"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts." -the Counting Crows
Films About Ghosts
Chapter 8: Sooty Yeti
"—haven't seen either of them all night! Surely one of them would have been at the party!"
"She hasn't been here two full days, she wouldn't have gone. And Draco's never fancied the parties."
"He went with me last year!" Ariane frowned. The two girls were Pansy and Tuyet, and Pansy was very much upset.
Tuyet sighed in exasperation. "Pansy, he only went because you half- dragged him there. He doesn't like parties when he's not the center of attention."
Ariane glanced up at Draco and saw that his jaw was clenched. She made a mental note to warn Tuyet about him before she got her tongue hexed off again.
"B-but I haven't seen him all afternoon!" Pansy half-wailed. Ariane decided that she must have had something to eat or drink that didn't agree with her, because it was totally out of character for Pansy to whimper, especially to Tuyet. "He's hardly talked to me since she got here."
No prizes for who she is, Ariane grumbled to herself. Tuyet wasn't the only one who was going to have to watch her back in the dormitory tonight.
"You'd better run for it," Draco breathed into her ear, "I've got to make it up with Pansy." He didn't have to tell her twice. Ariane crept off; trying to suppress the feeling that tonight was the last time she'd be able to enjoy Draco's company without Pansy breathing down their necks. Not to mention the thorn in her side that was Draco making up to Pansy right as Ariane fled down the hallway. It reminded her of the time they had been staying at the manor and Madam Hufflepuff, Helga's mother, had caught Helga's father in bed with the blacksmith's wife. To her intense shame, Ariane realized that she was playing the part of the blacksmith's wife.
She wasn't altogether familiar with the ways of her new world, but she would have bet money that she would never be Draco's 'girl' out in the open. They would keep their conversations and kisses secret—though if there were more people like Professor Connor in the school, it would get out eventually—and sooner or later Draco would lose interest and move on to another pretty girl. Daphne, perhaps.
A tiny shred of rebelliousness flared in Ariane's brain. She was Ariane Somerled, and she was born free and had better things to do than be a popular boy's plaything. She had come to like thinking that she was pretty, and she had also begun to think that she might be able to get another boy to fancy her once Draco had moved on. Maybe that Harry Potter—he wasn't bad looking, even if he was a little short—and Tuyet had said that he might fancy her.
Just outside the Slytherin Common Room, a shard of memory struck her like lightning.
Laramy.
Ariane clapped a hand to her forehead so hard that she staggered. How could she have forgotten?
Laramy's dead, said the new part of her that liked kissing Draco so much. He's nothing but dust, and you ought to forget him.
I was engaged to him! snapped her old self, I can't just brush him away like he never mattered.
He might have forgotten you. Probably married some brown-eyed girl with lots of freckles who knew how to milk cows and raise babies.
If it wouldn't have looked totally insane, Ariane would have stuck her fingers in her ears so that she wouldn't have to listen to her own inner argument. Instead she whispered 'Slatero' and went inside the common room. She would have given anything to be able to close off her mind from the thoughts now shooting through her brain.
Blaise ran into her almost immediately, his eyes crossed and his curly hair on end. "Hello, beautiful," he said, looking at her with a yearning expression almost as bad as Tuyet's had been, "My heart has missed your lovely lips, your moonlit mane, your—"
Daphne threw a pillow at him from her seat on the floor. "Ignore him," she said, rolling her eyes. "He's just been hit with a Confundus Charm." She patted the ground next to her invitingly, but all Ariane wanted to do was collapse onto her lovely bed and sleep away her second day at Hogwarts.
"I've got to get to bed," she demurred, pushing Blaise away from her knees, which he was eyeing queasily.
Once she gained the safety of the dormitory, she pulled on the pajamas set at the end of her bed and vaulted onto her windowsill and looked out. The waters of the lake looked the same as they always did, if a little darker than usual because night had fallen. Ariane was watching the purples and blues and green swim lazily, her eyelids drooping, when sudden the dormitory door slammed open. She yelped and toppled off the windowsill, but was saved the trouble of getting to her feet when Tuyet dragged her up by the collar.
"What's wrong with you?" she asked at the top of her lungs, using her free hand to point her wand at the door. It shut and locked itself. "I saw you two together when I was leaving the Ravenclaw party, up there kissing on the stairs! Ariane, I warned you about him, Pansy threatened you about him, and I'll be damned if you didn't go sneaking off with him the first chance you got!" Tuyet let go of Ariane's collar and pushed her so that she sat heavily on the bed. "Look, I'm telling you this because I really don't want to see you get shredded by the end of your first week. You should stay away from anything Malfoy if you want to grow old."
Ariane blinked up at the red-faced Tuyet, who was usually so cool and cutting, and said, "I'm sorry."
"Sorry isn't worth a rat's ass," she snapped, but when Ariane looked away, hurt, Tuyet sighed and sat down next to her. "Look, I know that he's got to be one of the most handsome boys at Hogwarts, but his family is up to no good. His dad was in Azkaban over the summer for breaking into the Ministry of Magic with a bunch of You-Know-Who's Death Eaters."
