me. This is a way to manipulate, isn't it?" He hears the bed creak again, and he cannot help his heart cantering into his throat, knowing that she is getting closer. "The afternoon we spent at the lake was not a performance, Ominis. I wasn't feigning laughs; I could never enact a moment so peaceful with all the storms that have been raging in my head. I might have told you to stay out of it in the hopes of having you insist on partaking, but everything else I said was true."

She leans next to him, and in this permanent darkness of his, he can see her materialize again; pictures her fingers trapped in his, the curve of her neck laced in midnight blue velvet, the coy smile she graces him with when he spins her around, the fragility he would've never imagine her to display if he hadn't seen her with his own eyes.

Aside from her family and the Collector's legion of faceless dancers, Livia is the first person Ominis ever laid his eyes on.

And now she is the first smile he ever starved for. The first eyes he ever looked through for a figment of soul that her scent, her touch, her taste could never relent.

How could he hold bitterness into his chest when she gave him the opportunity to sample a part of her?

"Your face is fading away," he whispers, as if an octave higher could cut right through the moment. "I tried to keep it inside of me like a breath until the sight would burn itself inside of my brain, but it doesn't hold. It isn't losing my eyesight again that eats me from the inside, Livia. It's being robbed of the glimpses of bliss I was awarded in there."

She coils her fingers around his forearm, the smile in her words like a living, breathing thing. "Come, the day is warm. Let's go out."

He raises a brow. "We'll get caught for missing class."

"Some things are worth a little trouble," she replies. "Besides, these little crimes we avow ourselves make for the best memories, wouldn't you say?"

Returning her smile, Ominis lets her lead him through the castle's loneliest corridors until they cross through a door under a warmish sun.

The sound of the grass underfoot is foreign, so is the blend of smells eddying around them. Pine, stagnant water, decaying flowers, dry leaves, the nitrous scent of a storm rolling in the distance.

"Where are we?"

Livia guides his hand to a slope chiseled in stone. He follows the curve upwards, across a neck, then a hand holding a feminine chin, a nose, eyes, and eyebrows.

A statue.

"I don't know what this place is," she tells him. "It looks like a garden left in disarray behind a door which knob is just as spotless as the day it was hammered into the wood. Right now, it looks very much like a place in-between."

"In-between what?"

He imagines her shrugging at that, picturing her green eyes looking around to the dead flower beds, the ruined statues, the gnarled branches. "In-between seasons, most certainly. In-between owners, perhaps. In-between lovers or mischief-makers or peace-seekers."

His heart caroms in its sheath of muscles at the question he allows out of his lips: "Which one are we?"

She graces him with a shy giggle. He has never felt her so pensive, so reconciled. "Given we are missing class, I suppose we are first and foremost mischief-makers, but there is no reason why we should don only one cloak."

He angles his face to where her voice comes from. "Why did you bring me here, Livia?"

"The Collector couldn't feed on my bliss."

A gossamer line runs across his forehead. "Why not?"

There is sorrow lacing her words. "He told me I was too scant a meal in my current emotional state; that I owe him bliss when I will be able to experience it."

"Why did he feed on you, regardless?"

"I wanted to be with you and Sebastian when he did it. If there was a way, I could make it less... painful, I would've been there to do it. That is the first reason..."

An open sky breathes around them, but the second Livia steps in his vicinity, Ominis feels as if she has trapped him in a glass jar. His skin tingles as she draws closer, the air rolling in his throat thickening with the words he surrenders. "What is the second?"

She takes his hand and presses his fingers to her cheek. "So you could associate smells and textures to the fading image you have of me, and strengthen the memory."

Guiding his hand on her face, she helps him chart her traits. The sharp edge of her jaw, her peaked chin, her small nose, proud cheekbones, the silk of her eyelashes, the soft outline of her full lips...

And there it dawns on Ominis, the need to have something to himself. Something that isn't shared, imagined or stolen. "Do you want to come with me to All Hallows' Eve ball?"

He feels her cheek move up under his fingers. "Was I such a good dancer?"

"You were."

"How much do you remember of our dance?"

"Everything," he says without hesitation. "I meant everything I said to you, Livia. All the glimpses I stole of you—I intended those too."

He recognizes the signs of disquiet in the change in her breath pattern, yet she doesn't recoil from his touch. "I don't know if I can know bliss, Ominis. With anyone."

"Why don't you steal it?" He suggests, her skin blistering under the pad of his thumb. "These little crimes we avow ourselves make for the best memories, right?"

"You're not a bad partner in crime," she concedes, her bitterness gone in the blink of an eye. "Yes. I'll go to the ball with you, Ominis Gaunt."

"Good," he replies with a smile. "At least we'll have a secret place to retire to if the festivities get tiresome."

She gives a silvery chuckle. "Do they ever?"

Song list: Tabs, by Lights.

Sebastian | Hogwarts, Early October, 1893.

The Room of Requirement swallows them whole only to spit them out mentally fissured and drained of their vim.

Ominis is the first to pull through, and Sebastian follows not long after.

For long minutes, they steep in a spent silence, wordlessly smoothing the pleats of their misadventure.

What the fuck was that?

Sebastian curls a fist against his sternum in the hopes of nursing the phantom pain that lingers in the wake of the Collector's leeching.

Across from him, Ominis' palm closes around his neck, and he sheds a pained groan at the touch.

This process is painless, albeit uncomfortable.

The entity certainly needs a fresh reading of the dictionary.

"Are you all right, Ominis?" Sebastian asks after the hush has crossed the boundary of acceptability.

Ominis' jaw is corded, his eyes wandering.

He offers no reply.

Sebastian shakes his head, exhaustion flocking to the back of his skull. "I'm fine, thanks for asking," he jests glumly in the face of his friend's mutism.

Minutes stretch by, and after lassitude, Sebastian is visited by worry.

Where is Livia?

"Did you see Livia in there?"

"Did you?" Ominis snaps back, and the causticity of his retort gauges a neat line between Sebastian's brows.

"What fucking bit you?"

"The Collector," Ominis replies matter-of-factly.

"What happened to you in there, Ominis?"

"Nothing I want to talk about."

The next words Sebastian vomits in the hope of convincing his friend to relent his prideful secrets. "I saw Anne. She was cured—happy. We spent the evening on a balcony, sharing childhood memories... The next thing I knew, I was running through a hedge maze and I—" He pauses, smoothing the shameful edges in his story. "I stumbled upon Livia, and the Collector leeched on me, and I woke up here."

"I'm happy for you," Ominis offers, his tone just as bone-dry, and before Sebastian can think of venting his rising annoyance, Livia is hawked through the mirror and lands on all fours.

Sebastian clambers to her side, his hands steadying her. "Are you okay?"

Through the curtain of mussed dark hair comes a diffuse titter. Her arms shake violently, and Sebastian endeavors to coral her mane behind her shoulders.

When he has cleared the last strands from her cheeks, he is met with glazed viridian eyes and a heart-melting smile.

"Someone is in their euphoric stage," he teases her softly. She throws her head back and nearly bumps the mirror before Sebastian gathers her onto his lap. "Careful."

Her cheeks are flustered, her chest hoisting with the ample breaths she draws in. "Hmm... Sebastian..." She nuzzles his shirt, inhaling deeply. "You smell so good."

She is feverish against him, her heat burning right through his clothes.

Ominis gropes his way closer, pressing a wrist against her forehead. "We should bring her back to her dorm. She seems more affected than we are."

"Ominis?" Livia asks, her voice sluggish. Extending a hand, she accidentally grazes his lip, then lets out a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a moan; one that drills right through Sebastian's gut.

"I'm here, Livia," Ominis says, and her fingers trawl higher on the slope of the Slytherin's cheek. "We should get you to bed."

Sebastian doesn't wait for another excuse to rise to his feet and help Livia up, but her legs are wobbly, her will to stay up, watery. She slants against him, her head bobbing against his chest.

"I don't think she can make it to the Ravenclaw tower without alerting Mr Moon," Sebastian remarks.

"Where else do you want to bring her?"

Livia presses her head against Sebastian's shoulder, a song spilling from her lips. "Oi khodyt' son kolo vikon."

Sebastian turns to Ominis. "I'll bring her to the Undercroft."

"A drimota—kolo plota."

"The Undercroft?" Ominis' tone is still barbed, and Sebastian weathers it only for Livia's sake.

"Pytayet'sya son drimoti: A de budem nochuvaty?"

"You're in too shitty a mood for me to bring her to our dorm," Sebastian points out. "Besides, she'll wake up the whole dungeon if she keeps singing."

"Whatever," Ominis says. "I'm way too exhausted to argue with you."

"Yeah," Sebastian shoots back, "I noticed."

Without another word for his nettlesome friend, Sebastian scoops Livia into his arms. She is not particularly heavy, yet he feels the hindrance exhaustion has placed on his joints, and already his muscles burn.

He waits for Ominis to leave the Room of Requirement before making his way west towards the staircase.

Livia has stopped singing, and if he thinks her fast asleep, he is dead wrong. When they are halfway down the stairs, she slides her fingers in his hair, weaving a mesh of prickles on his scalp. His mind aches to ease into the gesture, but his body screams with the effort. Instead of giving in, Sebastian clenches his teeth, praying the pressure he sinks into his gum will keep him rooted in his purpose.

After many more stairs and another stretch of corridor, they finally stand before the hidden clockwork entrance of the Undercroft, and it is only then Livia speaks again.

"I saw you," she says softly as he taps the mechanism with his wand and waits for the gears to hiss out of their axles to let them in. "You're always there."

He is rooted before the yawning entrance. A touch of mold rises from the castle's belly. "Where, Livia?"

"Everywhere," she replies, her voice wispy and lethargic. "In the corner of every mirror. In the tail-end of my eye when someone brushes by. Behind every open book, or pillar, or disappearing through a closing door. Why are you the face of every stranger I meet, Sebastian Sallow?"

They linger. Her, bundled in his arms. Him, with his heart leaping against his ribs.

Why was she a part of the phantasm the Collector devised for him? How has she squirmed so close to his heart, in this secret place where only his sister dwells?

He chooses humor as his buckler, for even if she is the fragile thing huddled in his arms, she strips him down to his bones. "Boys with brown eyes and hair are a Knut a dozen in Scotland. I suppose it's an honest mistake."

He climbs down the stairs, then lights candles and conjures a bed from a stack of felled wooden crates. Lying Livia down on it, he brushes another lock of hair from her forehead as she eases into the feathery pillow.

Her eyes are dim with fatigue when she smiles to him. "Do you snore?"

"I-I'm not staying here. I should go back to the Slytherin common room."

"I'll squirm if I see a spider."

He cannot help but smile at her kiss-feeding his own words back to him. Even in the clutch of exhaustion, Livia Novik's wits are just as sharp. "What do you want me to do?"

Her fingers cling to his forearm, her hold frail, but obstinate. "Stay."

Without thinking, he thumbs her chin, and holds her gaze. Her eyes flutter, drooping with languor.

In a second, she will be fast asleep and in the morning, perhaps, she will have forgotten she even talked to him at all.

How he aches to shrug behind her and press his body against the outline of her own and feel her spine unfurl against his chest.

But this night belongs to the Collector and his twisted cravings, and Sebastian doesn't want an anemic consent, so he conjures another cot next to hers, sits on it, and endeavors to strip from his damp shirt. The pain is gone on his sternum. His skin is unblemished.

Was his ordeal even real?

It felt real enough.

Sebastian lets the garment puddle to the dusty floor, his lungs burning with the lack of energy, then slides between the sheets, chancing a glance to Livia who sleeps soundly.

Despite his listlessness, Sebastian cannot stop looking at her, and note how tranquil she looks.

When, at last, he snuffs the candles with one swing of his wand, he hears her toss on her bed. "Sebastian?"

"I thought you were sleeping," he replies, whispering. "You should rest, Livia."

The dark yields an agitated silence in response.

"How long does it take for a memory to dissolve?" She asks him after a while.

"What do you mean?"

"If I die, how long would it take for you to forget me?"

Something squeezes in his chest, coiling tight around his heart. The words he surrenders are teeming with worry. "I'll never forget you, and you won't die."

"But we all wane in the mind of others, even those who loved us the most..." He can sense her fright, how deep it runs, and it reaches him, as if its roots are sprawling from her bed and vining into his own. "Laurence was the only person on my mind until you walked into my life."

He wants to find the words or the gestures that can seal her cracks, and his mind churns and churns for them, until he is dizzy with frustration, and by the time he convinces himself to leave his bed and join hers, his slumber pulls him under and the moment winnows away.

* * *

There is no sun in the Undercroft. No strict sense of time, and when Sebastian wakes from his torpor, he cannot say how long he has slept for.

Livia is still there, except instead of drifting out of languor, she sits, cross-legged, her dark hair mossing over her shoulder.

He takes in the shade of purple stretching under her eyes, the fingers she gnaws at, how her shirt yawns open on a half-laced corset.

Her eyes glide to him. They are cracked through with pink. "What do you remember about the Collector's leeching?"

He dredges the last traces of slumber from his neck, then sits upright, the blankets sliding on his chest.

"Everything," he replies, and that much is true. "But it was as if I was intoxicated in some way. Out of my body..." A lick of shame squirms into his throat. "I'm sorry for how overbearing I was back there."

The last part is not as truthful. The desires manifested were his; the Collector only allowed them to roam, untethered. Maybe shedding his civility wasn't of Sebastian's own volition, but the beast that shrugged out of his skin is a familiar passenger.

He has dreamed the unholy passions he enacted in the maze: the feeling of her throat narrowing beneath his knuckles, the firmness of her croup against his swollen manhood, the impious mewl she relented in his magisterial care.

Which begs the question:

How many of her secret yearnings did Sebastian have a taste of last night?

She shoves her hands under her blanket, to prevent herself from peeling more hangnails. "It's not your fault," she says, her eyes avoiding him. "I-I don't think I was myself either..." She stands, buttoning her shirt, then sleeks her hair with her palm. "I think I'm late to Beast class."

"Livia," he interjects as she yanks the gate open. She turns to him, a mess of crinkled clothes and tired beauty. "Do you remember the conversation we had before you fell asleep?"

A shadow crawls over her face, but he doesn't know if it's just another stroke of tiredness or something else. "I'm sorry, I don't." She gives a cloudy chuckle. "I'm afraid I haven't been myself until I woke up this morning. I apologize to have put you through my senseless prattle, if that was the case. See you in class?"

It's as if she has hollowed him out of his pit, and all he can manage in response is a stiff nod before watching her leave the Undercroft.

He knows he should run back to his dorm, change, and head to class, but instead he climbs into Livia's bed, his heart empty and hurting, and coils in the shape she left in the sheets.

