The Good War

by inwardtransience

Despite her best efforts, Elizabeth Potter is repeatedly drawn into situations she wants absolutely nothing to do with. People just refuse to leave her the hell alone. (fem!Harry, dark!independent!Harry, mentor!Snape, F/F, playing with tropes for fun and profit)

6. First Year — V

November 1991

---

A lot of this Slytherin house stuff was very silly, Liz thought, but at least the dueling room was pretty cool.

It was a large room — probably larger than the Great Hall, actually — made of the same greyish stone as the rest of the dungeons, but still far more colourful. All along the walls were banners, representing various noble houses and magical military groups and even national flags (some of them didn't exist anymore), a few that Daphne said were for modern dueling organisations. The floors were plenty colourful too. The plain stone was mostly covered with smooth ceramic tile, like the centre of the first years' circle or the bathrooms, but they weren't just a single colour all the way through, there was a lot of variety. Circles and rectangles were drawn here and there — dueling rings — surrounding them a layer of tiles arranged into tiny runes, the wards that isolated the duelers from the outside. Liz had seen it, you just had to tap the runes with a wand and they snapped up, would absorb any spell thrown at them, so the spectators didn't get hit with stray hexes. With all the gleaming tiles in all kinds of colours, the designs stretching all the way across the huge open floor, it was quite pretty.

And the ceiling helped with that too — or, the absence of a ceiling, that is. There were little balls of light floating here and there, but during the daytime most of the lighting came through the skylight. Looking up anywhere in the chamber, wall to wall, was the murky water of the lake outside. (Which, Liz thought that was actually impossible, given where the castle was in relation to the lake and how far of a walk it was...and shouldn't the common room be right over their heads right now? Hogwarts was weird.) During the day, sunlight poured through the water, filling the room with a soft greenish-tinged glow; during the night, the lake above dimmed to a deep blue-black, reflections dancing on the surface.

Liz thought the whole thing was pretty neat. It was certainly a good distraction from the long, boring Slytherin House Meeting.

So far as she could tell, most of what was going on wasn't particularly important. There were a few announcements here and there, but they mostly had to do with, like, the quidditch team, and things that had been added or removed to the list of banned items — the Slytherin list was apparently rather shorter than the official Hogwarts list, but Snape and the prefects actually searched their rooms occasionally — in a few cases developments going on outside the castle that had social consequences here. (To the people involved, they had nothing to do with Liz.) Apparently, even personal things were House Business — a couple fifth years announced they were engaged now, which...what? Okay, she guessed Slytherins cared about politics and social stuff and whatnot, so she could see how that might be the sort of thing they should tell the whole house, but why the hell were fifth years getting engaged in the first place?

Daphne, sitting next to her, hissed that this was actually perfectly normal. Most of the nobility (and the Slytherins were mostly noble) had arranged marriages, and they were usually arranged some years before the wedding actually happened. It was typical for people to be "betrothed" (nobody said engaged, but they meant the same thing, Liz thought) when they were fifteen, even if the wedding itself wouldn't happen until they graduated at the earliest, sometimes not even until their mid-twenties.

That was...odd. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Liz was essentially in a foreign country now, but then things like this slapped her in the face...

After they'd been sitting around for what felt like hours, Emily Scrimgeour — Snape was in the room, standing in a corner watching, but the Head Girl had run the whole meeting — started taking requests to have personal disputes arbitrated by the prefects before the house. There were a couple feuds that went on between older students, it had nothing to do with her, she hardly even paid attention.

These risers weren't particularly comfortable, her butt was starting to hurt a little. Were they about done yet?

She was paying so little attention she hadn't even realised Pansy and company were talking about her until Dorea elbowed her in the side.

Hallowe'en had been a couple days ago now, and Liz hadn't really seen any results from her little bit of retaliation. Well, no, she'd seen results, obviously — Pansy and Millicent and Draco had been wearing bandages, Pansy's still there and impossible to miss, off-white cloth covering much of her left forearm. Those were the three who had gotten the venomous snakes, Liz assumed Theo's had been easier to heal. There hadn't been any consequences, though, aside from a bit of glaring. She'd almost thought Snape might yell at her, but while he'd obviously been watching her, his eyes on her skin like ants all through Potions classes and meal times, he hadn't actually said anything so far.

Which was odd. Liz had put snakes in their beds, which was just... She was aware that had been an escalation, perhaps more than had been called for, especially for Draco and Theo, who hadn't been in any way involved in the bathroom thing (she assumed). They couldn't possibly have known their little prank would have affected her nearly as badly as it had — they didn't know about anything that had happened to her before Hogwarts, the only people who even knew she took calming potions were Dorea and Daphne. (Well, maybe Tracey and Hermione too, but they hadn't said anything.) On the other hand, Liz had intended the snakes to bite them, she'd been pretty sure that would happen going in. Liz had been the one to escalate to actual physical harm.

Yeah, the thing with stealing her clothes hadn't been the first thing they'd done to her — there had been little jinxes and such, shoves in the corridor, that sort of thing. Liz wasn't the first to do anything physical at all. She was the first to do actual harm, that required medical attention. By any standard, Liz had escalated things further than she'd thought anyone would think acceptable, honestly further than she might have if she hadn't still been a bit floaty from the calming potion when she'd come up with it. She'd expected there to be consequences. And yet there hadn't been.

Until now, apparently.

The four first-years who had been assaulted by snakes went through their sob story, how Liz and Dorea and Daphne had used dark magic to attack them without any provocation. (Oh, please...) Scrimgeour stonily listened through the whole thing, expressionlessly staring at them. When they were finally finished (took far too bloody long embellishing the thing, of course), she turned to the stands. "Elizabeth Potter, Dorea Black, Daphne Greengrass — do you wish to answer to this accusation?"

Daphne was hissing something at her again, but Liz wasn't listening. She jumped to her feet. "Dorea and Daphne had nothing to do with it, it was just me."

As a wave of whispers and dark chuckles ran through the assembled Slytherins, Scrimgeour hardly reacted, one of her eyebrows just tipping up a little. "Alright, Miss Potter. I suppose you have some defence for yourself, then?"

"I dunno, is that I only did it to retaliate for what they did to me first a defence?"

Scrimgeour's lips twitched. "It is. Get down here, Potter."

Dorea and Daphne were both whispering at her — telling her she shouldn't accept the prefects' arbitration, she assumed. But Liz wasn't certain they were right about that. She meant, the punishments the prefects were allowed to enforce were pretty mild. Just revoking rights to use common house resources and asking Snape to give the guilty party unpleasant detentions, mostly. (Snape wasn't obligated to respect the prefects' request to enforce their punishment, but according to Prefect Gemma he always did, out of respect for the house's little self-government.) So far, Liz hadn't even used any of those common house resources, and she couldn't imagine these unpleasant detentions were any worse than her chores back before she'd come into her mind-control superpowers — from what she'd heard, detentions were usually, like, writing the same thing over and over and over (for some reason?), or cleaning something gross, that sort of thing. That didn't seem particularly bad to her.

The other thing the prefects could do was censure the loser, basically saying they were a bad person who'd done bad things. She meant, social pressure, not being as nice to them, shunning them in the common room, the in-house tutors not helping them with classwork, whatever form it took. Like, treating them as though they weren't part of Slytherin at all, for however long their punishment lasted. Since the only Slytherins Liz really talked to were Dorea and Daphne (and she could get by without them for a few weeks no problem), and she really didn't give a single flying shite what the rest of the house thought of her, the prefects' censure meant absolutely nothing to her.

Submitting herself to the prefects' arbitration was, in a way, engaging in asymmetric warfare. Liz had done the worse thing — she'd done less things, but the one thing she'd done was objectively more harmful — so she was more likely to lose, probably. But the possible punishments didn't really bother her much. At the very least, they bothered her less than they did the other four — Pansy, Draco, Millicent, and Theo would actively dislike having their access to the house library revoked, or getting unpleasant detentions, and they would absolutely hate being censured for a couple weeks. As far as Liz could see, she had nothing to lose by participating.

So Liz brushed her friends off, and started picking down the stands, making her way for the Head Girl and the six prefects — Scrimgeour, Smethwyck, Wilkes, Monroe, NicCormaic, and Gemma and Charlie.

...Gemma Farley and Charlie Urquhart.

...

Wait a second...

Liz had learned pretty much right away that Slytherin was considered a mostly "Dark" house, and she'd assumed from that that most of the people in it had all supported that Dark Lord person, or at least had parents who had. But, well, even at the very beginning, there had been obvious problems with that. The Head Girl, obviously the most visible Slytherin in the school (excluding maybe Liz herself, she guessed, being famous and all), her uncle was apparently a bloke called Rufus Scrimgeour, who'd been an Auror in the war, and her great-grandmother was Erin Scrimgeour, who had retired from being the Director of Law Enforcement right around the beginning of the war, but who was definitely, definitely anti- Death Eater, no doubt about that. (Kind of famous for calling out the Ministry for being terrible at fighting them, apparently.) Scrimgeour herself obviously didn't give a shite about the stupid blood purity stuff, one of her best friends (boyfriend? maybe? not sure) was a Ravenclaw muggleborn in their year, and she wasn't shy about it. And she was the leader of the house — sure, the Headmaster picked the Head Boy and Girl, and he was less than well-liked in Slytherin, but the prefects and the rest of the house weren't required to treat her the way they did. Things like putting her in charge of meetings like this, that was an internal Slytherin thing, and they all obviously respected her (even if some of them didn't seem to like her much). She still thought that counted for something.

And there was the divide in her own year, that kind of made it obvious too. Draco and Pansy and their friends on one side, Daphne and Tracey and Dorea and Liz on the other — of all the magical families in that list (Malfoy, Parkinson, Nott, Crabbe Goyle, Bulstrode; Greengrass, Black, Davis, Potter), the only one that was considered a Light family was the Potters. The Greengrasses in particular, Daphne's family was definitely Dark, but they had also been one-hundred per cent opposed to the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters, and the Blacks and the Davises, also both Dark, had both been split, with people on both sides of the war. So, obviously, it was much more complicated than Light good, Dark bad. Even if it wasn't quite obvious to Liz what was going on, she'd been able to see that much pretty quickly.

Around the beginning of October, she'd been getting increasingly confused about how random the people who hated her were, so she'd asked about it. Dorea had known a little bit, but Daphne could go on rambles about this stuff for hours — she'd been being trained to take over her family's seat on the Wizengamot (magic parliament) since she'd been five years old, so. According to Daphne, when people said "Dark" or "Light", there were three different ways they could be talking about it: politically, culturally, or even just aesthetically.

Most of the time, Dark or Light was a cultural thing. They had different traditions and stories, different standards for personal behaviour, different ideas about morality, they dressed differently, that sort of thing. There was a bit of overlap, yeah, it wasn't a black-and-white thing, but the point was, it was about how people presented themselves, traditional stuff like holidays and things, how they talked to each other, little things, that felt a whole lot more important than they actually were. Culturally, Slytherin and Ravenclaw were Dark, and Hufflepuff and Gryffindor were Light. (For the most part, anyway.)

Their seven judges were Scrimgeour, Monroe, NicCormaic, Smethwyck, Wilkes, Farley, and Urquhart — assuming Liz was remembering these things correctly, those were five Dark families, and only two Light. One would think, just with that, that Liz, being from a Light family (not that she thought that bloody mattered at all, she'd never met another Potter before), would be at a disadvantage with this panel of judges. That they'd be biased against her, and in favor of Malfoy, Parkinson, Nott, and Bulstrode, who were all Dark.

Culturally, yes, five to two. But politically...

Before long, Liz was standing in her proper place — standing in front of the whole house at Scrimgeour's left-hand side, opposite her accusers. She tried not to notice the way everyone was looking at her...but not really her, exactly, but the show they were putting on. So actually mostly Scrimgeour, in a way. (And who wouldn't pay attention to Emily Scrimgeour, she was very tall and her hair was very red, and just had, this, Liz didn't know, presence about her, she had a way of being very noticeable.) That made it way easier, actually, her skin barely tingled at all.

And, well, Liz was getting a weird feeling this might actually go well for her, so, there was that. "I'm sorry, I'm not sure how this works. I can make a counter-claim, right? Separate from my defence, I mean."

Scimgeour's face stayed mostly blank, being all professional about her job, but there was a sharp sort of curiosity about her head. "You can, yes."

"Okay. Then I accuse Pansy Parkinson, Millicent Bulstrode, Draco Malfoy, and Theo Nott of breaking the Truce."

Whispers shot through the assembled Slytherins, echoing off the walls. Pansy, Millicent, and Draco glared at her, clearly annoyed — though Theo, she noticed, had gone a little pale, his eyes wide.

Scrimgeour just smirked.

See, for all the Gryffindors (and some of the Hufflepuffs) liked to say all the Slytherins were Dark, and all the Dark were Death Eaters, it was actually a lot more complicated than that. When it came to politics, what people meant by "Dark" was actually very fuzzy. A lot of things in the Wizengamot ended up coming down to whether they wanted to give the Ministry the power to do something, or let the various families take care of things themselves — to oversimplify things quite a bit, the pro-Ministry people were Light, and the anti-Ministry people were Dark.

