Elias had made a study of the Forbidden Forest.
Not the flora or the fauna — the patrol patterns.
When Hagrid took his evening rounds.
Which trails the centaurs favored.
How the light shifted through the canopy at different hours so you could always find your way back.
He’d memorized the creak of the gamekeeper’s boots and the nervous shuffle that preceded Quirrell’s presence by a solid thirty seconds.
Today, none of that knowledge helped him.
He was turning back toward the castle, a cluster of moonlace wrapped in damp cloth tucked inside his robes, when Quirrell stumbled out of the undergrowth directly in front of him.
Not thirty seconds of warning.
Not even three.
Just the sudden reek of garlic and rotting fabric and something else underneath, something that made Elias’s sinuses burn.
“Professor Quirrell.” Elias steadied his voice and took the initiative before the man could gather his scattered wits.
“What are you doing here?”
“I… I just…” Quirrell’s eyes darted.
A twitch ran the length of his jaw.
“Just wandering around.”
Fool!
You’re the professor!
The voice exploded in Quirrell’s skull, and his spine snapped straight as if someone had jerked a leash attached to his vertebrae.
Yes.
Yes, he was the professor.
What was he doing stammering at a first-year?
“Mr. Sorenson.” The stammer melted away.
Something smug crept into its place, sitting wrong on Quirrell’s face like borrowed clothes.
“Did you sneak into the Forbidden Forest?”
“Of course not.” Elias didn’t blink.
“I came with a professor.”
“Wh… what?” Quirrell’s head swiveled, scanning the trees.
“Which professor?”
“Severus Snape. He brought me here to find potion ingredients.”
The name hit Quirrell like a physical blow.
His shoulders dropped a full inch.
Relief slackened the muscles around his mouth before suspicion could tighten them again.
Elias had filed that particular weakness away months ago, the way Quirrell flinched whenever Snape so much as passed him in the corridor — and he was not above using it.
“Phew.” Quirrell exhaled, the sound wet and unpleasant.
At least they hadn’t come looking for him.
At least Snape wasn’t closing in.
But he still needed insurance.
“Don’t… don’t tell anyone I was here.” He stepped closer, close enough that Elias could see the broken capillaries in his eyes.
“Snape and I don’t… get along.”
The smell hit then — garlic curdled with something fecal, something dead and kept too long in a warm room.
Elias’s eyes watered instantly.
His throat seized.
He backpedaled two steps before his body could override the instinct to be polite, turning his head to suck in a breath of air that didn’t taste like a crypt.
“Okay, Professor. I won’t tell Severus Snape.”
A vein pulsed in Quirrell’s forehead.
He turned without another word and hurried out of the forest in the opposite direction, his robes snagging on branches he didn’t bother to push aside.
He needed distance.
From Snape, from this place, from the pressure building behind his eyes.
The Potions Master had watched him like a hawk since the start of term, and the Dark Lord’s patience was wearing dangerously thin.
The life-drain had accelerated.
His hands trembled when he thought no one was looking.
He didn’t know if the plan would work, but he had to try something before there was nothing left of him to try with.
He was halfway up the lawn to the castle when he stopped.
Wait.
What professor brought a first-year into the Forbidden Forest and then let them wander off alone?
The lie cracked open behind his eyes.
Snape would never.
Snape would breathe down a student’s neck until they couldn’t sneeze without permission.
Elias had lied to his face, and he’d been too rattled to see it.
Quirrell turned back.
The rage came first, hot and familiar.
Then something else crept in behind it.
A daring little idea.
A terrible one.
Elias had let his guard down.
He’d thought — stupidly, he could admit now — that the close call was the worst thing that would happen today.
That he’d navigated the danger and come out clean.
So he’d squatted in a clearing, pocketed his wand, and set to digging up a valerian plant with his fingers.
The work required attention.
He was absorbed.
Relaxed.
Unarmed.
Behind a moss-eaten oak, Quirrell raised his wand with a steadiness the stammering professor had never shown in public.
“Stupefy!”
The flash of red was the last thing Elias registered before his mind went white and silent.
[Two weeks later]
Tuesday’s last Transfiguration class spilled into the corridor in a crush of robes and exhaustion.
Hermione pushed through the current of students, book clutched to her chest, scanning the crowd until she spotted a flash of white hair.
“Elias!”
She jogged to catch up, nearly clipping his shoulder.
Held up the book.
Ancient Runes and Their Practical Applications, the one they’d been talking about last month when everything was still normal.
“Want to go to the library together?”
“I don’t want to go.” He didn’t look at her.
Didn’t slow down.
Hermione’s smile faltered.
She studied his profile — the set of his jaw, the flatness behind his eyes.
He’d been like this for days.
Worse than his usual moods.
This wasn’t irritation.
This was absence.
“Then… I’ll go to the library?” She offered it like a question, like she was asking permission to exist in the same world as him.
“Hmm.”
Impatient.
Dismissive.
He turned hard into the third-floor corridor without a backward glance, headed straight for the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom.
Hermione stood there.
The book hung heavy in her hand.