Author's notes

Sorry, not sorry, for breaking your heart in this one. 😈

At the request of a number of you for a therapy support group, I have created a little Discord server where you can discuss the fanfiction, support each other during hard times, as well as discuss anything related to Hogwarts Legacy or the art of writing!

Note that I'm still setting it up, but it ready enough for you to hop on there. 

Song list: Living in Another World, by Lights and Darkstars (Scene 1) | Trainwreck, by BANKS (Scene 2)

Livia | Hogwarts, Late September, 1893.

First Leeching — Bliss

Livia witnesses everything. Sebastian's soulful smile when he holds his sister against him. Ominis' luminous eyes as he takes his first quavering steps out of his blindness.

Her fingers pressed to the glass, she watches from a pitch-black room, thirsting for the same joys, yet denied them.

What she would relinquish to hold her own mirage, to drink in its oasis and quell her thirst. What she would surrender to touch her brother and find him warm instead of dead-cold, or to see her parents sit around the breakfast room table, varenikis heaped high on their plates and cherry kvass drawing red iridescent circles on the tablecloth.

But the Collector has decided otherwise, and when the images fade from the looking-glass, Livia feels his presence like a gathering thunderstorm.

Every particle is charged with electricity. Each notch of her spine straightening as if tutored by his company.

In the congested silence, she can hear his twine dragging onto the floor, and her skin bristles with goosebumps at the sole idea of it being attached to her flesh.

But how could he feed?

He has refused Livia her share of bliss.

"Why am I not trapped in an illusion of my own?"

The darkness constricts around her, as if she is being pushed down a titanic esophagus. She cannot make the entity's flailing tatters, but she can feel the gusts of air they send against her.

"You are not like them, Livia Novik." The voice brushes against her neck, less and less disembodied with every word. "Unlike your friends, you ache to die." Her chest heaves, the oxygen in the room rarefying. "Since your brother's death, you have been sleepwalking through this life, hanging by a thread, eager to cut yourself away from this world." Weightless fingers scuttle along her clavicles and tears coalesce in the pocket of her eyelids. "You cannot feel bliss, Livia Novik, even in the grip of illusion. You would make for a scant meal." At last, she relinquishes her sorrow, and water scorches a trail down her cheeks. "I will not feed on you today."

If she speaks, she will collapse onto herself; slip her bones; slough off her own skin and reveal the decay beneath.

Her fingers press against the glass, as if traces of Sebastian and Ominis can still be found within, between two grains of compressed sand.

But all she feels is the cold. The ever-clinging winter that lives inside of her.

The Collector's bony hands coil around her shoulders, the pointed ends of his fingers like knives upon her skin.

How easy it would be to cut herself on them, to watch her skin weep with blood and let life trickle out of her.

She could leave Sebastian and Ominis to their illusions; abdicate everything she has—all of her rage and her fear and her misery—to keep them trapped in a loop of eternal bliss.

Take everything I have, she longs to tell the entity, but her lips tremble violently, her heart thrashing in her corset. Take everything away.

A finger lands on her neck and Livia's breath hitches. The Collector's voice is no longer discarnate. It is avid. "The hellscapes your mind designs to torment you are most... singular, Livia Novik. You walk the tightrope of life and death, indifferent to the side you fall into, but one day, you will, and on that day, you will repay your debt to me."

A drop in an ocean. She owes so much already.

"Will they remember how happy they were?" She asks.

"They will lose what tangible things they have gained, but the memories will persist. Nothing can be permanent—as you asked—and I can only affect what you can touch with your fingers."

The cruelty of her friends' ordeal knifes deep in Livia's heart. She sees now that her limitation is a double-edged sword.

What isn't?

"I want to see them..." she begs the entity. "I want to be with them when you feed, and I want you to feed on me, too."

A nail mountains the slope of her neck, prickling her chin. "You have nothing to offer."

"I have despair by the plenty, Collector," she hisses, her own nails sinking into her palms.

The entity's fingers close around her jaw, his ridged gait settling on the crux of her back. There is no breath sidling through the Collector's words. There is no heart beating against's Livia's spine. It is as if death itself embraces her. "You want to share a moment of bliss with them..."

"If I cannot have the whole bottle. I will settle for a swig."

"The leeching will be long and painful."

"You said it yourself," she replies, steeled. "I walk a tightrope, and I don't care on which side I fall. Pain or pleasure; what difference does it make? They are one and the same."

"Why would you choose pain if you could avoid it?"

She sheds a dry scoff in response. "If you were human, you'd understand, but I'm afraid this is a riddle you cannot solve."

His grasp loosens, and a garish gleam blooms from the mirror, radiating outwards. The static of the Collector's squall builds up, developing like a storm. "Suit yourself, Livia Novik, but remember: this doesn't erase your debt."

"You are welcome to collect when the time comes," she says in defiance as the tempest of light hums around her. "I'm sure you got this name for a reason."

The last thing she sees is her own reflection falling apart.

* * *

Livia finds herself amidst a different turmoil, one billowing with consonant sounds, familiar textures and cogent light. Around her, silk skirts whirligig liberally, lavishly dressed men smoke pipes, servants comb through clusters of dancers and gossiping guests with silver trays clinking with glasses of champagne.

Her silhouette is trussed in a navy laced dress that leaves her back open and her waist tapered. The sleeves run up to her wrists, the embroidered lace crawls up to her jawline, the hemline stops at her ankles.

The Collector intended for her to dance.

With whom?

On the mezzanine, an invisible band conjures an energetic waltz that warbles through the room. The place is all crystal chandeliers with shivering white flames, velvets tumbling down the walls like shimmery tongues, florid light wainscoting, checkered marble floor and sashed windows behind which the night presses intently.

And with this handful of familiar sights, Livia is brought back to her family home in the Pecherskyi district, where her parents used to entertain Kyiv's finest wizarding society.

She almost expects to see Laurence perched on a windowsill, legs folded against him, a book balancing on his knees.

But there is no boy in the window, no disinterested reader, just an assertive gloom.

"May I have this dance?"

She recognizes Ominis' voice and turns to face him.

Gone are his lactescent pupils. Gone is the concern clouding his features. Gone is his Hogwarts uniform.

Instead, he is nipped in a black suit, a green silken bow tied around his neck, a handkerchief silk-stitched with his family crest folded neatly in his front pocket, his aurelian hair slicked and shiny.

His lips stretch into a smile, revealing pearly teeth as he proffers a hand that she can only accept.

Ominis presses a hand on her back, and leads her amidst the twains of dancers. His footing is precise, his movements balletic, his mien poised, and it's obvious to Livia that this waltz is not his first.

As the violins break into an allegro, he pulls her closer, his eyes prowling about her eyes, her cheeks, her lips.

"You're more beautiful than I pictured..." he says. "Sebastian's description didn't do you justice."

A shy warmth thrives behind her cheek as he elegantly spins her around the axis of his hand. Beckoning her back into his arms, he entices her closer—close enough for her to breathe a noseful of his perfume. Vetiver, sandalwood, neroli, myrrh. Her head swims as she basks in his proximity, her mind cruel enough to remind her how it felt to have his fingers curled around her thigh.

He comes to a stop, thumbing her cheeks, eyes charting her ridges and valleys as if to commit them to memory. His scrutiny is emphatic, stripping her bare, and she shrinks under its incisiveness, aware now of each faulty brush stroke composing her portrait.

Can he see through the varnish of her illusions?

Will he recoil in disgust at the sight of her scars?

His thumb grazes the soft skin under her eyes. "How haunting your eyes are, Livia." He travels across the expanse of her cheek. "How silky your skin is." Bound ever downwards, he brushes his finger against her lips, parting them with a slight pressure. "How inviting this mouth is..."

She doesn't know if he is utterly snarled in the Collector's delusion or if his sentiment is candid, but when he inches closer, all she can think about is how sweltering the pocket of air they share has become.

His hand unfurling on her back, he entices her closer. Her blood gushes to her temples, the oxygen in her lungs turning igneous as her fingers tangle in his shirt to break her advance.

In her engrossment she hasn't noticed the air festering with black clouds, and she has little time to process what is happening when the Collector's twine wraps around Ominis' chest.

Instinctively, she takes a step back, and watches, her stomach churning, the spiny teeth of the twine burrow into Ominis' neck, right below his left ear.

Eyes rolling to the back of his head, Ominis' feet leave the floor as he is caught in the web of an uncanny levitation.

Color leaches out of his flesh. His lips turn waxen. The gold in his hair melts away. His pupils fog and his eyelashes flitter as he blinks away the last dregs of his eyesight.

How ephemeral and poisonous the Collector's gifts.

At last, the twine loosens, leaving behind a perfect circle of nicks weeping a tar-black substance, and Ominis slumps to the floor.

Livia scrambles to his side, and when he opens his eyes, they are, once again, frosted through. Despite the bounty that was wrenched from his grasp, a smile buds on his lips, and he disgorges an eerie giggle.

Livia's fingers go to his injured flesh as it swells with the invasion he just suffered.

"Will it heal?" She presses the Collector. "You said there would be no physical consequences."

"The second he crosses back into your world, the wound will vanish."

"Livia..." Ominis articulates, and she trains her attention back on him. His fingers stretch to her cheeks, and when he touches her, a rapturous moan spills out of his lips.

The words of the Collector swim up from Livia's recollection.

Once I have absorbed the emotion, the nourisher will experience a short period of euphoria, followed by a mild fatigue.

"You will find Sebastian Sallow in the maze," the Collector says, and her head whips to him.

"You're using me..."

Impassively, the entity tilts its head. "We are collaborating, Livia Novik. Your emotions for the Promissum Mortis."

Her lungs burning, she asks: "What of Ominis?"

"I will send him back to your world once you complete your task. I advise you to make haste in doing so."

Reluctantly, she stands up, glancing one last time to the Slytherin worming on the floor. His limbs writhe against his chest, a beatific expression slathered across his traits.

He bites down into his bottom lip, the moans he waives breathy as can be, but he otherwise seems sound enough to make it through the night, so Livia leaves him to the throng of evanescing dancers, bound for her final stage.

Strangely, she knows the layout of the mansion enough to navigate its entrails swiftly. Scrolling past a hallway decorated with empty frames and a stairwell where droops a lit chandelier, she finds the door to the garden easily enough, and comes to a halt before the nubilous mouth of a hedge maze.

The moon overhead is glabrous and swollen, the path ahead leaden and clammy with cold.

Inhaling deeply, Livia sets on the trail, the ribbon of gravel screeching underfoot. The spectral moonlight casts angled shadows from the greenery and shivers run along Livia's arms as she makes incremental progress through the labyrinth.

Left, right, right, left, left, right.

A languid breeze needles through the shrubbery, carrying the scent of English Yew.

Then she hears it, lilting from a location she cannot pinpoint.

"Livia..."

Sebastian's voice.

She freezes.

It isn't a supplication nor a call for help. It is... impish. Alluring.

Starved.

Her heart thrashes in its bony cage, and Livia's instincts tell her to run.

She picks up her skirt, then hurries along the path.

Right, right, left, right.

Behind her, the branches rustle.

Ahead, footsteps mistreat the pebbly path.

Making a sharp turn left, she speeds down the trail, but the row narrows, the bramble catching in her dress, lashing the exposed skin of her back.

"Livia, where are you running to?"

Sebastian's voice seems to be everywhere all at once.

She presses forward, ignoring the sharp pain lancing from her flesh wounds.

Why is she running?

Her blood gushes not out of fear, but out of...

Thrill.

A smile blossoms on her lips as adrenaline skitters to her extremities, setting her senses alight.

What if he catches her?

A familiar ache pools between her thighs.

"I'll find you," he drawls as if he can read her mind. "I always will."

Veering right, Livia speeds along the shadowy path and, before she can catch her breath, hands close around her chest, and an imposing frame trellises her back.

Sebastian is rigid against her rump, and when he moils even tightly against her, she yields a recreant whimper.

What is illusion and what is truth?

His chin settles in the nub of her shoulder, his stertorous breath blistering against her neck. The frenzy of the chase has turned his voice predatory. "What happens to the doe when she bleeds herself between the wolf's fangs?"

"Sebastian..." she appeals meekly.

He whirls her around, his eyes wild with adrenaline. "What's your plea, Livia?" He presses his thumb against her throat, rolling a strained exhale out of her mouth, and Livia finds herself shamefully slick in the clutch of his coercive attentions. She evades his stare, but he props her chin up, forcing the meeting of their gazes. "This was almost too easy. I know you to put up a fiercer challenge."

"Let me go," she enjoins him feebly.

He graces her with a smirk, then reels her closer.

An inch is all that separates them. The swelter of his breath gathers against her lips and, despite her good sense, Livia tilts her head up, her ventricles pumping her bloodstream full of trepidation.

What does he taste like? How much of his soul does he surrender in his kiss? How many fissures can he etch in her resolve in a single flick of his tongue?

The answers never come, for the Collector wrenches Sebastian away from her, his twine tearing through shirt and skin alike.

Sebastian's face twists in a fervid grimace as he soars from the ground.

Just like Ominis, he is left with a circle of bite marks on his sternum and collapses to the ground, all smiles, his eyes vitreous with pleasure.

Livia lifts her head, all too aware of her scripted demise. The entity hovers closer to her, rawboned hands closing around her nape.

Snaking around her waist, the Collector's twine parts her breasts, and ends its course between her shoulder blades.

Livia feels each serration bite into her flesh, and it's as if each of her cells coalesce to the suction site to be emptied of their vitality.

There is no pain, no fear, no anguish in the embrace, yet a blanket of shadows is pulled over Livia's vision.

The hedge retracts into the earth, the moon caves in, the night sky desaturates, and time tarries past the point of discomfort.

Song list: Family Portrait, by P!nk.

Ominis | Hogwarts, Late September, 1893.

First Leeching — Bliss

The deafening clangor washes over Ominis as if he stepped under a curtain of seething water. It tingles along his limbs, melting like imploring fingers in his hair.

When he opens his eyes, he—

Sees.

The light plashes against his retinas, rinsing his skull in pain. Colors swarm his vision, as if an irked drove of gnats.

An aperture in the haze forms, growing larger and larger until the light softens enough for him to make up silhouettes.

His family sits around a dining table, picture-like, curls of steam pluming from an effusive assortment of dishes.

Directly facing him, his mother, Malicent Gaunt, is not the hideous woman Ominis pictured her to be. With her sleek ash-blonde hair and her sea-blue eyes, she sits with poise; her features no longer an echo of her soul's rot.

Next to her, Everard Gaunt—Ominis' father—smokes a pipe, his graying tar-black hair pomaded tight against his head and a newspaper stretched between his fingers. His older brother, Moros, is deep in his cups and slumping in his chair, while his twin older sisters, Lachesis and Clotho, two scrawny blonde girls, pick apart their food with a spiritless glare.

