Book 1: Astoria Greengrass and the Muggle-Born Slytherin

Song rec: "Soldier's Daughter" by Tonic

Rhiannon had scowled when Moody gave her the task of washing all of the ceiling-high windows in his classroom for detention… Muggle-style. She was carelessly spilling soapy water onto the floor from the pail on her unsteady ladder. What should have been a simple task was made complicated by the fact that each window had five divisions, and each division had at least sixty muntin diamonds. Still, Rhiannon started out by working inefficiently for fear that each of the following chores he would give her would be even worse. Last time she had detention, he wouldn't even let her read homework after finishing her task.

"Don't you realise you're going to give yourself the job of mopping these floors if you keep splashing water everywhere?" said Moody crossly.

Rhiannon took out her wand and fixed the uneven leg on the ladder before returning to her job. To keep herself from losing her mind from tedium, she tried to conceive lyrics for songs that would probably never get cleared by Mongaby. It had been nearly an hour, and Rhiannon was only finished with the first high window. It appeared that Filch had not bothered to clean the windows in the classroom for years, for the cloth she was using became so dirtied that it was no longer its original colour. She still had one hour to go but decided to rest for a few minutes. She knew that there was no way she could drag out the window-cleaning for a whole month just to avoid the silent treatment. During her unauthorised respite, she pondered that Filch would have let the windows get this dirty in order to provide the teachers with a potential means of student discipline… and to provide the school with an excuse not to invest in curtains. The beam of light from the newly washed window was sufficient enough to roast any student sitting in its path. Rhiannon waited until Moody started glaring in her direction before returning to her assignment.

On the fifth of June, it turned out to be the best day of the year to spend an afternoon in detention, for it was the fifteenth anniversary of Malfoy's birth, and Rhiannon knew that there was some obnoxious festivity taking place in the common room. There was no way to hide her progress, though, and she finished cleaning the windows. The once-dark classroom finally required no candles during the day. Rhiannon actually appreciated the result, for she could see a splendid view of the rolling hills of the grounds and the picturesque moorland in the distance. She dallied as she emptied the pail in the lavatory sink down the corridor; she realised she still had an hour of detention. She really hoped it wouldn't be like last time.

When she returned to the classroom, she saw what awaited her, for the fresh lighting in the room made obvious the amount of dirt on the floor. Before Moody could ponder about whether he wanted her to sweep the dirty floors or not, Rhiannon had the broom in hand. The professor seemed entirely unsure how to respond as she took the liberty to plan the remainder of her detention time.

However, the next day, Rhiannon knew her luck had finally run out, and she anticipated the worst of unpleasant tasks — the staring contest. When she entered the room, the professor was staring directly down at his desk rather bizarrely. Mildly unnerved, Rhiannon took a seat. Professor Moody suddenly appeared to lift off the very top of his desk; Rhiannon quickly recognised that he instead was holding a sort of picture frame.

"Rhiannon, are you able to identify the people in this image?"

Moody turned the frame round so Rhiannon could see its front. The image was unclear and smoky. In it were many silhouettes of people in tall pointed hats. A few shades of barely saturated colour were visible, but overall, Rhiannon identified no one.

"I see them, but I can't see their faces," she answered.

"Good, good," Moody blabbered. "This is a Foe-Glass, a mirror that shows one the reflections of his enemies. The clearer their images appear, the more serious the threat they pose, and the closer they are."

"Wish I coulda had one of those," Rhiannon mumbled nondescriptly.

"I suggest you get one, Miss Clarke. It's the most accurate Dark Detector I own."

He walked the device into his office and returned without it. He sat down, and his gnarled face was folded further as he squinted at Rhiannon in the newfound light from the windows.

"You know why you're in detention?"

Rhiannon hated when teachers asked stupid questions like that. It never proved anything. Actions cannot be reversed.

"Disrupting class," she said.

She could feel a dreadful essay about educational values coming.

"Wrong."

"Er, making you need to cancel class early."

"Still wrong."

"The… windows really needed washing?"

Moody let out a high, crowing laugh that entirely mismatched his gravelly and blubbering speaking voice.

"It wasn't what you did. I decided to end class. If I wanted class to continue, believe me, it would have continued. No," he said, "no, it was what you said."

"What I said," Rhiannon tried to recall it hazily. She mostly only remembered the situation in the lavatory that had followed her outburst in class. "What I said about Astoria's parents… Oh, well, I was—"

"Wounded by your own," Moody finished surely.

