Chapter 208: Rational Discussion
Sirius froze. The sheer, overwhelming effect of the [Harmless] skill washed over him, weaving perfectly with Tamara's flawless display of vulnerability. For half a breath, the manic, frayed nerves snapping inside his skull settled into a strange quiet.
His hollow, sunken eyes darted from the little girl's wide, innocent gaze to the pitch-black depths of the tree hollow. A tidal wave of despair and raw, unadulterated fury swelled in his irises, threatening to spill over.
The pieces clicked together in his fractured mind, forming a sickeningly logical picture. It matched that traitor's nature flawlessly—that despicable, cowardly instinct for survival. Wormtail had caught his scent. The rat had sensed death closing in and abandoned his cover, seizing the perfect window to scurry away into the dark.
He looked back at the Slytherin girl. She stood there, her small shoulders drawn up in obvious terror. She was nothing more than an unsuspecting, unlucky child—a convenient meat shield dragged along by that filthy rodent, completely ignorant of the twelve-year-old blood feud staining the very ground they stood on.
"Damn Wormtail..." Sirius hissed, the words grinding through his clenched teeth.
He released Tamara's shoulders as if burned. Moving with the restless, jerky energy of a caged beast, he paced two tight circles in the mud, his hands flexing as though debating whether to tear the ancient tree out by its roots.
Watching the mud-caked madman pace, Tamara felt absolutely nothing resembling fear. 'Filthy animal,' she sneered inwardly.
Outwardly, she slowly smoothed the crumpled fabric of her sleeves where his grimy hands had gripped her. A silent, wandless Scourgify washed over her robes, banishing the grime in a heartbeat. Her deliberate, graceful movements belonged in the plush leather armchairs of the Slytherin common room, not the freezing, damp rot of the Forbidden Forest.
Once she was certain her posture screamed helpless vulnerability, Tamara tilted her head. A masterclass of pure, unadulterated curiosity and confusion swam up to the surface of her deep, dark eyes.
She let her lower lip quiver just a fraction. When she spoke, her voice trembled, yet it carried that specific, naive stubbornness unique to a sheltered teenage girl.
"Excuse me... sir, who are you? Why are you dressed like this... appearing in the Forbidden Forest of Hogwarts?"
Sirius went rigid.
His neck snapped toward her, his bloodshot eyes locking onto Tamara's face. The sheer violence and warning radiating from his gaze could have withered a lesser person. As the most wanted escapee in the country, his survival depended entirely on remaining a ghost.
"Shut up, kid," Sirius rasped. His voice was a low, dangerous gravel, his posture coiled tight enough to snap. "If you want to stay alive, you had better keep everything you saw today locked tight in your head. If I find out you have breathed a single word to anyone..."
He let out a harsh, barking snort, leaving the bloody promise hanging in the freezing air.
An ordinary second-year student would have collapsed into a weeping puddle right then and there. Tamara, however, had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing out loud.
'A threat? From you?' she mused, thoroughly entertained. She knew this specific breed of self-proclaimed righteous Gryffindors and Order of the Phoenix lapdogs intimately.
To the former Dark Lord, these blustering, harsh words were pathetically toothless. If a proper Death Eater stood in his place, ensuring silence would not require a monologue. A single flash of green light from a Killing Curse would settle the matter permanently. Dead girls tell no tales.
But Black? He couldn't do it. These bleeding-heart fools, thoroughly brainwashed by Dumbledore's rhetoric, were chained to their own ridiculous moral baselines. Even teetering on the absolute brink of madness, consumed by a decade of festering hatred, Sirius Black could never bring himself to murder an innocent twelve-year-old girl.
It was their most fatal, laughable weakness.
'Pathetic,' Tamara sneered in the dark corners of her mind. On the surface, she dialed her frightened facade up to absolute perfection.
"Um... okay, I understand." Tamara bit her lower lip, looking thoroughly aggrieved. The [Harmless] skill amplified her every micro-expression, wrapping her in an aura of utter deception. "Since you say so... then I will pretend I did not see anything. Anyway, compared to you... I am much more worried about how to explain to Ron that I lost Scabbers..."
She blinked her large, watery eyes, allowing a natural, childish dread of an impending scolding to wash over her features.
