Chapter Twenty Five
Black Night
0o0
A party for the Gryffindor quidditch team was in full swing by the time Astoria made her way through the portrait hole.
"To Harry Potter," cried Oliver Wood, holding his bottle of butterbeer aloft, "the best seeker that Gryffindor has ever had!"
"Thanks," Harry murmured uncomfortably. "Really, Oliver, it's lucky that they weren't real dementors."
Even in a better mood, Astoria still would have found it hard to join in the fun. Felling emotionally drained and behind on her work, she dodged Fred's offer of a butterbeer and settled down in a far corner to read. Her nook, though far from quiet, soon became the only spot in the room that afforded any possibility for concentration. It wasn't long before she was joined by Hermione Granger and Neville Longbottom. Together, their collective wall of homework material was enough to seal out the party completely.
"I'm not so bad when I brew for practice, you know" confessed Neville softly, copying down a sentence Astoria had corrected for him while Hermione was busy. "But I can't do anything in front of Snape—especially now that he knows what I did with that boggart!"
Poor Neville's face crumpled and his chin began to pucker under the weight of a swollen lower lip. To spare him the shame of an 'almost-cry', Astoria directed her eyes across the room. Fred and George were juggling butterbeer bottles near the hearth. For a moment, she amused herself by trying to predict which of the flying beverages would spin loose and shatter first.
"You know what? Forget what Snape thinks!" Astoria suggested. "The more you let him get to you, the more you'll mess up and give him a reason to bully you. That's all he is you know—a bully. Pretend he's someone our own age and ignore him."
"I can't ignore the bullies our own age, either," Neville admitted quietly. "I let Malfoy step on my sunglasses a few days ago. He pretended it was an accident. I didn't say anything. I just picked them up and kept walking, but I've been taking the long way around to the owlery ever since..."
This story did nothing for Astoria's mood. Almost at once she began to wish that she had never heard it.
"Yeah?" hissed Astoria. "Next time you'd do better to throw snow in his face and tell him that he owes you a new pair!"
"I can't do that!" gaped Neville, recoiling with a stricken jolt. "He's always got Crabbe and Goyle with him! Besides, look what he's doing to Hagrid. And Hagrid's a teacher!"
"Tell you what," Astoria backtracked, recovering just enough to repress a wrathful quiver, "if Malfoy breaks any more of your things or tries to push you around, come tell me. I'll deal with him for you."
"I'm not going to do that," muttered Neville. "It's not your fault that I'm pathetic..."
0o0
The party started to wind down after supper, but a small collection loyalists remained curiously loud and insatiably rowdy late into the evening. Finally, at nearly one o'clock in the morning, Professor McGonagall arrived to put her foot down. Looking very much the part of Wrath Incarnate in her fluffy tartan robe and hair net, she scolded, corralled and threatened liberally until even Fred and George began to pack up their things.
"Brilliant game, Harry!" shouted Seamus Finnegan boldly, making his begrudging start up the dormitory steps. "The cup is gonna be ours for sure!"
Astoria watched the room clear out, curiously immune to McGongall's attention in her far distant corner. Even though she knew that she was tired she also felt very little desire to head off to bed, reasoning that her thoughts—which had been confused and turbulent all day—might be kept at bay as long as she remained sitting upright.
The sound of Neville's thoughtful quill scratches and the occasional snap of a log in the fire were soon all the remained of a once bustling crowd. A heaviness crept into eyelids as she watched the coals in the hearth, lulled by their smoldering and radiant heat. Without meaning to, her head drooped and the motion startled her back into consciousness. Dizzy and almost sick with fatigue, she closed her eyes again, this time allowing them to rest for a twenty second interval.
One, two, she counted. Three... four...
Halfway between two worlds, Astoria began to slip into a dream. She was only distantly aware of the couch pressed against her face; of the smell of musty, communal fabric against her skin...
Because Tracey was in the Gryffindor common room and that was more important. But what was she doing there? Ah, of course. She was demanding that they go sledding. But Astoria did not want to go sledding—it was after one o'clock in the morning, wasn't it? She wanted to stay right where she was...
"You're always such a disappointment" Dream Tracey huffed, triggering a retaliatory spasm of irritation in Astoria's chest.
A real and very strangled yell punctuated her consciousness like a slap.
Astoria sat up on the couch, blinking rapidly in the dim light. The fire had mostly burned down and the air was growing chilly. She cleared her throat and attempted to gather her scattered surroundings: Neville Longbottom was sleeping with forehead pressed into the spine of his potions textbook; the common room was silent but for the groan wind outside the tower windows.
Still, Astoria was certain that someone had yelled. She got up and crossed the hearth rug, heading in the direction of the dormitories. A sudden, panicked clattering in the stairwell caused her to freeze before she could think of climbing them.
"Is everyone alright?" she called out shakily.
