Chapter Thirteen: Tart

Salazar was eight years old when he first kissed a girl. His father later informed him – as Salazar shook with the trauma of the event – that this was a standard rite of passage experienced by all young men, and he would look back on the moment with fond memories.

However, the experience was vastly devalued by the fact that the kissee was a certain Ms Sophia Bruntt, who had pursued him ruthlessly through their grandfather's castle for two days with pursed lips and a wand. During this time, Salazar had eaten nothing more than a slightly rotten apple he'd found in the upper-limbs of a tree in which he'd concealed himself.

After forty-four hours of ceaseless pursuit, he finally surrendered himself to his fate, crawled out from under a bramble bush and waited for Sophia to find him. She materialised about twenty minutes later, grabbed him by the shirt collar and threatened to scrape his lungs out through his bellybutton if he didn't kiss her. Extra points if he could produce an heir in the process, though neither of them were sure of what this meant.

It lasted precisely five seconds. Sophia cried immediately afterwards and bludgeoned him with a nearby branch.

At the age of eleven, during his second night at school – when friend-making was still a suggestion he was almost willing to follow – he'd cautiously sat with a group of children in the common room. People were talking. A game of some kind had taken off in the corner.

Suddenly and without warning, he found himself confronted by the words, 'Slytherin – kiss Rowena.'

Salazar snapped to attention. 'What?!'

'Kiss Rowena,' the voice repeated, commandingly. It came from a vacant-looking brunette girl to his left.

Salazar's lip trembled. He managed to plead, 'Why?'

'It's the rules,' the girl said. 'Or you'll ruin the game!'

Ruin the game? He didn't want to ruin the game. Oh dear god, what if he ruined the game?!

Then I shall shatter their pathetic souls with a crushing blend of sarcasm and black magic, naturally. But…

Salazar lowered his voice. His conversation with the brunette girl had managed to progress largely unheard by the other children, and he intended to maintain this order.

'Who's Rowena?' he asked.

'She's got a blue dress on,' the girl replied, not making any attempt to lower her tone.

He glanced around the circle. There were two or three blue dresses. One red-haired girl, one girl with a plait, and…

Oh dear.

'Not…that one?' he asked, discreetly pointing to the blue-eyed idiot opposite him.

The girl nodded. 'Yep. That one. Kiss her.'

Not her. Not Ravenclaw. Not the only person in the entire school he'd been warned against; not the only person he'd thrown a potato at not twenty-four hours earlier. Not her! Why?

He shuffled backwards slightly. 'Don't want to…' he mumbled, weakly.

Rowena, noticing the movement, glanced at him. For a moment or so her expression was open and friendly; her mouth a broad smile, her eyes wide. Perhaps she'd forgotten! She must have forgotten; she was a girl. Girls are forgiving and stupid. He could re-introduce himself, strike up a non-offensive topic of discussion, she wouldn't remember a thing! It could work! It could work!

Rowena threw a potato at him, dashing his dreams somewhat.

'Ouch,' said Salazar. She returned to a more pressing conversation.

The brunette girl looked at him scathingly. 'You've ruined the game,' she said.

'It wasn't my fault!' he yelped, defensively. 'She hit me with a tuber!'

She sighed. 'Oh well.' And she grabbed his collar, yanked him forcefully towards her, and kissed him briefly before pushing him back into his seat.

Salazar stared at her.

She, too, returned to a more pressing conversation.

Salazar clambered to his feet, and parted the circle with a solitary mutter of, 'Bugger this for a lark.' He left the common room. He exited the corridor. And, after checking over his shoulders, ran down the staircase, two steps at a time, and escaped into the forest, having decided that society just wasn't worth it.

Now he was nineteen. He kissed Rowena's forehead, felt her body unwind from his like string, and watched her walk dazedly to the end of the corridor.

His face dropped. His fists clenched. Salazar Slytherin ran for his life.

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It was an hour or so later that Rowena staggered dazedly back to her chamber. Though her expression was frozen impassively, her insides were flooded with a ridiculous grin. She felt lighter than air. She felt like a huge weight had been lifted. She felt weak at the knees. She felt – well, a bit headachy and slightly confused, but for the moment she was entirely unable to question the day's events. Whenever she attempted conscious thought her brain was completely sidelined with a golden rush of happiness.

She allowed herself the joy of relaying little sights and sounds from her time with Salazar – his green eyes creased with an unguarded smile, the feel of his hand travelling up her arm and resting on her shoulder, the short breathy laugh he exhaled as their lips parted. Even the feel of the cold stone surrounding them was providing a pleasant mental connection.

Halfway up the stairs, realising she'd been stood there for a good few minutes, lost in thought, she giggled. She hadn't wanted to let go. Not ever. Food could bugger itself. She didn't need human company. She could sleep on the floor. Hell, she could multitask and sleepkiss.