While his gaze leaps on each face, Ominis cannot help but wonder how the sighted can make up the intentions of others if they can don such a beguiling mask. To Ominis, the features conjured in his mind were always a reflection of a person's character; their essence projected outwards.

Now he grasps the perils of navigating such a deceitful world.

Garnished with empty frames, the dining room is an overwhelming clump of glinting chromes and silvers, translucent glass, pellucid crystal, brass surfaces, shimmery velvets, lacquered woods, waxed checkered floors.

His head floods with vertigo, and he feels the need to touch something to anchor himself amidst this imperious surf of stimuli. He squeezes his eyes shut, his breath staggering, then gropes his way to his right until his fingers graze a smooth surface, and he holds onto its hem like a shipwrecked on flotsam.

"Are you all right, darling?" His mother's timbre is familiar, but her worried inflections are foreign to him.

He didn't know she could disguise the knife of her cruelty in the silk of motherliness.

Slowly, he opens his eyes, the light softening more and more until he can bear it without cringing. Carefully, he aims his attention on single objects, to ease into his newfound sight, then looks at his mother.

She returns a genteel smile, her hand gesturing to the empty chair next to her.

His heart recoils in his chest, as if a caged beast rattled to its core.

Is it a ploy?

He scans for her wand, but finds none.

Ringlets of smoke unfurl in the air as his father peeks from behind his newspaper. "Sit, son. We've been waiting for you."

There is no trumpets announcing an impeding doom, so Ominis circles around the table and sits next to his mother.

Her fingers find his cheeks, and she stares at her youngest son with a strange glint in her eyes.

Is this... love?

"We are so happy you could make it home for the summer," she croons, her voice fondling over him like silk. "I missed you so."

Ominis doesn't want to believe the words; knows that something is amiss, but he craved them so much they slide between his lips, finding the gaping holes in his heart and stitching them back together.

"The headmaster sent an owl to tell me you are Hogwarts' most brilliant student," Everard says, folding his newspaper neatly on his lap. There is pride in his father's gait, and, deep inside Ominis, an ever-bleeding injury mends itself. "I always knew my son would make me proud."

As if another day added to a string of normalcy, Ominis' family eases into harmless chatter while Malicent fills a plate for her son. Throughout the dinner, she is tactile beyond what he has ever known, her smiles easy, her voice doting. Everard manifests his delight with curled lips showing through a scud of pipe smoke. Moros acts a playful rivalry and surrenders brotherly advice while Ominis' twin sisters relish in the school gossip as if they have thirsted for it like sun-starved flowers.

Ominis revels in the pageant before him, letting his fingers get a feel for the silverware, the napery, the foods, and, for what seems to be hours, he reconciles the textures with the sights; marvels at the array of tinges and how subtle the shades can be.

He wants to see it all: the grass that yields this smell he likes so, the sun that heralds itself through its warmth, the lumps of clouds cruising through a bluish sky, the blinking stars that were, up until now, only clusters of dots in an astronomy book, the face of his friends.

His friends...

He didn't come here alone.

Or did he?

The only memory he can conjure is this of him riding the train to Ireland.

He sat alone, in a compartment, the locomotive steaming awake and the Scottish countryside trundling by. He doesn't even have to close his eyes to sharpen the reminiscence. The images are so stark. Emerald hills needled with golden paths, ruined castles august in their persistence, thousands of diamonds spindrifting on the surface of lakes, a bridge, arrogant in its height, and a ribbon of river water below.

He came to the Gaunt secondary residence for the summer, like his mother said, and as his parents and siblings settle in the drawing room for the evening, Ominis eases himself into this family portrait like he has always belonged there and glances around him.

Malicent stitches by the fire. Everard pours himself a glass of brandy and smokes in his armchair. Lachesis and Clotho share a book, huddled on the davenport. Moros sits at the chessboard, pondering over moves, and Ominis settles in front of the piano.

A finger grazes the key, then he adds another and another, teasing shy notes from the ivories. He does it gingerly, at first, as if he hopes to see the sound rise like a plume of dust from the instrument, then falls into an enraptured trance.

A melody soars from the piano's stringy guts and Ominis uproots himself from his seat, watching the tiny hammers pound against the cords.

This world is full of small mechanisms, he realizes; cogs that groan and tick and fall into place. Milicent belongs to her chair, the needle, to her stitching; Everard to his printed words and the peat of singed tobacco; Clotho, Lachesis, Moros to their simple evening pleasures; Ominis to this family and its inflexible peace.

It is a clockwork world, and he finds contentment in being a gear in its machinery. Not one that stutters and bucks.

Not anymore.

The music soars, the keys chant, and he plays until his fingers ache and his forehead is drenched in sweat. When the music dies, his lungs burn with contentment and his heart has sewed itself back into soundness. He rises, grinning, under a rain of filial compliments, then sets to sampling all the pleasures such a quiet evening can conjure for him.

He plays chess with his brother, reads to his sisters, rises to help his mother stoke the fire, shares a taste of his father's brandy, looks through the window to the dusk stripping layers of colors, going from delicate yellow to reddish orange to rosy pink and nightly purple.

When his father joins him before the window, Ominis is drunk on the beauty unfurling before him.

"Walk with me, son." They leave the drawing room, then cross into a corridor clustered with hanging pictures.

They stop before a frame and inside, Ominis can see his family sitting around a table in a Parisian cafe, the street bustling with activity. The scent of freshly baked bread purls in his mind, and he remembers how striking the sun was as they walked through the Jardin des Tuileries. Another picture yields the memory of him and his siblings, leaning against the railing of a steamboat as it nears departure. Seagulls circle overhead and the funnels disgorge a shoal of dark smoke.

"Tonight had me thinking," his father mulls. "We should stay here, at the summer estate. I long to escape the bustle of London. Don't you?"

In this instant, Ominis cannot remember what his father does for a living; cannot fathom if Everard Gaunt will be missed.

The idea burrows through him, a tempting gift.

He could spend his time plodding down the rickety staircase carved into the cliffs and watch the ocean fracture on the sharp cliffs or fill pages with musical notes, birthing songs from the ivories.

The picture frames are filled with endless possibilities. Day trips to Glasgow, jaunts through Wales, opera concerts in Venice, nights spent visiting other worlds through the pages of a book.

Ominis cannot help but smile, a riveting warmth blooming in his chest. Stopping his course at the end of the corridor, he looks at his painted family portrait.

Everard stands, scion-like, his palm wrapped around a silver-tipped cane. Sitting a chair, Malicent offers a soft smile. Lachesis and Clotho, hands knitted together, wear pearls and intricate hairdos. Moros' fingers trellis Ominis' shoulders in a protective embrace. And there, amidst this perfect family, is something strange that forces him to take a closer look.

A single crack in the varnish, so minute it is almost imperceptible. Yet it is there, cracking through his own face.

He gets closer, his fingers brushing against the ridge in the gloss.

"I believe the sea air will do us all some good," his father continues. "We could build a cottage by the beach."

A cog in the machinery falters, and something squirms inside Ominis' chest. He extends his finger to the ridge folded in the paint, and soon as he touches it, the lights in the corridor flutter in their sockets.

"What's happening?" He turns to his father only to find his traits muddled, as if erased from his face.

Words come, despite Everard Gaunt having no mouth to shape them. "We could clear the singles, perhaps, have warm sand to dig our toes in."

Ominis' vision flickers, as if a vacillating flame, and fear slithers into his chest as spates of total obscurity cycle before his eyes.

What is happening to him?

His heart pounds against his ribs, and as his father blurs into a shapeless form, Ominis feels points of contact on his shoulders, and realizes his father is whirling him around.

"Look, Ominis," his father's voice thrums against his eardrums, "at what matters."

Reluctantly, he peels his eyes open and faces his family portrait again. He squints, focusing on his own painted face, but finds no cracks in the lacquer.

A momentary lapse?

How could it be anything other than that? He is with his family, in a house by the cliffs where the ocean laps hungrily at a strip of shingles. He has ridden the train from Hogwarts to Ireland, sucking on a handful of Honeydukes sweets, sipping on the beauty wheeling past his window.

His heart eases back into its hushed pace, and his father's fingers squeeze around his shoulder. Ominis can hear the gentle smile in his voice. "It's an old thing, this portrait. How old were you? Fifteen?"

Ominis nods, his unexplainable episode all but forgotten. "I believe so."

Everard Gaunt's grip is firm around his son's frame. "How you have grown into a man, Ominis. This no longer does you justice. What do you say I commission a new family portrait?"

Sebastian | Hogwarts, Late September, 1893.

First Leeching — Bliss

Leaves turn into blood-red blades, shivering in the wind before they return to the Room of Requirement. In the interlude between their last visit and this one, Livia has shrugged into Sebastian and Ominis' life like she always belonged there; a bespoke glove easing over their fingers.

Their time at the lake has acutely festered in Sebastian's mind, and now he feels like he held the bitterness close to his chest for too long to let it squirm out without denting their unblemished friendship.

So he clenches his teeth when Livia and Ominis share an impromptu banter in the Undercroft. He sinks his nails into the soft flesh of his palms when she compliments his best friend on the questions he asks the Mimic. He swallows in a dry throat when Livia greets Ominis before him, as if the order in which she speaks to them is a leaderboard, and Sebastian is lagging behind.

To make matters worse (and with Sebastian's help to boot), people have taken to Livia the same way he has. Poppy Sweeting has come to relish in Livia's tales about the dragons lording over the Ukrainian sky, while Natty Onai found a gifted partner in her study of ancient runes. Even Garreth Weasley and Leander Prewett have come to coalesce around her, as if she is a carcass of beauty and wit offered for them to feast on.

She is no longer Sebastian's clandestine pleasure; her time is no longer his to furnish, and the thought alone makes him regret the role he played in forging her new reputation.

Worse even are the small cruelties she visits upon him without knowing. How much easier it would be to share her with others if she ran the scissors in their friendship, but she doesn't. Instead, she surprises him with elfin attentions that only add to the string of scars she incises on his heart.

One day, she leads him to the owlery, and they binge on a honey cake in a reenactment of their first evening together that leaves Sebastian craved beyond his wits.

Another, she pulls him from his bench in the hall of the Defense against the Dark Arts tower, and forces him to dance with her, her perfume so conquering he can smell it on his fingers for a day and a night, getting drunk on the scent of it alone.

She is everywhere. In his refuge in the Undercroft. In all of his classes, where he is more busy cataloging each of her expressions into his mental compendium than listening to the lectures. In the Great Hall, breaking her fast on muffins, fresh cream, blackberries and three servings of coffee. In his dreams, either running away from him, giggling or driving him against the wall before dragging her hand against his crotch, her tongue scorching a trail in his neck. In these dreams, he either dogs after her or after his release, invariably failing in attaining both.

It is maddening.

And every morning he wakes in his own sweat, his cock straining in his trousers, his thoughts astir, and enterprises to slide into the mask that allows him to speak to her civilly instead of tearing her clothes to shreds.

Fuck, he wants her... And, more than anything, he aches to know if she is an itch that can be scratched or an incurable fixation.

It isn't the Collector's first leeching Sebastian fears as they get sucked into the entity's mind-bending tempest and spit, once again, into the strange dining room. It's being made derelict to her quest.

Welcoming them, the same long table, the same chaste tablecloth, the same nine candelabras and prismatic flames. Nothing has moved an inch in the room, even the Collector remains unchanged, his cloak swirling around his gaunt frame like drops of ink in a glass of water.

Except, Sebastian observes, one of the four doors is wide open, its entrails swimming in unbreachable darkness.

For a string of minutes, they stand still, unsure what the entity requires of them, but at last Livia sits where she previously sat, and the Slytherins follow suit.

As soon as they are seated, the Collector lifts an osseous hand towards the candles.

"Nine leechings. Today, you will experience the first. Your sample, as you asked." The white-flamed candles gasp alive, their light growing enough to outshine the others. "Bliss."

"What are the others about?" Livia asks.

"If you wish me to answer this question, the limitation I offered in exchange to feed on three nourishers will be forfeit."

"Isn't the knowledge of what we're getting into worth it?" Ominis asks Livia, but she shakes her head in response, and Ominis adds nothing else.

"And about this limitation?" She asks the Collector.

"You must choose one."

Her chest rise and falls, her eyes leap from candelabra to candelabra.

Sebastian wonders how she can hold herself together, knowing she gambles with three fates, yet she keeps a straight face through the storm of her corybantic thoughts. "Nothing that happens during the leechings can be permanent."

The boundless ceiling rumbles above their heads, as if a distant bout of thunder cracked a mile away. Sebastian lifts his eyes to the ringlets of black clouds moiling overhead.

Is the Collector... irked?

Across the table, his faceless mask is unchanged and sleek as oil, but the flaps of his cloak shudder ever so slightly like creatures slashed by a knife.

Livia has noticed it, too.

"Granted," the Collector voices, and the celestial churning eases back into quiet.

The eye of the storm?

"How do we proceed?" Livia asks.

"When you are ready, walk through the door behind me. I will feed at the acme of your bliss, and when the leeching is done, you will be transported whence you came."

Without another word, Livia uproots herself from her seat. Ominis lingers, as if pondering every step that led him to this table. Sebastian stands up, aware that the entity could wait a thousand years for them to gather their courage before crossing that door, but that their minutes of bravery can be counted on the fingers of a single hand.

When the three of them stand before the yawning aperture in the wall, Sebastian's fingers stretch outwards and meet with Livia's. Eyes stitched to the senseless obscurity, she takes the hand offered. Her palm is damp, her hold almost desperate. She is frightened, and he holds her firmer, pulling her closer until their arms touch, praying to whatever numen drifts within earshot that he can dredge the fear out of her through the barrier of their skin.

The last thing Sebastian hears when they walk through the door is Livia's breath fluttering out like a blown candle.

* * *

The light falls like shards around Sebastian. His skull is stuffed with cotton. Livia's fingers are gone from his grasp, but so is the floor, the ceiling, the walls and everything that holds a shape.

When his senses are grafted back into his body, Sebastian stands before a floor mirror, an open shirt on his back, the scent of wisterias heavy on the air.

He doesn't have time to process the lavishness of the room—boudoir?—before two dainty hands circle his waist to land on his abdomen.

"Livia..." is all he can articulate as he is adjusting to his turbulent landing.

Her nails skitter along his skin, climbing the ladder of his abdomen, teasing a groove of prickles along the way.

Eyes closed, he eases into the touch, a familiar ache paddling between his legs. Already, he is swelling in his trousers as a hand planes against his chest to stop its course over his heart.

Thomp Thomp Thomp.

