Pain did not end when she closed her eyes.
It waited for her there.
The moment sleep took her, the memory stopped being memory and became present again.
Her body arched in the dream as if the curse were still active, as if invisible hands were still twisting every nerve inside her. There was no field. No sky. No grass beneath her fingers. Just white space and pressure, endless and merciless, tearing muscle from bone, skin from muscle, unraveling her from the inside out. She tried to breathe and inhaled fire. She tried to scream and swallowed it instead.
Crucio.
The word echoed without a mouth to speak it.
The pain was not sharp in one place. It was total. It crawled through her bloodstream, burrowed into marrow, coiled around her spine and pulled until her vision fractured into shards of light. Her hands clawed at nothing. Her back bent against an unseen surface. She could not find the ground. Could not find air. Could not find the edge of it.
Everything hurts.
The threads reacted in the nightmare the way they had in reality, but worse. They did not flare red. They shattered. Blue currents splitting into jagged fragments, slicing through the white void around her. They lashed outward blindly, striking nothing, striking everything. Magic surged without direction, folding the empty space inward until even the void seemed to compress around her.
Somewhere far away, a voice called her name.
It sounded distorted, pulled thin by distance.
"Ophelia."
The pain tightened again, deeper, more intimate, as if it had learned her shape and adjusted accordingly. It peeled through her nerves piece by piece. Her mind began to fracture under it, thoughts splintering, language collapsing into raw sensation.
Stop.
Please.
The word did not form fully.
Another voice cut through the white.
Closer.
"Ophelia."
A hand on her shoulder.
Not in the dream.
Real.
Her eyes flew open.
The infirmary ceiling rushed back into place above her, pale stone and carved lines replacing endless white. Her body jerked violently, muscles locking in remembered agony. A cry tore from her throat before she could contain it, sharp and broken.
But sleep took her back.
Her threads were fighting for her survival. Entombing her like a cocoon.
They formed a cocoon around the core of her awareness, sealing her inside something dense and resilient. The white void slammed against it, pressure building from every direction. The curse tried to penetrate the weave, tried to slide through cracks in concentration.
There were no cracks.
The cocoon held.
Inside it, the pain dulled to an echo. Still present. Still roaring beyond the woven barrier. But distant now. Muted. Like thunder heard from deep underground.
Her breathing, in the dream, steadied.
The white space outside warped under the pressure of her magic folding inward. The threads continued weaving, thickening, reinforcing themselves around her mind and the fragile center of her being. They did not need conscious instruction. They moved with something older than training. Older than fear.
Survival.
The void pushed harder.
The cocoon answered by compressing further, growing denser, luminous lines crossing and recrossing until the structure looked almost crystalline. The pain could not reach her core anymore. It scraped against the outer layers and slid off.
Somewhere beyond the woven barrier, the word Crucio echoed again, weaker now, stretched thin and meaningless.
Inside the cocoon, there was quiet.
Not empty.
Protected.
The threads pulsed softly around her, steady and patient, holding her together when her own mind might have splintered.
In the infirmary, her body lay rigid for a moment, then slowly eased. The violent tremors lessened. Her breathing, though still uneven, found rhythm.
Outside in the hospital, several nurses and doctors of magic stood around her and tried everything. But they really had no clue what was happening to her. Magic didn't respond to her injuries.
Nothing responded the way it should have.
"She's not rejecting the spells," one healer murmured, brows furrowed. "They're just not… taking."
"It's as if the magic isn't reaching her properly," the other replied quietly.
Fontaine who had followed her to the hospital raised his hand and the room went quiet. "I think its time to let it take its course, her body seems to not let our magic go in to help. So we won't." The message was clear, let her be.
The doctors walked out but Fontaine stood and watched over the girl.
He walked over to the side of her bed and put a hand on her shoulder. "Take all the time you need little one." His heart felt heavy, one of his students had gotten hurt. In his school. Not only from the girl Amanda but by the ministry itself.
He exited the door carefully as if she would awaken.
Inside her mind and body, her magic was still protecting her. Building stronger with her mind. Growing as one.
Days passed in the world outside her awareness. Days in which the infirmary room stayed dim and quiet, curtains half drawn to keep the light gentle. Healers entered softly, checked her pulse, her breathing, the faint hum of magic that seemed to sit just beneath her skin like a second heartbeat. They did not attempt more intervention. Fontaine's order had been clear.
Let it take its course.
Her friends visited in shifts at first. June would sit with a book open but unread in her lap, glancing up at every shift of Ophelia's fingers. Theo would stand near the window, restless and uncharacteristically silent. Calla sometimes braided and unbraided her own hair just to keep her hands moving. Milles asked technical questions the healers could not answer. Elliot observed quietly, absorbing everything.