Silence. Astoria sucked in her breath to call out again but the words immediately turned to dust in her throat. There was someone on the stairs. Even worse, at the sound of her voice, the figure had fallen into a fast, startling crouch.
All at once, Astoria knew that she was in trouble; that the hairs on the back of her neck were not mistaken, that the nightmare wouldn't gently resolve itself if she just ignored it hard enough. The thing in front of her was not built in the form of a hunched child, or even that of a teenager—it was too tall, too broad and decidedly masculine.
The stooped shape slowly unfurled from its crouch, revealing an adult man in a heavy cloak. His face was partially obscured by a deep hood, but a strip of flesh near his tattered hairline caught what was left of the firelight, exposing a single dark and sunken eye. It glistened menacingly at her.
For a long second neither of them moved.
"You gave me that letter..." Astoria murmured stupidly, instinctively recognizing the stealthy (and decidedly shifty) manner of the stranger she'd met in the Hog's Head so many months ago.
Without warning, the man lurched down the stairs. In the flickering light of the nearly extinguished fire, Astoria observed the outline of a long and very dirty knife grasped tightly in his white knuckled hand.
"Out of the way, girl!" he rasped.
His voice broke the spell: with an electric snap, Astoria's mind caught up with the situation. The man on the stairs was obviously Sirius Black. Who else could he be? He didn't appear to be carrying a wand, but his knife was as long and sharp as a Hippogriff's talon and a scream had just been silenced in the boy's dormitory.
Realization and cold dread took hold of Astoria's limbs—the only thing left between him and the portrait hole was her.
Her eyes flicked toward the couch, searching for the place where her own wand wand lay uselessly on floor. There was nothing left to do but yell. Her mouth was already halfway open before she knew what she was doing.
"Make a sound and I'll gut you!" Black growled.
There was no time to think. Harry Potter and the rest of the boys in the dormitory were probably already dead or dying and Astoria was next. If Sirius Black was going to murder the lot of them, she bloody well wanted to make sure that somebody knew about it...
She sucked in her breath, pushing every last ounce of force into the act. "AAHR—"
A flash of steel and a sickening stab of pain; something sharp made contact with the side of her head and her legs crumpled. The floor and a corner of the stone wall rushed up to meet her—she braced herself a fraction of a second before her already aching forehead collided. Flash bulbs of pain popped behind her eyeballs. Before she could even begin to recover from the first staggering blow, a pair of rough hands seized her from behind. Black was pushing her down into the dusty oriental carpet; she gasped and choked on lint and the smell of old shoes.
Terror, terror as she had never known before exploded inside her chest. She was going to die here, in a puddle of her own blood. The floor was the last thing she was ever going to see...
Then, another source of noise drew the attention of her overloaded senses: a thud followed by a wail. The hands on Astoria's back suddenly withdrew.
"Don't touch her!" someone shouted.
She heard the muffled footfalls of a physical struggle: the rough scrape of jostled furniture and then a second crash as objects were knocked off a shelf. Panting, Astoria managed to lurch forward and turn over. Her face was wet—with blood or tears or both—so she squinted and peered hard into the gloom.
Neville Longbottom had thrown himself over the couch at Black, toppling an armchair in the process. Even as she watched, he managed to lock both of his arms around the fugitive's neck from behind. The struggle, which really ought to have been one-sided, suddenly seemed liable to go either way. Neville was young (and rather soft, even for his age) but Sirius Black's time in Azkaban had clearly robbed him of a good deal of his physical strength. Though larger, he was also feebler and he could not immediately pry back Neville's arms.
With another great crash, Sirius Black bashed his back (and by extension, Neville) against a cloak cupboard
There were footsteps moving about in the dormitory now; voices overhead. Astoria prayed that they wouldn't be too late...
"Let go, boy!" Black choked, heaving both of their bodies back against the cupboard. A tinkling sound told Astoria that Neville's elbow had punctured a pane of glass in the cupboard door. "Let go, if you know what's good for you!"
"Umph!" said Neville. A second pane of glass broke and suddenly Black was free. With a snap of his long cloak, Black barreled through the portrait hole and vanished into the dark corridor beyond.
"Neville?" Astoria gasped. "Neville!"
She began to crawl toward him, gingerly picking her way around the sticky glass. She could see blood on his hands and even more on the carpet around him; Black had forced his arm through the glass front of the cupboard at two angles...
The sound of thunder overhead began to trickle into the stairway. Between the noise of the fight and Astoria's screech, more than half the house was awake and moving around.
"What's going on?" somebody was saying.
"Who screamed?"
"It was Sirius Black!" exclaimed a voice that Astoria immediately recognized Ron's. "He was here! He slashed my curtains!"
"What are you all doing?" demanded Lavender Brown. "Professor McGonagall told us to go to sleep!"
"Are you sure you weren't dreaming, Ron?" muttered Harry Potter.
