The Houses Competition
House: Gryffindor stand-in
Class: Muggle Studies
Category: Themed
Theme: [Reconnecting] Reconnecting with someone.
Prompt: [Action] Dragging something heavy across the floor
Word Count: 2984
TW: vague mentions of self-harm (I've edited to keep it T), bad prison practices, prejudice against creatures/beings, language.
Title comes from Hebrew 13:3 "Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering."
Thanks to Ashes and CelesteMagnolia for betaing!
His lungs expanded as much as possible to drag in the stale air, dry mouth open as he gasped.
He couldn't smell anything over his own sweat and the overpowering scent of jute, but he instinctively kept trying — animal impulses pushing him to look for a way out even if he'd consciously given up.
No matter how useless the effort, his eyes kept darting around in the darkness inside the sack as if a pinprick of light would betray a weakness he could take advantage of.
The muted sound of the sack dragging across the ground seemed almost unreal.
The drag was slow and steady now, the floor was almost smooth compared to the cobbled street he'd been caught on. He tried once more to strain against his bonds, to kick against the inside of the jute sack, but he could barely move and shifting around only made him nauseated. Though that was most likely a side effect of his head hitting the ground multiple times as he was dragged without regard.
Theodore had been attacked in Hogsmeade, right as he came out of the Hog's Head after a pint. It had been quick, professional, like someone had just been waiting for him to leave the inn. They hadn't even announced their presence or tried to speak to him, he'd just been hit with an Everte Statum, tied up and spelled in a sack like an unwanted litter.
There had been people around, going about their day. No one did anything.
He had strained against the magic bonds and tried to scream, but one of his two attackers hadn't even paused before grabbing the sack's opening and starting to drag him away — towards Hogsmeade's apparition point, Theodore thought.
He'd been dragged, apparated, and dragged somewhere else.
It took a while for the difference in temperature between Hogsmeade and his new location to be obvious, but after a few minutes of being dragged across the ground the cold managed to penetrate the jute. When his captor finally stopped, Theodore was shivering.
He clenched his muscles against the tremble and perked up his ears when he heard the jingle of keys and the sound of metal on metal. He even stopped breathing — entirely focused on what was going on around him — until a kick landed on his side. The sharp pain made the air rush out of him and he almost choked when he breathed in only to be kicked again.
"And stay there," his captor spat.
"What the—"
"Silence!"
Someone other than his captor was there and Theodore hadn't been able to tell before the stranger spoke. He twisted and stretched his neck — a vague idea about biting a hole through the sack took possession of his mind and made his body react before he could think it through. But nothing came of it. A harsh spell dragged the sack away from around him and, suddenly free, Theodore could only squint at the tenuous light and breath in with all his strength.
His captor closed a metal door in his face and strode away like he had better things to do, and Theodore abandoned his cheek against the cold floor, breathing in the musty smell and trying to convince his stomach to hold onto its contents.
"I never thought I'd see you sink quite so low, Theo."
Theodore flinched, pushing away from the floor and turning so he could lean against the wall and face the new threat.
"What the hell, Zabini," Theodore said, lacking the energy to make it a question.
"I remember giving you permission to call me by my first name back at Hogwarts, Theo."
"It was a decade ago," Theodore bit out.
"Eh, I'd say thirteen, fourteen years, but I guess time is—"
"I'm not in the mood, Zabini!" Theodore finally roared, slamming his head back against the wall because another concussion couldn't really make his situation any worse.
"Touchy, touchy, Theo. It almost sounds like you're not happy to see me."
Theodore shifted, dragging himself up to sit properly and stare at Zabini head-on. His old classmate was lounging on the only bed, eyes at half-mast and a corner of his lips curled in what could be a smile or the start of a disgusted grimace.
"Why would I? Why would I be happy to see you in this… this…"
"Prison," Zabini completed for him. "You can say it. Jail. It's not a dirty word. You can take this opportunity to get more comfortable with it."
"We're not in Azkaban," Theodore pointed out through gritted teeth.
"Not yet."
Theodore glared at him until Zabini rolled his eyes and explained.
"Seriously? We're in the Ministry's holding cells, Theo," Zabini said like he was explaining that the flick comes after the swish when performing Wingardium Leviosa.
"Right, of course," Theodore said, swallowing his first, incredulous response to answer with biting sarcasm. "How could I have possibly missed that when they dragged me through the Ministry in a fucking sack like so much rubbish—"
Zabini moved suddenly, heaving himself up in a smooth move to sit on the edge of the pitiful excuse of a bed. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his smile nowhere to be seen.
"Do you get it yet? That's the point. You are rubbish. You're society's new problem now that the masses have gotten over the Dark Lord." Zabini's dark eyes shone with an aquamarine gleam as they fixated on Theodore. "It's easy to think of you as other when the differences are so glaring, and it was just as easy for normal witches and wizards to convince themselves that creatures like you are subhuman. You're a thing they've got no space for in their perfect new society, where there are no blood prejudices and no room for monsters like you."