After the first week, the visits became routine.
After the second, they became part of the room itself.
Outside, the school continued. Classes resumed. The dueling club began without her. Rumors flared and then settled into something quieter but more persistent. The Ministry investigation concluded swiftly and harshly for Amanda. That news filtered through in fragments, but Ophelia did not hear it.
The white void never fully disappeared, but it no longer dominated. It hovered at the edges like a storm that had been pushed back beyond the horizon. The threads continued weaving, though now the motion was less frantic, more deliberate. They were not only shielding. They were restructuring.
The fragments that had once shattered under pain reformed into thicker strands. Where blue had once been light and fluid, it deepened into something richer. Layers interlocked. Patterns emerged. What had begun as instinctive defense slowly became architecture.
Her consciousness drifted through it.
Sometimes she sensed distant echoes of the outside world. A voice. A hand adjusting the blanket. The faint warmth of sunlight on her face. But she did not wake.
She was not trapped.
She was healing in a language no one else spoke.
The cocoon shifted from pure protection into integration. The memory of pain was still there, embedded like a scar, but it no longer pierced through her core. The threads wrapped around it, not erasing, not denying, but containing.
Gradually, the pressure that had once been external turned inward.
Her magic was no longer reacting.
It was growing.
Five months passed.
Winter came to Ilvermorny quietly and then fully, snow settling along tower ledges and frosting the edges of windows. The castle corridors filled with heavier cloaks and visible breath in the early mornings. Students adapted to the rhythm of the term, exams approaching, dueling becoming sharper, more competitive.
The infirmary room changed with the seasons. Autumn light gave way to pale winter glow. The air carried a faint scent of pine from enchanted garlands placed along the walls in December. Healers rotated shifts. Fontaine visited less visibly but no less faithfully, often late at night when the corridors were empty.
And still, Ophelia slept.
But her body did not waste away.
If anything, there was a subtle change.
Inside, the cocoon no longer resembled emergency construction.
It resembled something forged.
The threads were no longer thin lines crossing at random angles. They formed deliberate spirals, interwoven structures that pulsed with quiet strength. The crystalline density softened into fluid resilience. The storm at the edges of her awareness faded further, until the white void was no longer threatening. It had been conquered by her threads. A war no one could see.
Outside, five months had reshaped the school year. Snow began to thin along the lower grounds as February leaned toward March. Dueling ranks had been established. Classes had advanced. Rumors about her had faded into myth, into something quieter and heavier. The girl who slept had become a symbol to some. A warning to others. (She was transported back to the school medical bay)
She sat straight up one afternoon. The evening sun hit the windows just right to give that fire orange she loved so much.
Air rushed into her lungs, deep and steady.
Her bed was located at the very end of the medical bay, partially screened by soft dividers. Chairs surrounded it in uneven arrangement, as if moved frequently and without much thought for symmetry. Blankets folded and refolded lay draped over their backs. A stack of books rested on the small table beside her, some open, some marked with ribbons. A dried flower pressed between pages sat half exposed near the top.
She looked at her hands first.
They did not tremble.
She flexed her fingers slowly, watching tendons shift beneath skin that looked unchanged, though she felt anything but unchanged.
Her breathing remained calm.
She took in the room with steady attention, not confusion. She remembered the infirmary. The field. The corridor. The hug.
Across the room, Madam Thorne had been organizing vials near a cabinet when the movement registered in the air before her ears processed it. She turned.
And froze.
Ophelia stood at the edge of the bed, back straight, shoulders aligned, the last of the orange sunlight cutting across her profile like a blade of fire.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
"You're awake," Thorne said finally, her voice not loud, but carrying something close to disbelief.
"Yes," Ophelia answered. But what came out wasn't the old happy Fila, it was replaced by a tired, hollow and sad voice that couldn't belong to her if anyone heard it.
"How long?" she asked.
"Five months," Fontaine replied.
She absorbed that without visible shock. Her eyes moved briefly toward the window, to the fading line of snow near the forest's edge.
"Spring soon," she murmured.
"Yes."
Silence settled, but it was not fragile. It was measured.
Fontaine stepped closer then, but not too close. "How do you feel?"
She considered the question seriously.
"I don't know…"
She just stood there and it worried Madam Throne. A person hit but the cruciatus curse sometime didn't come back whole. Like something was empty, a person living but an empty shell.
"Ophelia… what do you like with magic?" Madam throne asked.
Fila didn't answer right away, the sunset was really captivating, and oh so beautiful.
"I like they way you can make it to what you want it to be…" while she was talking, Madam Thrones eyes widened. Flower were coming up from the ground spreading across the medical bay. And she smiled. She knew very well how this girl liked flowers.
