Leopold opened the door and ushered Katy in.  Howler, still in his elf costume, had curled up on Leopold's hastily discarded costume.  He yawned, scratched and lazily climbed up the arm the old man offered.

"Take a seat please, MIss Bevans,"  he said.  "I'm sure this has been a rather trying night.  Would you care to explain your part in it?  It is rare to find a Hufflepuff that has turned to the Dark Arts, so I'm curious to discover what made you do it."

Katy was immensely grateful to Professor Trishna, whom she'd never had any strong feelings towards before, because she didn't want to stand uncomfortably in the hallway being lectured about the Dark Arts.  It might be well after curfew but there would always be students lurking about.  She and Sasha would have been out still if they hadn't been caught. 

So on the way down to Professor Sandusky's office, Katy had time to reflect on the fact that she'd never had cause to be called into that same room for reprimand before.  A completely average student who did just well enough to be considered a good student and didn't do anything horrible, she was easy to overlook.  Not anymore though.  For better or worse, there were eyes on her now. 

Katy sat down as she was ordered.  Her feet and legs were purposefully placed as they usually were, with her knees together straight out in front and her feet rested flat on the floor.  Her hands rested palm-down on the pleats of her skirt and she looked straight ahead with a blank expression.  She put attention to this because she had no idea what to say.  Looking blankly at the face of the professor's pet monkey, Katy just shook her head minutely.  If you weren't watching carefully, you'd have missed it.

"I didn't- I didn't... know what else to do. But I had to do something."

"Tea?" 

Leopold filled the kettle and set it to boil.  He turned to look at her.  "Had to do something about what, Miss Bevans?  Given the date and what you were caught doing, I'm going to hazard a guess that you were making an attempt to contact the dead.  Piercing the shell is one of the names the for what I expect you to have been trying this evening.  Am I right?"

Leopold turned around and looked at Katy, waiting for her to answer.

Katy ignored his offer of tea in favor of staring at her Head of House.  How could he not know?  Hadn't he been told about her mother's death?  As the Head of Hufflepuff it would have been something he'd have been alerted to, right?

"My mother," Katy said, as though it was obvious because, to her, it was.  "She died in a car accident last week.  I never got to say goodbye.  That's all I wanted to do.  I needed to say goodbye."

 One of the only outward signs of Katy's growing distress was the clench of her delicate hands into fists against her thighs.  None of this was Sandusky's business and Katy didn't want to tell him.  She didn't want to say the words out loud again.  It hurt too much.  But she was in enough trouble. Things would probably go better for her if she just cooperated and came clean.

"A few weeks ago... I saw Sasha in the library.  I could tell something was wrong so a pressed him for information.  I found out that he was researching necromancy.  At first... I disapproved.  But once I found out about my mother, I asked to help."

Leopold said nothing for a moment.  "Life isn't fair, Miss Bevans.  That is an unfortunate fact.  We all lose people before we want to.  We're expected to be brave and carry on, when there has been a huge hole ripped in our hearts.  Then there are the friends who tell us they understand but really they don't.  When I say I know what it feels like to lose someone you love, I mean it.  Not everyone does.  Be that as it may, turning to the Dark Arts won't help.  They will, in fact, make things worse."

He looked at Katy for a moment.  "Do you believe in the soul, Miss Bevans?"

Friends.  The sad irony of it was that Katy didn't have friends.  Very few people liked her and fewer still actually knew about her mother's death.  No one ever asked why Katy was looked sad and angry because she generally looked like that all the time.  There were days where Katy felt like climbing on the table at breakfast and yelling at the entire school so they would all know just how alone in the world she was now.  She had no one left. 

Other days she felt like crawling into bed and hiding from everyone and everything.  She kind of felt like doing that now.

She'd never thought about the existence of the soul, per se.  It wasn't something that had really occurred to her to think about.  So when asked about it now, Katy just shrugged.  "I suppose so," she offered half-heartedly.  "Why?"

"It relates to what you were doing," Leopold explained.  "Belief in a soul evidences belief in an afterlife.  Not all souls become ghosts, otherwise we would be overrun with them.  The vast majority pass on to whatever this afterlife holds.  Do you believe that those who pass on are happy on the other side?"

They were sophisticated issues that even adults wrestled with.  Katy was still mostly a child but her actions had brought her into an arena where she needed to come face to face with some very hard questions.  Her desperate attempt to reach out to her dead mother was a cry in the darkness that needed to be addressed. 

Katy stared a random location in the middle ground of the room, the corner Professor Sandusky's desk to be exact.  Her walls were beginning to go up.  She felt patronized as the old man began a lecture on the soul.  Well-intentioned though it might be, a lecture was still a lecture and in this instance Katy did not appreciate it.

Still staring at the wood grain on the desk, Katy just shrugged.  "I guess," she supplied unhelpfully.  After a moment or two, she gave an irritated little sigh with herself and then added. "I guess it depends on the person and the afterlife.  I can't imagine one would enjoy Hell all that much."

