XXIX
The list of people I was actively avoiding was starting to become a little ridiculous. More than a little, actually. I could scarcely walk down a corridor without needing to double back upon encountering a less than desirable face, and, frankly, I was sick of it. I didn't have the spare time to waste on hiding in secret passageways and abandoned classrooms for danger to pass, so I stopped caring. If they had an issue, let them avoid me for once.
Like a good student, or as good a student I could be while already having hour long detentions every evening for the foreseeable future, I attended each class dutifully, giving absolutely no reason to earn any further punishment, or so I hoped.
I set a few hours aside each week for extra training in anticipation of the final task, but soon found my motivation waning in the dark classrooms scattered throughout the castle. If I was completely honest with myself, I doubted any of my pre-task cramming had yielded tangible results, the second task especially so.
Abiel dropped by on occasion to give me his own personally curated study notes, handing them to Pranavi to carry them up to our shared dormitory if I was nowhere to be found. When he did find me, however, he lingered, and I lingered, too, because while my relationships with so many others I thought would be by my side forever had become strained, the two of us had only grown closer since the tournament began. He was never the over-talkative type, though, so our conversations quickly fizzled and we parted awkwardly, not quite knowing what to say, given the circumstances.
On one early April evening, someone else did seek me out, just not a person I expected. I'd been sitting on the on the corse sand surrounding the lake, reading one of Abiel's recommended books, a rather bland tome about detection charms, when a set of worn leather shoes appeared in my periphery. Thumbing a page, I followed the length of their legs up to their face and swallowed. He didn't look at me, just stood there, close enough to touch, had I chose to do so.
"Hey, Damon," I said, sounding strained, even to my own ears.
I hadn't expected him to seek me out first, not with all he'd been going through. Honestly, I should have swallowed my pride long before then and sought him out.
"Hey," he echoed, then imparted a subdued grin. "It's been quite a year, huh?"
I chuckled softly, feeling acutely the awkward distance that time and trauma had put between us. Quite a year, indeed. What an understatement. "Yeah. Definitely not ideal."
'What do you want?' I couldn't ask. 'Why are you here?'
"Damon," I began after several moments of thick silence, "I'm sorry for—"
"Save it." He waved me off, like swatting away a fly, though his eyes remained clouded. "I... don't want to talk about it. Not right now. You understand, right?"
Nodding, I patted the ground beside me. "Alright. Do you... do you want to sit down?"
Truthfully, I didn't know what to say to him, my tongue still itching to give my condolences for his mother. We used to do so well in silence, but now it felt as though I was hyper-aware of every breath.
"No." He rocked back on his heels, clearly contemplating something. Finally, he said, "Rather than agonising over our misfortune, why don't we do something?"
From anyone else, I might have been offended. Do something? When my brother is comatose? Really? From Damon, though, well, he better understood my position than just about anyone. If he thought he needed to distract himself from recent events, then maybe I did, too, and I wouldn't stop him. If anything, I owed it to him as a friend to help him wade through his grief.
"Do have anything in particular in mind?" I asked.
"You know me." He tapped his temple. "I always have a few dozen bad ideas swirling around up here."
"Of that I have no doubt. "
Then, he started licking off his shoes, moving on to remove his socks, while I watched it all progress with suspicion. Whatever plan required no footwear was not necessarily a plan I wanted any part of.
"We are going for a nice little swim," he revealed, working free the buttons on his sleeves and around his neck.
"Damon," I laughed, surprising myself with the sound, "the water will be freezing. Are you trying to give us both hypothermia?"
"Never thought you'd be the type to back down from a challenge," he tutted, shaking his head with feigned disappointment.
"You see, the thing is, Damon, that I'm a Ravenclaw, and we aren't known to do stupid things like you Gryffindors." I put so much mocking condescension into the sentence that he had no choice but to take it as jest, like intended. "Swimming through the lake in late March would be just that: stupid, but by all means, for go for it yourself. I'll be sure to haul you back to the nurse for a Pepper-up Potion when all is said and done."
"You would have done it before," he pointed out.
Looking up at him, I made a rather unflattering face. "I'm stupid by Ravenclaw standards. Easily influenced. I'm trying to do better."
He grinned, and it stilled something in my chest. Oh, how I wanted him to be happy again. "Easily influenced, you say?"
Damon held out a hand, making grabbing motions with his fingers, daring me to take it, to be easily influenced one more time. Before I could reconsider, my fingers wrapped over his wrist, and likewise, his hand circled around my forearm. I jerked up to my feet in an ungraceful lurch, not even sure myself why I gave in. Maybe it's because I always gave in to his whimsy, yearning for acceptance and belonging. When Cass was too timid and Lyra too lazy when he wanted to do something reckless, I always rose to the challenge. Every. Single. Time.
It hadn't been a romantic inclination back then, nor was it now, since both of our hearts laid elsewhere. We were only friends in desperate need to do distract from their individual grief by doing something — anything stimulating enough to drag our whirling thoughts to the present moment, as opposed to drowning in regret and a million lost moments.
I made a show of stretching my limbs before shrugging off my robes. "So. What's the bet?"
Because there was always a bet with him.
He pointed out over the dark water. "I bet you... drumroll please... that I can beat you to the other side of the lake."
I followed his gaze and cocked my head, considering. "No other ground rules?"
"You Ravenclaws, always trying to be tricky," he said, rolling his eyes. "I can't believe I have to say this, but you need to swim the whole way."
