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You knew the minute the gate clanged shut behind you that this chamber was not as straightforward as the previous ones. You rubbed your jaw as you stepped forward, the stone snake bite from the previous puzzle still aching.
Sebastian came to the same conclusion. “The gate! I think we’re locked in. Again,” he said. His voice held a note of annoyance, though not the resignation that came from Ominis a moment later.
“Then Salazar Slytherin is not finished with us yet.”
You swallowed thickly, trying to push down your fears. You faced all manner of dark wizards and poachers in the forest and Highlands, but something about this chamber was making the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. You were distinctly uneasy, and as you continued into the room you understood why.
At the end of the chamber stood a door with horrific, tortured faces carved into it. And just to the right, a skeleton. Before you even saw the note on the ground beside it, you had a feeling you knew who it was. Noctua Gaunt.
Trying to avoid disturbing the bones, you carefully picked up the note and read Noctua’s last testament to the horrors of this place, and her regret for how her life had ended. Turning to the pale boy behind you, you said, “Ominis. A skeleton. And Noctua’s last journal entry. She mentions being trapped here— blocked by an unforgivable curse.”
Ominis blanched. “This — is where she died. This is where we’ll die. I shouldn’t have listened to either of you!” You could hear the panic begin to rise in his voice as he paced the back end of the chamber. You hoped he was wrong, but you weren’t feeling particularly confident at the moment.
Sebastian spoke over your shoulder, “Ominis, I’m truly sorry about your aunt. But I know what to do. It’s going to be difficult.” You turned again and stepped back towards him, raising an eyebrow. As though this journey had not been difficult already?
It was then that you noticed the word “Crucio,” glowing in the ground before the gate. You had been so distracted by Noctua’s skeleton you hadn’t seen it a moment ago.
You glanced at Sebastian, having a sinking feeling about where this was going. “You said you know what to do?” you asked.
“Tortured faces on the door and ‘Crucio’ is etched into this stone. My guess is if we cast the Cruciatus Curse, the door will open. That’s why Noctua died,” he continued, “She had no one to cast the curse on. Ominis has the most experience with this. He should cast it. You seem to be in Ominis’s favour— will you ask about this?”
You stood there a moment, processing. You couldn’t believe Sebastian looked so nonchalant about this, as though he had not just suggested you ask his best friend to relive his worst trauma for their sake. But, looking at the screaming faces in the door, you had no idea what else could be done. You didn’t know how to cast the curse, and it didn’t seem Sebastian did either. All the same, “I’d rather you ask him. You know him better than I do,” you said.
Sebastian grimaced. “Very well, wish me luck.”
“Wish we had some liquid luck,” he said to himself as he crossed to where Ominis was still pacing.
“Ominis, I know this is the last thing you want to do—“ you heard him say.
“Yes! It is!” Ominis exclaimed in response. He sounded both insulted and afraid. “I thought you knew me better!”
“But this is different,” Sebastian said slowly, as though he was explaining a difficult concept to a child. “Whoever you cast it upon will have agreed to it first. It wouldn’t be an innocent ‘victim.’ We have to open the door.”
Ominis sighed, sounding distraught. “The spell won’t work unless you mean it. That’s true of all Unforgivables. If it must be done, then one of you must cast it.” Sebastian nodded and returned to you.
“What do we do now?” you asked. “Ominis is not going to cast the Cruciatus Curse again.”
Sebastian scoffed. “Ridiculous. As if dying in here is a better option than casting a damned spell.” Privately, you understood and respected Ominis’s choice, but now was not the time to voice that opinion.
“It’s up to us. I can teach you ‘Crucio’ or I can cast it on you,” he said.
“Wait— you didn’t say you knew how to cast ‘Crucio.’” If he had known how to do it, why had he even suggested Ominis?
“Because I’m not sure I do,” Sebastian said, answering your mental question. “Ominis knows that, yet he’s left us no choice— I don’t yearn to follow in Noctua Gaunt’s footsteps. I think I can cast it if I have to.”
Something about the way he spoke, you weren’t sure he was telling you the entire truth. And while you knew the Cruciatus Curse might be useful in the battles that lay ahead, you also knew it to be a horrifying wrongness of magic.
“Very well,” you said. “I don’t want to learn the Cruciatus Curse, but you can cast it on me.” You spoke the last part quickly, knowing you were submitting yourself to something that you had read described as “a worse pain than death itself.”
“I shan’t forget this,” Sebastian said as he stepped back to cast the curse. “Ready?”
You nodded, bracing yourself as best you knew how. “I’m ready.”
