Chapter Text
The time for the last class in today’s schedule was almost done, and I waited on a bench in the Transfiguration Courtyard, not sure of how to kill time. The air smelled like soon-announced rain, the leaves of the tree above me rustled with urgency, and my hair moved around me.
The last few students who were in my sight ran to the buildings, calling it a day. But I stayed there, wrapping my arms with my coat and covering myself from the cold air, debating whether to stand up now and head to Ominis’s classroom, or wait a couple of minutes more.
Would it be weird if I arrived just in time? Or would he think I’m desperate to start? I was not, really. I actually wanted to hide, pretend to be dead or go out to find a troll and fight it.
Anything was better than that, especially after a tense and tough day.
I didn’t do much, to begin with. I couldn’t talk to Matilda, to tell her about my conversation with Mister Montgomery. And honestly, I was scared to do it. But she wasn’t here, and my other choice was talking with Ominis.
Which, of course, wasn’t an option at the moment. Firstly, the tension from the Three Broomsticks still hung between us; Secondly, I feared his reaction. And lastly, he was nowhere to be seen at breakfast.
So was Garreth.
The silence at the table was abysmal. The usual comments of Sharp and Ronen didn’t get in. And the emotional pressure of yesterday made me dizzy. I knew they knew something, but I was glad they didn’t mention anything.
So here I was sitting by the cold after wandering around the castle like a ghost. And before I knew it, the courtyard was dead silent, the wind roaring my only company.
I finally sat up and began to walk towards the Defence Against the Dark Arts Tower.
The place was quiet, besides the comforting song the violins played and the echo of my boots against the floor. I reminded myself, as I walked, that it was only a teaching lesson, nothing to be nervous about. And the sooner I start, the sooner the day ends.
Once outside his classroom, I knocked and opened the door immediately. I stepped in, the classroom was already empty, as I had hoped, but no sight of him either.
Well, I tried, I thought, turning around.
“You’re late,” Ominis called.
I looked back. He was leaning on the doorframe of his office, up in the classroom. He wore a dark green shirt with the sleeves rolled up and held a teacup in both hands. His eyes were looking at me, as if he knew exactly where I was standing.
“I thought you forgot about this,” I said, walking in with hesitant steps.
“Why would I? When I told you myself yesterday.”
I took a deep breath, accepting my destiny, “That’s why I came.”
“And late.”
“It was only five minutes. The castle is huge!” I complained. Though, who was I kidding? I did this to myself.
He arched an eyebrow in disbelief. I cleared my throat and ignored his deep stare at me, walking up the stairs. I stopped by the door, but Ominis hadn’t moved at all. His body was still blocking the entrance, and his eyes were looking straight at me.
I felt the air leave my lungs.
“Are we- uh. Should I enter?” I managed to say.
But he didn’t move. A tiny spark crossed those cloudy eyes, and his eyebrows twitched. I almost missed it. It was wild how he really seemed to know where my eyes were, as his never left mine.
I cleared my throat, trying to call attention again.
Ominis shut his eyes for a long second, “Come in.”
He turned around to enter first. His office remained exactly as I last remembered. The dim light of the fireplace lit the room. The space was cosy, warm. Intimate.
Ominis walked past the desk to leave his teacup on the other table. I stood there, watching every move he made, and waiting for an instruction, a word, a command. Anything. But he just served himself more tea.
I licked my lips, “Um-” I started, watching with confusion how he turned around to face me, like I was interrupting a sacred practice, “So, what am I supposed to do now?”
He took a sip before answering, “So now you want to start?”
I hummed, crossing my arms in front of me.
“You made me wait five minutes. Now you’ll wait exactly five minutes.” He stated. Then he sat in his chair.
I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out of it.
“Fancy some tea?” He asked after a few moments.
I swallowed, my mouth dry. “No, thanks.”
He shrugged, "Suit yourself.”
His composed self was throwing me off. He looked so unaffected while I was here, trying to stop my heart from pounding louder. He took the time to finish his tea, as if I wasn’t standing just in front of him. Yesterday, he was distant, last night exhausted by my presence. And right now, nothing affected him at all.