Ariane added all of these things to her mental list of words to look up and topics to ask Snape or Dumbledore about. "That's pretty serious, then," she replied hesitantly.
"Pretty serious, yeah," Tuyet said. "Look, my mum works at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as a Hit Witch, and she's not exactly a pansy." Ariane made an approving noise and made her mental list longer. "But she told me that there are only three wizards that she'd never want to face in open combat: You-Know-Who, Sirius Black, and Lucius Malfoy."
"He's not a very nice person then?" she asked quietly. Draco's horrifying memory of his father's friends torturing someone echoed in her mind. "He kills people?"
"Muggles, mostly, but he nearly did for a couple of Aurors in that scrape at the Ministry last summer," Tuyet replied with grudging respect in her voice, "Aurors are a step up from Mum as far as toughness and smarts go."
"They must be very clever," Ariane said politely, and Tuyet glowed.
"I want to be an Auror," Tuyet said dreamily, flopping backwards onto Ariane's bed. "Mum got shut out mostly because she's foreign, but I've got a fighting chance and I think I'll be able to do it."
"You don't look foreign." Now that her friend was no longer telling her off, Ariane began to organize her mental list. As soon as Tuyet went off to sleep she was going to write it all down so that she wouldn't forget. She knew that they had Sundays off, and she planned to spend her free day in the library and picking Snape's brain.
"Dad's British, but Mum's from Vietnam originally. I kept Mum's surname because 'Tuyet Smith' sounds ridiculous." Tuyet sat up sharply. "You've gone and got us off topic!" Ariane shrugged and hid a smile. "Listen, don't let Malfoy push you around just because you're new here and shy as all hell. Be polite but say no."
"No to what?" Ariane asked curiously. No to his kisses? It was a bit late for that. She had already begun forming her plot to get out of those, though.
Tuyet went pink. "Look, I know you're really naïve about a lot of things, but surely you know about sex. I don't think he's ever gone and done it, but he seems to really fancy you."
Ariane shrugged and aired her thoughts aloud. "I figured that eventually he'd get bored and move on."
"If this was a normal person we were talking about, that would be the way to go, but he can be very persistent." Tuyet gave her a doubtful look through her blonde fringe.
"Then I'll be very polite and very elusive," said Ariane simply, taking a comb off her night table and running it through her curls. Tuyet looked as though she'd like to argue, but then Daphne came in, her hair mussed and her face dewy with sweat.
"Blaise," she sighed in deep disgust. "I couldn't just leave him lying in the middle of the common room, so I dragged him upstairs. The oaf nearly knocked me out."
"Maybe he'd have learned not to insult Ravenclaws if you had left him there," Tuyet pointed out. "It would be a memorable lesson if he woke up drooling on Millicent's shoes."
Daphne shrugged and went faintly pink in the cheeks. "It gave me an excuse to go into the boy's room. Draco looks good without his shirt on."
Ariane giggled and Tuyet threw a pillow, and before long they were all flinging pillows at each other and shrieking with laughter. Millicent came in about five minutes after the fight began and was hit full in the face with somebody's sweater—Ariane held her breath—but took it in good humor and threw it back so hard that it knocked Daphne off her bed. The pillow fight was in full swing when Pansy came bursting into the room, her face red.
"Somerled, where were you?" she demanded and pointed her wand directly at Ariane, a ferocious look in her small brown eyes.
Ariane smiled placidly and realized that her wand was still in her school bag. "The library. I was researching my family." And she flung a pillow at Pansy's head with all her might.
It was quite fascinating, watching Pansy's feet flying up in the air, and then hearing the hollow thump as her plump bottom hit the green carpeting. "You b—" she started to shriek, but two more pillows cut off whatever she'd meant to say. "If you lot—ouch!—don't cut it out right now—ow—I'll give the lot of you detentions!"
"Prefect Pansy's pissed!" Tuyet taunted, and flung another pillow at her.
It hit Pansy squarely in the stomach, and she howled, pointed her wand at Tuyet's head, and cried "Petrificus Totalus!" Tuyet ducked, but it missed her by inches. Nobody was laughing now, and Daphne jumped behind her bed to protect herself. After a moment's hesitation, Ariane copied her example. Millicent was trying to hide behind a pillow, which was about as effective as trying to hide Hogwarts behind a napkin.
Pansy and Tuyet squared off, Tuyet standing on her bed in her mussed school robes, Pansy kneeling on the floor quite red in the face and surrounded by pillows. "Expelliarmus!" Pansy shrieked, but once again Tuyet ducked, though her wand was nearly knocked from her grasp.
"Impedimenta!" Tuyet yelled, and Pansy was thrown backwards into Daphne's school chest.
"Stop!" Daphne told them, but they ignored her. "Stop it!"
