Ophelia hummed as she sat upright on her bed.
This was the first time in several weeks that she had real food, and not some potion filled with whatever they fed her.
Naturally she would feel happy when eating some good warm soup. It wasn't some special soup, just some broccoli soup as the nurses and doctors were worried about her internal injuries. Swallowing heavy food with wounds in the stomach wouldn't be good.
But the soup poured down easily which made her happy.
Vinda sat beside the bed, she had been persistent on helping Ophelia to eat. But Fila didn't want that, she took the spoon in her wound filled hands and started to eat.
"You been asleep for five days Ophelia and you feel like a new person." Evan said from the seat by the window.
Fila paused with the spoon halfway to her mouth. The movement was stiff and her fingers felt like they were made of lead and glass, but she refused to let the tremors win. The soup was warm, truly warm, and the simple taste of it was so overwhelming after the metallic, stagnant tang of the cellar that it almost made her want to cry.
But Fila didn't cry. Not anymore.
"Sleeping is easy," she whispered, her voice still a jagged, papery rasp that made Vinda flinch every time she heard it. "It's the waking up that takes work."
She took another sip, the heat of the broth blooming in her chest. Underneath the fresh, white bandages, her skin felt tight and angry, humming with the phantom itch of nerves trying to remember how to be whole. The white cloth was still tied firmly over her eyes.
These short sentences had become a new normal. A normal that Vinda felt a wretch in her stomach each time she heard it. she couldn't help but feel that her granddaughter was taken from her and swapped with someone else. But she also knew that this wasn't the old Ophelia, no one would remain themselves after something like that.
Vinda watched the way Ophelia's bandaged fingers gripped the spoon. It was a clawed, defensive hold, a grip that expected someone to try and wrench the bowl away at any second. There was no grace in the movement, only a cold, mechanical determination.
"You are staring, Grandmother," Ophelia rasped, her head not moving an inch.
Vinda felt a chill. The girl couldn't see, yet she was tracking the weight of the gaze in the room like a predator in the tall grass. "I am only glad to see you eating, my flower. The soup is... it is a start."
Both Evan and Vinda looked at each other, they still didn't understand how she could 'see' Fila hadn't explained it to them, and she didn't want to. Or she didn't feel like she wanted to.
"It is fuel," Fila corrected. She swallowed another mouthful, the warmth a sharp contrast to the hollow, freezing void that now lived behind her ribs. "I need to be strong enough to stand. I am tired of the mattress. It feels too much like the dream."
Evan shifted by the window, the floorboards groaning under his weight. "The healers say you need another week of bed rest, Ophelia. Your internal organs were... compromised. The potions to seal the stomach wounds haven't fully set."
"The healers say many things," Fila said, setting the spoon down with a sharp, echoing clack. "They said I would be catatonic. They said my magic would be dormant for months. They were wrong about that, weren't they?"
As she spoke, a blue, bioluminescent vine curled out from beneath the bedframe, its tiny thorns scratching softly against the wood. It reached toward Fila and became a little table for her bowl of soup.
Vinda looked on in amazement, she would never be bored with the talent and creativity of this girl.
But Fila's mind let the room as the flowers in the hallway outside the door saw a girl. "Can you tell Fluer to come in, shes been standing there for three minutes now."
"Fleur?" Vinda asked softly, standing up. She hadn't heard a sound from the corridor, but she crossed the room and pulled open the heavy oak door anyway.
Fleur Delacour was indeed standing there, her hand hovering inches from the wood as if she had been debating whether to knock for the last several minutes. Her silver-blonde hair was pulled back in a messy knot, and her usual poise was replaced by a pale, haunted look. When she saw Vinda, she flinched, her eyes immediately darting past her to the bed where the broken girl sat.
"She... she knew I was here?" Fleur whispered, her voice trembling.
"She knows many things now," Evan said from the window, his tone unreadable. "Come in, Delacour."
