September 2, still the Common Room
Something happened behind black eyes between one blink and the next: smoke rolling through the night, a clock heaving to twelve with a conclusive click.
“Professor Slughorn has an hypothesis,” said the cobra—not Calmly, but actually perfectly calmly, as though Yaxley hadn’t said anything difficult. “He’s been following it for... I’m not sure how long, actually, sixty or seventy years. It’s more or less the hypothesis you’re espousing, Corban, if I understand you aright. It’s been translated several ways from the French, but I prefer ‘leave us to work.’”
Cleo could see that Yaxley was about to say something about families that needed to work. Which meant he was rattled by the way his barb had looked like it was going take but hadn’t. He’d known the Quartstaves (and the Lyttels, and the du Boises) long enough to know about the Sherwood-wide opinion that bankers and politicians were second in dishonor only to titled layabouts.
Fortunately for Yaxley, the Naj didn’t pause to let him get his sneer in. “The principle is that if the people are the right people, there’s no need for rules. They’ll do the right thing, nearly all the time, and control themselves very well, and all will be well. They’ll control each other, because more of them will be excellent than not, and they’ll want the good opinion of the excellent. Because they are the right people, brought up in the right way, and good behavior will be naturally met with rewards.”
Raising a sardonic eyebrow, he asked, “Whose definition of ‘the right way’ are we discussing, I wonder? Every Head of House has a different one. That’s intended.”
“Well, our Head of House’s,” Will suggested, not sounding very sure of himself.
“Which Head?”
This was such a blatantly stupid question that nobody dared to meet it with the obvious answer.
“Salazar Slytherin? We all try, of course, to be what we think he’d have wanted, but he didn’t exactly write us a philosophy book, and the writings that did come down need a certain degree of translating—not merely into our language, but into the context of our century. We know he had remarkably strong opinions about horse collars and garderobes, and which of you knows what one of those is?”
Merry and Will put up their hands.
The Naj rolled his eyes. “Which of you who have not spent summers hand-holding sight-seers around a tourist trap.”
Will kept his hand up. Merry elbowed him, hard, and he protested, “He said summers! I only did it for a week and then there was the thing with the crossbow in the gift shop and they wouldn’t let me back.”
“I remember,” Merry told him ominously.
“We were nine,” Will complained, looking hurt.
“I remember!”
The Naj eyed them, opened his mouth, and visibly decided his sanity would be better off without Will. Instead, he said in a dogged tone of long-suffering, “And there have been so many Heads of Slytherin since.”
Alan tried, “It’s got to be the one we’ve got, doesn’t it, whoever that is at the time? Anyway, that’s the one in charge.”
“What is his right way, then?” asked the Naj. After a moment, he elaborated, “What are his values?”
The silence stretched.
“All right,” the Naj allowed, amused in a distant sort of way behind the smoke and ticking, “we’ll try again. What does he value?”
“Pineapple?” Will tried.
“Connections,” Shafiq took over crisply. “Fellowship. Hedonism, in the classic sense of comfort and happiness as valuable things in themselves, of unhappiness and discomforts as things it’s not only pleasant but good and correct to be rid of.”
“People being pleasant,” Cleo put in. “Behaving nicely, correctly, getting recognition for…” she paused. “Er, hopefully for doing good work, but getting recognition, anyway.”
“How well,” the Naj asked lightly, “has that been working out for him, would you say?”
“…He seems pretty cheerful?” Alan ventured.
“I’ll be clearer. Professor Slughorn is a Slytherin. He has adopted a method of behavior, laissez-faire, in service of a long-term, overarching goal: that his students, who are his legacy, should be successful within our world. That we should behave well and achieve and be remembered well, according to the dictates of our culture and traditions. Do you argue with this? Am I wrong to say it, in any way?”
He waited with no signs of wanting to hurry them along while they glanced at each other and thought it over. Finally, even Yaxley grudgingly shook his head.
