Chapter 89: Maintaining Essential Connections
Late July.
London was sweltering that year.
In a newly renovated room at Wools Orphanage, Tamara sat at her desk with a foul expression, gripping a quill as if it were a murder weapon.
Several opened letters lay scattered across the desk, alongside a large heap of crumpled drafts.
For the great Dark Lord, this was nothing less than a particularly cruel punishment.
[System warm reminder: To maintain the good interpersonal relationships you established at Hogwarts, please reply to your friends' letters promptly.]
[This will help consolidate your leadership position and... obtain more love.]
"I do not need it."
[Then... how about a little shock?]
Tamara cursed inwardly, suppressing the urge to burn every letter in front of her to ash, and began her unwilling social obligations.
The first letter was from Draco Malfoy.
The stationery reeked of expensive cologne, enough to make anyone sneeze. The contents were even more tedious. The entire letter consisted of boasting about the new broomsticks at Malfoy Manor, complaining about how irritating Potter was, and once again inviting her to visit the manor.
Tamara quickly scribbled a few perfunctory lines in reply:
"Dear Draco, I am glad to know you are still alive. I would be delighted to visit, but my research has reached a critical stage. Give my regards to your parents."
The second letter was from Hermione Granger.
It was as thick as a brick.
It contained her thoughts on previewing the second year textbooks over the summer, along with more than a dozen questions about The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2. She had even enclosed a holiday revision schedule she had drafted herself.
Looking at the densely packed questions, Tamara felt her temples throb.
"Granger, you will find the answer to the principle of the General Counter Spell in the second to last line of page thirty four. It is common sense. Also, your schedule is perfect. I might be able to complete it myself, if I did not need to sleep."
The third letter was from Pansy Parkinson.
This one smelled strongly of roses, and the stationery was a gaudy pink.
Its contents were utterly worthless, consisting entirely of pure blood gossip. Who had worn what at a garden party, and how Daphne Greengrass had apparently looked like a mouldy cabbage.
Tamara gave a cold laugh.
This sort of empty noble girl chatter was a complete waste of parchment.
Still, considering the Parkinson family's financial influence in the wizarding world, and Pansy's place among the Slytherin girls, Tamara endured it and wrote:
"Miss Parkinson, instead of concerning yourself with the colour of other people's dresses, you would do better to focus on your Charms marks."
At last, after finishing the replies, Tamara let out a long breath and was about to throw down her pen.
[Ding! Abnormal situation detected.]
[Your core friend, Harry Potter, has been silent for more than two weeks.]
[This does not match normal interaction between friends.]
Tamara paused, and a cold, malicious smirk curved at the corner of her mouth.
"Silent? Excellent."
"Perhaps his Muggle cousin finally got fed up and flushed him down a sewer."
It was easily the best news she had received all summer.
If the saviour quietly died in the Muggle world, she would celebrate for three days and nights.
[Warning: Please correct your attitude, host.]
[As a friend who has established a deep bond with Harry at school, although one sided, you should feel concern about this unusual silence.]
[Mandatory task issued: A Long Awaited Greeting.]
[Description: True friends do not grow distant because of space. Harry Potter's current situation appears unfavourable. He needs your care.]
[Requirement: Please travel to 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, to pay a visit. You must see Harry Potter in person.]
[Restriction: You must not use Dark Arts to harm or intimidate his Muggle guardians.]
"I am not going."
Tamara's refusal was absolute.
Make her visit her mortal enemy?
Not unless Merlin crawled out of his grave and knelt twice.
[Does the host confirm refusal of the task?]
The system's voice took on an almost playful tone.
[If the task fails, punishment will be carried out: The host will be forced to loudly sing "Harry Potter is My Best Friend" throughout the entire opening feast next term.]
Tamara went still.
The quill snapped in two in her hand.
The mere image of such a scene made her feel sick.
It was utterly unacceptable.
"You win."
She forced the words out through clenched teeth, hurled the broken pen into the bin, and rose abruptly.
"If Potter is perfectly fine, I will strangle him myself for wasting my time."
...
Two hours later.
Little Whinging, Surrey.
Tamara stood beneath the sign for Privet Drive, her face dark with irritation.
The journey had been pure torment.
To avoid drawing attention, she had been forced to behave like a real Muggle, first enduring a bus that lurched enough to make her ill, then a crowded, noisy underground train, then walking three blocks in the blazing heat.
"4 Privet Drive..."
Tamara narrowed her eyes and fixed on one of the houses.
She straightened her slightly more respectable black dress.
She had chosen it from her pile of old clothes. It was not wizard robes, but its simple cut suited her slender figure. Combined with her smooth black hair and pale complexion, it gave her the appearance of a quiet, withdrawn girl with a certain coldness that might even inspire pity.
She strode forward, raised her hand, and knocked.
After a long pause, a heavy set of footsteps approached from inside, followed by a man's impatient bellow.
"Whether you're selling vacuum cleaners or some bloody insurance, we don't want it. Get lost."
The door was yanked open.
Vernon Dursley's large face, which seemed to possess almost no neck at all, appeared in the doorway. He glared, ready to continue shouting, then froze the moment he saw who stood there.
This was no salesman.
It was a young girl in a black dress.
She was very pretty, with pale skin and black eyes deep as an ancient well.
What unsettled Vernon most was her gaze.
There was none of the innocence or timidity of an ordinary child in it.
She stood there quietly, chin slightly raised, studying him with a cold, detached look, as though he were some unpleasant insect.
The invisible pressure of it made every curse at the tip of Vernon's tongue catch in his throat.
