march - loyalty
Amycus called on Pansy to read aloud from a Dark Arts book, and Theo knew she was immediately panicking. They had never talked about it much, but Pansy struggled with reading and acted like she simply didn't care about schoolwork in order to hide it. Amycus quickly grew frustrated, sending Stinging Hexes at Pansy for going too slowly, which of course made it even harder for her.
"She's just tired from the detention you made her help with last night, why don't you actually teach us some Dark Arts instead of relying on us to do it for you?" Theo asked snidely.
Amycus turned his attention to him. "I will not tolerate insolence! I don't care who your father is, I'm going to make an example of you," he said. Then he ordered Theo to the front of the class.
He didn't cry out when the blow came, just wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand. Amycus's face twisted, and then he slashed his wand several times, causing long thin cuts to appear: below his collarbone, on his bicep, over his ribs. Never deep enough to really cause problems, Theo knew straightaway, but enough to send that old familiar mixture of humiliation and fear down his spine.
He patched himself up, with Pansy's help, in the Slytherin dorms.
Alecto caught Theo falling asleep in her class and started screaming at him, then threw a book at his head which he barely dodged.
"Maybe if you were a better teacher, he wouldn't be so bored," said Pansy before she could really start in on him. That earned her a slap across the face, then Alecto fired off a curse that gave her a pounding headache and made sure it didn't wear off before the end of the lesson.
She was forced to apologise before leaving the room, which she did, because she wasn't as recklessly brave as Neville was in the Carrows' presence.
In the corridor, Millicent grabbed her by the hair and shoved her against the wall, because she could. Pansy wasn't surprised; before this year she too had always enjoyed opportunities to assert her power over another girl. Theo was there in a flash, putting his arm around Pansy and walking her to her next class.
april - fraternity
Astoria found Pansy wandering around the castle late that night, and choked back a sob when she saw her friend's clothing in disarray and her thousand-yard stare.
She took Pansy's hand and walked them to the seventh floor, where she went inside what Pansy knew must be the Room of Hidden Things. She emerged with Neville, who approached Pansy cautiously.
"I'm not going to hurt you; I'm just going to do a Disillusionment Charm, alright?" he said in a gentle tone that Pansy had never heard from him before. "Then Astoria will take you back to your room, and no one will see you."
She nodded, and he raised his wand, but then hesitated. "Unless...it's never too late, Pansy. If you want to come with me."
"And let my mates suffer the consequences of my betrayal? I don't think so," she responded. "Just tell the other Houses that Death Eaters are dropping by the school for visits now, and they shouldn't be walking alone."
Theo and Daphne had stayed at the castle for Easter, and they made sure Pansy didn't starve herself to death, although they couldn't get her to do much else. All Pansy wanted to do was be alone now. She slept fully-dressed, wand in her hand. It could happen again. Nowhere in the castle was safe. Almost no one could be trusted.
Ginny didn't come back after the Easter holidays, and honestly Theo was relieved that she had gone into hiding with her family. The Carrows were out of control, and Dumbledore's Army constantly winding them up didn't help. Theo had to focus all of his attention on his friends, because they needed him to be strong.
Draco returned having sustained torture for letting Potter, Weasley and Granger escape from the Manor. The two couples locked themselves in Draco's room; Astoria and Daphne held each other and cried while Theo petted Draco's hair just like he had done when they were children, before Lucius shouted at them for being so disgraceful and weak.
"I don't think I believe in this anymore," he whispered, so only Theo could hear.
"I know. We just have to survive, alright?" Theo said.
Whatever it takes , whatever it takes . From the time he woke up in the morning, Theo's mind would be chanting those words. His prediction had been correct-the stakes were high. He had to be ready for anything.
september - ambition
"Afternoon, Ginny, Neville," Astoria bellowed for everyone in the vicinity to hear as she approached the two Gryffindors sitting in the courtyard. "I've just been socialising with the Dark Wizards' Harlot and the Damaged Son of a Murderer, and then later I'll be seeing my Deranged, Teenaged, Ex-Death Eater boyfriend. Just in case anyone wants to know where the school's High-Strung, Tragic Alcoholic is."
Rita Skeeter had finally turned on some of her favourite sources and this morning's newspaper had included a wealth of reporting about Astoria and her friends.
The Slytherin girl sat down, and said in her normal voice, "I said we should make a new round of badges based how the Prophet labelled us, but my mates weren't quite ready for that joke yet."