Sort of. Kind of. It was complicated? See... The way Daphne put it, there used to be three major factions in the Wizengamot, called Ars Publica, Ars Brittania, and Via Communis; the first was Dark, the second was Light, and the third was...sort of both and neither? Via Communis used to be the Ministry people, and both of the Ars people were anti-Ministry, just, back then Dark and Light was mostly a cultural thing, and the Via people had people who were culturally Dark or Light, but... It was weird, whatever. Eventually, as time went on, both Ars people started developing actual real ideas behind their politics, and Dark and Light started to get a political meaning too.

Basically, the way Daphne put it, the Dark prioritised magic, and magical people, and the Light prioritised humans, and what was good for humans. Laws about what magic people were allowed to do or not? The Dark thought these laws were bad, but if the magic was dangerous and could hurt people, the Light might think it was a good idea. Laws about, like, what other magical beings, like goblins, were allowed to do, the rights they got to have? The Dark didn't care that they were different — this was the magical world, and they were magic, so they should be a part of it — but the Light did care they were different, so were often stupid about it. When it came to muggles and muggleborns, the Dark was perfectly cool with muggleborns — they were magic, after all — but didn't give a shite about muggles; the Light were also perfectly cool with muggleborns, but wanted to protect muggles, because they're still human. (Though, both sides did have their own flavours of crazy racism, because of course they did.) There are other things that are more complicated and fuzzier than that, but those are the basic ideas, according to Daphne.

But, the last century, things had gotten kind of weird — there weren't three factions in the Wizengamot now, but five. Basically, when Dumbledore came into the Wizengamot, a new faction formed, calling themselves just Light. They pulled people from Common Fate (the one that used to be Via Communis, they changed their name) and Ars Brittania, and their politics were basically halfway between the two, but also thought it was a great idea to adopt some more modern muggle ideas. Because of that bit, the more anti-muggleborn Light people stayed in Ars Brittania, basically making them the super racist version of the Light now, because that was a thing that needed to exist.

(Apparently Lavender Brown, one of the Gryffindors that made a point of annoying Liz, her family was in Ars Brittania. Which Liz guessed explained why she was such a bitch to Hermione all the time.)

When the Dark Lord became a thing, a new faction formed in the Dark too, pulling members from Ars Publica and some of the crazier racist people from Ars Brittania. Their politics were actually a mix of Light and Dark — for example, laws against magic bad, but non-human magical beings were also bad (and also kill all the muggleborns, which is really neither but also both, because crazy racists are bloody everywhere) — but taken to such extremes that they seem completely fucking insane to both Dark and Light. These people call themselves the Allied Dark now...which is funny, because they are very much not allies with Ars Publica, who consider themselves the real Dark.

In fact, Ars Publica hate the Death Eaters' guts. They think they're, like, traitors to their beliefs, or whatever, it's a whole thing.

The point was, just because Slytherin was Dark, didn't mean they were pro-Voldemort — these were separate things. Their year, Daphne had said, was sort of a bad example. There were Malfoy, Parkinson, Nott, Crabbe, Goyle, Bulstrode, all of their families were in the Allied Dark. The Grengrasses were part of Common Fate. Tracey, Zabini, Dorea, and Liz herself were somewhat more complicated. The Davises were with the Allied Dark, but Tracey's dad, who'd been the heir to their lordship at the time, he'd died fighting the Death Eaters, and her mum was muggleborn; it was assumed that when she took over the family, she'd probably join Ars Publica or Common Fate instead. (And no, the rest of her family were not happy about that, it was a whole thing.) Zabini, well, his mum had been friends with people in the Death Eaters' leadership, but these days she mostly worked with people in Ars Publica, so, that was complicated. The Blacks had been part of Ars Publica, but they'd had major players on both sides of the last war, so, exactly what they were was kind of complicated; Dorea herself publicly didn't get along with the junior Death Eaters, though, so at least anti-Voldemort (if more subtle than explicitly saying so). The Potters had been a Light family, but Liz was the only one left, and she hadn't made any commitments herself, so she was pretty much a free agent, politically speaking. Definitely anti-Voldemort, though, even if she said nothing on the matter people would assume she was anyway, just on principle.

So, their year, that made six for the Allied Dark, one for Common Fate, one for Ars Publica (kind of), and three unattached — six pro-Voldemort, four anti-Voldemort, and one whatever the hell Zabini was. (He said his mum was Switzerland, which made no sense to Liz, but okay.) So, pro-Voldemort majority in their year, yes, Death Eaters win.

But, across the whole house? Yeah, that wasn't necessarily the case.

Daphne had actually used the leadership of the house as an example of this. (And also wondering aloud if Snape wasn't nearly so closely tied to the Allied Dark as he claimed to be — he did pick the prefects, so.) Take the six prefects and the Head Girl, Daphne said they were actually far more representative of what the Dark is actually like. You have Scrimgeour, Monroe, and McCormac in Ars Publica; Smethwyck, Farley, and Urquhart in Common Fate; and Wilkes in the Allied Dark.

That came out to six-to-one, against the Death Eaters.

(Though, that was out of proportion too — according to Daphne, maybe about a quarter of the Dark were aligned with Voldemort's people. Well, the nobility, anyway, their support was actually much lower among the culturally Dark segment of the commons, apparently. So the prefects underrepresented the crazy racists, but not so much as they were overrepresented in her own year. Still.)

Liz hadn't realised until she'd been standing here that this little argument they were about to have was going to be four kids from Death Eater families against the Girl Who bloody Lived, basically calling each other arseholes...and the judges were mostly anti-Voldemort people. People who would probably be inclined, just on principle, to side with the Girl Who bloody Lived against racist idiots.

Ha ha, wow, Pansy and Draco were fucking idiots. She probably didn't need to do anything to get out of this scot-free.

She was still dropping a nuke on their heads, though. Once they saw she didn't fuck around, hopefully they'd learn their lesson, and she wouldn't have to deal with this again.

(She'd think putting snakes in their beds would have gotten that message across, but here they were.)

Once the whispering at her accusation that the idiots had broken the Truce died down, Scrimgeour ticked an eyebrow up at Liz. "These four claim you used restricted magics to slip venomous snakes into their beds. Before we move on to your defence, do you contest the facts of the matter?"

"Theo's wasn't venomous. Also, parseltongue isn't dark magic. Or...I don't think it is? I mean, I was just born with it, so if it were that'd be kind of stupid."

Her mind sparking with amusement, Scrimgeour's lips twitched. "No, parseltongue is not dark magic."

"Right. The restricted magics part is shite, then."

"How did you get the snakes?" Pansy asked, glaring at her. "You couldn't have owled them in, and we're too young for conjuration. The only way you could have gotten them is a ritual summoning."

Liz snorted. "Or, maybe I could just walk around the greenhouses hissing for any snakes around to come to me. Snakes aren't some kind of rare, exotic thing, Parkinson, they're easy to find if you know how to look."

Titters sweeping the room, Pansy flushed — apparently she hadn't thought of that.

"Strike the use of restricted magics, then." Scrimgeour's face was still impassive, but the tingling of amusement was so bright it was even slipping into her voice now. "Make your case."

"Er, my defence, or my counter-claim?"

"Just your defence for now."

"Right. For over a month now, they've been... I guess you'd call it a campaign of harassment?" Liz listed off the various incidents with being hit by (or narrowly avoiding) hexes and such, starting halfway through September and ever since — there was very little interruption, just asking which hexes, and Wilkes questioning whether she'd actually seen who'd cast them (arse). The ones she could remember, anyway, it kind of happened a lot, and they were usually minor enough irritants she didn't actually care that much. Eventually, "Though, the worst incident was on Hallowe'en, that same morning. It's why I finally decided to retaliate."

Monroe, the seventh-year boy prefect, who Liz hadn't ever even spoken to before, asked, "You never retaliated before?" He seemed a bit... Not doubtful, exactly, but certainly something. Probably nothing bad for her — of their seven judges, he seemed the most irritated, his mind sparking hotter and hotter as she listed off incidents, his attention not feeling quite properly focused on her. (She could usually tell if someone was feeling a thing at her or not, though she couldn't articulate the difference, mind magic was weird.)

Liz shook her head. "I didn't want to start a whole thing, you know? I thought, if I hit back, they'd hit harder, but if I didn't do anything they'd just get bored of it eventually."

"But they finally hit hard enough you decided you had to hit back." Gemma was watching her, narrow-eyed and thoughtful, her mind too still to really guess what she was thinking (without peeking, anyway). Her attention was actually on Liz, but whatever she was thinking it didn't seem bad, so, Liz just tried to ignore it. "What did they do?"

Liz took in a long, slow breath through her nose. "While I was in the shower, someone snuck in and stole my clothes, and all the towels. I reacted... I have problems, with feeling trapped. If Dorea hadn't found me and brought a towel, I don't know how long I would have been stuck in there freaking out like a crazy person." Thankfully, she wasn't freaking out like a crazy person now — she was trying not to think about it, and talking around what those problems actually were, and it seemed to be working. This time, it didn't always work, but.

Smethwyck frowned. "Freaking out like a crazy person?"

No, she wasn't being more specific than that. "Like I said, I have problems with feeling trapped. Snape gives me calming potions for it, it's a whole thing."

"Sir?"

"The particulars of Miss Potter's personal difficulties are not a matter of concern for this council." Pretty much the whole house's heads all swung to look at Snape, drawling from his place still standing in an out-of-the-way corner, arms loosely crossed over his chest, to all appearances bored of the proceedings. "However, Miss Scrimgeour, I will corroborate the facts of her story so far as I am aware of them. I do indeed provide her with calming potions, and I have some basic knowledge of this particular event. Miss Potter informed me later that same morning that there had been an incident of some kind, which caused her no small amount of distress, though she kept the...details of what was done to herself."

It was subtle, but Snape did sound less than pleased about that. Not with her...she didn't think. It was hard to tell, since Snape never emoted very much at all — he was one of the frequent exceptions to her ability to tell if people were feeling things at her — and most of Slytherin was between her and him, so she couldn't really pick up anything anyway, too much noise. But she thought he was annoyed for her, not at her. Probably. Maybe?

(Snape was bloody impossible to read on a good day, even with mind magic to help her cheat.)

"Anyway," Liz said, drawing attention back to herself. (She felt their eyes on— No, she was fine.) "When I got back to my room, I found my things — pants, shorts, vests, two of each — had been torn apart, probably with severing charms, and splashed with black and red ink. I threw them away earlier today, actually, the elves told me they can't get the ink out. I was very annoyed, and also a bit floaty from the calming potion, so I decided sneaking snakes into their rooms was the appropriate degree of disproportionate retaliation."

There was a bit more whispering and chuckling, probably at the idea of appropriate disproportionate retaliation. While they were still at it, Theo said, "But Draco and I had nothing to do with that! We can't even get into the girls' bathroom!"

"But you were part of the rest of it. The whole point of the snakes was to scare you off from doing anything else."

"But what about Greg and Vinnie?"

Liz blinked. Now that she thought about it, she hadn't included the bookends in her counter-claim either, and she probably should have. Oops. "Er...they're too bloody stupid to be considered players?" Another wave of amusement, including one outright cackle, that was probably Zabini. "Besides, they just do what Draco tells them, if I warn you all off they'll behave themselves too."

"Your response was a bit of an extreme escalation," Scrimgeour said — cutting over Draco, which was probably better for everyone within earshot. "Those were mostly nuisance jinxes, and they had just moved up to property damage, yes, but you sent four of them to the hospital wing in a single incident."

"I know. That was on purpose."

Scrimgeour took on another one of the Snapeish expressions of cold interest. "On purpose?"

Instead of talking to Scrimgeour, Liz turned to the four junior Death Eaters. "I've tried to play nice with you ever since I got here, as much I can, but I'm done. Leave me alone. If you want to keep playing your stupid game with me, take Hallowe'en as a lesson. Setting venomous snakes on you wasn't my last resort — it was my first. I don't play this game, I have no patience for it. This is the only warning you'll get: I do not fuck around." That last little bit was in parseltongue, but the tone was more important than the words anyway.

"Potter, you can't be— See!" Pansy shrieked, turning to the prefects, jabbing a finger at Liz. "She tried to kill us, and now she's openly threatening us, in public!"

Liz laughed. "I didn't try to kill you! It was just an adder, you baby!" If she'd tried to kill them, Pansy wouldn't be whinging about it right now, because she'd be too dead. Honestly. Also, that'd been a warning, not a threat — the only time she'd ever threatened someone, she'd forced him to hold a gun to his head and made it very, very clear she could make him blow his own brains out whenever she wanted. (She wouldn't have, she hadn't realised yet how easy it would be to get everything she needed with her mind-control superpowers, so she'd still needed him alive for food and shelter and such, but he hadn't known that.) She was just informing them that messing with her would end badly for them, that wasn't at all the same thing as a proper threat.

