Cassandra ran to her dorm room, and didn't cry. She thought she would, when she finally told Cedric what she'd been thinking since the day he confessed his feelings for her - that he didn't know the real her, and would no longer care for her once he did. But every time she felt her eyes filling up with tears, a self-aware part of her made her bark out an involuntary laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. Her parents were in Azkaban, there was a dark wizard roaming around her school, and she wanted to cry over a boy who hadn't stopped her when she had walked away from him.
She believed that if she were not the result of centuries of inbreeding, not the daughter of Death Eaters, she and Cedric might have been great together. But her temperament belonged to a Lestrange. Cedric had believed her to be kindhearted and good despite her family name, and because of his regard for her, and the lure of the tenderness he had shown her, she had been willing to be that, for him. Subtract the overintensity and the penchant for violence from a Lestrange, and you get someone willing to do anything for those they're devoted to. But such restraint didn't come naturally to her.
Yesterday, she had needed to scare Hagrid to get him to tell her what she wanted to know about Draco's and the other first years' detention in the Forbidden Forest, and so she had. She wanted to resent Cedric for having a problem with that. It wasn't as if he was close to the groundskeeper. But if he hadn't cared, he wouldn't be Cedric, and whatever was Cedric, whatever he was composed of, she wanted. They dealt in different values. For his sentimentality, she would give him her strength, and her loyalty. But in the end, that wasn't enough to balance their accounts. He was going to end things with her. Because he was a better person than her, better than any wizard she knew, the nearly perfect guy. Touchingly perfect.
The next day, during lunch, she sat on the opposite side from her usual spot, with her back to the rest of the tables. She didn't want to risk accidentally locking eyes with a certain Hufflepuff. Adrian took the seat by her side.
"I just can't believe it," Adrian said for the upteenth time. Cassandra had told him what had happened while pushing her food around her plate. "He's not going to break up with you over this. He thinks the sun shines out of your ass, it's actually nauseating."
"Not anymore," she said glumly. "He wasn't even mad at me, Adrian, he was- It was like he couldn't reconcile what he'd seen with the person he made me up to be in his head. He's probably disgusted by me now."
"I don't get it," Adrian said. "You've been glued to each other for months. How could he have not figured out you're… you? No offence, but anyone who's around you on a regular basis can tell you're not particularly nice. Or harmless. It's half the fun of being your friend. I thought he was into that, opposites attract and all. Maybe he thought-"
"What does it matter what he thought of me before?" Cassandra cut him off impatiently. "He knows exactly what I am now."
"Maybe we're just not meant for it," Adrian said after a while. She looked at him, trying to understand the meaning of his words. He kept looking ahead, not meeting her eyes. "Love, romance. The whole thing."
"Who do you mean by we? The two of us? Purebloods, Slytherins?" Cassandra asked.
Adrian shrugged. "Pureblood Slytherins? I don't know. Who do we even know with parents who married for love?"
"The Weasleys," Cassandra said. "My aunt Andromeda was disowned for marrying a muggleborn she fell in love with."
She searched her mind, but couldn't think of anyone else. The adults in her social circle had all either married someone their parents had chosen for them, or chosen to marry someone they knew their parents would approve of.
Adrian was now using his fork to angrily stab the food on his plate. "My parents married because they were both half-bloods who found each other agreeable. They want me to find a nice pureblood girl, or maybe a half-blood girl with good connections, so I can marry her and take over the family business. Maybe that's what I should do. Maybe that's all we get. Love is for poor people, and Hufflepuffs."
Cassandra listened to her friend silently. She didn't know what to say, or to think. Maybe he was right. For the first time in a while, Cassandra ached with how much she missed having a mother. Mothers were supposed to teach their daughters about these things, weren't they? About love, and relationships. She wished she had a mother she could talk to about Cedric, and Adrian's situation. She couldn't fathom what her own mother would say about either, if they could talk.
"If that turns out to be the case, then we'll just get married to each other. We can sleep in separate bedrooms, and ignore each other's affairs like proper purebloods," Cassandra said. "You'll have to take my last name, though. I'm not ending my line to become a Pucey."
The two friends smiled at each other for the first time since the beginning of their conversation.
"Are you heading to class?" Adrian asked, getting up from the table. She shook her head. "All right, I'll cover for you with McGonagall. And if Snape asks, you were indisposed. Witch problems."
Some time after lunch, feeling restless and tired of pacing in the common room, Cassandra headed out to the Quidditch field.
Once she got there, she positioned the tree bludgers she had brought, under a freezing charm, in her usual practice setup - in a triangle formation, each at one edge of the enormous field. She mounted her broom and kicked off from the ground, hard. Forty feet up in the air, hovering right at the center of the triangle formed by the bludgers, she took her wand out and performed three counterspells in quick succession, aiming at the frozen iron balls. She swiftly tucked her wand into her boot, and raised her bat.
