Students were already tucked into benches, laughing and making small battles of breakfast bread. The Hall smelled of wood smoke and frying. Plates clanked. The sun slipped through the high windows in pale coins of light.
She sat at a smaller table by the staff wing as McGonagall had suggested, trying to keep small and invisible. It was there that she saw a boy across the room. He was not looking at her, not then; his expression had a familiar guarded openness.
For a moment, his eyes flicked in her direction. He gave her a brief, polite nod and turned back to his friends.
Alisa felt, absurdly, seen. Not by the entire Hall, not by some adoring crowd or frightened Minister. Just by a single boy who looked like he would stand up if something needed standing up about. It made something in her unclench for an instant.
She put a piece of bread to her lips and reminded herself of what she was here for.
McGonagall had not promised miracles, only the slow, patient work of learning and watchfulness. It was more than she had had in months. It might be enough.
I will fix myself first, and then I'll see what I'll do.
Above the Hall, the castle kept its secrets, but the day was already moving, and classes began in an hour. McGonagall had said she was welcome to attend whatever interested her.
Alisa folded the bread in her hands and, for the first time that winter, allowed herself to look at the list of classes nailed to the noticeboard near the staff entrance. The letters were neat, the names of teachers comfortable. Her eyes landed on Transfiguration and then on Ancient Runes and then on Defence Against the Dark Arts.
She felt the pull of a life she had almost let go of—a life of study, of solved equations of power, of the brittle satisfaction of an idea proved true.
She picked up her fork, tasted the salt on the potatoes, and made a choice that felt like a small, defiant prayer.
She would attend.
She didn't have anything better to do anyway.
龴ↀ◡ↀ龴
A few days later, Alisa had become a fixture no one quite catalogued—an outline at the very back of classrooms, a quiet dark shape in the last bench, always a little apart as if gravity itself preferred to keep its distance. She arrived early, sat late; she took nothing, answered nothing, and let the lessons wash over her like a slow current she could map and measure but never join. She kept her hands folded where anyone looking could see they were empty. Her eyes followed the teacher, but her attention lived in margins and runes, tiny sigils drawn with the toe of a shoe in the dust beneath the bench.
Most students treated her as if she were a coat on a peg—visible, useful for a moment, then ignored. That was fine. She preferred being unnoticed.
There was one exception.
The green-eyed boy sat three rows ahead, shoulders hunched over a notebook, hair messier than anything she'd seen.
He glanced up once—only once—and his eyes locked on her face for the span of a breath. Not hungry, not staring; the look was patient and curious, like someone who had learned to read small telltale signs: the set of a jaw, the way someone held a silence. He gave the most discreet of nods, then returned to his work as if he had not broken the rule of watchers at all.
Alisa felt it, the awareness at the edge of her concentration—someone had noticed. She did not permit herself surprise. Instead, a small, involuntary tightening answered him; she adjusted the cuff of her glove and let the outward appearance of calm do its job. Inside, something hot and precise measured him like a variable in an equation. He would be—useful, or intrusive. She could not decide which.
From his angle, she saw the nicked edge of his lightning scar at the hairline when he turned, and the way his jaw worked around questions he did not yet voice. He was younger than the weather on his face suggested. She catalogued him the way she catalogued spells: observation, hypothesis, wait. He watched without approaching. For now, that was mercy.
Later that afternoon, when the castle emptied into a soft, blue dusk, Alisa slipped out on purpose. The corridors smelled of beeswax and cold stone; torches winked like patient eyes. She did not aim for the company. She walked simply to feel the wind move around her without runes spooling beneath her feet. A walk was a test, a way to measure the curse's current: loud? quiet? simmering? It had been a week since the fragment's whispers had been louder than background static; she needed to know if anything inside her had changed.
The path led her farther than she intended. Stone gave way to turf, the grass stiff with frost. The light thinned until the castle's silhouette behind her looked like a distant promise rather than a home. The air tasted of pine and something older—peat and a faint ozone tang that could be autumn or magic. She stopped when the trees of the Forbidden Forest rose before her, a dark wall of trunks and living shadow. Even at the edge, she could feel the forest's reluctance, the particular grammar of things that did not want to be troubled.
She had no business here, not really. It was precisely why she kept walking.
A sound—soft boot on loam—made her turn. A figure stepped out from between two pines as if the trunk had coughed them into being. Short, practical, hair already shifted to a soft violet that pulsed with a pulse of mischief when she smiled. Combat leathers tucked under a loose cloak. Eyes that missed little.
___
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