Astoria breathed a sigh of relief. If Harry wasn't dead, then no one was. She began to pull Neville upright, trying to coax him into a sitting position. He whimpered and sucked in a wet breath, but complied as best as he could.
The overflow of pajama clad students finally rumbled down the last few stairs and exploded into the common room.
"Are we carrying on?" asked George excitedly, rubbing his hands together.
"Back upstairs!" snapped Percy, pushing toward the front of the crowd. " Everyone, right now! If I don't see some cooperation, I'll—"
His eyes met Astoria's and he froze mid-sentence.
"What happened?" It was Fred this time, looking pale and horror-stricken. "Neville? Astoria!"
"Somebody fetch Madam Pomfrey!" ordered Percy, seizing control at once. "Back up, you lot. Back up!"
The crowd, which had fallen silent to gape, shifted back a wary step.
"What happened?" demanded Percy, crouching down to have a look at them. "Who did this?"
Unable to find her voice, Astoria shook her head and then wished hadn't when her vision lurched and pitched.
"It was Sirius Black!" Ron shouted, taking a stout step forward. "He ripped up my bed hangings with a knife. When I yelled, he ran. I reckon he must have met Astoria and Neville on his way out!"
"I was going to shout," Astoria managed slowly, "so he hit me. Neville tried to stop him and got rammed through the cupboard."
"You saw Sirius Black?" Percy's voice was sharp and eager for clarification.
Astoria nodded again even though doing so made blood pound in her ears.
"Does that mean 'yes'?" pressed Percy, oblivious to her discomfort.
"Give her a minute, Perce," muttered Fred. He eased down onto his knees and pulled Astoria's hair back to inspect her cut. "This looks bad. Someone should get a towel—"
George immediately bolted for the boys showers.
"It was Sirius Black," Astoria finally managed, gritting her teeth against wooziness. She wanted to confirm Ron's story before she got sick or fainted. "And he did have a giant knife..."
0o0
It was a long night in the hospital wing. Madam Pomfrey was able to mend Astoria's cut in a matter of minutes, but the nausea did not subside until she finished drinking a draught of steaming potion that stripped her throat as raw as sand paper ever could.
Then came the teachers.
Professor McGonagall questioned her first. Astoria sat with her feet hanging over the edge of the infirmary bed and did her best to answer. Unfortunately, she found that she could recall very little; the assault had happened quickly and she'd spent most of it concussed, half-blinded by blood with her face in the carpet.
Madame Pomfrey waited until McGonagall left to pour her a second measure of medicine. She was just choking down the final dregs when Professor Dumbledore arrived with Snape nipping at his heels. Eager to get this interview right (because who knew what Dumbledore would make of the matter) Astoria endeavored to sit up straighter, thankful that her dizziness had finally passed. Just as she'd suspected, Dumbledore's line of questioning proved curious and his logical obscure: he did not want to know what Sirius Black looked like, he did not even ask if she had any idea how he had managed to enter the castle. Instead, he focused on specifics that had not struck her as especially important or relevant in the heat of the moment: Did Sirius Black linger? Did he use any magic?
"He didn't have a wand," Astoria volunteered. "Like I've said, he was holding a knife. When I tried to scream, he hit me with it—he didn't curse me."
Dumbledore prodded the side of Astoria's face with his long fingers, his expression pale and unreadable. "You said he hit you? He did not try to stab you?"
"No," Astoria shook her head, pondering this small mercy for the first time. "He didn't stab me or Neville. I cut my head when I hit the wall."
"And he took action only when it became evident that you were going to raise an alarm?" Dumbledore murmured, gently releasing her face.
"Yes," agreed Astoria. "He was trying to get away. He hit me so that I wouldn't wake anyone up."
"Then he has managed to penetrate our walls twice without the aid of a magic," Snape interrupted coldly. "Dumbledore, do you really imagine that he could have done so without aid?"
"I do not believe that anybody inside this castle would have knowingly helped Black enter it, Severus," answered Dumbledore, calmly but firmly. "As I have told you some dozen times at least. Our intruder knows these grounds. It is my belief that he is using a means of disguise that we, in our limited capacity as foes, have simply not managed to understand yet."
By the time Dumbledore and Snape finally left her alone, the sun was beginning to rise. Neville was fast asleep in the bed next to her, his chest rising and falling slowly. When they'd first arrived, Astoria had watched Madam Pomfrey remove shards of glass—some the size of sharks teeth—from his shoulders and arms. She prodded his bandages with her eyes and repressed a shiver.
But no, she shouldn't be worrying. They'd gotten him help in time. Astoria lay back against her starched white sheets and willed her mind to calm itself. Professor McGonagall had wisely excused both Astoria and Neville from class for the day. But even though she had nowhere to be (and her body ached and her eyes felt as dry as parchment) she sensed that sleep would elude her.