The Naj nodded acknowledgement. “Now: Is his method getting him what he wants?”
“Okay, Naj,” said Merry, “you want us to say ‘not well,’ obviously, but he doesn’t seem to think so.”
“A frog in a cold cauldron set over a fire doesn’t think it’s being boiled alive, either,” said the Naj—somberly, not with any scorn. “The heat has to increase suddenly to realize, or you have to step outside the cauldron and see the flames.”
His lips thinned. “Here was my step outside: Professor Slughorn dragged me to a meeting of the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers to present my work this summer. Do you know how many Slytherins under the age of fifty were there to show their work and be recognized?”
Shrugs.
“Me. To discuss a project that will add to Ravenclaw’s glory, not Slytherin’s, that I never expected to bear my name. And I was only there because he realized about a week in advance that we had no representation. I still have the brochure, if you’d like to check. How many Slytherins have been heads of Ministry departments and Ministers for Magic since the Veil of Secrecy dropped?”
“Oh, Merlin, Naj,” Will groaned, “if we’d known there was going to be a history exam! Loads.”
“Precisely,” the Naj said dryly. “How many witches and wizards do you think are working in the Ministry today, in total?”
“I dunno, a couple of hundred?” Will said vaguely.
His sister looked like she was one word away from hand-delivering him to Professor Sprout for a new room assignment. possibly six feet beneath a flower bed. This was not uncommon.
“More along the lines of a couple of thousand, counting the DoM and the public-service peripherals,” the Naj said dryly. “It’s the largest employer in magical Britain. Care to take a guess at what percentage are Slytherin?”
“Sixty,” Yaxley said, his stuck-out jaw defying the trajectory of the Naj’s argument.
And also defying all probability. Even if a quarter of the population could have supplied more than half of its government, it wasn’t as if everyone had the same ambitions, and needing wages wasn’t really what a lot of Slytherins expected from their futures. Cleo didn’t, for instance, even though Anthony was going to inherit the bulk of the estate. Even if she had, her hopes for the future didn’t involve a lot of fiddly paperwork and never-getting-anywhere and waiting for her superiors to die.
“About twelve percent,” the Naj told Yaxley, not unsympathetically. “The ratio is higher in the Department of International Relations. If you take them out of the equation it drops to eight. Significantly more than half the eight percent are over eighty years old, and they’ve either held their positions draconically through force of will and cunning for decades, or been gently drafted into sinecures.”
“…Did it get cold in here?” Cleo echoed her co-prefect, trying for a wan little smile.
“How do you know that?” Shafiq demanded sharply, her dark eyes drilling into the Naj’s.
“I’ve been repeatedly exposed to Rose & Yew’s catalogue of miniatures. At wandpoint. Going back two hundred years, as I can generally only tolerate around three hours of that nonsense at a time.”
They looked at him.
“It was moderately clear by the middle of my fourth year,” he explained crossly, “that if I didn’t want to be the only Slytherin besides Mulciber in my Potions NEWT classes, I was going to have to either be a sounding board for someone’s art history studies or quit Quidditch.”
They kept looking at him.
“Narcissa considered that Potions class was mostly for working o—impressing Professor Slughorn,” he further explained, still crossly.
“Soooo you needed Rosier to be there,” Cleo gave in and said what everyone was thinking.
He glared at her, but she thought he looked miffed rather than angry. “Or for him to convince Wilkes. In any case, since I wasn’t going to quit Quidditch—”
“You know, Snape,” Yaxley drawled, “if your captain wants you to quit Quidditch you’re supposed to quit Quidditch.”
“He wasn’t captain in our fourth-year, Corban,” the Naj scoffed, “and it wasn’t a strategic impulse of his, he was just fussing.”
“Fair,” chorused Merry, Cleo, and Alan. “What?” Alan continued, raising a fuzzy eyebrow at the Naj. “The first time I got dragged to a match you got knocked off your broom and then I thought that titchy Gryff Beater must have broken your fingers trying to make you let go of it.”
