The War Between The Houses
This is a contest entry for the Dracolov challenge! If you would like to enter you must e-mail Dracolov, her e-mail is in her profile. The last day to enter is 12/1/04. Please R & R (read and review) and thank you for reading my story.
Chapter 1
"It was a cold day when the sun set on the horizon, leaving the castle in a black doom of… No, a blackness of… No, a black night…? No. Hey, how does this sound?"
Draco Malfoy looked up from his Transfiguration homework and stared boredly at the commotion that the fifth year Elizabeth Pearl was making. 'One more time…' He thought to himself, fighting the urge to twitch suddenly. He needed silence while he studied.
'Maybe the library would be a better idea.' But, no. The Annoyingly Golden Trio could be in the library, and he would be forced to taunt and anger them, as was in his nature. 'I'll never get any studying done that way.'
"No." The mousy-haired girl was saying to herself. It seemed that, though she had asked a question aloud, no one was paying an ounce of attention to her. "Maybe the night wasn't 'black.' Maybe it was just dark. Like, indescribably dark. Like –"
'That's it.' Draco rolled his eyes, closing his books shut promptly. "Woman!" He practically shouted, startling a few first years to the point of scrambling out of the common room. "What is your malfunction?!"
Elizabeth Pearl, not a complete idiot apparently, looked up from her parchment. "Are you talking to me?" She questioned, looking at her superior with only a small trace of fear.
'Her left eye twitched.' Draco thought as he smugly commended himself once more for having a keen eye for fear and uneasiness in others.
"Yes, I'm speaking to you." He said flatly. "Who else is disturbing my studies at this hour of the night?"
Pearl blinked her gray eyes at him. "It's seven o'clock."
"Go to your dorm!" Draco ordered, fed up with the short girl across the room.
"Yes, sir." Pearl gathered her things and scampered towards the girls' dormitories.
"Malfoy." Crabbe said from a ways away. Draco looked over, annoyed, but paused when he noticed that Crabbe and Goyle were standing by his chair, pointing to the timeteller on the wall.
"Well, well, well. It is seven o'clock." He said, smirking to himself and standing up. "Let the operation commence. Crabbe, Goyle. You know what to do." He blinked at his two friends as they stared back at him blankly. "Well, maybe I should run it by you one more time."
Hermione Granger took another step closer to Ron Weasley. "You need to study. Right now." She said through gritted teeth.
"I also need to shower." He said slowly, as though she might have trouble understanding him. "No offense, Hermione, but History of Magic is just going to have to wait until I'm finished."
"Let him go!" Ginny Weasley shouted from the other side of the Gryffindor common room. "Merlin knows he needs a shower, the smelly old – oh, hi Harry."
Hermione rolled her eyes as she stepped aside for Ron to pass through to portrait hole. "Well, hurry up!" She called after him lamely. "And don't use the prefects bathroom! Peeves made a horrible mess in there earlier, so unless you want tar coming out of your ears, I advise you to use another bathroom!"
"The plan is to take these buckets of Vaseline to the Gryffindor boys' empty showers and dump them all over the floor." Draco repeated as he walked alongside Crabbe and Goyle down the corridor. "Careful not to spill even a drop in the entryway. A single slip will alert them that the floor is slippery, and none of them will go inside, thus foiling the plan. Are you two listening?"
"Yes." Crabbe and Goyle said in unison as they each lugged two buckets of Vaseline down the hallway.
Draco smiled gleefully to himself as he tapped the tips of his fingers together. "The perfect plan! Finally!"
"Boss, we have a problem." Goyle said, interrupting Draco's thoughts and causing him to gasp in disbelief that his friend had actually formed a complete sentence. One with a comma, at that!
Then it sunk in.
"Problem? What problem? There is no problem! We've been over this! This is a perfect plan! Flawless! You, you incompetent idiot, are the problem!" He raged.
"There are Gryffindors in the showers already. It's supposed to be empty."
"Yes, well." Draco paused, rubbing his chin. "That could present a problem." He placed a hand on each of his lackeys' shoulders. "No, don't go in there."
"Yes, sir." They chorused, stopping in their tracks before a large portrait of Lady Guenevere, who batted her eyelashes in their direction adoringly.
"Well, I'm glad I caught you two in time. Merlin knows the damage that could have gone on in there if I hadn't noticed that the showers were already occupied." He muttered.
Crabbe and Goyle each exchanged a look of confusion.
"I've got it!" Draco said finally. "You two! Listen to me! Listen to me! Must I repeat myself once more? That's it, Crabbe, just look over here. At least pretend you're paying attention!"
"Now," Draco began once he'd deducted that he had at least a small bit of attention from the other two boys. "You two will take the buckets into the shower room as plannedDo not let anyone see you. I repeat, do not let anyone see you. Place the buckets in a spot where you will be able to easily find them when the time comes, but not anywhere where the stupid Gryffindors will spot them and become curious. Then you both will report back here immediately. Understood?" He paused and took in a deep breath. "Is that understood?!"
