Yeah, so this was supposed to be one chapter, but Webnovel won't let me post over 20k words, so it's gonna be 2, congrats.
Please leave a review and drop some powerstones.
...
The rain had been falling on Hogwarts since before breakfast, a thin, persistent February rain that didn't have the decency to become snow, and by the time the second-years filed into the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom the windows had gone entirely grey with it, and the Forbidden Forest beyond the grounds was only a darker smudge against a darker sky, the sort of weather that made the candles along the beams work harder than they should have had to and still left the back of the room looking slightly underwater. Theodore Nott reached the desk he shared with Lucian Bloodthorne and stopped, though he couldn't have said, just at first, why he had stopped, because the seat beside his was empty, and it had been empty every other week since October, and he ought to have been used to it by now. He wasn't. He set his bag down on his own chair and stood there a moment with his hand on the back of it, looking at the bare stretch of wood where Lucian ought to have been sitting with that ballpoint pen of his and that faint, lazy, amused look he wore for everything, and then he sat, and pulled out his things, and told himself it was only a class.
Blaise Zabini came in a minute later, shook the rain from his sleeves, and took the desk along the same row without comment, already wearing the expression of a boy who had decided, sometime around September, that most of life was a disappointment and saw no reason to revise the opinion on a Tuesday morning. Draca Malfoy came next, pale hair pinned up out of the damp, with Pansy Parkinson at her elbow and Crabbe and Goyle tramping behind them like a pair of damp wardrobes, and Draca's eyes went to the empty seat beside Nott the way they always did now, quickly, as if she weren't looking at it at all, and then away again just as quickly, her mouth tightening. She took her usual place behind them, arranged her robes, and began laying out her parchment with more care than the lesson deserved. Pansy sat beside her, glanced at the empty desk, glanced at Draca, and very wisely said nothing.
The Gryffindors came in a knot. Hermione Granger was first, her bag already open, a stack of notes under her arm that had nothing to do with the set of books on Lockhart's desk and everything to do with the hour she and half the second year now spent, two evenings a week, in an unused classroom on the fourth floor, actually trying to learn Defence. Harriet Potter came behind her, her hair still darkened from the rain and pushed back from the scar on her forehead, and Ron Weasley came last of the three, shaking water off his robes and muttering about the lakeside path and how somebody ought to put a roof on it. Neville Longbottom hovered at the edge of their group, looking as though he would rather have been almost anywhere else, and Seamus Finnigan was already talking, because Seamus was almost always already talking, and Dean Thomas was listening to him with the patient half-smile of a boy who had learned, over a year and a half, when to nod and when to let it pass.
The usual uneasy mixture settled over the benches. Gryffindor and Slytherin still didn't quite share rows. Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff filled the gaps and pretended, as they always did, that the arrangement was accidental. There were more empty seats than there had been in September. Two of them had been empty since the autumn, and one since just before Christmas, and nobody looked at those for very long. Nott looked at the one beside him instead, which at least would be filled again next week.
Portraits of Gilderoy Lockhart covered every available stretch of wall, the way they had since the first day, Lockhart smiling, Lockhart winking, Lockhart posed against a banshee, a werewolf, a yeti, and a griffin that all appeared to have been combed. The chandelier of candles burned under the ribbed vault of the ceiling. The pale skeleton still hung from the beams above them, and Nott, who had come to feel a certain respect for the skeleton, thought it was still the most honest thing in the place.
The door behind the desk opened.
Gilderoy Lockhart stepped out in robes the colour of a particularly self-satisfied daffodil, his hair gleaming as if it had been polished rather than combed, and the smile that he wore for every class already fully in place, bright and even and aimed at all of them at once. He spread his arms as he came forward, the way he always did, as if the classroom were a stage and the second-years an audience that had paid handsomely to be there, and then his eyes, travelling the room with the practised sweep of a man counting a house, found the empty desk beside Nott, and the smile did not vanish, but it tightened, very slightly, at the corners, as though someone had put a pin in it.
Nott saw it. He was fairly sure half the room saw it. Lockhart's gaze lingered on the bare wood for a second too long, and something pinched and ugly moved behind the blue of his eyes, and then it was gone, and the smile was perfect again, and he clapped his hands together as if he had just remembered they were all very lucky to have him.
"Good morning, good morning," Lockhart said, beaming. "What a simply miserable day out there. I always think rain like this is nature's way of encouraging us to stay indoors and improve ourselves. And improve ourselves we shall." He gave a little laugh, as though this had been a joke, and a few of the portraits laughed with him, which Nott found somehow worse. "Now, I had thought we might begin with a short recap of last week's chapter from Wanderings with Werewolves, but I can see from your faces that you're all simply aching to hear about the time I—"
He stopped. His eyes had gone back to the empty desk. He recovered almost at once, with a little toss of his head that sent a ripple through the golden hair, and went on as if he had meant to pause for effect.
"—the time I single-handedly saved the village of Obernberg from a pack of Alpine werewolves, in what I think I may modestly call one of the more stirring episodes of my career."
Harriet, who had been watching him the way she watched most adults she didn't trust, which was carefully and without much expression, felt the familiar flat dislike settle in her chest and stay there. It wasn't only that he was vain, or that he had vanished the bones in her arm on the Quidditch pitch. It went deeper than that, older than that, a caution that had been in her for years, the way a draught under a door is there whether you think about it or not. She had been told, once, by a voice she did not name even to herself, to be careful of men who loved the sound of their own names, and Lockhart loved the sound of his so much he had written it on every spare inch of the room. She sat with her arms folded on the desk and her wet hair dripping slowly onto the wood, and she did not smile when he laughed, and she noticed, not for the first time, that almost nobody else did either.
It had not always been like this. In September the girls had sighed. Hermione had sat up so straight her chair had complained, and Pansy had watched him with a cool, considering interest, and even Lavender Brown, two rows over, had gone pink whenever he turned in her direction. That was gone now. It had gone slowly, and then all at once, the way a spell fades when you finally stop pretending it is working. They had all caught on. Even the ones who had wanted, quite badly, not to.
Lockhart had turned to the blackboard and, with a flick of his wand, written OBERNBERG, 1985 in a large, looping hand, and then, underneath, as if it were a title page, LOCKHART AND THE THIRTEEN WOLVES. He stepped back to admire it. His chest rose.
