The other Hufflepuffs are all red-faced and cheery, piling their plates high and chattering away. Snippets of their excited conversation flies over his head - "Cor, Dad'll be delighted I made Hufflepuff!" "I can't wait to see the common room!" "Yellow is such a lovely colour, isn't it?" - but he doesn't look up. A girl with ginger plaits accidentally bumps him with her elbow, and turns around quickly to apologise. Jacen ignores her.
He sits there, pale and quiet, staring down at his empty plate and doing his hardest not to cry. Father never liked when he cried. Childish, he'd said. Weak.
But he's a Hufflepuff. He's a bloody Hufflepuff.
Merlin, his parents will kill him.
"Stop looking so sorry for yourself," comes a hiss to his right. He looks up to see a pair of angry green eyes staring back at him. A strange green, a pale green that doesn't look like it should ever hold that much hatred.
"Excuse me?"
"You're not the only one who wasn't supposed to end up here, you know," the girl says harshly. "I should've been a Gryffindor. But I'm not. So get over it."
"My family have been in Slytherin forever," Jacen says. He almost cringes at the self-pity lacing his words.
"Slytherin, eh?" Her mouth quirks up on one side. "Dorcas Meadowes."
"Jacen Gibbon."
"Suppose we can be misfits together, then?"
Jacen stares at her, the teasing line of her mouth, the quirked eyebrow. Gryffindor? He could see that. "Suppose," he says.
"Good. Now shut up and eat."
Dear Dorcas,
I suppose we knew our sides from the start. Was it always going to end up like this, do you think? I like to think you didn't. I like to think you thought I could be better than my family.
I can't. I can't. I have to do right by them. I have to make my father proud for once.
You wouldn't understand. You understood most things, but this is different. This is… Slytherin.
She's not his only friend by any means - the boys in his dorm are nice enough, and he's got mates in Slytherin that Father's introduced him to - but, for some reason, Jacen feels most at home when he's with Dorcas Meadowes.
"I think you would've been a crap Slytherin, honestly," she says one day, hunched over her Potions book. Her sleeves are rolled up and her hair is pinned back out of her face; she's in study mode. And apparently the topic is him.
"Why's that?" He's long since given up the self-pity, but he'd be lying if he said his throat didn't feel just a little tighter thinking about what could have been. Father hasn't written him a single letter. He didn't bother to go home for Christmas. He clearly wasn't wanted.
"You're too…genuine," she says decisively. Her pale eyes are fixed on his face, as if scrutinising his reaction. She has this way of making Jacen feel like she can see right inside his head. He shivers.
"What does that even mean?"
"Well, the Slytherins," she explains, "are all 'say one thing, mean another', you know? They say what people want to hear, or do what they have to do, but that's only a show. Just the surface."
He shifts uncomfortably under the steadiness of her gaze. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." She grimaces. "Most of them just want to look out for themselves. You're not like that, Jace."
He smiles. "Good. Now, will you stop bloody staring at me?"
She grins, eyes twinkling with amusement but never leaving his face, never even blinking. "What, you don't like it?"
"No. I don't."
"Liar," she mutters, and keeps on staring.
"You're a weird one, Meadowes," he says, and buries his head in his Potions book. He feels her gaze slip from him a few minutes later and is surprised to find he feels oddly bare.
Dear Dorcas,
You were the only perfect thing I could touch without destroying. For a while, anyway.
He takes the Mark two weeks after their first kiss and doesn't tell her a thing.
If you ask him, it was Snape - sidling up to him all year with promises and declarations. "You want your father to respect you again, Gibbon? Show him what you can do." But if he's honest… If he's honest, it was Black.
Regulus Black. A quiet boy, all high cheekbones and class, he took the Mark despite his brother. He took the Mark for his family, because they expected him to, because he was their son, their heir, their life.
"Why?" he'd asked, hand hovering over an empty vial in the dungeons.
One arched eyebrow and a bored expression. "Are you talking to me, Gibbon?"
"Why'd you do it?" Jacen asked, eyes darting towards Regulus' left arm.
Regulus smiled slowly. "Loyalty. You'd know all about that, surely, little Hufflepuff?"
Jacen just stared.
"Take your vial and go back to your seat," Black said quietly. "There are some things I couldn't expect you to understand."
He'd wanted to say something back, but nothing came. So he took the vial and left, and later he found Snape after dinner and told him he'd think about it.
When he kisses Dorcas though, she tastes like pumpkin juice and her eyelashes scrape his cheek when he pulls away and even that, the most minute of touches, makes him feel like fire and brimstone, like his blood lava, is more than someone else's expectation pumping through his veins.
When he takes the Mark, he thinks of her. While the Dark Lord burns it into his skin like branding cattle, the others around, watching in the half-dark, masochistic smiles glinting, he thinks of her eyelashes, and her lips, and her eyes as pale green and beautiful as her name.
"Gibbon," the Dark Lord says softly, voice high. "Welcome."
The others chuckle, a few stray claps echoing around the room.