If that is the bliss the Collector promised, Sebastian wants to drown in it. He wants to live in this room and spread Livia on the floorboards and fall asleep inside of her, riding out his days between her legs, drinking curls of perfumed steam and feasting on her quips.

His palm bends around her hand, and he gently tugs on her, inviting her to circle him.

The air stirs and when he opens his eyes, he is staring right back at—

Anne.

His fingers loosen, his breath calcifying in his throat.

She has yielded the permanent shade of purple dusting her eyes, the sickly complexion, the sapless hair tinge, and now sports vivacious strands of golden brown, glinting pupils, rosy lips curling in a smile.

"Missed me, brother?" She asks him, and his heart flitters, tears pearling from his eyelids.

He gathers her into his arms; the cheek she presses against his chest is warm as a summer day, not clammy with her curse.

Minutes trickle by before he breaks their embrace, his thumb going to her cheek to assess the soundness of her skin.

She is healthy, or at least looks the part, and the desire to have her taste everything she has missed burrows into his mind.

He wishes to fill his sister to the brim with memories; wants to bring her swimming in the lake or treat her to Honeydukes sweets until her tongue is powdered with sugar or bring her dancing and watch her twirl and twirl until she cackles with laughter, out of breath, and spent to the last drop.

And as if borne from his mind, a music warbles from beneath the floorboards. It slithers through the cracks, and so does the soft cantillating of the chandeliers and a low chatter.

"We are late to the ball, Sebastian," Anne tells him.

He ogles the yellow dress on her, wondering if she was wearing it all along. Before his eyes, her mane twirls into a slick bun and red lipstick effloresces on her lips.

The hand she wraps around his arm is gloved now, and when he glances at his reflection in the looking-glass, he wears a full poplin suit and a silken green cravat.

Anne leads him out of the boudoir into a red-carpeted corridor. Florid golden frames hang on the walls, the canvas within ink-black.

He has seen those before, but he doesn't know where. The memory he pursues is fleeting; a fragile thread slipping through his fingers like a string tied to an airborne balloon.

They come to a ritzy staircase corking around a crystal chandelier and the sound builds up. Clusters of guests flitter around, some bound for a balcony where an indigo sky bleeds into infinity, others gliding to a ballroom where cellos and brass conjure a spirited adagio. Anne pulls him towards the balcony, and the breeze skims against his cheeks. A gentle caress.

Below a baroque metal railing stretches an endless hedge maze, its pathways like dark serpents under a pimpled moon.

"How do you feel?" He asks his sister, the question strange on his tongue.

A gossamer line forms between her brows. "What do you mean?"

"Your... curse?"

Curse?

The word leaves a scratch in his throat, like a bit of cartilage swallowed by mistake.

Anne's eyes dip with confusion. "What curse?"

Sebastian combs through his brain for recollection, but the memories sieve right through it.

What did he want to say?

He turns to his sister with a smile and she returns it to him, and he brings her into his arms, smelling the soap on her hair.

Her shoulders are round, her arms fleshy, her skin radiant in the ghostly light of the moon, and they stay like this, knitted together, until Sebastian no longer remembers why he is so happy to see her.

Was she in any danger?

No.

Was she gone on a trip?

No.

She has always been here with him.

The maze that sprawls before his eyes is familiar to him now.

Yes.

Wasn't it there Anne sprained her ankle one summer?

It had to be.

Glancing around, he takes in a chip in the paint of the railing.

Didn't he chink it trying to perch himself to read?

Of course he did.

The carpet is where his mother dropped her tea set, he is sure, and cut herself on the splinters of porcelain.

The violin playing in the ballroom is his father's.

And there, from the fog of his mind, emerges the layout of the mansion Sebastian stands in. He pictures the parlor, the drawing room, the library perfectly; knows there is a greenhouse on the west side of the property, an elm tree where there was once a swing, cruelly snagged from its branch by a scathing storm.

His mind swells with memories. Anne and him looking for frogs in the creek; the postman running to the fenced gate under a whipping rain; a white cat curling by the fireplace, a Spaniel springing on his heels, a birdhouse at the foot of which his mother empties the breadbox, a lightning rod weeded by a seething squall.

And a well.

A well?

The idea doesn't quite fit the quilt of Sebastian's remembrance.

Where did he see a well?

Certainly not near the greenhouse or the elm tree.

There is a well in Feldcroft.

A lick of ash burgeons on Sebastian's tongue and he shots forward, shaken by a fit of cough.

Pain sluices through his ribs, coating his lungs with fire.

Anne presses a palm to his cheek, and he looks at her, the hurt pulling a dark blanket over his vision.

She smiles at him. "Do you want to dance?"

"Water..." He begs, his voice raw.

She sheds a lithe chuckle. "This is my favorite piece... We learned to waltz on it, remember?"

"Water," he croaks again, and when he looks to his sister, her eyes are two gaping pits of limitless black.

Two unending wells.

The taste of cinders snakes in his mouth again, and he heaves forward, his fingers curling around the railing.

The stars blink around him like thousands of flies and the labyrinth ripples like a nest of serpents and the moon fattens until Anne's nose stops casting a shadow on her face, and as he thinks he will faint, his twin's fingers find the grooves in his jaw and she brings him into a kiss.

Her breath tastes of honey and her tongue quells the fire in his throat. Her light fuses through him, erasing the pain, and when she pulls away from him, the world is silent again.

The stars glow faintly, the maze is still, the moon casts a spectral light on the peaceful land below.

He gives her a smile, his fingers twining with Anne's, and leans against the balustrade, heeding the music notes that lilt to his ears. "I remember," he tells his twin. "You kept stepping on my toes."

Anne rests her head on his shoulder and feeds him more memories.

The moon doesn't move. The stars don't shy away. The maze sleeps, ever peaceful, and with each and every breath, the weight on Sebastian's shoulders lessens, as if every second spent here cuts the ballast of worry from his life.

He will be featherlight. He will rise to the heavens like a balloon with a cut string.

The sound of shattering glass booms through the manor, as if a thunderbolt bisecting the roof in half.

Sebastian's heart nearly stops, but Anne gently tugs on his arm, flashing him a smile. "I want to stay here forever, Sebastian."

He angles his face to the corridor, waiting to witness the signs of a commotion, but all he sees are couples skimming out of the ballroom and up the stairs. The violin soars and plummets. The candles in the chandelier throw a white light onto empty frames.

Why was he looking into the corridor?

He turns to Anne, then plants a kiss on her forehead, smiling. "I have nowhere else to be."

Author's notes

I won't be posting before the weekend because I'm having some people over, so I made sure I posted only the part 1 of a very exciting thing... Our first leeching (trial). 👀 I'm a cruel mistress, I know.

Ominis | Hogwarts, Mid-September, 1893.

Days limp by. Sebastian rises and sets with nothing but the sun of Livia's presence on his mind.

He drags her to the duel club—even though she refuses to battle.

He walks her through the castle's warrens of corridors, regurgitating what he scrounged from a book about the history of Hogwarts.

He brings her to Hogsmeade for a Butterbeer, to the edge of the Forbidden Forest for a thrill, to the Astronomy tower to watch the stars blink their life away.

Every morning, they meet in the Undercroft. Or rather, every morning, Sebastian and Ominis find Livia tucked inside the grimy cellar. Her face turned to the Mimic, another trio of questions slipping from her lips.

Through the use of the magical mirror, they have learned that the Collector has fed before. That it has been living beneath the castle's stone skin for centuries. That his intentions are neither good nor evil. The Mimic taught them the Collector has never killed. He is no poltergeist, no ghoul, no boggart, no inferi—he is something he cannot label.

He knows Livia's name and what she craves because she touched his mirror, and this piece of intel is enough to make the Ravenclaw believe the stains on its surface have been left by other students.

Day in day out, Livia ponders and scribbles; the fever of speculation simmering from her body like a hot summer day.

Ominis is busy reading a book by a window in the atrium when Sebastian makes his way to him. He slumps on the bench, then snags the tome from Ominis' fingers. "Don't tell me you intend on spending the last summer day walled inside the castle?"

Ominis lets out a nettled sigh. "What does it matter? I thought you were spending the day with Livia."

"I am. We're going for a swim in the lake. She's changing."

"And?"

"Come with us. A bunch of last years will be there, too. Everett made it some kind of happening."

"Since when do you hang out with the likes of Everett Clopton? You bullied him since our first year."

"He's Ravenclaw," Sebastian replies. "I thought it would be a good opportunity to redeem Livia in the eyes of her housemates."

"What bug bit you? I earned a perfect grade in Beast class, but I never read anywhere about an insect that turns you from jerk to altruist in the span of a few days."

"If she gave you those beaten puppy eyes of hers, you'd want to help her, too," Sebastian retorts amusedly. "A shame you can't see them."

"Oh, come on," Ominis hisses, irksomeness billowing in his chest. "Quit your boasting, Sebastian. Might I remind you I'm the one that got a feel for her thigh?"

Sebastian's displeasure pulses like a clock, and he stands, tossing the book onto Ominis' lap. "Go back to your book, then. Livia's waiting for me to pick her up."

"No," Ominis retorts. "I'll go with you since you extended such a graceful invitation."

* * *

The afternoon is scorching, leaving a spoor of sweat in the valleys of Ominis' body. Strands of parched grass scrape against his trousers as he follows Sebastian and Livia down the gravel path winding to the lake.

Here and there, they encounter pockets of inaudible chatter as the students of Hogwarts lounge in the shade of a tree or share a picnic on the slope of a hillet.

If Ominis could see, he is certain the world around would explode in tinges of golden, that the sky is crisp, melting from an empyrean blue to a shy orange, but his understanding of colors is different from everyone else. To him, they are an aura, a quality, a texture; a temperature, on certain occasions.

As they near the body of water, a shy wind picks up the mildewed stench of the lake.

It reminds Ominis of days spent in his family's summer house, perched on the cliffs of Ireland. If the sound of waves breaking on toothed basalt crags brings him comfort, the reminiscence of the unspeakable things his parents did in the cellar is another matter entirely, so he trains his mind on something else.

The splashing sound eddying from the lake. Pebbles crunching underfoot. Spates of birds cawing in the sky, as if marshaling their legions to fly where the sun will remain warm.

He stops when his friends come to a halt, groping for a rock to lean on or a patch of grass to sit in, but stills when Livia's perfume inches closer.

Three small points of contact land on his sternum. Another three are added, and fingers tap against the buttons of his shirt as Livia enterprises to shuck him out of his clothes.

"What are you doing?" He asks her.

"You're not going to swim with a shirt on, will you?"

"I'm not swimming," he protests, albeit meekly.

He does nothing to shake out of her grip, however. A delicious warmth leaches through her touch.

"Oh, but you are," she assures him.

Her nails glide on his collarbone as she slips the fabric from his shoulders. A lash of treacherous goosebumps trail in the wake of her fingers. His shirt puddles at his feet where it will gather dust and sun stains.

The breeze coasts on his naked skin, hauling the last days of September along with it. Already, the wind smells of rotting leaves and sodden soil; it carries the sheen of cold that announces winter.

"Livia, I—"

"You don't know how to swim?"

"I do."

"Your skin will fall from your bones if water touches you?"

"No, I—"

"You are out of excuses, Ominis Gaunt. That's what you are." Her voice is playful. A chideful thing that subdues into his skin like a tectonic plate under its twin slab. "Come on."

She lugs him along the pebbly path. The splashing sounds grow louder, the briny perfume of the lake feathering to his nostrils.

A few bawdy whistles erupt around. Ominis cannot see the other students, but he feels countless eyes brushing on him, and he is suddenly made aware of his nakedness.

Outside of Sebastian and the handful of girls he coupled with, no one has seen his bare chest. There is something unsettling about it, and his gut knots with apprehension at the hurtful words that will no doubt have him crawl back into the shell of his clothes.

He waits for the insults about the fairness of his complexion or the glabrousness of his chest, but nothing comes. The mob has no pitchforks or torches, and after the childish heckle dies out, Ominis realizes no one pays him—or his physical attributes—any heed.

The attention, however, sticks to Livia like a coat of honey.

"Can you help me out of my trousers, Livia?" Garreth Weasley coos.

"Fuck off, Weasley," Sebastian hollers back at the Gryffindor, "or I'll Descendo that fuckface of yours into the silt."

"Don't gatekeep, Sallow," Garreth shoots back. "You're doing a shit job at it, since it's your best mate she undressed instead of you."

Ominis doesn't need a functioning eyesight to know Weasley's blow has landed a hit. He knows Sebastian will ruminate over Livia's attentions being somewhere else than on him. But for now, the idea of being the apple of discord tossed between the school's heartthrobs curls into his loins.

Everything has always been about Sebastian.

"If you two are so inconvenienced by this sudden surge of testosterone," Livia cuts in, "I know a spell that shrinks your balls for a fortnight. It should help in curbing these unwarranted face-offs."

Ominis cannot help but smile at Livia's repartee, and as she pulls him on the beach, he says: "Well played."

"Thank you."

The water laps hungrily at his toes now. Cold numbs him, veining up his calves, and his breath hitches.

"Don't tell me you find it cold?" Livia derides him. "It's heavenly."

She splashes her feet around, hurling lashes of algid water at him.

Her laugh fondles over him like silk, and in his blindness, Ominis imagines it as a halcyon plume of mist spilling out of her mouth.

"Maybe it's heavenly by Ukrainian standards," he says, "but here in England, I can tell you it's rather cold."

Another chuckle bubbles from her lips. The water sloshes before him, the ripples breaking on his legs. It's as if the sound crests everywhere all at once, and before Ominis can make sense of the muddle, Livia's fingers close around his wrist and yank him forward.

He loses his footing, plummeting into the cold waves, and swallows a gulp of brackish water. When he reemerges, his sodden hair tendrils before his eyes and against his cheeks, and before he gets the chance to push it aside, Livia's fingers brush the stray strands away.

Her touch is cool on his skin, but the longer she holds his face, the more feverish he becomes. Her blood pulses through the pads of her fingers, her perfume, only more potent in the care of the cold.

"I'm sorry I roped you into this," she says, her breath whispering against his chin. She is inches away from him. A gap easily closed.

"You're considering the Collector's proposal?" He asks her.

Her fingers part from his face, and he feels their absence like a knife cut. "I have nothing to lose, Ominis..."

"Of course you do. You—"

"No, you don't understand," she cuts him, her tone laced with sorrow. Gone is her halcyon laugh. She stands far from him now, too far to close the gap. "My family is dead. If you have no tutor that can take you as their charge, you cannot enroll in the Winter College. I sold everything my family had to come here to prevent my little brother's ghost from fading away."

His tone is soft, as if he fears to drive cracks in the porcelain of this moment. "To resurrect him, you mean?"

"Yes, to resurrect him."

"Resurrection is dangerous, Livia."