"Who are you?" he demanded warily. He disliked her at once. She carried a familiar and deeply loathsome air.
Tamara answered plainly, her voice low but hard.
"I'm here to see Harry Potter."
At the name, Vernon's face turned the colour of raw liver, as though she had spoken a filthy word.
"There's no one here by that name."
He roared it, spit nearly flying into her face.
"Get lost, or I'll call the police, you little..."
He moved as if to shove her, or simply slam the door in her face.
Tamara did not move.
She merely narrowed her eyes.
She used no wand. She spoke no spell.
She simply adjusted her bearing and let that cold, clinging pressure that once belonged to the Dark Lord settle fully onto this Muggle.
It was not the look of an eleven year old girl.
It was the gaze of something stripped of all ordinary human feeling, as though calmly deciding whether the thing before it was already dead.
In that instant, Vernon felt the air around him solidify.
Some ancient animal instinct for fear began screaming inside his skull.
It was the sensation of a fat rat in a rubbish heap suddenly realising a venomous snake had been watching from the shadows.
"I will say this once more, Mr Dursley."
Tamara took a single step forward, forcing Vernon to stumble backward.
"I want to see Harry Potter."
"Now."
Vernon's mouth opened and closed like a fish on land, but no sound came out.
"Who is it, Vernon?"
A thin, horse faced woman emerged from the kitchen, drying her hands.
Petunia Dursley.
She peered curiously toward the door, and then her eyes landed on Tamara.
At once, the cloth slipped from her fingers to the floor.
Petunia's face drained of all colour, even worse than Vernon's had.
As Lily Potter's sister, she understood that world far better than Vernon ever could, and she was more sensitive to it.
She could feel it.
That aura.
That dreadful, prickling edge of magic that only appeared around those people.
And this girl's presence was colder, darker, more dangerous than any wizard she had ever seen.
Far more terrifying than Lily had been.
"You're... from that place..."
Petunia's voice shook as she stared at Tamara as if she were some nightmare made flesh.
"Good afternoon, Mrs Dursley."
Tamara turned to her and offered a perfectly correct smile that held absolutely no warmth.
"I should think that, as Harry's classmate, paying him a visit does not violate your sense of hospitality."
It was phrased like a question.
It was not a request.
Petunia's lips trembled.
She wanted to scream. To throw her out. To refuse.
But under the steady weight of those black eyes, she felt the blood in her body turn cold.
She knew, with a certainty that defied reason, that if she said no, something terrible would happen to this house and everyone in it.
"He's... he's in the garden... weeding."
Her voice had shrunk almost to nothing as she stepped aside.
"Thank you."
Tamara withdrew that pressure at once and stepped over the threshold with all the effortless grace of a perfectly bred noblewoman, entering the house thick with Muggle smells.
Yet, in the instant before her foot touched the floor, she paused almost imperceptibly.
There was something in the air.
A taut, invisible tension.
She knew perfectly well what sheltered this house: blood protection, bought with that mudblood's life and reinforced by Dumbledore.
For the Lord Voldemort of her past life, this threshold would have been a wall of living fire, fatal at a touch.
However, Tamara did not draw back.
She merely lowered her lashes and methodically locked away every scrap of disgust, killing intent, and hatred for the saviour into the deepest chambers of her Occlumency.
Her foot touched the floor.
No agony came.
No burning soul pain.
Only the faintest ripple passed through the air.
The old magic searched for the malice of a Dark Lord.
It found none.
Within its rigid judgement, the young girl before it was merely a somewhat cold but otherwise harmless visitor.
Tamara stood in the shadowed foyer, feeling the magical disturbance fade, and a mocking smile tugged at her lips.
"So this is the so called magic of love?" she thought coldly.
"It is so pure that it is easily deceived."
"As long as I do not hate you, it can do nothing to me."
Vernon was still flattened against the wall, gulping air like a man rescued from drowning.
Tamara crossed the oppressively tidy sitting room and looked through the bright French windows.
She saw the garden.
Under the blazing sun, a small figure was crouched in the grass, yanking stubborn weeds from the earth.
He wore an absurdly oversized old T shirt, soaked through with sweat, hair in a mess, looking thoroughly miserable.
As if sensing something, Harry stopped and turned.
Then his green eyes widened.
The trowel slipped from his hand and struck the ground with a clang.
He rubbed his eyes, as though convinced he must be hallucinating from the heat.
The girl standing by the window in a black dress, arms folded, looking at him with open disdain.
The one who always mocked him at Hogwarts.
The one who had still saved him when it mattered.
"...Tamara?!"
Harry's voice cracked with shock and joy.
For the past two weeks, with no letters from anyone, he had started to think he had been abandoned again.
That Hogwarts had only been a dream.
That once he woke, he was still the same unwanted freak he had always been.
But now...
Someone had come.
At the moment when he felt most alone and most desperate.
Someone had actually come all the way to this terrible place to see him.
And it was the proud Slytherin who hated inconvenience more than anyone.
"Merlin..."
Harry sprang up from the grass, ignoring the dirt on his hands, and ran for the house.
The light in his eyes was dazzling.
[Ding! Target character Harry Potter's emotional response has reached a peak.]
[Favourability has increased significantly.]
[Congratulations, host! The first stage of the task "A Long Awaited Greeting" has been completed.]
Watching the saviour come rushing at her like some witless dog, and hearing the system's revolting little notification, Tamara stepped back half a pace to avoid having mud rubbed all over her.
"What an idiot."
She judged him coldly in her mind.
"The sort who gets sold and still helps count the money."
.....
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