Apples and Snakes

The Cheshire Cat Smile

I am in Malfoy Manor again, torturing someone, a young man maybe only a few years older than me.

"Crucio." I say in a cold, happy voice.

The man looks up, and I see Ky's angry, fearful dark eyes. I watch as I do it again, despite all my struggles not to. And again.

"Stop!" I yell, looking away, anywhere but the evidence of what I've done. I need to look anywhere but there. I look, and the body is gone, replaced by a mirror in the spotlight, surrounded by darkness.

"Come, see what you've become, young apprentice," Voldemort's voice whispers. I step forwards, to see a monster in the mirror. My hair is the color of the blood that stains my hands and the crimson of my eyes. My skin is pale, and there is an aura of shadow around me, and my expression is an insane Cheshire Cat smile.

"No." I back away, and the reflection flickers back to green-eyed, purple-haired, blood-free, panicked Alice. "No, I don't want this."

The girl turns back to me, and smiles sinisterly, and raises her blood-stained hand, and presses it against the glass. I stumble back, and see a bloody handprint over my heart.

"NO!" I awoke, thrashing, and looking about wildly for the monstrous version of me, the wicked girl with the Cheshire Cat smile.

"What is wrong with you, Alice?" Pansy whined, as she undid her rollers. "Always screaming and kicking. Maybe that's why the Dark Lord let you go, since you're so cowardly."

I glared at her, but got out of bed, and started about my morning routine. Lines were already drawn. Tracey, Pansy, and Millicent had decided that they were with the Death Eaters, and against the Spark.

Daphne, however, and the girls in the other dormitory except for one, Juno Rosier, were with the Spark. I took that small victory seriously as I got dressed in my robes and combat boots, and prepared for the school day.

At the table, we soon discovered where the loyalties really were. It was noted that all of the tables had two groups of students, divided largely by a foot where no one sat. At Slytherin, it was split exactly fifty-fifty, as was Gryffindor.

I sat with my group in the Slytherin table, and started pouring up my coffee as the others went about their day. I looked up at the staff table to see them all whispering and eying the divides with fear and worry.

You've got more important things to worry about, sweetheart, I thought as I sipped my coffee and watched Umbridge wrinkle her nose at the Hogwarts houses divided, and she scribbled something down on her cat-patterned notepad.

"How'd things go in the common rooms last night?" I asked my co-leaders of the Spark.

"Went just fine," Wesley said brightly. "There's a few people who don't want to join the resistance, but most are willing to fight, and train."

I nodded. "Good, good."

"The whole is Slytherin is divided," Ellie informed the others. "I've never seen anything like it. Everyone had a wand pointed at someone else's head."

"Gryffindor's divided, too," Teddy reported. "Not quite as strongly as Slytherin, but the half that isn't with the resistance doesn't believe that Voldemort's back. By the way, what are we calling this thing?"

"The Spark," Ellie and I chorused softly.

"Okaayy..." Wesley said.

"Things in the Ravenclaw common room went horribly wrong," Hayden said as we passed a group of sixth-years. One of them was a certain figure that filled me with dread, and I remembered my nightmare. Hayden, Alex, and Luis glared fiercely at him, and he gave them a cold look, and his eyes widened with surprise upon seeing my face. I just raised my eyebrows.