Paper Confines

xxvi. Living Death

PAPER CONFINES.
26. / Living Death

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Her mother's letter was short. Yes, I will send you a dress, she said. Are you visiting soon?  Your father is not writing to me. Come visit, Nadya. If it were a request, she wouldn't have called Nadya by her name; it would have been beta, flower, darling.

It was assuredly not. Nadya's mother was very good at being passive aggressive to mask her loneliness.

Not that that was a trait Nadya could fairly critique. If these things were hereditary, she had an inkling guess at where she'd gotten it from.

She considered writing a reply on the back of the parchment, but her answer was entirely dependent on how Slughorn's dinner next week went, so she tucked it in her pocket for later, recognizing that the act was as much one of hope as it was of fear. She was eager to leave the stench of the Owlery behind as she started mincing down the icy steps.

Undoubtedly, her mother would be grateful to see her daughter in person instead of garnering the stares of the ever-staring neighbours whenever an owl came delivering mail like a medieval pigeon. Nadya did try to coordinate her letters to arrive at night, but the school owls were old and dumb and she'd never desired one of her own.

She could always obliviate a few of the snotty English prats now that she was seventeen.

She tucked her chin further into a scarf Colette had given her weeks ago and refused to take back, and was reluctantly grateful for it as she stared at the long white hills between the Owlery and the castle and stepped off the last stair with a huff.

If her mother knew how much of a pain it was to walk to the Owlery and back this time of year, maybe she wouldn't be so vexed by Nadya's inconsistent correspondence; if anyone hated the cold more than her, it was her mother.

Nadya's father was more acclimated, or at the very least a better liar. When they'd first moved to London, he'd force Nadya to build things with him in the snow, even when she grumbled about missing the sun. They made snow angels and snow hearts and snow men—none of them looking quite right, none of the snow packed tight enough—until Nadya was the one begging him to stay and he was carrying her to bed while she thrashed half-heartedly on his back to go back outside.

He'd tried to make her love it. She didn't know if she'd forgiven him for it almost working.

Sure, the money was good and the house was pretty, but what of home? What of a Nadya who had grown up unafraid? There must have been a nearer escape than London, a captaincy that paid her father just as well but didn't change everything. There must have been a hundred wizarding schools dotting the maps of Asia. She imagined an array of novel houses and uniforms—flowers that still grew in the longest night of the year and colours that shone through the windows. Nadya couldn't even remember what her favourite flower had been. Something yellow, she thought. Honey petals that enveloped all the hypotheticals; maybe in this strange world she would have found her magic among friends, in an adventure instead of an atrocity. Maybe ripples in water wouldn't always look like knives. Maybe everything could have been different.

The snow was still coming down. Her ears were wet and numb. She wrapped Colette's scarf over her head and braced herself against the current, and mid-adjustment walked straight into an extraordinarily broad figure who apparently had been staring up at the sky because she was not so small that she was invisible.

Nadya fell over. The snow caught her weight but not her embarrassment.

"What the fuck?" she hacked, and her thick coat made it hard to stand. She probably looked like an idiot. She was sort of wiggling around trying to sit up. "Are you—stupid?"