"I can't believe I never realised," Daphne breathed. "You're just like me, aren't you?"
Oleandra took half a step back.
"It took you that long to realise what?" Oleandra asked, her brow furrowing. "That we look identical? Rather comes with the territory, doesn't it, when you're an identical twin?"
Oleandra had never seen her twin sister so excited, so positively giddy.
In all her life, she couldn't recall Daphne displaying more than the emotional range of a doorknob. Her sister guarded her heart too carefully for that, rarely smiling, always composed. The perfect heiress to a vast fortune, upon whose poised shoulders the family's future rested… since her two other siblings were quite hopeless as noble ladies.
"You're a Parselmouth, I'm a Parselmouth," Daphne said, gesturing first to Oleandra, then to herself. "I could never do this when we were younger— I only gained the power to speak to snakes when…"
Daphne's voice trailed off. She was forbidden to say any more, because it involved the Dark Lord's deepest, darkest secret, which concerned his immortality.
"…when you became a Horcrux," said Oleandra, completing Daphne's sentence in a small voice.
"So, you really are in the know!" Daphne breathed in relief. "The Dark Lord trusts no one, so I daresay it's just like him not to tell us the whole story. To think he made you into a Horcrux as well… two Dark Ladies, as insurance, I should have guessed…"
Oleandra's mind was reeling.
Thanks to Mai Dulac, she'd known since the beginning of last year that Daphne had been made into a Horcrux… but if Mai's dark powers truly could sense the foreign fragment of soul clinging to her sister— and if Oleandra herself was a Horcrux as well— then why hadn't she said anything?
A shadow of doubt crept into Oleandra's heart.
After taking Mai's seemingly harmless advice to restore her soul's shadow, she'd begun to notice gaps in her memory— and now, this business with the Horcruxes… How could she ever have thought it wise to trust Morgan le Fay's reincarnation?
It seemed there was no one left she could trust at all.
"I thought I was the only one, I thought I would go mad…"
Daphne was still babbling excitedly in Oleandra's shellshocked ears.
"No one else can understand what we're going through," Daphne went on, a feverish glint in her eyes. "Everything will be like before, the Greengrass twins against the world. Together, we'll be unstoppable… and maybe, when no enemies remain to stand against the Dark Lord, he'll at last allow us to embrace true nothingness…"
Startled, Oleandra met her sister's intense gaze and took her cold hands in hers.
"Is that really what you want?" she asked, her voice breaking with desperation, clutching at any excuse to silence her own conscience. "To die— is that it?"
Since the beginning of term, Oleandra had had countless chances to snuff out her sister's life, yet she had taken none of them. In her heart of hearts, she still harboured the fragile hope of finding some alternative to the unthinkable, but if Daphne truly wanted to shuffle off this mortal coil of her own accord, then wouldn't she be doing her a kindness by helping her along?
"Well, of course," Daphne said, tilting her head in mild curiosity. "Don't you feel the same?"
"Of course not!" Oleandra cried, aghast. "Whyever would I?"
In response, Daphne tightened her grip, and her fingernails dug painfully into Oleandra's palms, drawing blood.
"What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?" Oleandra cried, shoving Daphne away. "That hurts!"
Daphne stared at her sister's blood under her fingernails in horror.
"You're… vulnerable," she said slowly. "The Dark Lord didn't… do that to you?"
"Do what?" Oleandra hissed. "Saille…"
A pale white glow covered Oleandra's palms as the healing magic closed her cuts.
"The protective enchantments!" Daphne howled. "I can't be hurt, but my skin feels like it's made of lifeless stone! I can't feel pleasure! I can't smell anything! I can't taste my food! Everything looks grey in my eyes! Why would he make me go through that torture, but not you!? Why? Why!? Why are you always the lucky one!? Why am I always the one suffering!? It's not fair! It's not fair! It's not fair!"
By definition, a Horcrux was simply an object that housed a fragment of one's soul… but if a person were willing to slice their own soul to ribbons for the comfort of knowing they would never die, they would hardly baulk at inflicting further torment upon the cast‑off piece, binding it with dark spells to draw upon its limitless power and render its vessel indestructible.
"That's why you've barely been eating anything…?" Oleandra whispered. "That's why you weren't hurt when Seamus's spell exploded in your face…!?"
Oleandra now faced a brand‑new problem: if her sister's body was indestructible, how in the world was she meant to kill her? She was rather glad she hadn't rushed into things and made a half‑hearted attempt at assassination, or she would have found herself in quite an awkward position indeed.
"I swear I'll find a way to end your torment," Oleandra said calmly, striding forwards and wrapping her wailing sister in a hug. "I swear… if it's the last thing I do."
One way or another.
"It's just been so hard, facing this on my own…" Daphne sobbed. "I'm so ashamed… I'd never wish this on anyone else, least of all my sisters… but when I thought I wasn't the only one, I just felt so relieved…"
Oleandra remained stony‑faced as Daphne wept against her shoulder, though inside a cold fury burned in her breast. Her sister, once so strong and composed, had been reduced to a shell of her former self by the man who'd torn their family apart.
"Ha… hahaha!"
So what if Oleandra herself was a Horcrux? All the better. She would have her revenge on the Dark Lord, even if she had to burn this body to cinders to leave so much as a mark upon that pallid face of his, and in the process, taking from him what he held most dear…
"I swear, I won't rest until…"
And in that moment, when Oleandra's self‑hatred, guilt, and self‑destructive despair reached their height, she blinked— and she was no more. In her place, Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, drew breath once again.
"I feel your pain, my other self… but I will not stand by and watch you consumed by the flames of retribution," Viviane murmured, stroking Daphne's hair with a tenderness that might have been Oleandra's own. "Each of us has our destiny, and the future you yearn for belongs to another. To interfere would be an unkindness to us all, and so I cannot allow you to make that vow…"
Viviane lifted her gaze skywards, as though she could glimpse the stars beyond the ceiling of Salazar Slytherin's Scriptorium, and she smiled. "Isn't that so, Merlin, my love?"