Maybe it was indeed all in my head.
He stood up again, placed his teacup on its table, and took his wand from the desk. With a flick, he made it disappear, and at the same time, all the furniture moved over, leaving the middle space empty.
“Alright. We’ll start with something basic.” He said, “Take out your wand.”
With a trembling hand, I did what he said.
“For this first lesson, I need you to dodge my basic casts without Protego. It should be easy.”
We both took our defensive positions, each at opposite ends. When we took our wands out, Ominis counted to three and started casting spells at me. I dodged every one of them easily, vanishing some others.
“Now, I want you to cast them on me. And watch me dodge them.”
I raised an eyebrow, filled with the moment, “I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”
But he smirked, “Don’t go easy on me.”
At the count of three, I did what he told me to do. I cast spell after spell without stopping, and watched how masterfully he dodged every one of them. We moved in circles, keeping the distance between us pertinent. Sometimes I would step closer or farther, trying to surprise him in the attack. But he kept marvellously dodging them.
I was mesmerised, hitting faster and failing. And at every attempt, he answered with elegance and experience.
“Wh- When did you learn to duel like that?” I asked once we stopped.
“Practice,” he placed his hands on his hips, “But I should thank you for not hesitating there. That helped a lot.”
Back then, people wouldn’t want to duel him due to his condition. It didn’t seem fair to them, and they always went cautiously about it. We used to practice together sometimes. But it didn’t compare to today.
“The key, and what I need you to learn first, is to feel the magic around.” He said, taking a few steps closer. I took one step back, “You are a great duellist, guided by your experience. The thing is that that experience was accompanied by sight.”
He lifted his wand, the scarlet spark growing brighter at times. He let out a trace of magic from it, like drawing in the air. They didn’t have any structure, like doodles.
“You can see what I’m doing, where I am aiming, where I’m standing. Everything.” He continued, moving in circles around me, painting with his wand. “And since I can’t, my only resource is to feel it.”
With a flick, he made all his doodles vanish.
“Your advantage is that you already feel the Ancient Magic around you. But you acknowledge it. You don’t really know where it is or what form it is taking. And that is the goal.”
“Just to know where it is?”
“To use it. To differentiate between magics. To own it.”
“No problem,” I said firmly with a huge smile.
“Okay, Miss Confidence,” he joked, “Then close your eyes. And attack me like you did.”
I shook my head to understand, “Just like that? No practice?”
He took a place by the window, “We already did that. Now, close your eyes.” He ordered.
“I’ll make a mess,” I insisted.
“We’ll clean it. Close. Your. Eyes.” He said, surprisingly patient.
And so I did. He counted to three, and I began to shoot aimless spells that only hit the walls. There was no way for me to tell where he was. He moved with the ease of a cat. I could barely hear his steps in the middle of the chaos that the ricocheting spells and falling books made.
I rotated slowly with my wand ready, focusing on hearing his moves.
“Use your other senses!” He called out.
“I’m trying!” I said desperate.
I could only imagine the mess I made. I peeked only to see Ominis right in front of me, ready to cast a spell.
And before he hit me, I blocked it.
“You looked!” He pointed his wand at me, offended.
“No, I did not.” I panicked.
“Then you just happened to avoid the attack after thousands of your failures?” He inquired with a bored look, “Really?”
I kept quiet, caught in the lie.
Ominis sighed, closing his eyes and lowering the wand. I thought for a brief moment that he’d given up on me. Maybe this is how he found out what an unrealistic task he got into. Instead, he walked to me. His pace was calm but determined, which paralysed me as he got closer.
“Take it off,” he ordered, getting his hands up to his tie, untying it.
I blinked, “M-My coat?”
“Your sight,” he stopped, the tie held in his hand. At this distance, the lavender got to my nose, along with the mint of his tea earlier. “I have to make sure you don’t cheat. Turn around.” He said, barely a whisper.
I swallowed and obeyed, feeling my heart growing bigger against my chest, and the heat from Ominis’s closeness made my knees tremble. His fingers brushed against my skin as he touched to feel where my eyes were. It was as he already knew, as he did it with such delicate movements.