But, well, if they wanted to take it as one, she was fine with that.

There was a little bit more arguing after that, but it was very quick. Before long, Scrimgeour stepped out of her spot at the front of the crowd, crouching down with the seated prefects, a privacy paling snapping up. While the prefects deliberated, the four idiots fixed her with a bunch of glares. And Liz was getting, just, so tired of them. Honestly, were they ever going to give up their idiotic...whatever their problem was with her, she still didn't entirely get it. (Something to do with totally-not-Death-Eater political shite and stupid racism? That's all she had so far.) This whole thing was stupid, it'd been barely two months, and she was, just, so done with these people.

So, flatly staring back at them, Liz reached into their minds, just a little bit. (She couldn't feel him past all the Slytherins in the way, so hopefully Snape would be just as blind to her.) She didn't reach in to pull anything out, no, instead she shoved something in: fear.

All four of them cringed away from her, Pansy even nearly fell on her arse. Tee hee.

And then Scrimgeour was coming back, swirling back up to her spot between them, her cloak whipping around her as she turned on her heel. "A judgement on your claim," she said, to the four idiots, "will be made at the same time as hers against you. If you would, Miss Potter?"

She blinked. "Er, I guess my counter-claim is the same as my defence."

"What are you talking about, Potter?" That was one of the girl prefects, Liz hadn't been watching, wasn't sure which.

"Why do you think they've been being complete bitches to me in the first place? They barely know me, and I haven't done anything to them — not until Hallowe'en, anyway. I can only think of one reason, and I don't have to say it, you all know what I'm talking about."

"You're full of it!" There was a slight quiver on Pansy's voice still, but she'd gotten the words out just fine.

"So what, are you saying you have a reason for hating me that isn't just because your daddy's Dark Lord blew himself up like a fucking idiot while I just so happened to be in the same room?" People said she blew him up, but she didn't believe that for a second, the idea was just so bloody stupid. Well, no, the few people she'd talked to about it (who weren't completely stupid) assumed her mother had done a ritual or something — sounded plausible enough, she guessed — but still, Liz was absurdly famous for just being in the room when it happened, basically. (She still wasn't over how very stupid the whole Girl Who Lived thing was.)

"Saying that's breaking the truce too, Potter."

"Yeah, but you broke it first, so you're fair game."

"I did not!"

"Why the hexes and the stealing my clothes, then?"

"You just, just— Walking around all full of yourself—" That was a laugh, Pansy Parkinson saying anyone else was full of herself. "—and hanging around with that Granger—"

Honestly, this was too easy... "What's wrong with Hermione?"

"Don't play dumb, Potter, she's a—" Pansy cut off, her mouth hanging open, her head giving an odd, sudden clang.

Liz smirked. "Mudblood. The word you're looking for is mudblood."

"No, I did— Gryffindor! I meant she's a swotty, annoying Gryffindor!"

"Uh-huh. Sure you did, Pansy, I believe you so very much right now."

"Pansy might have broken the Truce, but I didn't." That was Draco, still glaring at her — a little paler than he'd been before her little fear stab, but managing to hold her gaze...which was almost impressive, actually. She hadn't realised until right this second that Draco Malfoy had a spine. (Of course, Pansy was glaring at him now for throwing her under the bus, which wasn't exactly a spine-having thing to do, so.) "I started because you lied to me, the first night here."

"I have no idea what you're talking about." She meant it too, she'd hardly said a word to him that first night. There'd hardly been any need for it, Draco could hold a conversation by himself well enough.

Draco's head threw off sharp sparks of irritation. "When I offered you my friendship, to help you find your way around here."

"Er..." Liz frowned, turning that over in her head — was that a lie, exactly? Whatever. "You're the one who broke off our little alliance, not me."

"Don't play dumb, Potter, you had no intention of following through."

"Draco. Don't take this the wrong way, but when I got to Hogwarts, I had no bloody clue who you were. I had no bloody clue who your father is. I had never, in my life, heard the name Malfoy before."

Draco scowled. "Oh, who are you kidding, Potter, you—"

"I grew up with muggles, you idiot. I didn't even know Hogwarts existed until I got my letter in July. I'd never heard of the Wizengamot, or your precious, perfect father, or the Dark Lord, or Dumbledore, or even the House of bloody Potter, for that matter."

"Are you serious?"

Liz blinked, glanced over to Scrimgeour, then across the rest of the Slytherins, the dueling chamber gone suddenly quiet. Even Draco looked surprised, staring at her wide-eyed. Had...nobody figured that out? Huh. Weird. "Er, yes? My family are muggles, they didn't tell me anything." Shaking off that odd moment, Liz turned back to her tirade at an idiot. "When I met you, Draco, I didn't know much of anything about magical Britain, practically a blank slate. At the time, I had no idea what you would or would not have a problem with me doing. I had every intention of following through on our little agreement. You are the one who broke it off — because I had the audacity to allow Hermione Granger to sit right next to me in Cambrian class, and to not treat her like dirt for no good reason. Yes, how completely awful of me, I do apologise for offending you."

Draco had had what almost looked like a regretful expression on his face — apparently he hadn't known Liz had been entirely in the dark, that he'd fucked it up by being a complete arse. But it quickly vanished under her mocking sarcasm, his mind simmering with petulant anger. "And I had every intention of following through until you showed yourself to be a mud-mucking blood-traitor!"

The room went dead silent.

Liz let out a long, slow whistle, followed by an explosion noise. (It sounded terrible, she had no idea what she was doing.)

"Have you lost your sodding mind, Potter? What was that?"

Fair enough, couldn't expect anyone to tell what that was supposed to be, she guessed. "That was you, blowing yourself up."

"What are you talking about?"

"You just called me a mud-mucking blood-traitor in front of the entire house, you fucking idiot." Draco gaped at her — apparently he hadn't meant to say that. Which just made it worse, really, too much of a stupid racist to watch his stupid mouth. (She realised he was only eleven, and his parents had probably filled his head with shite his whole life, but still.) She turned to Scrimgeour. "I'm pretty sure the Truce has a thing about that, right?"

Scrimgeour's lips twitched. "Yes, Potter, the Truce has a thing about that."

"Right, good." Honestly, while she had recognised that it was supposed to be an insult, she wasn't certain what that had actually meant. The mud-mucking part was probably a crass way to refer to someone who was cool with muggleborns, fine, that sort of made sense, but she'd never gotten an explanation of what blood-traitor meant. She did remember it was one of the things people weren't supposed to say because Truce that Snape had listed at the beginning of the year, so. "I think I've made my point."

From there, the rest of the meeting — or the part of it that had anything to do with Liz, at least — went by very quickly. Scrimgeour went back to the prefects to confer with them again, but it didn't take them very long to drop the palings and get to it. For Draco, Pansy, and company's claim against her, they let her off by a vote of four to three — with an added warning that she really had escalated more than was called for, but she was being let off this time due to extenuating circumstances, if something like this happened again there'd be serious consequences.

Which was fine, Liz didn't expect to need to do this sort of thing again. If nothing else, she'd made herself very clear.

Her claim against them, the one about the Truce, that was unanimous, which was weird...until she thought about it, anyway. Obviously, the Truce was just as important to the Allied Dark as it was to everyone else — their faction did include most of the individuals the Light might want to get revenge on, after all — if for no other reason Wilkes would want to make it clear to Pansy and Draco that they couldn't go around casually calling people mudbloods and blood-traitors in public. Anyway, Pansy and Draco and Millicent didn't lose any house privileges, like use of the Slytherin library and such, but for the rest of the term (until they left for Christmas) they would be stripped of the protection of the Truce. As part of this verdict, Scrimgeour said they'd be suspending the First Rule. They would spread the word to the other houses that the three of them were being punished for violations of the Truce — they wouldn't just have to deal with anti-Voldemort people in Slytherin targeting them, but the whole school, until they came back for classes in January.

(Scrimgeour didn't explicitly say it, glaring down at them, her voice hard and heavy, but it was very clear what she was saying: learn this lesson, now, when you're young and stupid, or we'll cast you out and leave you to the wolves.)

Theo was excluded from this, though — he couldn't possibly have been involved in the worst offences against Liz, and unlike Pansy and Draco hadn't broken the Truce while defending himself from an accusation of breaking the Truce (idiots). Which was fair, Liz guessed. He didn't really need to be punished with the rest for Liz's point to be made. By how cold and quiet his head was — just standing there staring at her, still and pale — she was pretty sure he'd gotten the message.

And they were released to go back to their seats. Liz weaved her way back to Dorea and Daphne, trying not to notice how many older kids were watching her. (She realised something kind of crazy had just happened, but come on.) Thankfully, Scrimgeour started the meeting going again before Liz had even sat down, everyone's attention drawn back to...something to do with someone stealing something or whatever, she didn't care.

"How did you know that would work?" Daphne hissed. Leaning in a little too much as she did it, but she was sometimes weird about some things, including personal space. (Liz was pretty sure there was some reason, but she didn't know and didn't really care.)

Liz shrugged. "I didn't."

The blank confusion that took over Daphne was really kind of funny.

Dorea spent rather more time around Liz, so was used to her being weird, she recovered quicker. "Liz, that was dangerous."

"Why?"

"You could have lost."

"So?" And now that same blank confusion hit Dorea, and she was just as speechless. That was definitely funny — Liz bit her lip to keep herself from laughing aloud. "Ah, anything the prefects could have punished me with would be way worse for them than it would be for me. I thought it was worth it. Even before I realised I could accuse them of breaking the Truce."

"And...when did you realise that, exactly?"

"Oh, on my down."

Dorea sniffed. She was trying to look annoyed and disapproving, but there was a slight shade of amusement at the edge of her thoughts — reluctant amusement, maybe, but it was still there. "You know, you're kind of mad sometimes, Liz."

She didn't really know what to say to that, so she just shrugged. Besides, Pansy and Draco had gotten the worse of it, clearly it hadn't been that crazy of an idea.

Dammit, her butt was hurting again already. They had to be almost done by now...

---

December 1991

---

All five of them turned to stare at her, eyes wide with surprise, minds sparking with something warm and squishy she couldn't quite place. Liz stared up at the glimmering golden ceiling of the Entrance Hall, stuck her hands in her pockets, and tried not to look quite so uncomfortable as she felt.

(She could feel their eyes on her skin like wasps.)

The end of the term had come, and all the students were going home for Christmas break. Well, they didn't call it Christmas break — she didn't think mages celebrated Christmas, or at least not really — but that's basically what it was, though not quite arranged how she was used to, starting a little bit earlier (so they'd be home for the solstice). The Entrance and Great Halls were full of noisy chaos, people trundling about wearing winter coats and hats and dragging around their trunks, saying goodbyes to friends, picking up a last sandwich at the table, far too many laughing and running around like crazy people.

It was very irritating. Liz had lead them over toward the emptiest corner between the stairs toward Slytherin and the front doors, the quietest spot to send them off from. Though it wasn't as quiet as she'd like — a slow trickle of other people kept coming by to wish them a good holiday, mostly friends of Daphne or Dorea. Blaise swept through at one point, Padma, Terry Boot, and Lisa Turpin from Ravenclaw, Lily Moon from Gryffindor, Susan, Hannah, and Wayne Hopkins from Hufflepuff...and more people Liz didn't quite recognise, but they were all talking to Daphne, she assumed they were older kids she knew from before Hogwarts.

People even dropped by to say hi to Hermione. Neville was here, of course, they'd come down together and he was sticking around. He'd been a constant feature for the last month or so, which was...fine, Liz guessed. He was sort of...annoyingly shy and skittish — honestly, it'd taken him weeks to not jump whenever Liz spoke to him — but whatever, if Hermione liked him, fine. While they stood around, Hermione was visited by Sophie Roper and Sally-Anne, Megan, Mandy and Justin. Apparently, Hermione had gotten it in her head to put together a study group of all the muggleborns — Megan Jones wasn't muggleborn, but neither was Dorea (and Liz), Daphne and Tracey, Neville, Padma, Lily Moon, or Susan and Hannah, and they were all in it too — and the only one she was missing in their year was a bloke called Kevin Entwhistle. (Supposedly, Liz couldn't even remember who that was off the top of her head.)

And Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas in Gryffindor, but most of Gryffindor hated her for stupid reasons, so Hermione didn't expect to get them. Dorea was pretty sure they just didn't have any interest in joining a study group, but Hermione had decided she preferred her own explanation. Which was odd, since her explanation was that people didn't like her, and that...

Well, it wasn't true, was it? At least, more people liked Hermione than liked Liz. She wasn't certain if Hermione had consciously realised that she actually had more friends than Liz did now. She certainly didn't talk like it.

Liz didn't care, of course, she just thought it was kind of weird that Hermione still talked like everyone hated her and she hadn't any friends, even though they didn't and she did. Maybe it was just because she still didn't get on with the other Gryffindors much at all, and the stupid racists dotted here and there, but really...