Fleur stepped into the room, her movements stiff. She looked at the blue vine holding the soup bowl and then at the white cloth covering Fila's eyes. A sob caught in her throat, but she swallowed it down, clutching a small, leather-wrapped bundle to her chest.
Both Vinda and Evan left the room to leave them alone.
"You smell like sunflowers, did you visit a sunflower field?" Fila asked.
The last time the two had seen each other had been just before Fila left the Delacour Manor.
And with the disappearance of Ophelia the Delacour family had put every person available to help with the search. The Delacour workers had been the first to find the ambushed carriage. And when the relayed this to the Rosier family they had been furious, not at the Delacour but the French ministry who had promised everything would be safe.
Vinda had told the ministry about Ophelia's travel plan and would keep watch on the way home, but the didn't look the whole way. And only put aurorers on the last part of the road home.
"Im sorry, if I never invited you. they would never had gotten you." Fleur said, Fila could hear a little sob coming from the girl.
Fila smiled. "They would've taken me at some point anyway Fleur. And its not your fault."
Fleur looked at her friend sitting on the bed. Covered in bandages, and even covering her eyes, or where they should be. Her father had already told Fleur what the did to her down under that cottage. But seeing it in front of her didn't feel good, or even real.
"Fleur ask what you want to ask." Fila could see the hesitation in the girl, even when blind.
Fleur tried forming everything in her head to one sentence but failed and just twirled her fingers around. "Im sorry…" she said again, unsure on what to say in this situation.
Fila smirked, "Oh come on. Yes it hurts, I don't know if it can be healed." She said. She knew what Fleur had wanted to ask, it had been about her eyes and wounds. But talking about her eyes probably felt sensitive to her.
Fleur looked down at her hands, the silver-blonde strands of her hair catching the dim light of the ward. "The healers at the Ministry... they say the nerve agent he used was experimental. That the damage to the optic nerves was... surgical." She couldn't bring herself to say the word permanent. "But my Papa is reaching out to contacts in the East. They have ways with light and spirit that we do not use here."
Fila tilted her head, the white cloth shifting slightly. Through the "vision" provided by the blue flowers in the vase behind Fleur, she saw the girl's slumped shoulders and the way she wouldn't look directly at the blindfold.
"Surgical," Fila echoed, her voice devoid of the bitterness Fleur expected. "He was very proud of his precision. He called it a masterpiece." She reached out, her bandaged hand hovering in the air until Fleur instinctively reached out to meet it.
The contact was jolting. Fila's skin was cool, and despite the healing charms, Fleur could feel the underlying tremors of a body that had been pushed past its breaking point.
"Fleur," Fila said, her grip surprisingly firm for someone so fragile. "Don't look for a way to give me back what I was. That girl died in the forest. The one sitting here... she doesn't need to see the world to know how to burn it."
Fleur's eyes widened, a shiver tracing its way down her spine. The "Grindelwald steel" wasn't just a metaphor anymore; it was a tangible, freezing presence in the room.
"But the Tournament," Fleur whispered. "You were going to win. You were going to show everyone."
Fila let out a dry, rasping chuckle. "Oh, I still intend to show them. Do you think a lack of eyes will stop me? I can feel the heartbeat of the manor. I can hear the sap rising in the trees outside. If anything, the world is much louder now."
The girl Fleur saw in front of her couldn't be described normally. To have that much strength in mind even when she went through literal hell. It proved just how strong this girl is.
But deep down Fila wasn't that strong. This was all a façade, a fake smile infront of her tears that would start pouring ones everyone had left her room for her sleep. Because she knew that even without her eyes she would still have the nightmare of the same thing over and over again. but she couldn't let that hinder her from showing others the smile she wished she could have still.
The clock ticked on as the two girls talked and talked about everything and nothing. Fleur still wanted Fila to transfer, which she didn't say no to, but also didn't say yes.
"Send a letter if you need anything, okay?" Fleur said as she stood in the doorpost.
Fila nodded and waved goodbye from her bed.
The door closed with a silent thud.