“He did,” the Naj said smugly, “or one of them, but that’s beside the point. The point is that I have spent hours upon hours helping Rosier swot for his grandfather’s exams.”
“I hardly think one bunch of artists’s records,” Yaxley started, dismissively.
“They don’t only keep records of their own work,” the Naj cut him off. “That would he highly short-sighted. And every record includes a family tree and list of accomplishments, and the sitter’s Hogwarts House, or the equivalent. For the more current statistics, let’s not even discuss the way Lucius Malfoy complains about the ratios all the time,” he answered with a little grimace that was half sympathy for their sudden unease and, clearly, half annoyance with Lucius Malfoy. “He can’t get halfway through dinner anymore without going on a rant about how no one over there knows the difference between lobbying and bribery. It’s making Narcissa mental, because when Reggie’s over he’s started taking notes at the table.”
Shafiq didn’t exactly sniff, or even make a face per se, but her opinion of Reg Black’s table manners was suddenly a solid presence in the room.
The Naj sat back on his hands, his spine loose. “Slytherins are working in St. Mungo’s, one or two in reasonably responsible positions,” he said. “There seem to be some at the Department of Mysteries, although that’s harder to confirm. Many are caring for their estates in very traditional ways, breeding horses and tending potions ingredients and so on, or…” he waved a mystified artisan’s hand that gave Alan a sudden coughing fit, “doing finance and trade and whatnot. You get the occasional Quidditch player or inventor, and there are a few on the paper. Do you understand me?”
“You are saying,” started Shafiq, and had to stop. Ice formed on her words, but it wasn’t directed at the Naj now. “You’re saying that we are out of power.”
“I am saying,” the Naj said, speaking right to her, “that England, its magical folk, Brittania, that Brigid has spoken. She’s telling us, every day, ‘We do not want what you’re becoming.’”
“You think you’re so smart,” Yaxley said, leaning forward, matching the Naj’s trick of ignoring everything he didn’t want to answer. “But this was really dumb, Snape. Coming behind Sluggy’s back when you knew he was ‘having an early night…’ gave your hand away, there. Maybe you thought you could talk us around, so no one would go tell him you’re working against him, but now we’ve got you. If you—”
He faltered, because the Naj was looking at him as if he’d grown an extra head. “Working against him?” the Naj asked, as though Yaxley had been speaking Swahili.
“Saying he’s… saying he’s doing everything wrong, and…”
“If it weren’t for Horace Slughorn,” the Naj enunciated, straightening up and biting off every word, “the percentage of Slytherins in government would be zero. If it weren’t for his genius at networking, his boundless goodwill and generosity and ceaseless efforts on behalf of our House, even those from the best and most powerful families would only have futures of financial security and empty smiles of contempt from your out-House colleagues. Not a scrap of power. And even security only for a generation or two more, before your names became utterly meaningless. It happened to the muggle nobility, and it could have happened to you. It can. If not for Horace Slughorn, it would have already.”
Now he leaned forwards. “Have you forgotten? The Professor was at the Fenshaw meeting. Do you think him a fool? Did you think,” he snorted, “Dumbledore forced me on him, because Dumbledore loves me so well?”
A few smiles ran around the room. There was even an unwilling eyebrow-quirk from Yaxley.
The Naj joined them, sardonically, then leaned forward, suddenly thunderous. “Slughorn has been waiting decades for Slytherin to pull itself together and prove him right: that it’s made of the right people. The best people, who will do the right thing and be excellent. To show its quality. To really behave well, not just ape it while he’s watching so he’ll ask them to a party. To behave correctly, as our ancestors would hope for us, to do good work and earn recognition. To be who Salazar Slytherin said we should be, not the pettiest that fools who hate us think we are.”
