Victoria laid in her bed as she watched the pocket watch that the Malfoys had given her one Christmas to keep track of the time. When it was close to eleven-thirty, Victoria was careful enough to leave her bed and making sure none of the other girls stirred.
Making sure that Tabitha was nowhere as she quietly left the dormitory. The common room was dark and quiet save for the current of the Black Lake lapping against the windows. Her feet sticking to the stone floor as she went up the stairs to the entrance.
Once outside the common room, she had disillusioned herself before going further. Though her heart was still beating rapidly in her chest as she navigated up the stairs to the Trophy Room.
It was empty by the time she'd arrived. Her hands were clammy as she pressed against one of the silver cases holding the various rewards and medals. Her eyes on the doors at either side of the room.
After what seemed like agonizing minutes, one of the doors did open, and she looked to see four figures enter the room. Thanks to the moonlight, it was easy to see who they were, and Hermione's scowl was all she needed to know that she didn't want to be there.
Ron was about to press his back against the surface that Victoria was blended into until he bumped into her. "Someone's here!" he gasped, and Victoria lifted the disillusionment charm the moment Ron turned to see her.
"You think that this isn't some set up by Draco to lure you here so he could sic Filch on you guys?" she hissed as she registered the shock on their faces.
"Nice to see you too," said Harry.
"That's what I have been telling them," Hermione hissed, wringing her hands.
"How did you get in here?" Ron asked, raising an eyebrow. "We didn't see you come in here."
Victoria lifted up her wand. "I cast a disillusionment charm so no one would see me. You won't find it in your current textbooks as we won't learn it until a few years."
"You know a charm that's above our year?" Andrew asked, eyes wide and smiling as if in awe. "Wicked!"
Harry is about to open his mouth when they hear something outside that made them jump. Harry had only just raised his wand when they heard someone speak – and it wasn't Draco or Vincent or Gregory.
"Sniff around, my sweet, they might be lurking in a corner."
It was Filch speaking to Mrs. Norris. Harry waved madly at them to follow him. Horror filling the pit of her stomach and Draco's plot confirmed, Victoria and the other three scurry silently from the door away from Filch's voice.
"They're in here somewhere," they heard him mutter, "probably hiding."
"This way!" Harry mouthed to the others, and, petrified, they began to creep down a long gallery full of suits of armor. They could hear Filch getting nearer.
"Let's run far enough so he wouldn't catch us," Victoria suggested. Harry didn't even argue, for the five of them sprinted down the gallery, not looking back to see whether Filch was following - they swung around the doorpost and galloped down one corridor then another, Harry in the lead, without any idea where they were or where they were going - they ripped through a tapestry and found themselves in a hidden passageway, hurtled along it and came out near their Charms classroom, which they knew was miles from the trophy room.
"I think we've lost him," Harry panted, leaning against the cold wall and wiping his forehead.
"I – told – you," Hermione gasped, clutching at the stitch in her chest. "I – told – you."
"Four of the five of us got to get back to Gryffindor Tower," Ron said, "Quickly as possible."
"Draco was planning to sic Filch on you guys," Victoria whispered. "I heard him bragging about it to Vincent and Greg near their dormitories."
"See, he was never going to meet you," Hermione concurred as if her thoughts were confirmed by Victoria's words. "Malfoy tricked you, don't you realize that?"
"Let's go," said Harry.
It wasn't going to be that simple. They hadn't gone more than a dozen paces when a doorknob rattled and something came shooting out of a classroom in front of them.
It was Peeves. He caught sight of them and gave a squeal of delight.
"Shut up, Peeves - please - you'll get us thrown out."
Peeves cackled.
"Wandering around at midnight, Ickle Firsties? Tut, tut, tut. Naughty, naughty, you'll get caughty."
"Not if you don't give us away, Peeves, please."
"Should tell Filch, I should," said Peeves in a saintly voice, but his eyes glittered wickedly. "It's for your own good, you know."
"Sod off, Peeves!"
"Awww, you do want me to tell Filch," Peeves taunted.
"Out of the way, Peeves!"
"What's an firstie like you going do with me with that wand?"
"Get out of the way," snapped Ron, taking a swipe at Peeves. This was a big mistake.
"STUDENTS OUT OF BED!" Peeves bellowed, "STUDENTS OUT OF BED DOWN THE CHARMS CORRIDOR!"
