Chapter 89: Maintaining Essential Connections
Late July.
The sweltering heat had turned London into a suffocating furnace this year. Inside a newly renovated room at Wool's Orphanage, Tamara sat rigid at her desk. Her knuckles were stark white as she gripped a brass-nibbed quill, wielding the delicate writing instrument with the white-hot intensity of a dagger poised over a victim's throat.
Her desk was an absolute disaster zone, buried under a mountain of opened envelopes and a growing graveyard of crumpled, ink-stained parchment.
For the greatest Dark Lord in history, this was nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment.
[System Warm Reminder: To maintain the wonderful interpersonal relationships you have established at Hogwarts, please be sure to reply to your friends' letters promptly!]
[This will help consolidate your leadership position and... obtain more Love!]
'I don't need it,' Tamara snarled in her mind, her eyes flashing with a dangerous crimson glint.
[Then... how about a little shock?]
The cheerful, patronizing voice of the system echoed in her skull. Tamara gritted her teeth, forcefully suppressing the overwhelming urge to cast an Incendio and reduce the entire pile of correspondence to a heap of grey ash. Taking a slow, measured breath, she began her reluctant social networking.
The first letter was from Draco Malfoy.
The heavy parchment practically reeked of expensive, overpowering cologne. Just breaking the wax seal released a cloying cloud of bergamot that made her nose twitch in disgust. The contents were even more tedious than the scent. The entire letter was a sprawling, self-indulgent brag about the brand-new racing brooms delivered to Malfoy Manor, followed by three paragraphs complaining about how utterly annoying Potter was, and ending with yet another pressing invitation for her to visit the estate.
Tamara dipped her quill and scribbled a few perfunctory lines with ruthless efficiency.
"Dear Draco, I am thrilled to know you are still breathing. I would love to visit, but my research has reached a critical stage. Do give my regards to your parents."
The second letter was from Hermione Granger.
This envelope landed on her desk with the heavy, ominous thud of a brick. Inside was a manifesto detailing Hermione's deep insights from previewing the entire second-year curriculum during the summer break. Attached were over a dozen highly specific questions regarding 'The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2,' and, worst of all, a carefully color-coded summer revision schedule she had drawn up specifically for Tamara.
Staring at the densely packed, microscopic handwriting, Tamara felt a sharp throbbing at her temples.
"Granger," she wrote back, her handwriting sharp and aggressive. "Regarding the principles of the General Counter-Spell, you will find the answer on the second to last line of page 34; it is basic common sense. Also, your schedule is absolutely perfect—I might actually be able to finish it if I simply gave up the mortal need for sleep."
The third letter was from Pansy Parkinson.
This one emitted a suffocating stench of artificial roses, written on stationery of a gaudy, eye-watering pink. The content was entirely devoid of intellectual substance, consisting purely of pure-blood high society gossip. The highlight was a detailed, mocking description of how Daphne Greengrass looked exactly like a moldy cabbage at a recent garden party.
Tamara let out a cold, breathy laugh.
This kind of vapid, aristocratic girl socializing was a tragic waste of good parchment. But, considering the Parkinson family's immense financial use in the wizarding world, and this particular follower's obvious influence over the Slytherin girls... she forced her hand to relax and patiently wrote:
"Miss Parkinson, instead of obsessing over the color of others' dresses, you would do far better to concern yourself with your abysmal Charms Class grades."
Having finally cleared the backlog, Tamara breathed a heavy sigh of relief and moved to toss her quill aside.
[Ding! Abnormal situation detected.]
[Your core friend—Harry Potter—has been out of contact for over two weeks.]
[This does not conform to the healthy patterns of interaction between best friends.]
Tamara froze. A cold, utterly schadenfreude-filled smirk curled the corners of her lips.
'Out of contact? Isn't that fantastic?'she thought, leaning back in her chair.'Perhaps his filthy Muggle cousin finally snapped and flushed him down the sewer.'
This was easily the best news she had received all summer. If the Boy Who Lived had actually managed to quietly expire in some mundane Muggle suburb, she would personally uncork her finest stolen wine and celebrate for three days straight.
[Warning: Please correct your attitude, Host.]