Sebastian lifted his wand as he prepared to cast the curse. As he shouted, “Crucio!” there was something that shifted in his eyes. Something that, for just a second, looked like pleasure. But as the curse hit you, nothing else mattered except the all-consuming, burning pain.
“Aaarghhh!” You screamed as you crumpled to the floor. This was nothing you could have possibly been ready for. It felt like a thousand knives were slicing you from the inside out, going through each and every nerve and muscle fiber.
“Are you alright?” Sebastian asked, as the magic still worked its way through you, and there was no way for you to respond.
You panted as it surged around you, coming in wave after wave of indescribable pain. Tears leaked from your eyes and black spots entered your vision. Your arms came around yourself, as though you could literally hold the pieces of yourself together now that it felt like you were being pried apart. Just when you thought the curse might genuinely kill you, the last blood red arc of magic leapt off your body and hit the door, melting it before your eyes. Sebastian immediately stepped through, leaving you behind as you tried to get your bearings.
Ominis came up behind you, a hand on your shoulder. You flinched slightly, the contact grated on your frayed senses.
“Are you alright?” He asked, the concern evident on his face. He looked like he’d just seen someone die. Viewing Noctua’s skeleton over his shoulder, you realized he basically had.
“That pain— was excruciating. But, I’ll survive.” Your voice sounded raw, you must have screamed more than you realized. Ominis helped you to your feet, brushing his hair out his eyes as you stood. “Let’s keep moving.” You gestured ahead to the Scriptorium.
He looked like he didn’t believe you were as fine as you claimed, but you could tell that he wanted to get out of here as desperately as you did at this point. Still, he didn’t leave your side, helping you through the door as your body readjusted.
Once inside, you saw Sebastian at the foot of the stairs. “We made it,” he grinned. “We found Salazar Slytherin’s Scriptorium.” He sounded triumphant. There was something in his voice and his eyes… you looked away as he ran up the stairs, wanting this to be over with as soon as possible.
You could tell the effects of the curse weren’t over with, just abated for the moment. Running on adrenaline and nerve for the moment, you cast ‘Revelio,’ looking for anything that might give you that answers you’d come here for.
Ominis stepped away and began feeling his way around the shelves in the ancient room. “I can’t believe it,” he whispered.
The chamber was blessedly small, and you almost immediately noticed a book on the desk directly ahead of you.
Walking over, still catching your breath, you called out, “Sebastian. Ominis. There’s a book, just here.” You gripped it and felt the wrongness seeping from the pages, the same wrongness that had knelt in your very bones while under the Cruciatus Curse. You nearly dropped the book, but kept your grip.
“You found something?” Sebastian sounded eager as he peered over the railing from the are above.
Ominis, on the other hand, remained where he was. “You two go ahead— let me know what’s in it. I’ll wander around a bit.” You shrugged your shoulders and bit back a groan at the ache in them. You forced yourself to continue up the stairs.
“May I have a look?” Sebastian asked, arm outstretched as you reached him. You handed it to him, glad to be rid of it.
“What do you think?” You asked, looking somewhere over his shoulder. You still weren’t ready to meet his eyes after what had happened mere moments ago.
“Looks like a spell book of some kind! This is incredible. A Hogwarts founder’s possession— what an honour.” He smiled and again you felt the wrongness of it.
You grimaced, feeling a tremor run through your spine, no doubt the after-effects of the curse starting to bleed through. The smile slipped from Sebastian’s face as he continued.
“Still can’t believe Ominis never told me about his aunt and what she found.”
Your expression hardened again. You didn’t think that was fair to Ominis, and changed the subject back to the book. “What will you do with Slytherin’s spell book?” You were wary of his answer.
“What I do with every book— read it! Having professors as parents ingrained that habit early on.” You wanted to believe it was that simple, you wanted to believe him, but you couldn’t get the feeling of trepidation to go away.
“But I can do that later,” he said. “For now, I say we explore this room.” He bounded away, cheery despite the ill circumstances, looking over every shelf and surface. “It’s breathtaking!”
You remained where you were. All you wanted was to get out. You could feel the adrenaline slipping. Thankfully, it seemed that Ominis was in agreement with you.
“I’ve been getting an uneasy feeling about this place. We shouldn’t linger here. Let’s find a way out, please,” he said from below.
“I don’t want to leave,” Sebastian grinned. “But I owe you— both of you. Without both of you, we’d never have made it this far.”
You noticed a sheaf of paper written by Salazar Slytherin himself on the desk next to you. Glancing at the text, you saw it had something to do with his discrepancies with the other founders, but your vision swam when you tried to read it. Pocketing the paper to review later, you turned as Ominis finally came up the stairs.