"Yes, sir." Each of the boys said as they turned to do as they were told, disappearing behind Lady Guenevere.
"Hey, pretty boy." Guenevere said seductively to Draco once he was alone in the hall.
Draco scoffed at her. "Woman, I am not pretty! I am ruggedly handsome! Ruggedly handsome, I tell you! Now get out of my face!"
Not long after that, Crabbe and Goyle returned to the corridor. "Did you do as I told you?" Draco questioned suspiciously. "And you weren't seen?"
"Yes." Goyle answered.
"No." Was Crabbe's response.
Draco sighed. "Good enough." He rolled his eyes and led his friends towards the Slytherin common room once more. "A small delay won't hurt anything." He informed them. "We'll return tomorrow and commence with the plan at that time."
"Yes, sir!" Goyle grinned.
Crabbe nodded. "I'll rub down every single one of those Gryffindor boys with Vaseline if I have to!" He proclaimed.
Draco blinked at his friend just outside the entrance to the dungeons. "See, Crabbe, that's why you shouldn't speak at all. It just causes raised eyebrows, gasping, shocked expressions, and unnecessary disgust. Grunting is your forte. Stick to that."
"So, theoretically, the idea that cocoa butter, when mixed with Veritaserum, will make the person who drinks it unable to utter a coherent word for an hour, makes perfect sense. If you just consider the science behind it…" Hermione was quietly explaining to Ginny Weasley when suddenly a group of four or five boys ran into the common room. Each of them was naked from the waist up as they ran towards the boys' staircase, clutching towels over their waists so as not to expose anything.
"What's going on here?!" Hermione exclaimed as Ginny erupted into fits of giggles beside her. Standing up, Hermione made her way over to the boys' staircase, about to shout up the stairs that someone better explain just what exactly they were doing running around practically nude when someone collided with her from behind, sending her flailing face-first onto the carpeted floor.
"So-sorry, Hermione!" She heard someone call out as she stood up slowly.
"Ron?" She growled, recognizing her friend's voice.
"What just happenned here?" Ginny asked, a digusted look on her face. "That was not Ron in a towel, I'm sure."
"We were attacked!" Someone shouted down the boys' staircase. "Well, not attacked, but it was so horrible!"
Hermione looked up the stairs to see Colin Creevey slowly creeping down them, his hair extrememly shiny and... greasy. "We were all leaving the showers when we just started sliding all over the floor! It was like some horrible, slippery... stuff! It got all over us! We're all covered in it! And I don't even know what it is!"
"What in Merlin's name are you talking about?" Ginny laughed. "More importatnly, what on earth happened to your hair! You look like Snape!"
Hermione shot Ginny a look, who shut her mouth quickly. "Colin," the fluffy-haired girl said slowly. "Do you mean to say that someone greased the floor with... something slippery... as in... a prank?"
"Maybe it was a prank." Colin shrugged. "I don't know. Right now I don't care. I'm waiting for the others so that we can find another bathroom."
"Who would be able to pull off something like that?" Lavender Brown asked from the couch. "My first guess would be one of the Weasleys, no offense, but Ginny was here the whole time, and Ron wouldn't have done that to himself. Did you see his face when he came through here?"
"Right." Hermione nodded. "It couldn't have been a Weasely... But it could have been..."
"Who?" Ginny cocked her head to the side.
Hermione sighed and placed her hands on her hips. "I think it was Malfoy."
The sound of Draco's shoes echoed noisily through the corridor. "So you're saying that a group of Gryffindors ran past you, covered in something slimy, and clutching towels to their waists?" He asked the first year Slytherin next to him.
"Yes, sir, Malfoy, sir." The small boy said. "They looked very angry. I thought of telling you right away, sir."
"Good work..." Draco trailed off, forgetting the name of the boy. "Go back to the common room." And with that, the first year scampered away.
Who could have infuriated the Gryffindors so? That... "something slimy"? Could it have been the Vaseline? But they decided to hold off the prank until tomorrow. Crabbe or Goyle couldn't have done anything, as they were with Draco the whole time.
'This doesn't make any sense.' Draco thought to himself. 'Who went through with it? No one else knew...'
"Ew, ew, ew." Draco heard from around the corner. "Ew, ew, ewww."
Raising an eyebrow, Draco rushed to where he heard the noise, rounding the corner at full speed. "Elizabeth Pearl!" He shouted at the fifth year before him. "I told you to go to your dorm! What are you doing here?!"
'She's just asking for trouble. Why else would she deliberately disobey me? Unless she's really that stupid.'
"Uh, sorry." The mousy-haired girl said, smacking the top of her head in an attempt to pat her hair down. 'What is she doing? It's already slicked to her head? What does she use, the same product as Professor Snape? That's so greasy, I - Ohh.'