The moment the latch clicked into place, the room didn't just become quiet; it became a vacuum. Fila held her hand in the air for a second too long, her mangled, bandaged fingers waving at a girl she couldn't see, in a doorway that was now just a cold displacement of air.
Slowly, her arm dropped. It hit the silk duvet with a heavy, dead weight.
The first sob was a small, broken thing, a jagged hitch in her chest that felt like one of the pockmarked man's needles piercing her lung. She reached up, her linen-wrapped hands trembling so violently they looked like white moths caught in a storm, and pressed them against the cloth covering her face.
She wasn't just crying. She was leaking. The salt of her tears began to soak into the white fabric, mixing with the faint, lingering copper scent of the fluid she had lost in the cellar. The bandages grew heavy and hot against her scarred skin.
"I can't see," she whispered to the empty room, the words finally breaking through the wall of her pride. "I can't see, I can't see, I can't see..."
She doubled over, her forehead touching her knees, her small frame shaking with a grief so profound it felt like it was physically tearing her stitches open. There was no sunlit field here. There was no Theo cracking walnuts. There was only the absolute, suffocating pressure of a dark that would never, ever end.
She thought of the sunflowers Fleur mentioned. She would never see the yellow. She would never see the way the light caught Theo's hair when he laughed, or the silver of her grandmother's robes. Every memory she had was now a photograph of a world she had been evicted from.
The blue vine table beneath her bed sensed her agony. It didn't sprout flowers this time. It curled inward, its thorns digging into its own stems, weeping a thick, azure sap that pooled on the floor like a mirror of her own tears.
"Please," she wheezed into the dark, her hands clawing at the duvet until she felt the phantom pain of the nails she no longer had. "Please, just once... just one more sunset."
But there was no answer. Only the rhythmic, clinical ticking of the clock and the terrifying realization that even in her own home, in her own bed, she was still trapped in that chair. She was still in the cellar. She was still screaming, and the world was just a vast, empty silence that didn't care if a Rosier lived or died.
She pulled the silk pillow over her head, trying to muffle the sound of her own soul breaking, terrified that Vinda or Evan would hear her and realize that the girl they brought home was nothing but a hollowed-out ghost, pretending to be made of steel.
The door didn't open. No one came to burst the bubble of her grief, and that was almost worse than being caught. The manor, with its centuries of history and its thick, stone walls, simply absorbed the sound of her weeping as if it were just another ghost added to the collection.
Fila eventually ran out of air, her lungs hitching in dry, rhythmic spasms. She pulled the pillow away from her face, the silk damp and cool against her skin. The heavy scent of the lavender Fleur had left behind felt like a physical weight, pressing into the raw spaces where her peace used to be.
She sat back against the headboard, her body feeling like a discarded marionette with its strings cut. The white cloth over her eyes was heavy, soaked through with the salt of her breakdown.
She reached out with a trembling hand, her fingers searching the bedside table. They brushed against the cold glass of the water carafe, then the velvet of a jewelry box, before finally finding the smooth, warm wood of the Black Walnut wand.
"You're still here," she whispered, her voice a cracked ghost of itself.
She gripped it tight. She didn't cast a spell. She didn't need to. She just let the wand's resonance fill the silence of the room. It felt like a low growl in the back of a throat, a promise that while she might be blind, the world was still full of things that could be broken and fixed.
The door handle turned. It was a slow, deliberate sound.
Fila immediately wiped the back of her bandaged hand across her face, trying to smooth the dampness of the blindfold, her posture snapping back into that rigid, mechanical uprightness. The mask was back on before the door even swung wide.
Vinda stepped inside, "I brought some peaches." She said with a smile.
Fila spent more than a week in her room before she could even step outside. Now that the middle of august had come to France she could enjoy the late summer air.
Some of her wounds had healed by the help of various potions and healing spells, but scars would remain. Not only physical ones but the mental ones too.