A cloud shifted and the sun suddenly broke through the infirmary curtains. Dazzlingly clear light the spilled into the room, brightening up even the most sterile looking surfaces with its hopeful rays. Astoria rested her tender face against her pillow and studied the slanted shafts of light. If it hadn't been for Neville, she might very well have died before sunrise. She was lucky to be alive—she did not want to go to bed. No, what she wanted was a slice of toast and a shower...
Astoria slid her blankets down and got of out of bed, catching an accidental glimpse of herself in the shiny surface of a water pitcher as she did so. A wan, poorly mopped up mess blinked back at her. Hoping against hope that she would not run into anyone that she knew, she set of at a half-jog to Gryffindor Tower
She found the common room empty and a quick glance at the clock confirmed that it was breakfast time. During her short absence, a cadre of house elves had returned order to the room: the broken glass had been swept away and the ruins of the cloak cabinet removed. Thankful to have the run of the place, Astoria headed for the bath and stripped out of her filthy robes. She showered slowly, appalled by quantity of dried blood that slid through her fingers and puddled around the drain. At first, she took care to soap her hair as tenderly as possible, but Madame Pomfrey had done her job well—so well that after a only few moments of scrubbing, she began to forget which side of her head had been struck. Indeed, it was almost as though she had never been hit at all.
Her pale reflection in the mirror told different story, though: a tale of blood loss and sleeplessness. Dressing carefully to avoid the appearance of being frail or damaged, Astoria dragged a brush through her hair and got a move on.
0o0
The great hall was just as deserted as the Tower had been. Taking advantage of the fact that she was still trailing an hour behind, she hovered over the Hufflepuff table (a bold move) and inhaled two pieces of toast and half of a cantaloupe in complete silence. The magically enchanted ceiling overheard showed a bright, spring-colored sky; clean, blue and profusely hopeful. Astoria finished off the last of her fruit and checked the time. The bell was about to ring. If she hurried, she might still manage to make it to her second period class.
The crowd outside the potions corridor was noisier than usual—a fact that Astoria immediately (and nervously) attributed to residual excitement left over from the night's break-in.
"Pity he didn't just stab Weasley and carry on to Potter," Draco's snide voice carried up the hallway, bringing Astoria to an abrupt halt. Without really thinking, she ducked back around the corner she'd just turned. Out of sight, but just barely...
"Weasley screamed," explained Zabini. "That's what the Ravenclaws are saying, at any rate. He probably forced Black to make a run for it."
Astoria debated turning around, but a cagey sort of embarrassment held her rooted to the spot. She peered around the wall.
"Assuming the Ravenclaws know what they're talking about," sneered Malfoy impatiently. "Where's Astoria? She'd know—it's her common room. I don't know why she'd skip breakfast on a day like today..."
"Obnoxious, really," agreed Blaise with a tiny smirk. "But I suppose it was a long night for her—celebrating Potter's win and all that."
Malfoy scowled.
"Besides, judging by what Bole says, it sounds as though she needed a little stress relief," Blaise continued slyly. "He saw her in the library yesterday. Fit to trot."
"I was there, Zabini," snapped Malfoy tersely, already knowing how this story ended.
Tracey's voice joined the mix: "Are you talking about Astoria?" Next minute she appeared, sliding through a gap in the crowd near Blaise's elbow.
Astoria sucked in her breath, torn between morbid curiosity and a desire to put her friends at ease. Surely the right thing to do was to announce herself? Then again, who knew what they might say if they didn't know that she was listening?
"Where is she, anyway?" Tracey persisted. "I want to hear about the break in."
This was typical but hardly heart-warming. Astoria already knew that she was the most socially acceptable—and therefore primary—source of Gryffindor gossip for the Slytherin third years.
"Hey!" hollered Tracey, flagging down the nearest girl in a red and gold tie. "Brown! Where's Astoria?"
"Sirius Black breaks into our common room and suddenly you're curious about our news, are you?" sniffed Lavender. But her primness was clearly a front—Lavender loved gossip and it was obvious that even now, in front of Slytherins, she was fighting to contain herself. "You really haven't heard? Some friend you are, Tracey!"
"What's that supposed to mean?" countered Tracey, frowning her displeasure.
"She's in the hospital wing, Davis," sighed Lavender. "She and Neville both are."
"Why?" Tracey dead-panned.
"Because Sirius Black broke into our common room last night and started attacking people with a knife!" explained Lavender in the most alarmist way possible.
Astoria watched, entranced, a guest at her own funeral...
"So?" countered Malfoy roughly. "What's that got to do with Greengrass?"
"She and Neville fell asleep doing homework, since you're so interested," Lavender continued, dangling the carrot. "They were in the common room. Black ran into them on his way out and there was a fight."
"Who had a fight?" demanded Tracey, failing to piece the story together in its absurdity.