"You..." Draco said through clenched teeth as he grabbed her arm and dragged her down the corridor. "You are going to do me a favor, Pearl. You are going to write down everything you did tonight, starting with my order for you to go to your dorm and ending with this moment. Is that understood?"
"Um, yes sir." She said meekly, as they walked through the portrait hole into the common room.
"Sit down here." Draco told her, pointing to a small table in the corner of the room. "There is a peice of parchment right there." He pointed again. "Grab a quill and begin. I will check back with you in an hour."
After an hour of playing Slap Jack with Crabbe and Goyle - causing a throbbing pain in Draco's hand - Draco stalked over to Eliza's spot at the table. "Have you finished?" He asked coldly.
"Yes." She nodded. "May I go shower now?"
He nodded. "Fine. Hurry back. I may still need to speak with you."
Looking down at the parchment, Draco sat in one of the wooden chairs and began to read silently to himself.
'Elizabeth "Eliza" Pearl's forced statement on her (well, my) whereabouts earlier this night:
Okay, so after Draco Malfoy (that would be you) told me to go to my dorm, I did. I went to my dorm, dropped off a few things, started looking over an amazingly sorrowful poem I'd written during History of Magic, and got so caught up in it that time just flew by. So, I put the poem away and left the common room. I completely forgot about Malfoy's orders to stay in my dorm.
Well, technically, he/you told me to "Go to my dorm" and I did, I just didn't stay there, which should be fine, considering you didn't tell me to stay. I'm just clarifying this for you.
Anyway, I decided to go spy on the Gryffindor boys in the showers.
Hey, I'm a girl. Just because I spy on naked guys doesn't mean anything weird. Guys do the same thing. Well, they spy on girls, not guys. Well, some of the time.
Okay, I lie. It does mean something "weird". See, I have this uncontrollable infatuation with a certain Gryffindor boy who's a year above me and I just think he's so cute and -
Okay, so that's why I was there. You don't need all the details, do you? Unless you want them. I mean, I've heard some stories about you. You might enjoy a long, erotically detailed explanation of everything I saw. But, no. I won't go into all of it.
When I got to the portrait on Lady Guenevere, she did that annoying glare thing she does whenever I walk by. (It's just because I'm a girl, I swear. I would so kill her if she wasn't just a peice of plaster or... whatever she is.) Then when I went inside, I did my usual hide/spy thing, which I can't tell you the details of, as that could jinx everything and I would be caught the next time.
Don't ask. I'm sort of very superstitious.
Anyway, a few minutes later, I heard the portrait hole opening behind me. I couldn't be caught, obviously, so I hid in the shadows as some first year went inside the showers. But when I rushed back to my position, I accidentally knocked over these two huge buckets with some kind of goo in them. I don't know what it was, but maybe you do. you seem to know everything.
Anyway, the sound of the buckets falling made a really loud noise, plus there was slimy stuff everywhere, so I quickly ran out of there, you understand. Unfortunately, I slipped a few times, thus covering myself in that nasty... junk.
I was wandering the corridors, paranoid that someone would see me and ask what had happened. I mean, what would I say? That I was spying on the Gryffindor boys in the showers and I accidentally knocked over a couple of buckets filled with slime? Not only would that be totally humiliating and embarrassing, but who would beleive that? I am in Slytherin, you know.
And that's when Malfoy/you found me. So, you see, it's a short story really. I could have made it longer, you know, by adding a few more details and whatnot - I am a literary genius, as you may be aware of; I write every day - but I don't think I could have finished in an hour if I had taken that route.
I could have told this to you, then. I didn't have to write it down. Although I probably would have blushed through the whole thing. You would probably tink that I spy on you in the showers, too.
I don't, though, don't worry.
So, I'm done, and there's still forty-five minutes left. I suppose I'll just wait here. I can see you playing Slap Jack with Crabbe and Goyle. Isn't that dangerous? They're going to break your hand, you know.'
Draco placed the parchment on the table in front of him and turned to Goyle. "Goyle," he said with a sigh. "I have a feeling that the Gryffindors are going to retaliate. Be on guard."
Sorry if this first chapter was a bit short, or seemed to suck a bit, but it's just the first chap. There's much more to come! Next chapter: "The Gryffindors Retaliate" (of course).
To my faithful reviewers already: I haven't given up on any of my other fics, don't worry. This is just something I want to do because it looked like a really good idea for a fic. In fact, I've updated on 'Well, What Do You Know?', but I don't think it sent out an alert, as I simply replaced the "NOTICE" chapter with the real chapter 15. Sorry for the confusion.
To everyone else: I promise I will never mention my other fics again. I don't really like doing that and I think it's annoying when other people do. If you want to read them, go ahead, but they have nothing to do with this fic, so they will never be brought up again.
Thanks for reading and please review!