Anyway, some of them had been talking about what they were going to be up to over the break. Hermione and her parents were going to France, to visit her family there. There would be all kinds of things going on at Greenwood over the entire season, practically a weeks-long festival...not that Liz was entirely certain what Greenwood was, and that honestly sounded kind of exhausting. Daphne seemed to be excited for it anyway, and Tracey. (She preferred not to go home, apparently, would be meeting her mum at the Greengrasses'.) Dorea expected she'd have to spend a day or two around solstice with her great-aunt Cassiopeia — the only other Black still around, had been teaching her the things people from these silly magic noble houses were supposed to know — the rest of the time would just be hanging around with her muggle family (who she had started to admit existed these last few weeks, because...Liz didn't know, whatever).

Eventually, the conversation had turned back to Liz. Put on the spot, she'd admitted she was just staying at Hogwarts, by herself. Perhaps she shouldn't have admitted that, because now everyone was staring at her, it was uncomfortable...

The nauseating, suffocating warmth of pity filling the air around her was starting to get irritating.

"I didn't— Liz, you could have said something earlier. I would have..." Dorea trailed off, frowning to herself a little. "Well, we don't have an extra bed, actually, but I would share..."

"There's always room at Greenwood," Daphne chirped, brightly smiling — a fake smile, behind it only pain and pity. She was good at faking these things with other people, but Liz was a cheater. (Nobody had told Daphne Liz could read minds, she didn't know faking it didn't work on her.) "You should come with us, how quickly can you pack? I think the train leaves in an hour or so..."

A chastising tone on her voice, Hermione said, "Shouldn't you ask your parents before inviting people over for the holiday?"

Daphne shot Hermione a flat, slightly confused look. "It's the Solstice." Apparently that was supposed to be an answer all by itself, because she didn't explain what she meant.

Hermione stared right back at her, with a practically identical expression. Though she just looked kind of ridiculous — she couldn't pull off Daphne things, her huge bushy hair ruined it. Which Liz had sympathy for, but she also knew better than to try to ape mannerisms off of Daphne bloody Greengrass.

"It's okay," Liz blurted out, before anyone else could say anything. "I'll be fine on my own."

Despite how very true this was, and how firmly she was saying it, nobody seemed to believe her — they were still giving her a variety of doubtful looks, nauseating pity still thick on the air. Which was, just, irritating. She understood they were...doing that friendship thing, so they all at least gave a shite (no matter how strange of a thought that was), but they could at least take her at her word. She was fine on her own, really.

Honestly, being alone for the holiday was a significant improvement from the usual, as far as she was concerned.

Thankfully, someone new burst into their little circle before anyone could continue being annoying, appearing out of nowhere flinging her arm over Dorea heavy enough she staggered. "Hey little kiddies, about ready to go?" Funny thing to say, because the new girl couldn't be any older than them. Though she couldn't be in first year, Liz was pretty sure she'd recognise all the first-year girls by now. The stranger was wearing muggle-style jeans and a jumper under her Hogwarts-standard cloak, round-cheeked face pulled into a grin, eyes sparkling...

...purple? Liz was pretty sure eyes weren't supposed to be purple. Also, her curly hair, stretching just past her ears in an asymmetrical mess, was an eye-searingly bright bubblegum pink. There was no way that was natural, the eyes were probably magic too.

"Dammit, Dora, you mad— You almost knocked me over!"

"Shut up, you know you love me." The unknown girl (Dora, apparently), clenched her arm tighter around Dorea, yanking her closer, the top of Dorea's head pressing into the girl's cheek.

Dorea huffed, rolling her eyes. "In case you're wondering, everyone, this," she growled, vaguely pointing in the general direction of the stranger's face, "is my insane cousin Nymphadora Tonks."

"Tonks." The girl grinned over Dorea's head, the expression sharp and vicious. (But fake, in her head was only bouncy amusement.) "Any of you firsties call me Nymphadora, I'll hex you. And I learned a bunch of good ones over the summer, believe me."

Okay, maybe the viciousness wasn't fake — maybe the idea of hexing them amused her, could go either way.

Hermione was the first to find her voice in the face of the weirdness that was Nymphadora Tonks. "Aren't... Isn't Tonks the seventh-year Hufflepuff prefect?"

"Hey, I'm a very responsible prefect!" Dorea snorted. "Oh, shush you, all the baby 'puffs love me."

"Er..."

"Tonks is a metamorph, Hermione," Daphne said, her lips curling with a faint smile. "She's a seventh-year, she can just look however she wants."

"Hugging people with a big height difference is just awkward, don't you think?"

Hermione stared at Tonks, her head stuttering for a second. "Sure...I guess."

The awkward conversation about whether Liz was really fine spending the holiday at school by herself interrupted by the arrival of strange, hyperactive, theoretically older cousins, and the departure of the train quickly approaching, their little group started splitting up. There were a lot of good-byes and happy holidays, and Neville wandered off, along with Hermione, then Daphne and Tracey, leaving only Dorea and Tonks behind with—

In a blink, quicker than she could react, Tonks sprung across the distance between them, throwing her arms around Liz's neck. Her heart jumping up her throat, her skin flaring with tingling heat, Liz struck out instinctively, blades of stop, let go of me, go away slicing in toward Tonks's mind, and sinking in—

Except they didn't stick, glancing off a surprisingly solid surface, smooth and cool like steel. It was so unexpected Liz was left off-balance, suddenly a little dizzy, shook her head to clear the stars from her eyes.

Tonks jumped, abruptly let go of her and retreated a step, her hands raised open to her sides. She couldn't quite read the expression on the odd girl's face, something in her head hot and churning. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to freak you out, or anything, I just— Sorry."

It took a moment for Liz to focus on the outside world again, recovering from her sloppy mind magic flailing — she really had to learn to handle that better, leaving herself defenceless for a few seconds after hitting any real resistance was probably the worst possible thing that could happen if she actually needed to use it. Still rapidly blinking, she said, "Ah, it's okay. I didn't... You just surprised me, is all. Er, and the, well..."

The girl frowned for a second, realisation hitting with a bright ringing in her head, her mouth opening in an oh. "You mean the mind magic? Don't worry about that, I blocked it, no harm done." Her hands slowly dropping to her side, her head tilted, one eyebrow ticked up. "How many know? That you're a legilimens, I mean, I haven't heard a thing about that."

It was Dorea who answered, though she wasn't looking at Tonks, instead staring at Liz, eyes slightly narrowed, feeling something cool and slick Liz couldn't read. "It's just me and Hermione, I think. She told us back on Hallowe'en. I know I haven't told anyone, and I don't think Hermione has either."

Liz shrugged. "Snape and Dumbledore know too."

"Of course Snape does, bloody creep." What might have been an insult said by anyone else seemed incongruously good-natured coming from Tonks, amusement clear on the air around her. Slightly...sharp amusement, sure, but not a hateful kind of sharpness, hard to explain exactly. "I'm sorry, I just... It just occurred to me that we hadn't really been introduced yet, and you've been in the castle for months and everything, and I was just feeling kind of bad about that, and I wasn't thinking, sorry."

"Er, what?"

"We are cousins, you know?" The way Tonks said it, she wasn't certain Liz did know. "Did Dorea never explain the Black family stuff?"

Well, there had been a bit of that, but... "The Slytherins talked about how everyone was related to everyone way at the beginning of the year, but I wasn't really listening."

Tonks giggled, high and bright, the tension hanging over them finally breaking. "Well, um, Dorea and I, our great-grandfather was your grandmother's older brother. Which, that sounds more distant than it actually is, because mages tend to think like houses are all equally related, in a way, and your grandmother, my mother, and Dorea's father were all Blacks. So, like, it's more like one generation out, not three or four. If that makes sense?"

Liz shrugged. "Not really, but okay." Didn't really get what the point was. She meant, sure, they were cousins of come kind or other, she still didn't understand why that should matter to her at all.

Honestly, she'd kind of hated the only cousin she'd ever had...

"Anyway, I just thought— I'll give you warning next time."

"How about you don't do it at all." An odd look crossed Tonks's face, something odd and twisty echoing from her. "I'm not... It's nothing personal, okay. I just don't do...the hugging thing." In the moment she hadn't even realised that was what Tonks was trying to do, she'd felt like she was being attacked and reacted accordingly.

...

Actually, Liz thought, feeling her own brow dip into a frown, she honestly didn't think she'd ever been hugged before. Like, that, Tonks randomly grabbing her, might really be the first time someone had tried to hug her ever.

Huh. She didn't know how to feel about that.

Neither Dorea nor Tonks seemed particularly pleased — not that she could say how they weren't pleased, something cold and sharp and uncomfortable, but whatever it was they moved on without saying anything about it. There wasn't much left to say at all, really. A few more mutters about having nice holidays, see you in Januarys, and the two of them were making for the doors, Liz watching them leave.

Right on the threshold, Dorea turned to give Liz a long, lingering look. Then she was gone, and Liz was alone.

Once she was out of sight, Liz turned on her heel, and started up for the library.

፠

Liz had never entirely understood Christmas.

It didn't help that there was a prominent church part of it, and she'd never really entirely understood church either. She meant, the Jesus thing was a nice story, she guessed...when they weren't focusing on the bits about sin and demons and hellfire anyway, that shite was just strange and slightly unnerving. The whole God sending his own son to be sacrificed and suffer so no one else would have to suffer thing, it was a nice story, sure. She just didn't entirely get it. Especially since, well, the world still kind of sucked, so it obviously hadn't worked.

When she'd been a little kid, she'd asked one of the church ladies why God didn't just, poof, make all the bad things go away. Or even better, why bad things existed at all — if God made everything, why did he make bad things in the first place? She had gotten an answer, it'd just been confusing, Liz remembered the uncertain looks she'd gotten more than the words.

(Dudley had told Vernon when they got home. Liz had been locked in the cupboard for a week.)

The church part of Christmas was sort of pretty, she guessed. They always went, and the place was always all decorated more than usual, and they put more effort into the music and stuff, and the story was...kind of silly, but nice, and it was pretty, yes. She just didn't get it.

Or...maybe being pretty was the point? She honestly wasn't sure.

And there was also the part at home, which she also didn't really get. The Christmas holiday was probably her least favourite time of the year, but not because it was...bad, exactly. Just more of the usual. There was always a lot of cooking, biscuits and fudge and sweets and shite on top of the usual meal schedule, and the house would be all decorated, which required cleaning everything first, and it was just a lot of work. It was slightly irritating, because it tended to involve cleaners with bleach in them, which made her chest hurt and her eyes sting after using them too long, and the cooking was, just, all the time constantly, and she never even got to have any of it. Which was perfectly normal, yes, she usually never got any of what she was cooking, there was just more of it, left her almost unbearably exhausted.

There had been days, a week into the holiday season, with another whole week and change to look forward to, Liz would collapse into her cupboard at the end of the day, weak and sore and hungry and tired, and she would go to sleep hoping she would never wake up.

Vernon and Petunia always made a point of sitting her down, and making her watch as Dudley opened his many, many gifts, just like they did on his birthdays. This had never really made sense to her either. In retrospect, they'd been trying to make her jealous — making the point that Dudley deserved nice things, and that she didn't, to rub her nose in it. It might have worked, if Liz had ever expected anything from the Dursleys. The idea of them giving her nice things was such a foreign concept that it had simply never occurred to her as something she'd been denied, so they never had gotten the reaction from her they'd probably wanted.

Really, long minutes she spent watching Dudley with his gifts were long minutes she wasn't cleaning or cooking or whatever else Petunia had her doing. She hadn't minded.

According to Daphne, the mages didn't celebrate Christmas, exactly, but there were a few traditional holidays right around the same day, and since Britain was a weird fusion of a whole bunch of cultures from all over the place in western and northern Europe it was a big confusing mess. The native Celts hadn't really had a midwinter festival, just one at the beginning of winter — Hallowe'en — and then another one at the end — Dorea called it Imbolc, Daphne said Gŵyl Oleuon, which were supposedly the same thing. A lot of the natives had been Romanised, though, and the Romans did have a holiday around this time, which involved a whole bunch of eating and drinking and silly games and gift-giving. The German tribes that invaded the Isles had their own holiday, which also involved a lot of eating and drinking and silly games.

The local mages had picked up the idea, because who doesn't like eating and drinking and silly games? (Honestly, that made way more sense to Liz than whatever Christmas was supposed to be.) The Roman holiday was supposed to happen a week before the solstice, but with the Empire falling, a lot of fiddly society things like keeping proper calendars started kind of falling apart. But the solstice was easy to calculate with magic, and the German holiday was supposed to be on the solstice, so the British mages decided that would be their day for eating and drinking and silly games and gift-giving.

On the old Roman calendar, the solstice was on December 25th, but the modern calender moved to the 21st. So the solstice holiday in magical Britain (whatever people wanted to call it, there were a few different names) was celebrated on the 21st or the 25th, it was really a matter of personal preference. So...magical Britain had two Christmases, kind of? Except, you were only supposed to do one of them, but people often did something on both, going to one eating-drinking-silly-games party on the 21st, and then another one on the 25th. Because all the eating and drinking and silly games and gift-giving was so much fun they needed to do it twice.