Ducking under Peeves, they ran for their lives, right to the end of the corridor where they slammed into a door - and it was locked.
"This is it!" Ron moaned, as they pushed helplessly at the door, "We're done for! This is the end!"
They could hear footsteps, Filch running as fast as he could toward Peeves's shouts.
"Oh, move over," Hermione snarled. She grabbed Harry's wand, tapped the lock, and whispered, "Alohomora!"
The lock clicked and the door swung open - they piled through it, shut it quickly, and pressed their ears against it, listening.
"Which way did they go, Peeves?" Filch was saying. "Quick, tell me."
"Say 'please.'"
"Don't mess with me, Peeves, now where did they go?"
"Shan't say nothing if you don't say please," said Peeves in his annoying singsong voice.
"All right - please."
"NOTHING! Ha haaa! Told you I wouldn't say nothing if you didn't say please! Ha ha! Haaaaaa!" And they heard the sound of Peeves whooshing away and Filch cursing in rage.
Victoria had only turned to see what room they were in when she stopped. The blood draining from her face and the feeling of ice rising from her toes to her stomach. It wasn't the fact that it was not a room but a corridor that they were in.
Before them lay a monstrous dog. It's three enormous heads in various states of stirring awake before three pairs of enormous yellow eyes turned to them. She swallowed, tugging Harry's sleeve as the giant dog rose to its feet. Underneath which lay a trap door.
The drool dripped from its fangs as it growled at the five petrified children.
Victoria would rather take the train back to London than be eaten to death.
The five of them ran. Ran from the forbidden corridor and ran in different directions. The dungeons were dark as she ran towards the safety of the common room. "Half-blood," she said to the hidden entrance and didn't give a chance for the wall to slide all the way open to squeeze inside.
It was when she was in the dormitory and curled up tightly in her bed when that trapdoor came to her mind. Severus was called for a meeting in late July, and he told the Malfoys that the third-floor corridor was forbidden. Dumbledore himself said that the corridor was out of bounds and that going there would result in a painful death.
What was so important inside this castle that they were using a dog that guarded the Greek Underworld to protect it?
"You look tired. You weren't out of bed past curfew, were you?"
Draco Malfoy's question made Victoria look up from her copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
"You ever get restless that you can't sleep at night?" she asked, suppressing a yawn while covering her mouth with her hand. "That's what I was."
Draco had shaken his head. He was spreading the marmalade on his toast when Harry and Ron had both come into the Great Hall. Victoria had masqueraded her giggle as a cough at the priceless shock on Draco's face as he nearly dropped his toast as if he had not expected to see them in the Great Hall.
Gazing at the Gryffindor table across the hall, Victoria could see that Hermione looked awfully bad-tempered. Especially the way she had seemed to be out of sorts with Harry, Ron, and Andrew.
"Anything okay, Draco?" asked Denmore, having noticed Draco's shock.
At that, Draco quickly recovered. Shaking his head as he took a bite from his toast. "Yeah, I thought I saw something unusual," he lied as their owls had arrived with their post. Perenelle gave her the Daily Prophet's morning print, her copy of Seeker Weekly, and an envelope from her mother. Victoria had begun to open the envelope when she heard Lavinia clear her throat.
"Beloved by wife Lucretia, sister-in-law Elizabeth, son Dominic, and granddaughter Lavinia," Lavinia had read aloud, her eyes looking around as she did so. "The memorial service for Gaius Mulciber will be held the coming Saturday, where friends and family will be celebrating his life."
A few chuckles and giggles follow Lavinia's reading of the funeral invitation. Victoria shook her head and muttered, "Blasted Mulciber," as she rips open the envelope and unfolds the parchment.
Dear Victoria,
I'm pleased to hear that all is well for you at school. The first weeks are always the toughest, as one has so much to adjust to.
In the future, tell me what is on your mind and what has been bothering you. Andrew and Violet have always shared their troubles with me, and I hope you can do the same.
There is also an important matter of discussion, though I prefer to speak it with you in person rather than on parchment paper. Severus says you might spend your Christmas holidays with the Malfoys as you always have, though I hope you can fit a day with me during that time.
Wishing you all the best and with lots of love,
Your mother.
An important matter of discussion. Did Severus happen to speak with her mother about what she found out? She'd still rather not.