Tuyet shouted something that Ariane didn't catch, and Pansy began to sprout a lot of black fur from her face and arms, giving her the look of some sort of longhaired dog or badger in a girl's clothes. She shrieked in fury and tried to get up, but Tuyet's Impediment Jinx was still working. Pansy snapped out her wand arm from her seated position, the thick fur swaying as it continued to grow. "Conjunctiva!" The blonde haired Slytherin dropped her wand and screamed, clutching the eye that Pansy's curse had hit.
Terrified, Ariane grabbed her school bag and rummaged around for her wand—how stupid could she be, to just leave it somewhere when she might have needed it—finally grabbed it, and yelled "Finite Incantatum!" to the room at large. Tuyet stopped screaming and Pansy got to her feet, just as Snape burst through the door with murder glinting in his eyes. Ariane noted with relief that Pansy's pelt had stopped growing, though it still hung there like a foot-long curtain from her arms and head.
"What," he said in a voice that made Ariane want to disappear, "Do you all think you are doing?" She hid her wand beneath her bed sheets. Snape's black gaze took it all in: Pansy's hairy state, Tuyet's bloodshot eye that was already beginning to swell closed, and the three other girls in the dormitory who had taken cover. He stared each of them down. "Who started this?"
"She hexed me!" Tuyet pointed at Pansy, one of her hands going to her eye.
"She got me with a Hair-Growth Charm first!" Pansy defended herself, though it was very obvious to anyone with eyes. She looked like a sooty Yeti. "And she was flinging things at me!"
"We were all flinging things," Ariane contributed hesitantly, not trusting her voice to remain free of the laughter she was suppressing. "It was all in good fun."
"All in good fun," Snape echoed disgustedly.
"All's fun and games until somebody loses an eye," Tuyet grumbled under her breath. "Pansy, you really need to grow a sense of humor to go with your pelt."
"I was fine until she knocked me down!" Pansy pointed at Ariane. "She's got it out for me, Professor."
Ariane barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes. "I haven't got it out for you," she said, somehow keeping her exasperation from showing through to her voice. "I didn't mean to throw it so hard." Blatant lie, she thought, crossing her fingers mentally, and if I got another chance, I would have thrown it harder, I think. But only if it would have sent Pansy howling to Snape right away instead of trying to curse Tuyet's eyes out.
"I expected better of you," he snarled, looking a lot like a vampire for a moment, "If anything of the sort happens again, you'll be disemboweling mandrakes until graduation. Do I make myself clear?" Ariane couldn't meet his eyes, but she nodded. Pansy simply looked defiant (though it was very hard to tell her expression through the fur), and Tuyet was too busy glaring at Pansy with her good eye to do anything. "Get to the hospital wing, both of you."
"Isn't she going to get a detention?" Pansy asked in a scandalized voice, pointing at Ariane once more with her hairy arm.
"No," Snape said in a voice that dried up all their complaints. "Go to the hospital wing, Miss Parkinson, Miss Qui-Minh."
Pansy left in a huff of black hair, Tuyet trailing after, and Snape glared at them all. "Clean this up," he said in a disgusted voice, and slammed the door behind him.
Ariane stood up and looked at the dormitory, retrieved her pillows, and climbed back onto her bed. Daphne copied her, her pretty face screwed up. "I hate it when they fight like that," she said softly.
"Do they do this often?"
"At least once a term for the past three years," Daphne sighed. "Last year was really bad, though. Pansy ended up with antlers." She shook her head, springy curls trembling. "It's really hard to be friends with both of them."
"I can imagine," said Ariane sympathetically. "You must be pretty diplomatic to deal with both of them at once."
Daphne laughed a little sadly. "I just duck when it gets bad." She hopped into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. "They'll be at each other's throats for the next couple of days. Tuyet needs to watch out."
"She did okay for herself in here," Ariane said fairly, jumping onto her own bed.
"She's quick, but her spells never work as well as Pansy's," the other girl replied ominously, and closed up her curtains. "Good night."
"'Night," Ariane told her, drawing her curtains around her and groping under the sheets for her wand. "Lumos!" she ordered it, and by its light found quill and ink and a spare bit of parchment. She began to make out her list of things to ask Snape about, once she got the chance and the courage to face him after her disgrace earlier.
The Ministry of Magic
You-Know-Who
Death Eaters
Sirius Black
Lucius Malfoy
Aurors
Hit Witches
Azkaban
She thought for a moment, chewing on the end of the quill, then added:
My father
Her dreams that night were memories that she had forgotten.
"Make sure this rinses all through your hair," Salazar whispered urgently. "We need to stay as unobtrusive as possible." He moved off, leaving Ariane staring into a bowl that reeked, filled to the brim with black walnut stain. It was thick and dark and would turn her hair as black as her brother's. Ariane fingered her curls, which at ten were waist-length.
"Salazar!" she called. "Can I not cover my hair?" Ariane knew that she couldn't bring herself to dye it, anymore than she could pluck her own eyes from her head.
"It's far too recognizable!" he said impatiently, throwing clothes into a trunk. "Lady Hufflepuff only agreed to take us along if we could blend in." Salazar came up beside her and placed his hand on her shoulder, underneath her silver hair. "It will fade with time," he reassured her.
