Chapter 2
Root’s second year at the magical school of Hogwarts begins somewhat inauspiciously. On the night of the Sorting, she pays zero attention to the ceremonies and instead devotes her sole focus to an intense stare across the Great Hall towards Sameen, who never turns around and shows no sign that she is aware of Root’s twin augurs boring into her soul. The dinner following was as impressive as expected, but she gives it little notice since her brutal campaign of psychological warfare requires her to turn almost completely around on her bench, which made eating most anything more trouble than it was worth.
Several of her Housemates attempt to engage her in conversation, since earning a year-long detention and vandalizing large portions of the castle is a fairly impressive resumé for a second year student, but despite being clearly deserving of the respect and adoration of her peers, Root finds herself strangely indifferent to it.
After the meal, she trudges listlessly out of the Great Hall while she knows she’s within eyeshot of Sameen, and afterwards steps rather more spryly the rest of the way to the Slytherin common room. The winding corridors and shifting staircases of the castle seem as friendly as ever, which is encouraging after a summer spent in a largely unfriendly place.
***
In Root’s imagination, detention at Hogwarts involved students being sent on dangerous missions, usually in the night, against some nefarious magical forces. Generally these sorts of imaginings also feature violence, subterfuge, and romance, and after that her thoughts tend to wander away from the original idea. In reality though, as she discovers after her first day of classes, detention primarily consists of sitting at one end of an empty classroom, while a bored professor works at her desk at the other end, occasionally glancing up to make sure her charges aren’t having any fun. Sameen is there also, and while the probability of violence from her remains high, she doesn’t seem inclined to subterfuge, and romance appears tragically out of reach. Mostly she just glares at Root and refuses to talk to her. It’s very disappointing. Root had spent a lot of her summer imagining the exciting adventures they would get up to when the term began.
But Root is not a wallower. When she encounters a problem, she dissects it, discovers what makes it work, and then studiously takes it apart. So after an appropriate amount of time spent making her best ‘please don’t be mad at me’ face at an immovable Sameen, she pulls out her quill and parchment and starts on a plan.
***
There are a number of reasons why Root earns the position of Seeker on the Slytherin Quidditch team when tryouts are held later in the week. One is that she had spent a good portion of her holiday training herself on a broomstick that had been lying unused around the family home for ages. Another is that in Slytherin House, social status is almost as important as skill, sometimes more so. Root’s family is generically and unobtrusively wealthy, but the antics of her first year have made her somewhat notorious among her House. And finally, for reasons no is quite able to explain, none of the other contenders for the Seeker position seem to be able to make it far enough from the hospital wing to participate in the tryouts. An unfortunate, coincidental set of circumstances, to be sure, but to the great relief of all, Root is there.
Of course all of this would be meaningless if she flew poorly. As it turns out, however, she comports herself admirably and by the end of the afternoon, Slytherin has found its new Seeker.
Root’s exploits of the day do not end as she leaves the Quidditch field, however. In a classroom filled with variously-colored steams and smokes mixing noxious scents in unpleasant ways, she pretends to follow along with the Potions lecture, while surreptitiously following a separate recipe, lifted from a withered and defeated-looking book she’d discovered in the library the previous year. She’d copied down the pages at the time, and had slipped her replicas into her own Potions book. The deception was probably unnecessary; students are not prohibited from reading library books, after all, but still. Extra secrets never hurt anyone. Or at the very least, they’d never hurt Root, which was her primary area of concern.
She produces several small vials and fills them with her concoction, returning them to her robes when the attention of the class is elsewhere. Which is often. Her peers are singularly unimpressive.
***
“You can’t just ignore me forever, Sameen.”
Shaw does her best to prove this prophecy wrong by continuing to stare straight ahead, which has been her new tactic since her angry looks failed to cause Root to dematerialize.
“Besides, you were having fun too.” Root says, unworried about being overheard by their erstwhile jailor, since the professor had both given up on curbing Root’s constant monologue and had cast a spell of silence around herself so that she could actually get some of her work done.
Shaw is unmoved by this as well. Her defiance of Root is actually forcing her to go against her own inclinations, since Root knows she’d rather tear something apart than sit meekly and accept her punishment. Her will is worthy of being lauded, even though it’s problematic to Root’s machinations at the moment.