When her bat smashed against the first bludger flying at lightning-fast speed towards her face, Cassandra felt her teeth rattle. The shock of the impact felt like relief. The ball shot like a meteor away from her. Before she could watch it make its way back, she dove down quickly, in order to avoid a second bludger coming from behind her straight for her spine, that she had sensed more than seen.
She darted around the field, weaving and twisting in the air so fast she was almost a blur, escaping and hitting bludgers. It was glorious. In one especially satisfying move, she managed to stop one of the heavy iron balls speeding towards by hitting it with another, well-aimed one. When the two bludgers collided, they cracked like thunder. At one point, one of the balls hit her left shoulder painfully, almost throwing her off her broom, but she kept going.
Cassandra hit brutally and efficiently, keeping the center line that ran through her head, back and hip straight, her rear arm bent and elbow tucked in at a ninety degree angle, and used her entire body to generate power when she swinged, rather than just her arms. She wasn't as physically strong as most beaters, who were usually male, but she made up for her size with technique and speed.
She kept going for as long as she could. Her whole body ached and she was drenched in sweat, but she felt alive. She had just sent a bludger in the direction of the lake, when at the edge of her peripheral vision, she saw another one coming blindingly fast at her from her right. When she turned and raised her bat to swing, she was startled by the feeling of an iron ball colliding brutally against the middle right side of her back. She was lurched forward by the impact, and was still trying to catch her breath when the bludger she'd forgotten about hit her in the face, throwing her off her broom.
She was woken up by the feeling of something poking at her face. She opened her eyes and realized it was Klaus, perched on her breastbone, who'd been gently trying to bring her out of unconsciousness. She pet the raven gratefully. After making sure his witch was alright, he jumped from her chest to the ground, staying by her side.
She looked up at the sky, and noticed black spots swimming in her vision. She blinked a few times, trying to clear them away, and realized some of those spots were the bludgers, now flying aimlessly above her. She drew her leg up weakly and pulled her wand from her boot, then aimed a freezing spell at each of the three balls. They stopped moving and fell to the ground one by one with heavy thuds.
After a minute, she started assessing the damage from her fall. She had a split lip and her mouth tasted like blood. She propped herself up on her elbows and turned her head to spit out the blood filling up her mouth on the grass. She must've bit her tongue on her way down. Her arms and legs were sore, but otherwise fine. There was a knot forming in the back of her head, her cheekbone felt like it was going to explode, and she could feel a sharp, stabbing pain on her back. Broken rib. She could go to the infirmary and endure Madam Pomfrey's fussing while she was healed, or take one of her grandfather's bone mending potions and be miserable for the rest of the week while her other injuries healed naturally. Yeah, she would take the potion she knew was somewhere in her trunk.
Cassandra took a deep breath, wincing at the pain that accompanied the movement, and looked up at the sky again. Her body hurt, but her mind was quiet for the first time since her fight with Cedric. She watched the clouds moving slowly, enjoying the peaceful moment. The moon was visible in the sky, despite it being the middle of the afternoon. She stared at it, trying to figure out why that nagged at the back of her mind. Hagrid had said something about the sky, hadn't he? She recalled their conversation, than sat up sharply once she remembered exactly what; her broken rib screamed at her, but she ignored it. The centaurs had repeatedly told Hagrid that 'Mars was bright' that night. Centaurs were famously skilled at diving the fates through stargazing. That had to mean something.
She gathered her training equipment and walked back to the castle. On the way to Slytherin Dungeon, she passed by students who looked at her face with concern, without noticing them. She had let herself be distracted by the drama with her not-boyfriend, and forgotten what the purpose of her interrogation of the school's groundskeeper had been in the first place - to understand what was happening in Forbidden Forest, and how it might affect her and the people she cared about at Hogwarts.
After taking the bone mending potion she summoned from her trunk, she sent Klaus to find Adrian while she showered and changed robes.
"Did you bring it?" Cassandra said as she got to the sofa her friend was sitting on, waiting for her.
"Merlin, Cassandra!" Adrian shrieked once he saw her. Before she could say anything, he got up and dragged her hurriedly to a secluded space in the common room, looking around to make sure no one was paying attention to them. "Did you hurt anyone?" He asked her quietly.
"Did I hurt anyone?" Cassandra repeated.
Adrian looked at her intently, then gestured at her bruised face. "I'm guessing whoever did that to you is lying in a pool of their own blood somewhere in the castle. We can go to Snape, I'll tell him I saw them attack you first. It wouldn't be the first time someone tried."
Once Cassandra understood the meaning of Adrian's words, she wanted to hug him. "First of all, I would die for you, Pucey, know that. But we won't need to arrange any cover-ups today. I got knocked out by a bludger while I was practicing earlier. The book. Did you bring it?"
"Yeah," Adrian said. "It's on the couch."
Cassandra sat down, grabbed her friend's copy of Unfogging the Future and got to work.