Which, silly, but sure, still made more sense to her than Christmas. The mages didn't even pretend there was some, like, special reason for doing what they did on this particular day, it was just tradition, and eating and drinking and silly games were fun. Fair enough, why not?

Liz hadn't expected anything much to happen here for the holiday. Hogwarts officially put the holiday on the 25th, and they had done some decorating and stuff, and apparently the evening meal would be extra special — extra special enough there would even be alcohol available to the students...which was apparently perfectly fine? Magical Britain didn't have a drinking age, turned out, though it wasn't something responsible adults thought kids should have all the time (especially when they were supposed to be learning). But it was fine on holidays, so. But anyway, there were barely even any kids still in the castle, just a few from each of the houses (and all the Weasleys, for some reason), so Liz hadn't expected they would really be doing anything.

In fact, waking up on the morning of the 25th, Liz didn't expect anything out of her ordinary routine at all. So she didn't even notice the parcels at the foot of her bed until she literally tripped over them.

Propped up with a hand against her bed post, for long seconds Liz just stood there, blankly staring at the packages. Were these...Christmas gifts? For her? She meant, they were in her room, they couldn't possibly be for anyone else. The elves must have brought them up, and elves didn't confuse people like that. So that must be it. Christmas gifts. For her.

...

She had no idea how to process this.

She almost might think she was hallucinating, but when she came back from the bathroom they were still there.

Okay, then. She'll just...give them a look?

The first one she picked up, it'd been on top but thrown to the floor when she'd kicked the pile, was wrapped in smooth, red and silver...well, she wanted to say paper, but it felt more like cloth, really. (Probably magic-made, they made weird things sometimes.) This one was poofy to the touch, maybe like the thing inside were made of cloth...though it was very light, far too light for its size. There was a note attached, a bit of paper just sticking to it, probably magicked to sit there, written in a loopy hand she didn't recognise.

Your father left this in my possession before he died.

It is time it was returned to you.

Use it well.

A Very Merry Christmas to you.

For long seconds, Liz just held the package, silently staring at the note. Then, slowly, she set it back down on the carpet, a bit to the side.

It didn't make any sense at all, but she almost felt scared to touch it.

The next thing she picked up was a box of plain wood, sanded smooth, a couple hand-widths on all sides. It looked like the panel on the top could be slid off, maybe. Carved into the top (probably with a spell of some kind) was an odd symbol, an eight-spoked wheel with...what looked like a bundle of wheat and a second bundle of flowers woven through the spokes? Staring at it in confusion, it took Liz a few seconds to recognise it as the symbol on Greengrass stuff. This would be from Daphne, then. Liz set it down next to the other one.

Another box, about the same size, was in familiar muggle wrapping paper, with stars and reindeer printed on it. It had a familiar muggle-style tag on it — To: Elizabeth ; From: Hermione. Didn't have to guess for that one then. She set this one aside too.

Two packages were, curiously, wrapped in the same paper, though rather more sedate than Hermione's, checkered green and red. The smaller one, a little bit bigger than Liz's hand and about twice as thick, looked like someone had scrawled on the paper with a marker rather than find a tag, three big sloppy capital letters. Okay. The other one Liz knew just holding it was a hardcover book, a pretty sizeable one. This one had another tag on it, said it was from Dorea. Those three letters scribbled on the littler one definitely wasn't Dorea's handwriting though. Hmm.

The last package was another box, maybe slightly larger than Daphne's, with a...hawk? with a fish in its talons? Liz had no idea what that was supposed to be. By process of elimination, she assumed this was probably from Tracey, so that must be a Davis thing. Tracey didn't have nearly as good a relationship with the rest of her family as Daphne, she didn't tend to advertise her Davis-ness the way some of the other kids did.

She'd gotten Christmas gifts. From Dorea (and someone who'd wrapped theirs with her), Daphne, Hermione, Tracey, and a mysterious stranger who'd apparently known her father. She...

She should...probably open them?

Yes. She would just...do that.

She reached for the one that'd come with Dorea's first — it was the smallest, and therefore the least intimidating. Her throat tight, her heart pounding in her ears (almost as though she was afraid of something, which was ridiculous), she wedged her thumb under a piece of tape, worked open a seam, pulled the thing open. Two somethings flopped into her lap, black leather lined with silver...

Gloves? They looked like gloves, anyway, though they were missing the fingers. (She'd always thought that was weird — wasn't the point of gloves to stop your fingers getting cold?) Liz spotted a piece of paper folded up inside of one of them, plucked it out and unfolded it.

Liz,

I took Doe Christmas shopping in Charing, and I figured since I was along, I might as well get you something while I was at it. I know, I am as generous as I am gorgeous and talented. I welcome your adoration.

Doe tells me you're ace on a broom, and are interested in getting into dueling next year — a good decision, if I do say so myself! You'll probably start playing around with quidditch in flying class come spring, so I grabbed some gloves. They're supposed to be just for quidditch, but they're handy for dueling too. (Get it? Handy?)

They're enchanted to keep your hands warm, and give you a bit of a cushion, so impacts won't hurt as much, stop little nicks. The palms are sort of sticky, give you a better grip on say, a broom, or a wand, or a quaffle. Don't worry if the size looks off, they'll adjust to you when you pull them on.

Hope Christmas at Hogwarts isn't totally boring. Dorea already said she told you you're welcome over next year if you want, so I don't have to say it. Try to have fun at least, and far too much sweets! That's what Christmas is for!

Your favourite cousin,

NT

Liz blinked. Oh, Dorea's cousin, the Hufflepuff seventh-year. They'd barely been introduced. If Liz had expected to get Christmas gifts at all (which she hadn't), she wouldn't have expected Tonks.

That was...weird. She had no idea how to feel about this.

Liz stuck the letter back inside one of the gloves, set them aside, and picked up the book from Dorea. It took rather more work to get the paper off this one — she suspected Dorea had been more careful about it than her silly, flighty older cousin. Eventually, she had to settle for squeezing the paper on the opposite side of the spine, where the pages dipping in from the cover gave her an angle to push against. Before long she had the paper torn off, revealing a thick, magic-made book, the cover leather in red and black, heavy and expensive-looking. The title, engraved in gold, read Illustrated Introduction to the Art of Battlemagic, in smaller text underneath, Augustin Olivier Cæciné, then under that, with Jaya Joshi and Cassie Lovegood.

Liz peeled back the cover — the leather creaked a little — revealing an inscription on the inside:

Elizabeth Potter —

If you're going to continue to make a habit of annoying people,

you should probably learn to defend yourself first.

— Dorea Black

Christmas 1991

Liz choked out a laugh.

The book did look very neat. It didn't focus primarily on spells — though there were a bunch of spells described in it too — but things like posture, how to shift from one stance to another, how to smoothly run from one spell to another, how to decide what spell to use in what situation, even stylistic things. Liz flipped open to a random page, finding a section that described a spell chain intended to break the shield of a retreating opponent with a quick cast speed. (Apparently, these things got that specific.) There was an introduction in red text, a couple paragraphs from this Cassie Lovegood person explaining the kind of situation this was useful in, an anecdote about winning the final in a tournament with a variation on this same thing. Then black text, presumably the primary author, explained the seven spells in the chain, what each one did, the advantages they presented and tips on how to stagger them and lead into the next, each with a little picture next to the description, a blonde woman wearing simple trousers and vest casting the spell, the motions exaggerated to make every movement clear. Then, at the end, a picture filling a whole page of the woman casting the whole chain in a row at a similarly-dressed dark-skinned man holding a glimmering orange shield, first slow — the woman darting forward and twisting as she smoothly cast one spell and then the next, flickers of colour striking the shield, exploding with bright flashes of light, some sending the man stumbling, the second to last shooting cracks through the shield, the last shattering it, the man flung back onto his arse as the shield exploded into orange and blue sparks — and then fast — a blinding blur of motion and colour Liz could just barely follow — then slow and fast again, on repeat over and over...

And the whole book was like this?

Another letter fell out of the pages as Liz flipped randomly through the awesome book, in the same plain muggle paper Tonks had used.

Elizabeth,

I hope you like the book. I wasn't sure what to get you — we've been friends for months now, but I'm honestly not sure if I can think of more than a couple things you actually like. A book on dueling was the best thing I could think of, but I wanted to get something useful, but I don't know a thing about dueling, I wouldn't know which to get.

So I asked Cassiopeia. She says a friend of hers on the Continent turned her on to this one, she looked over it herself before decided it was good. Augustin Cæciné is a former Beauxbatons professor — that's a magic school in France — and he doesn't have much dueling experience himself, but a lot of the content of the book is actually provided by two professional duelists. They're both ranked in the top ten in the whole world right now (though they hadn't been when it was written). I've even heard of Cassie Lovegood, she has something of a reputation for vigilantism, running around and tweaking dangerous people's noses and making a nuisance of herself. Cassiopeia said it explains things well enough for a beginner to follow, and Lovegood and Joshi are both extremely good. I figured I'd just take her word for it.

It's actually restricted in Britain, apparently. Not so bad you'll get in serious trouble if a professor spots you with it, probably just some awkward questions. Maybe keep that in mind.

I told Daphne what I was thinking of getting you, and she told her mother, and I think they might have come up with something to go with this. I don't know what it is, you'll have to show me when I get back.

I know what you're thinking, Liz — I don't need mind-control superpowers to figure you out. You might think you cover for these things well, but sometimes when I don't say anything, it's because I think it'd be rude to, not because I didn't notice. I know you don't expect people to care about you. I know you weren't expecting any Christmas gifts. I bet you're sitting on the floor of your room right now, with unforeseen gifts piled in your lap, just baffled.

I know I didn't have to, but I wanted to, so I did. You have friends now, you little idiot. You're just going to have to get used to this sort of thing. There's no choice in the matter. So there.

Happy Christmas,

Dorea

Liz stuck the letter under the cover, and set the book aside. She leaned forward, her elbows braced against her knees, rubbed both her cheeks. Waited for the ache in her throat to go away, the stinging in her eyes.

(Vernon hated it when she cried.)

When she thought she could function again, she reached for the next box. (Not Daphne's, she wanted to space that out if she could.) How about Tracey. She barely knew Tracey — she was always around, followed Daphne like a shadow, but hardly ever spoke — whatever she'd gotten her couldn't possibly be at all personal. The box sitting in her lap, she pushed at the top panel until she found how it slid out. Inside was another letter, this time parchment, on top of...what looked like a bunch of green and black fuzz.

Liz,

You look so bloody cold all the time. I don't know what colours you like, so we just went with a Slytherin theme. If you don't like it, too bad, I guess.

I did the scarf and the hat, though not the enchantments on them. Mum's pretty sure the hat will stay on over your impossible hair, but we couldn't test it. She did the jumper, because I'm not nearly good enough at this damn knitting thing to do that. She says her grandmother taught her, but I'm pretty sure that's a filthy lie, because my great-grandmother was a muggle, and there's no way that isn't magic.

Mum says she's sorry about Lily. I think they knew each other, but she won't tell me anything.

Now put all this on before you freeze to death, stupid.

Tracey

A shocked laugh was yanked out of her throat before Liz felt it coming. She shuffled through the box, sorting out a jumper, a hat, and a scarf, all woven from thick wool in green and black, traced here and there with lines in silver. She hesitated for a second before, fuck it, pulling the jumper over her head. It took her what had to be nearly a minute to get her arms through the holes and work her impossible hair back out of the collar. It was just a little too big, she thought — not surprised, she was really bloody tiny.

But apparently she had been bloody cold, because this was really nice. She hadn't even noticed...

Liz put the hat and the scarf back in the box — she'd have to try the hat later, just to see if it really would stay— Oh! It had been Tracey who'd rescued her stupid hat from the lake that first night here, wasn't it? She'd completely forgotten about that. Liz put the letter on top, slid the lid back on and...

Tracey and her mum had made these? Like, by hand? She didn't...

She should probably...do something, for her? She didn't know, she hadn't expected anyone to get her anything, and...

Well, it was just occurring to her now, that people had actually sent her Christmas gifts — which was still absurd to think about — and she hadn't gotten anyone anything. It honestly hadn't occurred to Liz that she maybe should. Just, she'd literally never given or received a gift once, not in her entire life, and...

She should maybe do something for them, all of them. She had no fucking clue what, but... She'd think about it later. Trying to ignore the way her stomach was twisting with guilt, Liz pulled the box from Hermione toward her. Like Dorea, Hermione had clearly put some effort into her wrapping, but it was so perfectly symmetrical and the lines so straight it was easy to work a finger into a seam, yank it open. Inside was a plain muggle cardboard box, and inside that was...

...a whole bunch of chocolates? There were a few bar-sized things, then a box that had a bunch of little squares in them, and another box that had rows of little unwrapped square thingies, little designs drawn on the tops in brown and black. Quite a lot of chocolate, actually, and it looked kind of...fancy.

