Of Rust and Stardust

By MissMoppet

Part Two

-----------

"When she was good, she was very, very good"

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

--------------------

Imagine a tattered hat, which sits on my head for a mere second before whispering a steward! then shouts for all the Great Hall to hear: SLYTHERIN! The dungeons where I will spend the next seven years are not a rat-infested, torture chamber affair but a quiet labyrinth of rooms that reaches under a lake, going so deep that the ground slopes downward beneath my heels. Torches burn brightly on the walls, but never seem to cast their light far enough to chase the shadows away. The room I share with Daphne, Tracey, and Millicent is round, like a wide well, and a skylight looks down upon the centre, offering a view of the lake's clear, greenish waters. Now and then I think I catch a glimpse of something swimming overhead--is it a tendril of the squid's tentacle or a waving banner of lake-weed? My glimpse is too brief to determine one way or another, even though I often spend Sunday mornings beneath the skylight, training my eye upward whenever light shimmers over the pages of my book, quick as a minnow's splash.

Imagine a common room where Slytherins speak in a free and friendly manner, but keep their secrets just out of reach, curling around them to keep the clandestine details warm and protected. I was quite the fool to think myself the only one with secrets to nurture--for they were plentiful in the dungeons. There was Daphne and her secret stash of letters, which arrived not by the Greengrass Owl, but by a bird of snowy white who bore a scarlet band around his foot. At night I heard her read and re-read them, for months upon end until the parchment grew soft and no longer crinkled in her fingers. There was Tracey, whose hands I had never seen. She kept them gloved in black kid even at mealtimes, and ran them under the faucet as casually as if they were her very own skin. There was Millicent, who spoke only when spoken to first, and who delivered her words very, very slowly, all in effort to disguise the stutter of her tongue over more difficult letters: tricky B's and trickier P's. There was Greg and his weekly visits to Madam Pomfrey, and there was Vincent, who would only shower after midnight, when the lavatories were empty but for ghosts. And then there was Draco. Draco whose greatest secret was that he had none.

I know what you're thinking, that everyone has secrets, that everyone has something to ball up in their fist and hide from the world. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps it is also true that there are some people who hide their secrets so well they give off the illusion of having none. If so, Draco was one of these people. As was I.

When I think of Draco as he really is, it is to think of that little boy flailing in the mud who thinks he's just seen the devil. But you'd never know he fears the devil to look at him now. He courts trouble like one who thinks it the finest dance partner, his eyes shining with unabashed naughtiness as he struts through the halls with his Potter Stinks badge blinking. Perhaps that is why it was I whom he asked to the Yule Ball, because he knew I would dance at his side in a gown of obnoxious pink ruffles and purposefully trip him up in its meandering train--all in the name of trouble. You dance as nicely as an air-sick Hippogriff, he'd muttered, whipping me out for a turn. Fess up, I had said, swinging back in to press up to his chest. It was your mother's idea to make me your date. The faint flush at his temples told all.

My greatest secret was my knowledge of Draco, and Draco's greatest secret was his knowledge of me. It was a knowledge I couldn't imagine ever wanting, and I was certain he felt the same.

No, if there was one Slytherin who truly had no secrets, it would be that quiet one. Quiet not because he stuttered, but because he was simple, like those eyes that sat plainly behind his squarish glasses, which magnified his vast lifetime of years with no secrets, no trouble, no want for anything but a kind word to acknowledge his presence.

His name was Theodore Nott, and this part of my story begins, but doesn't quite end, with him.

------

I liked to snack during prefect rounds. On blood lollies and sugar quills, mostly, because they made my lips a lurid red colour that no sticks of carmine could ever achieve. It was my way to lecture around a sticky lolly when I caught a curfew-breaking firstie, reddish spittle staining my teeth as I smiled--too hard--at my captive criminal. I did so love being a prefect. What better way to break rules, after all, than to be put in a position where you are expected to uphold them? Don't think me alone in this philosophy, either. Why, with my very own eyes I saw the old Head Boy, Percy Weasley, slip a swoony-looking Penny Clearwater into a dusty storage closet, and I stood at the door and heard them smack and slurp like starved vampires.

"Quit slurping like that," Draco said, looking straight ahead as we hurried up a staircase to a third-floor landing. Hurrying on the staircases was habit by then, for to get stuck on one in mid-rotation could make for a minute-long delay that would set Draco to sulking. He quite hated moments when he couldn't keep moving, his hands jittery as he looked from side to side, as if sensing a calm closing in. I imagined him a fitful sleeper, one who tossed and thrashed just to remind his sleeping self that he still lived. I myself slept like the dead.

"Why?" I gave my lolly a vigourous suck, my cheeks fairly aching.

"I don't know. Go on and slurp all you want." He knew, of course, that to chastise me was to encourage me.

I slurped anyway, then dislodged the lolly from the pouch of my cheek and held it out in an offering way. "Lick?"

He squirmed with disgust and pushed my arm away. "Don't be foul."

Even more foul was sitting before Madam Pomfrey with my mouth wide open as she applied a cavity-filling charm to four of my back teeth. The charm left a metallic, gritty taste in my mouth that no amount of rinsing could wash away. She sent me off with a lecture on proper tooth cleaning and advised me to refrain from eating so many sweets. I smiled with my newly whole teeth and said I would try, then dipped my hand into the bowl of pepper imps on her desk when I left. That metallic taste was still on my tongue.

At breakfast the next day an Owl delivered a large package into my plate of eggs. It was a box of blood lollies, in new and improved, cavity-preventing flavours. I twirled one between my fingers during Binns' lecture on the Goblin Rebellion, studying the cellophane wrapper. Who had sent them? Not Draco, surely.

A soft, tickling feeling on the back of my neck made me jump. When I turned my head Theodore's quill nearly swabbed at my eye, poised as it was for another attention-getting go at my neck.

"Are you going to eat it?" he asked, not bothering to lower his voice to a whisper.

"Now?" I lifted my fingers and moved his quill away from my face. He had leaned in close to me, not suggestively, but in a way that showed he had little regard for personal space. I could feel his breath upon my cheek, warm and milky.

He nodded, his glasses sliding down the end of his nose. I turned my eyes back to the lolly. It came back to me, all at once, how ever since my first year at Hogwarts, an unknown someone had seen to my needs in a most unobtrusive way. There was the cream tea, for instance, that arrived every Sunday as I pored over revisions, without my even asking. It would simply arrive on the corner of my desk--pop!--kettle going full steam, the scones placed side by side like plump little conspirators. Then there was the time I'd lost my mittens and had to cross through the courtyards in the dead of winter, blowing on my fingers to keep them from going blue. A new pair was on my chair at dinner that same evening, green cashmere with white angora snowflakes. I'd thought them maybe from Greg at the time; he'd made cow-eyes at me since our third year. But how did Greg's possible affections explain the time I'd been sick for over a week with a vicious cold that Pepper-up potion couldn't deter, and I'd found a tiny pansy tucked between the pages of my History of Magic book? It was made from pink and yellow tissue paper, twisted into delicate and artful petals by fingers much more slender than Greg's.

Theodore had sat behind me in History of Magic back then, too.

I held the lolly to my lips, crinkling the wrapper between my two front teeth as Binns' droning words lulled me deeper into my own thoughts.

Theodore was waiting for me just outside Binns' classroom, his sloppy rucksack sitting by his feet, bursting at the seams with odd bits of parchment. I stood across from him and drew to my full height, which wasn't tall. "How did you know I've soft teeth?" I asked, the lolly still clutched between my fingers.

"I saw you sucking on cubes of ice the other night. You looked to be nursing an ache?" He said this all plainly enough, but his lips quirked oddly, as if he weren't certain how to smile.

In all the time I'd known him, I'd though him little more than a pigeon. The others--Greg and Vincent, in particular--were always taking the mickey out of him, aware that he was the one Slytherin whose school marks were lower than theirs. He did seem a poor student, his essays always smudged with scrawls of ink, his potions always fizzing with a distinct lack of confidence. Daphne and Tracey claimed he was simple, and quiet not because he was shy, but because he could not possibly have anything of interest to say.

"Thanks," I said, carefully. "But I'm able to keep myself stocked in lollies, I think."

"Oh," he said, looking down at his shoes so that his sandy hair, which was as straight as straw, fell into his eyes. "Should I send them back?"

I tucked the lolly into my pocket, but kept my fingers balled around it--it had grown sticky in the hot confines of my hand. "No. But you need not..." I paused. "...go out of your way again." I thought it an odd request, coming from me.

"It wasn't any trouble?" he said, and I noticed that all of his phrases seemed to draw to a curl at the end, as if delivering a question instead of a statement, and it made him seem quite forlorn, as if I'd just denied him a private pleasure that he'd enjoyed for some time. Students filtered and tittered around us, their voices grating and loud in contrast to his.

"I said you needn't go out of your way." I huffed and turned on my heel, leaving him there in his raggedy, lopsided robes. He was like a boy who had never fit in anywhere, not even in the clothes that hung on his weedy, too-tall frame. He couldn't hope to fit in at my side. He was too genuine, too kind, and even more bland than Binns, with his funeral-dirge voice and faintly see-through skin.

When I returned to my room I rummaged through my desk drawers, finally finding that tissuey pansy and holding it to my nose. It smelled like dust, like the lavender power I'd spilled in there last year and hadn't bothered to sweep out. Trust a pigeon, I thought, to make gifts of paper flowers.

But when my cream tea arrived that Sunday, I bit into the scones with relish. They seemed even tastier on that drizzly morning, more than on any Sunday that had come before.

------

There were changes in our school that year; strange changes that I didn't know what to make of at first. Our new Defence instructor, Professor Umbridge, was the one who brought most of them about, but quite like a storm that pounds across the landscape and makes it anew, so that you're grateful for the draught's end, but are left feeling curiously upended and tossed about. She was the first professor I'd ever seen with a fondness for pie-frill collars and portraits of kittens, to be sure, but she was different for more reasons than that. When she had announced on the first day that she would teach Defence as a return to basic principles, I let my quill go loose in my hand, preparing to yawn into my shoulder and snooze.

