Atonement

I sighed and stared at the Sorting Hat, flinching unintelligibly at the stares and looks I received from the general population of Hogwarts. I listened impassively through the song, ate my dinner, stayed for the announcements.

"-the Triwizard Tournament!" My head jerked up. What was he saying? He was bringing a possibly life-threatening competition back to school? How could he be so incredibly reckless?

The people down the table obviously didn't share my apprehension, for they were murmuring excitedly to their neighbors. As Dumbledore went on, explaining the various restrictions that would be placed on the entrants, I breathed more easily.

No one over seventeen would be foolhardy enough to enter into something they couldn't handle. Well, perhaps some would, but the judges would see to it that no one that would be badly hurt would enter.

Satisfied that no one underage - specifically a dark-haired wizard in his fourth year - would be able to enter, I left for my room when dismissed.

Without consciously making an effort, I found myself in front of the portrait. "Multas gratias tibi ago," I said absently. I had seen no need to change the password that McGonagall had set at the beginning of last year. Consequently, I had no problems remembering the password, though it was Latin.

I pulled myself through the portrait hole, and sighed, staring at the room: a green couch sat in front of a silver fireplace; gold walls were offset by blood-red curtains. When those curtains were open, l they gave me an amazing view of the Black Lake. The bath and toilet were through a door on my right; my bedroom was on my left. Without looking, I knew what it would contain and how it would look. A cherrywood bedstead would hold a mattress covered in a silver comforter. The floor would be forest green, and the closet trim would be blood-red. The walls were a pale gold. The bed itself was soft, warm, and heavenly.

I took a deep breath, staring around the rooms with mixed feelings. While I was glad I was no longer being cursed every night, being around so many people younger than I at the House of Those Forgotten had left me changed. I actually longed for human contact. For the first time, I wanted a friend. Someone I could talk to. Someone I could share my secrets with.

Someone who would care about me.

It's no use mooning over impossibilities, I scolded myself. You have no need for friends. I couldn't truly count Malfoy, Bones, and Lovegood, who were nice to me, as friends. The fourth only tolerated me on his good days.

Thinking of him made me remember when I had had it all. Harry was living with me, and, though I was worried at the time about making enough for us to live off of, I had been content - the closest I ever got to being happy. I had had someone trustworthy, though I could not bring myself to confide my terrible secret to him; he had been closer to understanding me than anyone ever had gotten.

And then it all went wrong.

The Ministry found out; he was taken away; I had been sent from family to family until I ended up at Snape's orphanage.

There were worse places than Snape's - I knew; I had been to them. He really wasn't so bad, though he had strict rules. Those were mainly put in place for the kids' safety, though, and I suspected they were the same at any house - mind your manners, no running, no deliberate hurting of others with words or fists, all disputes are to be handled rationally, eat three square meals a day and remember your vegetables. He tended to be fairly lenient with some of the more ridiculous ones he had been forced into enacting - no one is to be out of bed by eight o'clock at night, all will be questioned in the event of something being taken even if the culprit is known, and no child will be asleep by nine o'clock in the morning, to name a few. That wasn't to say he wouldn't be mad if we stayed up until three in the morning (though all the others were ten or younger, so I was the only one who could manage that particular feat currently) or slept in until noon as a result.

I remembered the one time I had slept past breakfast. He had come in to my room and woken me up at ten o'clock, fully aware that I had gone to bed before even Hillary, the youngest of them all (she was five, and the most adorable thing I'd ever seen), and that I usually didn't sleep in - after all, he was the one who always pulled the early shift for breakfast at Hogwarts, and so had had ample opportunity to observe me come in at six every morning, hair still wet from my shower, and grab a donut or a muffin before the general Hogwarts population was even conscious. He had taken one look at me and probed my mind. Seeing himself through my disoriented eyes - I thought he had an elephant's trunk at that point in time - made him realize that there was something seriously wrong.

He had grabbed me (apparently he was much stronger than anyone had realized) and gotten me to St. Mungo's immediately. Once all the tests had been done, the Healers had come back with a grim diagnosis and a grimmer prognosis: a brain cancer called meningioma, and under five years to live.

Hearing that I would die before I was legal in the Muggle world and that I would barely be of age in the wizarding world had wrought a drastic change in me: I no longer cared. When I died was of no importance to me. Had I not been taught to shy from suicide, I might have taken my life that very day. But I had been, so I didn't.

Snape had taken me back to the place I had come to think of as home, but i had asked him for one very important favor: to not let the other kids know what was happening to me. They didn't need to worry about me.

I blinked, brought back to the present by the clock chiming. It was midnight; I needed to be up in seven hours. While I had gotten by on less - thrived on it, in fact - I had been told that I would need all the strength I could get to fight off the cancer for as long ass possible. That meant eating normal meals at normal times, exercising daily, and, most importantly, getting enough sleep.

I rubbed my eyes and went to bed, shaking my head at the thought that, come morning, I most likely would be starting to run the gauntlet of sleeplessness, overwork, and hunger that is my life while taking twelve classes a day.