Chapter Eight: Kindness

She went with Blaise to look at flats. She had enough saved up to rent a place in London, a place of her own. She loved Oxford, but she was also eager to move out and find her own place. Eogan had another year in Hogwarts, and then, hopefully, he could get a flat nearby. She hoped so, anyway.

She would have accepted the first listing they had looked at, but Blaise had said no very firmly to the Muggle landlord and dragged her out.

"That place was fine," she protested.

"The flat itself was not objectionable," said Blaise dryly. "The landlord was skeezy, and there's a bar across the street. You can do better, darling."

After a few days of looking, Blaise called to tell her exultantly that the flat on the floor above his had been put up for sale. The Muggle lady putting it up for sale was old, with a lot of creepy dolls and china knick-knacks being packed into boxes. Story suspected Blaise of Confunding the woman and telling her to move elsewhere, but the flat had a very reasonable rent and was already furnished. She signed a year's agreement and paid the down payment. She moved in the next day.

"Now we're neighbors," said Blaise, "and we can go to work together." He sounded extremely self-satisfied.

She visited home the first weekend; Daphne, Pansy, and Scarlett were having drinks and a chat. She didn't stay long, because Pansy was giving her coat the eye she had used to cast lustfully on Draco, and Scarlett was beaming hatred at her, and Daphne looked extremely uncomfortable.

"I moved into the apartment above Blaise's," she said casually. "He was very nice about helping me move in. He had a girl over for dinner the other night, but he doesn't really like her." A lie, but a necessary one, if she was to be on decent terms with Scarlett.

"Of course not," said Scarlett, and the hatred was still there, but now Story was confused, because the next words from her mouth were, "He's gay, didn't you know?"

"I did," said Story composedly. "I didn't know you three knew, and the first time he told me he asked me not to tell."

"I've known he was gay since sixth year," said Scarlett scornfully.

Pansy shrugged.

"He's gay?" said Daphne.

And that, thought Story, summed up the three of them rather well.

There was another confusing question then; why didn't Scarlett like her? She didn't think about it very much- Scarlett Lympsham wasn't a particularly important person to her- but she did worry about it, because she was fairly sure she was supposed to have done something in order to be hated for it. She hadn't done anything worth being hated for, had she? Saved a bunch of younger kids in Slytherin House. Set up an infirmary. Become a part-time, then a full-time model. Gotten a boyfriend. Moved in a floor above Blaise Zabini.

No, she couldn't have done anything. The question to really ask was this: what did Scarlet delude herself into believing Story had done? That was a more complicated question.

She asked Blaise about it one night, when she went down and they ordered Chinese food with the cellular telephone Blaise had bought, on a whim. It looked like a large black brick, with an antenna sticking out of the top like a unicorn's horn. She was slightly fascinated by the Muggle technology. Blaise had been a Slytherin at Hogwarts, but living in London, he had told her, had showed him that Muggles didn't have it all on the thin end of the wand. They had science that made up for their lack of magic, cars and aeroplanes and cellular phones.

"Why doesn't Scarlett like me?" she asked.

He laughed. "She's jealous of you, Toria. She knows you're prettier. Has she been bothering you about it? Scarlett's always been a bitch."

"But Scarlett is drop-dead gorgeous," said Story, frowning. "Crabbe and Goyle both asked her to the Yule Ball and she turned them down, and I know that Pucey, Flint, Bletchley, Warrington, and Montague have all asked her out."

"That was in the Hogwarts days," said Blaise, patting her hand condescendingly. "She's nineteen now, and while she's still a cute little thing, she's a complete bitch, and that carries over into her face. You're like a five-year-old child, still wondering why the world is so beautiful, and that carries over into your face. That's why people like you more. You're nice. She's not."

"But she's pretty!"

"So are you. You really are both beautiful. The difference is that you're beautiful on the outside and the inside. Scarlett is only beautiful on the outside. She has a horrid personality. And that makes you twice as beautiful- people see you and they see the little angel you are inside."

"I'm no angel." Story thought of her annoyances with Pansy and Scarlett, her anger at Nott, her brusque refusals of his attentions, the way she thought of another pair of eyes when she kissed Eogan. "I'm not a good person."

"Nobody's perfect," said Blaise. "But you're so much better than the rest of us, Astoria Greengrass. You have this innate sense of perfection that the mortals around you are in something of awe of. Including your sister and Pansy, because they're a pair of brainless twits."

"Hey!" protested Story. "That's my sister."
"Well, Daphne isn't so bad. Pansy is very stupid, however. But Scarlett's not an idiot, although she has an incredibly stupid attachment to Pansy, and she sees that you're prettier and smarter and sweeter than everyone else, and she hates you for it."

"Should I apologize or something?"

