Chapter Thirteen: The Duel
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Luna awoke to an empty dormitory. The time told her she had risen miraculously early for her relatively late night, as she still had enough time to have breakfast and get ready for morning Arithmancy. Given this, her absent Slytherin housemates appeared either to have risen sometime before dawn or not to have gone to bed at all; Luna mentally filed this away as something to investigate later, and slowly levered herself out of bed. Mercifully, it appeared she had not had enough wine the previous night to land herself with a hangover, and had escaped with a — moderate, she judged after swallowing once or twice, case of dry mouth. After doing a few exercises designed to return proper magical function to the hands, just for conscientiousness' sake, Luna quietly charmed some water to spray into her mouth and swished it around for a couple of seconds before swallowing. As usual, the conjured water tasted of sulphur and just slightly of mouldering almonds, but it did the job nevertheless, and her throat and mouth felt much better.
This done, Luna quickly dressed herself and headed off to the Great Hall to eat before class. To her delight, Euphemia, Fleamont and Everett were sitting at the Gryffindor table, and waved her over to eat with them. After the events of last night, as it turned out, a little while laughing with her friends over eggs and toast and complaining about Professor Kettleburn's enthusiasm for lengthy essays was exactly what she needed. When nine-a.m. rolled around, Luna found herself reluctant to leave her friends, and decided on impulse that she could stand to miss one more hour of Arithmancy without her marks suffering too badly. When Euphemia met her eyes and glanced meaningfully at the clock, brows raised, Luna simply shook her head, and Euphemia subsided without comment.
The four of them lingered at the breakfast table for another three-quarters of an hour, before very slowly meandering their way over to Charms class with Professor Mulciber. The man was stocky and of average height, with curly, greying dark hair and faintly squinting eyes, which were assisted by a pair of round spectacles. He was unusually quiet for a Charms professor. Luna had learned from Euphemia at the beginning of term, going off Prefect gossip, that Professor Mulciber was estranged from the rest of the Mulciber family, that the schism was complicated and at least partially against his will, and that he knew that a young nephew of his was to attend Hogwarts soon but was unsure of the boy's exact age. As there had been no such child in the Sorting ceremony at the beginning of term, Fleamont had added softly, Professor Mulciber would have to wait at least another year before he would be able to see a member of his own family. Awareness of this depressing fact was evident in the professor's subdued demeanour and rather dim aura, but despite these he nevertheless managed to teach Charms passably well, in Luna's estimation. This class period was not one of his greatest hits, but Luna did manage to refine her wand motions for Banishing Charms based upon his advice.
The remainder of the morning and the first hour of the afternoon were also spent with her friends, collaborating over homework and competing to see who could conjure the most brightly-coloured birds, as Luna did her best to avoid thinking about anything that mattered. Her period of respite ended too quickly, and she was forced to part ways with the other three at five minutes to one, so as to arrive on time to Defence Against the Dark Arts.
Almost immediately following her arrival at the doorway of the Defence classroom, Luna was struck by the impression that the room had grown larger. Some of that, she recognised, was probably related to the fact that the rows of desks that normally lined the floor were nowhere to be seen. Those students who had already arrived were clustered in front of Professor Merrythought's desk, chatting quietly as they waited for class to begin. Luna noted that Cecily and Walburga were standing at Riddle's shoulder, towards the right side of the room. Edith Selwyn was not with them; Luna spotted her loitering near the back of the throng, looking bored and ignoring the occasional glance from Walburga. After a moment of consideration, she went to stand at a measured distance away from Edith; a part of her wanted to just talk to the other girl, but she knew that now wasn't the best time to do so.
Professor Merrythought looked up from her paperwork, saw Luna standing in the back, and scanned the room briefly in what was evidently a headcount. When she finished, she stood up and smiled her characteristic wolf-spider smile. "Hello there, class. It looks like we're all here, finally." Luna was a bit needled by this; after all, she'd only been a minute late. When she took a moment to look round again, however, it did appear that the entirety of the class, excluding her, had arrived fairly early. Was there something particularly special about today's lesson that she might have forgotten?