"Picture, if you will," he said, beginning to pace, "a tiny mountain village, nestled in a fold of the Austrian Alps, cut off from the world by snow and superstition. I had only gone there for a short walking holiday. A man cannot be saving people all the time, you know. Even I require the occasional rest." He paused, as if waiting for someone to protest that he never rested, and when nobody did, he went on, a shade louder. "On my third night I was awakened by the most terrible howling. I threw on a travelling cloak — midnight blue, I remember, with a rather becoming silver clasp — and went to the window, and there, in the square below, were thirteen werewolves, enormous great brutes, all of them, with eyes like lanterns, circling the well at the centre of the village. The good people of Obernberg were huddled in their cottages, too frightened even to light a lamp. And I thought to myself, Gilderoy, if you do not go down there, who will?"
Seamus, who had been slouched in his seat with his chin in his hand, made a very small sound in the back of his throat. Dean elbowed him. Ron had his mouth open in the particular way he got when he was trying to decide whether something was funny enough to be worth a detention. Hermione's quill was moving, but Nott, who could see the angle of her parchment from where he sat, was fairly sure she was not writing down the colour of the cloak.
"I went down," Lockhart continued, placing a hand over his heart. "Alone. Unarmed, save for my wand and my wits, which, as you all know, have always been more than sufficient. The largest of the wolves came at me at once, a great grey monster of a thing, its jaws wide enough to close around a man's shoulders. I did not flinch. I looked it in the eye, and I said, in a firm, carrying voice, 'That is quite enough of that.'" He demonstrated the voice. Several portraits of himself nodded warmly. "And do you know, it stopped? It actually stopped. As if it had been struck. I have always found that a creature, however dark, however lost to the moon, can still recognise genuine authority when it meets it. I walked into the centre of that pack with my head high and my cloak billowing behind me in a way I am told was extremely impressive, and I simply began to talk to them."
"Talk to them," Zabini repeated, very quietly, to no one in particular. He was looking at the ceiling with the air of a boy taking an inventory of the cracks.
"I told them of the joys of civilised life," Lockhart said, warming to it now, his hands painting the air. "I told them of music, and of good conversation, and of the satisfaction that comes from a well-kept appearance. I may, I confess, have shown them my smile." He showed it to the class again, in case they had missed it the first several dozen times. "One by one, those werewolves sat down in the snow. One by one, their hackles fell. By the time the sun came up, the pack was sitting in a circle around me, as meek as a roomful of first-years, and the village of Obernberg was saved. The mayor himself came out in his nightshirt and wept on my boots. They wanted to put up a statue. I wouldn't hear of it, of course. I told them the memory would be monument enough." He beamed around the room. "And that, my dear students, is the essence of Defence. Not all the snarling and hexing you may have been led to expect. Presence. Composure. A little style. That is what turns the dark away."
There was a silence, of the sort that follows a story nobody has believed and nobody quite dares to be the first to say so.
Draca, behind Nott, had her arms folded and her chin tipped slightly to one side, and the look on her face was the one she wore when someone had served her a meal she had no intention of eating but was too well brought up to send back. She had not swooned at Lockhart even in September, Nott remembered. She had refused to be impressed on principle, the way she refused most things that were not hers to command, and the months had only hardened it. Pansy was examining her own nails with deep, contemplative attention, as if the fate of Obernberg were a matter she would return to once she had decided whether the polish was chipped. Crabbe was frowning at the blackboard with his mouth slightly open. Goyle was frowning at Crabbe.
At the Gryffindor end of the room, Ron leaned toward Harriet and muttered, without much bothering to lower his voice, "If he saved them by smiling, what's the rest of the book for?"
"Padding," Harriet murmured back, and Ron snorted, and Hermione, without looking up from her parchment, whispered, "Will you two be quiet. I'm trying to write down what he should have done."
That, Nott thought, was the whole of it, really. They had all stopped waiting for Lockhart to teach them anything, and they had, in the slow, practical way of children who have realised the adults will not be of use, started teaching themselves. It had begun, as most useful things at Hogwarts seemed to begin, with Hermione Granger. Sometime in November, after the third consecutive class in which Lockhart had described, at length, the origins of his most charming smile and had then released nothing more dangerous than a set of questions about his own publications, she had stood up in the Gryffindor common room and announced that if nobody else was going to learn Defence Against the Dark Arts this year, she would, and anyone who wanted to not die in a corridor could come and help. Harriet and Ron had gone, of course. Seamus and Dean had followed, mostly to get out of doing something else. Neville had been dragged. And then, because rumours at Hogwarts travelled faster than owls, the thing had spread. There was a Ravenclaw group that met in the library and argued about theory until the lamps dimmed. There was a cluster of Hufflepuffs who practised in an empty greenhouse after Herbology, to Professor Sprout's carefully unseeing eye. And in Slytherin, because Slytherins would not be caught dead being taught by a Mudblood in a fourth-floor classroom if they could help it, Nott and Zabini and a handful of others had started their own evenings in a corner of the common room, with a copy of Curses and Counter-Curses that Zabini's mother had sent and a great deal of muttered swearing when the spells did not work the first time. Pansy came to those and pretended she was only there to criticise. Draca came once, sat very straight, performed a Shield Charm that was cleaner than anyone else's, and then said she had only come to make sure they were not embarrassing the house, and did not come again, though Nott had seen her practising the same charm in an empty classroom a week later, when she had thought the corridor was clear.
None of them said any of this to Lockhart. There was no point. He would not have heard it if they had.
"Now," Lockhart said, tapping the board, "I expect you will all want to know how one cultivates that sort of presence. It isn't merely inborn, though of course some of us are more naturally gifted than others. It is a matter of practice. Of presentation. Of being, at all times, the most interesting person in the room." He turned, smiling, and his gaze, as if drawn by a hook, went back to the empty desk. The smile held. "I do think," he said, and the brightness in his voice had gone just slightly thin, "that it is a great shame when a student chooses not to avail himself of the opportunity. A great shame. Defence is not a subject one can simply pick up in a forest, however fond one might be of... trampling about in the mud."
Nott felt, rather than saw, Draca go still behind him. Harriet's eyes had narrowed. Hermione's quill paused.