"But then, I'm sure this group is up to snuff on basic principles," she announced, leaning forward and studying our Slytherin colours with a curious mix of hunger and satisfaction. I flitted a glance to Draco and he shrugged. We were not, generally speaking, accustomed to receiving favour from Professors, with the exception of Snape, who as our Head of House was the lone voice who spoke of us highly, with pride.

"Now then," she said, putting aside her lesson plan. "Tell me, how do you students feel about the way in which Headmaster Dumbledore runs this school?"

There was a moment of profound, stunned silence, and then hands began to rise one by one, each more eager than the one that had shot up before it.

They say that the most powerful witches and wizards remake the world to suit their own needs and name. Salazar did so, not content to compromise with his peers, but bent on shaping his surroundings as he saw fit. Dumbledore did so as well, cultivating a school full of students that would turn to him as flowers do to the sun, feasting on that warm and radiant light. But we were the cellar-dwellers who grew in the dark, our stubborn roots taking hold even as we were denied--taking hold fast the more we were denied.

We knew we weren't particularly well-liked, you see. Just as weeds aren't, but have the brashness to bloom amidst the daisies just the same.

There were other changes, ones that tried to remain unseen, unlike Professor Umbridge, but they too revealed themselves in time. My own knowledge of them came some weeks after Christmas, a holiday I had spent in the dungeons with Millicent and Daphne after a curt Owl came from Saversnake, written in Portia's hand. One of old wizard Perkins' hexes had breached the wards, taking a chunk out of the roof, and for safety's sake she thought it better I stay at the school. I didn't much mind, and spent my free time making magical snow for the common room--huge, shifting drifts that Daphne and I rolled in, waving our legs and arms to make angels. Three weeks later the snow was still there.

"Come on, Draco," I said, balling a mound of it in my hand. It was cool, fluffy stuff, and stubborn to melt. "Let's load our rucksacks with snowballs and take them on patrol. Filch will have kittens."

"No," he said, shifting on the couch before the fire, looking pink-cheeked and irritable, and yet curiously deep in thought. "I've a headache."

"So you're skiving off patrol?" I asked, crumbling the snow between my fingers and shaking it to the floor.

"I've a headache," he repeated, crossing him arms before his chest in a way that left no room for discussion.

"Fine," I said, my tone light and easy. He looked disgruntled at this, as if he'd been privately hoping I'd force him to come along. The truth of it was that I enjoyed solo patrols. I liked to take the stairs all the way to the top floor and work my way down, peering into dripping lavatories and empty classrooms, my feet quick and intrepid. All around me were the telltale signs of students, both present and past, and I probed into them like a child who greedily plucked out the sweetest, tempting berries from a shelf of cooling pies. The lavatories, in particular, always held a surprise: an abandoned hair ribbon in Hufflepuff colours left on a sink, or graffitied love confessions scribbled inside a stall. Once I'd found a pair of knickers kicked under a toilet, sticky with some boy's spent rashings, and wondered who would be so desperate and hurried to meet up for a tryst in the toilets, their elbows banging the walls as a boy did his careless duty.

I performed my own duties rather carelessly when left to them alone, and took the stairs all the way up to the seventh floor, my pockets lined for the journey with four strawberry sugar quills. I heard low splashing from behind the door to a boys' lavatory, and pushed it open with a flourish, thinking that a Weasley twin might be in there replenishing his supply of water-bombs. I was greeted with the high-pitched cackle of Peeves, instead.

"Got your conk! Got your conk!" He chortled, zipping around the lavatory like a popped cork.

"You have not," I protested, then rolled my eyes and made to leave, content to leave him to his childish canoodling.

"Got it!" He squealed, then lifted a finger and shot out a stream of water. It hit me square in the nose, making me cry out and choke, coughing on water that was freezing and tasted, to my horror, what I imagined Peeves might like taste like.

"Ugh!" I gasped, parting my dripping hair. I saw through bleary eyes that Peeves had already slipped out the lavatory door, his laughter trailing behind and hitting me like a fine rage. "Get back here!" I pushed through the doors and gave chase, though I didn't know what I'd do when and if I caught up with him. Likely nothing, as he'd no doubt be able to hose me down with ease before I came up with any operable plan. "Get... back...here!" I gasped, skidding in a puddle and

coming down hard on my arse, my skirt and stockings sopping up the mess like a sponge.

I sat there then, rubbing at my behind while muttering sour things, glad, at least, that no one had glimpsed my humiliating display of flail and fall. My sinuses hurt horribly from their recent flooding, and I coughed and coughed in effort to clear my lungs. Once recovered, I could hear a scuffling from further down the corridor. Peeves again, I thought, and stood up and kept to the wall, creeping slowly towards the noise.

It wasn't Peeves, though. It was Theodore, leaning against a tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, sporting a cut, quickly-swelling eye. At the corridor's end an angry book flapped and growled, its pages shredded inside its own binding.

"Theodore?" I smoothed down the back of my dripping skirt and peered at him in the dim light.

"All right?" I came closer. He had his glasses in one hand, and the other was reaching up to feel out the weeping bruise beneath his left eye.

"Pansy?" He lifted his head and squinted at me.

"What happened to you?" I took another step closer and the book snarled and snapped at my feet.

I gave it a kick and it yelped, then went back to the business of gnawing at its own contents.

"Attacked by an angry book?"

His lips jumped oddly, as if fighting a laugh. "No. I was reading up on dangerous creatures in the library? The book went skittish on me and ripped through my rucksack. I had to chase it all the way up here."

"But what about your eye?" I lit the end of my wand and brought it up to his face, seeing that the eye itself was bloodshot and watery, as if he'd been hit.

"Terry Boot gave me that," he said, touching the bruise again and wincing. "He wears a big ring. Like a signet."

"Terry Boot? What for?"

He pointed further down the corridor, in the direction of the puddle where I'd slipped. "I had the book cornered there, and all these kids came out of a room. Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, then a bunch of others, some Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws. They went down the stairs and didn't see me, but then Terry Boot and Michael Corner came out last. The book growled and they saw me."

"And they hit you just for that?" I frowned. Ravenclaws weren't generally quarrelsome by nature, and Theodore wasn't the sort to invite attack. If the book hadn't growled, I doubted he would have even been seen.

"I don't know? They seemed worried I'd seen something I shouldn't. 'How long were you watching', they wanted to know. And when said I didn't watch them, Terry gave me a punch and said I'd better not. Then they went running." His voice was curiously flat as he spoke, as if he wasn't angry, nor surprised, that he'd been hit. As if it were just another happening that might occur on any given day.

"And they came out of a room, you say?" I looked up and down the corridor, seeing no room in the immediate vicinity. "What room?"

"They came out of a door thereabouts," He pointed at the blank wall opposite us. "But I can't find the door now."

I pressed a hand to the wall, feeling out the stonework for a hidden latch or hinge. "There is no door." I wondered briefly if Theodore might be prone to fits or delusions.

"I saw them leave," He repeated. "Harry Potter. Ron Weasley and his sister. Hermione Granger, too."

"Them," I said, cracking my knuckles impulsively. "Always up to no good, that lot." I frowned to myself. Since when had Potter's circle of friends expanded to include fist-happy Ravenclaws?

"They're probably doing something that's against the new Educational Decrees, and are pissing themselves, scared that you'll rat them out."

"I don't rat," he said, carefully pushing his glasses back onto his face, then wincing a little when the frame budged up against his bleeding bruise.

"Why not?" I crossed my arms over my chest. "You don't care if they broke the rules and busted your face?"

He sighed a little, then looked in the direction of the snarling, snapping book. "Not really. I just want my book back."

It was a particularly violent text, I'll admit, but I remembered the Care of Magical Creatures books from third year, which needed to be stroked into submission before they could be read.

"Did you try..." I ran my fingers over my sleeve in a stroking motion. "...giving it a pet?"

"Petting isn't enough. It's from the Restricted Section," he admitted, his arms hung uselessly at his sides. "Madam Pince asked if my singing voice was all right before she passed it over? I

guess I didn't really think about it."

"Think about what?" I prompted, feeling impatient at his halting, thick way of speaking, licking his lips all the while as if it took great effort to shape his half-baked thoughts into passable words.

"Whether or not my singing voice was all right?"

"That was daft of you," I said lightly. I ran my fingers through my damp hair and approached the book slowly, bending at the knee and gathering up the hanging folds of my skirt. I hummed under my breath at first, trying to think of an appropriate song. The Weird Sisters seemed far from soothing, and Celestina Warbeck was horrible enough to send a corpse into a rage. I hummed again, and a song leaped to my lips at once, called up from the vaults of my memory. "Believe me if all those endearing young charms, which I gaze on so fondly today, were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms like fairy gifts fading away..."The book's snarls subsided as I sang to it, until it finally shuddered once and went still.

"There we go," I said, fetching the book up in my arms. It seemed to vibrate a little, as if it were purring. "Might want to bind something around it."

He nodded and tugged off his neck tie, looping it around the book and knotting it tight. I doubted the flimsy fabric could hold such a beastly thing, but didn't bother to say as much. "You've a nice singing voice," he said. "Mine isn't so good, I suppose. I sang it 'London Bridge Is Falling Down' and it tried to bite me." He hopped away from the tapestry as he spoke, stuffing the book into his rucksack, and I noticed then that he was limping.

"What's that? Did Boot kick you in the kneecap, as well?"

"Oh, no." He stood upright and gestured behind his shoulder. "I fell when I was chasing the book. Into a puddle back there. Twisted my ankle good." His simple acceptance of the events continued to amaze me. Were I to sustain such assault, I would have voiced my complaints loudly enough to wake the whole castle.