The plants did not invade. They filled space deliberately, weaving themselves along the walls and up the dividers that screened her bed. By the time Ophelia's sentence had fully settled into silence, half the medical bay had transformed into something alive and breathing.
The sterile quiet of the room softened.
It became a garden.
Ophelia finally looked away from the window.
She noticed the flowers as if they had always belonged there.
A small, tired smile touched her mouth.
"I still like flowers," she said softly.
The rest of the afternoon she was told to return to bed, doctors would have to come to check up on her condition. And she also had some quests how she would meet.
Fontaine had also said that the Thunderbirds missed their flower girl dearly. And had visited so much, even Madam throne had gone a bit irritated about not letting her rest properly.
The next morning sunlight entered the medical bay softly, pale gold instead of fire orange. The flowers she had grown had not vanished. They remained, though calmer now. Rooted along the walls and around the legs of furniture as if they had always been intended to be part of the architecture.
Fontaine stepped into the medical bay with two others following him. She didn't recognize them.
She sat upright against the pillows, fingers lightly tracing the edge of the blanket, when the doors to the infirmary opened.
Fontaine entered first.
He did not announce himself. He never needed to.
Behind him walked two unfamiliar figures.
They were not dressed like healers. Their robes were darker, formal without ornament. Their posture carried authority, but not the rigid hostility she remembered from the corridor five months ago.
She watched them approach without flinching.
"Good morning, Ophelia," Fontaine said gently.
"Headmaster."
Her voice still carried that lower timbre, that quiet steadiness that had replaced her old brightness.
"These two have asked to speak with you," he continued. "With my permission. And under my supervision."
The emphasis was deliberate.
The woman stepped forward slightly. She was older, silver threaded through dark hair pulled back tightly. Her eyes were sharp, but not unkind.
"Hello Ophelia, my name is Grace Smith, and this is my associate James Galler. And I am Director of the Aurorers at Macusa." She bowed slightly as if she was apologizing. "Im here to apologize, for both my short comings and the damage the Macusa has caused you"
Fila sat quietly for a moment. "What does Macusa have to do with me getting hurt?"
Fontaine looked at the two directors. And they both exchange looks.
The man whos name was James spoke up. "The one you knew as Amanda, wasn't really Amanda." He swallowed. "Her real name was Emma. She is a british born… and… a death eater."
Fila sat quietly. "Death eater?"
Fontaine walked closer. "A death eater is a name given to the followers of the dark lord Voldemort who raged in Britain a couple of years ago."
Fila looked at the headmaster for a long moment, her expression unreadable.
The name meant nothing to her in any personal way, but the weight behind it did. Dark lord. Followers. Britain. The words carried history, blood, fear. Things that existed long before she was born and yet somehow kept circling back to her life.
"A death eater," she repeated quietly, testing the shape of it.
Grace Smith inclined her head slightly. "Yes."
The flowers along the divider near Ophelia's bed shifted faintly, leaves angling as if reacting to the tension in the room.
Fila did not look away from Grace. "And this Emma. She was one of them?"
James Galler answered carefully. "She was not marked in the traditional way. She was recruited young. Radicalized. Trained. Sent here under false identity."
"Sent," Fila repeated.
The word landed harder than the others.
Grace did not avoid it. "Yes. Someone wanted you removed because of your last name."
Fila looked at them. her eyes didn't have the same warmth to them anymore, tired, hurt and betrayed. They placed people to look over her, and in doing so they made someone else get close enough to hurt her.
"I want all observing eyes on Ophelia here removed." Fontaine said with a stern voice.
Grace and James wanted to argue about this, but they didn't seem to have the courage to do so in front of the girl who had just been in a coma for five months because of their short comings in noticing that a girl was a death eater.
Grace held Fontaine's gaze for a moment, clearly weighing policy against consequence.
James shifted beside her, the tension visible in the line of his jaw, but neither of them spoke immediately.
Fontaine did not raise his voice again. He did not need to.
"I will not have my student treated as a suspect in her own recovery," he continued evenly. "Not after what has occurred. If you believe oversight is still necessary, you may take that concern to me directly. Not to her. Not around her."
The emphasis was unmistakable.
Grace finally exhaled. "Director Fontaine, our initial concern was never about punishment. It was about containment."
"Containment of what?" Fontaine asked sharply.
Silence answered that.
Fila watched them without blinking. The warmth that once animated her expressions had receded into something quieter and more distant. There was no fury in her face. No visible outrage.
Just fatigue.
And something colder.
"You were afraid," she said, not as accusation but as fact. "Afraid I might become something unstable."
Grace did not deny it. "Yes."