"I mean, no ones knows for sure what happened," Lavender whispered, "but the screaming woke us all up..."
"What?" snapped Tracey.
Tracey's tone had taken on a nervy edge. Astoria could not help but find the sound of it slightly gratifying.
"We only saw them for, like, a minute before Professor McGonagall arrived," Lavender confessed, clearly enjoying herself. "But there was blood everywhere."
A chilling silence descended.
"She's making it up," snapped Malfoy, his jaw working tensely. "Go ask someone else, Davis. Granger's too much of a goody two shoes to lie. Ask her."
"I am not making it up!" huffed Lavender. "McGonagall rushed them away before we could get the whole story but, honestly, it looked like they'd both been stabbed."
"What the hell?" gaped Blaise, making no effort to hide his extreme delight.
"That's ridiculous," sneered Malfoy. He narrowed his eyes at Lavender and turned away from her rigidly. "It's not true, Blaise."
"Is she alright?" jolted Tracey.
Astoria sensed that the moment to step forward had finally arrived. It was wrong to let Tracey to worry, but the prospect of having to deal with so many eager, nosy Slytherins... She recoiled weakly at the thought.
"Dunno," Lavender shrugged. "She wasn't in first period."
"I'm going to the hospital wing," declared Tracey.
"If you skip Snape's lecture, he'll put you in detention," cautioned Blaise, lazily inspecting his thumb for a hangnail.
On the spot, Astoria finally made up her mind to dislike him.
"Maybe Theodore's heard more," muttered Tracey, backing away.
Malfoy's sharp eyes followed Tracey's retreat down the hall. He was still sneering absently.
The bell rang. Try as she might, Astoria couldn't pluck up the energy or the courage to follow the rest of her class into the dungeons. Instead, she decided to seize her rare day off. She retreated to the library where, determined to remain hidden until dinnertime at the earliest, she carefully selected a spot so deep within the stacks that only Theodore (with his love of obscure and dusty corners) would think to search for her. She buried herself in a pile homework and waited for him.
To her surprise, however, it was not Theodore who found her first: it was Draco. He appeared in the late afternoon, accompanied as always was at that hour by Crabbe and Goyle. The fact that he had no apparent reason for being in the library stacks did not seem to trouble him and he made no attempt to come up with a cover story. He spotted her—his face registered an immediate mixture of relief and annoyance—and he marched toward her like she was his business.
"There you are," he sneered accusingly. "Seriously—you're skipping bloody class? Do you have any idea what people have been saying about you around school?"
Curiously, his irritation seemed to double as he took in her aura of general health and well-being.
"What are people saying about me?" returned Astoria flatly.
"That Sirius Black tried to murder you last night!" snapped Draco doubtfully.
Astoria stared at him. There was something like an inquisition buried in his gaze—was he looking for a confirmation of the whole absurd tale? A reason? Was he angry that he'd been left out of the drama in some way? Was she supposed to bloody well cry for him?
"It didn't work," Astoria grunted, scratching out a sentence with her quill. "Obviously."
Crabbe was toying with Astoria's eraser, bouncing it up and down on the table. She wished that he would stop—the unwanted motion frustrated her.
"Sirius Black stabbed you?" repeated Draco skeptically. He reached out to grab Crabbe's arm mid-bounce. "I don't believe you—you look fine. Stop it, Crabbe!"
"He didn't stab me," Astoria snapped back, suddenly irritable. "He punched me in the head and threw me into a wall."
Malfoy sneered to hide his discomfort.
"I look fine now because I was in the hospital wing all night," Astoria continued waspishly. "Frankly, though, I washed a pint of blood out of my hair this morning and I'm really not in the mood for this."
"I thought you said Black was after Potter," grunted Goyle thickly.
"In the mood for what?" snapped Malfoy. "He is after Potter, Goyle, I've told you a thousand times!"
"Sirius Black went to Azkaban for blowing up a street full of muggles," Astoria sneered, rounding on Goyle. "He doesn't care about hurting the people who get in his way. I met him on the dormitory stairs and I screamed."
"Why would you scream?" demanded Malfoy, plainly disgusted.
"I don't know," Astoria admitted, yanking her books away from Crabbe (who'd begun pulling out all her bookmarks). "I guess I figured he'd already stabbed everyone in the boys dormitory. If I was about to die, I wanted someone to know about it."
"You should have just moved!" Draco gaped, his expression clouded by a touch of bizarre stubbornness. "He's not after children from old pure-blooded families! What were you thinking?"
"He didn't actually ask me my name before pummeling me, Draco," hissed Astoria. "Neville's a pureblood, too—but that didn't stop Black from pushing him through a sheet of glass, did it?"
"That's different!" Malfoy sneered. "Longbottom's a waste of space—"
"Longbottom slide-tackled a notorious mass murderer to save me from being stabbed last night!" returned Astoria wrathfully. "In my book, that makes him a hero. Black was manhandling me when Neville jumped on him. What would you have done, Malfoy? Cowered in the corner?"