He took a deep breath, and the smoke rolled through his eyes again. It seemed to steady him. “I know—none better—that when everyone around you is telling you who you are, giving you the same name, it’s hard to remember they’re wrong. Backstabber. Cheat. Liar. Wicked, evil, cruel, twisted, reptiles, vermin.”
His eyes jerked to Shafiq, sitting next to him—not as if he’d meant to, but like he’d just realized, like a mediwitch when someone had just shown them a cutting curse someone had hidden. Cleo hadn’t noticed her do anything, particularly. Very gently, he added, “Cold-blooded. Unfeeling. Inhuman.”
It was like with Yaxley’s poisonous strike before, except that Shafiq didn’t have any smoke behind her eyes. Her face twisted at the last word and went all hot, and then the Naj had pulled her against his side and just held her there, tight, while her nails dug blood from her palms and she did grim battle with her own breath against his shoulder. “I know,” he said quietly, not quite apologetic, and laid a long, pale hand behind her neck.
Then suddenly a stare like claws, like a February storm raked over all their faces. “A taipan is her own defense,” a glacier creaked, icicles striping her black hair. “Except in this. If it is ever heard of again, even in insinuation, I will see you ruined.”
Yaxley drew in an unsteady breath, while Cleo was still trying to work out what ‘it’ was, then squared his shoulders. “I should curse you for doing that to my Housemate.”
Warm again so fast it made Cleo dizzy, the Naj smiled. “Good,” he told Yaxley fiercely, squeezing Shafiq a little tighter. “Yes.”
Taken aback, Yaxley eyed him. “You want me to curse you?”
“No, but only because you’re mistaken,” the Naj explained. “The impulse is exactly right.”
Yaxley started to say something, and then just eyed him, unwilling to admit he was confused.
“You had no right,” Shafiq said in a low, intense voice, although she didn’t pull away.
“I don’t ask for the right, when the need bleeds in front of me, the moment of opportunity is fleeting, and everyone else is too blind or too polite,” the Naj said matter-of-factly. “Quod succedit, facite.”
After a moment, she sighed, not happily. Her shoulders relaxed, though, and her fists unclenched.
He let them all settle a bit, let their nerves settle, let Shafiq get her face back in order and sit upright again, red-rimmed and a little quivery about bitten lips but in command of herself. Then he sighed, and spoke so casually that they only then noticed how tightly he’d drawn their eyes, how the chairs and rugs and game tables and even the fireplace had seemed to fall away from their little circle: not merely into irrelevance but out of their world.
“I didn’t really expect us to come to accord in one evening,” he remarked with a rueful little curl to his lips. “And we’ve all still got work to do before bed; I trust you fifth and seventh years will particularly want to start off running. So we’ll have to continue hammering this out tomorrow evening, unless there’s a crisis.”
He stood and stretched, and looked down at them. While no Flitwick, he was shorter than one or two of the taller boys even in Cleo’s year, certainly shorter than Yaxley, and skinnier than almost anybody.
Somehow he didn’t look small at all right now. The shadow of an almost-smile on his face wasn’t a threat, exactly, but it wasn’t a smile from pleasure, either.
“I’ll just leave you with this,” he said, summoning his papers with a flick of his wand. Cleo was so jealous; she’d heard they wouldn’t even start to learn silent casting until sixth year. “Slughorn was at the Fenshaw meeting. Afterwards, he didn’t merely allow the measures we decided on, he actively supported them. As a rule, he merely rewards what he likes and ignores what he doesn’t. When Slytherin came to a decision at that meeting, he helped make it happen.”
His face curled into an entire half of a smile. Even though Cleo would have quite probably walked through fire if their Naja had given her a good enough reason and promised to help her with the preventive spells and afterwards with the burns, that was hair-raising. She knew that his teeth were only crooked, but she was suddenly afraid of them anyway.
“You think the Head of Slytherin is blind to me?” he asked, so softly, the smile spreading darkly to the other side of his face. She would never have guessed his mouth could go so long. “Wake up, my own. He’s been praying for this all his life.”
