Shattered Souls

Shattered Souls
By Eilan

Chapter Three

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens;
but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."

-Helen Keller

Her sixth year was hell. Her parents died and left her with virtually nothing. The legal guardianship for her was given to Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, until she finished school. The apartment in Italy where she and her family had lived, and which she had returned to every summer, was sold, at least ensuring that she wouldn´t have to live on the street if she left school and couldn´t find a job straight away.

The grief was not as bad as she expected it to be, and she hated herself for that. They had been her parents; how could she feel so indifferent about them?

It was in that year that she also discovered that she seemed to attract troubled men like a magnet. There was Barty Crouch Jr., a Slytherin in her year, who eventually went to the Dark Side. There was also Aaron Young, who got expelled after hexing other students.

Still, when the person she later identified as the source of all her problems with relationships finally left the school, she could not feel as relieved as she thought she ought to.

***

There wasn´t as much to pack as she had imagined there would be. There were the academic materials she had no use for where she was going. She left them for the teacher that would replace her. Who that was, she had no idea; someone else would take care of that, so she didn´t care. The students would be taken care of, and that was what was essential.

There were some possessions she was taking, things she hadn´t wanted to pack before as she didn´t know what to do with them. A golden necklace with a cross that her mother had owned before her; the medal she had gotten as one of the best Astronomers in Great Britain; the ring her fiancé had given to her a few weeks before he had killed himself because of his drug problems. After four years of dating, he had finally found the courage to propose to her and then she had had to discover that without drugs he would have never had the courage to ask her. She was still not sure whether the argument she had had with him afterwards, or the fact that she had told him to leave, had caused him to hang himself. She could only hope it wasn´t so.

And there was also a small snake made of silver, a gift that Severus had given her for her birthday when they had been young.

She looked at it carefully. Two green opals formed the eyes that seemed to stare at her, asking her what she wanted. The snake was heavier than it looked. The pattern carved into its back was beautiful, she had to admit. She knew it must´ve cost a fortune, and yet there she stood, thinking about throwing it away. The snake began to hiss softly. It was charmed to react to the moods of its owner, a spell that Severus himself had cast on the originally lifeless object.

She still held the snake in one hand.

It seemed to Maria too pretty a thing to have come from a relationship that unsteady and destructive.

Then again, it had just been given to her with the intention to make her more comfortable with what she was, what the Sorting Hat had made her.

It was really quite ridiculous that an enchanted hat could determine her life and how others viewed her. Yet her parents had been disappointed, and boys in the other houses had never even considered speaking with her, much less going out with her.

She still held the snake in one hand.

The rest of her luggage stood in one corner of the room. There was not much she would carry onto the train that would take her to London and then later the plane that would take her to Rome. Her only other living relative, an aunt, had left her a house when she had died, and Maria was determined to spend the rest of her time there.

He had not come to say goodbye, and she had not expected him to. He had done enough as it was.

A loud knock on the window jerked her out of her thoughts. A raven as black as the night, with a letter tied to its leg, was perched on the sill, wanting to be let in. She immediately recognised the bird as his.

She let the raven in and untied the letter, but didn´t open it. She had only a few minutes left before she had to go, and she didn´t want to change her mind at the last moment just because of him.

Maria took her luggage and left the room.

She still held the snake in one hand.

***

Once on the train, with Hogwarts kilometres away, she felt strong enough to open the letter. There was no sign of identification on it and it was not signed. But it didn´t need to be. If she hadn´t known who had sent it by recognising his messenger bird, she would´ve known by the two lines that were written inside the parchment in a neat hand:

"It's not our blue blood, our pedigree, or our O.W.L.'s or N.E.W.T.'s that matter.
It's what we do with our life that counts."

To be continued...