Draco recoiled, possibly sickened by the visual that she had conjured for him. Then, realizing that she had called him a coward, his scowl quickly returned. The bell rang overhead.
"So you're just not going to class today, then?" Malfoy fumed.
"McGonagall gave me the day off," Astoria bit back passive-aggressively. "Have fun freezing with Hagrid. You certainly deserve it for campaigning to have his Hippogriff beheaded."
"C'mon, Draco," said Goyle. "S'the bell."
Draco shook off Goyle. "What do you mean I deserve it for having his hippogriff beheaded?" he spat. "That monster tried to kill me!"
"Because it's a wild animal—that's what they do!" yelled Astoria.
"What?" Draco sneered. Genuine confusion suddenly off-set his anger. "You're an animal lover now or something?" he fumbled. "Return them to the wild to run free—that sort of nonsense?"
"If you had just listened to Hagrid in the first place, Buckbeak never would have attacked you!" Astoria insisted. "It's your own fault that you got injured! I don't know why you're so bent on punishing other people for it!"
"At least I bothered to find out if you were alright!" countered Draco resentfully. "When, I'm sorry—Buckbeak, was it?—nearly ripped my arm off, you just sat around with Nott and had a laugh!"
"Your arm was fine!" Astoria shrilled, flinching as the unreasonable pitch of her own voice echoed back at her off the shelves.
"Not at first, I wasn't!" Draco snarled.
A tense, bitter silence hovered between them like a wall.
"Fine, Greengrass," he hissed tersely, "I faked a lingering injury to move Slytherin's quidditch match back, but there's a reason that irresponsible moron is crying in his filthy hut about it! His monster pet nearly took my arm off!"
"Your arm is still attached, though, isn't it?" Astoria demanded through gritted teeth, ignoring his confession because she had known it all along. "Why can't you just leave it alone?"
"Why should I leave it alone?" demanded Malfoy. He squared his shoulders. "Since when do you care about Hagrid? And what the hell is a 'Buckbeak'?—the sound the thing makes when it chokes?"
"That's the Hippogriff's name!" sneered Astoria fiercely. "Harry told me last week. Why would he make up something so stupid?"
Draco sucked in a sharp, hideous breath.
"Oh, Potter told you!" he repeated nastily, his expression taking a turn toward ferocious. "What are you listening to Potter, for? It's not my fault if he's unnaturally attached to Professor Oaf! That's the sort of thing that happens when people have no parents!"
"He told me because I asked him!" Astoria snarled, dropping her quill. Her hands were trembling wrathfully. "This is ridiculous! Harry may be an orphan, but he's saved the entire school twice! What have you done?"
"Are you kidding?" spat Draco, close to losing control of himself.
"You're the heir of an ancient family! Your father has half of England trembling in their boots and all you do is spend your time trying to make an uneducated giant cry!" Astoria yelled. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
A muscle near Draco's mouth twitched. He stood so still a passerby would have guessed that she'd slapped him instead.
Before he could say a word, Astoria knew that she had gone too far; the truth had come bubbling up out of her uncontrollably, more like an exorcism than a complete thought. She began to feel a twinge of hasty regret.
"Is that what's been bothering you all week?" sneered Malfoy jerkily. He'd recovered just enough to speak, but his mouth still twitched involuntarily. "You know, sometimes I think Pansy's right about you!"
Astoria cringed instinctively.
"I hope they make Potter and Hagrid watch when the executioner chops that filthy hippogriffs head off! Come on, Goyle!" Draco snapped.
Pushing Goyle ahead of him—as though it was his fault that they were now late for class—Draco elbowed his way roughly out of the stacks. Astoria watched the three of them go, feeling somehow even more miserable than she had before.
0o0
"You didn't even bother to find me!" Theodore berated her later that evening. "Everyone thought you were dead! I had to hear it from Malfoy that you were just hiding in the stacks!"
Astoria still hadn't moved and, truth be told, she was not especially impressed by how long it had taken Theodore find her. Ironically, now that he had finally managed it, she almost wished that he'd go away again: she was attempting to faithfully recount the whole incredible story for him, but Theodore, who had already managed to gather a startling amount of information on his own, wouldn't stop interrupting her long enough for her to finish it.
"I haven't moved all day!" Astoria protested. "It's not my fault Malfoy found me first!"
"He found you here?" Theodore cocked his head, frowning distractedly. "What was he doing in the stacks?"
"I don't know," returned Astoria dully, feeling some of the energy drain out of her. "Being nosy, I expect. If it makes you feel any better, I was a total savage to him. He'll probably push me down a set of stairs the next time I see him."
Theodore scoffed in a way that suggested how very much doubted this, but Astoria wasn't so sure. She had never seen Draco look as mad as he had when he'd stormed out of the library earlier. She had a funny feeling that he wasn't going to excuse her behavior on account of shock.