"And while you were watching me for instability," Fila continued, "someone else was preparing to harm me."
James swallowed.
The flowers along the wall seemed to still entirely, as if the room itself were listening.
Grace lowered her head slightly. "We failed to identify the threat in time."
"You failed to look in the right direction," Fila corrected softly.
Fontaine stepped closer to the bed, placing himself slightly between her and the officials without making it obvious. Protective without theatricality.
"She will not be monitored," he repeated. "Not through hidden observers. Not through assigned shadows."
Grace met his eyes again.
"I want to speak with the congress of magic" Filas voice could be heard from behind Fontaine, and all turned to her. She didn't meet their eyes as she was looking at her flowers. "And if I remember correctly, Albus Dumbledore also approved this observation on me, I want him there as well."
Fontaine didn't say much, he just looked towards the directors. He had a smirk on his face. He knew that something other than the warm and happy Ophelia was coming for them.
"I will address this in congress, it might take a while" Grace answered.
Fila didn't say anything else after that even when asked questions. She didn't want to.
The headmaster had escorted them out.
She sat and twirled with her flowers. A black rose emerged and beside it a blue one. Flowers had always been there, not to hurt her or to judged her.
The door to the infirmary opened again. Fila didn't take her eyes of the flowers this time. but she heard footsteps approaching, softer and lighter this time.
"Fila?" June's soft voice came from her right. She looked up and met her eyes.
Beside and behind June stood the others.
"Hello" Fila said, but the hello didn't sound like the usual happy Fila they all knew.
For a second, none of them moved.
June stood closest, fingers curled nervously around the strap of her bag as if she had rehearsed this moment and forgotten every word she meant to say. Theo hovered just behind her shoulder, trying and failing to look casual. Calla stood straighter than usual, composed on the surface, but her eyes were already shining. Milles and Elliot lingered a step back, uncertain whether to rush forward or give space.
"You're awake," she said, and the sentence carried relief that had been building for five months.
"Yes."
Fila's gaze softened as she looked at them properly now. There was tiredness there.
Theo let out a breath he clearly hadn't realized he was holding. "You really are," he muttered.
Calla stepped forward next. "We thought…" She stopped herself, swallowing the rest.
"That I wouldn't?" Fila finished gently.
No one answered.
She gave the smallest shake of her head. "I was just busy."
That earned the faintest huff of a laugh from Theo, fragile but real.
The black and blue roses beside her continued to wind around one another, their stems brushing softly. June noticed them immediately.
"You made those?" she asked quietly.
"Yes."
"They're beautiful."
Fila glanced down at them. "They grow well together."
June reached out slowly, hesitating just before touching one of the petals. The blue rose leaned slightly toward her fingers as if curious.
June's lips trembled into a small smile. "Still showing off."
"Not showing off," Fila replied softly. "Just… practicing."
Milles stepped closer now, hands shoved awkwardly into his pockets. "You missed half the dueling rankings," he said, trying for normal.
"I heard," Fila answered.
"You're technically unranked."
"That can change. If I want to that is." She said. Than she looked at them all standing there. "Sit down, you are making this look like a funeral"
They all chuckled as they took their seats around her.
And what followed was a moment between friends where they talked about things that had happened in school and over Christmas that she had missed.
"So," Theo began, clearing his throat with exaggerated importance, "you missed the greatest upset in dueling history."
Milles scoffed. "It was not the greatest upset in history."
"You lost to levitation charm."
"that chair hit hard."
The faintest curve touched Fila's mouth as she watched them. The rhythm of their bickering was familiar.
Theo accidentally setting off a minor hex during charms practice and blaming the wand. Calla winning a research commendation for a paper on magical migration patterns. Milles becoming uncharacteristically serious about defensive magic after what happened.
They did not avoid mentioning it.
They simply did not center it.
"And over Christmas," June said, leaning forward, "the common room looked empty without you. Even the tree seemed depressed."
Fila listened more than she spoke.
There were moments when her expression softened fully, when a quiet laugh slipped out without effort. The sound was not as bright as it used to be, but it was real. Unforced.
The black and blue roses beside her shifted gently as the conversation moved, as if responding to the warmth filling the room. The vines along the wall leaned slightly toward the cluster of chairs.
After a couple hours they left only because madam Throne told them to leave her to get some rest. But she didn't want rest.
But Fila did really appreciate her friends, they all came to talk to her.
The silence of the infirmary was occasionally broken by students running outside the door. Or Madam Throne looking for something.
She leaned back against the raised pillow behind her. She didn't need rest, she had rested for five months already. She wanted to return to class, to get a dueling rank.
Sigh, she let out as she kept looking out of the window.