Acupuncture
When Blaise Zabini was four years old, he was deathly afraid of needles. This was because one of his stepbrothers, Jackylyn, was instructed by the private tutor to master the art transfiguring matchsticks into needles. Blaise would imagine them piercing his skin and lodging so deep into his bird-like bones that no one would ever be able to wrench them free. While Jackylyn practed he would hide, scrunched up and in the fetal position, in the back of his closet, until he was eventually coaxed out with promises of fresh salmon for dinner.
When Blaise Zabini was five, the cousin of one of his mother's dead lovers buried an ornate dagger through his right lung.
Six years later Blaise transformed a matchstick into a needle without flinching.
Bread
When people call Crabbe a glutton, he grunts.
This is not, as many assume, because he is stupid. It's more that he's afraid that if he does speak, he'll end up telling them about the nights in his room without food, arms wrapped around his stomach to hold in the ache and wishing with all of his heart that he had not spoken out of turn.
Crazy
Narcissa is icy dignity. She wishes for money and marries a man even colder than she is. Her parents call her the perfect pureblood daughter.
Andromeda is warm and too soft. She wishes for happiness and marries a mudblood with gentle smiles just like hers. Her parents call her nothing, for they treat her as if she was never born.
Bellatrix is raw passion and wild frenzy; she spends years of her life serving a man even more insane than she is and dies with less than she started with.
She doesn't care what her parents call her. She spent fourteen years in Azkaban; some days she can't remember her own name, let alone theirs.
Dog
When Sirius Black was eight years old, he brought home a stray dog to his mother. Walburga Black took one look at the straggly fur and lopsided grin before she felled it with a glow of avada green and a hateful shriek.
When Sirius Black completed his first animagus transformation he laughed himself sick.
Emotion
Pansy vows never to tell Draco that his expressiveness banishes the similarities between him and his father. She's afraid that if she does he'll stop smiling, and she's become rather attached to his dimples.
Ferment
Harry doesn't drink milk.
Hermione wonders, absently, if he's lactose intolerant, but dismisses the thought when she sees him eat pizza during dinner.
If she asked, he would tell her that he was once so hungry that he drank expired milk, and the resulting sickness has made it his own sort of anathema.
Grade
Many of her housemates assume that, for Hermione, it was a toss up between Ravenclaw and Gryffindor. She doesn't tell them that before Hogwarts she was a B level student, that the only reason she buries herself in books and reads into the night until her eyes burn with exhaustion is because the thought of pureblood bigots sneering at her for any reason other than her blood gives her hives.
Hiccup
The Dark Lord Voldemort was the most feared dark wizard in centuries. He'd dueled more people than he cared to count and never once had he been in danger of losing.
He'd never counted on a baby that had barely started growing hair managing to deflect the curse he'd cast more times than he had fingers.
Injury
Harry doesn't go into Myrtle's bathroom anymore. It's not, like Hermione assumes, because of bad memories of the Chamber of Secrets, though that should probably be enough to put him off ever returning.
It's more because the water on the tiles looks like Malfoy's blood in the right light.
Joker
George doesn't understand why Fred won't get up. The joke stopped being funny the moment the spell hit his chest and, lined up in the Great Hall filled with the dead, Fred looks eerily at home among the corpses.
Kaleidoscope
Love potion twists your thoughts, shatters them like stained glass and puts them back together in looping patterns of I'd-do-anything and you're-so-beautiful and why-did-I-never-see-how-perfect-you-are.
Ron Weasley's head spins and wobbles, makes his hands sweat and his heart flutter in his chest. The world is multifaceted in a hundred shards of Romilda Vane and, for a moment, Dark Lords are the furthest thing from his mind.
The embarrassment afterwards definitely isn't worth the moment of peace. Still, cauldron cakes spiked with love potion are a hundred times better than Slughorn's drink and the bezoar down the throat.
Loose
Theodore Nott will be the last person to say his father beats him. It's not his old man's fault that they're losing to Scarhead Potter and his Golden Trio. It's not his fault that the Dark Lord snips and snarls and screams in rage with every loss, that he hands out crucios like kind old witches dole out pumpkin pastries. It's not his fault that he misses his wife or that Theodore can never compare, never quite hold up to his standards, never make the cut for "good enough".