He wrapped his tie around my head, adjusting my hair in the process. Every touch was agonisingly deliberate; it made me want to lean back and fall.
A simple thing, one he could have done in seconds. But he took every possible time there, and I wondered if it was intentional.
“Ominis-” His name escaped from my lips unconsciously, breathy.
He shushed me but didn’t move away. Instead, he reached around me, his arms caging me in without actually touching me, until his hands found my wrists. When I turned around, he was so close that the slightest lean and I’d be pressed against him. He adjusted my hands between us. And all I could hear was the rhythmic thump-thump of a heart, not sure of whose.
“Feel,” he whispered. His breath brushed my face, and I bit my lip hard, looking for steadiness. “You’re searching magic with your eyes. But it is in the friction. In the air surrounding us.”
His hand reached for mine in the handle of my wand, and stayed there. I felt my skin burn.
Ominis took a deep breath, “Do you feel that?” His velvet voice tickled my spine. I almost laughed at the question. If only he knew I felt everything.
“Your wand holds your tamed magic. Learn to know it. What’s inside here is your pure essence.” His grip tightened a little.
In the middle of the thousands of emotions flowing through my veins, I could feel the slightest electricity that resonated with my own magic. Ominis didn’t move; his palm remained still.
“If I can feel it, so can you. Recognise it first. Let it whisper to you.”
“I- I feel something,” I tried to say without my stuttering sounding too obvious.
“Good. Now embrace it.”
I was about to ask how, but the contact made me freeze, still like a statue, and my heart grew as if it had been set down by the sun. Ominis had raised my hand slightly higher and moved our tangled hands in the wand up to my chest. The nervousness roused in the waiting, I could hear my own heart trying to escape to find his, louder by the seconds.
Everything inside me screamed to lean forward. Or backward. To do something fast.
And moments before his hand made contact with my body, a shuttering made me jump away.
I let go of our hands and took off his tie, fading the intimate moment into concern, but feeling like breathing again.
All the glass-made artefacts in this room shattered; some portraits complained about the noise. And even though I was amazed by it, I had a brief suspicion that I had caused it.
“I’m so sorry.”
But Ominis remained still, his sight tilted by one side with a tight grip in his fists. But a second later, he raised his sight at me, almost unaffected.
“Just remember that your magic is guided by your emotions, whether good or bad.” He said, remaining in a professional posture, “And if you hold them back, they will eventually burst. Like the glass in here.”
He cast Reparo on the office, and in seconds, it all looked untouched. Even the heavy energy that surrounded us before.
“We will cause attention if we practice here. We must move our lessons elsewhere.” He took his coat from the wooden rack by the door and opened it. The red spark of his wand flickered, “Let’s go. We are not finished yet.”
I took a deep breath, dissipating the redness in my cheeks. I followed his movements out of the classroom, my steps behind him, being the only ones walking the corridors, crossing the bridges in the rain. I didn’t need to ask where we were going, as the path was utterly familiar.
We finally stopped at the tiny closet down the stairs. The place I haven't stepped foot in years and thought never will. The place that started it all and where it all ended.
The Undercroft.
The room felt smaller than I remembered, or perhaps we were just much larger now. Still, it remained untouched, with the same stains of past failed practices that time couldn’t erase, with the same piles of long forgotten artefacts and the same dim lights above. The silence here wasn’t cosy like the office we just left; it was heavy with the ghosts of Sebastian’s ambition and all our broken promises.
And suddenly, I was not twenty-five anymore.
“Let’s try this again,” Ominis commanded, his voice echoing.
I cleared my throat and stood at the centre of the room, placing the tie this time on my own. I tried to focus, to feel the friction he talked about while he cast spells on me this time. They didn’t hit me, but I knew that it wasn’t because of failed attempts.
“I can’t! This is useless!” I yelled, taking off the tie.
“It is because you're blocking yourself!” He yelled back, although more composed than I was, "Acknowledge your emotions. Don’t suppress them.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said, sitting on a stone bench nearby. “It must be wonderful when you don’t show any.”