She watched him disappear, the white hair swallowed by shadow, and something cold settled in her stomach.
The library was on the fifth floor.
He hadn’t even noticed she was going the wrong direction for company.
The office door clicked shut behind him.
“I tested Harry Potter.” Elias stood with his hands clasped behind his back, voice level and empty.
“He doesn’t know what the Philosopher’s Stone is.”
Quirrell’s frown deepened.
Useless.
If the boy didn’t know anything, he wouldn’t be nosing around restricted subjects.
Quirrell had assumed — hoped — that Dumbledore might have confided in his precious Chosen One.
But apparently the old man’s trust only extended so far.
Fine.
He’d investigate the restricted area himself.
The other professors were stone walls, polite and impenetrable, answering questions with questions until Quirrell wanted to scream.
“Go ask Professor Flitwick…” Quirrell stopped.
No.
Flitwick was too sharp.
Too loyal.
“Never mind. What I need from you is the troll-control spell. Learn it quickly. I’ll have work for you soon.”
He scratched a signature onto a slip of parchment and pushed it across the desk.
“Restricted Section. Look for a Dark Arts text on using the Imperius Curse to detect magical creatures. It should still be there — I’ve summarized a method for handling trolls from it, but I don’t have time to teach you personally.”
A flick of his fingers toward the door.
Dismissal.
“Yes, Professor.”
The parchment went into Elias’s pocket.
He let himself out, footsteps even and unhurried, and the door closed behind him with a soft final click.
Hermione saw him in the library.
He was in the Restricted Section, speaking quietly with Madam Pince, a slip of parchment changing hands.
A professor’s signature.
She couldn’t see whose.
She didn’t go over.
She sat at her usual table, homework spread in front of her, and didn’t read a single word.
The quill in her hand was still dry fifteen minutes later.
He was right there.
Thirty feet away.
Not the Elias she’d argued with about potion theory.
Not the Elias who’d sat across from her at breakfast and stolen her toast when he thought she wasn’t looking.
This was someone else wearing his skin.
She didn’t approach him.
She couldn’t think of what she would even say.
The professor’s signature worked like a key.
Madam Pince didn’t log the book.
Didn’t glance at the title.
A professor’s signature was the professor themselves — a privilege Hogwarts extended as a gesture of absolute trust.
Whether that trust was about to be betrayed was no longer a question Elias was capable of asking.
He had the book.
He had his orders.
He made his way to the Room of Requirement, and the days blurred into a rhythm of practice and compliance.
The spellwork was intricate.
The Imperius Curse was not meant for beasts — its architecture was designed for human minds — and adapting it required focus.
Time passed without texture.
His temper had not improved.
Draco Malfoy learned this the hard way.
One night, somewhere in the second week, Draco realized Elias hadn’t returned to the dormitory.
The bed-curtains were open.
The mattress was cold.
Draco’s mind, well-trained in the art of leverage, immediately supplied the next step: catch him out, report him, watch Snape descend.
He found Elias in the Defence Against the Dark Arts office, seated across from Quirrell, a textbook open between them.
Tutoring.
Perfectly legitimate.
Perfectly infuriating.
After that night, Draco started waking up in places he had no memory of going.
The trophy room, at three in the morning, with no shoes.
The floor of the Transfiguration corridor, cheek pressed to cold stone.
The entrance to Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom, a full three floors away from the Slytherin dormitories, with no idea how he’d gotten there.
He was certain he’d gone to bed.
He was certain his curtains had been drawn.
And yet.
He suspected Elias.
Of course he suspected Elias.
But the few times he’d worked up the nerve to confront him, Elias had looked through him with such complete, glassy indifference that Draco’s certainty evaporated.
There was nothing behind those eyes.
No guilt.
No satisfaction.
No recognition at all.
He wanted to tell Snape.
He needed to tell Snape.
But every time he imagined the conversation, he also imagined waking up the next morning inside the Chamber of Secrets — if it existed — or somewhere worse.
So he stopped sleeping.
He lay rigid in his bed each night, curtains cracked open, watching the door.
Waiting for Elias to return.
Waiting for Elias to settle.
Only when he was absolutely sure the other boy was unconscious — or absent — did Draco let his eyes close.
The exhaustion hollowed him out.
He dozed through Potions.
His notes became illegible scribbles.
Snape’s glares grew sharper, but Draco couldn’t bring himself to explain.
What would he even say?
The only person truly lost was Hermione.
Two weeks.
It had only been two weeks since that afternoon in the corridor outside Transfiguration, and their friendship — the easy rhythm of library sessions and bickering about theory and the quiet understanding that they were, against all odds, on the same side — had collapsed into something she didn’t have a word for.
He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
He wouldn’t sit with her at meals.
He moved through the castle like a blade, cutting through crowds without touching anyone, never stopping.
She watched him now from across the Great Hall, fork motionless in her hand.
The thought arrived unbidden and refused to leave:
What if this isn’t him?
It was insane.
Polyjuice Potion was beyond a first-year.
And yet.
If this is a fake — where is the real Elias?
She didn’t have an answer.
She wasn’t sure she wanted one.