Which, what the hell? Hermione knew Liz didn't like sweets, right? In fact, she was certain Hermione knew that, they'd talked about it before. Turning the littler boxes around, Liz found what was by Hermione standards a very brief letter.

Elizabeth,

I hope this gets to you alright. I've never sent anything to Hogwarts before. I know the mages set it up so they'll catch things sent through the normal post, but I'm sending this from Montargis, and I'm not sure how it works internationally. I would say tell me if it doesn't come, but that's very silly, isn't it?

Anyway, I was in Orléans, and I got dragged into a chocolaterie. I tend not to like sweets any more than you do — that's what happens when you're raised by dentists, I guess, never did get much sugar when I was little. I said as much to one of my aunts, and she told me I'm being very silly, that's what dark chocolate is for. It's pretty good! I was surprised, I don't normally care for chocolate.

I was reminded of how Fortescue's made you less heavily sweetened ice cream special, and I thought I'd get some for you while I was at it. This is some rather nice chocolate — I'm not certain you can even get it outside of a few certain places in France — but all kinds of people sell dark chocolate.

On all the packages for the bars and squares there's a two digit number there. That's the per cent of raw cacao — the higher the number, the less sweet it should be. If you find one you like, just remember it, and you can find similar things whenever. Personally, I thought the 72 was about perfect, but I got you all four kinds so you can try for yourself. The truffles are all 66 and 72, but the filling is a little sweeter. If they're too sweet for you and you end up giving them to someone else, that's fine, I don't mind.

Crap, I had more I was going to say, but I have to go. Aimée found me and won't leave me alone. My cousins are very annoying and very French sometimes. See you in January!

Happy Christmas,

Hermione

...Liz had no idea what to do with that.

Out of curiosity, she tried one of the squares labelled 72, and Hermione was right, that was actually pretty good. And the 79 was even better. Like, distractingly good, she was getting tingles, she hadn't even known it was possible for something to taste good enough to get tingles...

She shouldn't have any more right now though. It was probably a bad idea to just have a bunch of chocolate for breakfast, and it was fancy chocolate, literally imported from bloody France, so. Maybe don't eat it all at once?

She packed the box back up and shoved it toward her desk so she wouldn't be tempted.

So. She had left the box from Daphne, and the package that had once belonged to her father.

...

The box from Daphne it was.

The lid slid off of this one just as easy as Tracey's. Inside were a couple books, rather smaller and less fancy-looking than Dorea's. One was a collection of British folklore, old stories from all over the islands that the mages had been telling for generations — not surprising Daphne would get something like that for her, she had often ended up explaining about the weird religions and superstitions and stuff the mages had — and the second one was called Voices for the Dead, which was...ominous. Looking at the introduction quick, it said it was a brief history of something called the Mistwalker Clans, who were apparently modern magical families descended from a certain group of ancient Celts, the ones who'd lived on a certain island, Liz didn't recognise the name.

Liz was confused why the hell Daphne had send her what appeared to be a random magical history book, until she saw a list of the Mistalker Clans on one of the very first pages — there, near the top, was The Noble House of Greengrass and the Greenwood Commune. Okay, that sort of almost made sense, then. She guessed.

...Wasn't a "commune" like a pinko...hippie...thing? She was pretty sure that was one of the words that turned up in Vernon's rants now and again. Hmm.

(Not that Liz was entirely sure who "the reds" were or why Vernon hated them so much. And it didn't matter, she was hardly likely to take his opinion as gospel on...well, anything, really.)

Also in the box was a dark leather tube, accented with red and white here and there, about the length of her forearm. She had no idea what the hell that was supposed to be, presumably there was a letter somewhere that explained it. Wrapped in a bundle of off-white cloth were...picture frames? Magical photos, the ones that moved (which were kind of neat). Four total, with a variety of people in them, none of whom she recognised. They were all a few years older than Liz, probably in their mid-teens, for the most part.

One had four boys sitting on a couch, rather too small to hold all of them, shoving at each other and silently laughing. Another one was a somewhat wider shot, a round room with beds... Was that a dorm room? Presumably the Gryffindors', with the red and gold colour scheme — the picture was all the residents, she guessed, eight or so girls clumped together, throwing silly poses and giggling. The third was of two girls, one blonde and one red-head, a dark-haired boy and fiery autumn trees looming in the background. That red hair didn't look quite natural, too red, without the orange people usually had, so Liz noticed she was also in the picture in the dorm (though the blonde wasn't, she didn't think). The last picture was of the Gryffindor quidditch team, judging by the pads and the colour scheme, grinning and patting each other on the backs, one or another occasionally raising a big gold trophy above their head, the rest cheering.

Okay. What the hell?

There were two letters in the box this time. Liz recognised Daphne's handwriting, she read that one first.

Elizabeth,

I hope you're not too lonely there at Hogwarts by yourself. You really should have come to the Greenwood! Everyone is welcome here, the more the merrier and all that. Think about it for next time.

Tracey says I should say I had a little mead before writing this, so I might sound slightly silly. "Sound slightly silly" is fun to say!

I hope throwing these particular books at you isn't too...naggy? I don't know the word. You always have these questions about things, and a lot of them are things most people already know. You know, the only muggleborn I've ever known before Hogwarts is Sophie, that's Tracey's mum, and she's been around a while, I'm never certain what muggleborns know and what they don't know. So, I figured just covering everything would be a good idea. These won't cover everything, of course, but the one on the misters will at least help you be less confused when I say something weird — I try to act like a normal good noble girl, but I still mess it up sometimes — and the other one will have a lot of the stories other kids at Hogwarts grew up with, so if they reference a thing you'll know what they're talking about. That was the idea anyway?

So, yes, books. The rest of the package is from my mum, so I'll let her talk about that. Greenwood is starting up a bonfire, and fire is pretty!

Wishing you high times and good fortune,

Daphne

...Okay. That was...weird. Liz hadn't really any idea what to think about that, so she moved straight on to the other letter.

Elizabeth Potter,

I do hope I'm not being too presumptuous in adding to my daughter's package for you this season. You don't know me, but my daughter has written of you often, and I find myself moved to do some small thing for you, at least.

I don't know if this is what you want to hear, but I should explain myself a little first. I was a Ravenclaw prefect, some years ago now, and we had one persistent troublemaker, a few years younger than me. She had a habit of seeking out and hexing bullies into the Hospital Wing, lost more than her fair share of points for the house. The other prefects assigned me to attempt to manage her, an effort which would prove all but fruitless. The silly girl simply wouldn't listen to reason.

That rambunctious little underclassman was called Cassie Lovegood — yes, the international dueling champion and habitual huntress of dark wizards the world over. She never did settle down, did she?

In my NEWT years, Cassie made a new Gryffindor friend, who she roped into a number of her misadventures, so I ended up speaking to her quite often as well. She was Lily Evans, your mother.

Liz blinked, and her eyes darted away from the letter to the picture frames. Did that mean these were...

Lily and I were not particularly close, but we did keep up a casual correspondence after my graduation. I was seeking a Mastery in Enchanting at the time, and Lily had some talent with the subject. I wasn't in a position where I can now tell you much about her, personally, and I haven't anything of hers. There are much better people you can speak to, if you wish to know of your parents. But I still knew her well enough I wanted to give you these.

My Daphne heard from young Dorea Black that she intended to send you a dueling primer, and she also tells me you carry your wand in a pocket. Enclosed with this letter you'll find a wand holster, enchanted to withstand the stresses of magical combat. It's intended to be worn on your wand arm, a simple flick of your wrist will eject your wand right into your hand. It takes a little finesses, but I'm sure you'll figure it out with a little practice.

And, forgive me, dear, but Daphne says she's been in your room, and she didn't see any pictures of your parents. She suspects you don't have any. I took it upon myself to remedy that lack. I'm sorry to say I don't have any pictures of your parents together — I am some years older than them, and they didn't grow close until after I graduated. But I did manage to get my hands on a few of them with their friends, cobbled together from contacts of mine.

Of the four, I only took one of them myself. The autumn of my seventh year, I ended up being dragged into the forest to meet the wilderfolk who live out there. (They never did show up, wary of strangers I suspect.) I happened to have a camera with me, and I took a few pictures while we were waiting. In the foreground are Cassie and your mother — she's the one with red hair. You might also spot Severus Snape in the background, but he sometimes wanders out of frame.

Frowning to herself, Liz reached for the frames, picked up the one with all the orange and red leaves in the background. Lily and Lovegood were being somewhat distracting, shoving at each other, Lovegood flung an arm around Lily's neck, started ruffling her hair, but then they suddenly topped over, falling out of the bottom of the frame. So Liz could see the boy behind them more clearly. In muggle jeans and jumper, his hands stuck in his pockets, black hair blowing in the silent wind, he was glaring down (presumably at Lily and Lovegood), with an expression...an exhausted sort of irritation, she guessed, that they were making idiots of themselves, and they'd dragged him outdoors to do it — didn't strike Liz as an outdoorsy sort of person — but he was putting up with it, for now, but his patience wasn't infinite...

Fucking hell, that was Snape, wasn't it? It was kind of hard to tell, he was maybe only fourteen, so he barely looked Snape-ish at all, but... That was just bloody weird.

She'd already known Snape had known her mother, but still.

Lily and Lovegood stood up again, a complete mess made of both their hair, leaves stuck in here and there. Lovegood was giving Lily an over-dramatic sad pout, so Lily, laughing, went about fixing her hair, saying something — Liz could see her lips moving, but couldn't hear anything. Whatever it was, Lovegood broke into a smirk, grabbed Lily by the shoulders and...kissed her full on the lips.

Liz stared at the picture for several seconds, dumbfounded, as the two girls went on kissing, Snape in the background looking even more intensely exasperated than he had a moment ago (implying this happened a lot).

...

Okay, then? Hadn't seen that coming...

Liz watched her mother with...her girlfriend(?) for another few seconds, as they broke apart and went back to playing and giggling. Shaking her head to herself, she set the picture aside, picking up Mrs Greengrass's letter again.

The picture of the girls' dorm was sent to me by the family of one of your yearmates. Marlene NicIonmhuinn was a friend of your mother's, though she died some years ago now. I don't know the names of her other dormmates — I'm not even certain which is Marlene — but I thought it was a nice picture.

I'm not certain I ever met your father, but I tracked down a couple pictures of him while I was at it. The one with the quidditch team I got from Minerva — that is, your Transfiguration professor. Lily and James were among her favourite students, you might consider leveraging that her with in future. The other I got from Remus Lupin, a friend of your father's. He's still around, living in Provence at the moment, I believe. Unfortunately, British law can make getting by quite difficult for werewolves, poor man.

In the sofa picture, your father is the one with the uncooperative hair and the glasses. The boy with the slightly less uncooperative hair, who looks like he could well be James's brother, is Sirius Black — you might have heard that name before. The blond is Peter Pettigrew, and Remus is the poor dear with the scars across his face.

You might consider writing Remus. He should have done it first, but he's being a stubborn fool.

Out of curiosity, Liz tracked down the photo she was talking about, the one with the boys on the sofa. Her eyes lingered on her father for a brief moment — she had him to blame for her hair, apparently, that asymmetrical, random, impossible mess was very familiar — before moving to the black-haired boy next to him. They did look very similar, actually, their faces close to the same shape, if she ignored the glasses on James's face, Sirius's nose just a little longer, jaw just a little rounder. And his hair seemed much less annoying, still a mess, thick, riotous curls flung all over the place... Actually, since he wore it longer, it almost looked more like hers, just not as...big. James's smile was a bit more restrained, toothy and cheerful, but Sirius's looked almost manic, grey eyes wide and glittering, mouth stretched so wide it almost looked painful, flopped sideways on the couch, his messy head leaned into James's chest and his legs in Remus's lap, giggling like a crazy person, as James started...

...plaiting his hair? He was even conjuring flowers to stick inside, little pink things. He was smirking to himself as he went, Sirius's grin dimming a bit, pouting up at James, rolling his eyes as James said what was probably a joke of some kind (assuming from how the other two boys broke into laughter). That was slightly odd, but okay.

So that was Dorea's father, huh? He and James really had been friends, apparently. And she could see why people who'd actually known him didn't believe he'd been the one to sell them out to the Dark Lord — she suspected the people blokes set up to be murdered and the people they let plait pretty pink flowers into their hair didn't tend to overlap.

Mrs Greengrass wrapped her letter up quickly from there, with a few more pleasantries, nothing particularly important. Honestly, the biggest shock of her part in all this was the photo of her mother snogging another girl, and that little detail hadn't even been mentioned in the letter. Or, did she not realise Liz hadn't known her mother had gone around kissing people? She didn't care, of course, she was just saying, she...thought it was a weird thing to do, just, casually send a kid a picture of their mother out and kissing someone. Maybe? She didn't actually know.

Liz had, she thought, gotten quite a lot to think about dropped in her lap, first thing in the morning. She was just a little bit overwhelmed. She hardly knew what to feel about any of this, and there was just so much of it...