He leaned back totally in his chair, and Rhiannon thought it might fall. Having experience with falling backwards in chairs herself, she was about to say something when she realised he had only temporarily leaned that far back so as to gain the last drop from his hip flask by hovering it over his mouth. He then quickly hobbled to his office once more, evidently refilling the container.

"Well, now," the old professor grumbled, "You'd be awfully surprised to hear that my own father abused and abandoned me."

Rhiannon felt her shoulders slump. That hollowness in her chest returned. It was the spot where love for her parents should have been. After being thrown into an otherwise homogenous mixture of pure-blooded children in secure families, Rhiannon was indeed surprised, and a little comforted, by the fact that a pure-blooded wizard felt the same hollowness.

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Rhiannon softly.

"Oh, well, the old man's dead now," Moody said, juddering slightly as he took a messy swig from his flask. "He can't hurt me from the grave, can he?" he added in a flat chuckle.

"No, he can't," she uttered involuntarily.

Unmistakably, the poor old professor had been keeping these dark grudges within him for ages. Rhiannon felt guilty for bringing them to the surface by crying out in his class. What was she to say? What was anyone ever to say? In the Muggle and Wizarding world alike, there seemed to be no end to child abuse. It left scars even worse than the kind on Rhiannon's arm.

Her own painful memories amongst the sadness of knowing about the professor had caused her eyes to water. One of these days, she would stop crying in public, she told herself. She hated her weaknesses, and she hated those who gave them to her. By the time she conquered them, she might have a face as wrinkled as Moody's. The professor's magical eye had stopped rolling as it always did when he was serious. He was watching the clouds move across the dimming skies outside the newly clean windows. His mouth twitched at the beautiful view then furrowed back to a frown when he saw Rhiannon's sadness.

"It must have been hard," he mused, "to have been raised by those Muggles. They'd never understand you."

"I can't really say I was raised," Rhiannon said emptily. "It started because I was a witch, but sometimes I think even if I wasn't magical, they'd still find some way to hate me."

The professor clicked his tongue in a tut-tut.

"I had a mother who tried to raise me," he said. "She was always too ill to do much, eventually died. Father felt that the stress of my mere existence had sped up the process for her. He made things a lot worse after that."

"I didn't ever have anything from my mum. She made me afraid to leave my room after my dad left," Rhiannon unexpectedly opened up. "My best consolation is that she ain't round me too often. I don't think she'd try to do what he did, though."

It was far easier to speak about these things with someone who had experienced abuse as well, Rhiannon found.

"What did he do?" Moody asked rather bluntly.

"He got a gun and shot at me," Rhiannon said. "Then he left for good. The neighbours heard and called the police, but nobody ever found him. I don't know how someone stupid as him managed to outrun police. Unless he killed himself."

Moody stared at her, but this time, Rhiannon looked right back at him. Astoria had heard her words, but it seemed like Moody understood what it had really been like. It was like he could even see her scramble for her life, hear the screaming. This was someone who had never had a chance, either.

"I'm sorry, Professor."

"Rhiannon."

"What?"

"Don't say 'I'm sorry' to me ever again. You know none of this is your fault."

"I… I meant sorry for bringing it up."

"You needed to talk about it. You wouldn't have said it otherwise," he rasped. "You see, my father abandoned me, but…"

He brought a single, shaky finger to the middle of his face and jabbed himself in the forehead quite unsettlingly. "But Father never left here."

Moody chugged down more of his ever-present beverage as though it had an anaesthetic effect on his emotion. Rhiannon looked out the window toward the distant hills, hoping that she would not ever feel the need to resort to drinking. There were other places besides that flat in Whitechapel, places with hope.

"Without any parents, you have nowhere to turn," Moody rumbled thoughtfully.

Rhiannon thought of the people in whom she could confide. There was Professor Lupin, of course, who knew what it was like to be desperately poor and very much alone. There were Hestia and Flora, who avoided any talk about their family but were sympathetic when Rhiannon had the courage to say something about hers. There was Astoria, a girl as opposite as Rhiannon as could be, yet who tried to understand and comfort her. Then there was Professor Moody, an unexpected listener who could actually talk about things that could hardly ever be put into words.

"Well," Rhiannon reflected, "you just find someone who understands, I s'pose."

The professor tilted his head rapidly as he appeared to calculate her answer.

"Right you are," he said in a staid, clear voice that Rhiannon had never heard him use, "right you are."

