𝑩𝒖𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒖𝒑 | ᴊᴀᴍᴇs ᴘᴏᴛᴛᴇʀ

𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐝 𝐘𝐞𝐚𝐫

"𝑦𝑒𝑎ℎ 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑝𝑎𝑝𝑒𝑟 ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑠,
'𝑡𝑖𝑙 𝑤𝑒 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑘 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑𝑠 𝑎𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡."

𝐩𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐬, 𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐧

It wasn't that Aria was bad at magic; she simply did not hold the confidence to perform it in front of a group of people her age.

She was always conscious of the possibility that she was being watched everywhere she walked, every corner she turned, every stair she climbed.

The fear of doing something wrong, being judged, haunted by the ghost of a nonexistent voice that spoke insecurities into her ear.

Her hands turned sweaty, she would fidget. She would practise spells over and over with James or Peter, but the moment she was asked to demonstrate in front of a group, it was like she had never held a wand before.

The pain of never feeling good enough.

The fear of being made fun of.

In the letters delivered to her, Euphemia would often say that it was all in her head, and to just pretend that everyone was naked. Aria thought it was silly.

She loathed the insecurities that riddled her, but somehow they never seemed to leave.

Being called on in classes felt like a death sentence; her voice was stolen from her until the professor realized that they weren't going to receive an answer and moved on.

Because of an attempt to connect the houses, classes were divided up evenly amongst the classes to allow for 'friendship possibilities' to bloom. In turn, Aria was consistently placed into classes with Slytherins.

Not that she found anything explicitly wrong about the emerald-colored house, she had even scolded James and Sirius regarding their hatred of the house in the past. Aria simply found that some of the less likable aspects of Hogwarts seemed to stem from that house.

The laughing was always the worst part.

Over the past years, Aria's reading and writing had improved by a country mile, though she still found longer words difficult and continued to struggle to understand certain accents.

The majority of the laughter directed towards Aria was because of her poor English skills, and most of the mockery came from 5 members of Slytherin House specifically.

Lestrange

Mulciber

Avery

Nott

And Malfoy.

Merlin knows the number of fights that James and Sirius had gotten themselves into trying to protect her from them. It had gotten to the point where Aria no longer felt it necessary to report any incidents to the boys, she knew that nothing that they did would stave off the Slytherins.

So she kept it to herself.

She kept her head down, her boots clicking softly against the stone floor of Hogwarts, her heart pounding louder than the sound.

Lately, the taunts had worsened. Her accidental spell during Charms—one that had turned a quill into a screeching bat—had been the latest fodder. Now, even students she'd once smiled at avoided her gaze. The world she'd been longing to return to after the summer felt less like a sanctuary and more like a stage, and she, a joke written into the script.