Honestly, after all of that, when she found a cloak made of water and moonlight woven into the lightest and smoothest cloth she'd ever felt, that made the wearer invisible, which had apparently been her father's, Liz was too numb to even feel properly shocked anymore.

፠

It turned out Liz had been wrong, they were doing something for the holiday.

As had become the familiar routine over the break, Liz had had very little contact with other people, honestly wasn't even certain she'd spoken at all the whole day. The students who'd stayed behind were in upper years, just a couple in each house — the only people left in Slytherin were Snape, a sixth-year boy whose name she couldn't remember, and herself — and all of the Weasleys, for some reason. She never talked to any of the older students, and all the Weasleys were in Gryffindor — the twins showed their faces now and again, perhaps the most irritating fifth-year prefect in the school was a Weasley, and Ron, the one in her year, was one of those people still determined to hate her for no good reason, so they obviously weren't likely to spend any time together.

Mostly, she'd just puttered around in the library. She'd spent a lot of time in the library the last week or so, even though she didn't really need to, strictly speaking. She'd finished the homework assigned over the break ages ago, but, well, there were always more things to read. Liz still wasn't doing particularly well in Transfiguration, she'd occasionally take a peek at books on the subject not on the recommended reading list to see if something would help get it to click for her (nothing had so far), but Charms were dead easy, for the most part. The library had copies of all the assigned books for all the years so, in addition to looking at whatever caught her eye in the Charms section she'd been reading ahead. She was halfway through the third Standard Book of Spells already.

She wasn't actually two full years ahead in Charms, she'd just been flipping through the books and teaching herself the spells that sounded interesting or useful to her, which was probably only maybe a quarter of them. But she hadn't tried a spell she couldn't figure out how to cast yet, which was...odd. Why was the class going so slow? She meant, first year was pretty much all plain physical effects — making light, moving things, changing the colours of things, making things warmer or colder, that sort of thing — and those were, just, super easy, they were moving through the spells painfully slow, she didn't know how anyone could not get them right away. Though...maybe it was like the opposite of how she didn't get Transfiguration, other people just weren't as good at it as she was. Hmm.

But anyway, she'd also been looking at Potions books, just out of curiosity, which made it very clear her initial impression that potions were pretty much magic cooking had been a massive oversimplification — it was more than just the properties of the things being put in, there was a lot of fuzzy symbolism and metaphor and stuff that made it work the way it did. Apparently, Potions was actually a specific form of ritual magic, which was kind of neat, even if it made it very confusing sometimes.

Though, because it was really ritual magic, potions were also very exploitable — when it came down to it, potions worked the way they worked because the person who brewed them expected them to. You couldn't completely subvert the actual physical and magical properties of the things going into the potion, but there were all kinds of neat shortcuts and tricks that could be done by someone who knew what they were doing. All of them were far above Liz's level at the time, of course, but it was an interesting fact to keep in mind for later.

She had the very clear feeling that Hermione, very literally-minded as she was, was going to hate Potions when they got to the higher years, when this more fuzzy kind of thinking started being necessary. But Liz was better at that sort of thing, it'd probably end up being her best class alongside Charms.

Also out of curiosity, she'd been poking at Runes books a little bit. Enchanting and warding was just kind of neat. It was a lot like Potions, in a way, where there were these symbols that should have precise, reliable meanings, and could be pieced together like blocks of magic, but the more advanced uses started being fuzzy and figurative — sometimes on purpose, so competing enchanters wouldn't be able to copy their designs, and cursebreakers would have more trouble cracking their wards. Unfortunately, she'd have to wait until third year to actually start the class, but that didn't mean she couldn't read about it on her own.

If she were to put a single word to it, her holiday so far had been quiet. She woke up in Slytherin, almost entirely alone in the dorms, spent most of her day in the library, completely empty save for the occasional older student, when she remembered to go to meals the Great Hall pared down to a tiny fraction of the usual population, the noise reduced enough she could hear the echoes of voices bouncing off the high ceiling. Most days so far, she'd gotten all the way through without speaking to another person, even once. She knew from her friends' letters that they thought this was bad, that she'd be sad or lonely or something, but...

She didn't mind it, honestly. It was...relaxing.

Looking back on it, she'd gone through some pretty extreme swings over the first term. She hadn't been used to being stuck with so many people at once — especially not since she'd started using her mind-control superpowers to make people keep their distance — which, she really hadn't expected how...constantly on-edge it'd made her feel, at first. The apparently being famous thing didn't help, people were always watching her, it was bloody unnerving. But, on the other hand, there were the calming potions Snape had been giving her. Those were very nice, when she did have moments (and she could take the potion quickly enough), so those usually weren't as bad as they'd been before coming to Hogwarts (except for when they were)...but, just, stuck with all these people, she'd been having those moments more often. Sort of a give and take, on that one.

And even just dealing with people on a day-to-day basis, she had not been used to doing that anymore, not at all, and her being stupid famous for stupid reasons, people had extreme reactions to even little things she did, that most of the time came completely out of nowhere. She still couldn't predict what might make everyone freak out, like, did the Girl Who Lived really— Whatever it was, it was always very silly. Some people in the school still weren't over the talking to snakes thing — that'd even been in the newspaper, which, really?! — and she still didn't understand why talking to snakes was such a big deal. She meant, sure, the Dark Lord could talk to snakes, but...so what? Snakes were not that interesting! It was such a silly thing to get worked up over, honestly...

The point was, dealing with all this shite all the time, it'd been, just, exhausting. In retrospect, she'd been on a serious down-swing by the end of October, she'd been feeling awful, all the time — come to think of it, that'd probably been what Snape had meant by if she was feeling especially miserable he wanted her to tell someone about it. (She hadn't, of course, and wouldn't when it happened again, but at least she knew what he was talking about now.) Taking an entire calming potion had, kind of, reset her brain back to normal, if that made sense. She'd been all right since then. Mostly. It helped that the more annoying Slytherins had been (temporarily) cowed, and the rest of the school was mostly used to the Girl Who Lived being around, so the more...directly irritating parts had been at a low point.

But it was still exhausting, dealing with people all the time. Other people might think it boring, or lonely, or whatever, but she honestly thought being by herself all the time for days on end was a very nice break. If she'd been trapped with noisy, intrusive kids she couldn't just mind magic away for ten months straight with no breaks at all, she probably would have actually gone insane.

(She hated feeling trapped.)

It was Christmas, but she hadn't done much outside of her usual library-focused routine. The only deviation was, an hour or two before dinner, going out for a walk. Partially testing out her new hat, and partially just because. The sun had already gone down when she'd stepped through the doors, the darkening sky streaked with orange and pink, the snowy valley seeming to faintly glow. The Weasleys and a few of their friends had been having a raucous snowball fight just outside the doors, Liz had quickly angled away before they spotted her, hugging the edge of the forest toward the lake.

The Valley was very pretty she guessed, the night still and heavy and quiet, but she could maybe have dressed better. She didn't have to worry about the snow soaking through her shoes — paying a little extra for boots enchanted to be water-proof had been a great idea — and the hat actually worked pretty well. It was one of those stretching knit caps, with a little poof of black and green at the top (because of course), and it stayed on. It was actually kind of useful at cutting off the wind — the hat itself was warm, yes, but in pulling it on her hair ended up pressed closer to her, tight against her neck, which cut out some of the wind there too. The scarf took out most of the rest of it...once she'd figured out how she was supposed to wear the bloody thing, she'd never actually worn a scarf before.

No, the worst of the cold was from about her knees to a bit under her hips, where she didn't have quite so many layers on. She was wearing two pairs of trousers, but apparently that wasn't good enough. And, the jumper and her school cloak probably weren't good enough either, by the time she decided to call it quits — her legs stiff and numb, throat burning from the dry air — she was starting to get a bit chilly above the waist too. Warming charms helped a little, but they kept wearing off...

She took a moment right outside the front doors to kick the snow and mud off her boots, shake out her cloak and her scarf. She realised the elves could probably clean with magic, but she hated it when Dudley tracked mud into the house, it just...seemed the thing to do.

She heard chatter and laughter from the Great Hall, so dinner had probably already started, but she decided to run down and change quick first anyway. This many layers might not be good enough for outside, but she'd get very warm wearing this through the whole meal. Her thighs broke into hot, sharp tingles as she walked to Slytherin, halfway through changing she paused to try to rub warmth back into them for a moment, her own skin feeling weirdly stiff. It'd been a while since she'd gotten that cold, she'd forgotten how annoying it could be.

She'd probably been out longer than she should have, but it'd been pretty, and she had nothing better to do...

Set up again in her boots, trousers, jumper, and scarf — the barrier of soft wool kept her hair from tickling her own neck, she rather liked it — she left Slytherin for the rest of the castle again. She did consider not going to dinner at all, but she was feeling a little light-headed. It belatedly occurred to her that she'd missed lunch today. Without the class schedule, and Dorea leading her around, she forgot to eat far too easily...

Barely a step into the Great Hall, Liz twitched as an unpleasantly familiar voice called out. "There you are, Miss Potter! I was beginning to wonder if you'd perhaps gotten lost. Come, find a seat."

Liz paused for a moment at the threshold, looking out over the Great Hall. The place was decorated, of course — there were pine trees here and there, holly and mistletoe gleaming red and white under the rainbow lights strung all over place, along the walls and the tables and crisscrossing through the empty air, the ceiling over her head not quite so transparent as usual, frosted over with ice, a light snow slowly drifting toward the floor. (Fake, probably, none of it stuck anywhere.) That last bit, with the ice and snow, that must be a spell someone had put up just before dinner, it hadn't been there this morning. The four house tables were gone, instead a single table at the centre, a dozen smaller ones dotted here and there.

It looked like everyone else was already here, or at least most of them. The centre table — nobody was sitting at any of the satellite tables, and only the middle one had food and stuff on it — was lined on both sides with professors and students. She noticed the professors weren't all in their usual teaching robes, all stiff and plain, instead dressed more casually and colourfully. She particularly noticed McGonagall, who was wearing colours (looking very Scottish, Liz couldn't remember what that was called), and one of the younger professors (Arithmancy, she thought?) was wearing a vaguely muggle-looking dress in green and white, showing more of her shoulders than Liz thought she'd ever seen on a magical woman before (though she had a knit shawl too, because cold). And next to her, Snape was—

Liz gave the infamously intimidating Head of Slytherin a double-take. He was wearing a muggle-style jumper (she meant, it looked machine-stitched), and his hair had been tied back out of his face, a few wisps escaped around his brow, one bit over his left ear. It was bloody strange, he hardly looked like himself, if it weren't for the Saturday morning cartoon villain goatee and the expression of distant, faintly exasperated amusement on his face she might not have recognised him at all. That was just...

For the second time today, Liz wondered if she were hallucinating.

After a few seconds staring at the table in dumb confusion, she unstuck herself. Both of the seats near Snape were occupied — not that she really wanted to sit next to Snape for an extended period of time, but she'd at least actually spoken to him before. In the end, she picked a spot as far from Dumbledore as possible, which did put her closer to the Weasleys than she'd ordinarily like, but she had shown up late, beggars and choosers.

The instant she sat down, the twins immediately asked her how the hell she'd gotten the Slytherins to turn on their own, it was the best "prank" they'd seen all year. So, could have been worse, she guessed. Honestly, she thought the twins were her favourite Weasley — they could be a bit much sometimes, she guessed, but the prefect was a pedantic little prick, and Ron was just aggravating. Given all the options available at the table right now, being stuck with the twins for a conversation partner really wasn't that bad.

The meal itself wasn't that different from dinner any day, really, so far as the food part went. There seemed to be more desserts out, but Liz ignored those by default, since they tended to be far too sweet for her. (Though, the elves sent up some of her ice cream a few minutes after she showed up, because the elves continued to be great.) There were a few unfamiliar dishes, but she didn't bother trying any of them — she was aware she had rather specific tastes, if something didn't immediately strike her as possibly good it probably wasn't worth it.

The most noticeable difference was probably the pitchers sitting here and there, which were apparently a few different kinds of wine and mead, plus a couple glass bottles deep into the professors' area of the table that were probably harder liquor. (Liz learned, watching and listening over the course of the meal, that apparently it was acceptable for the students to have the wine and mead, but not the harder stuff, which sort of made sense, she guessed.) She assumed the alcohol was at least partially responsible for most of the table seeming noisier and sillier and gigglier than usual. Which was kind of amusing to watch, she guessed, even if she couldn't imagine being quite that silly herself.

Not that she really could — she tried a sip of the wine and the mead just out of curiosity, but they were both too sweet for her. Which wasn't a surprise, normal people liked things far too sweet, even non-dessert food sometimes. Liz had to watch which platter she got bread from, even on normal non-holiday meals, how the fuck do you make bread too sweet, honestly...

The meal gradually broke up, but people didn't actually leave. Pairs and littler groups moved to other tables with their drinks to chat, the kids pulling out games from nowhere — one which appeared to be some kind of card game (the cards periodically exploded), and another that looked very much like jacks (though they threw out jinxes now and again). Board games had appeared at a few of the little tables, some of the attendees wandering off to play, carrying a couple snacks and their drinks.