I didn't say anything as I sidled up next to him, nudging my shoulder into the crook of his armpit and clapping an arm about his waist. He was a good deal taller than me, and I could feel his breath hot against the top of my head.

"What are you doing?" His voice was low and perplexed, finally in wonder at something.

"Lean on me," I said, giving his side a pinch. "I'm helping you to Pomfrey's."

"That's okay," he said, pulling away from me slightly. "I... I'd rather not see Pomfrey." He shook a little as he spoke, as if the thought of the hospital wing made him nervous. "If you can just help me down to my room? I have something there that will help."

"Fine," I said, not in the mood to argue. "Just lean on me, will you?"

He did, and I balked under his weight at once. Weedy as he looked, he was heavy enough, and I used my wand to quickly lighten my burden before heading for the stairs. It was a long trip down, and we spent it in silence, carefully picking our way down each step . He seemed to get used to the pain of it after a while, and soon only kept his hand on my shoulder, clinging to it loosely for support.

"Your hair is wet. Did you know?"

"Yes." I didn't bother to explain. Something told me that I didn't need to, with him.

He shuffled along without complaint until we reached the common room, where he suddenly pulled away, shaking his head. "No, I meant my other room."

"Other room?" I was beginning to think that Theodore saw rooms everywhere, ones without doors, or doors that no one else could see or enter.

"This way." He limped past the common room entrance, heading for a corridor that was scarcely used. I followed him at a safe metre's distance, absently plucking at the cuffs of my jumper.

"There's nothing down here, Theodore. Just that potions workroom for seventh years practising N.E.W.T.s."

"Past the workroom," he muttered, pushing his palm into the wall for support. A draught blasted past my knees, making the torches stutter and weep. It sent warning gooseflesh prickling over my limbs, and I had a half a mind to turn back and leave him to his injuries alone. But I couldn't deny the curious core of my nature, so I followed him with out protest, my fingers on my wand just in case.

"See?" We'd reached the end of the corridor, where a giant, rusted-over door marked the dungeons' limits.

"We can't go in there," I said. The door looked as if hadn't been touched for a century.

"Why? Is there an Educational Decree that says not to?" His mouth twitched in profile, and I realised he was making... a joke.

"How should I know?" I grumbled, sucking in my cheeks. So he thought me a goody-goody prefect who lived to follow rules. It only showed how little he really knew. He hesitated when he reached for the doorknob, as if expecting me to stop him, and I felt my nerves curdle. So I brushed him aside and opened the door myself. It let out a teeth-grating creak, like it was opening on the end of the world, and rust flaked off the doorknob to coat my fingers. It opened onto darkness, and I took a lung-breaking breath and stepped through.

------

I thought I'd fallen through to the bottom of the lake. The air that filled my lungs was moist and sharp, smelling faintly organic, and water coursed over my already-wet hair. I thrust my arms out before me, blind, and a lapping noise filled my ears. Then the torches suddenly burst to life, causing me to jump back and fetch up against Theodore's chest, my head cracking against his sternum.

"Ow!" My hand shot up to the crown of my head, massaging, but the complaint died in my throat as I looked around and took in our surroundings. We were in a wide, low-ceilinged cave, and a rickety boardwalk led to a deep pool of water where twenty or so little boats were roped together, bobbing placidly on the surface. "Oh!" I exclaimed, recognising the place at once. "First year... this is where the boats came in." I walked in a circle, appraising the place. It might have been a bit ominous but for the boats, which were painted gold and lit with fairy lights, looking like a cheerful toymaker's idea of proper water transport. Stalactites dripped from the ceiling, their crystalline surface glittering. I turned to Theodore with raised eyebrows. "This is your room?"

"Over here." He gestured to a far corner of the cave, where a little boat was cradled between the dry rocks. Its seats had been removed, and it seemed very much like a large, curled leaf. An acorn cap, maybe. The hollow belly had been filled with blankets and cushions.

I walked towards it, then clambered up on a high stone and slowly tipped myself over, landing in the cushions with a muffled laugh. I flopped over and onto my back, wallowing to get free from the blankets, and the boat swayed wildly from side to side. "I want a boat for a bed!" I cried, but it was more mirthful than petulant. I pulled a wad of hair from my mouth and popped my head over the edge of the boat. Theodore had settled down on a nearby rock, and was opening a trunk that I hadn't noticed upon our entrance. "How did you find this place?"

He shrugged, and seemed to be smiling to himself. "By looking."

I propped my chin on my folded hands. "Got something in that trunk to heal your eye?"

"Yeah," he said, and removed a square of gauze and a tin flask. He opened the flask and poured an amber liquid onto the gauze, then pressed the gauze to his wounded eye.

"What--oh!" The boat tipped to one side as a spoke, nearly spilling me out, and I scooted backwards to make it more balanced. "What was that?"

"Firewhiskey. Dad says it's the best cure known to wizardkind."

"Firewhiskey!" I pursed my lips together, regarding him with vague amusement. "I think he means you're to drink it." I knew, of course, that his father was one of Virgil's associates, who was himself one of Lucius Malfoy's associates, who was of course an associate of... well, even Slytherins don't speak of such arrangements in mixed company. Mostly because we don't rightly know how to.

"Drink it?" He looked at the flask doubtfully, then tipped it back and swallowed long, his mouth curved around the opening in a faint smile. Another joke! I began to think him not so simple as he looked. I extended my arm and wiggled my fingers. He passed the flask over and I took several tiny sips from it, each burning down my throat like a sweet gulp of golden smoke. I soon grew dizzy and fell back into the boat, gazing up at the swimming ceiling.

"Are you all right?" Theodore's voice sounded far away. I nodded a little, then thought he might not be able to see me and said yes, I was just fine.

"Why did you send me the lollies, Theodore? And the tea, and the mittens?" My words seemed to float overhead like a balloon. It didn't seem possible that they'd come from my mouth.

He paused for so long that I wondered for a moment if he'd left. Then, finally, "You don't like them? They seemed like that sort of things you liked. That you were used to."

"How do you know what I'm used to?" My tone was crusty, and I balled my fists at my sides, feeling unusually vulnerable and exposed.

"I won't send them anymore," he said in a single rush of disappointment. Why did he care? What did he think to gain, from someone like me? I asked him as much and he offered no answer for several minutes. Then I heard him clear his throat, with embarrassment, it seemed. "I thought we might be friends," he said, in such an uncomplicated, child-like way that I knew all at once that he was simple after all. In a den of subtle, scheming Slytherins, he was as straightforward as a tack.

But I was straightforward too, in my own way. When I budged up on my favourite couch in the common room and ordered the gathered firsties to leave off, everyone thought me putting on a grand display of superiourity, and sniggered on in show of support. When I stomped from my bed in the middle of the night and threatened to put silencing charms over Daphne and Tracey, who gossiped by the fire till all hours, they thought me funny and quaint. You're such a spitfire! they said, the wireless chirping in the background, their stalwart companion. They took my histrionics for theatrics, again and again, and I was glad for it. Otherwise they might have guessed the truth--that really, I didn't know any better. Didn't particularly want to, either.

I reflected on Theodore's request for several minutes. I thought we might be friends. Is that what he thought friendship was? Endless doting and careful ego grooming? Perhaps he did. He didn't, after all, seem to have any friends. The cave dripped around me in a subdued harmony and I soon found that his concept of friendship was beginning to agree with me. It was simple and uncomplicated, like him.

"Pass me that flask," I said. "I've sugar quills here, but can only spare one--just so you know."

He gave over the firewhiskey, nodding so eagerly that I was reminded of Gabby. And your ears, too, I thought, the drink going down sour.

------

I finally had a friend who suited me, years and years after Portia had issued that particular decree, and Draco, for one, didn't like it a bit. "Where were you?" he hissed, always waiting in the common room when I returned from the cave, pink in the cheeks from Theodore's stash of contraband. I smirked quietly and ignored his interrogations, crouching down before the fire and removing my robes, then rolling up my sleeves and thrusting my bare arms toward the flames. I didn't think for a moment that he genuinely cared--he only worried that my vanity, which was admittedly vast, no longer held him as its primary target. I didn't need Draco for standing amongst my peers. I had found it all on my own.

"You're going to bed after this, yeah?" He'd pry during our patrols, his gaze always kept straight ahead to suggest he wasn't really that curious. But I knew that he was.

"We'll see," I'd reply, my mouth curled up and coy. I enjoyed having him on edge and suspicious. The stalemate of our relationship, which had come so early on over that game of gobstones, seemed silly and childish now. Were he to suddenly tell everyone I'd been raised by house elves, I didn't think I would much care.

I never stopped to consider the truth of the matter. That he had never told. That I had always expected him to, and he never did.

By now you're probably boggling at the sheer magnitude of my stubbornness. What can I say? I thought of Portia and how she'd married to find freedom, even though it meant that it would always hurt to look that freedom eye to eye. She'd passed it on to me, instead, and I would be damned if I wasn't going to take it for every lick it was worth. And if it made an ass of me, so be it. You can see, then, that I wasn't just stubborn, but also not half so clever as I thought myself to be.

I was very young. And my youth, it wouldn't last long. So don't you worry, dear reader, a comeuppance is headed my way.

It first came knocking at my door on the night we heard news of Dumbledore's disappearance. A collective cheer went up in the common room, parchments flying as people tossed aside their revisions in an abandoned show of glee. Professor Umbridge would be Headmistress now, and we thought ourselves in for a treat. More Educational Decrees, yes, but also the pleasure of watching the other houses suffer for them--that we would suffer too didn't matter. It was the world's oldest story of grapes gone sour: So what? They had it coming. We had earned all those house points fair and square, four years before, but what was hard work compared to last-minute heroics? At last, it seemed, our hard work had paid off.