"Lavinia's making me wish that my last name wasn't Mulciber," she tells Eridani, Andrew, and Hermione as they descend the dungeons to Double Potions. Victoria kicks a quill out of the way. "She's been giving me a hard time about it for years."
Andrew waves his hand. "Pureblood family politics are strange. Not something I'm interested in. My father left that world, or so people thought."
"From what I hear from the Slytherins, technically, she's still your niece," said Hermione. "Your father is still her grandfather."
"Where we come from, it matters because the blood status is called to question," said Eridani as they stepped inside the classroom. "Our world is miles behind the Muggles in these things. Mind if I sit with you this time, Neville?"
Victoria takes the center-most table in the front row and watches as Harry and Ron settle on a table in the back row.
"Psst. Harry!"
His green eyes look up at her as she gestured towards where she was sitting. She watches as he turns to talk to Ron, who seems to be uttering words of protest for a moment before seeming to comply with whatever Harry was saying.
When Harry gets to her station, he slumps into the chair next to her. "The place where I always wanted to be," he said, his voice dripping in sass and sarcasm. "Right where Snape can see me."
"If we can go to the back, I won't argue," she offered. If Harry was uncomfortable sitting in the front, they could always change where they sat.
"No," he protests, eyes wide and shaking his head. "We don't have to move. I mean, if you're comfortable sitting here, it's fine with me."
She raised her eyebrow, still not pleased with his response. She was okay with it if they moved. Victoria wouldn't want to sit in the part of the classroom where he felt the most uncomfortable.
Before she can continue to coax him that they could sit elsewhere, the door slams shut, and Severus' black robes billow behind him as he makes his way to the front of the room. He takes one look at the classroom as he begins taking the register, his eyebrow raising incredulously as he sees her and Harry sitting together.
"Now," he sets aside the register and turns his attention to the class, "I should assume that our last lesson has given you all an idea of what this class shall entail this year and the ones to follow. I trust that today…" at this his gaze lingers to Neville, "…shall offer no mishaps as the last one."
This lesson was Herbicide Potion, and had she been in Neville Longbottom's position and hadn't brewed the potion twice during the summer, she would have found the process difficult. "Now, I believe we need two measures of Horklump Juice to our cauldron," Harry said, reading the instructions as Severus stood behind their station. Victoria could see neither approval nor disdain on his face as he regarded them. He appeared unreadable as he regarded them before drifting to the workstation next to them.
And that worried her.
When the class was dismissed for lunch, Severus bid her to stay behind.
"I find your choice in your new class partner interesting," he drawled, lacing his fingers together. "In just the first class alone, Potter has proved to be one of the mediocre of those that I teach."
"Well, I thought that I could help him," Victoria said, dragging her feet over the stone floor. You were very unfair to him the last time, she thinks. And to Andrew.
"Of course, Potter thinks that it's above him to actually learn from his mistakes on his own," Severus drawled. "So, instead, he uses you to make up for his lack of talent."
Victoria felt the heat rush to her face as the tears obstructed her vision. That just wasn't true. Harry seemed hesitant to take up her offer and seemed to not refuse to not hurt her feelings. When she wiped her eyes and cleared her vision, she could see that Severus' eyes softened. As if he did not mean to hurt her feelings.
"I apologize, Victoria," he said softly. "Hurting you was not my intention. The fact of the matter is that a friendship between one from Gryffindor and one from Slytherin is rare. One that could end where one party can hurt the other and themselves in the process."
The way he said the last sentence sounded as if he was that friend who had hurt the other and himself. Severus had shared so little about his life, and the only thing she had known was that James Potter, Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew, and Remus Lupin were that group of friends that weren't so nice to him ("He didn't so much join in," he had said about Remus Lupin. "Though his enabling of it was just as bad.")
"What did you do that hurt both that friend and yourself?" she had asked before stopping herself.
Victoria realized her mistake when his face took on the look as if he was forced to drink something foul. "I believe that it is lunchtime," he drawled. "It would do best for you not to go to your next class on an empty stomach."
"She has nothing to fall back on, so she has to leech from Potter's name to achieve any cred that she lacks."
That was what Lavinia had said after Victoria had made the decision to partner with Harry for Potions. None of it was true, though Victoria had not told her that. Doing so would only bait Lavinia and prompt her to push Victoria to give the answer that Lavinia had craved.
