Disclaimer: Do I need one? Of course I don't own anything!
Chapter 1
"I am ashamed to be a Slytherin."
The words were spoken firmly and plainly. The stupid girl – whoever she was – had not even bothered to lower her voice! Draco Malfoy entered the common room and realized that there were only two occupants, next to the fireplace. One of them was his classmate, Daphne Greengrass, and the other one was a younger dark-haired girl, who he had seen quite often with Daphne, but had never bothered to say 'hello' to. He snorted – they were living in very dangerous times and he had thought that Daphne, of all people, would be smart enough to keep a low profile, even if she did not like the way things were at Hogwarts now. He did not like it either, but no one had seen him listening to such traitorous words. For all he knew, that idiotic girl could blurt out that she was ashamed to be a pureblood without turning a hair! And Daphne was here, and her silence showed an unspoken agreement. Stupid girls! Stupid, stupid, stupid!
"What were you saying?" he asked nonchalantly, trying to make her feel uncomfortable.
"I was just saying that I am ashamed to be a Slytherin," the girl repeated calmly.
His jaw almost dropped, as he officially put her on the list of people with mental disorders. "Why?" was the only thing he could say, shocked.
"The Carrows put Parvati Patil under the Cruciatus Curse for refusing to use it on her sister," Daphne explained quietly.
Draco blinked. "And what of that?"
"Obviously nothing for you" the girl whose identity he still did not know said. "Just for your information, I think that you and your bodyguards truly deserve each other!"
Again, he blinked. "Crabbe and Goyle?"
"Crabbe was the one who volunteered to torture Patil," Daphne intervened again.
Torturing her. Draco felt his throat going dry, when he thought of all the tortures that he had recently witnessed. Yet he drawled, ironically, "I did not know that the Patil girls meant so much to you."
"They don't," Daphne said. "But it is not about my liking, it is about – it isn't right, Malfoy. It just isn't – "
"Shut up!" he hissed, seizing her hand and shaking it furiously, while looking frantically around. "Do you want someone to hear you? Do you know what's going to happen to you, you stupid little cows? They will punish all of us and I suppose that the Cruciatus will be the least we can expect!"
"Leave me! It hurts!"
"It will hurt even more when they lay their hands on you! For Merlin's sake, couldn't you find a better moment to start caring for blood-traitors?"
He did not want the punishments and terror that reigned over the rest of Hogwarts to enter the Slytherin dungeons, no matter how stupid those two fools could get.
Daphne tried to yank her hand off, but he was squeezing it too tightly.
"Release me!"
The unknown girl grabbed his hand. "Leave her!" she yelled and pulled as strongly as she could. That was not saying much, because she was too short – at least a head shorter than he was – and her fingers were weak and fragile; but the act itself surprised him so much that he instinctively obeyed, feeling like he was reliving again something that had happened in the past. He could not figure out what it was, though.
"Be careful with what you say," he warned both of them. Daphne nodded silently and the other girl looked at him with something like disdain.
"Worried about your skin, Malfoy?" she asked. "Don't worry, you can just rat us out and become even more trustworthy in our new teachers' eyes."
Her eyes were icy and full of contempt. Again, he felt like he had experienced something like this before… but the memory escaped him. She turned her back at him. "See you later, Daphne," she said and headed for the girls' dormitories.
"Who is she?" Draco asked, looking at Daphne.
"My sister. Astoria."
He looked at his classmate for seven years, surprised. "I didn't know you had a sister."
Daphne shrugged. "You never asked."
That's true. He suddenly realized how little he knew about Daphne, although the two of them got along with each other quite fine, when they were in the same room. Actually, he didn't know much about any of his classmates, except for Crabbe and Goyle, but then, what was there to know about those two? Their food preferences? Well, that is easy: they like everything, and lots of it.
He was surprised by Daphne, though. She had been a member of Dolores Umbridge's Unit, so how the hell had she ended up feeling sorry for the Patils? At the moment when that pity could cost her her health no less! He had thought that she was a smart girl. How wrong he had been.
Her sister was even a bigger surprise. He looked at the girl's retreating back, the thick dark hair and the green robe. Astoria Greengrass left the impression that she hated him. That's great, he thought, I spent only a few minutes with her, but in these two minutes she learned to hate me. It was not that he was concerned about her hating him, but it was unusual. Every girl in Slytherin was enraptured with him or at least trying to look this way, no doubt envisioning herself as the future Mrs Malfoy, a mistress of a huge Manor and an owner of a tidy fortune – what the hell was wrong with Astoria Greengrass?
She was different. Not better than the other girls from Slytherin, far from it. In fact, she was far worse. She was rude, un-girly and stupid – so stupid that it could lead her to her death.
Still, it did not change the fact that she was different.
The girl was already disappearing from his sight, when the memory that had kept escaping him suddenly came back. The Mudblood, of course, Hermione Granger, when she had been retaliating for his taunts, when she had hit him for insulting that oaf Hagrid, Hermione Granger, who had looked at him with the same disdain as Astoria Greengrass each time when they had been close to one another.
He did not rat them out, although he himself did not know why. Maybe because he had seen too much torture for the last two years. He certainly did not need more of it.
Looking back years later, he could see that it was that night that had first made him start paying attention to Astoria Greengrass. Not like her, but start pay attention to her anyway. At least, he soon found out that he always noticed it when she was in the same room with him. It was hard not to, given the fact that any moment, the stupid girl could say something that would bring the punishments that he and his fellow Slytherins had managed to avoid until now, right in their middle.
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I liked that interview when Rowling said that Slytherins came back to fight and I wanted to describe a decent Slytherin. Did I manage?
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