Work Text:
Magic is often unexpected.
Pandora knew this intimately, from long years studying, both at Hogwarts and at her home laboratory, experimenting with exotic ingredients and lichen scraped from the local woods. Research that started with digging through books at the Hogwarts library, repairing charms cast so often that sometimes nearby torn parchment would weave itself together, and continued with owling requests from colleagues in countries she has never set foot in. On occasion, she had resorted to sending letters via muggle mail to spare owls from the long flights.
She was limited in using these texts to the fullest potential however.
She woke uncomfortably. Distantly, the sound of scratching and scraping came. Without opening her eyes, she went to swat away the sound.
Her hand brushed against cold skin. She opened her eyes. Crawling out of the book she had left on her bedside table, was a small man, bare chested, skin the pale blue of hypothermia. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was twisted in an expression of pain. As he escaped the book completely, icicles grew out of his skin with a crunching ringing sound, piercing it, the blood trailing down his arms and chest. He collapsed.
For a moment, she stared in shock and horror. Then she screamed.
Over the next few hours she explained what happened to her dormmates, to Professor Flitwick, to Madame Pompfrey, to Professor Dumbledore, to random interested students wondering what the fuss was about. No one could quite figure out how an icy corpse had crawled out of her book.
Until it happened again.
A few days later, she was pulled out of her sleep to the sound of choking. Jarring awake, she watched a woman flail around, pulling herself out of the book, coughing up blood and dirt. They made eye contact for an instant, long enough for Pandora to see the fear across the woman’s face, before the woman fell to the floor dead.
That time, the Ministry got involved. Two corpses coming out of books was too much for even Hogwarts to keep in house, and thus she told her story to dozens more people, Department of Magical Law Enforcement officials, the occasional politician and even a couple of unspeakables.
She had to stay in Ministry of Magic accommodation while this was investigated. They told her she wasn’t a prisoner, but she spent long hours in an empty cell, denied any books to read and with no one to play gobstones with. She listened to the radio, flicking between channels between interrogations and experiments.
Eventually, they told her she had been cursed. Any time she completed a book, that night a mortally wounded person would come out of the book and drop dead in front of her. When she asked if they could remove the curse, she was told it wasn’t a priority. It was determined it wasn’t the result of Death Eater activity and thus wasn’t a priority. There was a war on. They sent her back to Hogwarts to figure out how to study without reading.
They wouldn’t tell her if these people existed before she summoned them.
She did not completely abide by their advice. She was a ravenclaw, and a love of knowledge was her blessing and her curse and thus she carried on reading despite the visits from people experiencing their last breath and the threats and scoldings from Filch as he went to clean up the body.
The people never spoke to her. Even when they seemed aware of their surroundings, they just looked at her, with terror, pain, and horror. It was a small mercy they never asked for her help.
These days, managing the curse was simple enough. After acquiring another book she would look at the contents page and guess which section would be the least useful for her, and section them off with bookmarks. She would read the book, excluding the section she had marked, make her notes, return it to whomever lent it to her, and lie awake with her brain itching to find out what was in the part she couldn’t read.
Even that didn’t completely stop the visits. Sometimes the section she marked out wasn’t big enough to ward off the almost-dead, and sometimes her better judgement would be overridden by the nagging need to know.
As it was, she was late at home, her husband and daughter asleep in their beds. Her current experiment had to regularly be tended until dawn, so she forced herself to stay up, adding an ounce of aurora honey every 20 minutes.
Inevitably, the book she had kept in the corner of her eye began to spit out its cursed bounty. Hands. Arms. A head. The body was covered in pustules and rashes, its eyes bleeding. As it escaped the book, necrosis crept over its body. She turned her head back to her potion and tried to ignore it.
A hand grabbed her ankle.
Instinctively, she kicked, wrenching her ankle from the now dead hand. The brief moment of curiosity was torn away by an itching, painful sensation in her leg. She didn’t have time to wonder how this was contagious before she raced to the cupboard to grab the bezoar ointment.
Before she could get across the room, her legs gave out. Attempting to scramble to her feet, she realised that the contagion had already given her necrosis. She tried one last time to reach for the ointment before she heard a knocking at the door.
“Mummy, I had a bad dream,” her daughter said from beyond the door.
She didn’t have time to respond.