The garden of the Rosier estate was a sensory labyrinth. To anyone else, it was a picturesque late-summer afternoon, but to Fila, it was a chaotic map of rustling leaves, the heavy buzz of honeybees, and the intense, baking heat of the sun on her skin.
She stood on the stone terrace, her fingers gripping the silver handle of a cane she hated but needed. The white cloth was gone, replaced by a dark one that had been made by a tailor. Fila didn't want glasses to cover her, she would rather have a these covers instead.
In her hand she held a letter coming directly from the minister of magic.
Only that it was just filled with bullshit about being sorry, and that they would do anything blablabla.
She crumbled the heavy paper in her hand, it stung a little as her wounds split open as she crumbled the paper but she didn't care. They had even written about it in the paper, about how the ministry found the kidnapped Rosier from the grasps of the Dark wizards.
But didn't mention how she herself had to grow a fucking tree for them to even find her, and not only that but some village girl had been the first to find her.
"Naturally," Fila muttered, her voice regaining a sliver of its old, venomous wit. "The Ministry didn't just fail to protect the road; they've now decided to steal the credit for my gardening."
"They want to send a representative," Vinda said softly, her voice carrying across the terrace like a warning. "They want to offer you a 'Commendation for Bravery' at a private ceremony. Evan wants to decline, but he thought you might want the chance to tell them exactly where they can shove their medal."
Fila's fingers tightened on the silver head of her cane. The metal was cool, a biting contrast to the summer heat. "A medal? How quaint. Do they think a piece of gold covers the cost of two eyes and a soul?"
A medel would also be a weird thing to give someone who just got tortured half to death, what was it? someway to tell her "Hey, good job in getting tortured"
Fila would roll her eyes if she had any.
The crumbled letter in her hand suddenly caught fire. Fila hadn't thought about her control just now and let the paper burned in her fist, the blue flame consumed the paper slowly. It didn't feel hot as it had been her flame. A thing she didn't know she could do.
Fila turned to Vinda. "Can you send a letter, requesting a meeting with Headmaster Dumbledore?" She asked. Fila had in her so called dream made a donation, and she was about to do it again. but this time there had been a even bigger reason for it.
Think about it. what message would giving a donation to Hogwarts give? Right after being tortured? Even the thought made her want to giggle.
Vinda looked confused. "I will try, but the headmaster doesn't just accept anyone…"
"He will." She said simply.
Vinda and Evan looked at each other. They weren't about to talk back to her.
Fila stepped out into the garden, feeling the soft grass against her feet. A feeling she had missed dearly. The Fila they had brought down into that basement had been erased, torn out with each nail that he pulled out, with every cut he did. She had become so tired.
She stood looking up at the giant oak that stood in the back of the Rosier garden.
From the leaves of the tree she could see herself looking at the tree.
Fila focused on the tree and its roots. "I need something strong like an oak…" the ground on her right and left crumbled open, and from them emerged two panthers made from oak.
The were beautiful, to Fila at least. Standing at a respectable two meters tall each of them. with the terrifying gaze of a real panther, their blue eyes glowed while the looked around. Fila patted them as the went in to snuggle her like two real cats.
If anyone even needed to be warned about even touching Ophelia when these two were around, she would question the sanity of that person. And even with Bob, it would be suicide for anyone to come close. Bob had struggled against the dark wizards who chased her, more or less because Fila didn't have any fighting power in her. So the guardian of wood didn't fight like he needed to. But still managed to take down two of the dark wizards according to Vinda who visited the site.
Fila felt her cane in her hand. Metallic and bland. "This wont do." She said as she tossed it to the side. And making a cane out of the same oak. She made sure to make some important details to it, a thunderbird visible from the front.
She tapped with it into ground a few times, and put some weight on it. "Not bad for a first time craftsman." She smiled.
School was fast approaching. With it now being the middle of august she felt a bit of worry that she would miss the start of the term. Deciding to attend the tournament was easy, she wouldn't miss it. but would she heal enough for September first?
Thinking about the first days of school made her somewhat happy.