"I still can't believe you were attacked," exclaimed Theodore, dropping into a scratched-up wooden chair. "I mean, how often do you nap in your common room? What are the odds?"
"Never a dull moment in my house," Astoria grumbled.
"I don't get it, though," he burst. "Why didn't you just get out of Black's way? You were unarmed and he had a knife! You must have known he was trying to get out of the school as quickly as possible—and it's not like he could have hexed you. Why bother provoking him?"
"I thought he'd already murdered half the tower!" Astoria enunciated, beyond exasperated. Why did she keep having to explaining this?
"Why not wait for him to leave and then raise the alarm?" scowled Theodore. "That's what any sane person would have done..."
"I don't know, alright?" Astoria huffed. "I panicked, I guess."
"You're lucky that Black didn't stab you!" Theodore muttered.
"Yeah," agreed Astoria rather bitterly, "he just cracked my head open, is all..."
"I wonder why he didn't stab you," Theodore mused, turning speculative. "After all, that's what I would have done, if I'd been in his place. I'd have slit your throat so that you couldn't bear witness against me."
"Lovely," Astoria deadpanned.
"At any rate, you'll be a school celebrity tomorrow," Theodore continued miserably. "Don't sit with me at breakfast. I don't want to watch Malfoy hounding you while first year Hufflepuffs beg for a dramatic reenactment."
"It won't happen," Astoria assured him. "The Hufflepuffs'll have Neville and Ron to get the story from and Malfoy won't want to speak to me."
0o0
Astoria turned out to be quite right on both accounts, but correctness did not make the fallout less miserable to endure.
Ron Weasley, enjoying his first ever burst of celebrity, spent the next week telling anyone who would listen about everything he had seen. In loving detail, he described the way Sirius Black's face had looked as it loomed over him in the dark. Without even a trace of shame, he described fist-fights he hadn't had, and mad dashes to raise the alarm that had never taken place. All things considered, it was the least flattering display of his character that Astoria had ever witnessed. As far as she was concerned, Neville alone deserved praise.
Poor Neville's intrigue, however, was more than a little complicated by scorn. The more people came to understand that he was at least partially responsible for letting Black into the common room in the first place, they less they wanted to hear his side of the story.
"I didn't mean to lose the passwords," Neville muttered sadly. "I just couldn't remember them all. Sir Cadogan's always changing the words around!"
The fact that Neville had come to Astoria's defense seemed to be the only thing separating him from Professor McGonagall's wrath. Sir Cadogan, who could claim no such bravery, had been removed and the Fat Lady had once again taken up her post guarding Gryffindor tower. Fully restored from her slashing but visibly nervous, two new security trolls had been also been hired to stand guard on either side of her portrait.
They were not the only signs of heightened security. Over the next several days, Filch went about boarding up mouse holes and interrogating passerby. At the same time, if Ernie Macmillian was to be trusted, Professor Sprout had begun enchanting the hedgerows around the entrances to the grounds to recognize Sirius Black's face on sight.
Meanwhile, stalking about in a black mood and sneering at these new security measures, Draco Malfoy had never been louder.
"It's not as though Black slipped in through a crack in the wall," Astoria heard him complaining loudly to Crabbe, Goyle and Pansy's Parkinson's gang of Slytherin girls between class. "The man doesn't even have a wand, for God's sake!"
Astoria tried not to look up and let him know that she had heard, but her eyes seemed to gravitate toward him as though magicked to do so.
"He's probably not even dangerous," Draco went on in a raised voice, knowing that Astoria was listening. "Black didn't even manage to off Longbottom. How competent can he actually be?"
All week, the sound of Pansy Parkinson's delighted laughter had been ringing in Astoria's ears. Once again, hearing it was enough to make her want to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.
"I don't know what you said to Malfoy," Theodore complained in a low voice as they skirted around Pansy's laughing gang, "but you might want to consider apologizing. He's been a complete tit ever since and I have to share a dorm with him."
Astoria shrugged anxiously. "Hasn't he always been a bit of a tit?"
"Sure," agreed Theo, "but last night he pushed Harper off of the back of a couch for breathing too loudly. I don't care if you're actually sorry. Just tell him that you think his plan to have Hagrid's hippogriff executed is brilliant and spare the rest of us."
This was the smartest way forward in theory, but Astoria did not want to apologize. Not because she didn't feel badly—on some level she did feel a little guilty for taking such a personal stab at him—but because she was beginning to see a pattern in her own behavior that she was very uncomfortable with. She had always toed the line between friendship and argumentativeness with Malfoy. A fight was nothing new. Only Draco rarely targeted Astoria with real, intentional unpleasantness: when he did, it was almost always because she had provoked him first. The more Astoria considered this, the more she began to sense a greater, intentional manipulation on her part.
