Kate ran out just like that. The classroom had been far too loud, a tangle of voices from every direction. She needed somewhere quiet, somewhere she could pull herself together.
"I need a room where no one will disturb me." She spoke her request aloud at the entrance to the Room of Requirement, then pulled open the door in the wall and stepped inside.
The room was blank white, with a single chair standing in the very centre.
Kate walked over and sat down, her face composed, and stared into the emptiness in front of her. Her small brows drew tighter and tighter. The wand she had been clutching all this time slipped from her fingers without a sound and rolled to rest against her foot.
What a Boggart shows is what a person fears most. There was no arguing with that.
But she was certain she had never seen that old man before in her life, and she had certainly never been beaten until her body was covered in wounds.
Never... had she?
She kept drawing deep breaths, trying to scour that image out of her skull, the one that would not stop repeating.
But that is how a mind works. The harder you try to forget, the sharper it becomes.
She could even remember the moment the white-haired girl with her own face had no strength left to run: the eyes that showed between the soaked white hair and the blood, brimming with hatred and terror.
Those were her own eyes. She washed her face in front of a mirror every morning. Kate would never fail to recognise herself.
So when had she ever lived through that?
She clenched her teeth hard and pressed both hands to her head, straining after any memory connected to it at all. Her mind gave back nothing but blankness.
Nothing. Not this life, not the one before it. She had never owned a memory like that!
Then her eyes snapped open.
Sometimes a memory does not vanish because you chose to forget. Sometimes it vanishes because someone cast a Memory Charm on you.
The only wizards near her back then had been that old man, and the old butler.
Whoever had cast the spell on her, the old butler knew what lay behind it.
And perhaps even her own inability to bear the cold was tied to that missing stretch of memory.
She closed her fist slowly, feeling the Strength surging through her body.
Kate laughed under her breath. So that was it.
She trained every single day. Her Strength was nearly level with a Basilisk's, and yet her constitution stayed strangely frail, along with that chill in her bones that not even Potions could cure.
If the fault was not in her own body, then that old man had done something to her all those years ago.
She stood without a word, walked straight out of the Room of Requirement, and started down the spiralling staircase. A few steps in, she came face to face with Hermione, who was hurrying up in search of her.
"Kate, are you all right?" The instant Hermione saw her she rushed forward and threw her arms around her. "You ran out without saying a word, you frightened me half to death!"
Everything a Boggart shows is false, and yet it is also whatever sits deepest in a person's fear at that very moment.
On an ordinary day, what Hermione feared most might have been failing every one of her exams. But in the moment Kate fled the room, what she feared most was Kate.
She was afraid she would arrive too late, and Kate would have turned into the thing the Boggart had shown.
Held in that warm embrace, Kate began to feel a faint hint of heat creeping back into her cold fingertips.
She managed a thin smile and lifted her arms to hug her back. "I'm fine. Just a bit tired."
She rested her head lightly in the hollow of Hermione's neck, closed her eyes, and listened to the other girl's quick, uneven breathing. At last she felt as though her feet had found solid ground again.
She let out a breath and stepped back half a pace, a faint smile surfacing. "Class must be nearly over by now. It probably wasn't very good of us, walking out like that."
Hermione sniffed. "Then... let's go and apologise to Professor Lupin."
"Mm." Kate looked at her and had to laugh, reaching up to wipe the tears from the corner of her eye. "Why are you crying? I'm standing right here, aren't I?"
"I'm not crying..." Hermione's eyes reddened and she ducked her head, scrubbing at them in a flustered rush, nothing left of the girl who had blasted a Boggart into a wall in front of the whole class.
If she had her way, she would let everything else go and simply keep Kate somewhere quiet, alone with her, until she was sure she would never become the thing the Boggart had shown.
She clung to Kate's arm and would not let go, head down, letting herself be led along. Not even the odd looks from other students along the way could make her loosen her grip.
They finally reached the Defense Against the Dark Arts office, and there was Lupin coming down the far end of the corridor, worn out from the lesson he had just finished.
"Professor Lupin!"
