Chapter 244: Refusal to Acknowledge
Harry opened his mouth, the words hovering on his tongue. Before he could utter a single syllable, a booming voice echoed down the stone corridor.
"Harry! So there you are!"
Heavy, frantic footsteps slapped against the flagstones. Oliver Wood, the Gryffindor Quidditch Captain, charged around the corner like a stampeding centaur. He had a polished broomstick clutched in one hand and a look of absolute, unhinged mania in his eyes. He didn't even spare a passing glance for the Slytherin girl radiating a distinctly lethal, low-pressure aura just inches away. Instead, Wood lunged forward and clamped a vice-like grip onto Harry's arm.
"Hurry up, come with me!" Wood barked, his voice breathless with adrenaline. "Tomorrow is the match against Ravenclaw! We have to thoroughly inspect every single broomstick before the feast, and then it's straight to the locker room for one last tactical review!" He shook Harry's arm for emphasis. "This is a life-and-death battle, Potter! The Cup depends on it!"
Wood's eyes burned with a terrifying, religious fervor for Quidditch. He offered Harry zero room for argument, immediately hauling the Boy Who Lived toward the nearest staircase.
"Wait, Wood! I—"
Harry stumbled, his trainers skidding against the stone floor as he was violently towed along. His face twisted in sheer reluctance. He had finally scraped together enough Gryffindor courage to successfully invite Tamara for practice. The ice between them had just shown the faintest, most miraculous sign of thawing. The absolute last thing he wanted to do right now was polish a broomstick!
At the very least, he needed to lock down a time for their next meeting!
"Tamara!" Harry called out, twisting his neck and trying desperately to pry his arm from Wood's iron grip. "About that practice time—!"
Tamara watched his pathetic, stumbling retreat. With every step he was dragged away, he threw a desperate, longing glance back over his shoulder.
She slowly crossed her arms over her chest, tilting her chin up in a gesture of supreme, aristocratic indifference. She certainly wasn't in a rush. After all, preparing the ingredients and brewing a high-concentration Soul Separation Potion required careful precision and time. Until she had absolute, foolproof preparations in place to ensure the soul fragment could be extracted in a single, flawless stroke, she had zero interest in staring blankly at this idiot Savior in a locked room.
"It's fine, Potter." A tolerant, yet utterly frigid smile curled the corners of her lips. "We have... plenty of time in the future."
She waved her hand with a lazy, arrogant flick of her wrist, exactly as one might dismiss a particularly clingy, dim-witted pet.
"Now, go play your boring game of chasing balls."
She stood in the corridor, listening to the fading echoes of Gryffindor noise until their backs completely disappeared around the stairwell. Only then did Tamara drop the polite smile. Her expression smoothed into a mask of cold calculation. She turned on her heel and glided up the stairs, handling the castle's shifting architecture until she reached the eighth-floor corridor.
She stopped in front of a blank stretch of stone wall, directly opposite the massive woven mural of Barnabas the Barmy attempting—and failing miserably—to teach ballet to a group of club-wielding trolls.
She paced past the blank wall. Once. Twice. Three times. A silent demand echoed in her mind.
The smooth stone rippled, melting away to reveal a highly polished wooden door. Tamara stepped inside. The Room of Requirement had perfectly answered her will, transforming into a vast, dimly lit potions laboratory. Brass scales gleamed on obsidian workbenches, and rows of crystal vials stood ready beside a heavy pewter cauldron.
Yet, she made no move toward the ingredients. She didn't ignite the burners or begin the complex prep work for the dark brew.
Instead, Tamara stood rigidly beside the cold cauldron. Slowly, her slender fingers slipped into her sleeve, drawing out her holly wand. The polished wood felt warm against her skin, but her thoughts were entirely consumed by a chilling echo.
Love.
Lupin's piercing, infuriatingly earnest voice replayed in her mind. That single, pathetic word seemed laced with some foul, lingering magic, refusing to be banished from her thoughts. Tamara stared down at the wand in her hand. A dark, turbulent shadow flickered across her crimson-tinged eyes.
A horrifying thought crept into her brilliant mind. What if... what if those bizarre, alien emotions that had been sporadically bubbling up within this new body lately—emotions that felt entirely foreign, leaving her physically nauseated and weak—were exactly that? What if this sickness was the ridiculous "love" Dumbledore and his sycophants constantly preached about?
She needed to verify this laughable hypothesis.
Tamara took a slow, measured breath, ruthlessly crushing the immediate wave of repulsion rising in her throat. She closed her eyes. With the clinical detachment of a vivisectionist, she forced her mind to retrieve those specific, sickening emotions.
A strange, sour warmth bloomed in her chest. It was a sensation entirely contrary to her predatory instincts, surging violently upward. It clawed at her ribs, clashing frantically against the deep-seated conceit, malice, and absolute arrogance woven into her very soul. The internal war was agonizing. The sheer physical nausea of feeling warmth and affection was infinitely worse than swallowing a boiling cauldron of fermented dead rats. Her stomach churned. Her skin crawled.