In the pauses in-between, they'd done nothing but breathe. It'd taken them a good fifteen minutes to clamber to their feet, the journey interrupted continually by yet more kissing. And lip nibbling. Can't forget the lip nibbling. Or the rather interesting trick with the ear.

Her mind had never felt so vacant. It was a terrific feeling: the self-doubting, nagging mental track finally silenced as life delivered just what she wanted, even if she wasn't sure she'd wanted it. She had to try and hold on to these memories. Dark days would depend on them.

'I don't know how to ask without sounding overly-formal,' she'd said, as they lay side-by-side, 'but do you think we could go back to the kissing for a bit?'

He'd smiled. 'If it'll shut you up.'

She giggled again at the memory. Must remember everything. Must remember this feeling.

They hadn't discussed anything…no, of course, they didn't need to. They didn't need words. Who needed words? Stupid little letter things…all nouns and verbs and nasty little adjectives, just waiting to mess things up. They didn't need to talk. Nothing was as important as that hour and a half – nothing felt like that, nothing shook her quite so much. Death and werewolves and students and brothers are all – no, don't think about them. It doesn't matter. Be happy, be happy. You're allowed to be happy. You're allowed to be carefree, for once…

'What do we do now?' she'd asked, slightly incoherently as they stood by the door.

'This seems pretty good,' he'd replied.

'But what do we – I mean, what happens now?'

'We keep kissing,' he'd said. Simple as that. And so they did.

Yep – simple. It's not fair, having to over-complicate things as they did. Never getting things the easy way, all your dreams with so many obstacles. What's wrong, once in a while, with making it easy?

And they'd stood there, a good long while, arms resting around each other, her face pressed into his chest and his chin resting on her forehead. And he kissed the top of her head, softly, seeming to savour this final contact, tightening his embrace.

And now…

Rowena giggled again, dragging herself ever-closer to Ravenclaw tower. It's easy now. It's me and Salazar together, and now we can sort everything out because we don't need to worry about this anymore.

She smiled as she reached the door of her chamber. My inner-narrative actually agrees with how I'm feeling. This has to be a good sign.

As she entered her chamber, she was met by the already all-too-familiar sight of Richard in her comfy chair, glaring at her accusingly with Clarence in his lap. His injured ankle rested on a nearby spell book.

Rowena waved.

'Don't try talking your way out of this one, young lady,' Richard replied curtly, though years of good breeding automatically returned a polite wave. 'Just where have you been all night?'

'Nowhere,' Rowena heard herself say, in a deliriously carefree voice that didn't sound much like her usual tone. 'I mean, I've just been, you know, milling around. None of your business really.'

'"Milling"?'

'Milling,' she repeated, confidently. 'Generally. You know how much I love a good…you know. Mill.'

Richard's eyes narrowed suspiciously. 'You smell of sex.'

'No I don't,' she snapped back, returning to her senses slightly. 'I just smell happy.'

'Why is your back all dirty?'

'I fell.'

'Directly onto your back?'

'Yes. Look,' she parted her hair to show the bloody bump at the back of her skull. 'Concussion and everything.'

Clarence clucked accusingly.

'It's true!' she insisted.

Clarence clucked again.

'I did! I fell on my back and hit my head!'

'Rowena,' said Richard, 'need I point out that you're debating this point with a chicken?'

Rowena glared. Her good mood was dissolving at great speed. 'There you go then,' she said. 'Proof of my unfit state of mind. Now bugger off.'

'You have post-coital hair,' he pointed out.

'I do not—' She caught sight of her reflection, and hurriedly patted her hair down. 'Well, that's as maybe. But my current hair style was not preceded by any amount of…coitus. I mean,' she continued, barging out of his accusatory gaze to open the window and allow in a sharp winter breeze, 'do you have any idea how many layers of skirt and knickers I'm wearing? There's buttons and belts and ribbons and buckles and all sorts. It's winter. In Scotland. I haven't seen my bare legs for three months, and I'm sewn in to my own pants.'

Something about her ceaseless underwear-orientated babble seemed to have sunk in, or at least bored him into submission. 'Fair enough,' he said, his voice returned to his more usual apathetically soft tone. 'Then embrace me as a brother and we'll say no more about it.'

'Er…ok.'

'Don't squash Clarence.'

'Oversized dirty pigeon,' Rowena muttered, glaring at the poultry with hatred. 'Every time I wake up in the night it's sat there, watching me sleep. It's a thing of evil.'

'He's charming company!'

'He's two roast potatoes and a bag of peas short of Sunday lunch.'

