Ok, so this was supposed to be my "Yay, I get to write Aquila again!" moment. But it didn't really run out that way. I still think I love it, what do you think? Drop me a review would ya?
All I own is the girl who is referenced in the silly boy's thoughts. And I totally love her, even though she's been around for such a short time.
He had been horrified, sickened to realise that she was beautiful.
He had been fifteen, had just returned to the wretched school for his fifth year and suddenly she didn't just look like another one of them, her good looks weren't as casual as they had once been.
She was beautiful, especially when her bright blue eyes were lit with laughter.
How he wished he could be the one to make her laugh.
It wasn't hard to recall the look of disgust that he most often aimed in her direction, for he just thought of how he'd felt when those thoughts had first become clear.
And her almost always being accompanied by the mudblood, the traitor and that idiot, Potter, made it that much easier.
But it was when he was alone, in the darkest hours of the night - when there was nothing to distract him from her sparkling eyes or the soft sound of her laugh - that he would struggle the most.
She was mentioned in his home when he was a child. Her parents too. But there was never a kind word said about the trio, throughout the first eleven years of his life. And when he first met her he had behaved in a way that shamed him now.
He hadn't exactly changed his ways – they didn't socialize outside of class and he wasn't nice to her when they were put together in the class room – but she seemed to understand, that was the way he had to be. It was the only way he could be.
Even if he wished he could change.
Never would he admit to anyone out loud that she was interesting, or that her beauty plagued him. It would be the worst thing he could do.
She was a mudblood lover.
She spat on the very things that his parents stood for.
And she was family.
Her father had been burned from the family tree for not upholding family values, and she wasn't even mentioned. It was only through a few scathing comments from his mother that he even learned of their existence.
Watching as she crossed the Great Hall with her three friends, each of them covered in red and gold, he scoffed, muttering more to himself than the two friends that accompanied him everywhere he went.
She was a Black after all. If she was anything like the rest of them, she would have joined Slytherin, taken her rightful place among the green and silver. But just like her Muggle loving father, she'd forsaken the snake and gone to the lion.
That alone made him want to hate her as he did her friends, but it was impossible.
She had tried to befriend him in their first year, probably not having heard such horrible things about him as he had about her, but his father wouldn't have allowed it, so he didn't either.
She gave up on him after the first few months at the school and they didn't speak again unless directed to by a teacher. No one seemed to notice that, now at sixteen, his insults were directed around her, to her friends rather than at her personally.
But it was better that way. If they were to realise, he would have to explain, and he couldn't do that anymore than he could verbalise a really horrible word against her.
Whenever he was caught watching her, he managed to cover himself quickly curiosity, he would explain, as to how someone from such an important and pure family could turn out so… wrong. The look of disgust came easy; it was more at him than anything else.
But no matter what he said on the subject, or didn't say, he wanted to know more.
There was so little that had been said about her when he was growing up, most of it, he remembered, had been expressed as thoughts of his aunt Bellatrix, communicated by his mother.
The former seemed to take it as a personal insult (if his mother was to be believed) that their cousin had never stood with them, and had abandoned the family at his earliest opportunity.
He needed more than that.
Their thoughts weren't enough anymore, nor did he think they ever had been.
He had reached an age where the opinions of others just didn't suffice. He needed to formulate his own if he were to get anywhere in the world. He was on the cusp of manhood; following along with everyone else wasn't an option these days.
Then again, neither was the star-gazing that he so often found himself doing.
No matter what he thought or felt in the darkness when she laughed and sparkled in his mind, he had to put a stop to it all. There may have been a time when purity had been achieved by keeping the bloodlines closed, cousins marrying to create more branches on the tree, but that would never happen for them.
She'd tried to reach out to him in their younger days, but after years of taunts and derision she had hardened herself against him. If he were to make a complete transformation the very next day it would be for naught.
The damage he had inflicted was too great.
She would hate him forever and he would never be able to change that. Nor would he deny her to do so. He deserved nothing more than her deepest darkest loathing.
Fin.