On Wednesday, Rhiannon had detention immediately following D.A.D.A., for it was her last class of the day. She no longer dreaded detention, but there was something about not being able to leave a room when the bells sounded that daunted her spirits slightly. Having finished her assignment on historical Ministry corruption with the Dark Arts, Rhiannon was watching Astoria rush to compose a long essay about Corona Australis and Corona Borealis. Astoria was not exactly discreet about it and had been under the surveillance of Moody, but since she had finished her D.A.D.A. assignment, the professor said nothing. He was more concerned with students in the back of the room whispering about the assignment they had from him; they promptly received deducted points before even turning it in.

"This Astronomy is due tonight," Astoria sighed, having noticed Rhiannon's attention.

"Forget about it?"

"I did."

"Sinister Sinistra isn't one to go easy on you if you miss an assignment," Montel noted from her seat behind them. "She can tell if you did it last minute, too!"

"Thirty points from Slytherin, Mr Davis," came Moody's rasp. "Is that what you call your instructor?"

Rhiannon saw Montel nod a 'yes' at her in jest, though thirty points was a bit much.

"Dad says you're all done recording," he conversed after class.

"We are," Rhiannon perked up.

"Can't wait to hear it, Rhi," Montel smiled. "Hey, have fun in detention."

Montel walked out with the twins and left Rhiannon to her light sentence. Professor Moody hobbled to his chair and made a sound that no man under the age of sixty could make as he sat himself down in it.

"Snape was complaining to Professor Flitwick about that group of yours," he cackled. "He said you actually tried to use electricity in the castle?"

"Please, we're not mental," Rhiannon sighed. "I use a Muggle electric guitar, that's true, but I spent a long time converting the thing to use magic only. I'm just doing what The Hobgoblins did back in the '70s. I don't know why he's so repulsed."

"You know The Hobgoblins?" Moody asked curiously.

"'Course I do," Rhiannon replied. "I like them better than The Weird Sisters, to be perfectly honest. But I'm on the same label as The Weird Sisters now, so it's not good publicity for me to compare and contrast, you know?"

"What, got an album, do you?" Moody laughed. "That was quick."

"Sure do," Rhiannon said defensively.

"Honestly?"

"Swear."

"Any good?"

"Sure it is!"

"You sound like The Hobgoblins?"

"Well… Not too much, nah," Rhiannon said.

"Shame, they were incredible till Boardman got weird and started playing in churches."

"Hey, we're just fine," Rhiannon continued.

It seemed anomalous that Professor Moody was a fan of the borderline-metal Hobgoblins; Rhiannon figured he ought to have been more of the 1940s-Henry-Hall-dance-band type.

"I didn't think you'd be one for The Hobgoblins, Professor," she ribbed.

"If you're saying I was already too old in the '70s, lass, I'll have you pick cobwebs out of the ceiling."

Rhiannon buried her last comment, "I said nothing."

She laughed at herself when she realised that she had stayed twenty minutes overtime in "detention" rambling about music with the professor. If she had talked too long to Astoria about the different techniques musicians can use on double-neck guitars, she'd have put the girl to sleep faster than a Sleeping Draught.

The next afternoon, Astoria kept herself from falling asleep during the last bits of class by studying the book about Saturn's moons that Flora had bought her. Moody was not forgiving this time, and confronted her.

"The last time I checked, this was not Astronomy class, Miss Greengrass. That's not even your Astronomy textbook. You must be done with your final report on the Unforgivable Curses and ready to turn it in."

Rhiannon watched amusedly as Astoria cautiously pulled out a sheet of parchment that was blank except for her name and the due date. Moody, much to Astoria's advantage, indicated that his comment was on the warning level. He clambered off to yell at sixth-years who were skipping class and making noise in the corridors.

"How do you spell 'Kedavra' again?" she asked Rhiannon soon after the teacher sat back down.

"K-E-D-A-V-R-A," Rhiannon whispered. "Hey, do you think if we spell out the whole thing and hold a wand, it'll kill someone?"

"That's not how incantations work," Astoria said, but after a pause, she added, "Don't try it, though."

When Moody had mentioned their final paper, Rhiannon knew she was way behind in both homework and studying for final exams. It didn't help that most of the teachers were shoving the fear of the O.W.L.s down their throats. Rhiannon hated standardised tests more than she hated Pansy Parkinson and Diane Carter. It seemed ridiculous that teachers piled stress on the students all through their fourth year for something a whole year later.