But for the sake of this crucial experiment, the greatest Dark Lord of the age refused to back down. She forcibly restrained her natural urge to instantly obliviate these feelings, instead squeezing them out, drop by agonizing drop, from the fractured cracks of her soul.
She nurtured the disgusting warmth until it swelled to its absolute peak.
Then, Tamara snapped her eyes open.
The disguise of her bottomless, innocent black eyes shattered. A vicious, murderous scarlet light flared in her pupils, born of extreme psychological revulsion and sheer, forced endurance. She ground her teeth together, looking remarkably like a madwoman willingly swallowing broken glass. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the holly wand. She slashed it through the air in a sharp, hate-filled arc.
"Expecto—!"
The ancient incantation barely left her lips before disaster struck.
An unmatched, violently explosive backlash erupted from the very core of her magic. This was entirely different from her previous failure. When she had tried to fuel the Patronus Charm with the sadistic thrill of murder, it was the pure, white magic of the spell actively rejecting her darkness.
This time, the rejection came from within. It was her own fundamental instinct rebelling.
Deep within Tamara's subconscious, the true Voldemort utterly loathed the emotions she was currently forcing herself to feel. The moment that fragile, unfamiliar trace of positive emotion attempted to fuse with her magical core, it was viciously ambushed. Her own boundless arrogance, her supreme disgust, and her dark nature rose up like a hydra and strangled the light to death.
She refused to acknowledge this warmth. To her, this fleeting yearning was not power—it was an unforgivable weakness. A betrayal of everything she was.
Bzzzt—!
The holly wand vibrated violently in her grip. The wood emitted a high-pitched, agonizing groan, as if the core itself was buckling under the paradoxical strain. Not a single spark of silver mist bloomed from the tip. Instead, the spell collapsed inward, creating a terrifying magical vacuum.
The aborted magic didn't manifest as a physical explosion. Instead, it sharpened into a cruel, invisible blade. It reversed course, pouring backward through the wand, surging straight up her arm, and plunging directly into the deepest, most heavily guarded vaults of her mind. It violently tore open the forbidden zones she had sworn never to touch.
"Ugh..."
A stifled, breathless groan escaped Tamara's lips. Her legs gave out. She stumbled backward, her boots scraping against the stone floor as the wand nearly slipped from her trembling, sweat-slicked fingers.
There was no physical pain, but her brain was instantly hijacked. A torrent of humiliating, agonizing memories flooded her consciousness, playing out in hyper-realistic detail.
She saw the freezing, rotting dampness of the Albanian forests. She felt the absolute degradation of existing as a lowly, bodiless phantom—a pathetic parasite worse than a common ghost, forced to possess the minds of rats and snakes just to cling to a miserable existence.
Then, the vision shifted. A blinding, apocalyptic flash of emerald green light filled her vision. She felt the sheer, unadulterated terror of her once-invincible soul being violently ripped to shreds by the rebounding curse.
And then, at the very bottom of this overlapping nightmare, the scenery dissolved into the sterile, blinding whiteness of King's Cross Station. She was back in limbo. The great Dark Lord, stripped of all terrifying majesty, reduced to a flayed, bloody, shivering monstrosity. She saw herself huddled helplessly in the shadows beneath a pristine bench, a filthy, whimpering thing waiting for a train that would never come.
This absolute degradation—a humiliation rooted in the very fabric of her soul—was a thousand times more agonizing than the Cruciatus Curse.
The spell finally shattered completely.
The suffocating mental pressure receded like a dark tide, leaving her gasping for air in the quiet potions lab. Tamara slammed her free hand onto the edge of an obsidian workbench to keep from collapsing entirely. Her chest heaved. A layer of cold, clammy sweat plastered her dark hair to her pale forehead.
Yet, surprisingly, as the wretched suffocation faded, her chalk-white face displayed no frustration. Instead, she let out a long, shuddering sigh of absolute relief.
Slowly, she pushed herself upright. Her spine straightened into its usual, imperious posture. The vulnerability vanished from her eyes, instantly replaced by her trademark, superior arrogance. There was even a faint glimmer of triumph in her gaze, like a survivor walking away from a deadly trap.
"As expected..."
Tamara murmured. She looked down at the holly wand, now dead and silent in her hand. A conceited, mocking sneer curled her lips.
The facts had proven her hypothesis flawlessly correct. These nauseating, pathetic emotions were not some miraculous, world-conquering power, no matter what Dumbledore claimed. They were a lethal poison designed to erode a wizard's reason. They were a vicious, self-inflicted curse that triggered the most terrifying vulnerabilities within the soul, threatening to drag her right back into the bottomless abyss of defeat.
Tamara tightened her grip on the wand, her knuckles popping in the quiet room. Her red-tinged eyes narrowed into slits of pure, unadulterated malice.
"I will never acknowledge..." she whispered to the empty room, her voice dripping with venomous disdain, "...such weak and filthy emotions."
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