As her head nodded in an almost mechanical fashion, she revised her feelings on being under the imperius curse. It felt pleasant but now that he was giving her orders, she didn't like it at all. She knew it was sometimes possible for people to resist the curse and foolishly believed, perhaps emboldened by her earlier triumph, that she would be able to fight it off with ease.

It became apparent as soon as she began walking towards the door at his demand that she leave, that for all her conviction that she was unbreakable and magically gifted, she was unable to fight off the curse. Her stride didn't even falter. Now there was a new skill she could do with honing, not that she expected to be placed under the curse again in the future, but it would be a nasty shock indeed if he tried and found it ineffective. Unfortunately, practicing in secret would be next to impossible.

---

  

---

She was gone. Somehow, that failed to make it better. He didn't feel cornered anymore, now that she was gone, but he did feel... shaken. The revelation that Antigone could do that had taken him entirely by surprise, and this had presumably all happened right under his nose. She'd been living across the hall from him for the past several years, and he had somehow failed to notice that she had mastered a very difficult and very powerful bit of magic. What else might she have been up to, while he wasn't looking? Could she use legilimency, now? Tiberius had taught himself the skill, so knew it was possible to do without a direct mentor. He wouldn't have thought her capable of it, but an hour ago, he wouldn't have believed she had the attention span for serious study of any sort, and she had proven him wrong on that count.

Shit.

He needed to figure out what to do about Antigone; he couldn't keep her under the Imperius Curse and not speak to her for the rest of their lives. But first, he had to become a god damn animagus.