Cassiopeia Malfoy can be rather patient she believes. She can tolerate her brothers snottiness, her father's distance, and her mother's smothering for hours. She can deal with jerks who look at her Ravenclaw colors and treat her like some kind of nerdy know-it-all and she can deal the Slytherins who she'd grown up around teasing her on her lack of following family standards in house sorting.
But she was absolutely done with being in the crossfire of those two Weasley twins's pranks.
Whether it was a frozen hallway in the dungeons that made her path to potions treacherous. Or releasing all the owls to send joke notes thus preventing her from easily replying to her mother's letters. Or any number of stink bombs and exploding treats. She was quite over how often it interfered with her own day-to-day.
Now, she would be able to recognize the hilarity and ingenuity of many of their pranks, if she weren't currently covered with whipped cream that came from the exploding pastries that were waiting on everyones plates at breakfast.
So, after cleaning herself of the mess they'd made of her, Cassiopeia goes to find the two red-headed devils in question.
She discovers them in a small alcove, clearly joking between themselves and stirring some substance in a cauldron that Cass studies quietly before clearing her throat and glaring her most threatening glare at the pair of them. "The two of you believe yourselves quite clever don't you?"
"Clever?" One of them asked, a smile clear upon his face.
"Nah, not clever," the other said, a duplicate smile on his face.
"Genius sounds better," the first nods as though in consideration, "don't it, George?"
"Oh definitely," the other, George, agrees. "Quite better, Fred."
"I don't care whether it's clever or genius, or just plain stupid," Cass cuts in, "I want the pair of you to stop with it around me."
"Well that wouldn't be any fun," the one called Fred frowns though he still has that smiling twinkle to his eyes.
"We quite like pranking, why should we stop?"
"You don't have to stop your stupid jokes," Cass relents, "just prank everyone but me. I couldn't care less about you messing about with the rest of the school."
Fred laughs while George studies her, "well why should we keep you out of the fun?"
"Doesn't seem quite fair for the rest."
She plasters a brilliant smile upon her face. The one a girl raised in high pureblood society could master that held a perfect mix of charming and threatening. "Because if I have to clean whipped cream from my robes one more time, then the pair of you will be spending the rest of the year with Madam Pomfrey hexed beyond belief."
The twins glance between each other before Fred speaks, "well who said we're scared of you?"
"Yeah, we've got no reason to be."
"I could certainly give you one." She produces her wand and taps it lightly against her palm, "would you like to take that chance?"
"Wait…" Fred studies her, leaning back and looking rather relaxed despite the wand threatening his direction, "you're the Malfoy girl, the one who hexed Warrington the first month right?"
"Bloody he was in the infirmary two weeks that time," George, looking just slightly less relaxed than his twin, peered at her again. The pair of them both held an equal level of awe and alarm to their eyes, mixed under the twinkle bit of mischief that seems to be ever-present.
"Sure you weren't sorted wrong, Malfoy?" Fred asks.
"Curses like that," George clicks his tongue, "and threatening us now."
"Very Slytherin." Fred finishes.
She rolls her eyes, "yes, well I am a Malfoy, even if I am a Ravenclaw as well, and there is a reason most Malfoy's are Slytherins, shared traits and all that." She continues to glare, "so, will you leave me out of any targeted pranks from now on or would you like to be like Cassius?" Fred and George looked at each other, and Cassiopeia got the intense feeling that they were likely conversing entirely with just their looks and she wondered if that was from pure closeness or some twin thing they shared.
Finally the pair of red-heads turned back to her and smiled before nodding, "fair enough."
"We don't really fancy spending precious time in the infirmary—"
"We spend enough precious time in detention—"
"Time that could be better spent working on the next thing—"
"So we'll do our best to not aim for you—"
"Though if a prank or two end up your direction—
"Well it's bound to happen—"
"But you have our word—"
"A trustworthy thing we swear—"
"That we'll leave you out best we can."
Cass glanced between the two of them a moment, disoriented at first by their back and forth that worked almost like it was one person speaking rather than two, before deciding that this was the best promise she'd get that they'd leave her be. So, after her moment of consideration, she gives them a nod and returns her wand to her robes.
She turns to leave but before she does she takes one more quick glance at their potion and notes, "stir the other way, fifteen times and then once the other way round." She peers a second longer, "and add two rose petals, it'll intensify the smell." And with that she leaves them glancing between themselves and the potion.
A week and one stunk-up hallway outside the Slytherin common room later the twins found their way out to the black lake fresh from detention— for said stunk-up hallway— and plop themselves down on either side of Cassiopeia on the grass where she flips through an old copy of Northanger Abbey. Quickly the pair of them strike up conversation about the potion that had landed them in detention and how her advice had improved upon it. They applauded her apparent brilliance and joked about the looks upon Warrington's and Bletchley's— "rather fitting name that one with the way he wretched" George remarks laughing— faces when they exited into the fumes.
By the end of the conversation they've garnered her help in their next endeavor.
And by the end of Cassiopeia's first year she's found herself in more detentions than she'd ever have wanted to be in. But even so she can't find herself caring when she's ending up there with Fred and George Weasley on either side of her.