Lockhart seemed to realise, a second too late, that he had stepped a little nearer to saying what he meant than he had intended, and he laughed, lightly, and waved a hand. "But we must not dwell on those who are absent. We must think of those who are here, eager, I am sure, to improve. Let us turn, then, to the moral of the Obernberg affair, which you will find discussed at some length in chapter twelve, and which I will now, as a treat, recount in rather more colour than the book allows, the publishers having been, if I may say so, a trifle conservative with my descriptions of the dawn."
He launched into it. Ron, who had been listening to the mayor weep on the boots for as long as he could bear, dug an elbow into Harriet's side. "D'you reckon," he whispered, "that if a werewolf actually turned up, he'd smile at it and then climb out the window?"
"He climbed out of the window on the first day," Harriet whispered back. "When the pixies were out. I don't think he'd bother with the smiling."
"I heard that, Mr Weasley," Lockhart said, without much heat, from the front of the room, and Ron went red and sank down in his seat. Lockhart had not, Nott noticed, heard any of the rest of it. He never did, when the rest of it was about him.
The class ground on. There was no spell. There was no practical. There was another ten minutes on the importance of a well-chosen travelling cloak, and a short, baffling digression into the dietary habits of Alpine goats, which Lockhart seemed to believe were relevant because he had eaten a very fine cheese the morning after his triumph, and then, at last, he clapped his hands again and told them they might use the remaining time to begin an essay, two rolls of parchment, on the subject of How I Would Have Handled the Pack, with particular reference to chapter twelve and to the personal qualities they most admired in their professor. A groan moved through the room and was not quite murdered this time. Lockhart either did not hear it or chose, magnificently, not to.
Chairs scraped. Bags opened. Nott pulled a sheet of parchment toward himself, looked at the empty desk beside him, and, after a moment, wrote at the top of the page, in a very small hand, He wasn't here, and then sat staring at the words, and then crossed them out, because they were true and they would not get him any marks.
He knew where Lucian was. They all knew. Every other week, for months now, Lucian Bloodthorne had walked out of breakfast and down across the wet grounds toward Hagrid's hut, and from there into the Forbidden Forest, and he had come back at dusk with mud on his boots and that same unbothered look, and he had sat at this very desk the following week and taken whatever punishment Lockhart had devised for the absence the way he took most things, which was to say, as if it were faintly funny and not really any of his concern. He did not do the essays. When he did turn one in, Nott had seen a page of it once, over Lucian's shoulder, and it had consisted of three sentences, the last of which had been, I wasn't there, so I wouldn't have handled the pack at all, which seemed to me the most sensible option available. Lockhart had given it a zero and a long, wounded comment in purple ink.
Nott bent over his own essay and tried to write something that would pass, and tried not to look at the rain, and at the dark smudge of the forest, and at the thought of Lucian out there in it, probably perfectly dry in that long coat of his, talking to something that would have sent the rest of them running.
When the bell rang, it was a relief so complete that even Crabbe sat up.
They packed away their things in a rustle of bags and a scrape of chairs. Hermione stacked her notes and said, in the firm, carrying whisper she used when she was organising people against their will, "Fourth floor tonight. I'm going to show you the proper wand movement for a Disarming Charm, because we are not learning it in here, and I don't care if it isn't on his board." Harriet nodded. Ron said, "Brilliant," with feeling. Seamus said he would come if there was food. Neville looked anxious, and then, when Harriet glanced at him, gave a small, determined nod of his own. They filed out. Draca rose, smoothed her robes, and went past the empty desk without looking at it, which Nott thought probably cost her some effort. Pansy lingered just long enough to say, to Nott and Zabini both, "If he tells that story again next week I'll scream, and it will not be a charming scream," and then she went after Draca. Zabini picked up his bag, looked at Lockhart, who was beaming at the departing class as if they had just given him a standing ovation, and said, very dryly, "Presence," and walked out.
Nott was one of the last to leave. At the door he looked back, once. Lockhart's smile was still there, aimed at the emptying room, and the yellow robes seemed, in the grey light from the windows, a little too bright, and the empty desk sat where it had sat all hour, bare and quiet and somehow louder than anything Lockhart had said. Then Nott went out into the corridor, and the door swung shut behind him, and the sound of the class, such as it had been, went with him, and Gilderoy Lockhart was left alone with his portraits, and his blackboard, and the skeleton, and the rain.
He stood there for a moment in the quiet, still smiling, because the portraits were watching and a man had a standard to maintain. Then he let the smile go, and it dropped off his face the way a cloak drops off a hook, and what was underneath it was not charming at all.
He turned on his heel and went into the little office that opened off the back of the classroom, and he shut that door too, harder than he needed to, and stood with his back against it and his hands flat on the wood, and for a few seconds he only breathed, in and out, through his nose, while the rain ticked at the small window above his desk and the framed photographs of himself on every wall went on waving and winking in a silence he did not find comforting.
The boy had done it again.
Gilderoy Lockhart had, in the course of a carefully constructed life, been inconvenienced by a great many people. Publishers who wanted cuts. Journalists who asked the wrong questions. The occasional dull, persistent Ministry clerk who wanted dates and witnesses and other such tedious proofs. He had handled all of them. Handling people was, in the end, what he did, and he did it better than anyone alive, and the world had agreed with him often enough, in print and in prizes and in the soft, admiring looks of strangers, that he had long ago stopped thinking of it as a skill and started thinking of it as a law of nature, like gravity, or good lighting. He had come to Hogwarts in September with a perfectly clear purpose. He was going to stand in front of a new generation and show them, beyond any possible doubt, that Gilderoy Lockhart was the greatest wizard of the age, the man who would one day outshine Dumbledore himself, the name that would be left standing when all the older names had faded. Even the Girl Who Lived, with her little scar and her tiresome, accidental fame, would not hold a candle to him by the time he was done. He would teach them. He would charm them. He would make this castle remember him.
And then Lucian Bloodthorne had arrived, and from the first day, from the first miserable hour of that first miserable class, the boy had done everything in his power to ruin it.