The fact that she sometimes instigated Draco on purpose was not what bothered her—she already knew that she found nettling him to be occasionally pleasant. What bothered her was the realization that, on the rare occasions when she had pushed Malfoy just far enough to properly hate her, she had always gone out of her way (in as subtle a manner as possible) to lure him back again. A puppet on a string.
This clear-headed concept had taken Astoria fully by surprise. Not only did it go directly against the way she had always imagined her relationship with Malfoy to be, it forced her to take a hard look at her own motives.
True to form, less than a day after calling Draco an immature waste of his heritage, Astoria had begun to feel the first stirrings of a powerful urge to make him forget that they had ever argued. Even though she'd meant most of what she'd said, she found the idea of Malfoy really disliking to be very unsettling.
And she had been in the same place before, hadn't she? The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she had. The time she'd hit Draco in second year? She had apologized less than a day later! And what about the MacLaggens' New Year's party? Astoria had driven Draco to disgust by talking about her date with Cormac on purpose and she knew it.
It was as though they'd been playing a head game together for ages; a silent, psychological war that she was only now coming to understand existed. Perhaps he already knew this, and that was why he was reacting the way he was? Astoria did not know—what she did understand, though, was that Draco was not playing alone. Her reactions were quieter than Malfoy's were and her motives harder to guess. But she was certainly, unquestionably reacting.
Draco's role in the proceedings was not so very hard to understand: in fact, Astoria had an idea that Theodore had pointed several factors out to her over the years. Draco possessed an overwhelming desire to be seen as impressive and he craved approval almost childishly—Astoria almost never gave him peace on either account. Therefore, luring him back after an argument was as easy as allowing herself to feed him a taste of something hard-won, something that she generally withheld.
What Astoria was getting out of the arrangement, however, was much less obvious to her. Just examining the idea filled her with a sense of self-loathing because it required her to admit some essential truths about herself that were not pleasant to think about.
The most glaring of these truths, of course, was the fact that Draco had an uncanny habit of paying attention to her when other people didn't.
It was not the sort of shallow attention that she got from Cormac, either. Nor was it the faintly absent sort she got from her father. Malfoy's attention was a shrewd, sharp thing that did not stop at exteriors. If Astoria was privately impressed by something or prone to a certain type of behavior, Malfoy noticed. Even more embarrassing to admit was the fact that he was probably the only person who did.
At heart, she suspected that this was the coveted prize she was chasing. Otherwise, wouldn't she have stopped being pleasant to him years ago? Despite the fact that Draco was self-conscious, cruel and embodied all of the qualities of death-eater culture, Astoria could not quite bring herself to want to give him up as a friend. This was troubling for a multitude of reasons, but mostly, if Astoria was honest with herself, it meant that it was within Draco's power to upset or hurt her and that she could not abide.
Astoria blamed her father for her lack of male security and she blamed her aunt for instilling her with such a habit of manipulation. But above all, Astoria remained silent. She did not allow herself to look as upset as she felt; she was determined to dedicate her time to healthier life choices.
"I'm not apologizing, Theodore," Astoria returned firmly. "He'll forget about it eventually."
But Draco didn't forget and by the end of the week, it was becoming clear that between Astoria's reluctance to be sorry and Draco's desire to get back at her, the whole thing was culminating to be the worst fight that they had ever had.
In an attempt to get a rise out of her, Malfoy progressed from needling Astoria by talking about how pathetic Neville was to actually mentioning Daphne's apparent lack of concern for her safety.
"You know, when half of the school thought that your sister was dead, I don't think I heard you worry even once," she heard him drawl in Daphne's direction on Wednesday during Care of Magical Creatures class. "It's like you were secretly hoping she'd snuffed it."
Daphne blushed. Pansy laughed uproariously—she did not care how uncomfortable this comment made Daphne feel, because it was it was a direct jab at Astoria and the fact that Draco had taken to making these lately seemed to be the cause of her greatest happiness.
Pansy's glee was hard enough to swallow, but the idea that Malfoy's scorn might infect Daphne was hell.
Astoria could not help noticing that her sister had begun to glance at her in the corridors again. At first these glances were tentative, even shy, but she could sense a current of annoyance running through them. Perhaps she privately felt that Astoria deserved the flack she was receiving and was determined to watch her suffer?
The grace period that Astoria's new friendship with Tracey had won her was over. She could feel herself falling back into the same dark hole of glumness that had affected her for most of the early fall term.
0o0
This was a bit of an odd-duck update (what with half of the chapter being dedicated to a physical attack) but I just couldn't see any way around it. I went way out of my way to write in that Sirius Black/Astoria letter scheme, so I figured I shouldn't miss the opportunity to connect the dots! We'll be back to regular and non-violent business as scheduled in the next post, though, I promise!
As always, reviews are an awesome treat!