"I don't care if it kills me," she replies. "Being a girl alone in this world is even more dangerous."

"What if I could help you?" He suggests. "Find you a home?"

"My heart will never have a home unless I have my brother back, Ominis. I-" Her words stray, and he pictures them as motes of pollen spirited away by the great sway of water. "I wanted to ask you to stay away from me and this whole mess with the Collector. Just pretend as if we never met..."

Confusion cuts through him, settling in his stomach like a swig of acid. It bubbles up his esophagus, then spills out of his mouth. "Why? What about Sebastian?"

"There's something in it for Sebastian, but you... You have no stake in this."

"I have Sebastian. And you."

She sheds a cloudy chuckle. "I'm a stranger to you. I would never accept to be fed on by a sinister entity for a stranger."

Livia | Hogwarts, Early September, 1893.

For the rest of the afternoon, Livia spends her time cutting herself on serrated memories she wishes she had kept fastened in her trunk. Digging for the Mimic implied rummaging through the sundries she brought all the way from Ukraine.

Laurence's pocket watch, her mother's hairbrush, her father's glasses, all are scattered through silken scarves and poplin skirts for safe keep.

The last mementoes of a culled family.

The ballast of solitude ties itself to her waist, keeping her rooted to the floor of her bedroom for an hour and dewing her eyes with tears as her fingers skitter along the objects that are a testimony to a life that is no longer hers to hold.

After her momentary lapse, Livia leaves her dormitory, the handheld mirror in tow, to join Ominis and Sebastian before the Room of Requirement, where, if the Collector is truthful, the door will appear.

And in the corridor of the Astronomy wing, she finds Sebastian slanting against the wall, hands pocketed, and Ominis pacing his tormented thoughts into submission.

Livia extends a curled roll of paper to Sebastian.

"What's that?" He asks.

"Your question."

"Good to know we spent three hours in the Undercroft for absolutely no reason at all," he jests.

"Having people to brainstorm with is much better than speaking to my reflection in the mirror," she retorts. "Was an afternoon with me such a torture, Sebastian Sallow?"

"I endured worse. I've been bunking with Ominis for seven years." His chin jerks in the Mimic's direction. "And were we so bad at brainstorming that you changed your mind and brought your mirror?"

"This isn't a simple mirror. You inspired me when you mentioned Malisect and how it allows you to relive memories." Ominis drifts closer, his fingers grazing the metallic frame of the mirror. "We had our own Garreth Weasley at the Winter College—Viktor Kozmenko. Except he didn't dabble in potions. His thing was imbuing objects with magic. This is called a Mimic. An enchanted mirror that, if aimed at a subject, will replicate their personality and their reactions. For our Magical Law class, we'd be tested on our ability to defend a case. We'd each be appointed an Inquisitor, so we used the Mimic to capture our Inquisitor's personality and practice with questions they would be likely to ask. If we point the Mimic at the Collector, we'll be able to ask its Mimic as many questions as we like."

Perplexity etches a line between Ominis' brows. "What's to say the Mimic's replies will accurately reflect the Collector's thoughts?"

"Nothing, unfortunately. What the Mimic answers is only hypothetical, and it can be wrong, but it might also give us some insight. See it as a way to learn more about the Collector without asking him directly. A way to circle around his three questions rule."

Sebastian lets out a chuckle. "That's clever. I stand by my belief the Sorting Hat chose right, even though it's a sin to have you locked up in that tower. We have better dorms in the dungeons."

Livia graces him with a sarcastic smile. "I'm sure you're a bliss to wake up to. If one likes to be bullied before their first coffee..."

There it is again, the game sprawling with ease between the two of them. Livia wonders if it feeds Sebastian's fire as much as it does hers, and the oily eyes he gives her tell her he might.

"Who's the bully now?" He asks her playfully before Ominis clears his throat.

"The door..."

Livia and Sebastian whirl around in time to see the portal flicker into existence. The air gorges itself with a strange scent, something between rust and sulfur, and when they step inside, they are faced with the same antiquated looking-glass.

"This is such a bad idea," Ominis mutters.

"You can wait for us here," Livia suggests.

"And leave two morally flexible individuals alone with an evil entity?"

"What a hero you are, Ominis," Sebastian teases him back.

"We don't know if the entity is evil," Livia points out.

Ominis sheds a cynical scoff. "Maybe you two have been sensitively impaired... Couldn't you feel something sinister in that room?"

"The most potent fear is fear of the unknown," Livia voices, and the aphorism whisks an irked sigh from Ominis.

"Can we just proceed before I change my mind?"

As she inches closer to the mirror, it appears to Livia as if the finger stains on its surface have multiplied. Despite her desire to focus on the task at hand, her mind swarms with questions. Questions, she promises herself, she will ask the Mimic about.

She presses the pad of her fingers to the glass and another storm of sounds and light breaks upon them.

When the fury dies out, Livia opens her eyes. They no longer stand in the chaste white room, but rather sit around a long table.

Before them, an unblemished ivory tablecloth is topped with nine candelabras, all fluttering with versicolored flames. It takes Livia but an instant to commit them to memory: Geranium pink, blood red, orphic purple, malachite green, golden yellow, celestial blue, rust orange, vestal white and ink-black.

Why nine?

The dining room is paneled in mahogany wainscot, the upper half of the walls dressed in crimson flourished wallpaper. Hung on the walls, empty frames, florid with intricate tinsel work, their canvas a stygian black swallowing all the light. Glancing around, Livia notes four latched doors—one on each wall—no windows, and a ceiling so high it disappears into a boundless patch of swirly murk, as if a night sky choking with clouds.

Are they still in the castle?

Sebastian and Ominis are respectively seated to her right and left, while the Collector sits at the other end of the table, the tatters of his black cloak churning on each side like tendrils of mist.

There is no smell in the room, no sound beside their own staggering breaths, and Livia wonders how much this kind of sensory deprivation weighs on Ominis.

"First question?"

The Collector's voice is like the cry of young thunder in the stillness of the room. For a fault of perceiving any other sound, Livia's mind is splintered with it and hairs rise on her arm. Perceiving her dismay, Sebastian sets on uncurling his roll of paper.

This provides enough of a distraction for Livia to aim the Mimic's under the table without alerting the Collector.

Sebastian clears his throat as he fumbles needlessly to smooth the curled edges of the paper.

Has he caught on Livia's intentions?

At the opposite end of the table, the Collector is placid; his featureless mask polished as a coin and unmoving.

"What is your true nature?" Sebastian asks when he has wasted enough time.

Again, the sepulchral voice jumps from particles through particles, trawling through the air and conquering it entirely. "I am not alive nor dead. I am sentient, but I cannot feel. I can make, but I am not made. I have desires, but no way to satiate them."

The gears in Livia's mind turn full-steam, but so do her other two companions'. When Sebastian opens his mouth to voice another question, her hand shoots to his arm, and he clenches his jaw shut.

There will be enough time to ponder over the Collector's words. Even more to interrogate its Mimic in the rustic comfort of the Undercroft.

For now, Livia focuses her attention back on the Collector. "You gave us three questions and time to ponder over them," she remarks, "undoubtedly to establish a form of trust with us. What do you have to gain in such a transaction?"

"The potential to feed on your emotions through you."

"You have desires, but no way to satiate them..." Livia parrots for herself. Slowly—collectedly—the entity nods.

She wants to ask which desires he hungers for, how he will feed, if he requires of his proxies to merely act the desires or feel them truly, but she is out of questions.

The third is reserved for Ominis.

Livia has designed it to be a show of trust. A necessary sacrifice of an insightful inquiry, if Livia hopes to convince the cautious wizard to help her and Sebastian in their cause, for it is now apparent to her that he has nothing to gain from finding the Promissum Mortis; that he doesn't share the same longing or the desperation to knife through rules.

What he did so far, he did for Sebastian.

But she is no one to him. As he said it himself, she is not Slytherin. She is not one of them.

Ominis understands her forgetfulness as an intended gesture and turns a perplexed expression on her. "You didn't slip me a paper."

The wager is a dangerous one, and Livia knows she might allow a lick of fire to run over the trust bridging her and Sebastian together. Maybe he will assume she thinks little of his abilities, but she is persuaded she can mend the torn seams later.

He seems to her like the kind of man that can weather a little scorch.

"I trust you," she tells Ominis, and just as surely as she postulated, Sebastian's knuckles tighten around his piece of paper, his gaze knifing seethingly on the tablecloth.

Ominis stiffens, more furrows creasing his forehead, but he relents, his sightless eyes going in the general direction of the voice he perceived. "Exhaustively, what does that feeding entail?"

There is no change in the Collector's gait, and when he speaks, it is akin to a puppet mouthing the words of an invisible ventriloquist. "In order for me to feed, the nourisher needs to experience an emotion genuinely. During this happening, I will attach my twine to the skin of the nourisher. This process is painless, albeit uncomfortable. Once the twine is attached, I will leech on the emotion for a few minutes. The more powerful the emotion, the faster the process. Once I have absorbed the emotion, the nourisher will experience a short period of euphoria, followed by a mild fatigue. The leeching process has no other serious consequence on the human body besides those aforementioned. The leeching can only happen in this room and with a consenting nourisher. Nine times, I need to feed to sustain me for a decade."

The word parasite is the first that chisels itself into Livia's mind. An icky concept to most, but she knows not all parasites entertain a vampiric relationship with their host.

Sometimes, the relationship can be mutually beneficial.

"I believe you had a question for us," Livia remarks.

The Collector lifts a bony hand, his fingers outstretching in their direction, and for a heartbeat, Livia thinks him about to cast a hex on them, but instead he twists his wrist so his palm face up and from the vast expanse of the table burgeons a banquet. First, intricate silverware, then crystal chalices and baroque ewers, at last, a coterie of fruits and cheeses, heaps of steaming meat.

Smells effloresce through the room, filling the space just as much as the entity's voice.

"You cannot pull things from the veil of reality like I do," he explains, "but you are finite and this finitude allows you to hold within you the material and the ethereal like—"

"Feelings?" Livia suggests.

The Collector nods. "You can eat and drink. I can pull through the strings of reality, weave a new tapestry of possibles, fabricate anything, provided it is tangible."

Livia leans forward. "Only fallacies or originals?"

"I can give you anything you want, whether from this world or another, provided you can touch it with your fingers."

"Even the Promissum Mortis?" Sebastian asks, and Livia's fingers tighten around the brass handle of the Mimic.

A flush of heat blooms beneath her cheeks at the imprudence of telling the entity what they are truly after, but the words have escaped Sebastian's lips and it cannot be helped.

The Collector nods.

"You said you had a question for us?" Livia asks their host, eager to leave the entity's vicinity before Sebastian can think of sharing the exact coordinates to their dorms.

"If given the same opportunity, would those you wish to save squander it?"

Livia's heart squeezes, but she lets nothing show. Instead, she lifts her chin. "A waste of a question on a rhetorical one."

"It is only rhetorical because you know the answer to it," the Collector replies passively. Another gesture on his part dissolves all the food on the table, and it is as if there was none at all. "The arcane object you hold under the table will not wield the answers you seek, Livia Novik. I have pondered over any you could think of, and always came short. You cannot understand me. No more than I can."

"Let us have a sample before we make our decision," Livia suggests, her heart pounding at her brazenness. "You made a banquet appear before our eyes, yet you didn't allow us to eat. Let us have a taste of your leeching, and I'll let you have a bite of my emotions. If we both find it palatable, then I'll consider discussing terms with you." Above their heads, the dark fog churns and churns. Livia doesn't falter. "You said the nourisher has to consent to you feeding on them. You need to earn my trust, and this is how you will."

"Agree to her terms," Sebastian adds, "and you'll have at least two people to feed on."

The Collector rises from his seat, the shreds of his cloak winging up in the air. "If the third agrees to participate in the first leeching, I will warrant you a limitation. A safety, to show my good intentions. Ponder over my offer, and return to me when your heart hungers for its missing piece."

Livia nods, her heart lurching against her ribs, and when the squall of the Collector's tempest simmers down from the ceiling and swallows them, Livia, Sebastian and Ominis are surrendered back into the corridor instead of a noose of bedsheets.

"I'm starting to believe you are more Slytherin than Ravenclaw bargaining with that thing like you did," Ominis says as soon as their senses have trickled back into their limbs.

"It was quite sly, indeed," Sebastian adds, bitterness bleeding through his tone.

The blow shouldn't have landed through her armor, yet Livia feels it bludgeoning all the same. "Ominis, would you mind giving me a minute alone with Sebastian?"

"I'm exhausted, anyway," the Slytherin replies before leaving them to their meeting.

Sebastian's jaw is corded, his gaze fleeting and dark, the slants of his face sharper.

Something inside of Livia coils into its shell—something brittle, frightened.

The questions that swell through her mind are agitated. Dreading.

Would she have held her ground before the entity is she was alone?

Could she dive into the Collector's chasmal uncertainties if she had no one to hold her?

Why is the idea of seeing him walk away from her knifing so deep into her gut?

"I know what I did wrong," she confesses. "I didn't mean for you to think I don't trust you."

His jaw loosens, but he cannot speak, or else she will lose the courage to bare herself, so her fingers twine around his arm, and already his heat blisters through her as if it is a sentient thing eager to slide into the cracks in her ice.

"I'm a stranger here, Sebastian," she tells him. "Maybe I'm being presumptuous in saying so, but you're the only one who trusts me. You know, before the dueling night, I lied to the other Ravenclaw students by pretending I didn't speak English. Then I used a bad spell and nearly maimed a girl. A few days later, I asked Ominis to damage his reputation for me—a stranger..."

Sebastian gelid demeanor thaws with her touch, the angles of his face planed by her words. "His reputation is already beyond repair... But I thought you didn't care about Hogwarts."

"I shouldn't," she replies, "and maybe it doesn't show on my face, but when I walk in a classroom and all conversations stop, it... hurts me. So I suppose I do care. At least a little..." she sheds a lithe scoff. "I guess the Collector could've fed on these inconvenient insecurities of mine." She turns her face to him. "I know he'd be replete with my sorrow if I lost the only friend I made here."

A smirk cracks through the varnish of Sebastian's ire and when it has completely slipped from his features, he tugs her along as she hangs at his arm. "I hope you're an early riser, new girl."

The tight coil inside of her loosens and she is able to relinquish a smile. "Why do you ask?"

Alice | Hogwarts, 1857.

A girl sits at a table set for twelve. The tablecloth is busy with steaming plates. In a golden bowl drowses an assortment of fruits slowly rotting away, and, burrowing through the sweet pulp, hatchlings feast heartily.

Soon, they will weave a chrysalis around their bodies, and before the dinner is over, flies will tear through their pupas and turn their globoid eyes on her.

