Tainted
The war has slithered through Hogwarts' supposedly impenetrable wards. The school was once a safe haven for learning. Now it is a subtle battlefield where innocuous jinxes have been traded for darker curses. House rivalry is tainted with snarling animosity, and the tension between opposing factions is drawn impossibly tight. Dorcas feels it more acutely this year because she is attending classes with the Gryffindors and Slytherins for the first time.
The students sit in self-imposed quarters, but the invisible barriers don't remove him from her line of sight. She fumbles when he catches her staring, and the Venomous Tentacula scores a livid line across her arm. She doesn't know if her tears are from the searing cut or from the hateful look that sears and bruises her heart.
Leaving the greenhouse is a new skirmish, all sharp elbows and dark scowls and eff yous. Snape and Wilkes push in front of Black and Potter. Dorcas holds her breath as the tension thins to translucency, and then shatters when Sirius Black shoves Snape hard between the shoulder blades.
Potter can't resist vocalising the hatred: "Get out of our bloody way, Snivellus!"
Dorcas stops dead in her tracks, and he bumps into her. The touch of his hand on her shoulder is fleeting before he jerks it away.
"You're all going to get detention again," she says prissily, although her voice holds an edge of desperation she is sure everybody can hear. "Just stop already!"
"And how are you going to make me, Dorky? Abracadabra me?"
Dorcas flushes bright red; that had been her fourth-year guess at the name for Avada Kedavra.
"Name-calling is childish, Snotter," she retorts.
The look on James Potter's face is darker and uglier than anything she's ever seen on a Slytherin's face. He pushes past her, bumping his shoulder roughly against hers. Her bag drops to the ground. The wind snatches at her notes, and they scuttle towards the Forbidden Forest on icy currents.
He stoops, picks up her inkwell, and then holds it out to her. His eyes have changed, she thinks sadly. They used to be a clear green, but now they are dark -- almost as dark as Snape's eyes.
She doesn't take it from him. "What happened, Evan?" she asks softly.
"You pissed the Prince of Gryffindor off." Obviously, you bleeding idiot, his disdainful expression says.
She shakes her head. "No. To us. We used to be friends."
He stares at her for a moment, and then a sneer twists his lips, making him look dark and cruel.
"I was never your friend, Mudblood," he says coldly, and he drops the glass inkwell onto the stone path.
He turns on his heel and walks up to the castle, leaving Dorcas alone with broken glass and a broken heart and her trust fluttering like torn parchment in the breeze.
Black ink bleeds across the stones into the grass. "Evanesco," she murmurs. The pool of ink disappears, but the stone path is still stained black.
Author's Notes: Written for lj community, romancingwizard.
Set in October 1976. Severus Snape and the Marauders were in sixth-year. I have assumed that Dorcas Meadows, Wilkes, and Evan Rosier were in the same year. Thanks to Jas for proof-reading for me.