He bowed to them. Properly, correctly, exactly as their grandparents had taught them. From the chest, his shoulders barely moving, not in a single, dutiful descent but the nod graciously following the bow: first among equals. Then he turned on his heel and left with his research. Their House’s doors opened for him, and closed behind him, without being touched.
(Cleo thought she saw his hand start to rise as he approached the doors, thought she saw his shoulders move a little when they swung open, as if he hadn’t expected that at all. He surged through smoothly enough, though, and didn’t turn while they could see him.)
Merry lifted her voice, her coloratura winding a very-nearly Greensleeves melody spookily around the hearthlit common room, notes as clean as starlight but just as far away, almost as quietly as the Naj had spoken:
“Runes he knew: young Kon well knew them,
Runes of honor and family runes.
Runes he used: men to preserve them,
Edges to deaden, the seas to calm.
Kon with Rig in runes contended;
Great was his craft and great his kenning.
This right Kon sought, and soon he won it:
Rig to be called, and skilled with runes.”
“Well done, Merry-Jan,” Will groaned disgustedly after a moment, the sudden strength of his Northern vowels blessedly and reassuringly mundane in the sudden darkness. “Tha’s put out the fire.”
“Er,” said Merry, a little sheepishly. She kept a better control over her voice, which shouldn’t have surprised anybody. “Professor Flitwick did say last spring he’d probably better start teaching me to incant this year.”
“That choir is a menace,” said Shafiq harshly, the sound coming from near the great window, close to the stairwell. Her skin was dark enough that, with only the last strainings of twilight filtering through the murky Black Lake, they could barely see her at all.
“Fear us,” Alan agreed solemnly, “for trilly we are treble and shall round-ly defeat you.”
There was a long pause wherein options were weighed, but since it was hard to aim well in the dark, everyone jointly decided the best option was to Firmly Ignore Him.
Alan made a sad noise.
“That choir,” Yaxley said, not so much harsh as disgusted, “is being infected by Essence of Ravenclaw.”
“Could be worse,” Merry pointed out, at the same time as Will pointed out, “Yeah, but it’s the whole choir being infected, innit.”
Alan said brightly, “Not really, but we think they’re really buying it.”
“Merlin’s balls,” Yaxley growled, “if this is more of that let’s all pretend we’re happy fluffy—”
Shafiq cut him off. “Snape’s right about one thing, at least: this is the start of OWL year and NEWT year for all of us but you sixth years.”
“We’re still starting NEWT study,” Merry pointed out warily. “Building our founda—”
“Which means that you two Quartstaves will be on patrol duty three nights a week to each other year’s two, as Yaxley and I were last year, although for the first week the two of us will accompany you fifth years. Thank you, Marion, for volunteering to start tonight.”
“…Reet,” sighed Merry. Despite also having been volunteered when it wasn’t his fault for once, her brother laughed.
Taking that for meeting-adjourned, Cleo made for the stairwell to the girls’ dorms, but before she got there, an enormous hand closed on her wrist in the dark. Her heart sped up and her other hand flashed to her wand, but the big former Beater didn’t yank or twist, only held her, rough fingers spread sweaty and hard over half her arm.
“Funny thing about old Snape,” Yaxley’s voice poured into her ear, hot and oily, the kind of angry that was pushed through a pleasant smile. “He thinks he’s some kind of guard dog, you know? Thinks we’re all his cute little lambikins. Especially sweet, swotty little blossoms like you, Periwinkle.”
“Did you like everyone calling you Crows-foot, Corban?” she asked, her voice steady. Her grip was steady on her wand, but he was only using one hand, too, and he was mostly behind her, pulling her not off her feet, quite, but up and back, a little off balance.
“Little Peregrine,” he crooned, which she supposed was some victory. “Won’t even use her own name anymore. The snake that helps, so eager to please, first to crawl up and lick the mudblood’s boots.”
She sighed. “Do you have some career planned where you think your NEWTs aren’t going to matter? Because I know you have homework.”