Her cheeks are dewed with tears. Her mouth pasty with her own sick. In the corner of the dining room, an anguished violin plucked by an invisible soloist renders a dolent aria.

No, not an aria. A requiem.

Hers.

The Collector materializes at the head of the table, and as soon as he is corporeal, his sea-blue eyes hook onto her and a smile creeps upon his lips.

He unashamedly dons Jeremiah's flaxen curls, the same dimples that used to nick her fiance's cheeks; he even extends the same elongated fingers to a spoiled apple mottled with bruises and rolls it between them. Pressing against the table, his turgid gut looks about to burst.

But he is never satiated—ever famished.

He will feed until the world's bones are picked clean.

Knowing what comes next, she squeezes her eyes shut, loosening another lash of tears from her lids.

"Uh uh," he tuts her. "You agreed to let me feed on you nine times, and you didn't ask to be desensitized to your ordeals. No—you asked me to spare your little sister, and so I did."

With a snap of his fingers, her eyelids are violently peeled back and, despite her desperate attempts, she can no longer blink.

The Collector waves his hand and there, flowering amidst the piping dishes and silver cloches, is the body of her dead fiance.

Tudum, tudum.

Her heart pumps her full of dread.

She dares not stare into Jeremiah's lifeless eyes, yet she catches the waxen pallor of his skin in the tail-end of her eye; and glimpses his extinct lips, scallop-colored in the low light of the candelabras.

A sharp pain blisters from her palms as she stares with horror at the bones jutting out of her skin. Slowly—excruciatingly—the cartilage contorts and reforms into the shape of a knife and a fork.

She nearly faints with the torture, but the Collector has always made sure she can weather it without slipping out of consciousness.

He doesn't like to feed on a sleeper; prefers to season his dish with screams and drizzle it with agony.

"What are you waiting for, Alice?" He asks her tauntingly. "Dig in."

Jeremiah's body inches closer to her, his feet climbing up her empty plate.

Water burns its way down her cheeks. She can taste the salt on her tongue, and the bile crawling up her esophagus.

One more walk through the Collector's pandemonium.

One more trial, and she'll be free.

The Collector's glass fills with a tar-like substance and he reclines in his seat as her fork quaveringly prongs into the dead flesh. "The things we'd do for love..."

* * *

The Collector's Game

Still here, reader? Do you think you could do better than poor Alice?

Let's put this faith in your skills to the test, shall we?

I will hide secret messages in the upcoming Act (the chapters comprised between Interlude 1 and 2). If put together, these words will provide the answer to my riddle. Be the first to solve it, and you will win your own personal one-shot fic starring yourself with the love interest of your choice.

Do you think you have what it takes? Keep reading, and we'll both find out...

The Collector's Riddle:

Within the depths of human hearts I reside,

A hidden desire, relentless inside.

Though darkness veiled, it yearns to be free,

To taste the violence that dwells in me.

In secret whispers and forbidden dreams,

A primal hunger, more than it seems.

What is my nature?

Disclaimer

The song and video footage used aren't mine. The song is In the End, by Tommee Proffit.

Sebastian | Hogwarts, Early September, 1893.

The fall is soft—painless. And as Sebastian tumbles down a dark and vacuous abyss, he almost believes he found himself in the grasp of Malisect again.  

The landing, however, is pitiless, and as his senses couple back with his body, he jolts awake, his nails scratching at the knot of fabric noosing his throat.

Not Malisect. Definitely not Malisect.

Fear surges from primal depths, and in his panic, Sebastian sees his parents, eyes bleak, mouths ajar, necks purple with the poison; both lifeless and lying face up in the cellar library.

Ominis is on him in seconds, feeling his way to the knot of bedsheets. Fast enough, the collar loosens and Sebastian jerks upright, heaving. 

“Are you all right?” Ominis asks him, concern roiling behind his milk-white eyes. 

Sebastian’s fingers shoot to his neck. His flesh is feverishly hot. The morning light fuses through the mullions, mooring him to reality. He allows the familiar scents of his room to expunge the last dregs of his nightmare before replying—albeit with uncertainty: “I’m fine.”

Something, however, is amiss, and when Sebastian realizes he is fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes, it all comes back to him.

The Grimfire scorching his fingers; Livia touching the stained mirror; the dark figure speaking in a cavernous echo. 

“How did we make it back here from the Room of Requirement?” He asks Ominis. “Do you remember leaving?”

Shaking his head, Ominis ambles to his dresser, then yanks a fresh shirt and trousers from the first drawer. “No. I woke up feeling this crushing weight on my chest, as if someone was sitting on me. Whatever that entity was, it either dazed us or teleported us in our beds.” He shrugs out of his shirt, then slides into the new one. “Whatever it is, I’m not eager to repeat the experience.”

Sebastian’s fingers card through his hair, the motion enough to leave a score of shivers on his scalp. Settling in him, an undescribable discomfort. It’s not a mouthful of sick or a pang of anxiety, but rather an itch that prickles at the back of his throat, as if he curled his toes on the edge of a cliff, leaning ever forward until the bottomless void calls him into its arms.

Uprooting himself from his bed, he stands before the looking-glass, and, to his surprise, finds himself unblemished. There isn’t even a necklace of bruises where the loop of bedsheets twined.

 Ominis leans against the desk, his arms crossed before him, and Sebastian knows what his friend will say before he utters the words. “You don’t consider going back, right?”

Sebastian finds himself avoiding his friend’s stare, even though he knows it to be sightless. Ominis senses dismay the same way a dragon would its distressed brood, so he opts for the truth to pacify him. “Of course, I’ll go back. We don’t even know what this Collector is or what he wants. He gave us three questions. Feels to me like we’d be fools to make a final decision without at least asking them.”

“The thing noosed you,” Ominis points out.

Sebastian gives a dismissive laugh. “How do you know it wasn’t me who ensnared myself in my own bedsheets?”

Ominis’ lips twist in dissension, yet he says nothing at that, knowing all too well the fire of Sebastian’s obstinacy will only wax if he gives it oxygen. 

When they are dressed and fed, they hurry to the Defense against the Dark Arts class and find themselves amidst a dissonant chatter. 

How strange to see them all dizzying themselves in senseless palavers, not knowing that somewhere beneath the castle’s stone skin, an entity awaits.

Ghosts roam the corridors, poltergeists skirl through walls, thestrals stomp the school grounds, their bones showing in their wasted sheath, yet something tells Sebastian the Collector doesn’t belong to Hogwarts’ palimpsest of mysteries. 

Again, his mother’s words roil in his brain. 

There are wonderful things hidden behind Hogwarts’ skin. But there are sinister things, too. 

Lost in his thoughts, Sebastian scarcely harks the shreds of conversations ebbing around him. Neither does he hear Poppy Sweeting’s wispy voice until she grazes his shoulder with her fingers.

“What?” He asks her as she snaps him out of his trance.

Her brown eyes are sleek with the diffidence Sebastian knows her to be plagued with. “Can I sit?”

He looks around him, to the occupied seats, realizing Livia will have nowhere to sit if he grants Poppy her wish.

If Livia comes to class at all, he reminds himself.

Poppy stands, expectant, her knuckles bent around her textbook, two scarlet florets thriving on her cheeks. Reluctantly, he nods and the Hufflepuff girl slides nervously in the chair next to him.

“I heard you dueled with the new student,” Poppy attempts meekly. 

Sebastian offers her a faint smile, made all too aware of his placidity. “Yeah, I did.”

“How is she?”

A pleat forms between his brow as he strains to conceal his surprise. If Ominis or Amit or Leander had asked the same question, his answer would be nothing short of a eulogy. 

He would tell them Livia Novik is alternatively a naked flame and a sheen of ice; that a word escaping her lips is excuse enough to want to ruin her in a single thrust; that she is a headache waiting to happen, and that, for all intents and purposes, he already feels the trepan of lust drilling through his skull.

But curated for Poppy, his answer is wholly different: “She’s… an acquired taste, but approachable.”

The description lacks substance, but Poppy nods regardless, peeling her book open before her. 

As if she has been beckoned into the room by her mention alone, Livia streams in, her fearless demeanor miles away from Poppy’s. Her reputation is enough to curtail the most verbose students, and she lifts her head at the sudden hush, her green eyes needling through the rows of occupied seats until she finds Sebastian. 

Warmth courses through his face and in lieu of offering a seat, he gives an apologetic shrug. 

“Hey, new girl!” Garreth Weasley shouts from the second row on the other side of the platform, his hand tapping the empty chair next to him. “You can sit with me.”

Fucking Weasley.

Sebastian’s jaw cords so tight he fears his teeth will shoot out from his gums, and as Professor Hecat forgets herself into an agonizing lecture, Sebastian watches, powerless, Garreth sharing his textbook with Livia, both of them stitched together by the shoulder. Halfway through the class, Garreth succeeds in making her laugh, and Sebastian mulls over the soft angles of her face. 

Has he seen this shade of spontaneous contentment on her before? Has he witnessed the way her teeth show but for a twinkle when she giggles so primly? Has he been on the receiving end of her tactile attention; the same she graces Garreth with when she coils her fingers around his forearm to entice him into passing her the book?

“Sebastian?” Poppy asks, drifting into sight and, once again, wresting him from his convulsive thoughts. 

“Hm?”

Across the platform, Garreth leans in to whisper something in Livia’s ear and snags her another smile.

“I-I wanted to ask you something…”

His pupils leap to Poppy. A trickle of sweat breaks on her temple, crawling down the side of her ruddied face. Her fingers are pallid, wringing the fibers of her gold-and-black scarf as if they are soused through with water, but the wretched thing is dry as a sheaf of wheat. 

“What is it?” He asks her, resting his cheek against his palm. 

“I know the Hallow’s Eve ball is in almost two months, but… I was wondering if you’d like to—I mean, if I could go… with you?”

The words fall into him like through a well until the last two break the surface of his mind. He turns to her. “Me? The what? The ball?”

More red vines through Poppy’s face. “Yes… You can say no if you had other plans or even if you don’t, I mean… I’d understand if—”

“No, it’s…” He doesn’t know what to say, and for a moment, he itches to tell her he never had a smidge of interest for her; not even the slightest afterthought when he combed through his mind for another girl to release to. Another glance to a laughing Livia knifes deep into his gut, and he focuses back on Poppy. “Sure, we can go together.”

For the remainder of the class, Poppy is beaming. 

Sebastian, on the other hand, chaws murderous thoughts for Weasley, his attention trained on the uncanny couple he forms with Livia Novik.

* * *

“If you had a whole basement at your disposal, why did you shepherd me into your bedroom, Sebastian Sallow?” Livia teases him as the metallic gate to the undercroft screeches vexingly on its rusted hinges.

Ominis leads the way, the small ripples of air his wand pushes around its tip whisking flurries of dust from the floor.

“You seemed like the kind of girl who’d squirm at the sight of spiders,” he replies.

“Is it because of my silk shirts?”

“The dainty hands.” 

“Am I interrupting something?” Ominis cuts in when they are deep into the belly of their secret hideaway.

Sebastian leans against a pillar, the cold rock biting into his back. “I’d say you are, but I don’t want to impose my pettiness on Livia, even though she already did her good deed for the day speaking to Weasley.”

She glances around her to the statues gathering cobwebs and the gutted wooden crates. 

The place is vast; its ceiling buttressed in stone; the floor uneven and clammy; the walls hoarding zealously on Sebastian and Omnis’ secrets.

Livia lets her fingers scuttle over the surface of the pillar where Sebastian nods. The scratch of her nails against the stone curls into his abdomen, and she turns to him with those eyes that scream defiance. “Another man you’ll uselessly provoke in a duel?”

Sebastian chuckles lightly. “With the amounts of drug emanations he inhales on the daily, Weasley can barely hold his wand on the right side up.”

She raises a brow. “Drugs?” 

“He’s a potions prodigy—his sole talent,” Sebastian replies. “He got to producing his own questionable decoctions.”

Ominis sports one of his contemptuous smiles. “You’d know what you’re talking about, right, Sebastian? Aren’t you out of Malisect already?”

“Malisect?” Livia asks, and Sebastian shrugs.

“A liquid that enables you to hop between memories—to relive them at will.”

Something scrolls past her eyes. A glint Sebastian has not yet learned to interpret. A cautious interest?

“Hum, well…” she says. “Far from me the the idea of beheading this delightful banter, but I believe we have more pressing matters to discuss, namely the reason why we all time-skipped last night.”

Ominis doesn’t waste a second to give his opinion on the matter. “We shouldn’t meddle with this Collector figure. I couldn’t even see it, but the thing gave me the creeps. There was something in the air…”

“The smell of your own piss, perhaps,” Sebastian aims at him. “The thing did nothing to us, so it can’t be that ill-intentioned.”

“I disagree with both of you,” Livia says. “It’s not because the wolf doesn’t lurch at you straight away that it isn’t ravening, and I haven’t come this far to flee with my tail between my legs at the first show of teeth, either. We have three questions, and I intend to ask them.”

“I really didn’t think I’d have two Sebastians to contend with this year.”

Ominis’ dagger flies right past Sebastian. “You know, Ominis, you can give us your question. No one’s going to fault you for preferring the shelter of your blanket to the thrill of toying with mysterious forces.”

“You’re not helping our case,” Livia remarks. “Still, we should think about our questions carefully. There’s no way for us to know if we’ll get more questions later.”

“What’s your plan exactly?” Ominis asks, not without an ounce of annoyance lacing his voice. “I thought you two were after the Promissum Mortis; that you wanted to ask the Room of Requirement to conjure it for you?”

“I’m not sure the Room of Requirement can conjure the relic,” Livia explains. “Have you never wondered how the room conjures the objects contained within? Nothing—or no one—can simply make things. Matter has to be pulled from somewhere and rearranged. It can only be shaped, designed, never created.”

Sebastian lifts a brow. “What do you mean to say?”

“I mean, if the room gives us the Promissum Mortis, it could be a mimic, and magic this powerful has a very high chance of backfiring if channeled through a precarious vessel. Maybe this Collector can help us acquire the original…”

“Do you hear yourselves?” Ominis snaps. “Flaunting the risks about like it’s nothing… We walked into a shady room, shedding our blood as some kind of offering, then were sent back into our beds with a yoke of sheets around our necks, and now you want to do what exactly? Bargain with this entity we know nothing of to gain a relic that will, mostly likely, curse us and our entire progeny?”

Sebastian cannot help but smile at Ominis’ verbal lactation. “Good to know you thought of breeding yourself, so now I can make sure it doesn’t happen.”