Her unvoiced question was answered almost as quickly as she'd thought it. "Today is indeed that long-awaited day," the professor intoned, her solemn tone dripping with irony. "Yes, indeed. The day you all get to finally release all that pent-up aggression and do your damnedest to inflict each other with the most creative of non-fatal injuries. I'm understood, am I not?" She stared at them all through her tinted spectacles, and Luna nodded along with her classmates, suppressing a smile. Professor McGonagall would have loved her. "Good. I'm sure you all remember the basics we went over on Thursday. Now, rather than allow you to choose your own partners, I have deigned to place you all into pre-assigned pairs." She raised a hand at the scattering of groans that rose in reply. "Yes, yes, it's all very terrible. My primary goal in this class, however, aside from teaching you, is ensuring your relative safety. I have put each of you with a partner who should be fairly close to your skill level, according to my own guesswork. This way, fate willing, none of you will end up jinxed into the beyond because your opponent has bothered to spend an extra moment or two practising their Reflecting Charms and you have not. It's for your own good, the end, no arguments, no appeals." Her smile widened. "Is that clear?" Riddle stayed silent this time. A dutiful echo of yes, Professor spread through the crowd of students. Merrythought inclined her head briefly, apparently satisfied. "All right, then. Listen carefully, because your partners are as follows, and I am not repeating the entire list for every lackwit who would rather focus on gossiping about your little weekend escapades." She fluttered her fingers at them, blithely ignoring the fact that the room had been entirely gossip-free since she'd started speaking. The Slytherins might play along with Riddle's passive-aggressive taunts, Luna reflected, but they wouldn't dare mutter under their breath to each other, not in this class. Professor Merrythought breathed in deeply and began running through the names.
"Evan Rosier and Thaddeus Spectre. Edith Selwyn and Walburga Black. Rabastan Lestrange and Pallas-Athena Quirrell. Evelyn Fitzwallace and Helen Orlaith. Jade Collins and Vanya Dolohov…"
Luna listened with trancelike intensity as Merrythought went down the list, exhaling shortly in relief and letting her shoulders slump when Riddle was named alongside Abraxas Malfoy. When she finally heard her own name, it felt so sudden that she came awake with a start: Luna Lovegood and Orion Black... Well. Perhaps it wasn't the ideal scenario exactly, but Black seemed disinterested enough that duelling him likely wouldn't cause her any problems. As Merrythought directed them all to stand at marked spots on the floor that were each a yard-and-a-half or so apart, Luna began mentally laying out her strategy for the next forty-five minutes. She planned to avoid anything conspicuous or flashy, and needed to balance her spellwork carefully; it wouldn't do to make an enemy out of Black by winning too quickly, but then, she also didn't wish to seem a pushover by giving him an easy victory. Possibly she could play off of the Slytherins' perception of her as odd and dim-witted by ignoring the assignment altogether or using spells that she simply liked rather than those that were useful; several years ago, she might have followed that course without a second thought and done whatever she wanted. No, Luna concluded: the time for such frivolous deceptions was long past. It might be easier for her to follow her instincts and go back to happily ignoring the reactions of everyone around her, but however simpler that might seem, it would only set her efforts back in the long term. She couldn't afford to waste time.
Eventually, Luna settled on a simple defensive strategy. It occurred to her, in a brief and wry flash of insight, that she had once told Ron she'd never won a game of Wizards' Chess, and that it had been true.
Across from her, Black was moving into the standard duelling stance and shaking his black hair out of his eyes. His gaze was flat and impenetrable as it focused on her, and his expression reminded Luna inexplicably of Walburga, although the girl standing on the other side of the room seemed rather dissimilar to him in personality. His cousin was as histrionic and mercurial as Orion was stoic and close-mouthed; however, the two of them shared a kind of gracefully cruel air about their persons that made Luna shudder almost as much as Riddle's unsettlingly hollow charisma. Luna had little time to wonder if Walburga would one day be a favourite of her fanatical young niece before Merrythought gave the starting signal and the students bowed to each other. To her surprise, however, Black did not immediately begin attacking her; he seemed preoccupied with something, and after a moment Luna realised he was busy blocking a flurry of misaimed spells from somewhere to their right. His eyes flicked back to Luna, glinting with evident irritation, but he merely inclined his head at her and summoned a tangle of ribbons that flung themselves forward toward her legs. Luna made short work of incinerating them, although it took her a frustratingly long, adrenalin-spiked two seconds to remember the proper incantation. When she looked up, Black was lying sprawled on the floor, several steps back from his mark, and glaring furiously in the direction from which the misaimed spells had come a moment ago. Luna followed his gaze; it was Abraxas Malfoy, who was standing calmly in his duelling stance with his eyes on Riddle, across from him. As she watched, Black sat up and cast an enraged and probably ill-advised Full Body-Bind Curse at Malfoy, who handily blocked it before shooting a spray of emerald-coloured vipers back at him. Luna fell out of her stance and glanced at Riddle, hoping she wouldn't regret it.