"You do it," she said tightly, closing her arms over her chest. "I cannot."
Gently he gripped her shoulders and turned her about so that her back was to the bowl. With the grave air of a preacher dipping a sinner into the baptismal pool, he lowered her down until she felt the dye lapping at her scalp. A lone tear of vanity trickled from her eye as she dried her black hair and tucked every strand of it into a kerchief until nothing showed.
Ariane sat up in bed. "What a stupid memory," she whispered to herself. Was I ever so vain? But did I fear losing my hair or my identity—that is the question. She punched her pillow and lay back down, violet eyes wide in the darkness, waiting to sleep again. When sleep evaded her for a half- hour, however, she got up, pulled her black winter cloak on over her pajamas, and went down to the common room to pace.
The fire in the long fireplace was low, merely glowing embers. Ariane sought out a poker and prodded the coals, her body remembering how to coax a flame from the fragile cinders. As she crouched, her face warmed by her chore, she thought of another time and another hearth.
She was fifteen or so—almost a woman—and she was wearing her Hogwarts clothing, gray skirts, white kirtle, black bodice. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, bright in the firelight of the kitchen hearth. A poker was gripped loosely in her right hand; her left steadied her as she crouched by the flames.
"You shouldn't be here," she told Laramy, who was leaning against the door. "You should be in Rowena's house at this early hour."
"What you mean is that you don't want Salazar to wake and see me talking to you," Laramy said, cutting through her excuses as he always did. "Is he your jailer?"
"No!" she replied, shocked at this assessment. "What on earth would make you think such a thing?"
He screwed up his face in mock-concentration, pushing his coppery hair behind his shoulders. "Hmm...because he gets angry when you spend time with anyone but him...because he only lets you spend time with other women when he isn't monopolizing your time...and possibly because he half-killed the last person who dared to ask for your hand in marriage."
Ariane turned around so quickly that she nearly set her skirts on fire. "What?"
"Didn't you hear about that? The headman from the village down the hill petitioned for you." Laramy studied her expression intently, and then grinned. "Don't worry, I think your brother dissuaded most suitors from that village. I doubt the headman's rid himself of the hooves yet."
"Isn't he a Muggle?" Ariane asked, aghast. "I couldn't marry one of them!"
"Muggles aren't so bad. This one wanted a witch for a wife. Very practical man, if you garner my opinions."
Ariane made an indignant noise and went back to the fire. "Muggles killed my mother," she told him. "I couldn't share my house with one."
"That's your personal life and opinion. But then again, since Salazar's choosing your husband, why wait? Tell him so that he knows what to look for." Laramy chuckled, his mood lightening hers.
"Why even take that much effort," Ariane returned with a laugh. "I should just marry you. You're a clever wizard, you're not too old nor too young, and you're Rowena's favorite student."
"I wouldn't dare marry you," Laramy joked, "For fear that my new brother-in- law would organize my untimely demise and leave you a widow before we were married a fortnight." Ariane brushed the weak jest aside, ignoring the way it chilled her bones.
"Why—" Ariane froze halfway through the word as the door separating the kitchen from the rest of the house swung open. "Hello Salazar," she said pleasantly.
"Why are you up so early?" he asked, his long dark hair sleep-mussed. "And what were you doing in here?"
"Talking to myself," she said airily, resisting the urge to see where Laramy had hidden himself. "I'll stop if it's bothering you."
Salazar looked a bit confused, but shook his head and went back through the door. "You can keep talking if you like, but do it quietly," he replied over his shoulder. The door swung closed.
"Laramy?" she whispered once a decent amount of time had passed. "Where—God!" For Laramy had just dropped out of the thatched ceiling onto the kitchen table and was grinning from ear to ear.
She blinked hazily at the embers in the Slytherin common room, her brain caught between her future and her past. Why had she been so afraid of Laramy's joke about Salazar organizing his untimely demise? Was it because she had already begun to like him, or was it because it seemed like something Salazar was capable of? As she went back upstairs to her dormitory, she tried to puzzle out her worries. Would Salazar kill someone for her? Maybe if that person was trying to hurt me, Ariane reasoned, but not if he was marrying me. Salazar would be picky about my husband, that much is true, but if he went to all the effort of finding a suitable wizard he wouldn't kill him right away. That would be a waste of effort. Her reasoning had holes, however, and the perfectionist in Ariane wasn't satisfied by her argument. After a brief hesitation, Ariane added it to her list of thing to ask Snape about.
After all, Ariane reasoned, was there any other useful thing about having another person who knew all her memories? Perhaps he could see things in them that she couldn't—or wouldn't.
Author's Note: Nothing much to say, other than thanks for review (even if it takes longer than I think it does, lol). Oh, and even if Draco is hot, he is still scum, and I promise that there won't be any more unjustified angst over him...I've gone on. And also sorry about the chapter title...I was going to upload it when I realized that I'd forgotten to title it...and due to a mental clog I couldn't think up anything better.