[As a friend who has established a deep bond (albeit one-sided) with Harry at school, you should feel deeply concerned about this unusual silence.]
[Mandatory Task Issued: A Long-Awaited Greeting.]
[Description: True friends do not grow distant due to space. Harry Potter's current situation seems unfavorable; he desperately needs your care.]
[Requirement: Please travel to 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, to pay a visit. You must see Harry Potter in person.]
[Restriction: You must not use Black Magic to harm or intimidate his Muggle guardians.]
"I'm not going."
Tamara's refusal was flat, cold, and absolute. Make her go out of her way to visit her mortal enemy? Not unless Merlin himself crawled out of his grave and kowtowed at her feet.
[Does the Host confirm the refusal of the task?]
The system's voice took on a distinctly playful, malicious lilt.
[If the task fails, a punishment will be executed immediately: The Host will be forced to stand on the Gryffindor table and loudly sing 'Harry Potter is My Best Friend' throughout the entire duration of next semester's Opening Feast.]
Tamara sat perfectly still.
Snap.
The brass-nibbed quill in her hand broke cleanly in two, the jagged edges biting into her palm. Just visualizing that scene for a fraction of a second—standing in the Great Hall, under Dumbledore's twinkling gaze, belting out a tribute to Potter—sent a wave of visceral nausea churning through her stomach.
This was absolutely, fundamentally unacceptable.
"You win," Tamara squeezed the words through her clenched teeth. She threw the broken pieces of the pen into the wastebasket and stood up so abruptly her chair scraped loudly against the floorboards. "If Potter is perfectly fine, I will strangle him with my bare hands just to make him understand the price of wasting my time."
Two hours later.
Little Whinging, Surrey.
Tamara stood under the pristine street sign for Privet Drive, her face the color of ash.
It had been a hellish, degrading journey. To avoid drawing the attention of the Ministry's underage magic detectors, she had been forced to act like a common Muggle. That meant enduring a bus that rattled violently enough to scramble her internal organs, transferring to a crowded, foul-smelling underground train packed with sweating bodies, and finally walking three sprawling blocks under the merciless, scorching sun.
"Number 4, Privet Drive..."
Tamara narrowed her dark eyes, locking onto a painfully ordinary, square-looking house with a perfectly manicured lawn.
She paused to straighten her dress. She had dug this outfit out from her pile of old orphanage clothes. Though it lacked the sweeping elegance of Wizarding robes, the minimalist black cut highlighted her slender, delicate frame. Combined with her smooth, ink-black hair and unnaturally pale complexion, she projected the image of a quiet, introverted young girl. She looked aloof, fragile, and entirely pitiful.
She strode up the pristine driveway, raised her hand, and knocked sharply on the front door.
After a long, agonizing minute, heavy, thudding footsteps echoed from inside. A man's gruff, impatient roar bled through the wood.
"Whether you're selling vacuum cleaners or some damn insurance, we don't need it! Get lost!"
The door was wrenched open.
Vernon Dursley's massive, purple face appeared in the doorway. His head seemed attached directly to his shoulders, entirely bypassing the need for a neck. He glared down, his mouth open to continue his tirade, but the words died in his throat the moment his eyes registered the figure on his porch.
Standing there was no salesperson. It was a young girl in a simple black dress.
She was undeniably pretty, with porcelain skin and eyes as black and deep as an ancient, lightless well. But what made the hairs on the back of Vernon's thick arms stand up was her gaze. There was absolutely none of the innocence, timidity, or warmth expected of a child her age. She simply stood there, perfectly still, her chin tilted up just a fraction, scrutinizing him with the cold, clinical detachment of someone observing a particularly ugly insect.
That invisible, crushing weight in the air made the curses at the tip of Vernon's tongue evaporate.
"Who are you?" Vernon demanded warily, his piggy eyes narrowing. He instinctively loathed this child. She carried a familiar, unnatural aura that made his skin crawl.
Tamara spoke plainly. Her voice was quiet, yet it carried an unquestionable, diamond-hard authority.
"I am looking for Harry Potter."
Upon hearing that forbidden name, Vernon's face instantly shifted from purple to the mottled color of raw liver. It was as if she had spat a filthy curse onto his pristine doorstep.