"How bad are the O.W.L.s exactly?" Rhiannon asked Moody after class.

"They're nothing if you actually study, Rhiannon," he answered. "I passed all of mine."

That did not sound very much like Rhiannon.

"What if you don't study?"

"Would you like anything in lieu of flowers?" he joked.

"I see."

Rhiannon tried to think of which O.W.L.s she actually had a chance at passing, and apart from Care of Magical Creatures, she felt hopeless, although she had to admit she had improved greatly in Charms. Learning new defensive magic in Moody's class had also been interesting. Rhiannon knew that O.W.L.s led to N.E.W.T.s, which led to jobs, but perhaps Pariah would be a job that could sustain her instead. In the end, she knew better than to rely on that despite the band's hopeful outlook. Even the Sex Pistols ended after two years.

"What's that noise?" Rhiannon jumped.

The noise was unclear, but if she had to give it a name, she would have said it was the noise of a very angry Professor McGonagall smacking her hand on her desk. Moody's magical eye rolled wildly to the back of his head, and Rhiannon briefly got the unsightly spectacle of an entirely white eye. He at first looked quite exasperated at whatever the source of the noise was but ended up laughing it off.

"There's a Boggart in my office," he said, rapping his fingers on his desk as if trying to decide what to do about it. With a growl and a sigh, he brought his eye back to the front.

"Say, can you actually see a boggart's body with your eye?" Rhiannon enquired. "What's it really look like?"

"Ever seen a troll fœtus?"

"No…"

"Looks just like it, except it's black all over and its eyes are huge."

"Sounds lovely," Rhiannon grimaced.

On Friday, the students started chatting about Quidditch on their way out of the classroom. Some were very excited to reunite the team after not getting to play all year due to the Tournament. Most of all, they were eagerly awaiting autumn's try-outs with the rush of competition lacing all of their words. Rhiannon had been listening to these conversations all throughout the term, though no one ever invited her to join them. It was almost a habit now to talk to Moody about her daily happenings. She forgot it was part of detention.

"Like Quidditch, do you?" Moody asked as he was shuffling through piles of N.E.W.T. papers.

"Absolutely," Rhiannon replied.

"You play?"

Rhiannon hesitated. "Well, no. I don't have a broom of my own. That prevents me from that. Plus, the Slytherin Seeker hates me something awful."

"Malfoy? The rat never pipes down about being Seeker. Go on and try out anyway. You could use what you get from that album of yours to buy a broom."

"Think so? I'll need a pretty good one if I want to be a Beater."

"You'll need to practise clobbering Malfoy for me if you want to be a Beater."

"Gladly!" Rhiannon said.

After several enthusiastic discussions about national teams and a handful of unresolved arguments, Rhiannon remembered to ask Professor Moody if he saw the Quidditch World Cup that took place over the previous summer. It was an opportunity she had once greatly wished she had had; she was lucky she didn't, however, since a large pack of Death Eaters stampeded the World Cup grounds the very night after the final match.

"I'm afraid I wasn't quite there to see it, no," the old man answered, bitterness tingeing his voice. Shortly after, "I had to prepare for teaching over the summer and those tickets were terrible hard to come by."

"True. A bunch of old Death Eaters got in anyway, I heard. That's ridiculous they could just sneak into a public place like that and have a go," Rhiannon said.

"Aye, and packed like zebras too. Bunch of milksops, they are. They're blessed I wasn't there. Oh, I would've shown them their place."

By the way the reports of the incident sounded, it would have been much to the public's advantage if a few more Aurors had been present at the games.

An Auror, now that's a trade, Rhiannon thought. In no vague terms, Rhiannon would thoroughly enjoy kicking the arses of Dark wizards and getting paid to do it. However, it would mean that she'd have to make greater efforts in all of her classes. She knew from the beginning of the year that Aurors were required to have at least five high N.E.W.T. scores to qualify for the job. It didn't seem to coincide very well with leading a band, and the thought soon became a daydream.

The next week had the impression that detention was utterly voluntary. Rhiannon did not inform her friends of that, of course, for they would be undeniably insulted that she would rather spend two hours having conversations about music, nasty people, and Quidditch with a teacher than talking with them. As she recalled, Flora's current focus was on studying for final exams, Hestia was precariously experimenting with mixing plants to make different herbal incenses, and if one looked closely enough into Astoria's eyes, one might see Philippe Boisvert's reflection regardless of where the boy actually was. Moreover, the classroom was quieter than the common room, and Rhiannon was guaranteed all that time of not being called a Mudblood. It was a nice change.