Staring down at this weak, easily bullied, and frankly foolish child, the last remnants of suspicion drained from Sirius's chest. He let out a dismissive grunt, turning his back to her. He intended to take one final, loathing look at the empty tree hollow before shifting back into his canine form and fleeing this cursed forest.
Tamara was already running calculations in her head. 'How do I leak this encounter to the right people while maintaining perfect plausible deniability?' she pondered, her mind whirring like a well-oiled machine.
Then, the heavy, wet foliage at the edge of the clearing violently snapped apart.
Harry Potter, half-tangled in a shimmering Invisibility Cloak, his messy hair full of twigs and dead leaves, burst into the open without a single warning.
Back in the warmth of the Gryffindor common room, his original plan had been simple: grab the cloak, check the map, and see what Tamara was doing wandering around so late. But halfway down the stairs, a glance out the window had frozen him in his tracks. A massive, grim-like black dog had been tearing across the Hogwarts grounds like a demon unleashed, sprinting directly toward the tree line. A gut-wrenching spike of intuition had driven him out into the cold, tracking the beast all the way into the shadows.
Now, tearing through the final layer of brambles, his lungs burning, he saw her. He saw Tamara standing mere feet away from the gaunt, hollowed-out murderer whose screaming face had haunted the front page of The Daily Prophet for months.
Harry did not pause to analyze the scene. He did not think.
"Get away from her!"
His voice cracked into a desperate roar. He lunged across the damp earth, his fingers clamping like a vice around Tamara's arm. With a violent yank, he hauled the Slytherin girl behind his back. Planting his feet in the mud, he raised his yew wand, positioning his own body as a physical shield between Tamara and the most dangerous man in Britain.
Harry locked his gaze onto the sunken, waxen face. He knew those hollow cheeks and matted locks intimately. Sirius Black. The Azkaban escapee. The betrayer.
The hand gripping his wand shook violently, adrenaline and raw terror flooding his veins, but his sneakers remained rooted to the forest floor. He did not give a single inch.
"I know who you are, Black!" Harry spat, his jaw locked tight. His emerald-green eyes blazed with a volatile mix of absolute terror and unyielding determination. "They say the person you want to kill is me, right? Come at me, then! Let her go!"
A suffocating, dead silence crashed down upon the clearing.
The biting wind of the Forbidden Forest seemed to stop entirely, plunging the space into a bizarre, suspended absurdity.
Sirius turned to stone. Twelve years. Twelve agonizing years rotting in the sunless, soul-sucking hell of Azkaban. He had only ever seen his godson in fever dreams, always as a crying, helpless infant.
The murderous inferno raging in his sunken eyes extinguished the very second his vision focused on the boy's face.
It was a ghost stepping out of the past. The boy's face was carved from the exact same mold as James—the same jawline, the same perpetually unruly, gravity-defying black hair. And there, flashing behind those round glasses... were Lily's emerald-green eyes.
Yet, this living ghost of his best friends was currently pointing a wand directly at his chest, looking at him with nothing but pure, unadulterated hatred and wariness.
Sirius's jaw went slack. It was as if an invisible bolt of lightning had struck him dead center in the chest. A broken, meaningless rasp clawed its way up his ruined throat. He forgot how to breathe. He even lost the basic instinct to raise his hands in defense.
Meanwhile, standing directly behind her self-appointed shield.
Having been yanked so hard she had nearly stumbled into the dirt, Tamara stared blankly at the messy back of Harry Potter's head.
Her dark eyes held absolutely zero gratitude. She was not moved by his grand display of Gryffindor bravery. She felt no awe at this scene of self-sacrifice. She felt only a deep, soul-crushing exhaustion.
'I hate teenagers,' the former Dark Lord sighed heavily in the confines of her mind.
She had just expended genuine effort to pacify a deranged, murderous Animagus. She had perfectly mapped out her exit strategy and the subsequent blame-shifting campaign. Could someone, anyone, please explain to her why, at every single critical juncture, a self-righteous savior had to sprint out of the bushes to completely derail her flawless plans??
Before Tamara could mentally curse him any further, the boy hero opened his mouth again.
"Speak! Black!" Harry gripped his wand with both hands now, his knuckles turning white. Forcing down the bile of fear rising in his throat, he threw a quick, protective glance over his shoulder at Tamara before shouting at the escapee. "Where is Peter Pettigrew?! I clearly saw him right next to Tamara on the map just a minute ago! Now he is gone! What did you do to him?!"