"Astoria, we do not need any more badges around this place," Ginny said, having no desire to add that to the list of things she had to deal with as Head Girl.
"Fine, but then I tried to tell them that Harry Potter was constantly maligned in the press, and look how things worked out for him. That went over even worse," she said, making Neville chuckle before a serious look swept over his face.
"They're not going to try to start up old feuds over this, are they? I don't want any problems from Slytherins this year," he said, ready to swiftly retaliate even if they were Astoria's friends or Housemates.
"I will keep them all in line," she said confidently. "Maybe this will convince you." She reached into her bag and pulled out several folders of various thicknesses. Neville could read the labels as she began to reorganise them: Slytherins' Strengths to Prioritise , Everyone's Weaknesses to Exploit , Flattering Photographs In Case I Go Missing , NEWT Past Papers , and finally, the one she apparently had been looking for, Blackmail Material .
"I've been working on this since second year," she said proudly, showing off the folder. "Ah ah ah, these are for my eyes only," and snatched it away before Ginny could make a grab for it.
"Why are you doing all this? You didn't seem to care about your future at all before the battle," Ginny said curiously.
"I was the lucky one, for a while, regardless of what side you were on. Because I knew I was going to die young no matter what. And there was a freedom in that...plastered by half nine? Fraternising with the DA? Sleeping with the youngest Death Eater? Why not do it all?" Wearing a wry smile, she looked up and blinked a few times. "But then I had to go and fall for him, and now, I have to fight against the clock to get what I want."
"What do you want?"
"After I'm gone, I want my friends to be safe and not skint and at least somewhat happy. I want to have a child, and even if I am able to, I don't know how long I'll be around for that child. So I need to make sure that my chosen family will be equipped to deal with all the options: if that child inherits the curse, or is a Squib, or falls in love with a Muggle-or, for all I know, a Potter or a Weasley. So, Salazar, give me strength, because I know I'll need it."
The three were quiet for a few moments.
"Do you rehearse these little speeches?" Ginny asked.
"Sometimes," she confessed, laughing.
"Right, well I better get back to doing damage control," Astoria said while packing up. She raised her voice again to declare to anyone who could hear, "As the leader of the newly-dubbed Conspiratorial Squad , I would like to announce that we are not recruiting," She winked at the two Gryffindors before departing.
Ginny and Neville shared a grin; they had both enjoyed that headline's callback to the days of Umbridge and relished the payback. But they had already agreed that the Prophet had been out of order with some of the things that were said about the Slytherins, especially Parkinson and Nott. Of course Ginny was still angry over what Parkinson had done right before the battle, but it wasn't right to call her a slag when Avery was the only perpetrator of the crime. Theo wasn't responsible for what his father had done and shouldn't have to shoulder the public's scrutiny since Nott Senior would never again see the light of day.
None of them were the same people they had been before the war, Pansy and Theo included. They didn't have the energy for fighting anymore; not with the nightmares, the hypervigilance, the difficulty concentrating on basic tasks. Spell-shock , Ginny's dad told her it used to be called, but now there was a more complicated name for it.
Nobody had told Ginny that winning a war would be this fucking painful.
Nobody had told Neville that coming out on top would leave him feeling so hollow.
Somehow, they thought the Slytherins might understand the best out of anyone.
Neville saw Pansy approach two younger Ravenclaws on an afternoon where the weather was still so warm that it drew nearly all the students outside.
"Is that a Muggle cigarette?" she demanded, and they failed valiantly at trying to hide it from her. "It goes this way," she said simply, taking a fresh one out of the pack and pointing the filter end towards the fifth-year's mouth. After commanding them to light one for her as well, she caught Neville watching her. Pansy raised her hands as if to say, what do you want me to do? , before sending him the first real smile he thought he'd ever seen from her.
It didn't have a name on it, but Ginny recognised the parchment that had been tacked to the door of the Muggle Studies classroom overnight. It spanned the entire length-about seven feet. The original black ink had been marked up with red, annotations spilling into the margins. The revisions completely deconstructed all of the shit about Muggle-born witches and wizards that Alecto had spouted for months. Even Hermione felt the new version was exceptionally well written and cited.
"Do you know who did this?" Hermione asked her, and she nodded in response. The group of students gathered around looked to her with bated breath.
"If the student wants to remain anonymous, I think we should respect that." She paused. "Fifty points to Slytherin," she said, and went to slip a note under McGonagall's office door.