Revisions forgotten, we kicked into full-out celebration. Covert bottles of spirits were produced, and mixed with butterbeer to disguise both their taste and their presence. The Exploding Snap cards were dug out of pockets, and previously-hidden stashes of truffles and biscuits were passed around with uncommon generosity. I myself had stripped off my robes and untucked my blouse, and was lounging on the couch in a slovenly heap, a near-empty bottle of butterbeer dangling from my fingers. Just then, the wireless was turned on full blast and the sound of the Weird Sisters filled the room.

"Turn it up, Daphne!" I exclaimed, then jumped to my feet, the blood draining from my head all at once and leaving me woozy. I clambered up on a table and spun around, shaking my arse and waving my arms in a way that I knew was ridiculous. "Who's going to dance with me?" I asked. The spiked butterbeer made my cheeks feel much warmer than usual, and I imagine I looked both appealing and nightmarish. I appraised the room from my perch and spotted Theodore near the back, lingering in the corner as if hoping to disappear. "Theodore!" I commanded, crooking my finger. He looked startled and owlish, but slowly approached me. I took hold of his hands and helped him up to the table, then flung my arms about him, my fingers clinging fast, like kitten claws. I moved him in a reluctant circle, in a poor imitation of dancing, while he stood stiffer than a quill, his eyes wide and his adam's apple gulping. From around the curve of his shoulder I could see the others laughing, thinking I was taking the mickey and making a mockery of poor, simple Theodore. I goosed him on the arse and gave my audience a wink, which elicited nothing less than a roar of approval.

And there, amidst the roar, I saw Draco, looking dead serious and whiter than new parchment.

I turned away from his look and pressed my mouth to Theodore's ear, too quick for the others to see. "You're a peach," I whispered, my lips shaping into a kiss as they formed the last word. He blushed and went loose in my arms, like a heroine on the verge of a deep, lusty swoon. I let go and jumped from the table, calling out for someone to set me up with another bottle of butterbeer.

Later, when Headmistress Umbridge summoned Draco up to Dumbledore's old office, I wondered vaguely if we'd kicked up our heels too soon. Would she punish us now as she'd punished the others? I wouldn't have to wait for Draco to find out--she sent for me less than twenty minutes later. I tried to tuck in my blouse as neatly as possible as I made my way up the spiral staircase. There was nothing to be done about the hair, or the smear of chocolate truffle on my sleeve.

But she only wanted to show off, it seemed. She was in the process of putting up a portrait of capering cats on the wall when I entered, and the room had already been noticeably dolled up with the addition of pink toss pillows and lacy doilies. The air was too warm and smelled overly fragrant.

"Get... up... there!" she huffed, pounding on the wall with the end of her wand. The wall seemed

to shudder and let out a rude burp, and the painting dropped to the floor, the frame cracking in two. "Confounded wall!"

I folded my hands together the way Portia would have, and delicately cleared my throat. "Headmistress?"

She whirled around and saw me there, her face red and quivering like a great pudding. "There you are, Miss Parkinson." She took a seat and with slow, carefully chosen words she made her offer. Draco had already accepted, she said, showing her sharp teeth with a grin. She held a special badge in her hand, shaped in the letter I, and explained how with special badges came special privileges.

I very lightly lifted an eyebrow as she spoke. Did she think we didn't know how she needed us? We knew all too well. "An Inquisitorial Squad?" I asked, repeating the words as if I were too daft to truly comprehend them. "It sounds..." I trailed off, and she looked at me expectantly, her round eyes bulging. I enjoyed the suspense of the moment immensely. "It sounds agreeable," I finished, and stretched out my hand to take up the badge.

I left her then. I believe she was already collecting her doilies and pillows in anticipation of making a move to a less treacherous room. Her old office, perhaps.

I went through the corridor blithely, my new badge tucked safely in my pocket. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a shape moving through the tapestries and paintings, and it tracked me down for two floors, as persistent as my own shadow, before I finally turned to confront it.

"You're following me," I said to a painting of a unicorn, who was curled up under a spring rowan tree, his coat shimmering like flax in the half-light. The unicorn didn't stir. It appeared to be sleeping. But soon enough a man stepped out from behind the rowan, looking as out of place in that pastoral scene as the devil himself. He walked elegantly into the foreground, dressed in equally elegant robes. His eyes glittered knowingly, like a predator's.

"Miss Parkinson, I presume," he said, his face nearly filling out the frame.

"Who are you?" I took a cautionary step back. He didn't seem frightening, but that knowing look unsettled me.

"Phineas Nigellus, at your service. Lord Elmer Edwyn has told me of you on those occasions when I visit his portrait." He steepled his fingers beneath his chin as he spoke, looking very satisfied indeed. "The most recent addition to the Parkinson line of stewards... yes, I see why he's concerned."

"Concerned?" My nose twitched. I reached up to scratch it. "What for?"

He widened his eyes, tutting softly. "Well, just look at you, girl."

I looked. My shirt had come untucked again, and I smoothed it down self-consciously, then gave up and took another step back, planting my hands on my hips. "If Elmer Edwyn has something to say to me, he can do it himself."

He gave a snort of amusement. "I don't think he's had anything to say to you since you tried to set his wife on fire."

I was confused for a split-second, then remembered the bonneted woman whose portrait I had held a candle to. "How was I to know that was his wife?" I stomped my foot a little, for effect.

His eyes seemed to narrow, then grew larger than plates. I thought I glimpsed a flicker of green fire in their pupils. "There are things a steward should know. Things she should know about herself, if she is to do her job properly."

I didn't speak, pressing my lips into a thin line of defiance instead--though I was more perplexed than annoyed. "What do you know about me that I don't know?" I said, tossing my head back in challenge. "I've never met you before in my life."

His laughter rang through the corridor. I thought for certain someone would hear it. "See? You've not even heard of the greatest Headmaster in Hogwarts' history . It's no wonder you're so ignorant."

I knew he was baiting me. I knew it, and yet I couldn't help but respond in true form. "Either speak to me directly or don't speak to me at all," I retorted, slapping my hand against my thigh. "Or I'll take a candle to your frame next."

My anger seemed to almost calm him. He was silent for several seconds, his nostrils flaring with the force of his breath. "Yes, yes. It's only right that you know. Lest the mistakes of the past be repeated again. Have to do it. Unpleasant business..." He muttered to himself like that for a time, as if engaged in a private debate, then finally straightened up and addressed me directly. "Your birth was a sign of bad luck for the Parkinson line, I'm afraid. Such a difficult birth, the midwife, inept little Ailema Parkinson, couldn't manage it. Portia had to be rushed to the nearest mediwizards. Saversnake was left unattended. Even you must know what that means."

An icy hand seemed to close over my lungs. I knew what it meant, all right.

"It wasn't my fault," I finally whispered, my voice reed-thin.

He smiled, almost sympathetically. "Wasn't it? The Perkins breached the wards and stole the rune. Salazar's will was broken."

I knew what he spoke of. The year that followed my birth marked the decline of Voldemort's reign. One bad blow after another, and the tide had suddenly turned.

"You're lying!" I said at last, though my voice was still meek. "I was born at home. I was, Portia told me." I had to have been born at home. Virgil had been away, answering the Dark Lord's call, and Portia never left Saversnake. She couldn't have left Saversnake. Only Parkinson blood could protect Salazar's rune, and should it depart from Saversnake, the wards could be broken by anyone. By Perkins.

It was then that I remembered. Harry Potter was born on July 31st, a few days after I was.

"I imagine Portia thought it best to protect you from the truth," Nigellus sniffed, pulling at the point of his beard.

I knew it was true then, all of it. And the truth really did hurt, just as the saying promised.

I ran from Phineas Nigellus, my heart pounding wildly in my throat. He gave chase through the tapestries and paintings, his voice calling after me. It's not too late to make amends, girl! Make up for the misfortune of your birth and protect the rune with your dying breath! The future of Salazar's will is on you...

I didn't want the future of Salazar's will on my hands. I didn't want my Parkinson blood and the honour of stewardship. My birth was no misfortune. Had the old man never heard of coincidence? Bad timing? Who was to say that Salazar's decree didn't really say Perkins? It looked as if it could go either way, to me...

But it still hurts to look.

Portia, I knew you at last.

-------

When I was nine I read the book Alice's Adventures in Muggleland. I had been quite set on hating it, because any adventures in Muggleland were sure to be dull and disappointing. And that Alice, what a pigeon to chase a niffler down a niffler-hole in hopes that it would lead her to a heaping pile of galleons. But I hadn't put the book down for days. Muggleland hadn't seemed dull, exactly, just different, and the way the story unfolded had held me in its grip like a horror. There were no galleons down that niffler-hole, just one oddity after another, each more unbelievable than the next, until finally Alice was left on an aeroplane to Brazil, holding a toaster in her lap--whatever that was.

I myself wasn't holding a toaster, but it seemed as if one might have been dropped on me. My head ached and spun with the unwanted truth that had been put upon me, and I returned to the common room dazed, my feet propelling me forward dutifully despite the fact that they no longer seemed attached to my body.

The common room had cleared by the time I returned. Only Draco remained, fussily gathering together empty butterbeer bottle even though he knew as well as I did that the house elves would take care of the mess while we slept. He looked up expectantly as I entered, and appraised me from across the room while wiping his fingers off on the sides of his robes.

"She gave you one too?" He showed me the lapel of his robes, where his Inquisitorial Squad badge, a shiny little I, was already pinned.

"What?" I moved stiffly, and it took special effort to slip my hand into my pocket and feel the badge there. "Oh, that. Yes, yes she did."

"Well, what do you think?" He took a step forward, squinting at me as if I were a particularly troublesome potion, on the verge of frothing over or taking on an odd colour.

"Sounds like a good time." My voice was hoarse, as if I didn't use it much.