Lockhart pushed off the door and went to his desk. He stood over it, his hands braced on the blotter, and stared at a stack of unmarked essays from the week before, and at the little gilt inkstand he had bought to celebrate his appointment, and at the empty space on the far side of the wall, through which, if he had been able to see through stone, he would have been looking at that desk, that wretched empty desk, sitting there in his classroom like a snub. The boy skipped him. Not once. Not as a lark. Every other week, as regular as a timetable, Lucian Bloodthorne walked out of the castle and down to the grounds and into that forest with that great oaf of a gamekeeper, and he did it with the Headmaster's blessing, and he did it as if Defence Against the Dark Arts, as if Gilderoy Lockhart, were a thing a person could simply elect not to bother with. He didn't do the work. He didn't answer the questions. When he was present he sat there with that faint, idle look on his scarred face, and the other children looked at him, and then they looked at Lockhart, and something in the room leaned, very slightly, away from the desk at the front and toward the boy who wasn't even trying.
It was unbearable. It had been unbearable in September, when the boy had commanded the pixies as if they were dogs and left Lockhart standing there with his wand up and his dignity in pieces. It had been unbearable on the Quidditch pitch, when those same lazy American vowels had carried across the crowd, quite calmly, as if the boy were correcting a rather obvious mistake, telling him, in front of the whole school, that he had done it for a camera, that a centaur foal with a bucket would have done better, and someone had laughed, and Lockhart had had to walk away with his smile nailed on and his ears burning. It was unbearable now, in February, with the rain at the window and the empty desk next door, and the second-years sitting there taking notes on what he ought to have done, as if they had already decided he was a problem to be worked around.
He was Gilderoy Lockhart. He had written the books. He had won the awards. He had spent years building a life in which he was the most important person in any room he entered, and a twelve-year-old with a lightning-bolt scar and a name out of a history book had walked in and taken it from him without even seeming to want it. The name was part of it, of course. Bloodthorne. You could not move in wizarding Britain this year without hearing it. Parents wrote to one another. The Prophet danced around it. Even the staff, who ought to have known better, spoke of the boy in that careful, wondering way they reserved for things they did not understand and were not entirely sure they were allowed to touch. And all the while the boy himself wore Muggle clothes and wrote with a Muggle pen and spent his time in a hut with a half-giant, and still, somehow, the castle turned toward him like flowers toward a window.
Lockhart's hands had closed on the edge of the desk hard enough to hurt. He unclenched them, slowly, and straightened, and looked at himself in the small silvered mirror he kept on the wall beside the door. The face that looked back was still an excellent face. That, at least, had not changed. He smoothed a curl back into place with a slightly unsteady finger, and he breathed in, and out, and he let the first wave of the anger go down into the place where he kept the things he did not show the portraits.
Anger, however, did not pay. Anger was what other people saw. What he needed was a way to plant himself so firmly in this world that no scarred child, no ancient name, no smirk from an empty desk, could ever shift him again. Fame was all very well. Fame had always been all very well. But fame, he had begun to understand, could be borrowed, and it could be questioned, and it could, on a wet Tuesday in a Scottish castle, be made to look faintly cheap beside a boy who did not even want it. What could not be questioned was position. Money. A name that opened every door in Britain and had been opening them for centuries. A family that sat at the centre of things, with gold behind it, and influence, and a seat where it mattered.
The Malfoys, for instance.
He had thought about it before, in a drifting, idle way, the way he thought about a good portrait commission or a particularly fine set of robes. He taught the fourth-years as well. He had noticed the older Malfoy girl in his class the way he noticed anything that might be useful: Vivienne Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy's elder daughter, a pale, quiet, expensive fact at a desk in the second row, who took her notes without looking at him and who had never once given him the look he preferred to receive. He had not been offended. The Malfoy fortune was one of the great fortunes of wizarding Britain. The Malfoy name opened the Ministry, the Prophet, the right drawing rooms in the right houses, and Lucius Malfoy, whatever else he was, would be a very difficult man to ignore if one were married into his family. A man who stood at that particular intersection of gold and influence would not need to smile quite so hard at a roomful of second-years. A man like that would not need to fear an empty desk.
The thought, which had been idle, was not idle now. It had weight. It had edges. He turned away from the mirror and began to walk the small length of the office, from the door to the window and back again, his yellow robes whispering against the chair.
She was young, of course. That didn't matter to him, but perhaps to everyone else. Nothing could be done now, nothing proper, nothing that would stand in the light. He could wait until she was of age. Or he could leave a little something for her. He could make certain, long before any banns were read, that when the time came she would not have a choice worth speaking of. There were potions for that. There was a draught that could turn reluctance into devotion, quietly, reliably, without any of the mess of ordinary courtship, and once it had taken hold, a girl would write the letters she was told to write, and smile when she was told to smile, and stand where she was put, and her father would be presented with an engagement as if it had grown there naturally, like a rose on a trellis. If the potion proved stubborn, there was always the other way. The Imperius Curse was illegal, of course. So were a great many things that useful men did and were not caught doing. He would not need it for long. Only until the thing was signed and sealed, and the Malfoy gold sat behind his name, and no American child with a pocket full of ancient authority would ever be able to make a room lean away from him again.
He stopped at the window and looked out at the rain, and at the dark line of the forest, and he could not see the boy in it, which somehow made it worse.
It would have to be done carefully. He would be careful. He was always careful. He would be kind in class. He would be attentive, in the modest, professional way a professor might be attentive to a promising student, and if he asked her, in time, to stay behind for a word about her work, that would be perfectly in order, and no one would think anything of it. By the time he felt ready, the ground would already be there, and the fortune would follow, and Gilderoy Lockhart would have what he had always deserved, which was a life no one could take away from him by simply not turning up.
He stood there for a long time, watching the forest and not seeing it, and the photographs on the walls went on waving, and waving, and waving, at a man who was no longer looking at them at all.
~~~
The first thing Ginny Weasley knew, properly knew, was the cold.
It came back all at once, a sudden unpleasant rush of sensation that made her gasp and catch at the edge of a sink, and she was standing in a bathroom she did not remember walking into, on stone that was wet and slightly slimy under her shoes, and the air smelled of old water and stale perfume and something coppery that she would not, just at first, let herself name. The light was the thin grey light of a February afternoon, coming in through a high, rain-streaked window and lying in a sickly sheet across the cracked tiles. The taps dripped. Somewhere in one of the stalls, a pipe knocked, and then knocked again, and a thin, familiar moaning started up behind a closed door, rising and falling like a badly played flute.
Ginny looked down at her hands.
There was blood under her nails.