His voice came closer, until she could ugh, feel his breath on her ear, hear his smile go nasty. “He wants to wrap us all in cotton-wool, Blakeney. He thinks we’re babies. It doesn’t matter what you do for him, how much you jump up on him and lick his face. He’s never going to kiss you back, he’s never going to touch you.“
Nothing but air grabbed her, low, smooth, sliding, secret and swift under her robes. She couldn’t help it, she gasped.
Yaxley’s voice went as deep as he could make it, mocking her. “He’s never going to fuck you, Cleo. You can bend over backwards and spread as wide as you want, give the rest of us a show, he won’t even notice. He’ll never fill you up even if you beg and rip your robes off. You’ll always be just a helpless brat to him.”
I never wanted that, she reminded herself, pulling fury up from her toes to distract herself from how, right now, she could have used a guard dog. From the air under her robes, still slipping against the pure silk of her smalls as if she were standing in a living stream, lapping at her, prodding.
She remembered suddenly, vividly, fighting with her mother about superstition and family tradition and ostentation and fitting in. Now her mother’s superstition was the only thing keeping that insinuating magic outside of her. Only she could keep his other invasions out.
I never wanted it. I blessed his handfasting. He didn’t think I was a brat, he asked for my blessing, he counted on my help tonight.
What would the Naj do? He wouldn’t fight. Not unless his brain had shut down from Potter-poisoning.
She flicked her wand, but not at Yaxley. The hearth re-lit, warm yellow light bursting out over the room.
Thank Circe, he jumped back.
Before he’d realized everyone had already left she was halfway down the stairs that fought off all boys past puberty with pendulums, paralysis, spiky bitey things, and really nasty semi-poisonous gasses. She tilted a cool gaze up at him and, in the bland, meek voice she’d used on Lily Potter before she had the clumsy bint’s measure, said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you, Lead-Prefect Yaxley, but not everyone’s as, I mean, not everyone thinks like you. Good night.”
She gave a little wave, and touched the wall. The stairs, the wonderful, obliging, understanding Slytherin stairs, flattened out into a steep ramp and slid her down and around the corner before Yaxley had worked out what she’d meant.
Darting into her dorm room, she put an extra ward on the door, just to feel better.
“Prefect meeting went that well, did it?” asked Glenda, looking up from what looked like the same herbal Cleo had been trying to read earlier.
“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Cleo said, her chest tight. “Except, Yaxley is going to be a colossal problem and does anyone want to give me a hand?”
“With Yaxley?”
“Well, him too, obviously. Ideally with feeding him his bits, although I’d settle for making sure no one ever takes him seriously about anything again ever in his life ever.”
“Goosed her,” guessed Maeve wisely.
“No, look at precious, she’s mad! It’s to do with Se-e-e-ver-us,” Branwyn sang, grinning.
Cleo didn’t lash out at them, although Yaxley had her so wound up that for a moment she was tempted. She was going to need them, and they were her friends really. Her family, like McGonagall always told the firsties. And not like Yaxley, not the kind of family you drugged at Beltane so you could blackmail them into behaving for the rest of the year with photos of the sorts of things they drunkenly decided made appropriate chamberpots and glory holes.
“Both,” she agreed, “except he’s actually trying to make trouble and he’s being smarter than we thought he was, and I think it’s going to be bad.”
Because he was. He really was being smart. It wasn’t that she’d ever made any secret about supporting the Naj; she’d started admiring him too early for that to work, before Slytherin had really started to teach her what subtlety was.
Besides, some people just could not take a hint. Some people had to be hit over the head with an I’m-Your-Friend stick before they’d even consider it might be true, let alone believe it. Had to be hit a lot. Subtle had not been an option.
So it took no great intelligence for Yaxley to zero in on her as someone he should neutralize if he opposed Snape.