Damn. I'd been planning on summoning a broom had he not elaborated.
"How boring, but fine," I agreed. "We need to swim it. Anything else, your majesty?"
"This is about physical speed, so no magic to make you speed by faster." He patted my head, missing up my hair, just to be annoying. "Worry not, young sapling, for I will be there to rescue you when your strength fails and you start drowning."
I swatted his hand away. "I think you meant IF I start drowning, which I won't. I'm in fantastic shape, I'll have you know. I have to be to get through the tournament."
He nodded sagely, also slipping off his robes and letting them pool to the ground around his ankles, before moving on to toss away his shirt and roll up his pant legs. "I'm sure napping your way through the second task required so much stamina and strength. I apologise for ever doubting you."
Glaring solely at his face, in part to avoid glancing the rest of his available skin, I gave him a good natured shove for his teasing, and while he was mid-fall, I took off for the water, shedding my extraneous clothes as I ran. The impact of the icy water on first my toes, my ankles, and then my calves made me gasp, every affected square inch of my flesh recoiling and begging me to reconsider. I sunk down to my thighs before opting to get it over with and diving the rest of the way under. The cold stung my cheeks and seemed to freeze the air in my lungs, preventing them from expanding for a heart-chilling moment, until I emerged with a loud splash, flinging the foulest curse I could think of in Damon's direction, who I heard cackling behind me. That, too, cut off when he hit the water. His sharp inhale as the cold took hold came as music to my ears.
Served him right to suffer with me.
Not willing to squander my head start, I forced my numbing limbs into motion, kicking forward off the last bit of land that I could touch into wild, open water.
"What are you doing?" I heard someone call from a nearby bank growing more distant by the second. The iced-over cogs in my brain eventually placed the voice as Frey's, and I flushed at being caught by him, of all people, doing something so objectively foolish. The warmth from the blood flooding my cheeks unfortunately did not last.
Could I have answered without my chattering teeth biting off my own tongue, I would have.
I saw a swell in the number of people crowding the lake the further we got out, and thought I might have even spotted Lyra and Cass, but wrote that off as wishful thinking. My stomach dipped with disappointment when I searched out Frey's white blond hair without luck, concluding he had better things to do than to watch me freeze half to death.
At the sound of Damon's nearing splashing, I redoubled my efforts.
"I think I felt a grindylow," he choked, and I noted with satisfaction that he didn't seem nearly as smug about this idea now than he had when he suggested it.
"Are," I let in a shaky breath, "are there grindylow's native to the lake?"
"You're the Ravenclaw," he quipped when he could at last muster the words. "You tell me."
"Do you think the giant squid is a man-eater?" I asked. "He might be testing you out."
"Again," he gasped, "you tell me."
We were quite a while away from shore by then and tiring fast, maybe half way, maybe less. Hogwarts' lake was objectively massive, but it never felt more massive than while trying to force myself to cut through it, my arms slicing through water, so far from everything else that the only thing left to hear came in the form of Damon's laboured breathing and our mutual splashing. The distance hadn't felt nearly so far while traversing it as first years on our shared boats. The memory was a bright light shining over a dark time in my life.
"Do you recall the boat ride across the lake on our first day?" I asked, pushing the words past my clenched teeth. "You puked into the water, remember? That's how we met. You were sitting in the middle of the seat between me and another boy when you suddenly needed to vomit and I nearly fell out of the boat trying to get out of your way. Who gets sea sick on a tiny paddle boat?" When he didn't immediately respond, I twisted my neck to peer behind me. "Damon?"
Except, the water had grown eerily quiet. Void of his breath and his splashing, and he simply wasn't there.
Damon was gone.
That cheater! He must have opted to use a bubble head charm, or a form of transfiguration to breathe underwater and leave me in the dust. I might have respected his ingenuity had he not explicitly forbade me from my first line of trickery in flying across, but he never did say anything about trickery so long as we swam the whole way.
For a second time, I dipped my head beneath the surf, squinting open my eyes to try to get a glimpse of him. I wanted to see how far ahead he'd gotten, but the water proved too cloudy, and the dark too dense. Soon, I dearly wished I hadn't looked at all, for knowing how bad the visibility was beneath me, the uncertainty of what could be lurking nearby, did nothing to ease my anxiety.
I made it only a little further before something large brushed my bare leg, winding around my ankle. Try as I might to kick the thing free, in one abrupt tug it dragging me completely under, constricting my leg in a grip so tight I held little doubt it would bruise, but I hardly had any time to think of that as dirty lake water rushed down my throat. I reached into the belt area around my skirt where I sometime stashed my wand and found the spot empty. I patted at it again, expecting to have made a mistake, to find my wand carefully tucked away as it always was, but no. Nothing.
Did it get dislodged during the swim? Did I somehow leave it with my robes?
"Damon!" I tried to scream, only for the sound to be lost in a deluge of rushing bubbles and thick, thick dark.
Water burned up my nostrils. Instinct demanded I choke it out, gasp for breath, there was nowhere for the water to go but in, in, in.
Abandoning my fruitless attempts to find a wand that simply wasn't there, I sought to dislodge the tendrils twining around my leg. Whatever dark thing had curled itself around my ankle spanned twice the length of my thumb in width alone, and was hard to the touch, unrelenting to my clenched fists beating against it.
It didn't tighten, nor otherwise go for an attack, only dragging me lower.
Lower.
Until the rippling light trickling in from above grew dark, and my mind grew dark with it.