On Tuesday, when Rhiannon walked into the room, she discovered an iron cage which contained a bird about the size of her forearm. Rhiannon circled the cage and studied the fowl. Most of its feathers were deep blue, though yellow feathers fringed the edges of the wings. The tail feathers almost looked as if they had been glued on; they added about ten inches to the bird and were formed wispier than those on the rest of the body. Rhiannon was happily studying the pretty bird when it suddenly made a very repellent noise that sounded like the sneeze of a large dog.

"Mimicry," entered Professor Moody's similar-sounding call. "That's a Doppelvanga, and right now, it's trying to sound like me."

Rhiannon secretly thought that the bird was doing a fine job of an imitation. Moody opened the cage and brought the bird out once it perched on his arm.

"Now, this is something you should never do, and I'll tell you why — the Doppelvanga has a four-X danger classification."

Rhiannon found herself on the other side of the classroom rather quickly.

"You didn't let me finish. This bird is interesting because it's not the bird itself that's dangerous. It's what preys on the bird that's given it the four-X. Doppelvangas are delicious to a wide variety of carnivorous creatures like Erklings, Graphorns, and Quintapeds."

Rhiannon understood the situation but decided to stay in her spot regardless.

"So," Moody continued, "to stay out of trouble, the Doppelvanga uses mimicry. It can imitate just about anything in only a few moments of being in its presence. A very prized bit of evolution, that is there. The problem is that when the bird is exposed to its own reflection, its true cry can be heard. Most magical carnivores are able to recognise the tune as a dinner bell!"

"That's fascinating," Rhiannon said.

The small lesson on the Doppelvanga was reminiscent of Professor Lupin's classes. Moody put the bird back into the cage, which started making five-syllable calls that sounded like Rhiannon's tones. It was very amusing.

"This was going to be tomorrow's lesson," Moody stated, "but with the Last Task coming and only three classes left, I knew that no one would pay attention. Instead, we'll start reviewing for your end-of-year exam since I'm feeling so generous. It's on Friday, you know."

Every time the remainder of the exams were mentioned, Rhiannon felt a wave of dread.

At least, she thought after turning in her exam on Friday, that the Astronomy exam this evening won't have those awful critical thinking questions. Moody was marking the tests rather quickly, and in hardly any time, he had finished Rhiannon's. She received a low B; the horror that that mark would have been to certain other students was a pleasant surprise for her.

Moody was ignoring his usual routine of sorting papers that day. He leaned far back in his chair as though he wished it were a recliner yet did not bother to Transfigure it. He was incredibly edgy — no, twitchy, and refilled his hip flask three times in those mere two hours. He looked so unwell that Rhiannon gently encouraged him to ease up from drinking.

"No, no, the drink is supposed to help," he shrugged her off.

Rhiannon was thinking about how wonderful it was that exams were finished and was planning different ways that she could waste the time during the last week of school when Moody changed the topic.

"What's your father's name, Rhiannon?"

Taken remotely aback, Rhiannon answered, "Geoffrey."

"Clarke?"

"Yeah."

"Scared of your magic, is he? Tried to kill you with a gun?"

"Well, yeah," Rhiannon said tensely, "He thought it was devil's work if he was sober enough to have an opinion."

"Your mother's the same? What's your mother's name?" he enquired.

"Jessica Limmen," Rhiannon answered plainly. Perhaps if more people knew of her domestic situation, she might be able to get a summer residence at Hogwarts like some of the teachers had.

"Those swine," Moody kept mumbling, "those swine."

Rhiannon would have hand-picked that word herself for her parents as well.

"Who do you think will win the Triwizard Tournament?" she asked in an attempt to take Moody's mind off of any bad memories he might have been having of his own father.

"That," he said, "I'm afraid I don't know about that."

Rhiannon was doodling graffiti on a sheet of parchment that had a pumpkin juice stain when detention time ended. The juice stain aside, she was proud of her Hobgoblins logo, so she gifted it to the professor. On her way out of the classroom, Moody smacked his fist against the desk and requested erratically, "Constant vigilance, Rhiannon, you hear?"

"Certainly, sir," Rhiannon called back. "Hey, erm, thank you. I feel better."

"Don't thank me, Rhiannon," Moody said. "Go on, now. You're free."

Undeniably, there was something iffy in the old man's drink.