I was sweaty, my hair was a mess, and the emotional exhaustion of the day was catching up to me, making me say things without thinking them through. I covered my face with my palms and let out a long breath.
Ominis’s steps echoed louder when I noticed him approaching. He looked toward me with an unreadable expression, but his shoulders dropped just a fraction. He looked almost as exhausted as I was.
“You used to be better,” he said. Not with anger, or exhaustion. More like a quiet observation.
“Well, I used to be young and convinced I could do anything,” I leaned my head against the cold wall behind me. “Now I’m just tired, and frustrated, and dragged to reality.”
Ominis hesitated, then slowly, he sat on the edge of the same bench, keeping a small distance between us. For a moment, we weren’t two hopeless adults. We were just two people in a dark room.
“I don't know if I have ever told you about this,” He started, his eyes fixed on an invisible spot in front of him. They sparkled with sadness and nostalgia, “But there was one time before fifth year. Sebastian tried to charm the torches in here to change colours based on his mood.”
I couldn’t help the small laugh that escaped me, “Did it work?”
“Of course not.”
I laughed harder, picturing a foolish Sebastian. Ominis’s lips curved into a genuine, soft smile, “He made something, though. Every time he passed by a torching light in the entire castle, it would change colours. He was so embarrassed when our whole Common Room turned pink from a crush he had. He refused to leave his bed if there were people close.”
“Why would he do that?” I said breathy of laughter.
He shook his head, smiling, “He was something else. Too consistent, full of pride. He had to have all the answers and know all the ways.”
“Did it eventually work?”
“Not really. Anne happened shortly after,” his smile vanished, and the air in the Undercroft felt colder with the memory of our strongest and greatest failure of us both.
He turned his head towards me. He shifted on the bench, his hand resting on the stone between us, just inches from mine.
“But before everything collided, you came. And brought back for a brief moment his old self. You two were too similar in some ways. Both stubborn, untamed. Fearless.”
I shook my head, “That was so long ago. I don’t think I have it with me anymore.”
“Sebastian taught me the wrong ways that one goes as far as we let ourselves go. And you taught me that loyalty is a form of magic itself. You were the anchor, even when Sebastian drifted, your heart kept us from sinking.”
The ghost of the destiny that followed us since the end of fifth year still haunted me in dreams. I blamed myself for what happened, even when Ominis had told me that it wasn't my fault. I was scared of facing the same fate Sebastian did. I looked down at my hands, the same ones that were marked with a ‘gift’ that helped corrupt our friend, fearing they were stained with all the wrong choices I did and could make.
“And what if it corrupts me?” I asked more to myself.
“If you want to own your magic, you have to stop being afraid of your own heart.”
The silence that followed was suffocating. I look at his profile, the sharp line of his jaw, the way the candlelight caught the gold in his hair. And the urge to lean in, to break that wall, was almost physical. I was a teenager again. I was in love with my best friend, I was terrified, I was losing it.
My hand twitched, my fingers yearned to find his on the cold stone. My sight went to his left hand. And I forced myself to close my eyes.
But then Ominis stood up and fixed his clothes. He seemed to catch himself, realising just how much of his facade he had let slip away.
Before he could say anything, I stood up too, heading to the door.
“I’ll go to the kitchens. I’ll be quick.” I said, not waiting to be excused.
I needed distance for now. My body was reacting before my mind; I feared I could do something unforgivable. But more than anything, I needed to drown out the sound of my own heart before it led me back to him.
And after a long, wet walk, I stopped in front of the door and tickled the pear to open it.
The kitchens smelled like bread, spices and wonderful food that hugged me from my very first steps. The house-elves moved quickly around the room with their nightly chores, barely noticing my presence.
They were so accustomed to these disturbances, anyway.
I looked around, searching for something to distract my mind with. It all looked delicious, but I was not really hungry.
“Are you looking for something specific, Miss?” A voice down below brought my attention.
A house-elf covered in flour and strawberry stains looked up at me. His big green eyes showed anticipation.