"Are you all right?" Another step and his figure had fully retreated away from the light of the fire, so that shadow overtook him. The recognisably sharp and even placement of his features disappeared and he was rendered blurry, the inquiring cock of his head making him seem nearly kind.

I swallowed and hunched over, my hands knotted together at my abdomen. "No?" It came out like a question, in the way that Theodore might have said it.

"What is it?"

I watched Draco's feet shift, their noise very loud in the ensuing silence. I didn't know what to think of him just then. Portia had made him my friend, and so I had acted like one when the occasion called for it. I had taken a turn with him on the dance floor. I had passed him his quill and ink when his arm had been injured and bound to his chest like a crushed wing. But when it came to more personal exchanges, I was guarded and glowering, my face echoing his own perpetual state of mistrust.

"The saddest thing in the world is to realise that you'll never be somebody else, don't you think?" I asked, all in a rush. The words were spontaneous and unplanned, and even as they filled my own ears I wondered what they meant. If there were hidden stores of depth and insight within me, it was as much of a surprise to myself as to anyone else.

He took a step back. It was in his full right to retreat, and I didn't blame him just then. "What are you talking about?" His tone was accusatory. How dare I reveal myself as having secrets. Any I had already belonged to him, and vice versa.

"I've learned something," I said, my teeth stuttering over my tongue as Millicent's might. "I've learned something you don't know about me."

His response was so swift and severe that it sent me skittering back on my heels. "I don't want to hear it." he said, turning his face away. "Just... don't say anymore. I don't want to hear it," he repeated, and I half-thought he might take out his wand to ward me away. His face was luminously white, his hair falling over his face and blurring his features further. I couldn't see how he'd twisted them in anger--as he surely had--and that contrived distance made him seem all the more like his mother. He had no beginning and no end, like a shapeless vapour. But then vapour doesn't pinch as it takes hold of your arm, shaking as it serves up its indignation. "And don't you tell anyone else, either."

Those last words took hold in my chest and squeezed tight: his indignation was contagious. A pathogen.

"Why?" I spat, thrashing in his grip like a snared rabbit. "You don't want to know anything about me, but you couldn't stand it if anyone else knew, either?"

"Maybe I couldn't." Calm now, his words might have soothed me, had they come a few seconds earlier. But by now my rage was as frenzied as spit on an iron. It sizzled at the meat of me, and all at once I felt better--better to be in a temper than to taste such awful uncertainty.

"Leave off," I said, yanking my arm from his talon's grip. I left him then, as I'd left Phineas Nigellus, and the path between the common room and Theodore's cave took an eternity to tread.

I pushed the rusted door open, its hinges creaking like sick organ pipes. Theodore sat on a rock by his boat, quite like a crow on a stump, something shiny in the cradle of his hands. He hid it away when I entered, standing up as I approached.

"The party's over," he said. No truer words had ever been spoken, it seemed.

"Yeah." I crouched down in the dirt and he took back his seat. The silence soon grew companionable. He had no questions about where I had been or what I had done. That I was with him at all was wonder enough.

"How do you spend your nights in here?" I asked him. "Are you hiding from Draco and the others?" I tilted my head to get a better look at his flushed, blinking face. "You are always apart, on the edges. Why is that?"

He swallowed and stared at his knees. "I don't feel apart," he said. "I just feel me?" He lifted a hand and gestured at the cave's lofty expanse. "But I can be more when it's just me."

I wrinkled my nose, tripped up by his graceless abstractions. "But I'm here now. Does that make you more or less?"

"More," he said, his voice taking on shades of uncertain feeling. "Because you see me. And it makes up for the others who don't."

I shrugged, stretching out my legs before me. "It doesn't seem that you want others to see you. Hiding in a cave and all."

He said nothing, and I wondered if my words were senseless and cruel. I was beginning to finally suspect, you see, that there were consequences to what came out of my mouth--consequences that had nothing to do with my immediate wants and worries. I rested my hand on the back of his shin. It seemed impossibly long, and I gave the cuff of his trousers a tug to re-capture his attention. "What was that shiny thing you were looking at when I came in?"

His hand automatically darted to his pocket, guarding its load protectively. I reached around his waist and squirmed my hand beneath his, burrowing into his pocket like a greedy niffler. He gave a tight laugh and tried to push me away. "Lemme see," I cajoled, also laughing. His palms were sweaty and warm, and from his fingers I plucked what I was sure would be another Inquisitorial Squad badge.

"Ouch!" I wrenched my hand away, my ring finger leaking blood. "Ooh," I breathed, inserting my stung finger into my mouth, worrying my tongue against the raw flesh.

"Let me," he said, offering a clean handkerchief and swathing it around my finger. It's white expanse was soon blossomed all over with red.

"What was that?" I asked once the bleeding tapered off to a trickle.

He showed me the treasure I had invaded his pockets for. It was a cameo brooch, delicately rimmed in gold and ivory. "My mother's," he said. The cameo opened to reveal a picture of a woman. "That's her."

I held out my hand to take it, then paused, my palm hovering just beneath his. He placed the cameo in its center and I brought it close to study the woman's face. She barely moved, only blinked in a placid, lizard-like way that reminded me of Theodore. Her hair was fairer than his, her features as wide and open as the English moors. "She's... gone, isn't she?" I asked. It was well-known that Theodore's mother was dead.

"Yes," he said, staring at the bloodied handkerchief absently before balling it into his pocket.

"She died after giving birth to me."

A sharp lurch tugged at me, as if the brooch's pin had pierced me for a second time. "Oh?" I whispered, closing the brooch and hiding the dead woman's face. He nodded in confirmation, and

I passed the brooch back. It wasn't in my plans for Theodore and me to be so increasingly alike.

"Does that mean..." I paused. This time I knew my question would sound cruel. "That you sometimes wish you'd never been born?"

"Yes." He nodded again, his hand clenched around the brooch tight. He had no fear that it would ever prick him.

"Why?" I sputtered, incredulous. He threw up his head, taken aback by the force of my response.

"No one can help being born! That's stupid." He looked at me silently through the fall of his hair. "They can't help it... they can't," I repeated. If I said it enough times, perhaps it would be true.

------

The following weeks were something of a blur. Easter came and went, bringing with it a breath of spring life that made me want to hole up inside the castle's interior, away from the accusing eye of the sun. With my new Inquisitorial Squad privileges I attempted to take points from Terry Boot for being out in the corridors after hours--a deserved payback for Theodore, I thought. He only snorted at my show of authority and hexed me up with a pair of out-sized antlers. A little merriment went out of my patrols after that.

O.W.L.s came, and I performed well enough. We all performed well enough, though it seemed an enormous achievement, given the divisions and chaos happening within the castle by then. The Astronomy exam was interrupted by Headmistress Umbridge's nocturnal attempt to get Hagrid sacked, and the exam for History of Magic ended, quite dramatically, when Harry Potter fell to the floor screaming, clutching his head while in the throes of a fit.

When they speak of spring fever, they are no doubt referring to love and lightheartedness, the kind of fine bliss that takes hold and warms up your insides, thawing the cold from within. But this year's spring fever had taken hold of Hogwarts like the fist of an unshakeable illness.

I felt oddly immune. Was there a war forming outside the walls, to match the one within? It didn't matter. Had Salazar's will finally gained a foothold, now that the rune had spent a number of safe years in Parkinson hands? It didn't matter. Must I make up for the stupid misfortune of my birth, as Phineas Nigellus had said? It didn't matter.

My heart wasn't in much of anything, you might say. The taste of hysterical drama and doom that had once thrilled me seemed too close of a companion, now. I liked to sit on my bed and read quietly, to write letters to Portia that I never did send. They all began the same: Dear Mother.

That was all. I never got further than that.

There came a night when Draco tried to rouse me out of my stupor. I was leaving the library after spending nearly three hours on one of those ill-fated letters, scribbling and scratching my way down a length of parchment, then finally crushing the hopeless thing into a ball and stashing it into the recesses of my rucksack, muttering darkly all the while. Outside, I was nearly trampled by Draco and some of the others, who were running and pink cheeked, their heayy panting sounding like a dizzy, exhilarated symphony.

"Come on!" Draco urged, catching hold on the strap of my rucksack. "Umbridge's stealth alarms just went off. Bet you a million to one it's Potter."

"Potter?" I asked dumbly, as if I'd never heard the name before.

"Come on," he said again, his tone edged with impatience. His gray eyes seemed clouded with smoke, tinged with a fever that tried to leap out like a spark and set me smoldering. I shugged listlessly and told him I'd be along in a bit. He nodded and the whole group thundered away from me, chasing merrily after the storm.

I turned and took off in the opposite direction.

Of course, fate would have it that Theodore would be at that very same corridor's far end, sitting in an open window's casement with a breeze fluffing the fringe of his hair. I went to him, of course. It was practically instinct, by then.

It was a dark, sickle-mooned night, and for once I could not look to his face and read everything there. The only thing to be seen was the cache of prickled starlight that fell on his skin like pollen, Orion reeling across the lens of his left eye.

"What are you doing?" I asked. Whatever it was, I wanted to join him.

"Thinking of astronomy," he said.

"The exam?" I squeezed my head between his shoulder and the casement, looking down at the dark forest below. "I can't believe they had the stones to stun old McGonagall like that."

I felt him shake his head. "No, not that." He scooted to one side, making room for me on the casement, and I clambered up next to him, my feet dangling off the sturdy edge. My stomach swelled up into my throat when I saw how high up we were, and I reached out at once for his hand, finding it in the billow of his robes and squeezing it until my fear was small enough to swallow.

"What about astronomy, then?" I asked.

I don't think there are enough ellipses in the world to demonstrate how slow his speech was, like sap leaking from a stunted branch. But I was used to it by then, and I waited quietly while he worked his words out. "Professor Sinistra once said everything on earth is nothing but recycled stardust? 'Other suns' leftover rubbish', she said."