"There's no one by that name here!" he roared, droplets of spit flying through the air, stopping just short of Tamara's face. "Get lost! Or I'll call the police! You little—"
He reached out a meaty hand, fully intending to shove the girl backward off his porch and slam the door in her face.
Tamara did not flinch. She did not step back.
She merely narrowed her eyes.
She didn't draw her wand. She didn't whisper a single syllable of a spell. She simply adjusted the invisible constraints on her magic, allowing the cold, suffocating, sticky malice of the Dark Lord to bleed outward, projecting it directly onto this pathetic Muggle without a shred of reservation.
It was not a look an eleven-year-old girl possessed. Those were the eyes of an apex predator, entirely devoid of human empathy, sizing up a slab of dead meat.
In that fraction of a second, Vernon felt the summer air around him turn to solid ice. A primal, biological instinct of pure terror frantically sounded alarms in his primitive brain. It was the exact sensation of a fat, complacent rat gorging itself in a trash heap, only to suddenly realize a cold, venomous snake was coiled in the shadows inches away.
"I will say it once more, Mr. Dursley."
Tamara took a single, deliberate step forward. The sheer pressure of her presence forced Vernon to stumble backward into his own hallway.
"I want to see Harry Potter. Now."
Vernon's mouth hung open, working soundlessly like a fish hauled out of water.
"Who is it, Vernon?"
A thin, horse-faced woman emerged from the kitchen, wiping her soapy hands on a dish towel. Petunia Dursley. She peered curiously toward the open front door, her gaze sliding past her trembling husband to land on Tamara.
The next second, the dish towel slipped from her fingers, hitting the linoleum floor with a soft slap.
Petunia's face drained of all color, instantly turning a sickly, deathly white. As Lily Potter's sister, she understood the hidden world far better than Vernon ever could. She was infinitely more sensitive to its unnatural presence.
She could feel it. That sickening, hair-raising fluctuation in the air. The heavy, static charge of magic that only ever appeared around people of that kind.
But this was different. This girl's presence was colder, heavier, and infinitely more dangerous than any Wizard Petunia had ever encountered. It was a hundred times more terrifying than Lily's magic had ever been.
"You're... from that place..." Petunia's voice was a thin, trembling whisper. She stared fixedly at Tamara, her eyes wide with the raw terror of a woman looking at a monster wearing human skin.
"Good afternoon, Mrs. Dursley."
Tamara shifted her gaze, offering Petunia a perfectly polite, entirely temperatureless fake smile. "I think, as Harry's classmate, coming to visit shouldn't violate your strict sense of hospitality. Should it?"
Though phrased as a polite question, the tone was an absolute, unyielding command.
Petunia's thin lips quivered. Every instinct screamed at her to shriek, to grab a broom and drive this unnatural creature away from her normal, perfect home. But trapped under the weight of Tamara's pitch-black eyes, she felt the blood in her veins turn to slush.
She had a terrible, gut-wrenching intuition. If she dared to utter a single syllable of refusal, something catastrophic would happen to this house and her family.
"He... he's in the backyard... weeding," Petunia finally yielded, her voice shrinking to the volume of a mosquito as she pressed herself against the hallway wall to make room.
"Thank you."
Tamara instantly withdrew that suffocating, terrifying pressure. Like the most well-bred, aristocratic lady, she elegantly lifted the hem of her dress and stepped over the threshold, entering this house thick with mundane Muggle mediocrity.
But in the half-second before her leather shoe made contact with the floorboards, her movement paused. The hesitation was microscopic, invisible to the terrified Dursleys.
There was a heavy, invisible tension strung tight across the air of the doorway.
She knew exactly what shrouded this pathetic little house. It was the ancient blood protection. The ultimate sacrifice that mudblood woman had paid for with her life, carefully reinforced and anchored by Dumbledore's meddling hands.
For the Voldemort of her previous life, stepping over this threshold would have been akin to walking into a roaring incinerator. The ancient magic would have recognized the malice, the taint of the Horcruxes, and scorched her soul to cinders upon contact.
'However...' Tamara's eyes darkened. She did not shrink back.
