she isn't what she says

Chapter 13: A memory

'But there's only so much hurt a man can take.' - Damon Salvatore

Valencia had a strange start to life. Whilst she grew up she was an apprentice to my mother. By the time she was 5? She could name one hundred different curses and hexes off by heart. 

The night is shrouded in fog, a fog that seems to seep into the very soul, making it a struggle to not only to see but to hear, to feel, even to breathe. A dark figure can dimly be seen disappearing in a cloud of the deepest blackness, leaving behind the sound of cold, chilling laughter that lingers in the air with the fog. She is suddenly aware of a horrible sensation, like freezing and burning at the same time, writhing through her body like a serpent, creeping into her mind and drawing curtains over her vision. Her knees hit the pavement as she falls to the ground, eyes open but sightless, and she hears distant screaming....

"Valencia, you have a visitor."

The voice broke Valencia's concentration, awakening her from her dark memories and bringing her back to the present. She sat up on her bed and looked around, blinking her eyes in the bright light as if she had just been asleep for hours. The translucent, glass-like spheres that had been floating aimlessly about the small hospital room gravitated toward the open door, as if trying to escape. Valencia's short, blonde nurse stood there in the doorway, eyeing the spheres suspiciously and holding the door open for her visitor. She was wearing the most counterfeit smile Valencia had ever seen – and no wonder.

Nothing could have looked more out of place in the blandly decorated, extensively normal room than the man standing in the doorway. Neither Valencia nor the nurse had never seen such a flamboyantly cut suit in their entire lives, nor one even close to that shade of bright purple. Though the man's long, white hair and beard made it obvious that he had lived quite a long time, he was not the kind of man that could really be called old, and this made him stranger still. Valencia's eyes travelled to the man's hat, which was the same bright purple colour as his suit, rested on it for a moment, then came back to his face bearing a curious expression. Valencia had not seen very much of the world beyond the hospital in which she now resided, but the way the nurse was eyeing the visitor made her fairly certain that the man was not at all considered normal.

"Good afternoon, Valencia," said the man pleasantly, stepping smartly into the room as the nurse closed the door. "I am Professor Dumbledore."

"Hello," she responded automatically, still trying to figure out what kind of a man this was.

He smiled kindly, regarding her with disguised curiosity. She was slender and tall, especially for an sixteen-year-old, with pale skin and dark hair falling past her shoulders. Her grey-blue eyes were an echo of her mother's, Dumbledore saw, but they wore a strange expression of guardedness that he had never seen in them in the years he had known her. Dumbledore noted that her eyes, and perhaps her build, were the only things she seemed to have inherited from her mother. 

As for Valencia, she was having trouble deciding what to think of this Professor Dumbledore. He was certainly like no other person she had ever met, and she wasn't entirely sure why someone with the title of Professor would be coming to see her. She met his gaze intently, trying to tell what his purpose was, but here was something else she could not remember ever encountering before: a human being whose mind she could not see.

"You are undoubtedly wondering why I am here," said Dumbledore, pulling the chair over to the side of the bed so that he was directly facing its occupant. Valencia nodded. She continued to search his expression but it told her nothing.

"I have come to offer you a place at my school."

Her eyes widened slightly. "School?" she said blankly, taken off guard. She had been expecting an asylum, or another conversation about a mental hospital. She was fairly certain that a school was very different from either of those places, though she wasn't entirely sure how she knew. She searched Dumbledore's expression once more, then hesitated before asking: "What – what kind of school?"

"Hogwarts is a school for people who, like yourself, possess certain special abilities." Valencia was intrigued.