Theodore stared at him after his impassioned speech, slowly working through everything Zabini had said, and not said. But there was something he couldn't ignore.
"Like us, you mean."
Zabini scoffed as if he'd have preferred to bare his teeth.
"Don't pretend that we're in the same boat. We're not." Zabini took the time to jerk his head back as if to push his short curls away from his face, then he focused all the intensity of his shifting gaze on Theodore. "This wasn't some accident for me, I wasn't bitten or turned by a feral creature. This is my heritage, my birthright. I've lived with the knowledge of who I truly was all my life and if you'd known about it back at Hogwarts, you wouldn't have spat on me if I were on fire." Here, Zabini paused, maybe waiting for Theodore to contradict him. Theodore stayed silent and Zabini went on as if he'd planned the whole speech. "You, Malfoy, Greengrass… you were the elite and you knew it. You thought you were owed everything because of your pure blood. You were a prince. I was always the pretender."
Theodore allowed himself to comment on the diatribe only when Zabini fully stopped, nodding to Zabini in what could have almost been called respect.
"And how well you pretended," Theodore said, then he thumped his head back against the wall and let the silence grow.
⎰⟆⟅⎱
He slept. Probably. Maybe. At least for a few minutes.
Then he laughed. It started with a small huff that he tried to cover up but soon enough he was chuckling with an arm wrapped around his aching side, and Zabini addressed him again.
"What, Theo? Have you gone mental already?"
It didn't take much for Theodore to quiet down. It hadn't been that funny anyway.
"I just… imagined what thirteen-year-old me would think about this," Theodore explained even though he didn't need to. "Hell, I don't care what you say now, you know you were the same as me back then. We thought we were magic's gift to earth. You, me, Malfoy… We walked around school like we were untouchable." Theodore went on before Blaise could interrupt him. "So you knew that your mother was part-siren and you could inherit the genes… What a terrible burden! Except for the fact that you enjoyed every single one of the advantages that purebloods have in society."
The shift from a society tolerant of all its minorities once the Dark Lord was dead, to one where even a-quarter creature was too different to treat with basic decency had been slow and steady.
"Now fucking look at us," Theodore continued. "We're in holding cells for being filthy half-breeds, and last I heard Malfoy's living like a hermit in France."
Who knew what happened to the little ponce? Certainly not Theodore, who couldn't even remember the last time he'd thought about Malfoy other than when he'd been regaled with the small pieces of information that made the rounds after the war.
Theodore chuckled once more. A dry, bitter thing.
"We were on top of the world, everything within reach." Theodore shook his head. "How the mighty have fallen."
Blaise let his head dangle from the shitty mattress, humming in agreement.
"Dalle stelle alle stalle, as they say."
"And what is your mother up to?" Theodore asked, making no effort to bridge two apparently disjointed conversations. Honestly, he thought he could still blame the concussion for a lot, and he was a Slytherin, so he wouldn't let an opportunity to shift the blame go to waste.
Blaise seemed willing to play along.
"She went back to Italy even before the Dark Lord's fall. When she heard how the cards were falling here, she stayed. She's got good friends there."
Theodore couldn't help another jab. "Of course. Those friends," he said.
Blaise just shrugged.
"It's useless to pretend that those kinds of bonds don't control the world."
"Mordred." Theodore breathed deeply. "I didn't remember you being such an embittered little shit."
Blaise started straight into his eyes from across the tiny cell.
"I hadn't spent days in this hole then."
Theodore let it go. Maybe he would be able to sleep more.
⎰⟆⟅⎱
Time passed. There wasn't light that could shift the shadows in the cell, and no one came with food or water, but Theodore had developed a crick in his neck that could only have formed after several hours in the same position.
He shifted on the harsh ground, picking himself up from where he had slid down the floor and sitting properly against the wall. He bent his head forward, then he slammed it back against the wall a second time after the first wasn't satisfying enough. The dull thud made him close his eyes.
He couldn't believe that he was in the Ministry's holding cells. Never had he imagined that he would end up in such a place — sitting where small-time criminals and beasts had sat. He'd considered those sorts of people beneath him because his pure blood had made him inherently better. But now he was tainted. His blood was muddied irreparably. A pureblooded lineage of several centuries had been broken because the heir went and got himself bitten by a werewolf after a misspent youth. Mordred, he thought, how misspent it had been. And what would he give to be that careless, entitled little ponce again. To believe in his own superiority— Scratch, scratch. In his magic-given right— Scratch, scratch.
"You still doing that, then?" Theodore asked, eyes still closed.
For a long moment, his only answer was the sound of nails on skin.
Scratch, scratch.
"Go back to pretending to be a wallflower."
"I just wondered if you wanted to try doing it with my nails," Theodore lied. "I'm pretty sure that my new claws work more efficiently."