The Saturday after that Friday, Victoria had served detention with Draco. The two of them having to catalog every item in Severus' storeroom and make sure that everything was accounted for. If it weren't for the fact that they were to be quiet, Draco would have been filling the silence with his string of complaints about how Harry was to be the Seeker of his House team and the unfairness of it all.
Victoria was not invited to Gaius Mulciber's memorial, not that she cared. Why attend the memorial of someone who wasn't even your father to begin with and where half of its attendants despised her for merely existing?
As for the incident that had involved the Cerberus that they had encountered, Hermione wasn't speaking to either Harry and Ron and Andrew ("They could have gotten us killed, you know," Hermione had told her crossly. "You only need one person as your second for a Wizard's Duel, and Andrew obviously went with them for the thrill of breaking the rules"). Victoria had made no plans to see that dog in the future, but like the lions they no doubted were, Andrew, Harry, and Ron had seemed eager for another encounter.
September had faded into October, and it is from the classroom windows that they could see the brown, yellow, and orange leaves start to blanket the lawns. The air crisp and cool, Victoria and a few of the Slytherins trooped to the Quidditch stadium the first Saturday of the month to watch their team practice. A few feet away, Cassiopeia was seated with some of her friends.
"She's here to see Marcus Flint practice," said Eridani, with a roll of her eyes. Marcus Flint was the burly fifth-year that was captain of the Slytherin Quidditch team. Victoria wasn't oblivious to the dreamy looks that Cassiopeia had given him during the past months.
Victoria couldn't understand the fuss. Marcus did look like he had troll blood, though.
On Halloween, the whole of Slytherin House had awoken to the aroma of pumpkin wafting down from the kitchens above.
That afternoon, as the students made their way towards the Great Hall for the feast, she had heard snippets of Lavender Brown's and Parvati Patil's conversation.
"I mean, she's been in the bathroom all afternoon," whispered Lavender. "She's going to miss the feast."
"I think we should leave Hermione alone," Parvati replied. "I tried what I could."
Victoria froze.
"What's wrong with Hermione?" she asked, wondering what could have happened that would send Hermione to tears.
"She was fine at Charms Class, and then when we left for lunch, we saw her run off in tears," said Lavender, sending a glare past Victoria's shoulder. "I think that toerag Ron Weasley had something to do with it."
Victoria turns around to see Ron standing with Andrew and Harry a few yards away. With Ron looking down at his feet, she didn't need to ask anymore
"Eridani, mind if you save me some dessert?" she asked before running to the girls' bathroom on the first floor. Seeing what was wrong with a friend was more important than feasting on Halloween.
"Hermione?" she had asked as she opened the door to the lavatory.
"Go away!" shouts Hermione through her tears.
"Nonsense," Victoria tells her as she enters the lavatory and towards the stall where she could hear the sobs. "Tell me, what did that tosser Ron Weasley do to you?"
"I mean, h-he's not-t wrong!" Hermione sobs. "A-aside f-f-from Neville, I-I've g-got n-no friends in G-gryffindor!"
Victoria sighed. Of course, it would matter to Ronald Bloody Weasley the friends one makes within their Hogwarts House.
"It shouldn't matter whether you have friends in the same House," she said, slapping her hand on the stall. "You're one of the new friends I have made, and you're not in Slytherin. You're probably going to say that I have no trouble with my House, though you wouldn't see me in Draco's circle that often. Some of the kids there don't like me at all. Though I had Eridani. Still do."
Hermione sniffs. "I was always the odd one. Most of the kids in my old school didn't like that I thought that learning and reading were more important than what they were doing. I did have this one friend, Anna, but she's in secondary school, and I don't think she would understand the types of stuff that we're learning here."
For what seemed like a half-hour, the two girls have shared their experiences with some of the kids in their lives. How they seemed to be the odd ones out. Perhaps Hermione didn't want to be left alone, that she needed to hear from someone who understood and cared.
"As I said, it shouldn't matter whether you have friends from Gryffindor or not," she said. "It's best to have a friend from a different house and be happy then force yourself to be friends with someone from your house and be miserable."
Hermione opens the stall door and smiles faintly as she wipes her tears. "Thank you," she says. "It shouldn't matter what House we're in." After a few seconds, she says, "Let's go to the Hall. We're missing the feast."
Leaving the bathroom proved to be impossible, for as they turned to the door, there stood what could only be a Mountain Troll. Blocking their exit.