Films About Ghosts
Chapter 8: Sooty Yeti
"—haven't seen either of them all night! Surely one of them would have been at the party!"
"She hasn't been here two full days, she wouldn't have gone. And Draco's never fancied the parties."
"He went with me last year!" Ariane frowned. The two girls were Pansy and Tuyet, and Pansy was very much upset.
Tuyet sighed in exasperation. "Pansy, he only went because you half- dragged him there. He doesn't like parties when he's not the center of attention."
Ariane glanced up at Draco and saw that his jaw was clenched. She made a mental note to warn Tuyet about him before she got her tongue hexed off again.
"B-but I haven't seen him all afternoon!" Pansy half-wailed. Ariane decided that she must have had something to eat or drink that didn't agree with her, because it was totally out of character for Pansy to whimper, especially to Tuyet. "He's hardly talked to me since she got here."
No prizes for who she is, Ariane grumbled to herself. Tuyet wasn't the only one who was going to have to watch her back in the dormitory tonight.
"You'd better run for it," Draco breathed into her ear, "I've got to make it up with Pansy." He didn't have to tell her twice. Ariane crept off; trying to suppress the feeling that tonight was the last time she'd be able to enjoy Draco's company without Pansy breathing down their necks. Not to mention the thorn in her side that was Draco making up to Pansy right as Ariane fled down the hallway. It reminded her of the time they had been staying at the manor and Madam Hufflepuff, Helga's mother, had caught Helga's father in bed with the blacksmith's wife. To her intense shame, Ariane realized that she was playing the part of the blacksmith's wife.
She wasn't altogether familiar with the ways of her new world, but she would have bet money that she would never be Draco's 'girl' out in the open. They would keep their conversations and kisses secret—though if there were more people like Professor Connor in the school, it would get out eventually—and sooner or later Draco would lose interest and move on to another pretty girl. Daphne, perhaps.
A tiny shred of rebelliousness flared in Ariane's brain. She was Ariane Somerled, and she was born free and had better things to do than be a popular boy's plaything. She had come to like thinking that she was pretty, and she had also begun to think that she might be able to get another boy to fancy her once Draco had moved on. Maybe that Harry Potter—he wasn't bad looking, even if he was a little short—and Tuyet had said that he might fancy her.
Just outside the Slytherin Common Room, a shard of memory struck her like lightning.
Laramy.
Ariane clapped a hand to her forehead so hard that she staggered. How could she have forgotten?
Laramy's dead, said the new part of her that liked kissing Draco so much. He's nothing but dust, and you ought to forget him.
I was engaged to him! snapped her old self, I can't just brush him away like he never mattered.
He might have forgotten you. Probably married some brown-eyed girl with lots of freckles who knew how to milk cows and raise babies.
If it wouldn't have looked totally insane, Ariane would have stuck her fingers in her ears so that she wouldn't have to listen to her own inner argument. Instead she whispered 'Slatero' and went inside the common room. She would have given anything to be able to close off her mind from the thoughts now shooting through her brain.
Blaise ran into her almost immediately, his eyes crossed and his curly hair on end. "Hello, beautiful," he said, looking at her with a yearning expression almost as bad as Tuyet's had been, "My heart has missed your lovely lips, your moonlit mane, your—"
Daphne threw a pillow at him from her seat on the floor. "Ignore him," she said, rolling her eyes. "He's just been hit with a Confundus Charm." She patted the ground next to her invitingly, but all Ariane wanted to do was collapse onto her lovely bed and sleep away her second day at Hogwarts.
"I've got to get to bed," she demurred, pushing Blaise away from her knees, which he was eyeing queasily.
Once she gained the safety of the dormitory, she pulled on the pajamas set at the end of her bed and vaulted onto her windowsill and looked out. The waters of the lake looked the same as they always did, if a little darker than usual because night had fallen. Ariane was watching the purples and blues and green swim lazily, her eyelids drooping, when sudden the dormitory door slammed open. She yelped and toppled off the windowsill, but was saved the trouble of getting to her feet when Tuyet dragged her up by the collar.
"What's wrong with you?" she asked at the top of her lungs, using her free hand to point her wand at the door. It shut and locked itself. "I saw you two together when I was leaving the Ravenclaw party, up there kissing on the stairs! Ariane, I warned you about him, Pansy threatened you about him, and I'll be damned if you didn't go sneaking off with him the first chance you got!" Tuyet let go of Ariane's collar and pushed her so that she sat heavily on the bed. "Look, I'm telling you this because I really don't want to see you get shredded by the end of your first week. You should stay away from anything Malfoy if you want to grow old."
Ariane blinked up at the red-faced Tuyet, who was usually so cool and cutting, and said, "I'm sorry."
"Sorry isn't worth a rat's ass," she snapped, but when Ariane looked away, hurt, Tuyet sighed and sat down next to her. "Look, I know that he's got to be one of the most handsome boys at Hogwarts, but his family is up to no good. His dad was in Azkaban over the summer for breaking into the Ministry of Magic with a bunch of You-Know-Who's Death Eaters."