Blaise stopped scratching. Then he brought his short, human nails to the skin of his inner elbow one last time like he couldn't help himself.
Theodore had never understood why Blaise scratched himself when they were at Hogwarts. He hadn't given it much thought either, and a few months back, when he'd found out about Blaise's siren heritage, it hadn't come to mind. Only at that moment, as they shared a tiny cell, Theodore thought that the two could be linked. He wondered if it had something to do with scales.
He'd been a werewolf for only 18 months, he didn't pretend to have a clue about creatures and beings he'd looked down upon all his life.
As Theodore contemplated getting a few more hours of sleep, Blaise spoke quietly from the other side of the cell.
"Making it hurt isn't the point."
"Then what's the point?" Theodore didn't know why he didn't let it lie like he'd done a thousand times during their time at Hogwarts. Maybe it was different now that he knew about Blaise's creature heritage, like having discovered a truth about a roommate he thought he knew meant he felt entitled to all other truths as well.
"You wouldn't get it." There was a weird quality to Blaise's voice. It sounded like, if Blaise could put just a tiny more effort in, he'd be able to convince anyone of anything. Was that the power of a siren? Blaise couldn't be a very good one, if it was, because he didn't sound like he believed it in the first place.
"Try me," Theodore said simply, and the floodgates opened. Or at least that was what it seemed like to him, who was inundated with Blaise's feelings about the inherent lack of freedom of living in a world where you could either hide the unacceptable parts of yourself and lie without remorse about them to survive in society, or stay true to yourself and be marginalised to the point of prison, in their case.
Theodore understood his old friend's plight not only through the words Blaise used but also through the emotions he exuded. Blaise may be a creature of the ocean, but his emotions propagated like a firestorm: hot like lava at the origin, it burnt Theodore's skin but only left his insides pleasantly warm, like he had to let it penetrate him fully and endure the negatives to appreciate the positives.
Then Theodore shook his head because he couldn't believe what Blaise had managed to make him think. He slammed his skull back against the wall for good measure, not even caring if he spent the rest of his life with an imprint of the holding cell on his head.
Fuck sirens.
He should say that to Blaise. Just — something, anything except for sympathy.
"Cheers to death then, when we'll have true freedom," he finally settled on, looking closely enough that he caught Blaise's face twisting in a grimace before he turned away.
After a second, Blaise breathed in deeply like he planned to keep going, or maybe to berate Theodore for making him explain himself and then reacting so glibly. But both of them shut up and straightened their spines at the same time. A small cry was coming from outside their cell and they focused on the furthest point they could see from behind bars until an Auror in black robes, like the one who had captured Theodore, walked into their line of sight. He had a bundle in his arms that he pushed into the cell next to Theodore and Blaise's.
The Auror closed the door, ordering, "Stay there!" at the small, crying bundle and all at once Theodore realised it was a child. They'd put a child in the cell next to them. Without thought, he was pressed against the bars of his cell to try and get at the Auror.
"What the hell?!" he screamed. "That's a bloody toddler you threw in there!"
The Auror only turned towards him when the silver of the bars made him hiss and clutch at his burned skin. His eyes froze Theodore's very blood.
"Stop pretending to have compassion for your fellow beasts. We know what you creatures do to your own spawn."
This said, the Auror walked away, leaving a child and two creatures in adjacent cells.
Immediately, Theodore started pacing. The child's cries agitated him more than the prospect of staying in a cell for who knew how long with an old classmate ever could.
"Why the hell would they put a child in here?"
"He's a werewolf," Blaise replied from where he'd kneeled down near the bars of the cell.
"He's a toddler," Theodore snarled, twirling around to bare his teeth at him.
"Look at the bright side. He wasn't dragged in a sack like yesterday's rubbish."
Theodore made himself pause long enough to truly look at Blaise, who was pushing his frayed robes through the bars of their cell, trying to angle the fabric so it would go into the adjacent cell. It was made all the harder because of the silver bars that burnt him every time he touched them.
Theodore fell to his knees next to him and started helping.
Soon enough, the toddler started grasping at the robes as they entered his cell, and his cry became a sniffle.
"There you go, at least you can be warm," encouraged Blaise.
"I — I want my daddy," cried the tiny voice of the child.
"Hey, what's your name? And your daddy's name? Maybe we know him," Blaise said, ignoring the weirded-out look Theodore fixed on him.
"I'm Ted-Teddy. Everyone knows my daddy, he was my dad's friend and my dad left me to him. I-I want to go home…"
And just like that, any progress they'd made with the robes was gone. Teddy started crying again, calling for his father.
"Ssh, Teddy," Blaise tried again to soothe him. "Don't cry now, everything will be fine. They can't hold you here."
Theodore looked away as he thought about what he'd experienced in the last few days.
"D-daddy's gonna come," Teddy announced with a trembling voice, so clearly trying to be brave.
Theodore and Blaise looked at each other.
"Of course he's gonna come."