But the thoughts about seeing the first years suddenly became a thorn in her mind as she wouldn't actually see them at all.
"Fila." A voice shooting her back to reality said.
Fila looked behind her towards the man she had meet and not meet during the summer, a different kind of man. "Hi Theo." She said with a smile.
Theo looked at the girl standing underneath the big oak, surrounded by flowers of different shapes and colors. His eyes looked at the visible bruises, bandages and her eyes.
"I…" he began but couldn't find a single word to describe what he felt.
Theo stood frozen at the edge of the terrace, the late afternoon sun casting his shadow long across the grass. He had rehearsed a dozen witty things to say, a dozen ways to be the "Theo" she remembered, but the sight of her, flanked by two massive, breathing predators of wood and the way she held that oak cane like a scepter, stole the air from his lungs.
The panthers turned their glowing blue eyes toward him in eerie unison, their wooden joints creaking with a sound like a ship's hull. They didn't growl, but the air around them hummed with a protective, ancient power.
"They're called Hugin and Munin, Theo," Fila said, her voice carrying that new, papery edge. "Thought and Memory. Though right now, they're mostly just making sure you don't startle me. I find I don't like being startled anymore."
The two panthers sank back into the ground, the dirt didn't even look like it had just been erupted after it swallowed them back down.
"They are wonderful, but Fila…" he began and suddenly paused again.
Fila walked towards him slowly, her cane sinking lightly into the soft earth under her. "Don't come here to say sorry, I already scolded Fleur for even saying that."
Theo tilted his head not really understanding, but understanding at the same time. "I just don't know what to say." He finally said. His mind was conflicted by seeing the girl who had been so full of energy last time he saw her. And now he saw a hollow shell of that girl.
Fila stopped in front of him. "Here give me a hug, but be gentle please."
Theo hesitated as if he would break her if he did it wrong.
Theo moved as if wading through deep water, his usual arrogance completely replaced by a fragility that mirrored her own. He reached out, his arms trembling as he finally pulled her into a light, careful embrace.
He could feel how thin she had become under the fabric of her summer dress, the way her breath was shallow and rhythmic, like a wounded animal trying to hide its pain.
The only thing interrupting them were the birds chirping around the garden, bathing in the bird bath just a few meters away.
"Its going to be alright Fila." Theo said suddenly.
Fila wanted to punch him but let it go, he did his best trying to keep her in a good mood. But come on choose some better words in this case.
They let go of each other and walked together into the manor, Fila needed to sit down for a bit now.
The walk back to the manor was slow. Fila's oak cane clicked rhythmically against the stone walkway, a sharp, grounding sound that cut through the soft rustle of the late summer leaves. Theo walked at her side, his hand hovering near her elbow, never quite touching her but close enough that she could feel the heat of him.
He was being careful. Too careful. It was a weight she could feel in the air between them, a heavy blanket of caution that made her want to scream or set something on fire.
"You're hovering, Theo," Fila rasped, her voice catching on the dry air. "If I trip, Hugin will catch me before you even realize my center of gravity has shifted. You can stop acting like I'm made of spun sugar."
Theo let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sigh. "Habit, Menace. It's a hard thing to turn off."
They reached the drawing room, a space usually filled with the scent of expensive beeswax and Vinda's floral arrangements. Now, it smelled of the bitter herbs the healers insisted on burning to "cleanse the spirit." Fila sank into a high-backed armchair, the wood of the seat seemingly sighing as it welcomed her weight.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The only sound was the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner, a sound that Fila used to find comforting but now felt like a countdown.
"So… have you heard anything from the others." Theo said trying to start something even when he felt uncomfortable.
Fila looked in his direction, the flower in the vase could see his expression as he realized he was too stale. "sorry fila, I just don't know how to do this well." He said in defeat.
The admission got a small laugh from her. "Don't be so daft Theo, just be like you used to. I'm the same, more or less." But she leaned more on the less part.
Mipsy came and gave her a cup of tea, and for Theo out it on the table.