Kate, calm again on the surface, spoke first. "We came to apologise to you. We're sorry for leaving early in your very first lesson of term. It was our fault."
Lupin's step faltered when he saw the two of them, then he came briskly over. "Miss Shafiq, I'm glad. Glad that you would come and own up to a mistake of your own accord."
"Professor, Hermione only left because she was looking for me. If there's to be a punishment, please punish me alone."
Kate said it plainly, and a moment later felt a tug at her sleeve, followed by Hermione's anxious voice. "That's not true, Professor. Leaving early was just as wrong of me. Please punish me as well!"
In the old days, walking out of a lesson was something that could never have happened to Hermione, model student and lover of learning. But she had done it for Kate, and somehow it no longer felt like much of anything.
Even a punishment wouldn't be so hard to bear, so long as Kate was serving it with her.
Lupin looked at them quietly, and a faint smile appeared on that face, older than his years. "Young ladies, I think you've misunderstood me. It never once crossed my mind to punish you."
"But, but..." Hermione stood there stunned.
A wrong going unpunished did not fit anything she believed about the world.
Kate squeezed her hand, unruffled. "Thank you, Professor. It won't happen again in your next lesson."
"Good," Lupin nodded. "Oh, and today's homework is an essay on Boggarts, at least five inches. If you run into any trouble with it, come and ask me in my office during the day."
"Yes, we'll do it properly." Kate inclined her head slightly and took Hermione's hand, about to leave.
She had gone barely two steps when Lupin called after her. "Miss Shafiq. If you're feeling low, a little chocolate helps."
Kate looked back and gave him a smile. "Thank you for the reminder, Professor. I will."
Once they were far enough down the corridor, Hermione finally released the hand she had been holding until both palms were slick with sweat, and let out a long breath. "Professor Lupin really does seem like a good man."
Setting aside today's incident, his first lesson had actually been close to perfect.
Kate shrugged. "He is. Let's hope he makes it through the year."
She had no desire to let Katherine come running back to clean up the mess a second time.
By dinner, the little snakes of Slytherin were all discovering, to their astonishment, that their table was unusually quiet tonight.
Malfoy, who normally never missed a chance to sneer about something and get sneered at twice as hard by Shafiq in return, had gone remarkably silent.
They had all assumed that after what happened to Shafiq today, Malfoy would seize the opening and make an enormous production of it!
Instead the two of them sat across from one another, eating in silence, ignoring the startled looks all around, and then rose and left one after the other.
"You don't think those two decided the shouting at the table wasn't exciting enough and went off to duel in private, do you?"
"Are you joking? That's Shafiq. A hundred and fifty straight wins across the whole of last year, the duelling champion! Malfoy taking her on would be asking for trouble."
"Then what are they off doing..."
Doing what?
Malfoy had in fact meant to get Kate alone and ask her about what happened in class today. Unfortunately, she had barely followed her into the Common Room before she saw Kate walk straight into the girls' dormitory, leaving her no opening whatsoever.
And following her in there would blow her cover completely.
Malfoy: I hate this!
In any case, after everything Kate had been through today, plus a whole afternoon spent comforting Hermione instead of the other way around, she had no wish to speak to anyone for a while.
For once, she did nothing at all and simply lay down on her bed.
The moment she shut her eyes, her head filled with that hideous old man chasing her younger self and beating her, over and over, as though it were a game.
Who on earth was he?
Why had he gone after the child she used to be?
And why had the old butler kept it from her?
Kate's thoughts were a hopeless snarl. She didn't want to look at anything, didn't want to think about anything. She only wanted to sleep, quietly, for a while.
As long as she was asleep, it was almost as if none of it had ever happened.
Through the whole of the following September, Kate studied and trained exactly as she always had, as though nothing had occurred at all.
Lupin praised her essay lavishly in class, and the Boggart never appeared in his lessons again. In its place came smaller creatures, Red Caps and Kappas and the like.
Perhaps only the more observant noticed that the Dementors circling near Hogwarts castle seemed to be growing more numerous.
Word was that a portion of the Dementors had gone missing without explanation, and the Ministry of Magic had been forced to transfer replacements in from every corner of the world that kept them.