Ariane added all of these things to her mental list of words to look up and topics to ask Snape or Dumbledore about. "That's pretty serious, then," she replied hesitantly.
"Pretty serious, yeah," Tuyet said. "Look, my mum works at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as a Hit Witch, and she's not exactly a pansy." Ariane made an approving noise and made her mental list longer. "But she told me that there are only three wizards that she'd never want to face in open combat: You-Know-Who, Sirius Black, and Lucius Malfoy."
"He's not a very nice person then?" she asked quietly. Draco's horrifying memory of his father's friends torturing someone echoed in her mind. "He kills people?"
"Muggles, mostly, but he nearly did for a couple of Aurors in that scrape at the Ministry last summer," Tuyet replied with grudging respect in her voice, "Aurors are a step up from Mum as far as toughness and smarts go."
"They must be very clever," Ariane said politely, and Tuyet glowed.
"I want to be an Auror," Tuyet said dreamily, flopping backwards onto Ariane's bed. "Mum got shut out mostly because she's foreign, but I've got a fighting chance and I think I'll be able to do it."
"You don't look foreign." Now that her friend was no longer telling her off, Ariane began to organize her mental list. As soon as Tuyet went off to sleep she was going to write it all down so that she wouldn't forget. She knew that they had Sundays off, and she planned to spend her free day in the library and picking Snape's brain.
"Dad's British, but Mum's from Vietnam originally. I kept Mum's surname because 'Tuyet Smith' sounds ridiculous." Tuyet sat up sharply. "You've gone and got us off topic!" Ariane shrugged and hid a smile. "Listen, don't let Malfoy push you around just because you're new here and shy as all hell. Be polite but say no."
"No to what?" Ariane asked curiously. No to his kisses? It was a bit late for that. She had already begun forming her plot to get out of those, though.
Tuyet went pink. "Look, I know you're really naïve about a lot of things, but surely you know about sex. I don't think he's ever gone and done it, but he seems to really fancy you."
Ariane shrugged and aired her thoughts aloud. "I figured that eventually he'd get bored and move on."
"If this was a normal person we were talking about, that would be the way to go, but he can be very persistent." Tuyet gave her a doubtful look through her blonde fringe.
"Then I'll be very polite and very elusive," said Ariane simply, taking a comb off her night table and running it through her curls. Tuyet looked as though she'd like to argue, but then Daphne came in, her hair mussed and her face dewy with sweat.
"Blaise," she sighed in deep disgust. "I couldn't just leave him lying in the middle of the common room, so I dragged him upstairs. The oaf nearly knocked me out."
"Maybe he'd have learned not to insult Ravenclaws if you had left him there," Tuyet pointed out. "It would be a memorable lesson if he woke up drooling on Millicent's shoes."
Daphne shrugged and went faintly pink in the cheeks. "It gave me an excuse to go into the boy's room. Draco looks good without his shirt on."
Ariane giggled and Tuyet threw a pillow, and before long they were all flinging pillows at each other and shrieking with laughter. Millicent came in about five minutes after the fight began and was hit full in the face with somebody's sweater—Ariane held her breath—but took it in good humor and threw it back so hard that it knocked Daphne off her bed. The pillow fight was in full swing when Pansy came bursting into the room, her face red.
"Somerled, where were you?" she demanded and pointed her wand directly at Ariane, a ferocious look in her small brown eyes.
Ariane smiled placidly and realized that her wand was still in her school bag. "The library. I was researching my family." And she flung a pillow at Pansy's head with all her might.
It was quite fascinating, watching Pansy's feet flying up in the air, and then hearing the hollow thump as her plump bottom hit the green carpeting. "You b—" she started to shriek, but two more pillows cut off whatever she'd meant to say. "If you lot—ouch!—don't cut it out right now—ow—I'll give the lot of you detentions!"
"Prefect Pansy's pissed!" Tuyet taunted, and flung another pillow at her.
It hit Pansy squarely in the stomach, and she howled, pointed her wand at Tuyet's head, and cried "Petrificus Totalus!" Tuyet ducked, but it missed her by inches. Nobody was laughing now, and Daphne jumped behind her bed to protect herself. After a moment's hesitation, Ariane copied her example. Millicent was trying to hide behind a pillow, which was about as effective as trying to hide Hogwarts behind a napkin.
Pansy and Tuyet squared off, Tuyet standing on her bed in her mussed school robes, Pansy kneeling on the floor quite red in the face and surrounded by pillows. "Expelliarmus!" Pansy shrieked, but once again Tuyet ducked, though her wand was nearly knocked from her grasp.
"Impedimenta!" Tuyet yelled, and Pansy was thrown backwards into Daphne's school chest.
"Stop!" Daphne told them, but they ignored her. "Stop it!"