I cleared my throat, “Do you have something strong—?” I asked, a little ashamed.
But the house-elf smiled big, “A celebration?”
“Quite the opposite, actually.” I bit my lips.
“Oh-,” his expression changed to understanding, “Bobbs has just the thing.”
With a snap of his fingers, he made a glass of wine appear in front of me. Bobbs looked happy, expecting happily for me to take it.
“We make those. Drink it carefully, though.”
I smiled at him, thankful, and took the glass that waited patiently in the air.
The first swallow went down hard, with a berry-strong flavour but a welcoming one. The second one passed more easily.
I looked around for a spot to sit for a couple of minutes, promising myself it would only be this glass and no more. Somewhere I wouldn’t get too comfortable.
I sat next to a pile of flour sacks, sipping the beverage slowly and cautiously, watching the house-elves work. And before I knew it, the glass had filled again with the same content. In the farthest part of the kitchen, I saw Bobbs smiling at me.
An enchanted glass.
I should’ve just left the glass and headed back to the Undercroft. I shouldn’t have just taken another sip. And I most definitely shouldn't have let my common sense disappear.
A second glass turned into a third, and that one into a fourth, until I lost track of them. Every glass I emptied refilled with my desires for more. And my mind wandered in the memories of lost and forgotten duties.
I started thinking again about what I didn’t want to think about. I replayed my moments with Ominis, our last conversation in the Undercroft years ago. I thought about his ring and the looks he gave me when we were alone.
I knew him too well to differentiate between his annoyed sigh and his thoughtful hum. I learned to read all his expressions, from concern to happiness. I memorised the sound of his voice, and I would hear it in dreams ever since I left this place. I would let myself drown in his scent forever, the lavender that never changed over the years.
And that was precisely the reason I didn’t understand him anymore. His expressions didn’t match his words; his eyes were fixed for longer than before. Did he still despise me, or did he want the same thing as me?
But what did it matter anyway? I was never honest about my feelings, and I ended up losing the bare minimum we had. I knew him by heart, and now I had no other choice but to be a stranger in his life.
After I leave, that’s all I’ll be. For a second time.
I watched the full glass in my hand, and my face reflected in it. I wondered who she was. I wondered if she knew that he’d had only mint tea with exactly two spoons of honey and not sugar; that he sometimes hummed under his breath when focused on a book; that he always buttoned his coat from bottom to top.
I wondered if he ever whispered my name in his sleep like I did.
“Summershall-” A very familiar voice called from the entrance, followed by hurried steps that stopped by me. “Are you drinking?”
I shook my head, smiling, “I am acknowledging my feelings.” My words slurred.
I heard a sigh and then two hands wrapped around me. There was no possible way for me to know for sure who it was; my eyes were blurry, my mind dizzy. But the unmistakable lavender filled me once I got up.
“Leave me here, Ominis. I'm just fine.”
“I think you had enough. Let’s take you to your room.” He said, gently pulling the glass out of my hands.
“I can stand just fine,” I frowned. And immediately lost balance.
Ominis caught me before I could stumble. His arm wrapped around my waist, firm and steady, pulling me against his side. My head felt heavy, and I rested on his shoulder.
I tried to walk, but my legs didn't respond. Ominis sighed again, carrying me. He placed an arm behind my knees and the other by my waist. And started walking out.
The walk was a blur of stone corridors and hushed shadows. My head rested comfortably beneath his chin. And suddenly, I found it more pleasant here than on my own pillow.
“You should stop doing this if you really despise me so much,” I whispered, half asleep.
“Doing what?” His voice came out hoarse.
“Being nice to me,” I said once he closed the door and headed to my room. I stopped my words before saying something stupid.
“Why?” The word sounded like a plea in my head.
He placed me on my bed and covered me with the sheets.
“Because it makes me want to do things I can’t do,” I managed to say.
For a moment, I dove into complete silence, and I thought he had left the room without me noticing. But then he spoke. His voice sounded far, like in a dream.
“You’re just drunk. I’ll leave before it’s too late,” a pause, hesitant steps and then, “See you tomorrow.”
And a door closed.