He had been staring at her. He now smiled invitingly, with an apologetic roll of his eyes at Malfoy, and inclined his head toward an empty space toward the end of the line of students. The spot was on the far side of the room from Merrythought, and also happened to be large enough for two duellists to test each other's mettle with relative freedom. After a moment, Riddle abandoned his place and moved swiftly to the empty area. Luna glanced at the professor, who apparently hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary, and followed to stand across from him. The gleam of triumph she saw when she met his eyes irked her, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that she was about to get a chance to vent her emotions in the most direct way possible.
He bowed to her, his smile turning ironic. Luna, never taking her eyes from his, bowed in return. Without warning, he moved like water into Morgana's Primary Offensive, a highly aggressive duelling posture that called for several weak spells cast in succession, followed by a higher-tier spell and a Shield-Shatter Curse that, in theory, would leave the target vulnerable for several seconds. Thinking quickly, Luna fell into a favoured posture of hers called Pyrrha's Triangle, a strategy that utilised a combination of Arithmantic properties of angles and quick-fire stabilising spells to guard against an especially forceful offence; the posture would have been too impractical to maintain had she been duelling a more restrained opponent, but Riddle was evidently going to play this one true to form. It didn't surprise her that he'd chosen such a strong posture for the opening move of a duel, but she was half-bemused, half-impressed that he practised proper duelling form at all. Very few Hogwarts students thought of duelling as anything more than an over-formal fistfight, and even Luna hadn't had the idea to study advanced duelling techniques until after the first time she'd been forced to go head-to-head with a Death Eater. Then again, she supposed that such an arcane school of knowledge would fit in rather neatly with his highly romanticised self-concept.
His first barrage of spells failed to make much more than a dent in her shielding. She saw a glint of appreciation in his eyes at her evidently well-chosen defence, but he wasted no time in switching tactics; the Pendragon Pentacle was his next choice, a series of hexes cast in a unique area-of-effect pattern that was tricky to get right, but if executed correctly would substantially weaken any non-offensive spells cast from her position on the floor unless she moved either much closer to him or much farther away. Distantly, Luna remarked upon his evident affinity for Arthurian-era postures. Did he see himself as King Arthur, or as Mordred?
As the duel progressed, she had increasingly little time for such wayward imaginings. He kept her guessing constantly, moving from highly advanced spellwork to the most basic of tactics seemingly at random, but always returning to the offensive. Luna, in turn, kept a careful eye on his duelling attitudes, which usually managed to give away his next move by a split-second. Once or twice he managed to feint between postures quickly enough to fool her, but he never broke through her defences for long enough to land a winning strike. About thirty minutes in, Luna realised with some perturbation that she was being forced to rely more and more heavily on Pyrrha's Triangle to avoid being hit by his stronger offensives. Evidently he had zeroed in on her partiality toward the strategy and was attempting to use it against her; the Triangle was useful against attack postures like those he'd been using early on in the duel, but it was exhausting to cast in succession, and doing so made it very difficult to recover into a respectable offence.
Luna was attempting to choose between two different strategies that might allow her to avoid his spells for long enough to re-establish her ground, when the decision was abruptly taken from her. Evidently getting impatient, Riddle abandoned his fine technique and blasted her with three curses: two extremely quick shots that would force her to abandon her Triangle in favour of a lighter and faster defence, and one more to break through that defence and throw her bodily — and rather painfully, if her assessment was correct — across the room, thus ending the duel. Moving without thought, Luna blocked the first two spells, sidestepped the third, blinked away a sudden image of round taped-up spectacles and green eyes, and called out clearly with a flourish of her wand, "Expelliarmus." She reflexively caught the bit of wood that sailed through the air toward her hand without processing immediately what it was.
After an instant, she blinked. She was holding two wands, and Riddle was glaring at her with such intensity that he could probably fry an egg or two if she could manage to get a skillet in front of him, and somebody was shouting that it was Enough!
Shaking slightly, Luna crossed the stretch of floor between herself and Riddle and presented him politely with his wand. He repossessed it quickly, with a slight contact against her hand, and when she looked at his face, it had regained its usual cast of calm politeness. "I know you don't like me, Lovegood," he murmured, "but it really is a shame. I would so appreciate the chance to further our acquaintance."