“Well,” Root says, turning away and leaning back in her chair. “I guess I won’t take you with me when I get out of here early tonight.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a muscle in Shaw’s jaw twitch. She turns with a strange, jerky motion, as if half of her is resisting the action. “What?” She asks flatly.
“I’m just saying. I would help my friends get out of detention. But if you don’t want to be friends…” Root trails off and shrugs.
Shaw narrows her eyes. “You’re lying.”
“OK.”
After a few minutes of silence, Shaw asks, “How would you do it?”
“I wouldn’t tell anyone but my friends either.”
“Fine!” Shaw bursts out. “We’re friends! Are you happy now?”
“Yes,” Root replies. “I’m just going to wait for her to fall asleep.” She nods at the professor, mired in papers at her desk.
“Great plan.” Shaw says.
Root, for once, stays silent for several minutes, until she sees the professor’s head loll forward onto her scattered papers. She turns to Shaw. “So, where do you want to go?”
***
Root guesses they have a little over an hour before they need to return, so Shaw’s initial idea of sneaking out to the Forbidden Forest to look for monsters has to be postponed for another time. They wander down torchlit corridors, choosing the paths that look the most sinister and seeing where they take them. There’s a stone wall that sounds strangely hollow when they knock against it, and for a while they take turns casting spells attempting to blast through, but eventually have to admit defeat with little more than mildly scorched robes to show for their efforts.
“See, this is fun, isn’t it?” Root says. They’re in a strange corridor that’s rotating slowly, so every few minutes they have to hop down from what is becoming a wall onto what will soon be the floor. One time Root stays too long at the wrong end, thinking that she’ll tumble down into a heroic catch from Sameen, but instead she just hits the floor painfully while Shaw frowns at her.
“Better than detention, I guess.” Shaw replies. “Are you going to tell me how you did it?”
“No,” Root says. “Then you’d know how to do it yourself next time.”
“So you’re blackmailing me?”
“Yes.” Root says brightly.
Shaw seems to grudgingly respect this. “We’re playing Slytherin next week.” She says offhandedly, moving one foot off of the old wall to the new floor, balancing between them.
“Are you looking forward to it?” Root’s legs, placed against what used to be a wall, start to take her weight as the corridor orients her into a standing position.
“Looking forward to beating you.”
***
Root skims over the stands, not exerting any special effort towards looking the golden Snitch. She and Sameen are playing a game within the game, where she tries to get close enough that they can talk, but darting away whenever Shaw finds a Bludger to knock towards Root. Root thinks she’s winning this second game so far; even though Shaw’s conversation has been mostly limited to grunts, she hasn’t managed to score a hit yet. Her team is behind in the first game, the less important one, but not so far that they can’t recover. She’s torn between a desire to let Shaw win to make her happy and a different one to completely destroy her and earn her respect.
Out of the corner of her eye she detects a flash of gold and darts off after it. Shaw must have been watching her, because not long after, as she’s swerving to keep the small, winged ball in sight, a Bludger smashes into her side, knocking her off course and nearly unseating her from her broomstick. She re-orients herself, fails to catch sight of the Snitch again, but zooms off purposefully as if she had, keeping Shaw, holding pace across from her, in the corner of her eye. Abruptly she swerves and flies straight at Shaw, whose surprise is clear on her normally unexpressive face, and she fails to dodge out of the way before Root collides with her. Root throws one leg over Shaw’s broomstick to keep them from separating. Shaw swings her Beater’s bat wildly and smashes several of Root’s fingers. Root kicks Shaw’s thigh and tries to grab her bat.
A harsh whistle sounds, and several moments later both girls find themselves immobilized in the air, being berated by the referee. They’re escorted to the ground, where their chastisement continues, until they’re deemed sufficiently remorseful to resume playing. Root is far more adept than Shaw at fake repentance, but she makes apologies on Sameen’s behalf as well. Shaw holds one hand over her bruised leg while Root cradles her own hand as they mount their brooms to return to the game.
Shaw turns to Root. “That was pretty fun.”
***
One weekend, the last one before the holidays, they sit in Root’s constructed sanctuary on top of a section of roof, huddled underneath her gathered blankets against the cold. Root takes another strange piece of candy from the pile in front of her. Shaw, as a third year student, is now allowed to go into Hogsmeade village, and she’d purchased and brought back a selection of confections to give to Root. Well, ‘give’ may be a slightly generous description, since really she’d just sort of shoved them in Root’s general direction, but it was a nice gesture anyway.