Snape, Liz noticed, had ended up at a chess table with one of the older students. Fingers flicking at the card in her pocket, she frowned to herself, biting her lip. She'd intended to catch up with Snape on the way back to the dorms, but if he was staying...

Oh, well. Liz waited for the game to end — Snape won, obviously — and then through a second game — Snape won, again — then finally swept up the moment the older girl wandered off to rejoin her friends. "Hello, Professor," she said, flopping into the empty chair.

One of Snape's eyebrows ticked up, just slightly. "Severus."

"Er, what?"

"This is not a night for proprieties and titles, Elizabeth. It's tradition, I'm afraid."

"...Oh." She had noticed that, of course, that everyone had just been using first names the whole evening, people who ordinarily wouldn't be using first names with each other. It hadn't really occurred to her to wonder if there was a reason for that. "Er, okay then, Severus." She winced, hissed, "God, that feels weird..."

The corner of his lips twitched, just slightly, his amusement far more clear in the bright ringing from his head. "Good." He took a slow sip of his drink, a casual tap of the chessboard righting all the pieces in their proper places — wandless magic of some kind, she assumed, she'd felt a slight crackle of static right as he did it. "Your move."

Liz glanced down at the checkered board, the variety of carved ceramic pieces arrayed across it, and froze.

"Elizabeth?"

"I, er, don't know how to play chess."

Snape sighed.

Over the next few minutes, Snape went through explaining the rules — the different pieces and how they moved and the win conditions, a few basic strategy things — very quickly, before jumping straight into their first game. It wasn't completely sink-or-swim, though, he kept shoving feelings at her, a sort of sharp wariness spilling into the air when she was about to do something stupid, or cool approval when she managed to find something that was actually pretty good. (That second one didn't happen very often.) It didn't seem too complicated, but it'd probably take a few games to get the hang of it — Snape was racking up dead white pieces far more quickly than she was capturing black ones.

"I'm surprised."

It took her a second to realise he wasn't surprised by anything to do with the chess. "What?"

"I don't think I've ever seen any of the students staying back for the holiday forego the wine entirely."

"Oh, that." Liz shrugged. "It's too sweet, is all. It's fine, I don't mind."

Snape gave her a flat look for a couple seconds, one finger tapping at the table. With another little sigh, his wand appeared out of his sleeve, he silently cast a quick charm — whatever it was, it hung over the table, a faint tingle on the air. Probably a paling of some kind. "One moment." Carrying his own mug, he swept off toward the main table. Liz barely waited a minute before he was back, now with a second mug. Holding it out toward her, gripping awkwardly by the rim, he said, "This is the only one you're getting, don't waste both our time asking."

Oh. Er. Out of a lack of any other ideas of what she was supposed to do — she hadn't thought he'd go off and get something for her, what the hell — she accepted the mug. Apparently her fingers had been cold, because the thing was almost tingly warm, she hadn't noticed. Hugging the mug to herself, she muttered (awkwardly), "Thanks."

Snape waved it off — or maybe the wave was wandless magic, because the faint feeling of the charm over the table vanished at once. He sat down again, glanced at the table for barely a couple seconds before making his move.

As she scrambled to figure out what the hell she should do now, she took a sip from the mug — and was distracted from the game, blinking down at the stuff. It was pretty good, actually, all creamy and cinnamony, with an odd sharp bite to it that she didn't recognise, that was probably the alcohol. And...apparently she was colder than she'd thought, because swallowing something warm felt good just by itself.

(How the hell had Tracey realised she was cold all the time but Liz hadn't? That didn't make any bloody sense.)

Before too long, Liz lost the first game, because of course she did, obviously. Snape set the pieces back up with another simple tap — then raised an eyebrow at her, silently asking if she wanted to go again. She didn't, really, but she hadn't even gotten to the reason she was here in the first place yet. She didn't just come right out and ask though, went ahead and made her first move.

Finally, after a few moves had gone by and she thought it wouldn't be too intrusive and weird, Liz pulled the note out of her pocket, set it on the table. "I was wondering, do you recognise the handwriting on this?"

Snape glanced at the note, the one that'd come with the magical bit of cloth that had (apparently) been her father's. A lurching something cut through his mind, Snape bit out a sharp sigh. "He gave you that damn cloak, did he."

Okay, Liz hadn't expected Snape to guess what it was that easily. "It really was James's then?"

His lip curling with disdain that wasn't mirrored in his head, Snape nodded. "Yes, your father was quite fond of that detestable old rag. He and Black used it to make an impressive nuisance of themselves on the regular."

"I'd heard he was a bit of a bully, yeah." For a second, Snape felt like he couldn't decide whether he should be more surprised or amused, which was kind of weird — one of the very, very few things any of the professors had told her about James and his friends was that they perhaps liked their "pranks" a little too much. She wasn't so stupid she coudn't read between the lines. "I was asking about the handwriting, though."

"Albus." Probably noticing her confusion, he added, "The Headmaster. He never did explain why he had the thing to begin with, but I didn't think it a matter of any true importance. When he first told me he had it, years ago now, he expressed his intention to pass it on to you when he felt the time was right. It would seem that time is now."

She would wonder why he hadn't passed it on to her years ago — the ability to turn invisible whenever she wanted might have been quite convenient, before her mind-control superpowers had kicked in. But that was silly, he obviously would have just sent it to her vault at Gringotts, not handed it straight to her. (He did have complete access to her estate which supposedly existed, more than she even would until she turned thirteen, but he hadn't actually touched anything. That was one of the very few straight answers the goblins would give her, stubborn bastards.) "Right, okay. That's all I wanted to know."

"You shouldn't open anything if you don't know who sent it."

Liz opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. She knew that, actually, it could be cursed or something. Too surprised by the surreal fact that she'd gotten Christmas gifts, it simply hadn't occurred to her at the time. "Oh. Oops?"

A shiver of irritation shifted through Snape, but his face didn't twitch. "You needn't worry over such things too much, so long as you are at Hogwarts. The chances of any sort of cursed object getting past the wards and the elves are so low the danger is negligible. Should you be sent anything anonymously outside the castle, however, do not open it before you have a competent adult check it over. If you haven't anyone else available, owls will find me at home."

"Er, I wouldn't want to bother you, or..."

Shooting her a flat look, Snape drawled, "Believe it or not, Elizabeth, given the choice between your possible death and losing an afternoon of leisure to myself, I do prefer the latter. However narrow that margin may be."

Liz laughed.

A few moves passed in silence, focusing on the game and sipping at their drinks. (Liz was starting to feel a little tingly, she assumed it was supposed to do that.) As he took one of her castles, Snape said, "You're being too reactive."

"Huh?"

He didn't say anything for a moment, staring across the table at her, the white castle turning in his fingers. "Unless I am much mistaken, you are focusing solely on your own potential path towards a win, reacting to my moves as they happen." He set the castle down with the other dead white pieces, the ceramic making a high click against the table. "You must not only develop your own strategy, but analyse the board in an effort to decipher your opponent's, so you may plan a proactive response. To do otherwise dooms you to a haphazard, reactive defence, which leaves you all too vulnerable."

Liz frowned at him — he had that weird quality to his voice, the kind where someone was saying one thing but also another thing, trying to be clever. "You're not just talking about chess, are you."

A hidden smile twitched at Snape's lips. It was so subtle Liz wasn't even certain it was actually there, she might just be inventing it based on the amusement she was picking up from his head. "No, I am not just talking about chess. You must realise your asinine little rivalry with Draco and Miss Parkinson is not in any way settled." Draco, but Miss Parkinson? What was that about? "It may be some time before they retaliate — I wouldn't be surprised if they're sufficiently intimidated by the censure of the older students that they hold off until next autumn — but it is inevitable. You might reconsider your strategy for dealing with them. I'll admit you handled that confrontation at November's house meeting quite well, but it never should have gotten to that point."

Well. That was irritating. She'd sort of assumed they'd be back eventually, yes, but she couldn't deny part of her had hoped they'd learn their lesson and leave her the fuck alone. "I didn't have a strategy."

"Choosing not to respond in anticipation of your opponent tiring of the game is a strategy, Elizabeth. Attempting to terrify your opponent into compliance is, also, basic strategy. The latter worked out well for you, this time, but children's memories are short. They will respond, given time. Their enmity will not simply go away if you ignore them long enough."

Liz barely managed to hold in a groan of frustration. "Well, why the hell not? It's not like I've ever done anything to them, why can't they just leave me alone?"

"It's not a matter of anything you've done, Elizabeth, but who you are."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

Snape let out a brief sigh. Moving a bishop deep toward her end of the board, he said, "Checkmate." Wait, what?! How did he... "When it comes to your relationships with your peers, there will always be matters outside of your control," Snape lectured, as Liz scanned the board, trying to figure out where the hell that had come from, see if there was any possible move she could do to slip her king out of danger. (There didn't seem to be one, what the fuck...) "You will always, for the rest of your life, have the legacy of the Dark Lord's fall hanging over your head. Much has been said on the matter by many people, in the decade since it happened, and everyone you will ever meet will have certain preconceptions about you, dictated by their own history and politics. You can learn to play with the hand you've been dealt, but you can't throw it away entirely — you said that day that you don't play this game, but you have no choice but to play, in one way or another. It is unfortunate, but it is as it is."

Liz flicked over her king, and collapsed back in her chair, hugging her (mostly empty but still pleasantly warm) mug to herself. "Why does that matter so much? I mean, it's not like that Dark Lord person is still around or anything."

After a brief hesitation, he muttered, "Perhaps. But whether he still lives or not is ultimately irrelevant. Draco is constrained to behave a certain way by his upbringing and his circumstances. His treatment of you is, at least in part, borne out of a desire to please his father. He is misinterpreting his parents' desires in this matter somewhat, but whether he is correct or not doesn't truly matter, he will continue to act in a manner that he believes will please them."

"How is being an infuriating little shite supposed to accomplish anything?"

A shade of amusement tinged the air, but Snape's face didn't twitch. "Honestly, I don't think Draco has thought it through that far."

Of course he hadn't. Liz grumbled to herself, sipping at the remains of her drink. She couldn't say she was surprised — she hadn't really thought Draco and Pansy were done messing with her. Why should they be, this whole thing had started over something completely bloody stupid, and her slapping them down hard once hadn't actually changed anything. It wasn't like Draco and Pansy were going to magically stop being idiots just because she'd gotten one over on them.

She'd sort of hoped they would, but they hadn't really expected them to. People didn't work that way. Unfortunately.

"What should I do, then?" Because, honestly, she had no bloody clue. Ignoring them until they went away had really been the only halfway reasonable idea she'd had. She'd had other ideas, of course, but she was going to go out on a limb and assume Snape wouldn't consider permanently altering her classmates' minds to make them more cooperative, or perhaps just straight-up murdering them, to be in any way reasonable.

"I cannot tell you how to manage your relationships with your peers, Elizabeth. I've given you my warning, and I have nothing more to say on the matter."

Well, that was unhelpful. Liz glared at him for long seconds, but he showed absolutely no sign of budging, expressionless as a bloody brick wall. She hadn't expected anything else, but it was still irritating. She drained the rest of her drink, set the mug back on the table with a put-upon sigh. "Fine, I'll figure it out on my own, I guess. I really hate people sometimes, you know?"

Snape's head rang with silent laughter again. "I am familiar with the feeling, believe it or not."

Oh, she knew, he wasn't exactly subtle about it. "Anyway, I think I've gotten my arse kicked enough, I'm going back to the dorms." That, and the longer she stayed up here, the more chances Snape would have to drag her into another uncomfortable conversation. No thanks, she'd had enough. She pushed herself to her feet, and nearly toppled right over, feeling oddly light-headed. After a second she was fine, though, she'd probably just moved too quickly, that happened sometimes. She might have forgotten too many meals with everyone gone...

"Good night, Elizabeth."

"Good night...Professor." She knew she was supposed to use his name, since that was apparently something mages did on Christmas, but it just felt too bloody weird.

Liz fled back toward the quiet sanctuary of the nearly-empty Slytherin dorm, Snape's fond amusement echoing in her wake.

---

[Gŵyl Oleuon] — Supposed to be "festival of lights", but I don't speak Welsh. A Brythonic Celtic precursor to Candlemas, on the same day of but slightly different than Imbolc.

If anyone noticed Liz refers to the twins as a single person (i.e. [favourite Weasley] and [a conversation partner]) that's on purpose. Back on the train, she noted that the twins were a single mind spread across two bodies, which is just kind of neat. She really thinks of them as a single person, whether or not that's perfectly accurate (it's debatable).

Okay, this chapter wasn't meant to be nearly this long, thing got away from me. Also, I didn't expect it to be nearly this soon — I've written this whole thing since posting the first five chapters, had days I wrote over 6k words twice, which is absurd. Don't expect updates that frequently, I really should get back to other projects.

There are currently two more chapters planned for first year, but we'll see how that goes. The first one has the first serious plot divergence, so...should be fun?

—Lysandra