Paper Confines

v. An Olive Branch

PAPER CONFINES.
05. / An Olive Branch

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       It was an unparalleled phenomenon to be both the victim and the executioner, but Amoret Banks was only three months away from eighteen and somehow she'd managed it. For years, there'd been little variance in the way people looked at her; concern-cross-awe for the inventive pureblood witch, Reid's sister, Sybil's sister, the girl with so much to live up to and yet not worthy of her own name. Banks.

Amoret had bigger boxes to crawl out of now.

Her unwelcome stares were newly diverse, like no one could decide which way to spurn her name when there were so many options to choose from. That morning she sat at the Ravenclaw table with her chin in her palm, bedewed with sweat under her thick robes, contemplating the list.

There was sparsely pity, but pity still. That was familiar. She'd known it since her father died and she'd mastered it when Reid left; the aversion of eyes, the clasp and unclasp of nervous hands, the uninvited reach for comfort. So much touching. It was precisely why she'd been keeping her mother's prognosis private. Having one dead parent garnered enough unbidden affections to last a lifetime; having two would make her no better than a puppy kicked into a remote field and left for the dogs with sharper teeth—just something to be saved.

But there was no hiding this. She couldn't tuck a murder away in a cottage across the country and wipe her hands clean of it. There was blood so set in the stone not even magic could deterge it. It was Amoret's name beside Ruby Belahue's in the morning paper.

They'd pull the floorboards of her mother's cottage if it got them an inch closer to an answer.

The second look, Amoret hadn't known since she was a girl. She'd spotted it first in the way Olive stared her up and down at yesterday's breakfast and curled her mouth in distaste: the hatred. Amoret could've sworn she'd seen her collecting the wet from her tongue and forming a spitball with it. But Olive Hornby would not be the first to draw a pitchfork, and so the hate was swallowed back down.

Today's breakfast had been an onslaught of similar glares, and Amoret assumed Liv's gossip was spreading with the same epidemic quickness as Hopkirk's piece in the Prophet. Amoret stared at the ceiling stars to avoid them.

The third look sent her spiralling in the prefect's lavatory for the fifth time that week. Fear.

It had happened before the first classes of the day, when the corridors were cast in rectangles of sunrise that didn't reach more than the hem of Amoret's skirt. She should have been more careful. It was so small. A week ago it would have been wholly insignificant. But Amoret's shoulder slammed into the side of a first year boy at an intersection of the courtyard and the instinct to apologize died on her lips at the look in his eyes. He'd been staring up at her, holding his knees for balance, and his recognition knocked him to the ground.

He was the boy from the library, Amoret had realized: the one who'd been eager to play Nadya in chess. With a sharp breath, he'd scurried away on hands that shook like hers had that night.

"Please don't hurt me," he'd squeaked, a cornered mouse.

Amoret couldn't say anything. She'd just run. Bystander eyes stalked her disheveled form to the closest washroom. Hands went up to her hair and she wanted to claw it out. Follicle by follicle, curl by curl. She wanted to scream. She wanted to bruise, break skin, cleave bone. To feel anything but this.