"I hope you're prepared for what's to come, my boy."
"Yes, sir," Gibbon rasps, glancing away from the blood-red eyes making his stomach turn.
"Excuse me?"
His heart skips a beat. "Yes, m - my Lord."
The Dark Lord's lips stretch into a cold mockery of a smile. "What a fast learner," he coos. "Daddy will be proud."
Dear Dorcas,
You got me through the darkest parts of it. I promise. You were my light when there was no other. I wish I told you that. I wish you'd want to hear it.
I wish for us a lot: a different time, a different place, a different ending.
A different beginning.
"But the Order wants us to - "
"Dorcas, please," he hisses, looking around the library hesitantly. "Not now. We've already talked about this."
"No," she whispers back, and Jacen can hear the oh so familiar bite in her words. "We haven't, have we? Because you won't bloody well let me finish!" She grabs his wrist, so he steels himself and meets her eyes. They are confused, and beautiful, and so green, and he has never deserved her. "Why won't you let me talk about this? This is important."
He stiffens. "Not to me."
"What?" The word is flat, barely a question at all. Her eyes narrow.
"Look, I didn't mean - I just meant - " he tries, but none of it makes any sense out loud. "My father wouldn't - "
"Oh, no," Dorcas all but growls, "I'm not accepting that. You're too old for 'Daddy said', Jacen. This is on you." She lets go of his wrist, finally, and the loss of contact feels like the loss of so much more. "Why won't you talk about it?"
He drops his gaze to the table. He follows the patterns in the grain as he reaches for his left sleeve, pulls it up slowly and deliberately. Every line is headed in the same direction, all running off the end into nothingness.
He can almost feel the moment she realises. The air feels colder, somehow. She looks at him blankly, vaguely disgusted. Like she has turned off her affection in the blink of an eye. Like he is nothing to her now. He lets his sleeve fall again.
A look of utmost confusion crosses her face. "Why would you - you didn't even say anything. You just went and - why didn't I see? Why didn't I realise?"
"I don't know," he answers, voice soft.
"You're sick. You're a fucking psycho. You're on his side?"
He can't look at her, at those eyes. "I have to do this. My family needs me."
"I need you, Jace," she snaps back, angry tears forming in her eyes. "We need you, on our bloody side. I need you. You bloody - "
"Come on, Dorcas," he says, forcing nonchalance. "Didn't you see this coming? The would-be Slytherin and the almost-Gryffindor?"
She shakes her head from side to side as slowly as she can. Her neck almost creaks, a rusted gate closing on him for the final time. "No." She stand up suddenly, her chair toppling to the floor with a loud clatter. "You're not a Slytherin, Jacen. You're a bloody Hufflepuff. And seven years with us hasn't taught you about loyalty?"
"I am loyal. My family needs me," he repeats. Exhaustion echoes through his body. He closes his eyes and waits for her reply but it never comes. He doesn't open his eyes until it has gotten dark.
When he finally does, she is long, long gone, but there's a note on the table in her handwriting. *Jacen*, it reads. *I would've helped you if had asked. Now we are fighting two different sides of the same war.* He sighs. The parchment trembles in his shaking hand.
He reaches for a quill.
Dear Dorcas, he writes. I loved you. I still do. But there are bigger things than us in this war.
They meet again four years later in a back alley, wands out. She's changed some - her hair is shorter and choppier, and he can see the glint of a nosering, but she's still wearing her school scarf over her black duffel coat and her eyes are still pale and green and beautiful, and she's still looking at him with a mixture of hatred and disappointment.
"You?" she calls incredulously. "They sent you?"
"No." He lowers his wand and takes a few cautious steps forward. "They sent Bellatrix. I just got here first."
"Why?" she spits. "Don't act like you still care. You gave up that right a long time ago."
"I know."
"Then why are you here?" she shouts, throwing her arms wide. Her voice ricochets off the walls like a stray curse, hits him square in the chest.
"They're going to kill you," he says, matter-of-factly. The words trip over his tongue as he forced them out. They taste terrible, entirely too real. "You need to get out of here. I'll say I got here first and we duelled, but you managed to get away. Just go. Now."
"What makes you think I'd listen to you? In case you hadn't noticed, Jace," she says, fixing him with a sharp glare, "they're always trying to kill me. You can't save me. This isn't your little act of penance. You can't pretend to save me and think everything will work out in the end."
"I'm not - "
"I'm going to die. And so are you. And this war is probably going to be the reason why."
"I - When I heard your name I had to come."
At his words, her face, by some miracle, softens. Her eyes are warmer by a fraction, her lips a half-smile. She really is gorgeous. "Thank you, Jacen," she murmurs, so quietly he barely hears her.
She turns on her feet, leaving Jacen alone in the cold and waiting for the others to find him in his failure.
She is dead within the week.
Dear Dorcas,
You were the most beautiful enemy I ever knew. It's been an honour.
I loved you, you know. Maybe I still do
I'm sorry.
Author's Note: Thanks again to my fave Aussie Nay for publishing this. I love her more than life itself!