'Beast. Ah.' In a dramatic fashion, he allowed his brow to fall. Rowena sensed a performance of some kind coming along, and realised that nothing short of pursuing him with a harpoon would spare her. And one does get tired of harpooning, after a while. She accepted the majority vote and took a seat at his feet.

'Yes?' she prompted.

'I'm horribly in love,' he confided.

'No you're not.'

'I sort-of am.'

'Ok.'

'Yet she will not offer me the time of day.'

Rowena sighed. 'Perhaps because saying "what time is it" is your way of distracting them long enough for you to drop your britches and present it like a root vegetable.'

Richard looked vaguely affronted. 'I seldom have to invoke a sneak attack to get a woman into bed with me, thank you very much.'

'I didn't suggest it. Just that you have a habit of presenting your goods like a man at a farmer's market.'

Richard considered the statement, and nodded fairly. 'True. But women find me attractive, Ro! I'm not the most handsome of men, true – or the strongest or bravest or most chivalrous—'

'Or smartest,' Rowena offered.

'—or the most daring or athletic—'

'Or muscular.'

'—yes, thank you, I wasn't really looking for suggestions—'

'And you have the most sporadic growth of facial hair of any man I've known.'

'You're a tart and a deviant and I hate you,' Richard informed her, folding his arms.

'Sorry. Well, I wouldn't worry about your glaring inadequacies too much; Helga's not a superficial person.'

'I'm not talking about Helga,' said Richard, in what he clearly imagined was a convincing tone.

Rowena sighed, prodding his injured ankle. 'Of course you are, you've been bouncing around after her since you got here. It's freaking embarrassing.' She narrowed her eyes, suddenly taken by an idea, and demanded, 'Did you love Prunella?'

'Pru?'

'Yes. I mean, I know you married her—'

'For two months,' he muttered, bitterly.

'—but did you love her?'

Richard didn't reply for a while, but scratched the back of his head uncomfortably. Eventually he lifted Clarence to eye level and said, 'It is best that you don't hear this, old boy,' and allowed him to flap into Rowena's adjoining office.

Rowena disguised her disgust, and persisted, 'Did you?'

Richard never usually looked self-conscious. He never usually looked grown-up. It was unnerving. 'Darling, I worship every woman I come across. Every one.' He shuffled in his seat a while, looking shame-faced. 'Often resulting in a lewd sex act and a near-death experience, true, but that's beside the point. Ah. But as soon as Pru came along—' He shuffled uncomfortably again. 'I loved her very much. Yes.'

Rowena swallowed, feeling suddenly rather awkward. 'What happened to her?'

He shrugged. 'I was with her a year, married two months and – ah.' He shrugged again, as if the gesture would speak for him. 'She was a very good actress, I suppose.'

'Didn't she—?'

'No. She didn't – apparently return the feelings. But she was – ah. She was rather fond of my inheritance, as it turns out.' He sighed, melting back into a more comfortable position in his chair, and added, 'And a rather dashing stable boy named Lorenzo.'

Rowena wrinkled her nose. 'Lorenzo?'

'Don't let the name fool you; he had style.'

'I'm sure.'

He shrugged again. It seemed that shrugging played a large part in the narration of events. 'It's such a horribly confused matter, love. It's never just one thought or feeling, you know – it's a little bit of all of them, all at once. All the good ones and all the bad ones. And I'm not at all sure I want them back.'

'That's sad,' said Rowena, short of anything articulate to add to the discussion. The world of heartache was too far away from her present state for her to even try to sympathise.

'Yes. Well. It happens. Doesn't it?' He shook his head, covering his eyes with his hands. 'For the love of god, my dear, please cover that love bite. I can't go on pretending not to notice it.'

Rowena hurriedly did so, a blush flashing into her cheeks. 'Eh,' she stammered, covering her neck with her hair. 'Um – it's not what you – it's not how it—'

'Of course not. But I was actually referring to the one on your chin.' He cocked an eyebrow. 'Bad aim, that Slytherin boy.'

Rowena squealed. 'He – I – we never—'

'Whatever. At least he hit the right girl.'

'Get out,' she squeaked, feebly.

'If he gets you pregnant I'll chop his cock off.'

'Out!'

'Tart.'

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'Bless you,' said Anatole.

Helga looked up. 'Pardon?'

'Bless you?' he repeated, less certainly this time. By means of explanation, he added, 'You sneezed, rather loudly, so I said bless you. I think it's the etiquette.'

Helga frowned. She hadn't sneezed that loudly. 'Are you allowed to say that?'

'What, etiquette?'

'Bless you. I mean, what with you being all…vampyric, and all.'

'Er,' said Anatole, short of anything more substantial.

'Are your lips burning?'

He shrugged. 'They're a bit chapped.'

'Does your oesophagus stream with hot, sticky blood?'