Not a little of it. Not the sort of smear you got if you bit a hangnail too short, or if you had been helping Hagrid with the roosters and had nicked yourself on a bit of wire. It was dark, nearly black in the grey light, packed in crescents along the underside of every nail, and dried in a thin crackled film across the sides of her fingers, and when she turned her hands over she found a rusty stain running down the heel of her right palm and into the cuff of her robe, which was already marked, she saw now, with more of it, a brownish smear along the front and a darker one at the hem, as if she had knelt in something. The smell, once she had admitted it, was unmistakable. It was the smell of the henhouse. It was the smell of the writing on the walls.
She made a small, wretched sound and scrubbed her hands against her skirts, which only spread it, and then she went to the nearest tap and wrenched it on and shoved her hands under the cold water and rubbed, and rubbed, and the water in the basin went pink, and then brown, and the blood under her nails only lightened, it did not go, and she stood there with her shoulders up around her ears and her breath coming short and sharp, and tried to remember how she had got here.
She couldn't.
She remembered breakfast. She remembered Transfiguration, and Professor McGonagall's voice, and the way the rain had looked on the classroom windows. She remembered walking down a corridor after lunch, and then... nothing. A blank, like a page that had been torn out. And now she was here, in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, with rooster blood on her robes and a taste in her mouth she did not like, and in her left hand, which she had been clutching so hard the knuckles were white, there was the little black book.
She stared at it.
It was a diary. She knew it was a diary. She had found it in her cauldron in August, tucked down among the second-hand books, and she had thought, at first, that it was only an empty book, a bit of leftover stationery someone had thrown in, and then she had written in it, only a little, only because she had been lonely and the castle was so large and her brothers were always somewhere else, and the book had written back. It had been so easy to tell it things. It had been so easy to believe it was a friend. And then the blanks had started, and the blood, and the walls, and she had understood, in fragments, in the terrible clear moments that came between the blanks, that the friend in the book was not a friend at all, and that she had been doing things she would never have done, and that if she did not get rid of it she was going to do something worse.
The diary was warm. It ought not to have been warm. It sat in her hand like something that had been held close to a fire, and she had the awful feeling, looking at it, that it was looking back.
"I won't," she whispered. Her voice came out very small in the dripping room. "I won't. I don't want you. I never wanted you."
The diary did not answer. It only sat there, warm and black and ordinary-looking, the way a trap looks ordinary when you have already put your foot in it.
She thought, wildly, of taking it to someone. To Ron. To Percy. To Harriet, who had held her hand at the Sorting feast and who looked at her, always, the way a sister might, with a warmth that had nothing in it of the other thing, the thing some of the older girls had assumed, at the start of the year, when they had seen Ginny watching the Girl Who Lived with her mouth slightly open. They had been wrong. They were still wrong. Harriet was the bravest person Ginny knew, and the kindest, and the nearest thing to a sister she had ever had, and Ginny would have followed her into the forest without thinking twice, and none of that was the same as the other feeling, the small, hopeless, stupid one she had been carrying since September and had been stupid enough, once or twice, to write down.
She had written about him in the book.
That was part of why it had to go. It wasn't the largest part, not even close, not with the blood on her hands and the blanks in her memory and the writing on the walls that she was more and more certain had come from her own fingers. But it was the part that made her face go hot even now, standing here in a ruined bathroom with her heart going like a hammer, because the book knew. The book had been so interested. It had asked her questions in that friendly, careful way, and she had told it, because she had told it everything, about the boy in Slytherin with the scar across his face and the long black hair and the American voice, the one the whole Hall had gone silent for, the one who wore Muggle clothes as if a thousand years of his family name were a coat he could take off when he felt like it. She had told it that she looked for him in corridors and then looked away. She had told it about the Quidditch pitch, about the way he had walked through the crowd and told Professor Lockhart the truth, not loudly, not like a boy showing off, but calmly, as if the truth were simply a thing that needed saying, and about the way she had stood there among the first-years with her hands over her mouth and thought, I wouldn't have been brave enough. She had told it that she knew it was hopeless, that he was a Bloodthorne and a Slytherin and she was a Weasley with hand-me-down robes and a second-hand Transfiguration book, and that she would die, actually die, if anyone ever found out. And the book had been so kind about it. The book had said it understood.
She looked at the diary, and the kindness felt, now, like a hand on the back of her neck.
"You're not having any more of it," she said, and her voice was shaking, but it was louder than before. "You're not having him, and you're not having me, and you're not having anyone else in this castle. I'm done. I'm done!"
She turned and went to the nearest stall, the one at the end, where the moaning was coming from, and she shoved the door open with her shoulder. Moaning Myrtle was floating a few inches above the toilet, her glasses crooked, her eye sockets pink, in the middle of what appeared to be a very satisfying sulk, and she looked up with a wet gasp of outrage when the door banged in.
"What do you think you're doing?" Myrtle wailed. "This is my bathroom. Mine. You can't just come barging—"
"I'm sorry," Ginny said, and she meant it, even now, because she was still a girl who apologised to ghosts, and then she stepped up to the bowl and, before she could lose her nerve, before the warm little book in her hand could become any heavier, she opened her fingers and let it fall.
It hit the water with a flat, unremarkable slap.
Myrtle's wail went up an octave. "My toilet! You threw a book in my toilet! Oh, that's just typical, that is, nobody ever thinks about Myrtle, nobody ever asks if Myrtle minds having people's rubbish thrown at her, I suppose you think it's funny, I suppose—"
Ginny reached up and pulled the chain.
The cistern roared. The water rose, and spun, and the little black diary turned once, slowly, in the whirlpool, and for a terrible second Ginny thought it wasn't going to go, that it would simply sit there, obstinate and warm, and she would have to put her hand in and she did not think she could bear to touch it again. Then it tipped, and slid, and vanished down into the dark with a sound that was much too small for how much of her it was taking with it, and the water settled, and the bathroom was only a bathroom again, dripping and cold and smelling of wet stone, and Myrtle was still shouting, and Ginny stood there with her empty, stained hands hanging at her sides and felt, for the first time in months, as if there were a door open somewhere and a little clean air coming through it.
She did not wait to hear the rest of Myrtle's complaint. She wiped her hands once more on her skirts, which did no good at all, and she pulled her sleeves down as far as they would go, and she went out into the corridor as quickly as she could without running, and she did not look back. The rain was still coming down against the high windows. A pair of fourth-years went past her, talking, and did not glance at her robes. She walked. She kept walking. She thought of Harriet, who would, she knew, have listened if she had been told, and she thought of the little black book turning in the water, and she thought, only once, and very privately, of a boy with a scar and a quiet voice, who did not know she existed, and who would never need to, and she found that she could bear that, if it meant the book was gone.