Tuyet shouted something that Ariane didn't catch, and Pansy began to sprout a lot of black fur from her face and arms, giving her the look of some sort of longhaired dog or badger in a girl's clothes. She shrieked in fury and tried to get up, but Tuyet's Impediment Jinx was still working. Pansy snapped out her wand arm from her seated position, the thick fur swaying as it continued to grow. "Conjunctiva!" The blonde haired Slytherin dropped her wand and screamed, clutching the eye that Pansy's curse had hit.
Terrified, Ariane grabbed her school bag and rummaged around for her wand—how stupid could she be, to just leave it somewhere when she might have needed it—finally grabbed it, and yelled "Finite Incantatum!" to the room at large. Tuyet stopped screaming and Pansy got to her feet, just as Snape burst through the door with murder glinting in his eyes. Ariane noted with relief that Pansy's pelt had stopped growing, though it still hung there like a foot-long curtain from her arms and head.
"What," he said in a voice that made Ariane want to disappear, "Do you all think you are doing?" She hid her wand beneath her bed sheets. Snape's black gaze took it all in: Pansy's hairy state, Tuyet's bloodshot eye that was already beginning to swell closed, and the three other girls in the dormitory who had taken cover. He stared each of them down. "Who started this?"
"She hexed me!" Tuyet pointed at Pansy, one of her hands going to her eye.
"She got me with a Hair-Growth Charm first!" Pansy defended herself, though it was very obvious to anyone with eyes. She looked like a sooty Yeti. "And she was flinging things at me!"
"We were all flinging things," Ariane contributed hesitantly, not trusting her voice to remain free of the laughter she was suppressing. "It was all in good fun."
"All in good fun," Snape echoed disgustedly.
"All's fun and games until somebody loses an eye," Tuyet grumbled under her breath. "Pansy, you really need to grow a sense of humor to go with your pelt."
"I was fine until she knocked me down!" Pansy pointed at Ariane. "She's got it out for me, Professor."
Ariane barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes. "I haven't got it out for you," she said, somehow keeping her exasperation from showing through to her voice. "I didn't mean to throw it so hard." Blatant lie, she thought, crossing her fingers mentally, and if I got another chance, I would have thrown it harder, I think. But only if it would have sent Pansy howling to Snape right away instead of trying to curse Tuyet's eyes out.
"I expected better of you," he snarled, looking a lot like a vampire for a moment, "If anything of the sort happens again, you'll be disemboweling mandrakes until graduation. Do I make myself clear?" Ariane couldn't meet his eyes, but she nodded. Pansy simply looked defiant (though it was very hard to tell her expression through the fur), and Tuyet was too busy glaring at Pansy with her good eye to do anything. "Get to the hospital wing, both of you."
"Isn't she going to get a detention?" Pansy asked in a scandalized voice, pointing at Ariane once more with her hairy arm.
"No," Snape said in a voice that dried up all their complaints. "Go to the hospital wing, Miss Parkinson, Miss Qui-Minh."
Pansy left in a huff of black hair, Tuyet trailing after, and Snape glared at them all. "Clean this up," he said in a disgusted voice, and slammed the door behind him.
Ariane stood up and looked at the dormitory, retrieved her pillows, and climbed back onto her bed. Daphne copied her, her pretty face screwed up. "I hate it when they fight like that," she said softly.
"Do they do this often?"
"At least once a term for the past three years," Daphne sighed. "Last year was really bad, though. Pansy ended up with antlers." She shook her head, springy curls trembling. "It's really hard to be friends with both of them."
"I can imagine," said Ariane sympathetically. "You must be pretty diplomatic to deal with both of them at once."
Daphne laughed a little sadly. "I just duck when it gets bad." She hopped into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. "They'll be at each other's throats for the next couple of days. Tuyet needs to watch out."
"She did okay for herself in here," Ariane said fairly, jumping onto her own bed.
"She's quick, but her spells never work as well as Pansy's," the other girl replied ominously, and closed up her curtains. "Good night."
"'Night," Ariane told her, drawing her curtains around her and groping under the sheets for her wand. "Lumos!" she ordered it, and by its light found quill and ink and a spare bit of parchment. She began to make out her list of things to ask Snape about, once she got the chance and the courage to face him after her disgrace earlier.
The Ministry of Magic
You-Know-Who
Death Eaters
Sirius Black
Lucius Malfoy
Aurors
Hit Witches
Azkaban
She thought for a moment, chewing on the end of the quill, then added:
My father
Her dreams that night were memories that she had forgotten.
"Make sure this rinses all through your hair," Salazar whispered urgently. "We need to stay as unobtrusive as possible." He moved off, leaving Ariane staring into a bowl that reeked, filled to the brim with black walnut stain. It was thick and dark and would turn her hair as black as her brother's. Ariane fingered her curls, which at ten were waist-length.
"Salazar!" she called. "Can I not cover my hair?" Ariane knew that she couldn't bring herself to dye it, anymore than she could pluck her own eyes from her head.
"It's far too recognizable!" he said impatiently, throwing clothes into a trunk. "Lady Hufflepuff only agreed to take us along if we could blend in." Salazar came up beside her and placed his hand on her shoulder, underneath her silver hair. "It will fade with time," he reassured her.