'Should it?'

Helga regarded him suspiciously for a moment. 'Are you going to start spitting black bile in my eye-holes?'

'It's just etiquette!' he insisted, recoiling slightly at the thought. 'I was being polite! And – and I'm only a bit vampyric, we've been through this.'

'Yes, yes,' she said, waving her hand as if this was all inconsequential. 'I'm just still in the process of trying to figure out which bats. Bits,' she corrected herself, hurriedly.

Anatole looked reproachful.

'Slip of the tongue,' she mumbled.

'Any particular reason you've asked me here?' he asked, in a vaguely-diplomatic attempt to usher the conversation forwards.

They were in a dungeon classroom; just one of many they had deemed unsuitable for use as a teaching environment for reasons of mould. A steady drip of warm water between them promised to add to this problem. Helga pulled her cape more tightly around her shoulders.

'I need your help,' she said, 'with…something. If that's ok.'

He shrugged. 'Probably.'

'It will involve lying, espionage, duplicity and possible death.'

'Oh dear.'

'Well…probably not death.'

'Ok.'

'But definitely the first three.'

'Excellent.'

'Except espionage.'

'Right.'

'Maybe.'

'Elaborate?'

'I think Salazar's a bastard.' Her hands flew guiltily to her mouth immediately after she'd spoken.

Anatole just nodded. 'Go on.'

She lowered her hands, carefully. 'I mean…in a really bad way.'

He nodded again. 'As opposed to the really annoying way?'

'Well…yes.'

'As opposed to a "yet another really annoying smarmy titwrinkle who all the nice girls fall for even though there are perfectly nice and sincere people just hanging around, doing their best, slipping under the radar just because they're under five and a half foot tall" kind of way?'

'Er…yes.' She wrinkled her nose. '"Titwrinkle"?'

'I have issues. Continue.'

'I've done a bad thing.'

'Er…continue?' he prompted again, cautiously. He hadn't known Helga for very long, but was already of the opinion that a sinful confession from a Hufflepuff could range anywhere between "I accidentally lost your wand" to "I accidentally killed a man". She just had that air about her.

Helga dithered for a while. She was an expert ditherer. 'The thing is,' she said, biting her lip, 'the thing is, I really think that he might be a very, very bad man. You see? I mean not just your average philandering knob-wart, I mean a really bad man. You see?'

'I…not really,' Anatole confessed. 'You're going to have to explain why.'

And so, she did.

She didn't quite mean to – she intended to give away snippets of information, talk them through, let him persuade her she was over-reacting and pretend the whole thing never happened. But instead she opened her mouth and out the whole thing came, in a positive tsunami of too-much-information.

She told him of Heather, and her conviction that he – or perhaps Malfoy – was going to kill her; about Heather's spying; her insistence that Salazar had been the death of the last child they discovered; that he had killed the other students; that Salazar had murdered his grandfather – that he had murdered Cray Slytherin as he slept, all those years ago…

She descended into silence. Anatole made a kind of "bibble" noise.

Something in the dungeon went drip.

At a loss for anything else to say, Anatole offered another "bibble".

'Is that all you have to say?!' Helga demanded.

'Er…'

'None of that stuff powerful enough to evoke a response in your soul, you vampyric nipple?!'

'Er—'

'We're talking about a probable murderer potentially having it off with my best friend, you melon!'

'Er…oh dear?' Before she had chance to explode, he hurriedly added, 'You're right – if you're right, I mean – we need a plan of action. Need to discover the truth. Need to ascertain Heather's whereabouts. Need to run a lot of tests, ask a lot of questions, consider a lot of facts and keep all our cards very close to our chests—'

'I've told Rowena.'

'—or, that.' He frowned. 'What did you go and tell her for?'

She dithered again, flapping her hands around in a feeble attempt to escape the situation via the power of flight. 'I don't – I mean, I didn't mean to! I just had all this information and no one to talk to, and—'

'Well, what did she say?'

'Nothing.'

'Nothing?'

'Yet.' She scratched the back of her head sheepishly. 'I sort of…had it all written down in convenient note form, and…well, I was going to go and tell her earlier but she wasn't in, and I sort of, er, left it in her office.'

'Accidentally?'

'Sort-of.'

'Sort-of?'

'No. Not really.' She sighed and looked at the floor. 'I did a bad, bad thing…'

'And where's Professor Slytherin now?' Anatole asked, panic rising slightly. 'If you're right and he's as dangerous as you think he is, the last thing we need is him seeing that note—'

Helga sighed again. 'That's the thing,' she mumbled, sadly. 'I don't think there's any worry of that.'

'Why not?'

'I saw him in Hogsmeade earlier. I don't think he saw me.' She looked up. 'And he was running for his life.'