To Harry, Peter Pettigrew was nothing more than a random string of ink on parchment. His teenage logic had already drawn a grim conclusion: this escaped lunatic had been spotted by an innocent passerby named Peter, brutally murdered the poor boy in the dark, and was just about to silence Tamara next.
But the moment those two words hit Sirius's ears, the effect was catastrophic.
"You... you know that name?"
The gaunt man's skeletal frame began to convulse with violent tremors. He stared at Harry, the crazed, rabid hatred instantly reigniting in the sunken pits of his eyes. Yet, when he spoke to his godson, his tone cracked with a desperate, almost begging urgency.
"Harry... listen to me, it is not what you think... I have not killed him yet... that damn traitor is not dead! He is right here! He has been hiding at Hogwarts this whole time!"
Sirius jabbed a filthy, shaking finger toward the empty tree hollow, his chest heaving as he gasped for air.
"He is an Animagus... he turned into a rat... he killed James and Lily! I am going to kill him... I am going to tear him to bloody pieces!"
Harry stood frozen, completely derailed by the madman's incoherent rambling.
What traitor? What rat? What killed his parents?
Harry's brain scrambled to keep up. He had only heard the whispered rumors in the corridors—that the Azkaban escapee was hunting him down to finish the job. He knew absolutely nothing about the actual history.
The standoff teetered on the edge of another bout of pointless, screaming confusion.
Then, a pale, distinctly cold hand rested lightly upon Harry's rigid shoulder.
Harry flinched, instinctively whipping his head around. Tamara, whom he had been so valiantly shielding with his own body, calmly stepped out from behind him, brushing past his outstretched arm.
"Wait a moment, Potter," she said softly.
Her mind was a fortress of cold, hard calculation.
'Since this wretched System will physically punish me if I try to murder Black right now, the truth of that night twelve years ago coming to light is inevitable,'she reasoned.'After all, the only people who truly keep secrets are corpses.'
Besides, leaving this pack of Gryffindor imbeciles to fumble blindly through the dark would spawn a dozen uncontrollable variables. Left to their own devices, their blundering might even lead them to uncover her own secrets.
For a Dark Lord accustomed to treating every living soul as a puppet on a string, surrendering control of the narrative to a pair of emotional wrecks was an absolutely intolerable, amateur mistake. If this chessboard was destined to be flipped, she would be the one flipping it.
Tamara's dark, fathomless eyes bypassed the boy hero entirely, locking straight onto the mud-covered fugitive.
"Although this gentleman's words make it sound as though he has chugged ten gallons of Confusing Concoction..." Tamara murmured, narrowing her eyes slightly. In a fraction of a second, she wove a masterful web of half-truths and calculated logic. "But, Potter, if we actually piece together what just happened here with that map of yours..."
She let the sentence trail off, injecting a deliberate, heavy pause into the frigid air. She watched with immense satisfaction as both Harry and Sirius snapped their bewildered, desperate gazes toward her.
"Perhaps your initial premise was entirely wrong from the start."
Tamara slowly, deliberately raised her left hand into the moonlight.
Right before Harry's widening eyes, pinched delicately between her slender, pale fingers, was a small, unmistakable tuft of ginger-gray rat fur.
"The creature following me just now was not a human named Peter Pettigrew," she stated, her voice smooth and unyielding. "It was Weasley's pet rat, Scabbers."
"Before Weasley departed for Hogsmeade, my cat accidentally scratched his pet. To express my sincere apologies, I offered to help look after the poor thing for the day."
"But it seemed exceptionally frightened this evening. It refused to return to the Slytherin common room with me, instead bolting all the way out here into the Forbidden Forest."
"I had no choice but to chase after it. It vanished into this hollow root—and then this gentleman, and subsequently you, appeared."
Tamara shifted her bottomless dark eyes back to Harry. With a perfectly clear, chillingly calm tone, she laid out the inescapable truth for them to choke on.
"If your map truly never lies, Potter, and if this gentleman's frantic claims about a rat being an Animagus are actually true..."
She let her hand drop, the ginger-gray fur drifting away in the wind.
"Then that Peter who vanished from your map..."
"Might just be Ron's rat. The one missing a toe."
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