Luna's lips quirked in answer, but she didn't get the chance to verbalise a reply; Professor Merrythought was marching up to them, frowning mightily over her tinted spectacles. "Well," the professor said in a clipped undertone when she reached them, "that was, indeed, rather spectacular. While I'm sure we have all benefited a great deal from the two of you showing off, I trust you will both stick to your assigned partners next time, hm?"
"Yes, Professor," replied Luna softly, breaking eye contact with Riddle to meet her teacher's gaze. "Of course." She was, after all, the one who had followed him to the empty spot in the line, even if it had been his idea to start with. He made some relatively noncommittal noise of assent, earning a glare from Merrythought before she stalked back to her desk.
Merrythought released class a few minutes early, complaining of a headache. On her way out of the room, Luna was stopped by a tall, startlingly pale figure with silver hair: Abraxas Malfoy. He was smiling at her a bit repellently, despite his angular good looks, and he leaned casually against the wall as he spoke. "Hello there, Lovegood," he said. "I've been thinking — we seventh years are doing independent study, you know, and we're supposed to be researching something that interests us, something that might benefit the magical community at large." The smile grew; his canines were much too long. "You interest me."
At Luna's failure to respond, he dropped the expression and went on. "As far as my knowledge goes, nobody has ever heard of anything like your resistance to the Imperius Curse. With your consent, I'd like to do some testing of your abilities — see how far they extend, from where they might originate, how they might be taught, and so on. Would you be willing to help me?" The smile returned, a bit more controlled this time. Luna blew out her breath quietly. She disliked Malfoy, it was true; she couldn't exactly pinpoint the reason why, but he seemed somehow far more serpentine — disingenuous, she supposed — than his admittedly troubled grandson. Even Riddle's patently obvious insidiousness aggravated her less than… than whatever this was. In spite of that, however, she could see no real reason to disagree. Perhaps Malfoy's research might help her to learn more about why she had this ability, and if not, she wasn't risking anything more than some wasted hours with an irritating young aristocrat.
"Fine," she said at last, meeting his eyes briefly.
"Next Saturday, we'll begin?" he prodded, watching her carefully.
Luna nodded, forced a small smile, and swiftly made her escape. She had a free hour before Care of Magical Creatures, and she meant to spend it in the library, preferably alone.
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Monday, September the 13th, 1943. 2:45 pm.
She beat me, the little bitch. — I was angry enough at her victory that I was almost ready to try something wandless, before I remembered where we were.
It's annoying, frankly. At every turn, she does something else that I fail to anticipate. I keep trying to handle her the way I would handle any other student who might cause me trouble, but she is unfailingly obstinate. Evidently I must consider switching tactics. I might be able to play off of her reactions to my baser magnetisms; those, at least, I can be sure of, judging by the results of my efforts last Friday and a few little nothings that have reached my ear thanks to Cecily (and, later, Walburga, who was apparently expecting to be rewarded for providing me with out-of-date information. I corrected that supposition quickly enough). I shall look toward alternative possibilities for either gaining her favour or her terror in the future — I suspect I'll have to lean to the side of favour, as it seems she doesn't scare easily. But if we happen to cross wands again, she should not expect a repeat of today's outcome!
Moving to a less aggravating topic: An interesting new development has been brought to my attention of late. Several days ago Nott, in his enigmatic little habit of sneaking out and wandering the forest after dark, came upon something quite unusual. It was, in truth, a dramatic enough discovery to sufficiently distract me from the humiliation of my defeat. He expressed to me that he had wished to ascertain the nature of the thing before informing me of it, in explanation for his tardiness, but I was too caught up in the fascinations of his find to deal with him as severely as I otherwise might have.
I will not write of it yet; not until I have learned a little more, but I expect I will need to put Selwyn's and my regular research on hold for the time being, while I investigate this new element.
I am beginning to suspect that it will bring me into the orbit of even greater powers.
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A/N: Hi, everyone! Sorry for the unexpected wait on this chapter; thank you all very much for being so patient. A bit more bad news: since school is starting up again relatively soon, updates will probably not be more frequent than about once or twice a month. Don't worry, though – even when I don't update quickly, or when my writing stalls, I never stop thinking about this fic. (i'm 100% serious, it's to the point of being weird, lol)
Thank you all so much for reading, and don't forget to leave me your comments! I love nothing more than to hear from you. :) xo shai