She simply lowered her eyelashes, her breathing slowing to a glacial crawl. With the flawless precision of a master Legilimens, she dragged every ounce of her surging killing intent, her visceral disgust, and her absolute, burning hatred for the savior into the deepest, darkest vault of her mind. She slammed the iron doors of her Occlumency shut, locking the monster away behind walls of pristine, empty calm.
Her foot landed on the floorboards.
The expected, agonizing pain of her soul being ripped apart did not descend.
Instead, a strange, warm breeze rippled through the stagnant air of the hallway. The ancient magic washed over her, frantically searching for the malice and dark intent that only a Dark Lord would emit.
It found nothing.
Trapped within its rigid, archaic judgment mechanism, the ward scanned the young girl standing in the foyer and registered her merely as a somewhat cold, entirely harmless visitor.
Tamara stood in the shadows of the hallway, feeling the heavy wave of magical fluctuation recede like a defeated tide. A mocking, triumphant smirk curled on her lips.
'Is this the so-called magic of love?'she evaluated coldly in her mind, her internal voice dripping with contempt.'Because it is too pure, it is also pathetically easy to deceive. As long as I do not actively hate you in this exact moment, you are utterly powerless against me.'
She sneered inwardly, her confidence fully restored.
Vernon was still pressed flat against the floral wallpaper, gasping for air as if he had just been dragged up from the bottom of a lake. Ignoring the trembling Muggles, Tamara paced through the oppressively tidy living room, her eyes locking onto the bright French windows at the rear of the house.
She looked out into the backyard.
Under the blistering, unforgiving sun, a small, scrawny figure was crouching in the dirt, violently struggling to pull out a patch of stubborn weeds. He was drowning in an absurdly large, faded old T-shirt that hung off his thin frame like a tent. He was drenched in sweat, his messy black hair plastered to his forehead, dirt smudged across his glasses. He looked utterly, hopelessly miserable.
As if sensing the weight of a gaze upon him, Harry stopped his frantic pulling and looked back over his shoulder, his expression blank and exhausted.
And then.
His brilliant green eyes widened to the size of saucers.
The metal trowel in his hand slipped from his grip, hitting the stepping stones with a sharp clang. He frantically rubbed his dirty hands against his eyes, entirely convinced the blistering heat had finally given him a hallucination.
Standing just inside the glass doors, wearing a crisp black dress, her arms crossed over her chest, was a girl looking at him with a face full of absolute disdain.
It was the person who constantly mocked his intelligence at Hogwarts, yet miraculously appeared to save his life at the most critical, deadly moments.
"...Tamara?!"
Harry's voice cracked violently, pitching upward with sheer, unadulterated excitement.
Over the past two agonizing weeks, without a single letter from Ron or Hermione, he had spiraled into a dark pit, convinced he had been entirely abandoned by the magical world. He had started to believe Hogwarts was just a beautiful, cruel fever dream, and that upon waking, he was doomed to remain the unwanted freak of Privet Drive forever.
But now. Someone had come.
At his absolute lowest, most desperate and lonely moment, someone had actually handled the Muggle world, making a special trip to this terrible, abusive place just to see him! And of all people, it was the haughty, untouchable Slytherin who openly hated dealing with trouble!
"Merlin..."
Harry scrambled up from the grass, completely ignoring the thick mud caked on his knees and hands. He sprinted across the lawn toward the house, nearly tripping over his oversized shoes. At that moment, the light shining in his bright green eyes was startlingly, blindingly bright.
[Ding! Target character Harry Potter's emotional fluctuations have reached a peak!]
[Favorability has increased significantly!]
[Congratulations, Host! The first stage of the task 'A Long-Awaited Greeting' has been completed. ✿]
Watching the savior of the wizarding world rush toward her like a dumb, overeager golden retriever, and hearing the system's nauseatingly cheerful notification chime in her ear, Tamara's expression remained entirely deadpan.
She took a precise half-step backward, ensuring the glass door remained firmly between them so the filthy boy wouldn't accidentally rub mud onto her only decent dress.
'What an absolute idiot,' she evaluated coldly in her mind, watching his beaming face near the glass.
He was the kind of fool who would help the person selling him count the money.
'How did this pathetic excuse for a savior ever manage to live long enough to take me down?'
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