"What do you need my Divination book for? You said it's a useless class," Adrian asked.
"Maybe I spoke too soon," Cassandra said distractedly while she flipped through the book's pages. When she noticed Adrian's incredulous look, she rolled her eyes. "What? I was wrong, there, I said it. There's no class you can take to become a Seer. You either are, or you aren't. But you can learn enough to be able to interpret someone else's prediction, even if you don't have the Sight. Therefore, the subject as a whole is not useless."
"Whose?" Adrian asked, grasping her reason for her sudden interest in the subject.
"The centaurs in the forest. Found it," Cassandra exclaimed, reading bits and pieces of the passage she'd been looking for aloud as she skimmed through the text. "Mars… named after the Roman god of war… rules over willpower and the urge to violence… symbolizes war, hatred, virility, masculinity…"
"That doesn't sound good," Adrian said.
"No, it doesn't," Cassandra agreed. "The centaurs kept saying that 'Mars was bright' that night. Could that have meant they had predicted violent acts were going to be committed?"
"A unicorn was killed, and your cousin said whatever did it tried to go for Harry Potter. Those are violent acts," Adrian said.
"Whoever did it," Cassandra corrected him. "You know what I don't get? Centaurs are supposed to be territorial to the point of violence, but they let a dark wizard roam their forest murdering innocent creatures at will? It doesn't make sense."
"Maybe they're scared of this dark wizard. You said it would take someone seriously twisted to drink unicorn blood to stay alive," Adrian replied.
"An entire herd afraid of one wizard on the brink of death?" Cassandra mused. "I don't think so. There has to be another reason."
"We could ask Professor Trelawney," Adrian suggested. "Even if she's not a real Seer, she might know what the thing about Mars means. Or how centaurs choose to go about acting on their predictions. She's been teaching that class for ages."
After they knocked on her office door, the teacher greeted the two students with a glazed look in her eyes, saying she had expected them all afternoon. If that was the case, Cassandra thought when she stepped into the room, she could've aired out the place a little. As it was, heavy curtains blocked out the sunlight, and loose colored fabrics were thrown haphazardly over pieces of gaudy, old-fashioned furniture. Candles floated above them, creating shadows that moved randomly around the dimly lit room. With the addition of the sickly sweet scent that permeated the space, the Divination professor's office was an onslaught to the senses.
It took very little time in the presence of Sybill Trelawney for them to realize she would be of no help at all. The witch spoke in a soft, ethereal voice, and talked circles around the subjects Cassandra brought up, without ever giving a direct answer to her questions. She regurgitated the explanation on the influence of Mars that could be found in the book used in her class, didn't seem to know much about centaurs, and spent an inordinate amount of time talking about her great-great-grandmother, a famous Seer with whom Cassandra apparently shared her first name.
"She's a loon," Cassandra mouthed to Adrian behind the teacher's back. She had insisted on making them tea, so she could read their fates in the dregs before they went back to their common room, and was blabbing about the oncoming death of a Ravenclaw girl she had apparently foretold at the beginning of the school year. Adrian snorted silently and nodded his head in agreement.
They politely drank the tea, swirled the dregs, per Professor Trelawney's instructions, then drained their cups and handed them to her. She started with Adrian's, staring into the teacup while rotating it clockwise.
"A very interesting cup," The teacher said softly. "A frog… that means a significant spiritual transformation is coming."
Cassandra and Adrien hummed, pretending to be greatly interested in what she said.
"A pair of glasses… you are being fooled by someone close to you," she continued.
"Wow," Adrian said sardonically. Cassandra pressed her lips tight to keep herself from laughing.
"And a knife… there is someone in your life who doesn't belong there, dear. I do believe you will experience an extraordinary improvement in your spirits once you eliminate a traitorous friend from your circle, Mr. Pucey," the Divination teacher said pointedly. Cassandra smiled to herself, wondering if she was supposed to be this traitorous friend.
"I will, professor, of course," Adrian replied.
"Now to your fate, Ms. Lestrange," Professor Trelawney said in her dreamlike tone. She lifted the second teacup in the air and rotated it delicately for a moment, gazing at its bottom. Cassandra and Adrian were sharing an amused look when they were startled by the sound of breaking china. Cassandra looked back at Trelawney, who was now staring lifelessly at her, teacup no longer in her hands. When she spoke, the guttural sound of her voice made the hair on the back of Cassandra's neck stand up. "Cassandra Lestrange… Forced into battle, the war's greatest killer you'll become… Twice you'll lose your family, and twice you'll choose your targets in those you find responsible for the slaughter of your loved ones… Bound in a covenant, only death will undo the knot you join in."
At once, Trelawney seemed to wake up from her trance. "Oh!" The Seer exclaimed. "I seem to have dropped your teacup, how clumsy of me. Maybe we can leave your reading for another time? You can always come by my office, I do love visits."
Cassandra stared at the teacher, speechless.
"Holy shit," Adrian said.