I nodded against his shoulder. "I remember. What of it?"

He lifted his arm and pointed in the direction of the lake. "When we get thirsty, we drink water. And fill ourselves with stardust again. I was thinking that if you drink enough of it, you drink of yourself and everyone you ever knew." He sounded rapt as he spoke.

A smart response trembled on the edge of my tongue--Gross--but I bit it back, and in that biting my throat seemed to dry, as if he'd passed on his thirst to me.

"I've learned something that almost no one knows about me," I said. It was more or less the exact same thing I'd said to Draco, and Draco had turned me away. I held my breath, though I knew without doubt that Theodore would not do the same.

"That must be nice," he said, his mouth widening into an elusive smile. "To know something that almost no one else knows."

I knew, then, that before the evening reached its summit he would be my first lover.

It was I who led us to his boat. He sat trembling at the bow as I unbuttoned my blouse, three, four skips down and I'd worked them all free. I had always thought that to remove my clothes for a boy might be like worming out of a great, shaggy cocoon, and that I would have to contort my arms into makeshift wings in order to hide my weak and withering self. But I saw the look on Theodore's face that split-second before my blouse dropped away. I saw how he bit on his lip with a barbed incisor. How his throat stopped working as he huffed in a breath and held it. I knew then that to be a boy watching a girl is to see her in a constant state of almost-undress. The white, standard-issue school blouse that I hardly gave a thought to was, in a boy's eyes, the mouth and hands that had free license to touch upon my breasts. The cuff of my stocking, bunching as I unrolled it down the ricey length of my calf, could be any boy's fingers, pinching into my thigh throughout the day, leaving behind a crimson welt when finally removed. To be a boy is to see and make real, to leave a wet and raw imprint. No need for a wand--this kind of magic is the business of eyes.

I do not know precisely what Theodore saw, then, as I slowly undressed. A Venusian goddess rolling around like a pearl inside an equally pearly shell? A black wraith with a hungry heart, ready to suck out his soul with a kiss? It was only me, milk-white and faintly freckled, my legs two serviceable sticks, my breasts small and, to my eyes, not perfect but perfectly nondescript. His hands touched me as hands might touch china--a delicate object that he both longed and feared to break. One cupped my breast and seemed as large as a paw, as if he could snap up his fingers and swallow the whole of me. I tried to swallow him, instead, my mouth meeting his for taste after greedy taste, either side of his shuddering face held steady by the span of my hands.

"You," he gasped, and I dropped my hand to his lap, making him gasp again. I thought perhaps he would lie back and let me orchestrate the event, free to shiver and cry out while I performed a haphazard, improvised take on the classic seductress: pin his arms above his head; keep him subdued with the jiggle and strut of my hips. But there was no me left to initiate such orchestrations. As he gasped I felt myself unspool like a ribbon, like he had caught the end of me and was running with it into new, never-imagined waters. He kissed me and kissed me, swaying as the boat swayed us, and I winced with both remarkable pleasure and remarkable pain.

We had no idea what we were doing, of course. But it wasn't difficult to suss out, and by the time he'd found his way in I was already rendered a mish-mash of my roughest and softest parts, my lips held to his temple, whispering for him to keep on. Keep on keep on keep on, oh for the pain to be over, oh for it to never end.

To be with Theodore waslike taking that long, thirst-quenching drink of stardust, familiar and infinite. I touched my fingers to his hot face and wondered if I loved him.

It wasn't love, not exactly. As familiar and infinite as my drink from him was, it tasted like water in the end. Like nothing. Like bland, sweaty Theodore, whose sweet earnestness never failed to leave me sated, much to my picky palate's surprise.

He slept for a while, after that, but I was unable too. The cave seemed sentient and knowing; I couldn't relax in its humid belly.

"Theodore?" I whispered, rolling over and prodding my chin into his shoulder. He made a groggy noise and turned over to look at me, rubbing his eyes blearily. I saw, then, that his eyes were gray, like Draco's, but darker--very like flat, still water. "Are you awake?" I asked, though he clearly was now that I'd disturbed him.

"Yeah." He stretched and the boat swayed a little, then he looped his arms around my waist, a reassuring prison. "Is something wrong?"

"Why did you want us to be friends?" I asked, my voice uncharacteristically small. "Did you know that we were alike, when I myself had no idea?"

He paused for a very long time, his fingertips bunched into the small of my back. "Are we alike?" he finally asked.

I tilted my head back and held his gaze. "Tell me why you wanted us to be friends, first."

His mouth crinkled into an almost-smile. "You seemed as if you needed someone to trust. You still do."

I sighed a little, leaning into him. "We are rather alike, despite our apparent differences. I lack your restraint, obviously."

"Let's just say that given this moment, I really don't mind," he said with a knowing laugh.

A smile played at my lips despite the fact that my insides were fluttering; I could feel each organ twittering like a nervous bird. "My birth was a misfortunate one," I said, low and uncertain. "I'm of the stewards, you know."

I felt him blink against my forehead. "How is that a misfortune?"

"I clawed and tantrumed my way out of my mother, I think--that sounds like me, doesn't it?--and the midwife had to take her away from Saversnake to see a mediwizard. Without Parkinson blood in the manor to support the wards, old wizard Perkins stole in and nicked Salazar's rune. And, well, the war pretty much went to shite after that. Salazar's will and all... I'm sure you've heard the story." I spoke in one long breath, as if the words had been fighting to be free of my tongue.

"Some of the story," he said. "Not all of it. How did your family get the rune back?"

"Virgil went to the Ministry and showed them Salazar's decree. There was a big debate but eventually was deemed genuine and Perkins was ordered to return the rune or face time in Azkaban." I shrugged listlessly. "Perkins wasn't happy about giving it back, but he was rather beaten down by then. All his children were dead, and some people were threatening him. They blamed him for betraying Salazar's will, for the Dark Lord's downfall."

We were both quiet for a moment. His thumb stroked my cheek, and he looked thoughtful.

"There's another war starting now," he said, very slowly. "Do you think it will go differently this time? That Salazar's will might be fulfilled?"

"I don't know." I didn't. The idea of a war and its outcome depending solely on an old rock seemed strange to me. Strange and a little foolish--but who was I to argue with practises that had been around for nearly twelve hundred years?

"Either way, I don't see what makes your birth misfortunate. It wasn't..." He faltered, licking his lips as if having difficulty finding the words that he wanted. "It wasn't your idea to be born, or to be one of the stewards. 'No one can help being born,' is what you said to me. If you meant it for me than you have to mean if for yourself, too."

I wrinkled my nose, but pressed my cheek against his chest, thankful for its comforting murmur.

"You won't let me play favourites?" I asked, teasing just a little.

"No," he said, pulling carefully on my hair so that my chin tilted up and our mouths met--shyly, it seemed, as if we'd only just been properly introduced.

------

Theodore and I spent the next day lolling about in his boat, skiving off classes to read books aloud to one another and nourishing ourselves on a large box of caramel custards. Unbecoming behaviour for a prefect, but we had only one week's worth of classes left by then. If anyone asked, I'd just say I'd been holed up with cramps.

On Saturday, when I finally sat down in front of the mirror to comb my freshly washed hair I dallied for several minutes longer just to study my face, searching for signs of change or newness. My face was wide, narrowing to a triangular point at my chin, and my eyes were ordinary brown, large and far-set as I imagined Portia's might be. I didn't have her sharp little nose, but a putty-like bump that was a miniature of Virgil's, and my hair was dark brown verging on black, a compromise between the two. I saw, for the very first time, that my mouth was my own. Not Portia's wide, enigmatic smile, nor Virgil's thin smirk, but a round, pink 'O' perfect for blowing bubbles. When I grinned it stretched out into a lazy 'U'.

I tried to plait my hair, but was no more adept at it than I'd been at eleven. The three pieces of hair refused to cooperate in my fingers, and I finally wound a few strands around the end of my wand, charming them into a curl. Soon they were springing out all over my head, like ribbons on a birthday present, and I put my wand away with satisfaction. I looked almost pretty, for me.

It was hard to stop myself from humming quietly as I made my way to the common room. To do so would be entirely unoriginal, however, so I gritted my teeth together and settled for a suppressed smile, instead.

My smile froze in surprise when I stepped into the common room. It was thick with black, acrid smoke, and a cluster of younger students stood at a safe distance behind the couches, murmuring to themselves and watching Draco as he crouched before the fireplace, pushing in papers and stoking the flames higher.

"Draco," I coughed, waving smoke away from my face. "What are you doing?" I walked up behind him and heard him cursing under his breath.

"I have to get rid of these," he said, then repeated himself, as if caught up in a chant. All around his feet, like a snowdrift, were copies of the Daily Prophet. His expression was haggard, and his forehead gleamed with perspiration.

I picked up one of the papers at his feet, skimming the headlines. HE-WHO-MUST-NOT-BE-NAMED RETURNS was written in blinding print on the first page, and I frowned, wondering how this news would drive Draco to organise an auto-da-fé. The article continued on page three, and my hands gave a lurch when I read it in full.

Several of You-Know-Who's supporters have been detained for involvement in the Ministry break-in, including Lucius Malfoy, Sigmund Crabbe, Antonin Dolohov, Augustus Rookwood, Walden McNair, Abraham Nott...

"Draco," I said lamely, my tongue floundering for a soothing lie. "It's okay... I'm sure they just want to question them."

He whirled around to face me, his fists stained with newsprint. "That's not true and you know it," he spat. "He's finished. Potter's been up with Dumbledore since yesterday, singing like a canary."

"Dumbledore's back?" I said, genuinely surprised.

"Yes." His eyes narrowed, suddenly suspicious. "You missed Thursday night's show. Granger led Umbridge into the Forbidden Forest and ordered the centaurs to kill her. She's alive, but barely. Then Potter and his mates took off and broke into the Ministry."