But even after that, an uncomfortable silence still followed.
Fila sighed. "You know, when the caught me. I had a dream." She began which made Theo look surprised. "They hit me with the cruciatus curse and I started dreaming when I collapsed." Theo made fists as he heard that. "I had a dream about going to England and living with you and your family in a manor, or its not really a dream. Since I meet with Lysandra, Tiberius and even your brother Cassius." Theo's eyes went wide. He had never ones told his families names.
"Fil…" he began but was interrupted by Fila.
"And you know, we did a lot together. We went to Diagon alley, I got a new wand. And I even bought you a new broom. And omg, we ate this amazing ice cream, it wasn't as good as it is here but still." She just kept going, talking about everything they did together, not even skipping the part where they basically flirted. "But you know. When I sat in that chair I realized it wasn't just a dream. I was what would have happened if they didn't hunt me down." She finally said and sat there in silence holding her cup between her hands.
He knew he hadn't told her. He was certain of it. His family was a vault he kept locked, a part of his life he shielded with layers of sarcasm and a carefully maintained distance. But here she was, mapping out a life that hadn't happened with the accuracy of a seasoned seer.
"A new broom," Theo whispered, the corners of his mouth twitching in a way that wasn't quite a smile but wasn't a grimace either. "I hope it was a Firebolt. Anything less would be an insult to my flying."
The light attempt at a joke died quickly. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his gaze searching the dark fabric covering her eyes as if he could find the girl he knew hiding behind it.
"You lived a whole life while they were..." He stopped himself, the word breaking sticking in his throat like a shard of glass. "You built a world where I was there. Where we were happy."
Fila took a slow sip of her tea, the warmth of the ceramic spreading through her silk gloves. "I built a sanctuary, Theo. I took every scrap of you—the way you smell like old paper, the way you get annoyed when I touch your things, the way you try to be a hero even when you're terrified, and I made it into a home. It was the only place the needles couldn't reach."
She set the cup down, and the blue vine beneath the chair shivered, sensing the sudden drop in the room's temperature.
"But the ice cream... that was the cruelest part," she rasped, a dry, jagged sound. "Knowing how it tasted, and then waking up to the smell of rot and copper. It made me realize that the man in the cellar didn't just want my eyes. He wanted to make sure that even when I closed them, I'd only see the things, I could never have again."
Theo sat silent, even when he thought he should say something. He couldn't.
The grandfather clock continued its steady, indifferent march, the only sound filling the gap where words should have been. Theo stared at the steam rising from his tea, his heart feeling like it was being squeezed by a giant, cold hand. He wanted to offer a platitude, a promise that he would make it up to her, but after hearing her describe a life stolen by a curse, anything he said felt like ash.
Fila reached out, her gloved hand moving with a slow, deliberate caution until it found the edge of the tea saucer. She didn't need to see his face to know he was crumbling.
"Don't do that," she said softly, her head tilting toward him. "Don't go back into your vault, Theo. I didn't tell you about the dream so you could feel guilty for existing in it. I told you because even when I was at my most broken, the memories held me together."
Theo finally looked up, his eyes glassy. "I wasn't there, Fila. I was at home, doing nothing while you were-"
"You were there," she interrupted, her voice firming. "In the only way that mattered. You kept me from becoming just a garden for flowers that smell of rot. You kept me me."
She stood up slowly, leaning on her new oak cane. The wood hummed under her touch, sensing her shift in mood.
"I'm going to my room to rest now," she said, her 'vision' through the flowers on the windowsill catching the way Theo's shoulders finally dropped.
He looked up, his hand still resting near the spot where hers had been on the table.
"In the dream, you were a terrible dancer. Try to practice before we get to school? I'd hate for the dream version of you to be better at something than the real one."
A small, genuine huff of a laugh escaped him, the first real sound of life she had heard from him since he arrived. "I'll see what I can do, Fila."
Fila walked toward the door, her cane clicking a steady rhythm.