The Boy With Black Eyes

Shattered Spirit, Soul of Glass

*TRIGGER WARNING: DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY, GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF SELF-HARM. THIS IS NOT INTENDED TO MAKE LIGHT OF A SITUATION, BUT TO HIGHLIGHT THE EMOTIONS THAT GO THROUGH THE MINDS OF CUTTERS, REFRENCES TO THE EVENTS OF PRIOR CHAPTERS. IF SUCH THINGS ARE LIKELY TO TRIGGER YOU, PLEASE RETREAT TO THE FLUFFINESS OF THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER: THIS IS YOUR WARNING*

Another month passed. But this one was not a blur. Every day was dragged out, taking forever to progress from seven in the morning, when she hauled herself out of bed, to eleven at night, when she tucked herself in. She didn't eat. She didn't sleep. She didn't think.

She just...was.

Any interaction with another human had a fifty-fifty shot of ending with her in tears or she screaming about how idiotic they were and she was still crying. By the time nighttime rolled around, she had cried herself to a nosebleed. And she sat in front of the floor-length mirror in her dorm and watched the blood stream down her face, not moving to wipe it from her face, not wincing when the wounds scabbed over, not caring when the house-elves could not scrub the stains out of the front of her shirt.

The majority of her weekends were spent staring at the canopy of her four-poster and trying not to cry.

Dumbledore had encouraged her to take time off to grieve, when news of her father's death reached the castle. Slughorn had excused her from classes for a week. But there was nowhere she could go that wasn't Hogwarts that didn't remind her of what she was, and what she had done. So she lay in the Common Room or in her dorm, or on the stone floor of the passageways through the tunnels in the dungeon, and cried, and cried, and cried.

Her father was dead. And she had killed him.

Severus insisted that it wasn't her. It was the werewolf. The black wolf-gargoyle hybrid with the tufted ears and the eyes as yellow as topaz. The Nox he knew loved her father far too much to kill him. But she could remember, as clear as anything, sinking sharp teeth into her father's calves, ripping his liver out through his back, pawing through his guts in an attempt to sink her teeth into the strong muscles of his heart and let blood overflow through her lips and drip down her chin. Nox was the one to do it, because the werewolf wouldn't have cared so much for the man and three girls it had killed that night.

Nobody had told her how badly the Mark hurt either. How the skin around it was always irritated, for the first week it leaked pus and blood and she didn't dare scratch it for fear of having pain sent to her directly for irritating everybody else. She nicked bandages from the hospital wing under the guise of needing them around the full moon 'just in case', but in reality, she was getting Severus to help her bind and bandage the Dark Mark now branded and blackening the skin on the inside of her left arm.

And when it burned, she knew. She was to rush to her Master's side, usually within a few hours of the full moon, when she was the most useful to him. He enjoyed his newest of pets.

Memories from another full moon came rushing back to her, where she was forced to drink Wolfsbane so she was complacent, and had been tortured into curling up at the foot of the Dark Lord's throne, as he met with visiting dignitaries from the Americas, promising him support in the coming war, a few of the leaking intel from forces gathering against him in a place currently out of his control. All the while, her Lord had petted her, and for a day afterwards she was unable to shake the feeling his cold, long, spindly fingers were running through her hair. After he'd seen all his dignitaries, he strung her up with silver chains and beat her mercilessly with a cat o-nine tails that felt like it was braided with silver chain.

Severus had thrown a fit when she returned home with her back the colour of pickled beets and blisters wrapping around her limbs from where the silver had touched her skin.