“We were lucky!” He shouted at Sebastian. “We could have died. We must swear to never do this again.” You wanted to agree, but the tremor had worked its way up your spine and you couldn’t speak without fear of your teeth chattering.
Just a minute later Sebastian exclaimed, “I see a way out!” You turned your head and saw him looking at a figurehead in the wall.
“Best news I’ve heard all day,” Ominis quipped grimly.
You all stepped forward to travel through the rotating door. As the other side came into view, you recognized the dungeons by the Slytherin dormitory entrance.
The tremors doubled as stone grated over stone and jostled your fragile body. The world twisted sideways. You stepped out of the doorway as quickly as you could. Breathing heavily you leaned against the nearest pillar for support, closing your eyes tightly and trying to keep your stomach out of your throat. Sebastian and Ominis moved further into the dungeons.
“Ominis, about your aunt—“ Sebastian began.
“Please, Sebastian” Ominis cut him off. “I meant what I said before! We swear right now never to engage in anything to do with Dark Magic again!”
Sebastian agreed too quickly for your liking. “Understood. I’m truly sorry about your aunt, Ominis.”
Ominis sighed, “I suppose, after all this, I am grateful to know what happened to her. Thank you,” he said, though it sounded like his voice was pointed more in your direction than Sebastian’s. You opened your eyes slowly to see his reaction.
Sebastian must not have noticed though, distracted as he was by the spell book. He touched the book in his pocket, smiling slightly and nodded absently, immediately heading off towards the Slytherin entrance.
The moment he was out of sight Ominis was by your side. “You need help,” he said, touching your shaking shoulders as you leaned against the pillar to stay upright. “Believe me,” he smiled sadly, “I know the after effects of the Cruciatus Curse. I had a feeling you were putting on a brave face in there. The tremors will get worse before they get better though, and it’s going to hurt. We need to get you somewhere safe to wait it out.”
You couldn’t go to the hospital wing, and you both seemed to realize that. After everything that had happened, you felt you could trust Ominis, so you took a deep breath and said, “Seventh Floor corridor.” You nearly bit your tongue as another tremor rolled through you. “We need to go to the Room of Requirement.”
Ominis’s sightless eyes widened, “That place is real?”
You nodded, as much as you could. “Yes.”
“That’s quite the trek from here, are you sure you can make it?”
“Have to—“ you sucked in another shaky breath, “—try.”
Ominis nodded and pulled you to him, putting his arm underneath yours for support, and you leaned on him heavily. But he didn’t complain. With his other hand he extended his wand, the red light at the end silently helping him navigate the way.
It was slow going. You felt like you were forcing your muscles to do the opposite of anything they wanted to do. The seizing ached and echoed the earlier curse in both your body and mind. You tried to fight through it, putting one foot in front of the other and clenching your teeth. It was blessedly dark, nighttime at the castle, and you weren’t looking where you were going, just trusting that Ominis could tell the way.
The longer you walked, the worse the tremors became. Mid-way through the third floor you could no longer fight through it. A harsh wave of agony spun through your body from head to toe, whiting out your vision and sending you crashing to your knees. Heaving, you threw up the little that was in your stomach and sagged back to the floor, body tensing and aching even more. It was hard to see in the dim light, but you could tell black spots were at the edge of your vision again.
But Ominis was there. “It’s okay,” he soothed, finding his way to where you had fallen. His hands stumbled across your shoulders before catching your ear and then gently stroking your face. He felt your clammy forehead and smoothed your hair away. He cast a quick charm in the general direction of the sick to clean it up, and another to make your mouth taste less like death.
“I’m going to lift you now, okay?” He asked after a moment of letting you recover. “We need to keep going.”
“Mm,” was all you could respond through the waves of blinding pain. You were no longer in any condition to walk.
He slipped one hand underneath your shoulders, the other underneath your knees, and gradually lifted you. You saw the red light of his wand held in the hand under your knees before you closed your eyes, trying not to be sick again. His robes felt like sandpaper against your feverish skin, but you tried to ignore it for his sake. You felt him begin walking and prayed that you wouldn’t run into any professors or prefects on their nightly patrols.
You drifted into a place where all you felt was pain. The tremors still wracked your body, coming closer together now. In your mind, you could see that look in Sebastian’s eyes again. Ominis had said that you had to mean it for the curse to work. There was some part of Sebastian that had enjoyed watching you writhe on the floor, and you didn’t know yet what to do with that information.
As Ominis walked, you were lost in that place, experiencing it again and again until you felt him come to a halt.
“Shh… shh… it’s okay,” he whispered, and you realized that he had been trying to calm you this whole time. “We’re here,” he said, “how do we get in?”
“Across from— the tapestry,” you tried to breathe through the tremors. “Walk past— three times—“ you bit out the last part, “thinking of— what you need.”
You expected him to set you down, but Ominis kept you in his arms as he paced back and forth in front of where you knew the entrance to be. You heard the door carve itself into the wall as it appeared and Ominis gasped in surprise. But he wasted no time in pushing it open.
Glancing around you saw your usual setup, but this time with a four-poster bed at the center of the room, piled with blankets and pillows, and a nightstand to the side. You were grateful that you’d chosen a dim, moonlit ambience. And thankfully, Deek was nowhere in sight.
“Ahead,” you whispered to Ominis, who was pointing his wand around, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar space. He nodded, moving directly forward until his knees came in contact with the side of the bed. He gently set you down amongst the quilts and stepped back.
“Thank you,” you whispered and you laid back on the soft bed. Everything still shook and hurt, it was nearly unbearable but the soft surroundings helped the smallest amount. “I’ll just—“ you breathed through a tremor, “stay here. Until it subsides.”
Ominis sat down in a chair beside the bed. You either hadn’t noticed it before, or the room had just conjured it for him. “I’m staying. I know this curse, and I couldn’t possibly leave you to go through this alone.”
You smiled through the pain. You were glad he was here, even if you were sorry for what he had gone through. You let yourself drift for a while, shaking and gritting your teeth as your muscles tensed and untensed. It was like the aftershocks of an earthquake. You were sure you were whimpering, but you tried your best to just silently bear it.
After a while, you became aware of Ominis pacing around the room. You opened your eyes a crack and saw him investigating the entrance to the vivarium. When this was over you would definitely need to explain everything. You owed him that much.
When he came back to the bedside, he had his wand out to direct him, and it seemed to alert him to something before he could sit down again. “I think these are some balms on the nightstand. The room must have known— they might help with the pain. I could…” he trailed off.
“Yes, please,” you immediately agreed. Merlin, anything to help with the spasms.
“I—“ he faltered, “You’ll have to undress a bit for me to— but I can’t see anything!” He added quickly. If you hadn’t hurt so much you probably would have laughed. Now was not the time for modesty.
“It’s okay—“ you struggled to even get up on your elbows from where you lay. Panting, you said, miserably, “I might need help.”
“Of course! Sorry!” Ominis dropped the balm to the side table with a clatter and immediately leaned over the bed to help you, feeling his way forward until he found your arms. Getting your clothes off was awkward and painful, and once you were finally left just in your undergarments the air in the Room of Requirement bit at your overly-sensitive skin. You shivered, which only irritated the tremors more.
Ominis picked up the tub of balm. Prying it open he dipped his hand in and turned back to you. “Are you sure?” he asked, and you saw he was blushed deep crimson.
“It’s okay,” you whispered.
He nodded and set to work, as business-like as possible. He warmed the balm in his hands and then gently lifted your fingers and began to massage it into your palm. The warm balm took the edge off your senses, and as he worked his way around your limbs, you felt as though there was a wall being erected between you and the pain. It was still there, but it was almost out of reach. You were still shaking, but it wasn’t as painful, and there was more time between wracking tremors. Ominis had you roll over onto your stomach so he could massage your shoulders, and as the agony slipped away so did your consciousness.
Sometime much, much later, you awoke with a shattered scream, seeing a maniacal version of Sebastian's face above you, the statue of Salazar Slytherin’s snake behind him, the red light of the Cruciatus Curse arcing around your body, and the pain… You sat bolt upright, shaking again but not from the remains of the curse, just from fear and memory.
Ominis was there. Ominis was always there. He sat up from where he had dozed off in his chair and came to sit beside you on the bed, putting an arm around your shoulders and tucking your head into his neck as a few tears slipped free.
“It’s okay. Truly. This is normal, and you’re going to be okay. I promise.” He squeezed you to him and you curled into him, ignoring the remaining ache in your bones that you knew would last for days. You needed the comfort. You could examine all that had happened and what it meant for the two of you in the morning. But for now, as the panic wore off, all you wanted to do was sleep.
“Stay,” you whispered. Ominis looked at you. You knew he couldn’t actually see you, but the look in his eyes as they moved in your direction… you knew he had seen more of you in the last few hours than anyone else ever had. And he was still here.
He helped you lay back down and wrapped an arm around you protectively.
“It’ll be okay,” he whispered in your ear as you both fell into a blissfully dreamless sleep.