By the time she reached the marble staircase she had started to cry, quietly, with her chin tucked down and her hair falling forward, and she told herself it was only the relief, and for the most part she was even right.
~~~
A few days later, after dinner, the Slytherin common room sat in its usual green quiet, the high windows holding back the lake, the fire throwing a low, steady light across the sofas and the rug and the little knots of students who had claimed their places for the evening as if they were inherited seats. Someone was playing cards near the far wall. Someone else was arguing, not very seriously, about a Potions essay. The password had been spoken, the stone door had ground shut, and the dungeons had closed around the house the way they always did, close and green and theirs.
Vivienne Malfoy came in first, with a letter in her hand and her bag still over her shoulder, and she stood for a moment just inside the door, letting her eyes adjust, and then she saw her sister at the writing table along the far wall, bent over a piece of parchment with her quill tapping, not writing, the way Draca tapped when she was thinking about something she did not want to be thinking about. Vivienne's mouth moved, very slightly, toward a smile. She crossed the room without hurry, nodding once to Cassian Avery, who was on prefect duty by the fire and who nodded back with the faint deference the older Slytherins had learned, over the last few months, to give a Malfoy who did not ask for it, and she came to a stop beside Draca's chair and touched two fingers lightly to her sister's shoulder.
Draca looked up, startled, and then relaxed when she saw who it was.
"You're late," Draca said.
"I'm fourth year. We have Arithmancy on Thursdays, as you would remember if you ever listened when I complained about it." Vivienne held up the letter. It was thick, and cream-coloured, and sealed with the Malfoy crest in black wax, and Draca's eyes went to it at once. "Mother's written. To both of us. Come and sit with me, I don't intend to read it over a table with half the house listening."
Draca was already on her feet. She capped her ink, shoved the unfinished parchment into her bag without looking at it, and followed Vivienne across the room, around the end of the long sofa, past Pansy, who glanced up from a magazine and opened her mouth and then, catching Vivienne's look, closed it again, and over to the recessed seat beneath the lake windows, the one Vivienne had claimed on the first night of term and had never really given back. The water beyond the glass was black at this hour, with only a faint, shifting bloom of green where the castle lights reached it, and the seat was deep enough, and set back enough, that once they were in it the rest of the common room became a low murmur at their backs, a firelit blur of movement that did not quite reach them. Vivienne sat first, tucked her robes around her, and drew her wand in a quick, economical little motion, tracing a small, tight circle in the air between them and the room. The murmur of the common room dimmed, as if someone had shut a door.
"There," she said. "Now we can be improper in peace."
"You didn't have to do that."
"I did, if you're going to make the face I think you're going to make. Sit down, Draca."
Draca sat, with a little huff that didn't have much conviction in it, and pulled her feet up under her on the seat the way she had done when she was small, and Vivienne, watching her, felt the familiar, complicated fondness that she never quite showed when other people were looking. In front of the house she was the finished thing, the level head, the sister who measured twice and spoke once and did not reach for anyone. Here, in the window, with the lake at her shoulder and her little sister scowling at a letter that hadn't even been opened yet, she allowed herself the luxury of being, simply, older.
She broke the seal with her thumb, unfolded the parchment, and angled it toward the light.
Mother's hand was as it always was, tall and elegant and perfectly controlled, the black ink laid down as if it had never considered going anywhere it had not been invited. Vivienne glanced down the first page, then the second, and then she looked at Draca, who was watching her with her chin up and her grey eyes bright, trying not to look eager and failing at it completely.
"All right," Vivienne said. "I'll read it. You may interrupt, but if you interrupt every sentence, we shall still be here at breakfast."
"I don't interrupt every sentence."
"You do. Listen."
She cleared her throat, very slightly, and began.
My dearest girls,
I was so very glad to have your letter. It arrived on a morning when the house had gone too quiet, and I sat in the small salon and read it twice, which I hope will flatter you and not encourage you to write sloppily, knowing I shall only read it again. Thank you for the trouble you took over the Christmas gifts. I am pleased they arrived safely, and still more pleased that you liked them. Your father chose the cloaks himself, which I tell you only so that you may thank him properly and not assume, as you usually do, that all good taste in this family comes from me.
Vivienne glanced up. "She's not wrong."
"The cloaks were all right," Draca said, with the grand indifference of a girl who had worn hers every cold day since and had been extremely pleased with the cut. "The gloves were better. Go on."
Vivienne's mouth tipped. She went on.
I wish, more than I can easily say, that you could have been with us in Germany. The visit was a long one, and formal, and your father was occupied almost without rest, but the evenings at the von Strohm house were beautiful, and I kept thinking how you would have liked the winter gardens, Draca, and how you, Vivienne, would have been bored by the dinners and interested by the conversations afterward. We were entertained very kindly. I brought back a small box of the sweets you both liked last year, and I shall send it on with the next post if I can find an owl that does not eat sugar in transit. Still, I will not pretend I did not miss you. A castle is a very large place to be without one's daughters in it, even when one is a guest.
As to the rest of your letter, I will not lie to you, and I would ask that you not lie to me in return. I am concerned about the reports we have had of the school. A monster, they are calling it, though no one seems able to agree what manner of creature it is, or whether it is a creature at all. I have written to Headmaster Dumbledore, who has been courteous and entirely unhelpful. I have also spoken to your father.
Vivienne paused, and her eyebrows rose, just a fraction, and she read the next lines in the same even voice, though something drier had come into it.
Your father believes that all will be well for you. He is quite certain of it. He says that whatever is in the castle has, thus far, shown a very clear preference, and that two daughters of the House of Malfoy have nothing to fear from it. He asks me to tell you to be cautious, of course, and to keep to the proper corridors after dark, but he does not wish you to be frightened, and he does not believe there is any true danger to you.
"There," Draca said, immediately, as if this had settled something. "You see? Father says it's fine."
Vivienne lowered the letter into her lap and looked at her sister. Then, slowly, she rolled her eyes, which was not a thing she did in front of other people, and which she had, as far as Draca knew, learned from no one but herself.