Livia leaves the shadow of the pillar, oscillating close to Ominis. Sebastian watches as his friend tenses when he feels her entering his vicinity. “I’m not asking you to risk anything, Ominis.” Her fingers climb over his shoulder, and Sebastian feels the strain in his jaw once again. “I never properly thanked you for your help the other day. I’m aware you barely know me, and you didn’t have to agree to it, but I’m very grateful that you took the plunge for me.” Ominis’ gait softens, as if Livia’s leaches a thaumaturgic spell through her fingers. “But I’d ask you to give my intelligence the benefit of the doubt. I won’t be reckless. I just want to know what we’re dealing with before making any decision. Besides, if this entity is malevolent, it’d be wise of us to act before it lures less… cautious students into its trappings.”

Sebastian almost falls on his face when Ominis says: “Okay. Let’s work on our questions, then.”

The air laces with moisture over the course of the next hour as they sit around a table, scribbling questions and subsequently discarding them. 

The paper fills with inquiries of a various nature, some more utilitarian, some more ontological.

“We should just ask it if its intentions are good or evil,” Sebastian suggests as the pang of hunger churns his stomach. 

Livia shakes her head. “Good and evil are complicated matters to define. It’s too open for interpretation.”

“I agree with Livia,” Ominis voices. “We have to be smarter than this. Cover more ground.”

“What about we ask it what its weaknesses are?” Sebastian proposes. “So we’re prepared if it tries anything on us or on an impressionable second year…”

Ominis twists the nib of his pen on the paper, the stain growing around it. “The Collector might mislead you and manipulate the information to its advantage.”

“I agree with Ominis,” Livia says.

“Between the two of you, I really feel left out,” Sebastian sneers bitterly. “If you big brains have better ideas, fire away.”

In a heartbeat, Livia pushes her chair against the stone and stands, her eyes lucent.

In time, Sebastian will learn to read this shade and to fear seeing it smolder through Livia’s eyes, but for the time being, it sends a tingle down his spine. She gathers her scrolls and her cloak. “I’ll see you tonight. I need to do something before we meet with the Collector again.”

Without another word, she leaves them stranded and Ominis reclines in his seat, his brow stitched with his puzzlement. “This girl is a little obnoxious.”

Livia | Hogwarts, Early September, 1893.

The Grimfire candle gasps alight. A shy lucence at first, then a blood-red glow dispelling the legion of shadows emboldened by the gathering night. 

Sebastian is gloved to his wrist, the Grimweave Gauntlet espousing his hand and fingers like a second skin. 

He insisted on carrying the sacrificial work—despite Ominis’ injunctions to study the artifact before making a brash decision—sliding into the garment without a second thought and palming the Grimfire with confidence. 

Now the spiny candle rests in his hand, a long, emaciated and crooked thing, barbed with hundreds of prickly needles, crowned in a vermilion flame.

It burns hot—blistering, really—and even at a distance, Livia can feel the swelter on her cheek. 

She takes a step back, the familiar lump in her throat calcifying at the thought of the blaze jumping over to her, setting her clothes afire. She half expects Sebastian’s hand to melt from his bone, but he looks unaffected by the sizzling heat.

“Now what?” He asks her.

The corridor stretches on each side of them. The silence in the castle is oppressive—strictening. A yoke looping around Livia’s neck and ushering her further into the arms of her goal.

As if there was any other way but forward. Her past is spinous with teeth. The present, brittle and shivery. 

Only the prospect of pulling Laurence back from what orphic reality lies behind the afterlife’s veil sustains her. 

“We need to move,” she says. “The flame will find the fraying seams in the wall.”

“How you itch to speak as cryptically as Dovetail to make our little quest more exciting…” Sebastian teases her. 

Next to him, Ominis clicks his tongue in annoyance. “She quoted the exact passage.”

“I’m well aware,” Sebastian shoots back. “The flame will flutter when the room is nearby because fire feeds on oxygen, and a hidden room is bound to be filled with air. I’m no Ravenclaw, but I’m not an idiot either.”

“There is a little more to it,” Livia adds. “The Grimfire has been designed to detect things that have been magically concealed. No normal candle would do.” She glances around her, to the pooling shadows that fester outside of the crimson light’s vicinity. “We should get going before someone catches us. I don’t know how I could justify meandering in the company of my tormentor.”

A neat line traces down Ominis’ brow, but a scowl is the only thing he offers in response to her slight before Sebastian leads them onward.

They plod wordlessly through hallways at candle glow, the flame burnishing their warped silhouettes on the walls.

Hogwarts is silent as a tomb, save for the ghosts that idle in the eaves somewhere above their heads. Even the paintings are empty, as if the subjects they shelter have been expatriated by the Grimfire. 

There is something eerie about the blood-red glare and the way it slices through the murk and, for an instant, Livia thinks it a sentient, living thing, marshaling them into uncharted depths to a destination only known to it.

They traipse past the Three Sisters Bells, needle through countless warrens of corridors, ascend a tower, then climb down another, until they find themselves in the Astronomy wing.

The air here is stale, the silence assertive. The Grimfire’s glimmer flickers once, twice, thrice; the flame’s apex dramatically leaning to the left.

Excitement swells through Livia’s veins, her heart thrashing against the boning of her corset. 

Ghosting over her palm, the phantomatic touch of her brother tells her she has never been so close to pulling him through the shroud of death back into the world of the living.

Sebastian likewise smiles, his excitement dripping through his face.

“Did you find it?” Ominis asks, his eyes wending about the shadows before him. 

“Yes,” Livia confirms. 

Her fingers scuttle along the stone wall, and Sebastian inches closer. The Grimfire throbs, its heat intensifying. He turns to Livia, his pupils two boundless pits of ink-black in the queer light. “How do we get in now?”

“What do you do when can’t see things, Sebastian Sallow?”

His brow hikes on his forehead, a smirk playing on his lips. “I tell myself it must suck to be Ominis.”

Ominis gives a low growl before giving Sebastian an irked shove.

Livia ignores the puerile display. “The right answer is you turn on the light.”

“Isn’t it already on?”

“Lift the candle,” she orders Sebastian and he obeys, his curiosity discernible.

She lets her fingers hover close to a sharp spur. “Haven’t you wondered why it’s made of needles? The Grimfire flame feeds on blood.”

“I don’t know why I let you two sway me into coming with you,” Ominis cuts in, his tone barbed with exasperation. “First, we paint me as a ravisher to break into Black’s office and now we prick ourselves with needles to access a room that doesn’t want to be found. Doesn’t it sound a little dangerous to you when I say it out loud?”

“Sounds even more exciting, actually,” Sebastian retorts with a wicked smile on his lips before angling his face to Livia. “Show us what you’re made of, new girl.”

Her ventricles plangent, she extends a finger towards the candle. 

The tip is razor-sharp, puncturing into her skin with ease. A flower of blood blooms on the pad of her index, bubbling when it comes in contact with the seething heat. The Grimfire flame tumefies, and Livia retracts her hand swiftly, clasping her flesh wound into the folds of her skirt to stave off the blood flow. 

Sebastian is next, the shy pain and the sight of his blood leaving him unfazed. Again, the flame purrs and fattens. Sebastian turns to his friend. “Care to contribute, Ominis?”

With a sigh, the Slytherin obliges. 

The flame sibilates now, the glimmer tumescent and replete.

“Fuck,” Sebastian mutters, his teeth sinking into his bottom lip. “This shit’s burning through my fingers.”

He doesn’t have to weather the hurt for too long, for a searing line crawls through the spaces between the stones forming the wall. There is an ominous hiss, then a sheen of simmering air rippling before them. The Grimfire goes out next, and a door flickers into existence.

Sebastian tilts his head, visibly perplexed. “Is it—”

“It must be,” Livia says, her voice is reduced to a whisper. “The Room of Requirement.”

Ominis sighs next to them. “A part of me really wished it didn’t work.”

“What a spoilsport you are,” Sebastian snides. 

Livia’s thoughts, however, are miles away from the banter, and even further from the caution she knows she should exert. 

The room beckons, its arcane a calling Livia longs to unravel, and she presses both her palms to the metal flourishes stippled into the door.

“Maybe we should tread carefully,” Ominis advises.

“It’s a door, Ominis,” Livia replies. “There’s only one thing to do with it.”

“Get your wand ready if you’re so skittish,” Sebastian suggests before laying the candle on the ground and shrugging out of the glove.

Together, they push the door open. It groans on its hinges, then gives way.

A musty smell feathers to them. The room’s entrails are stitched with obscurity.

Swallowing in a dry throat, Livia moves deeper into the room. She cannot see any walls, yet something encroaches on her. A film of brumal air roams close to the ground, swirling around her ankles, and she is reminded of the poltergeist’s lair. 

Reality bends and twists here. She can sense it. The fabric of materiality is threadbare. If there is a tear in it, Livia will find it and wrench the Promissum Mortis from it. 

She pulls her wand from her pocket and utters a feeble: “Lumos.”

The light grows coyly from the tip, throwing a bone-white glow through the room. It sits hollow, save for a looking-glass.

“A floor mirror, really?” Sebastian mouths, and even if considerably lower-pitched than his usual clarion tone, his voice booms through the room like a lash of thunder.

For a moment, Livia doesn’t move. Behind her, Ominis likewise holds himself in an agitated silence.

Can they awoke something? Is there a presence lurking in the gloom with a lick of froth on its lips?

Seconds elapse during which nothing happens. Even the gelid glaze of air seems to have settled and dissolved.

Staring at the mirror, Livia notes the surface is stained with black fingerprints. The florid silver frame is antiquated, coated with a patina of fine dust. It is an old thing, rusted and neglected, and something ferments inside Livia’s stomach. When her fingers touch the glass, the effect is striking and immediate.

The room shifts. An eidolic lucence fuses from the mirror, and the wainscot of the previously imperceptible walls peels away as if curling away from a naked flame. Above their heads, a crystal chandelier skirls seethingly. 

Sebastian’s fingers curl around Livia’s arm, wresting her away from the looking-glass. 

The tempest of sound and light grows fiercer until Livia can see nothing but bursts of white exploding through her vision.

It is maddening, but not once does Sebastian let go of her, and she desperately holds onto his presence to anchor her back into reality. 

When the squall dies out and Livia peels her eyelids open, her heart skips a beat. 

They stand in a chaste white room in the middle of which stands a masked figure.

It is nipped in a black robe; its obsidian mask featurless and smooth as polished stone. Voiceless, Livia takes in the trailing knurled twine jutting out from the entity’s navel, as if a braided umbilical cord limping lifelessly onto the floor. Its gait is angular and cadaverous, and Livia is persuaded that if it steps out of its clothes, it would be no fleshier than a skeleton.

Sebastian’s fingers tighten around her shoulders. In other circumstances, Livia would note the feverish warmth effusing through him, the comforting press of his body trellising hers, the curt breaths he pushes against her scalp, but her mind is fixed on the uncanny being before them. 

Time leaches, cruel in its abating. 

Next to Livia, Ominis is tensed as a wire, his shoulders corded with apprehension. If he cannot see the figure, he can sense something is amiss. 

The festering air, however, is enough of a deterrent for him to loosen his lips to let out a question.

Then, noiselessly, the presence tilts its head, as if curiously eyeing a flock of unfamiliar creatures. Its long, skeletal fingers join before its lap, right above its strange appendage, and a cavernous, masculine voice swells from everywhere all at once, as if carried to their eardrums by every particle hanging in the air.

It scuttles over the walls, skims across the floor, bleeds from the ceiling. It is utterly and mesmerisingly terrifying and beguiling. “You sought, and you found. You may call me the Collector.”

The Collector glides forward, the mangled hems of his cloak soaring with each of his moves as if poised with a will of its own. Livia feels Sebastian’s hand inching ever closer to his pocket. 

But the entity stops, as if combing through his intention and Livia asks, her heart hammering in her chest: “What are you?”

Slowly, he shakes his head. “Three wizards found their way to me. Three questions I will grant them, and one I will ask in return.” The Collector lifts his hand and his sleeve bares a rawboned hand. His skin is papery, fragile and, most of all, without nails, yet the tip of his fingers are keen as knifepoints. “Return to me at the same hour tomorrow with your inquiries. The room will be open to you.”

And before Livia can think to react, a white noise savages through her skull.

The stone of Sebastian’s presence is gone. So are all sensations within her. 

It’s as if her soul is wrenched out of her body; her shrilling fear dissected from her frame.

Ominis | Hogwarts, Late August, 1893.

The sound of Livia’s heels eddies all around; a steady padam that tunnels right through Ominis’ eardrums. Her walk is spirited. Her presence definite, like a scud of coal-gray clouds heralding an impending storm.

Ominis barely talked to her. But people leave a footprint in their wake; an imperceptible aura decanting around them.

The demure and withdrawn give off a radiating emptiness; a bereft creature, desperate to be cherished. 

The gregarious and effusive blister their heat outwards like a vexed beast; just as feverish for the cage of affection.

Ominis has learned that everyone is an empty well. That all ache to be sated by another. That acceptance is the only currency that has any genuine value—albeit unconsciously. 

Livia Novik wants something, too. She longs to furnish her soul with the very thing she lacks. She has to. 

Yet Ominis cannot perceive her yearning under all of this noise. 

Padam padam.

She stalks into the jaws of her brazen plan with not a sheen of fear on her forehead.

What is she made of? 

Ominis cannot help but wonder as he tails her through the corridors, his wand pulsing in his pocket, alerting him to the treacherous corners and the crooked stones rearing underfoot.

Livia smells sugary, but her words are anything but. She wears silk, but her wit bristles with edges. She walks fast, but her gestures are measured—calculated. 

Something isn’t right with her. 

Turning west, she comes to a brisk halt. Ominis’ wand surges with the sudden inertia and he stalls by her side. 

“Here is perfect,” she says. 

The syllables are breathy. 

Is she… thrilled?

“Are you sure?” He asks her. 

A thirsty inhale. A faltering exhale. She is… eager? “Yes. Now it would be best if someone could see us.”

She is a deluge of signals now. The perfume of vanilla and black currant sours with her rising pulse. The breath she pushes between her lips is serrated. The whale-boning of her corset cracks under the pressure of her lungs heaving with oxygen. 

She is apprehensive… 

The question comes to him, not because he is interested in the answer, but rather to probe her reaction. When he speaks, his voice isn’t wavering. “You want someone to see us do what, exactly?”

“We need to make it believable. We need witnesses.” Ominis can hear her teeth skating on her bottom lip. “Press me against the wall and tear the buttons from my shirt.”

He wants to tell her this will scarcely make a difference in the narrative she’ll spin for Professor Weasley, but he is curious to test how similar she is to Sebastian. How thirsty for theatrics and attention.

Gaining an inch on her, Ominis almost wishes her to falter.

She doesn’t. 

So his knuckles curl around her waist, and he drives her back against the stone wall, wringing an astounded gasp from her throat. 

