Leave Out All The Rest

Of Hormones and Lies

Chapter 22: Of Hormones and Lies

POV: Nia and Rose         

I was sitting in front of one of the walls of my room, my knees crossed over one another as I kept my eyes steady before me. There, hanging on the wall by nails and not magic, was a full-length mirror in the shape of a pentagon that was bordered by white marble. I didn't know how long I was sitting there, just that I couldn't look away.

I couldn't make sense of what was going on inside my head. That was a first for me. I always knew exactly what I was feeling every second of every day because things were always exactly as they should be. That's where I thrived, when things were as they should be. 

But now nothing was how it was once before and it was making my thoughts a jumbled mess. It was making me lost. I often heard you needed to be quick to adapt to change or else you'd get caught in the crossfire, and I would laugh at those idiots because Harpers were chameleons, we adapted to every change to survive. Yet, somehow when I stepped away from my favorite old armchair, folding the corner of the page of my favorite book to go make a cuppa, someone replaced my favorite armchair with an ugly, modern leather thing you see in all those extravagant home decor magazines and threw my book into the flames of the fireplace and shoved a copy of that Witch Weekly crap at my face. 

Change was a bastard. And I was going to curse his bullocks off.

"Nia!"

Okay, fine. Figuratively speaking, I was (I'm well aware I can't harm something that's a force of the universe and all that shite). Change had taken my comfort from me. And I was not someone you robbed.

"Nia!"

Someone had to be jinxing my existence. Sure, my life wasn't perfect, I didn't have a vault in Gringotts overflowing with gold and other valuables, but for sixteen years I was content (occasionally angry). I would wager the few galleons I have saved up that it was Malfoy who had someone curse me just so he could have a proper laugh, but, then again, I was a judgmental bitch that blamed him for everything because of his surname. Then again, that within itself was something that had not changed and it made me appreciate the bastard. I could always count on Scorpius Malfoy for a good row (but at the rate things were going, I wouldn't be surprised if he decided he wanted to be best mates and find enlightenment). 

"Nia Harper!"

 I choked on that defeated sigh escaping my lips at my grandmother's shrill voice calling me from the level below. Merlin fuck, I was becoming her.           

All my life I've associated my grandmother with being domineering; demanding respect, demanding purity, demanding perfection, demanding things to stay the way she has always known them to be since she was a child (which, come off it, was about a thousand years ago).  It was the way she was, as my mother always said, but now it was clear. It was the way she stayed in control over everything. So, now as I felt like I was losing my sanity because things were slipping from me, had I become what I've hated all along? Have I been clashing with her all these years because, ultimately, we were the same bossy and commanding person?

The eyes reflecting off the mirror opened wide, a paralyzing fear in them as the thought formed.  

"Oh, Merlin, no," I breathed, feeling a panicked feeling starting to fill its way inside me.

Before I could start heaving for air and pass out as cold chills started running up my spine, the door to my bedroom opened.

"Not now, Grandmother," I managed to say through clenched teeth.