It's not his fault that Ogden's firewhisky lowers his inhibitions, makes him a little rough, makes him a little angry.
It's not his fault, but Theo still finds himself hating the man who taught him through hard hands and strong drink that loose muscles make the hits hurt less.
Magpie
The Ravenclaw mascot is an eagle. Ginny spends the day before summer break carefully combing the Hogwarts corridors for traces Luna's scattered possessions and thinks, furiously, that the thieving wenches stealing from her friend would be better represented by a magpie.
Never
If the rumors are to be believed, Harry Potter is the heir of Slytherin.
Fred and George look down at the thatch of unruly hair, the furious hurt in green eyes, the skinny shoulders taut with tension.
"Make way for the Heir of Slytherin!"
They laugh because it's funny.
Optimal
Draco Malfoy is ferrety and prideful as the devil himself. He's not the worst on a broom, but he's certainly not the best. When he flies against blink-and-you-miss-'em Potter he may as well be standing still. Flint has to make due with the supercilious little git, though; his first choice of seeker got sorted into Gryffindor.
Partake
Narcissa sits in her chair at her large oaken table, surrounded on all sides by her grandeur in her ostentatious house.
A snake longer than she is tall unhinges its jaw to swallow the cooling corpse of Bertha Jorkins.
She feels she will never be hungry again.
Quandary
Harry Potter is much too small for a boy his age. He is skin and bones and glasses. The thought of knobby-kneed Potter going up against a man years his senior and housing the darkest wizard in centuries is terrifying.
Poppy Pomfrey stares at the Hogwarts toilet seat lovingly addressed to her ward and, for a moment, considers actually giving it to him.
Ricochet
Voldemort awakens as a spirit, his entire being aching with the cold of Death's wind.
He'd always wondered how it felt to be hit by an avada kedavra.
Snake
For all that he says about the greatness of Gryffindor, Ron Weasley can't help but notice, hangings drawn and mind caught on the haunting image in the Mirror of the Erised, that his ambition occasionally outstrips his bravery.
Tongue
His quicksilver mind crafts responses with the same passion as the blood purists spout their superiority. He constructs his sentences carefully, makes them feel like velvet even while they cut like knives.
Tom Riddle has the singular talent of making even the blackest lies sound beautiful.
Underneath
Millicent Bulstrode is built like a brick-house; first years power walk out of the common room every time they hear her approaching footsteps. She locks herself away in unused classrooms, and rumors fly rampant among the dorm room about how she spends her time in there practicing Unforgivables and blood magic.
Surprisingly, it is Draco Malfoy, narcissistic ponce of Slytherin House, who first figures out that Millicent Bulstrode hides herself away so she can concentrate on writing poetry.
Verdant
They say he has his mother's eyes.
Harry smiles. He doesn't tell them that he's studied her face in the photo album, stared at it without blinking so as to soak up as much as possible.
Time's worn away at their memories. Lily's eyes were a beautiful shade of verdant green. Harry stands in front of the bathroom mirror and thinks, morbidly, that his look more like the color of the avada kedavra curse.
Water
A week after Dumbledore falls from the astronomy tower Hermione notices that Harry's been drinking nothing but juice with every meal. When she asks him why, he lies and says he feels like something sweet. He doesn't want to tell her that even the thought of drinking water makes him sick to his stomach, fills his head with thoughts of sieve-like cups and the Headmaster's voice, weakening with every sip.
X-ray
When Hermione was five she fell off her bike and broke her wrist. It took months to heal.
Professor Lockhart vanishes every bone in Harry's arm. The very next day he's sitting at the table in the Great Hall cutting his eggs as if it'd never happened.
Yellow
Fred loves Canary Creams. They remind him of the early testing stages and the look on Percy's face when George coughed up a pillow's worth of bright saffron feathers at the breakfast table one morning.
Zany
Luna Lovegood wears radish earrings and makes polite conversation about blibbering humdingers.
When Ginny overhears one of the fifth year Ravenclaws sneering out words like "St. Mungos" and "loony ward" she stops for a moment to have a chat.
She rewards herself for the best Bag Bogey Hex in the history of magic with an extra scoop of ice cream at dinner and one of Percy's best quills.