“What are you doing for Christmas?” Root asks.
Shaw shrugs, the motion of her shoulders mostly concealed by the blankets heaped on top of them. “You?”
Root shrugs too. “Same thing.”
“Nice to get away from homework for a while.” Shaw offers, although neither of them are particularly diligent about that obligation.
“I’d rather stay here.” Root replies.
Shaw frowns. Root eats another sweet. Shaw pushes her blankets away and rises to her feet. “Stand up,” she says, gesturing at Root, who looks back quizzically, but does so.
Shaw pulls out her wand, and Root doesn’t hear the words of the spell that blasts her off the roof of the castle, and only has time for a mild sense of surprise before the ground hits her and breaks most of her bones.
***
“Sorry.” Shaw sits on a spindly stool beside Root’s bed in the hospital wing. “I didn’t know they could fix broken bones so fast.”
Root had been told that her recovery would take only a few days, not long enough to delay her departure over the holiday break. “It’s OK,” she replies. “It was sweet of you to try.”
“OK.” Shaw says awkwardly, and then stands up and walks away without saying anything else.
***
“If you tell anyone about this,” Shaw says warningly. “I’ll kill you.”
Their year-long detention had been cut short a few weeks after their return to Hogwarts, as Root and Shaw had begun spending enough of their time talking cordially that their overseers decided they’d learned their lesson. This served to illustrate how poorly the administration comprehended their reasons for causing wanton destruction, but neither one felt inclined to correct any misunderstandings. The end of shared detention could have meant an end to their nighttime excursions, but the next day, Shaw had sat next to Root at the Slytherin table for dinner and asked where she wanted to explore next.
“I won’t tell,” Root promises, making a zipping motion across her lips.
Shaw looks dubious, but produces a thin, shimmery cloak from her bag and tosses it over them. Root jumps up and down, unable to contain her excitement. “Stop it!” Shaw hisses.
Under cover of the invisibility cloak, they make their way into the kitchens and liberate several steaks that Sameen feels make their way to the Great Hall too rarely. They’re frozen, so after locating a promisingly abandoned room somewhere in the lower bowels of the castle, Shaw conjures up a fire and attempts to cook them.
“They’re burnt.” Shaw says with disgust some time later.
“You’ll do better next time,” Root assures her, watching her kick the slabs of meat into the darkened corners of the room. “Now I know how you kept getting away from me,” she says, looking towards the invisibility cloak, folded on the floor. “Guess you won’t be able to do that anymore.”
“Oh yeah?” Shaw challenges.
Root shrugs. “Well, you can try. If you want.”
***
For a period of time, a strange sort of staccato war begins. During the day, Root attempts to track Shaw. She pretends to be a third year student to attend the other girl’s classes, only to lose trace of her when she exits the classroom. She casts to spell to turn her skin gray as a statue to try and blend into the background. She enchants a legion of spiders to spin thin lines of webbing across doorways and corridors so that even a person under an invisibility cloak will leave a trail.
However, in the evenings, by nothing under than mutual unspoken understanding, a truce is called, and the two go off on adventures together. One night in the Forbidden Forest nearly gets them detention again; a groundskeeper passing by misses them only because Shaw’s sensitive hearing catches a crackle of branches and she has time to pull the cloak over herself and Root. On one occasion, Shaw agrees to dance with Root at the top of a castle spire, on the condition that she never mentions it to anyone. It’s unclear who Root would have told, in any case, but neither of them addresses this. They discover a carriage that occasionally brings goods to and from Hogsmeade, and stow away beneath it, somewhat painfully and by way of a spell that makes their hands and feet adhesive. Root is even able to make Sameen laugh occasionally, which she regards as one of her greatest personal achievements.
Professors and students alike are unsure if they should feel relieved that the two focus their primary energies on each other, or afraid of what sort of mayhem those energies may bring in their wake when joined.
***
“Will you write to me?” Root asks on the last night of the term, hanging by her legs on the plinth of a statue, her head resting upside-down beside Shaw, sitting right-side up with her back to the plinth.
“…OK.” Shaw replies eventually.