"You do it," she said tightly, closing her arms over her chest. "I cannot."
Gently he gripped her shoulders and turned her about so that her back was to the bowl. With the grave air of a preacher dipping a sinner into the baptismal pool, he lowered her down until she felt the dye lapping at her scalp. A lone tear of vanity trickled from her eye as she dried her black hair and tucked every strand of it into a kerchief until nothing showed.
Ariane sat up in bed. "What a stupid memory," she whispered to herself. Was I ever so vain? But did I fear losing my hair or my identity—that is the question. She punched her pillow and lay back down, violet eyes wide in the darkness, waiting to sleep again. When sleep evaded her for a half- hour, however, she got up, pulled her black winter cloak on over her pajamas, and went down to the common room to pace.
The fire in the long fireplace was low, merely glowing embers. Ariane sought out a poker and prodded the coals, her body remembering how to coax a flame from the fragile cinders. As she crouched, her face warmed by her chore, she thought of another time and another hearth.
She was fifteen or so—almost a woman—and she was wearing her Hogwarts clothing, gray skirts, white kirtle, black bodice. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, bright in the firelight of the kitchen hearth. A poker was gripped loosely in her right hand; her left steadied her as she crouched by the flames.
"You shouldn't be here," she told Laramy, who was leaning against the door. "You should be in Rowena's house at this early hour."
"What you mean is that you don't want Salazar to wake and see me talking to you," Laramy said, cutting through her excuses as he always did. "Is he your jailer?"
"No!" she replied, shocked at this assessment. "What on earth would make you think such a thing?"
He screwed up his face in mock-concentration, pushing his coppery hair behind his shoulders. "Hmm...because he gets angry when you spend time with anyone but him...because he only lets you spend time with other women when he isn't monopolizing your time...and possibly because he half-killed the last person who dared to ask for your hand in marriage."
Ariane turned around so quickly that she nearly set her skirts on fire. "What?"
"Didn't you hear about that? The headman from the village down the hill petitioned for you." Laramy studied her expression intently, and then grinned. "Don't worry, I think your brother dissuaded most suitors from that village. I doubt the headman's rid himself of the hooves yet."
"Isn't he a Muggle?" Ariane asked, aghast. "I couldn't marry one of them!"
"Muggles aren't so bad. This one wanted a witch for a wife. Very practical man, if you garner my opinions."
Ariane made an indignant noise and went back to the fire. "Muggles killed my mother," she told him. "I couldn't share my house with one."
"That's your personal life and opinion. But then again, since Salazar's choosing your husband, why wait? Tell him so that he knows what to look for." Laramy chuckled, his mood lightening hers.
"Why even take that much effort," Ariane returned with a laugh. "I should just marry you. You're a clever wizard, you're not too old nor too young, and you're Rowena's favorite student."
"I wouldn't dare marry you," Laramy joked, "For fear that my new brother-in- law would organize my untimely demise and leave you a widow before we were married a fortnight." Ariane brushed the weak jest aside, ignoring the way it chilled her bones.
"Why—" Ariane froze halfway through the word as the door separating the kitchen from the rest of the house swung open. "Hello Salazar," she said pleasantly.
"Why are you up so early?" he asked, his long dark hair sleep-mussed. "And what were you doing in here?"
"Talking to myself," she said airily, resisting the urge to see where Laramy had hidden himself. "I'll stop if it's bothering you."
Salazar looked a bit confused, but shook his head and went back through the door. "You can keep talking if you like, but do it quietly," he replied over his shoulder. The door swung closed.
"Laramy?" she whispered once a decent amount of time had passed. "Where—God!" For Laramy had just dropped out of the thatched ceiling onto the kitchen table and was grinning from ear to ear.
She blinked hazily at the embers in the Slytherin common room, her brain caught between her future and her past. Why had she been so afraid of Laramy's joke about Salazar organizing his untimely demise? Was it because she had already begun to like him, or was it because it seemed like something Salazar was capable of? As she went back upstairs to her dormitory, she tried to puzzle out her worries. Would Salazar kill someone for her? Maybe if that person was trying to hurt me, Ariane reasoned, but not if he was marrying me. Salazar would be picky about my husband, that much is true, but if he went to all the effort of finding a suitable wizard he wouldn't kill him right away. That would be a waste of effort. Her reasoning had holes, however, and the perfectionist in Ariane wasn't satisfied by her argument. After a brief hesitation, Ariane added it to her list of thing to ask Snape about.
After all, Ariane reasoned, was there any other useful thing about having another person who knew all her memories? Perhaps he could see things in them that she couldn't—or wouldn't.
Author's Note: Nothing much to say, other than thanks for review (even if it takes longer than I think it does, lol). Oh, and even if Draco is hot, he is still scum, and I promise that there won't be any more unjustified angst over him...I've gone on. And also sorry about the chapter title...I was going to upload it when I realized that I'd forgotten to title it...and due to a mental clog I couldn't think up anything better.