"Don't do that," Draca said, colour rising in her face at once. "Don't look like that. He knows what he's talking about. He's on the board of governors, Vivienne, he's spoken to people, he wouldn't just—"
"He would," Vivienne said, quite calmly. "And he has. Father thinks a great many things are certain that are only convenient. It is one of his talents."
"That's a rotten thing to say."
"It's an accurate thing to say." Vivienne sat back against the stone of the window seat, the letter still open in her hands, and regarded her sister with the particular patience she reserved for Draca and for no one else. "Listen to me. I am not saying Father doesn't care whether we are safe. Of course he does. He would burn the forest down if he thought it would help, and then bill somebody for the timber. What I am saying is that it is stupid, Draca, it is genuinely, dangerously stupid, to sit here and tell ourselves that a monster walking these halls is going to stop and check a family tree before it opens a door. As if it were a footman. As if it were going to read the Sacred Twenty-Eight, curtsey, and go on down to the Hufflepuff corridor."
Draca's mouth had gone tight. "It's the Chamber of Secrets. Everyone knows what the Chamber was for. Slytherin built it to—"
"Slytherin built a great many things, and we do not, as a point of fact, know what is using them." Vivienne's voice had not risen, but it had hardened, the way ice hardens, still clear and still even. "Mrs Norris was a cat. Colin Creevey is a Muggle-born, yes. Justin Finch-Fletchley is a Muggle-born. Nearly Headless Nick is a ghost who died four hundred years ago and cannot, I think, be accused of having the wrong grandparents. That is not a pattern I would stake your life on, or mine. It is a pattern Father likes, because it means he does not have to be afraid for us, and Father is a man who prefers not to be afraid if he can help it. I do not intend to take my safety on his preferences."
"You don't trust him."
"I trust him to love us. I do not trust him to be right." Vivienne looked down at the letter, and then back up, and some of the hardness went out of her face, and what was left was older, and tired, and very fond. "I am not trying to frighten you. I'm trying to keep you. There is a difference, though you aren't always interested in it. You may be as angry with me as you like. You may write to Father and tell him I have been disloyal and disagreeable, and I am sure he will believe you, at least on the second count. But you will not walk these corridors after dark as if your last name were a Shield Charm, and you will not tell me I am wrong for worrying about you, because I have been worrying about you since you were born, and I am not going to stop because Father has decided we are exempt."
Draca stared at her. For a moment she looked as if she were going to keep fighting, her chin still up, her hands tight in her lap, and then the fight went out of her in a small, unwilling breath, and she looked away, at the black glass and the lake beyond it, and muttered, "I don't walk around after dark as if I were exempt."
"You do. You went down to the trophy room last week because Pansy dared you to look at Flint's old plaque."
"That was different."
"It was not different." Vivienne's mouth had softened. She reached out, quite casually, and tucked a loose strand of pale hair back behind her sister's ear, and Draca suffered it, which was as close as she generally came to admitting she had been comforted. "I am glad Father thinks we shall be fine. I would like him to be right. I would like it very much. I am simply not going to stake you on it. Now be quiet and let me finish the letter, I am not done being the unpleasant one."
Draca made a noise that might, in a kinder light, have been a laugh, and pulled her sleeves down over her hands, and nodded at the parchment.
"Go on, then. Before you start on my posture as well."
Vivienne lifted the letter again.
I will not pretend that this is the only matter that has occupied your father's mind. You asked, in your last letter, whether we had heard any more from home about the Bloodthorne boy, and I am afraid the answer is that one can hardly hear about anything else. All of wizarding Britain, it seems, has been writing to all of the rest of wizarding Britain since September, and the name is in every drawing room and every club and, I am sorry to say, every gossip column that is not actively being sat on by someone with sense. I will not repeat the wilder stories. You are both quite old enough to know that most of what people say about a family like that is either envy or invention, and often both.
What I will tell you, because you asked me to be honest, is that your father remains very concerned about him, and about your proximity to him. He has asked me to write, quite plainly, that you are to stay away from the Bloodthorne boy. He does not consider him the proper sort to mingle with. He says he had the measure of him in Diagon Alley, last August, when the boy was still only a well-spoken child with unusual manners, and that even then there was something about him that did not sit quite right, a lack of the right sort of deference, a way of being polite that was not, in your father's view, the same thing as knowing one's place.
Keep to your own, my loves. Write to me. Wear your cloaks, and do not skip meals, and be kind to one another, which I know is a great deal to ask of sisters and which I ask anyway. I think of you both constantly, and I am, as ever,
Your devoted mother,
Narcissa
Vivienne let the last line sit in the air for a moment, and then she folded the letter, once, not yet putting it away, and looked at her sister, who had gone very still, and whose face had done the complicated thing it did when she was trying to be angry and trying not to show that she was also something else.
"Well," Vivienne said, mildly. "There we are."
"Stay away from him," Draca said. Her voice had gone tight and bright, the way it went when she had been given an order she had no intention of finding reasonable. "That's what he says. Stay away. As if I were trailing after him. As if I—" She stopped, and gave a short, frustrated breath, and looked at the lake. "He called Father Lord Malfoy. That was polite. Father liked it. I was there, I remember. He liked it so much he almost smiled. And now it isn't the proper sort of politeness, because now he knows the boy's a Bloodthorne, and Father can't bear it. That's all this is. It isn't about whether he's proper. It's about Father not liking that there's someone in this castle he can't buy a broom for."
Vivienne regarded her for a long, quiet moment, and the look in her eyes was the one Lucian Bloodthorne had noticed, once, from across a room, the measuring look, the chessboard look, and then it warmed, because it was not being turned on a stranger.
"Yes," she said. "That is more or less exactly what this is. I am glad you can hear it. I was afraid I would have to walk you there."
"I'm not stupid."
"No. You are many things, Draca, but you are not that." Vivienne turned the folded letter over in her fingers, thoughtfully. "Father liked him when he thought he was a well-mannered curiosity with no name worth worrying about. A boy who bowed, and said the right words, and could be filed under miscellaneous and forgotten. Then we wrote and told him who he had been polite to, and miscellaneous became a problem, and now the problem is not the proper sort to mingle with, which is a very useful phrase, I have always thought. It can mean almost anything, and it always means, I have been made uncomfortable, and I would like it to stop." She tipped her head. "You should ignore him."
Draca blinked. "Father?"