Even so, Hogwarts's Dementors went on disappearing every few days, until even the sitting Minister for Magic began to suspect Dumbledore was behind it and invited him to the Ministry for tea on several occasions.
It made no difference. Even with Dumbledore away from Hogwarts, the Dementors kept vanishing one after another.
"Have you heard? The Ministry's lost more than thirty Dementors now, and every one of them went missing near Hogwarts!"
"You don't suppose our school really is hiding some mysterious treasure that can kill Dementors?"
After the hundreds of "treasures" pulled out of the Chamber of Secrets last year, a good many students had begun to believe that different hoards lay hidden all over Hogwarts castle.
And that one of those treasures was capable of killing even a Dementor.
Kate, the sole author of this particular school legend, had absolutely nothing to say about it.
She had been in a bad mood lately and had eaten a little too much XP, that was all. And once she noticed the Ministry starting to suspect Old Man Dumbledore, she had already cut back on how often she fed.
But the legend spread anyway, and there was nothing she could do about that.
The only thing left to do now was to eat XP on a regular schedule, so that the story of "Hogwarts hides a treasure that can kill Dementors" would keep circulating.
That way the Ministry would stop suspecting Old Man Dumbledore and instead send people to quietly watch the Dementors' movements.
Not that it helped much. In that single short month she had eaten ten Dementors, pushed the Patronus Charm to level 6, and rolled five Attribute Points, all of which she poured into Luck.
She was starting to suspect her Luck was running rather low. Otherwise, why would things like this keep happening to her?
And past level 6, the Patronus Charm began to change in ways that were far from minor.
For a start, common knowledge held that a Patronus was made of a great volume of silver mist, and that summoning one always came with a considerable amount of commotion.
Now, though, she could shrink her silver dragon down to the size of her palm and it lost none of its ferocity. It certainly showed no hesitation when it came to eating Dementors.
And as her count of castings rose, she started noticing how emotional fluctuation affected the amplification of Mana.
It was still in the research stage for now, but with the System's help, Kate was confident her theory would be proven soon enough.
As the Dementors dwindled and the Aurors sent out to investigate kept failing to catch the culprit, the Ministry of Magic seemed at last to settle down.
For the near future, at least, the Dementors would only drift about the outer edges of Hogwarts castle and come no closer.
As for the Aurors left behind to protect the Dementors... nobody appeared to care much about them either.
Since they stayed away from the castle, Kate couldn't be bothered trekking all that distance to eat XP, and so both sides enjoyed a temporary peace.
During that time, the old butler also heard about what had happened in her Defence Against the Dark Arts class, and went so far as to write and ask her about it.
Kate assumed he had got his information from Dumbledore. But of these two old men, one had not asked a single question, and the other, though he cared, had confined that care to a letter on paper.
She had never once doubted the old butler's loyalty, and she knew that an ordinary little girl who had suffered abuse like that would almost certainly have come out of it damaged in the mind.
So from the old butler's point of view, forgetting genuinely had been a form of protection for her.
She understood the reasoning perfectly. It was the feeling she couldn't get past.
Her memory still hadn't returned, but every night now, the moment she closed her eyes before sleep, there it was: that old man beating her as though he were playing a game.
Even watching it as an outsider, it was appalling enough.
Every time she remembered, she found that even when she wanted to forgive the old butler, she simply hadn't the heart for it.
So she wrote back to him pretending nothing was wrong, and resolved to wait until the Christmas holidays to go home and hear the full explanation.
After all, two years ago the old butler had already told her that once she turned fifteen, he would share certain secrets with her.
She hoped these were the secrets he'd meant.
On another note, at the start of October the Quidditch season began, and the Firebolt she'd ordered had been delivered in secret to her dormitory without alerting a soul.
Malfoy was thoroughly pleased with herself and declared she would hide it away as a secret weapon, to be brought out only for the match against Gryffindor.
Kate had no objection. She was a member of Slytherin, whatever else she was. Still, lending Malfoy the broomstick on the day of the match, when she hadn't trained on it once, meant whether they actually won was another question entirely.
Before long, it was the middle of October.
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