The way he’d raked her soil soft and planted seeds she knew were true, though. The way he’d made her stare at facts she’d never cared about before while her pulse was high and she was scared and throbbing. The way he’d forced her into association, tricked her body into sensation and expectation when there was nothing coming. Manipulated her chemical emotions like that, and all the time made her think about the most alive wizard she’d ever met, who protected her and believed in her in ways no one else did, who she’d never known how to protect back. Who sometimes felt almost as strong as the Headmaster, when he forgot that he could even find reasons to be scared of (for) the firsties.
The way that piece of filth had made her think about someone she’d always seen as a beaky, bony, fragile, ferocious, boy-shaped hurricane: not even as a grown wizard, but as a man.
She didn’t, in fact, think Yaxley had thought all that out. She didn’t know him well, two years above her own, but she’d watched them all over her books, like she’d seen the Naj do a thousand times, like Lance had over his sketchbooks. She thought she knew him well enough to be able to say: no, he wasn’t as thoughtful a plotter as all that.
Thoughtful plotters tripped themselves up. It was the opportunistic ones that were the worst. The ones with low cunning and quick reflexes and good instincts, who’d go for a vulnerable spot the moment they saw it without bothering to work out the whys and wherefores. Those were the ones who couldn’t be stopped, because they never knew what they were going to do next themselves, until they’d done it.
The jinx had stopped when she’d turned the corner, but it had done it’s work. She could be as mad about it as she wanted, but prowling around in her own brain like a helpless wet cat wouldn’t help. She could endure and let his nasty fungus prey on her, or she could shed a blighted skin and make herself her own again.
So, plaintively, she said, “And it was both, and I despise that wanker, and I could really use a hand.”
“I’d love to,” Glenda said fervently, eyeing her around the chesty regions. “Merlin, hasn’t it been the worst summer? My parents wouldn’t let me have one day to myself! But Maeve and Winnie tried to have a go together when we were all upstairs, er, trying to do homework…” She rolled her eyes. “And someone’s done something to the beds. Everybody’s. The boys’ beds, too; I went up to see and we asked around.”
“They won’t tie together?” she asked, dismayed.
“Yeah, and it’s worse than that,” Maeve scowled, sitting up. “The second person who tries to get on one just rolls off!”
Thinks we’re babies, Yaxley’s voice drifted through Cleo’s head. Cotton-wool.
She shook him off. Hopefully, she asked, “Did anyone try the showers? Or the floor?” From the way they brightened up, just as hopeful, she gathered that they hadn’t thought of that. Instead of deploring the quality of Slytherins today, she grabbed Glenda’s hand and told the other two, “You can test it out in here, if you want.”
The spoilsport she wasn’t going to try and name (even though there was, really, only one possible candidate) had, it turned out, either not thought of the showers and floor or had mostly been concerned that everyone do their actual sleeping alone. Or maybe the buttoned-up—er, the silly and definitely unknown person had assumed everybody wanted privacy.
Whichever it was, Cleo felt much better once she was scrubbed and clean and Glenda had replaced mocking magic with real, admiring, warm, toothy, lingering, solid friendship. Even if they couldn’t cuddle up after.
Cleo really wished they could have cuddled up after. Alone in her own bed, closeted behind her own curtains, without a friend’s bulk and snoring and distinctively long, curly hair to distract her, she couldn’t stop the thoughts she’d never had before.
Like long fingers on her neck, anywhere, everywhere, white and smooth as ice but warm, with big, knobby, very human wrists and knuckles (and knees? Probably also knobby knees). Eyes so fierce and focused and certain they made the world fall away. She’d seen him bared once when he wasn’t himself, when she’d really been a child. Yaxley was right: she’d never find out what was really there, never be held even as close as Shafiq.
She didn’t want to. If that happened, everything would be awful. She’d blessed his handfasting. She’d meant it. She still meant it.