"No, I suspect Hell would be most unpleasant," Leopold said, nodding in agreement.  "You might want to pay more attention to this conversation, Miss Bevans," he continued.  "What you have done or tried to do is very serious and I'm trying to explain to you why what you did cannot be described in any way shape or form as a good thing.  If you mother is in a better place, why would you want to drag her out of it?  To say goodbye one last time?  What if that one time wasn't enough?  Would you do it again?  Would you try and find some way to pull her back and turn her into a ghost?  There is a reason necromancy is a forbidden art, Miss Bevans.  It is also a very selfish art, because you are forcing your will upon another who has passed beyond the final gate.  For better or worse, your mother has earned her resting place.  Grief is not for the departed, Miss Bevans, grief is for those left behind.  Believe me, I know."

There was an enormous sadness about the old man as he spoke.  It was clear that he had suffered the loss of someone he cared deeply about and he was reaching into that still-raw pain to try and understand what Katy had done.

"You might want to pay more attention to this conversation, Miss Bevans,"

Katy shot to her feet, her eyes blazing with anger.  "You know nothing!" she accused viciously.  Her hands were clenched at her sides, gripping and releasing rhythmically in want of her wand. 

"I could feel the darkness of that spell.  That book alone..." She trailed off with a shudder at the memory of the way her skin crawled when she'd first laid eyes on the book Sasha used for the spell.  With a half-step back, Katy sank back into the chair and played with the hem of her skirt.  "I didn't want to do that to her.  I'd...  I'd had time to think about it and I know my mother would have wanted me to move on it's just... Sasha." 

Katy felt so alone that she'd latched on to the closest person with whom she'd shared a tenuous but real partnership.  Without her mother, Katy's Hufflepuff loyalty cried out for attachment.

Leopold removed his glasses and polished them with a cloth.  "Life is full of pain and you are far to young to have been forced to learn that lesson,"  he said.  "By the time you reach my age, people expect you to be able to ignore it or deal with it but I'll tell you a secret that they don't like getting out.  No matter how old you are, no matter how many times it has happened to you in the past, losing someone you love is a pain that burrows right into the heart of you and it makes you want to scream and cry and break things, anything to just stop the pain."

He paused before continuing "My wife-" Leopold's voice broke for a moment but he continued "- meant more to me than anything else in the world.  More than my son, even and I love him with all my soul.  When I lost her, I was devastated.  It took everything I had to not seek out the magic you were contemplating tonight, just to see her one more time, so when you say I know nothing, I'm forced to respectful disagree.  I know exactly where you are coming from."

He sat heavily into his chair.  "So you say it was Mr Schlagenweit?  What exactly did he do to convince you that this was something you wanted to do?"

Katy was somewhat mollified by Professor Sandusky's admission.  She tucked her fingers under her thighs and sat quietly staring at her knees.  She was frankly surprised that he was still so calm.  Why hadn't he gotten mad at her?  Did he really understand?  It seemed unlikely that he could.  He'd lost his wife but his son was still alive.  Katy had no one now.  Still... he'd described the way she felt really well.  "I'm... sorry, I guess," Katy admitted eventually, even though she remained largely skeptical.

Katy's grief all but vanished when the professor talked about Sasha.  She frowned and looked hard at him before folding her arms defensively over her chest.  "Sasha didn't convince me to do anything!  He didn't want me to get involved but I insisted."  She refused to let Sasha take the blame for this on his own, even though she could if she wanted to.  It wouldn't be the truth and it would go against her innate desire to protect Sasha.

"Then how did you discover that he had a... similar goal, shall we call it?  I mean it isn't exactly a topic you're going to sit in the library and research, is it?"  Necromancy was about as dark an art as there existed.  The fact that there were books that revealed its secrets within the Hogwart's library bothered Leopold immensely but he had more than once defended that very point at some very heated meetings of the governing council.  Knowledge of the dark arts was essential to fighting them.

With her lips pressed into a thin line, Katy tried to think of a response that wouldn't sound trite.  The fact of the matter was that Sasha had been researching it in the library when she found out about it.  Her face was fairly transparent, clearly displaying her effort to think of the most appropriate response.

"He was in the... library," she said slowly.  "Like I said before, I could feel the darkness of the book.  I asked him about it and eventually peeked inside of it.  That's how I found out.  I told him that necromancy was forbidden for a reason.  I couldn't tell Professor Morgan because Sasha did have permission to be in the restricted section."

Katy's eyes dropped to her lap once more.  "It wasn't until my mother died that I gave it another thought."

Leopold was curious as to who had given Sasha permission to be in the restricted section and whether they knew what the boy had actually been studying.  "Here is where the questions get more difficult,"  he said.  "If you knew the book was dark and could feel that darkness, what possessed you to approach Mr Schlagenweit?"

Leopold didn't expect Katy to have a definitive answer.  It was one of those tumultuous emotional situations that produced actions that were normal beyond consideration.  He was prepared to be surprised, however, just in case the young girl had a more mature grasp of her motivations than normal.