"Oh." I felt foolish and awkward, and shamed to know that Draco's father was in captivity while mine was not. And Theodore's father, too, my mind whispered, and I shut my eyes, pushing the unwelcome thought away.

"Where have you been, anyway?" He'd stopped stoking the fire now, and was slowly crumbling one of the papers between his fingers, reducing it to a smaller and smaller ball. The noise of it set my already-frazzled nerves on edge.

"I..." I faltered. How could I tell him where I had been? I couldn't. "I haven't felt well," I said, glancing at the fire. "Cramps."

He nodded stiffly, then tossed the crushed newspaper into the fire, where it smoldered and sent off fresh eddies of smoke. "I'm going to breakfast," he said. "They don't expect me to show, but I'm going." He set his jaw into a firm line, his expression fathomless and utterly blank.

I watched his retreating back, rubbing at my dry, stinging eyes.

The Slytherin table was as quiet as death at dinner. Draco ate methodically: fork, mouth, chew, chew, chew. Repeat. He kept his eyes straight ahead, and no one dared breathe a word in his direction. Vincent had no appetite, and arranged his food into neat little piles on his plate: vegetables facing north, potatoes to the east, bread to the west, and meat to the south. Routine fell upon us like an enchantment. Daphne asked me to please pass the juice. Normally, she would have just thrust out her hand and grabbed for it.

Theodore was nowhere to be seen.

Later, I found him on the stairs that led up from the dungeons. The torches flickered faintly, and in their dim light I saw him struggling with his trunk.

"Are you leaving?"

He looked up at the sound of my voice. "Yes," he said, dropping the trunk and straightening up, his hands fiddling with his tie.

"Why?" My voice wobbled precariously, then re-directed itself into a sharper tone, one laced with exasperation. "The train leaves next Saturday."

"My father. He doesn't have anyone. He's older than the others." He moved towards me uncertainly, as if the small distance between us was a thick treacle he had to wade his way through.

"I know," I said, and he managed to put a finger to my chin, making my voice catch.

"I'll see you soon?" Something in his voice told me that he wasn't as sure of this as he wanted to be.

"Here. This will help." I held my wand out to his trunk and it lightened considerably, floating a few centimeters up from the landing and nudging his knees like a pet.

His eyes searched my face, his fingers found my wrist. "Goodbye," he said, drawing me closer.

And then a scuffle sounded on the stairs above, and we recoiled in opposite directions.

Not for long, I hoped.

------

The ride home on the Hogwarts Express was familiar in an almost-comforting way. At first. Daphne and Tracey were exchanging O.W.L. horror stories while Millicent shuffled through her collection of chocolate frog cards, removing the ones she had doubles of: Agrippa, Cliodna, Ptolmey. I silently swapped her a Circe for a Cliodna, and she went back to arranging them, her fingers moving deftly in a way that the rest of her never did. Draco had set off with Vincent and Greg early on, a predatory look in his eyes that indicated he was out to dish up trouble with Potter while there was still time. I myself decided I was peckish for cauldron cakes, and set off in search of the snack trolley.

I made my way through the swaying string of cars, my hand braced against the wall to keep me steady.

"Look, here's another one," a voice said, and I looked up to see Terry Boot blocking my path, his arms crossed loosely over his chest. A tall, spotty boy stood behind him. Anthony Goldstein.

"What do you want?" I sighed.

"I think I like you better with antlers," he said, his voice playful in a way I didn't like.

I stared at him. His eyes glittered with the suggestion of either malice or mischief--perhaps a little of both. As I looked him over my gaze caught on the large signet ring on his finger; it looked jagged and hard.

"Come on, Terry. We're supposed to be getting chocolates," Goldstein said, licking his lips nervously. He was a prefect, and quite a rule-abiding one, at that.

"Yeah." Boot waved his hand at me dismissively, and they both turned for the back of the train, in the same direction I was heading.

I hesitated, quickly weighing the pros and cons of following them to the snack trolley and risking more insults and a possible hexing. I had my wand on me, of course, but the odds were stacked two to one. Three to one, really, if one considered the mental advantage of Ravenclaws. But then Goldstein's good will and conscious would be a disadvantage, and I might be able to--

My thoughts were cut off when someone grabbed me roughly by the arm and pulled me forcibly into the nearest car, which turned out not to be a car at all, but one of the train's cramped, smelly toilets. My hip banged against the pint-sized sink and I cried out in protest.

"Draco! What..." I shut my mouth at once, staring at him. He was covered in slimy, oozing patches of skin. Raw looking spots that looked like burst blisters.

"Potter," he gritted, tossing his head. "Vince and Greg are still stuck up in the luggage rack."

"Oh!" I reached up to touch his cheek. When I pulled my fingers away strands of ooze clung to them, like half-congealed spellopaste. "Yuck." I wanted to ask if it hurt, but from the way that he jumped, I guessed that it did.

"Don't just yuck," he huffed. "Help me get rid of them." He faced the little tin mirror that was hung over the sink. "I can take care of my face. You need to get my back." He dropped his robes halfway off, and I saw that he'd already removed his shirt. His shoulder blades were horribly wet and red, as if he were halfway to sprouting mutated wings. I pulled out my wand and got to work.

"If the rules about doing magic away from school only applied once we set foot on the train, this

wouldn't happen every year," I said, pleased to see that his skin was quite willing to return to normal.

He let out a thin snort. "Potter deserved it."

I peered around his shoulder and met his eyes in the mirror. "So you got him? What did you do?"

He looked away. "Not much," he said flatly.

I sighed, hoisting up his robes over his mostly-healed back. "Maybe next time."

He only nodded. Half-heartedly. "Did you clean up my back?"

"Good as new."

Draco pivoted around, his expression suddenly awkward. "I heard you saying goodbye to Nott," he said.

I blinked. So that had been him, up on the stairs. "Yes, well." I remembered Theodore's words. "His father is older than the rest. He had to go to him before... you know."

He leaned against the sink, his pale hair falling over his eyes. He looked old. "I don't know what you see in him," he said. His voice wasn't unkind, but quietly baffled, as if he had been trying to figure out what I saw in Theodore for quite some time.

"Nothing," I said.

Only then did he draw up to his full height and glare at me, his eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. I wanted to explain to him that to someone who had always been expected to be a something--like a steward--to be nothing seemed a generous relief. He was a Malfoy. He might have understood what it felt like to have a desire to take a blank slate of a person and scrawl your name upon them, over and over again. Yes, he would most certainly have understood. Property of Draco C. Malfoy. It was penned neatly on every last one of his belongings, announcing his presence to a mostly-indifferent world.

But I didn't explain. I only opened the door. "Make room," I said. "I have to use the loo."

------

When I returned to it, Saversnake was changed.

The Knight Bus dropped me off on the road closest to the Manor, and as I made my approach up the hill I noted how still the air was; it smelled feral and thick with ozone, as if a storm had just passed. No birds chattered in the trees, and the crunching of stones beneath my feet was obscenely loud to my ears. A feeling of wrongness shivered through me but I shrugged it off--just barely. There was a new quietness in me, after all, so perhaps the external world had gone quiet as well. Possibly it had always been quiet, and I had simply never noticed it before. Still, the click and grind of paving stones seemed to stuff my ears so they ached.

"Portia!" I shouted, thrusting open the front doors. The air shimmied with late afternoon sun and my voice echoed through the entryway.

There was no answer. I pushed my trunk against the wall, leaving it for Gabby to unpack. Then I kicked off my shoes and socks left them in a careless pile on the parquet floor. Old habits were so much easier to slip into.

I went upstairs and headed for my room next. It was quite unchanged, right down to the snoozing fairy in my bedside lantern. I stretched out on the duvets and prodded her awake. She stretched her luminous wings and lit on my finger once, in greeting, before returning to the lantern and curling up in the base.

I rolled over on the bed. "Gabby!" I bellowed, clapping my hands together. "Time to unpack." I crossed my arms behind my head and leaned back on a pillow, wiggling my toes. I waited for the pop! that signaled Gabby's arrival. It never came.

I pushed myself upright, eyes flitting to all corners of my room. "Gabby?" I called, my voice wavering uncertainly. I wasn't shouting, now, but my voice seemed loud and alien.

I padded across the rug and into the corridor, calling out for Gabby, Portia, Virgil, anyone. The oppressive silence I had heard out in the forest had staked its claim here in the manor, and I ran from it, all my senses reeling with the portent of something very, very wrong. I tripped my way up the spiraling stairs that led to Portia's study, and saw from the corner of my eye that all of the portraits were empty, their backgrounds sunny and bright but decidedly unpopulated. Fear caught in my throat and drew tight like a fist.

It isn't easy for me to describe what came next.

Portia's study was torn apart. There were piles of violated books, their pages pulled out and shredded, their spines bent and broken. Shelves were tipped askew, chairs upset with their stuffing leaking out. The fireplace was cold and smelled of old ashes. There was another smell in the air, too, something richly rotten with foul, yet unmistakably human undertones.

Portia and Virgil were seated face to face, as if engaged in an absorbing conversation. Portia looked as if she were wearing a scarlet apron, which pooled down the length of her legs and puddled around her shoes into sticky blood. Virgil's head was bowed deeply into his chest, like a man on the verge of nodding off into dreams.

Right now, I wish this were a happy story. Happy stories are boring. Better.

I didn't know what to do. I went to the washroom and drew a glass of water from the taps. Then I brought it back to them and stood nearby, holding the glass to my chest, wondering who I had intended to drink from it--them, or me? It grew slippery in my hand and I didn't bother to steady my grip. The shards of glass bounced everywhere, adding to the mess.

Eventually, I found the strength to move closer. The top of Virgil's head was reflected in Portia's mirrored spectacles, and I reached out, my hand moving of its own accord, and lifted them from her face. Her eyes were milky and colourless. I fled at the sight of them, skidding in papers and finally falling down hard on the ottoman, my fingers pushed to my mouth to hold in a scream. I think I went a little mad, just then. Some time passed, I don't know how much, and my throat soon hurt terribly and I realised I was screaming after all.