"She'll only hate you more if you do," said Blaise. "Better to leave well enough alone, sweetie. You can only be so perfect." She threw a pillow at him. In some ways, Blaise was like the brother she'd never had. She doubted that a boy of the Greengrass stock would ever turn out gay, though- her parents were ridiculously conservative. They didn't approve of Blaise and his transparently obvious homosexuality, although they were perfectly civil to him. They would have disliked him more, Story reflected, if he had been sleeping with her. Or maybe they wouldn't. You never knew with her parents.

She didn't buy a bed for her flat- that was the only thing it didn't have. The Muggle woman had had back problems and her bed was specially made, so she had taken it with her. Instead, she drilled holes into the ceiling with her wand and managed to rig up a hammock. It was for more comfortable than a bed- colder, but more comfortable. She would get a bed, maybe, when Eogan was done with school. She didn't know.

She went to work every day and did seven, eight shoots a day, with different outfits and makeup, depending on what Gladrags was advertising. Soon she was the lead model, making even more than Blaise. She tucked it all away into Gringotts, only removing what she needed to survive in Muggle cash.

She visited Eogan on Hogsmeade weekends; they went to the tea shop or the Three Broomsticks or occasionally the Hog's Head, and then they would wander around the shops, holding hands and grinning like the foolish children they were. He would tease her mercilessly, and she would laugh and smile and he would kiss her and they were the only people of any importance. On their one-year-anniversary he skipped classes and sneaked down to Hogsmeade and she skipped work and they went to the precipice where people looked at the Shrieking Shack, and they just sat there for hours and talked. He told her that he had a job lined up with Flourish and Blotts, so he would be living in London when he graduated. They kissed- made out, really. Eogan was too polite to try and deflower her on a chilly autumn day out-of-doors, where anybody could see them, but she knew he wanted to. She avoided that topic. The time wasn't right.

It became more common to open the Daily Prophet, delivered every morning by owl, and see her face or her body, modeling the newest fashions, as she walked up and down the little studio, joking with Blaise and Neil, trying to figure out how to get them to get together. Sometimes she saw herself staring out at the world from the Gladrags catalogue. In January she made the cover for the spring fashions; she stood still on that glossy magazine cover, her face long but not horsey, her arms long and thin, her legs longer and thinner, her waist a healthy sort of thin, her feet encased in high heels.

After that people began to recognize her in the streets. Not the Muggles, of course, although she got wolf-whistled at a lot by them. But she would walk into Diagon Alley, looking for ingredients for a Headache Potion or something to buy for her cousin's birthday at the Weasley shop, and people pointed and stared. A few times, a little girl would trot shyly up to her, holding the spring catalogue and a quill, and Story, surprised every time, would sign: "Toria Greengrass. Follow your dreams!"

That's who she was at work. Toria Greengrass. To most people she knew in person she was Astoria. As a model she was Toria. To Daphne she was Torrie. And to herself, Story. She had told noone about her private name for herself, not even Eogan.

One day she was walking to one of the five different places she Disapparated to work from, and she noticed, out of the back of her eye, that some Muggle boys were following her. Skipping school probably- they looked about her age. Story knew that Muggles went to school for longer than wizards did. She ignored them.

At least, she ignored them until she turned into the abandoned alleyway where she Disapparated from on Thursday mornings and they followed her in. She stood waiting, ignoring them as they approached.

"Hey," said one of them. "What's your name?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Piss off."

"Oh, don't be like that, baby-"

She had to do something, or they would hurt her. She could see that intent in their eyes. She drew her wand and cast several spells in silence, sealing off both ends of the alleyway and causing instant darkness to descend over the alley. She could see though, and as she did she cast a spell on the boys that made them unable to hear her, and then she cast a Memory Charm on the lot of them and removed all of the other spells at the same time she Disapparated.

She was a little shaken when she arrived at work; Blaise arrived a few moments after she did. "We really have to find a better place to Disapparate from," he said easily, catching up. "If the Muggle boys are going to bother you, that is."

"You could always scare them away," said Story shortly. She wasn't in a good mood.

Blaise snorted. "There were five of them, sweetie. I don't think that would have been enough. We should Disapparate from Diagon Alley from now on."

Story sighed. She didn't want to admit that she didn't really like London anymore. The novelty had worn off from living in the big city. She didn't want to move back home, either. She thought the country would have been nice, though- closer north to Leeds, perhaps, or maybe south in Devonshire. But she couldn't just go and buy a house. She had plenty of money, but she didn't have that much money.

The Daily Prophet the next morning featured an article on the Malfoys and what they had been up to since the war. Story read it over breakfast with curiosity. Lucius and Narcissa were on house arrest- Aurors would show up if they so much as passed the gates of Malfoy Manor, and an Anti-Apparition Jinx had been cast over the entire property. Draco was free to come and go as he pleased, because he had given testimony against the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord in the Wizengamot. He was in Europe at the moment- nobody had seen him for two and a half years.

She set the paper down and sighed. She really had to stop daydreaming about him. She was in a committed relationship with a boy who adored her and whom she adored in return. Sort of.