Glenda was lovely and fun, and a great friend. So far, at least, there weren’t any misunderstandings between any of the four of them. Glenda was safe, she was good. But they were just friends, there wasn’t any real pull between them. If her clear voice shivered boys’ bones, or Maeve’s, it didn’t Cleo’s. And her fingers were awfully small.
She kept remembering empty air, stirring, seeking. Small fingers like Glenda’s and her own were no shield at all, no stopper, couldn’t rub that wicked ghost away.
She kept thinking that the sandpaper scrape of a sharp jaw a few too many hours past a morning shaving spell might do the trick. That was the only stubborn, revolving, indelible phoenix of an image that she could forgive herself for at all, and that only because she could tell when a grown wizard was using growth-suppressing topicals instead of fussing around with spells every morning.
Well past midnight, by the moon, Cleo Blakeney gave up on sleeping and went to the window with her parchment and quill. She wrote:
Dear Mum,
I’ll write a longer letter on Saturday about how my first week back and Prefect duties are going, but I know you’ll be happy to get this one. It boils down to: Apothecary Snape (he gets awfully snippy about Mister and Master and just about everything else, as usual; speculation is high again already about what crawled down his collar as a child and died) agrees with you about robe safety. He read everyone the riot act this morning about short skirts and wool fibers getting into potions, and jewelry, and probably quill feathers or something. I left for breakfast rather quickly, as I felt I’d got the gist.
So: I still think it’s a bit over the top, and even if it was a great diversion for great-whatever Percy there’s no need for me to flounce around like a peacock, but if it’ll stop me getting lectured every morning, I give in. Please send along a nice magically-neutral silk wardrobe that will protect me from hallway hexes and cross looks by Mr. Overprotective Wizard and let me get to breakfast in time to eat some of it before class. Yes, I promise I will really-truly wear all the silk, all the time, just as you asked, as long as it’s within school guidelines and not silly.
I hope you and Not-Professor Hardars Mother Hen will be very happy together in the heavily warded tower with the slick diamond walls I assume you’ll mutually decide is the only possible option for sensible people to live in. Dad and I will console each other with tea and the kneazle and too many cakes.
Your loving, if exasperated, daughter,
Perry
(missing you and Dad again already.)
It occurred to her that she could, as a prefect, actually get up to the owlery even at this hour without getting a detention. As soon as the ribbon was tied around the parchment, though, the day caught up to her in a wave of grey exhaustion. The morning would be soon enough, and getting it around noon would worry Mum worlds less than if she could trace the letter back to 2AM.
Satisfied, she put the rolled up parchment and started back to her bed, but the open curtains and slick, rumpled sheets gaped at her like a wet mouth. Her hand started to shake.
She couldn’t go back in there. She’d been lying there, aching and tossing and poisoned. New shields her mother could give her to put around the outside of herself were not going to help.
She went back to the window, scrawled a few lines and rolled them up in a new ribbon, and cast the best fireproofing spell she knew. Then she crept upstairs, eyes peeled, heart pounding, and wand out, to the common room fireplace, and dropped in a pinch of her supply of emergency floo powder.
“Evander Rosier’s hearth, Rosier Hall,” she whispered, and hurled the scroll down into the fire as hard as she could, willing with all her memories of what baby-magic felt like for it to clear the flames and reach him before their green faded back to hot orange.
Maybe she was imagining it, but she thought she heard a startled, sleepy, “Ow! Wha…?” and a deeper, inquisitive, contented rumble that made her clench and quiver all over, especially inside. It sent her fleeing for the stairs like a terrified mouse.
Despite that moment of irrational, electrifying adrenaline, the moment her own door closed behind her all the tension fell right through her bare feet.
She had done all she could for the night, had started to do the right thing. In the morning, she would send Mum’s letter, and that would be useful and safe and not in the least suspicious: everyone with good manners would be writing home at least once this week.
Her bed was just her bed again, the one she’d slept in for four years. Relieved by resolve, she had no more trouble sleeping that night—although the dreams were, deliciously and regrettably, about what she’d expected.