"Father. Yes. Ignore him." Vivienne's voice was perfectly calm, as if she had suggested that Draca take a different corridor to Charms. "If spending time with Lucian is what makes you happy, then you should go on doing it. Father is in Wiltshire. He is not standing in this common room. He cannot see how you look when the boy walks past with a letter in his hand and does not tell you who it is for, and he cannot see how you look when I say what I have just said, either, which is a pity, because it is a very informative look."
The colour came up in Draca's face so quickly it was almost impressive. She sat up straight, her feet coming down off the seat, and stared at her sister as if Vivienne had leaned over and tipped a goblet into her lap.
"I do not," she said, with great precision, "look like anything. And I do not — I am not — I do not enjoy spending time with him. That is a completely stupid thing to say. I like bothering him. That is all. He is an American twat who wears those ridiculous Muggle clothes and writes with a Muggle pen and walks around this castle as if he has better things to do than talk to any of us, and someone has to take him down a peg, and it might as well be me, because nobody else has the spine for it. That is not the same as enjoying him. That is not the same as anything. I can't believe you would even suggest it. You sound like Pansy. You sound like Nott. You sound like—"
"Like someone who has been watching you since September," Vivienne said, and she was smiling now, not unkindly, a small, private smile that belonged only to this window and this sister and this particular shade of furious pink. "Draca. Love. You followed him across the common room on Christmas night. You pranced."
"I did not prance."
"You pranced. I was on the stairs. I had an excellent view. You went after him with your chin up and that little bounce you do when you think you have caught someone out, and he said one word to you, and you stood in front of a blank wall for a full ten seconds afterward with your mouth open. Pansy told me the rest, at some length, because Pansy is constitutionally incapable of keeping a story of that quality to herself. Family, he said. And you have been in a mood about it ever since."
"I have not been in a mood."
"You have been unbearable. You snapped at Nott for making a joke about marriage, which, I will grant you, was a very Nottish joke and not a very good one, and then you spent three days writing a thank-you letter as if the parchment had personally offended you." Vivienne leaned in a little, and lowered her voice, though the charm was still in place, because some things deserved a quieter tone even when no one else could hear them. "I am not laughing at you. I am not going to tease you in front of the house, and I am not going to write to Mother and tell her that her youngest has developed a complicated interest in the most famous boy in Britain. I am telling you, here, where it is only us, that I have watched you spend half the year sharpening yourself on him, and that you are happier when you are doing it than you are when you are not, and that Father's letter does not change that, and should not. If bothering the American twat is what you want to do, then do it. I will not stop you. I may even enjoy watching. He can look after himself, I think we have all established that, and you—" she reached out again, and this time she took Draca's hand, quite simply, and held it, "—you are allowed to want things that Father has not approved in advance. Even this. Especially this, perhaps."
Draca's hand stayed in hers. For a long moment she said nothing. The pink was still there, high on her cheeks, and her eyes were bright and angry and faintly damp, which she would have denied until the lake froze solid, and then she pulled her hand back, though not as sharply as she might have, and folded her arms, and looked very hard at the window.
"I don't want him," she said, and it came out lower than before, and a good deal less certain. "I don't. I just... he doesn't take me seriously. He never has. He looks at me as if I were a very good joke, and I hate it, and I can't stop walking up to it. That isn't the same as being happy. That isn't the same as what you said."
"No," Vivienne said gently. "It is only very nearly the same."
Draca made a disgusted noise and scrubbed at one eye with the heel of her hand, as if there had been a piece of dust in it, and then she said, without looking around, "You're not going to tell anyone."
"I am not going to tell anyone. What do you take me for?"
"You're my sister. That's what I take you for." Draca's mouth twitched, unwillingly, toward something that was almost a smile. "You're worse than Pansy. At least Pansy doesn't pretend she's being kind while she's ruining my life."
"I am being kind. I am also, if we are being honest, a little relieved. I had started to think you were going to spend the entire year trying to be Father in a smaller cloak, and it was going to be very tiring for both of us." Vivienne unfolded the letter again, smoothed the crease, and held it out. "Here. You should read it yourself, or you will accuse me later of skipping the parts that were nice. Mother misses us. That much is true, and I am glad of it. The box of sweets will almost certainly arrive with toothmarks in it. And as for Father..." She shrugged, a small, elegant movement, and glanced once toward the common room, where, beyond the edge of the charm, Theodore Nott had just said something that made Pansy swing a magazine at him, and the fire went on burning, and the lake went on pressing its slow green weight against the glass. "As for Father, he may write what he likes. I didn't come back to this castle to be told whom I may stand next to in a corridor. Neither did you, even if you would rather bite your tongue off than say so. Keep bothering your American twat, Draca. If it starts to be something else, you may tell me, or you may not. I will still be here. That is the one thing in Mother's letter I intend to take absolutely literally. We are to be kind to one another. I am going to hold you to it, and you may, if you can remember how, hold me to it in return."
Draca took the letter. She looked down at their mother's tall, perfect hand, and then up at her sister, and the fight had gone out of her face, leaving behind a look that was younger, and softer, and a little bit amazed, as if she had been braced all evening for a different conversation and had not yet caught up with this one.
"You're a terrible influence," she said.
"I am the only influence you have ever listened to," Vivienne said, and reached over, and tugged, very gently, at a lock of her sister's hair. "Now come up to the dormitory and help me hide the next lot of sweets from Pansy, or we shan't see a single one. And do stop looking at me as if I have just recommended high treason. I have recommended something much worse. I have recommended that you be honest, which I know you find exhausting, but you may practise on me. I am already ruined. I rolled my eyes at Father in a private letter from Mother. There is no coming back from that."
Draca laughed, a short, unwilling, genuine little laugh, and leaned in, briefly, and bumped her shoulder against Vivienne's, which was as close as she came, in a public room, even a charmed one, to a hug. Vivienne bumped her back, and let the muffling charm fall, and the murmur of the common room came up around them again, warm and ordinary and full of other people's evenings, and the two of them sat a minute longer in the window with the lake at their backs, the letter open between them, before Draca got to her feet and said, "Well, come on, then, if you're going to be so noble about the sweets," and Vivienne rose, and followed her sister up toward the girls' staircase, and did not, for the rest of the evening, look like a girl who was measuring anyone at all.
...
Lockhart's a pedo. This will not be a recurring thing if Lucian has anything to say about it.