It’s his heart’s turn to pump his bloodstream full of elation. As his thumb mountains the slope of her neck, his mind howls with corybantic thoughts. 

How easy it would be to plunge his finger to the knuckle into the soft spot in her throat and listen to the cartilage pop. 

How fast he could feel the warmth dredge from her body if he only squeezed long enough. 

How many screams he could coax from her depths if he played her scenario with too much zealotry…

A stroke of red pulses at the back of his eyelids and the wretched thing that lives beneath his skin races back to its cage to lick its wounds. 

Crucio.

Learn your place, his mother spits, or I’ll nail the curse into your spine until it’s too broken for you to stand up to your own mother.

Stomach flooding with nausea, Ominis swiftly retracts his fingers from Livia’s skin. “I… I believe you can ruin your shirt yourself. I’ll make it believable when we have an audience.”

Her surprise is palpable. Her response, cautious. “Sure.”

The next sound that slashes through Ominis’ permanent darkness is this of fabric tensing and a hail of buttons snowing onto the floor. 

Without a warning, her fingers close around his right wrist and force his palm to connect with… wool.

Underneath the fabric, Ominis feels the curved shape of her thigh. His fingers notch mechanically into the crux of her knee and she lifts her leg, pulling him closer. 

His other palm splays onto the stone to break his fall. 

The air festers with tension, and his intrusive thoughts come blistering back into his skull until—

She screams. 

A mortiferous wailing that strikes Ominis right where he stands. 

He almost lets her go, his fingers detangling from behind her knee, until he feels Livia’s hand furl around his palm to keep him rooted to her. 

It takes only seconds for the wooden stairs above them to creak with the weight of many legs. 

The Ravenclaw tower, really?

“Mister Gaunt! What do you think you’re doing? Leave her alone!” 

Professor Weasley’s voice lashes through the air, and for an instant Ominis thinks Merlin himself plodded down his celestial throne to smite him. 

Livia pushes him away, allowing him a brief window of time to slide into the clothes of his imposed role.

He fake trips, bobbing his head without rhyme or reason. “Is it here I lost my flagon?”

A pack of girls giggle from above the railing. 

As he simulates a drunken hiccup, he wonders if Livia struggles to keep her own mask on. 

“What is this about?” Professor Weasley urges them.

What comes next confirms the Ravenclaw girl is as gifted in stagecraft as Sebastian. “He—” The world dies in her gullet. She sobs helplessly. Long enough to shove a spoonful of unease down his esophagus. “He slid his hand up my skirt…”

It’s in a thunder of laughs and a score of whistles that Ominis Gaunt is yanked away from the bawdy crowd by Professor Weasley and roughly shepherded towards headmaster Phineas Black’s office.

* * *

When the headmaster is done with Ominis, he has missed both herbology and divination. 

He also missed his breakfast and the ever-shrinking window of sleep his constant nightmares afford him every night.

Parched and surly, he makes his way—early—to the dungeons, then drags himself to potions class.

He gropes for the first empty seat, then slumps against the table, his cheek stamped against the coarse wood. 

If Ominis managed to keep the headmaster’s guillotine away from the tender flesh of his neck, he doesn’t know if he’ll survive the sentencing of Hogwarts’ social tribunal after his escapade with Livia Novik.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for him, Sebastian finds him before the inquisition does. 

“Got my hands on Dovetail’s book,” Sebastian boasts, sitting next to him. “Twenty points into the difficulty meter for crossing paths with Peeves and an extra ten for being in Reyes’ vicinity when she started her period this morning.”

His skull throbbing with a sharp hurt, Ominis aches to grind his friend’s face into a powder with the pestle, but instead he just surrenders to his exhaustion and says nothing. 

Sebastian isn’t deterred by his murky silence. “Did Livia find her candle?” Ominis shrugs placidly at the question, the discomforting feeling of the Ravenclaw’s skin still ghosting over his fingertips and cleaving through the haze in his mind. 

“Fuck’s sake,” Sebastian mutters. “You’re sour when you haven’t slept…”

Another bout of footsteps resounds outside, and as the belly of the classroom fills with students, so does the air with the thorough spreading of Ominis’ late mishap. 

Ominis sits through the hum of rumors, too tired to rear his head and show his fangs, until Livia’s presence pulsates next to him. 

“Did you find it?” Sebastian asks her, eager as he is to drink her ellipses and choke on her commas.

“Yes,” she says, her voice lowering. “All thanks to Ominis’ outstanding performance.”

“You owe me a full night of sleep and one breakfast,” he retorts, more curtly than he intends to.

If she has noticed his dim mood, her tongue knifes him regardless with one of her salient comebacks. “And you owe me a shirt, or at least some thread to sew my buttons back into place…”

“And while we’re compiling our debts…” Sebastian chimes in, his words bleeding with his despicable sarcasm. “You two owe me a story…”

Ominis’ spine unfurls. There is a need creeping in his mind, one that longs to hear the gears in Livia’s head steam and startle for the right words. 

Will she tell Sebastian the truth or will she wriggle out of the snarl?

The tale itself is of no significance to Ominis. But Sebastian’s bait, and how she will slip it from around her neck might tell Ominis more than he needs to know to figure her out.

To understand what she wants and how low she is ready to stoop to see her desires realized... 

Livia’s voice has stitched all of her aplomb back into place. It is miles from the quavering inflection Ominis experienced last night when he shrugged into the same feverish inch of air as her. “I suppose you could say that unlike what the situation appeared to be on the outside, I was very much the assailant. Then I disgorged a screech so loud, I suppose I’m the reason Ominis sports a splintering headache this morning.” He feels her lean close, the sheaf of her scents clawing into his nostrils. “Will you ever forgive me?”

Despite himself, the Ravenclaw’s badinage worms its way into the chinks in his armor.

He will blame it on the sleep deprivation, but for now, he allows himself an evanescent smile that cleaves through his anemic ire like a knife through butter.

Sebastian | Hogwarts, Late August, 1893.

It is well past curfew when Sebastian and Livia make it to the Slytherin common room. Aside from the occasional glance around, Livia appears unbothered by the fact they are trampling through a few rules. 

Drifting from her, the same perfume that trailed Sebastian into his dreams last night. It bled out into the morning, too, as if a piece of her had been wedged between gum and teeth for him to pathetically suck on when the need for another hit arose.

What is it with this girl?

Is it the cutting wit? Her wand game? The hint of a Slavic accent leaching out when she speaks his name? The way her scant smiles feel deserved—earned?

Sebastian needs to focus on something else than the itch she leaves in his mind… And avoiding being caught is just as effective as a cold shower.

The living room is empty, save for the hiss of flames, and Sebastian steers left towards the stairwell. Together, they tiptoe up, silent as graves, and come to the dorm Sebastian shares with Ominis.

He opens the door and peers inside to find his friend sitting at the desk, hunched over a pile of books. 

“Late, as always,” Ominis chides him. “You’ll be grateful to know that while you were playing with your wand, I located the book you were after in the restricted section.”

“Playing with my wand?” 

The innuendo snatches a smirk from Sebastian. Next to him, Livia’s lips curl upwards likewise. 

Ominis turns on his chair, and for a moment, Sebastian thinks he can smell his shirt’s burned fibers or the irony tang of blood on it, but it’s neither the fire nor the blood Ominis sinks his teeth into… “Who are you with?”

How does he know? How does he always know?

Livia’s back stitches itself to the door, as if she regrets outstaying her welcome. 

In response, Sebastian slumps on his bed hoping to iron out the pleats tension has made in the Ravenclaw’s composure with his nonchalance. “Livia Novik, this is Ominis Gaunt. Don’t let his blind guy act fool you… He only does it to soften womanly hearts.”

“She shouldn’t be here,” Ominis hisses. “She’s not Slytherin, and it’s way past curfew.”

Sebastian cannot help but roll his eyes. This, too, Ominis has learned to taste on the air. “Haven’t you realized after eight years that the argument about breaking rules isn’t really a deterrent to me?”

“I’m well aware you’re a lost cause, but maybe she isn’t.”

“I feel a little embarrassed to say,” Livia chimes in gingerly, “but I don’t mind either.”

An odd pride shrugs into Sebastian’s chest. Livia’s clay is soft for the crime, and he wonders just how far she will go to get what she wants—how much her aspirations shape her.

“Fuck’s sake…” Ominis sighs in exasperation. “And here I thought this eighth year would be a quiet one. Should’ve insisted I’d bunk with someone else…”

“Oh, stop whining,” Sebastian derides him. “You’re embarrassing me in front of our guest.”

“A guest that shouldn’t be here…”

“It’s nice to meet you, too, Ominis.” Livia’s apologetic tone finds the dents in the wizard’s armor and he sheds it swiftly, rising from his chair and extending a hand in her direction.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he says. “Please forgive me.”

To Livia’s untrained eye, the gesture might seem friendly—almost penitent—but Sebastian knows better.

The little Gaunt boy that hunkered down through his family’s relentless spates of magical torture has found an inclination of his own for the meek and the complacent.

An ironic penchant Sebastian has kept himself from bringing before Ominis’ attention or else jeopardize their friendship.

Unaware of the wicked thoughts that, Sebastian is sure, don’t fail to materialize in Ominis’ mind, Livia shakes the hand offered and parts with a coy smile. “No harm done,” she says candidly before turning to Sebastian. “Now I believe you had me risk detention for a reason?”

“There are many reasons I’d have you risk detention,” he says playfully. “The first is so I have company. The second, to make good on my promise to include Ominis in my adventures, and the third being to have a private place where we can discuss the allegedly brilliant plan you enticed me with earlier, Livia Novik.” He stretches on his bed, his hands cradling his skull. “How does the saying goes? To zap three birds with one spell?”

“To kill two birds with one stone,” Livia and Ominis correct him in unison.

“See?” Sebastian sneers, “You two are already getting along like two beets in a pond.”

“Two peas in a pod…” Ominis feels compelled to rectify. 

Sebastian waves him dismissively. “Whatever… So, what’s this plan of yours, new girl?”

Livia leans against his disorderly desk. Will the pages of Sebastian’s notebook drink her scent and torment him with it when he expects it the least? Livia gives this thought no leeway to swell in Sebastian’s mind when she asks him: “Will you call me new girl for much longer?”

Ominis disgorges a sarcastic chuckle. “He will.”

“Another clause to add to our contract, then,” Livia adds.

 The word takes Sebastian by surprise. “Contract?”

“Spilling all my secrets before two Slytherin boys seems like a very asinine thing to do, wouldn’t you agree?” She crosses her arms before her chest, her eyes steeling. The stare she drags on Sebastian electrifies his chine. “I will reveal the plan to you as we go and if you prove trustworthy. We jest, we caper, we banter, and it’s all in good fun, but I’m not in Hogwarts to fawn over the Quidditch team, fuck through a cortege of boys or to learn how to cast myself out of a paper sack… I’m here to resurrect my brother, and if you two are all talk no walk, I’ll find the Promissum Mortis on my own.”

Ominis frowns. “Resurrection?” 

So does Sebastian. “A cortege of boys?”

Livia is all ice and no honey. “Are you with me, or did I risk detention for nothing?”

“I was with you the moment you cast that Confringo on Reyes, new girl.” Sebastian cracks his knuckles with a smirk. “I know now, it would be unwise to anger you.”

They turn to Ominis, both their gazes cutting enough to make the Slytherin’s brow hike. “I’m not as eager as Sebastian to walk on smoldering charcoals, but I’m not a snitch either. Time will tell if you’re likewise trustworthy, Livia Novik.”

“Acceptable terms,” she replies.

“So?” Sebastian uproots himself from his bunk bed, smoothing his trousers. “It seems like the perfect hour to snatch headmaster Black from the arms of his wet dreams, wouldn’t you say?”

* * *

The Grimfire, Livia Novik tells them, is a silver candle bristling with sharp needles. A thing you can only hold while wearing the Grimweave Gauntlet.

However comical the artefacts’ monikers seem to Sebastian, they aren’t half as absurd as the plan the Ravenclaw comes up with.

“Can you remind me why Ominis is so instrumental to your plan when he wasn’t even slightly enthused about the prospect of stealing from the headmaster?” He asks her as she discards her cloak and leaves it on Sebastian’s desk.

“Are you envious, Sebastian?” Ominis asks him, and his tone is enough a taunt to force Sebastian to inhale deeply through his nose. 

“I’m merely questioning your motives, Ominis…”

“You are quite vocal about your detention record and how… visited it has been,” Livia explains. “Black will believe me too fast if I pretend you nearly assaulted me after you got drunk.”

“Besides, I’m a Gaunt,” Ominis remarks, hammering on the nail of Sebastian’s coffin. “The headmaster won’t risk angering my father without trying to defuse the situation first, whereas he’d commit you to Azkaban without an afterthought if you as much as sneezed on her.”

“Don’t be so smug, Ominis,” Sebastian scowls. “Your bravery will deflate the second Black’s blade hovers above your neck.”

“How you underestimate me…”

“Boys,” Livia interjects, scissoring through the thread of their budding rivalry in one quick snip. “I’d love to be surrendered back to my feathery bed before the dawn rolls in, so could you focus a little?”

Sebastian graces her with a cynical smile as he kiss-feeds her plan back to her to show his assiduity. “Ominis tries to force his way on you. You make a scene and wake half the castle with your shouts, so Professor Weasley will have no choice but to bring you two into Black’s office. As Ominis wields his threats about like Ashwood would his dick, you steal the relic, and while you two are having a blast, I sneak into the restricted section to get my hands on Dovetail’s book. Seems to me like I’m the one doing all the heavy lifting…”

“Perhaps you’d choose Azkaban?” Ominis suggests. “The result would be the same for us, except we wouldn’t have to contend with your whining.”

Before Sebastian can think to retaliate, Livia clears her throat. “Or I could run to Black myself and tell him both of you sequestered me here. You already have my cloak in your possession and it would be a trifle for me to tear holes in my own clothes, muss my hair and make my eyes water.” She flaunts a triumphant smile about. The kind Sebastian aches to stare at as she twists it around his cock. “Which one will it be, chaps?”

“You do have the mind of a Slytherin,” Ominis remarks. “At least it’s one thing Sebastian didn’t lie about. Shall we?”

Leaving the dorm, they traipse through the common room, then spill out into the deserted corridor. 

The moisture of the dungeons clings to Sebastian’s nape and raises hairs on his arms. Somewhere deep inside of him, something rouses. A disquieting unrest that settles in his skull, like a viper in tall grass, waiting for a trespasser to sink its fangs in.

The walls have eyes, perhaps, and there, between the cracks in the timeworn mortar, sidle half a thousand secrets. Hogwarts’ secrets. 

His mother’s voice carries from a moment long lost. The shade of a reminiscence that, in its slow trickle, is more potent than any strychnine: