The King of the Castle and the Ice Queen

Amelia still wasn’t looking at the headmaster when she heard him begin to speak, contradicting her yet again. It seemed that no matter the answer she gave, even when it was an honest one, the headmaster seemed to pick it apart. It was a frustrating experience, knowing what he was saying was flying directly in the face of what she believed. He was implying that keeping so much to herself, guarding herself against the world, would not always be so easy, nor so good for her wellbeing. But in her experience – and she had at least tried before – trusting people gave you nothing but problems. Sometimes they were small problems, sometimes ones that seemed bigger than they were, and sometimes problems that were even bigger than you anticipated. But no matter what, whenever she showed her hand, it had never been for the better.

It was surprising, to hear the headmaster spouting this kind of advice, considering what she knew of him thus far. He had seemed overly cynical to her, using his sarcasm and irony and just about anything else verbally pointy to keep people away, so what right did he have to stand on his metaphorical soap box and tell her differently? This was Amelia’s stubbornness coming through, she realized, but even that self-actualization did not make her feel any less like the headmaster was being hypocritical.

What he was saying was idealistic, something the rest of the population believed, but Doyle? Amelia wouldn’t have guessed it if she had a million guesses. Her view of him had made him out to be someone that could identify with her reasons for choosing solitude; someone who wouldn’t question them. He had gone from telling her she was choosing wisely to keep others at bay to encouraging her to let people in, and all in the matter of ten minutes.

But while the headmaster seemed capable of finding loopholes in his own argument, Amelia was not so easily willing to concede her own ideas on the subject, and thus she merely nodded when he finished speaking and maintained her gaze at a point slightly up and to the right of the headmaster’s face, which she could see in her peripheral vision but it was not clearly in focus. Arguing with him about this would be pointless; he would claim his experiences gave him knowledge she did not possess, and even if he didn’t, their argument would be circular – in the end, it came down to opinion, and Amelia was too stubborn to change hers, and she very much doubted the headmaster would be easy to bend.

Taking her silence as an invitation to change the subject, the headmaster informed her that it was her turn to ask a question, though at this point Amelia would probably rather have merely played the game out in silence. Talking to the headmaster was making her nervous, because she could sense how perceptive he was and she knew that the more she talked, the more she played this game, the more information he would have on her, and information is dangerous. But she had too recently broken the rules of the game and knew it would not be acceptable to do so again so quickly – or to back out altogether – so Amelia brought the headmaster back into her direct line of sight, his weathered features coming into focus as she posed the first question that came to her mind, because it had been on her mind since the beginning of this entire escapade.

“What did you know about me that made you ask me to come here today, and who told it to you?” Amelia asked bluntly though not harshly, not making a chess move to accompany this question because it was, afterall, still Doyle’s turn. It was still curious, to Amelia, that a new headmaster should so quickly take an interest in her, without having seen that much of her work in class, and more curious still was who could have told him her back story. Not that many people were interested enough to care about the ‘Ice Queen’s story, and those that did care enough didn’t usually get any answers when they tried to find out. So who had enough information on her to interest the headmaster?

''I was expecting that question earlier, Miss Lyons. But, well, we shall have to answer it, won't we? You have to understand that I know professors Wilson and McCoy very well. Your Transfiguration professor and I have been friends probably before your parents were even born. Wilson, I met him later, much later, when I was in a phase similar to yours. He was, himself, like that and somehow, we managed to connect. While McCoy is more positive, trying to view the better side of everything, Wilson is a cold realist and a person who can deduce a lot from just looking. I can't say I haven't heard about a certain Raoul Lyons a long time ago, but I wouldn't have put the pieces together without Wilson. As he was, always, more distant than me, well... he just did not try to change people, he did not... try. He told me about a certain student from my House, he did not tell your name nor describe you so, practically, I did not know who you were until I saw you. He just told my you were worthy. Now I see why. Young Poe, if you were alluding to him, did not have anything to do with it, I've met him after I met you. Somehow, Miss Lyons, Wilson managed to spark my interest, he managed to show me myself in a period I had long forgotten... Naturally, I wanted to examine it myself and yet, somehow, I was right. I did not call you here to give you empty life lessons or to attack you with ma experience and wisdom that comes with age. I wanted to make that clear, getting the impression that you might have misunderstood my last replica. I called you here to see how you think, how you function. I called you here to discuss things with you to try to show you what you might expect from life, to try to help you if needed. This may sound like a paradox full of loopholes, but the state of things is exactly like this. I might not care what your best friend does with him- or herself, but I do care what you do with yourself. You have great potential, Miss Lyons, and I do not mean intellectually, that much is obvious, I mean personally. Yes, you will achieve professional success and whatever it is you please, but I do not want you to rot personally... I want you to avoid that... not by forcing you... that would be a nonsense, but by showing you how you will look. I am not the most ideal person nor friend you will meet, but I have learned somethings in life. It is, of course, too late for both Wilson and me to change back, but you, you still have time, that is the goal of this whole play of ours'', he said, sincerely. He sighed. ''But, to cease my monologue, it may be boring to you, my question is... who has harmed you? Who is to blame for your current state of mind? Was it someone you are still close to? Or?'', he asked.

I should have figured… Amelia thought immediately to herself when professors Wilson and McCoy were mentioned. Those two had always taken a greater interest in her than she would have preferred, if only because they expressed their interest so vocally for all of her classmates to hear. Wilson was likely the reason she had gotten a reputation for being a teacher’s pet, though she had made no conscious attempt at earning that title. She preferred to do her work correctly, efficiently, and with as little panache as possible so she could avoid the attention that Wilson gave her anyway.

The headmaster continued his story, giving a brief history of how he had met Wilson and McCoy, before bringing up another name that made Amelia’s already tense demeanor stiffen further. Raoul was someone she never talked about; not with her parents, not with her classmates, and certainly not with her professors. Ever since he had dropped out of school and run away from home, Raoul had become a taboo subject in her household. It seemed that, for her parents at least, it was easier to pretend that Amelia was an only child than to accept the embarrassment of a son that had left everything and become nothing to them.

Of course, Amelia was not under the delusion that because Raoul’s presence and name were gone from her household that no one would remember him. She remembered him, and of course the professors who had known him would remember him as well. While Raoul’s former classmates had still been at school, a few of them had remembered him. Some of her own classmates and even a few younger students might still remember the dark-haired boy with whom Amelia could occasionally be seen walking the grounds with, or perhaps they had seen her sitting high in one of the spectator towers around the quidditch pitch while Raoul raced himself round and round. But for the most part, when Raoul had left school, his name had been scattered around for the first few weeks, and then forgotten like old gossip.

Although Amelia’s mind had wandered significantly away from the conversation at the mention of Raoul, she had still managed to pick up the gist of what the headmaster had been saying. Understanding how she thought, functioned… something about caring about her potential, but not of the intellectual type. He was talking now about making a change that would save her from rotting on the inside, even though the exterior remained a cold visage of perfection. Basically the same old thing he had been preaching since she came in, although judging from what he had done over the past lifetime, he hadn’t taken his own advice.

Before Amelia could cut him short, tell him ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ on the advice, the headmaster seemed to realize he was rambling – which had been quite obvious to Amelia several questions ago, but she politeness was too ingrained in her to mention it – and instead of continuing to stand on his soap box and preach the virtues of social interaction and personal relationships, he posed a question of his own, and this time, Amelia’s breathing stopped completely.

Who has harmed you? Who has harmed you? Who has harmed you?

The question repeated itself over and over again in her mind, an echo that never died away. Her heart was beating out of her chest, as if trying to make a break for the door with or without the rest of her body’s consent. Amelia tried to find words to defend herself again the headmaster, push him away, but air seemed to catch in her throat, every word pushed back into her lungs or lost in the whirring of her mind. He was staring at her, waiting for an answer, and she was staring straight back, her eyes eerily blank as she pulled herself into her mind.

Her castle was under attack, and the defenses she had lowered on account of the headmaster were being snapped back into place. Even if she had wanted to stop them, she couldn’t have. It was an automatic defense mechanism, one she had used so many times before that it was no longer under her control; it was compulsory, just as much as her flight response was.

“I need to go now,” Amelia said abruptly, though her words did not lack conviction as she stood up from the table, the legs of her chair making a scraping noise on the stone floor as it was moved away from the table. Without waiting for permission, Amelia grabbed her book bag from the floor, her panic having taken over now. Her mind had switched into autopilot, a method of self-defense against the most personal of attacks on her solitude, and the headmaster’s last question had been more than her rationale could take. It didn’t matter anymore that he was the headmaster, or she a student that needed to make a good impression. It didn’t matter that her mother would be pulling her hair out if she saw what Amelia was doing right now, or that Amelia would never be safe again in potions. All that mattered right now was getting out.

She had already crossed the headmaster’s office now and reached the door that would allow her escape down the steps, away from the headmaster’s probing questions and his dangerous perception. Amelia paused only for a moment here, compelled by some small part of her mind still trying to hold on to decorum, but as she turned to look at the headmaster one last time, she could only muster two words.

“I’m sorry,” she said dejectedly, knowing this wouldn’t fix the fact that she was running away, the fact that for all the headmaster’s coaching in the past hour, she was still doing just what she always did. There was a reason the sorting hat hadn’t put her in Gryffindor; she wasn’t brave. She wasn’t brave enough even to face her demons alone in the darkness of her room, let alone to bring them out into the open for the headmaster to dissect.

In this regard, she was weak, and it made Amelia sick to think of her own weakness, and in an effort to escape that emotion and to put the last nail in the coffin of any type of impression she may have made with the headmaster, Amelia put her head down and slipped out the door, down the steps, and disappeared into the corridors of the castle, silent tears running down her cheeks that she only let fall because there was no one around to see them.