When I finally found my feet, I scuttled quickly under Portia's desk, then pulled uselessly at the latch to the vault for a few minutes before remembering how to unlock it. There was a quill by my knee. I picked it up and jabbed at my thumb mercilessly, watching numbly as the blood beaded out. I pressed my thumb to the latch and it popped open. Inside, there was Salazar's decree, rolled into a tight scroll, and Salazar's rune--still protected, still safe. I put the rune into my pocket. Beneath it was a strange little bowl, about the size and shape of a teacup, filled with silvery fluid--some kind of pensieve. At the very bottom I found a thick, creamy envelope marked with my name. I pocketed it all, then hurried from the room.

I had to get out of the house. The smell in the study seemed everywhere, now, and I wonder how

I hadn't noticed it before. Or perhaps it had decided to move into my nose now that I'd had a whiff of it. Elsewhere, there were signs of something gone wrong--many signs that only served to point out my own obliviousness. A week's coating of dust had settled onto the banister. Piled to the side of the front steps were several newspapers and a heap of old owl post.

Somehow, I ended up at Salazar's tree, my heart pounding out its denial as I crouched at the foot of the tree's thick belly. My eyes tried to dart in all directions at once. Every rustle sounded like old wizard Perkin's inevitable footfalls.

Move. I thought. Get somewhere safe.

Where was safe?

I pawed through the pockets of my robes. My fingers found the envelope first. Pansy, it said, written in Portia's neatly round script. I opened it almost delicately. Inside was a clipping from the Daily Prophet and a scrap of parchment. I looked at the parchment first, expecting a letter. What was written upon it, however, was hardly revealing.

I put too much trust in the Parkinson name. My mistake.

That's all it said. No more.

I looked at the clipping next. It was yellowed with age and dated from January 12, 1981.

Amelia Perkins, who was sentenced to twenty years in Azkaban for theft and attempted murder, was found in her cell today, a victim of the dementor's kiss. Ministry officials are perplexed by Miss Perkins' state, and insist that this is an isolated, accidental incident and does not in any way verify the public's concerns regarding the dementors' presence at Azkaban. Amelia Perkins' crimes included the attempted poisoning of Portia Parkinson, of Marlborough, Wiltshire, and the theft of a valuable magical heirloom known as Salazar's rune. The Wizengamot found Miss Perkins guilty of these crimes after both Portia and Virgil Parkinson provided (cont. on page 3)

I turned the clipping over and over again in my hands, thoroughly baffled. Old wizard Perkins' daughter had tried to murder Portia? Why had they never told me? I knew that Perkins' daughter had been given the dementor's kiss, but I thought it had been ordered by the Ministry--not accidental. Question after question rained down around me and I felt my thinning sanity draw even tighter, threatening to snap.

Then I remembered the pensieve. I dug it out and held it in the cup of my hand. The silvery substance beckoned to me, and I fell in.

All was black.

------

It's almost time..

Portia is lying upon the bed, her face red and sweaty, strands of damp hair sticking to her cheeks. She is hugely pregnant, her legs freakishly thin in comparison to the mound of her stomach.

Where am I? I can't tell. I am bodiless, but seem to float near Portia's side, immobile and fixed for all time.

Not quite. You're only a few centimetres. The midwife, short and efficient, moves to and fro, outfitted in a mediwitch's habit.

Oh, but it hurts! It's telling me it wants out! Portia puffs up her lips and blows through them fiercely, her expression almost angry. She isn't wearing her spectacles, and her eyes are a clear shade of brown. I am startled by how much she resembles me.

The midwife laughs a little. They all hurt like that. I know mine did... She talks a blue streak and tries to fluff the pillows behind Portia's back. Portia squirms with discomfort, lets out a cry.

Let me give you something for the pain. The midwife opens her case and pulls out a phial. Something she's prepared in advance. She cradles Portia's head in her cupped hand and holds the potion to her lips. Take it all, she says. Her voice reminds me of something. Someone.

She watches Portia intently, a small smile playing on her face. Her eyes are glassy and still. Gray.

I know her! When the realisation of it comes my phantom finger stings, as if still being pricked by that cameo brooch that housed her photograph.

I want to strike the potion from Portia's mouth, but it's already too late. Thank you, Ailema, she says. She's drunk it all down, ever drop, and licks her lips slowly, as if perturbed by a chalky undertaste.

I don't feel very well.

Me either.

All is black.

------

Even as the memory dissolved around me, I felt sharp hands yank me free of its slow fadeout. A weight flung itself upon my chest, and my shoulder blades knocked painfully against a tree root. I tried to scream, but a hand was clapped over my mouth, tasting coppery, like blood. My vision went black and starry, then the world swam back to me in small details; it hurt to see everything all at once. There were his wispy eyebrows, glinting like sand. His lips, pulled back to show white, even teeth. Finally, there were his eyes, gray eyes veiled by glass that revealed nothing but my own gulping, straining face.

"Welcome home," Theodore said.

I bit down on his hand, hard, and he yelped and pulled it away. Then he drew it up high and smiled in a chastising way. Naughty pet.

I'd never been hit in the face before. It hurt dreadfully--pain exploding in my lips and nose with a crunch that made my ears ring. I gasped and choked on my own pulpy blood, then was on the verge of tipping back into a sweet darkness when he shook my shoulders rudely, knocking my head against the tree. "Wake up," he said, his voice foreign and barbed with hatred.

Somewhere, a bird tittered.

"Come on, Pansy, open your eyes." These words came softer, like a familiar, soothing balm. I did as he said, and his face loomed over me; a face so vague, so Theodore, that I almost wanted to smile.

"Who are you?" I whispered. He was sprawled on top of me, his weight grinding me into the mud and underbrush. I could barely squeeze the words out.

"You're asking that now?" He propped himself up on his elbow, his mouth twisted into a snarl or a smirk--it was hard to tell which.

"Perkins..." I wheezed.

"Well, yes, that's obvious." I felt something cool bite against my throat--steel, not wand-wood. "The son of Amelia Perkins."

Amelia Perkins. I remembered how old wizard Perkins' daughter, who was given the dementor's kiss, was named Amelia. And Portia's midwife had been named... what had Phineas Nigellus called her? Ailema. As Portia had. One a Parkinson, the other a Perkins. Oh, oh, oh. Portia's mistake. I put too much trust in the Parkinson name.

Theodore pushed his face close to mine, the heat of his breath stinging my torn lips. "I can see you thinking, you know. I always can." The words were terrifying to my ears--how true they seemed, just then. "She told your mother she was a distant cousin. There was no flaw to her plan." He held up the handkerchief I'd found in Portia's study, still rust-stained with the blood I'd spilt when examining Amelia Perkins photograph. "Just as there was no flaw to mine."

I stiffened and waited for him to continue. All the villains in the best books revealed their plan at the end, and it was often their undoing. Perhaps he knew this, because he offered no more of his story, only ran the blade across my throat in one shallow swipe, the wound bubbling over to meet the chill air. No blood spurted from me, but I felt it run a fast course down my neck and shoulder, sticky as albumen. "No! Stop!" I thrashed and cried out, life sparking within me even as it flooded out. I dug my fingers into the space between his ribs, clawing at the thin flesh, and kicked my feet like a drowning swimmer. He grunted and tried to hold me down. I tossed my head from side to side wildly, searching for my wand. No wand, but there was the pensieve-cup, tipped over and feeding Portia's single, saved memory to the husk of Salazar's roots.

And then I could see nothing but the tip of his blade, already stained with my blood--and my mother's and father's, too. "Hold still or I'll put it in your eye," he said, his words as flat as his weapon was sharp.

I went still. Limp as a boneless fish. If only hatred could strike a person as easily as a fist.

"Where is it?" he asked. The blade came to my neck again. "The rune... I want it." His free hand came to my waist and tried to burrow through my cloak.

It must have been the brush of his hair against my cheek, or the way his fingers skated over my hip--blind and slow with uncertainty. "Theodore," I croaked, squinting my eyes shut. "Please stop."

He brought his head up sharply, his face twisted with such venom I thought he might spit at me. "You think I want you? I only want it. That's all I've ever wanted."

That's not what I meant, I thought. I meant please stop. Please go back to being Theodore.

But there was no Theodore. There never was. He was like water, like nothing, even as he rooted his hands through my clothing, his teeth gritted together with determination until he finally found the rune, the unremarkable rock hidden in the inner pocket of my robes. He smiled and let out a sleepy, gratified sigh, bringing a thumb to my tender lips. I rolled my eyes back and glimpsed the gnarled braches of Salazar's tree, reaching down as if they might think to snatch me up and save me, if they could only be bothered.

I'd thought him a pigeon. How stupid. The only pigeon was me, all along.

"You're the devil," I said, my voice curiously calm even as he slipped a hand around my neck and drew me closer to his blade, as if he would use me to cut it.

I should be grateful, I suppose, that it was I who had the last word. There wasn't much for us to say to each other, after that.

---

End notes: Of course there's more to Theodore's story! And yes, many pertinent details as to how he pulled off his wicked plot. Watch for them in the conclusion and third part of this fic.

The timeline of events for the end of OotP can be a bit hard to follow; I made my best guess (with the lexicon's help) as to the amount of time that passed between the DoM battle and the end of the term, etc.

Pansy tosses the word "pigeon" about a lot - this is not meant to be "stool pigeon" but rather the old british slang for one who is a victim or easily duped. You can see how it applies in this context.

If you have been reading this, thank you. I know Pansy fics and Slytherin-centric fics are not the most popular fare in the fandom, so thanks for taking a chance on something outside the norm.

Thank you to Slytherincess and Luminousmarble for the beta help. J