Ideally, a simple expanding-universe theory requires a dense core and a primordial explosion. Yet the universe is too complex for such an original unity. Energy in fact travels in every direction and therefore eruptions happen at infinite points in space-time. Pressing latently against the surface, their antagonism had built energetically. Small cracks had allowed gasses and smoke signals to emerge as warning signs. They had tried to evacuate the area, to escape the imminent and ongoing hazard of and in their proximity. But their opposition enforced a gravitational, and disruptive, attraction.
This is how we find them: rapidly moving bodies in proximation. Resisting. Friction. Collision.
"I swear by Rowena, if I find you Weasley I'll subtract so many points from your House that Gryffindor will be overdrawn." Otillia Burdett boiled with anger, prefect's badge gallivanting on her rope. She circumvented the hallway by quickly making a 360-degrees turn, heart pounding excitedly. Besides the students caught in magical patches of swamp scattered as landmines and a couple of curious onlookers there was nobody in sight. Least of all her target, Fred Weasley. Quickly she scurried around the various corners bending the walls of the fifth floor further into the Castle's enclosed carcass, trying to get a glimpse of the shadow of his reddish posture. She scolded him silently, her left hand tightened into a fist. He was gone.
Otillia let out an audible sigh and resolved to rescue the trapped youngsters in the hallway. Something she, admittedly, should have done before. The compulsion to pursue Fred Weasley's escape had, however, engulfed her.
Trying to subdue her irritated infatuation with catching the rascal, she breathed in deeply. The knowledge that the awaiting punishment would be executed anyways alleviated her frustration somewhat and, feeling a bit more tranquil now, she murmured Wingardium Leviosa to levitate the students off the floor, whereafter she fixed the floor effortlessly with a Reparo spell.
"Thank you," some unknown Gryffindor student uttered before retiring shamefully, head bowed to the ground.
"No–" Otillia started, but the student had already left, as had all the eyes and whispers that had accompanied the scene. A persecution was more entertaining than the mending of damage done. The audience was always more interested in him.
In the first four years of her Hogwarts life, he had not bothered her much. They had existed separately. There had not even been the need to avoid him, because her radar did simply just not detect his being. Sure, she had known who Fred Weasley was. Everyone knew. His status as prankster extraordinaire made him famous throughout the Castle. This was no overstatement. He seemed to be loved by friend and foe alike. Loyal Hufflepuffs enjoyed being startled by him. Reserved Ravenclaws were intrigued by his innovations. Ambitious Slytherins had all but respect for his cleverness. And the courageous Gryffindors applauded his bravery.
He and her, however, had simply coexisted. It was hard to describe therefore how their coexistence expressed itself. It was simply there. No feelings of animosity nor of goodwill. Not even neutrality seemed to capture the concurrence of their lives. Just the contemporeity of two bodies in space.
There were, structurally, only two recurring moments when Otilia noticed Fred Weasley. This was, firstly, during Quidditch games. Although, truthfully, his shape only materialized as one of the two anonymous and interchangeable red-headed Gryffindor Beaters. Besides, it was the Bludgers that got her attention most. The other place and time when Fred Weasley's existence forced itself upon her was whenever the capricious prankster arose in the boy and his practical jokes simply forced themselves upon anyone nearby. Although Otillia counted herself lucky that she was one year below the Weasley twins, and could thus easily avoid otherwise compulsory convergences, it was impossible to entirely circumvent the Weasleys' foolish endeavors. But the moments in which she was strained to interact with either of the twins were as if you saw something in the corner of your eye. And she had long learned that everything is blurry and colorless at the edges of one's eyesight.
However, times had changed. Ever since Otillia became a prefect, their bodies had started to clash, rotate, and rub against each other. From that moment on, her authorized power was increasingly met by the power of his subversion and their opposition enforced an almost gravitational, disruptive, attraction. Whenever such collisions happened, she erupted and he laughed.
While Otillia lived a passionately serious life, to Fred Weasley she was a joke. Because of her steadfast orderly conduct, he utilized every possibility to throw this strict control into disorder. In her fifth year, the first year she was a prefect, he had made it his duty to magically afflict every part of her body, form her limbs to her garments. A mission he had succeeded in quite well.
The first trial had been her hands. Unbeknownst to the both of them, Fred had ignited their rivalry by inflating her hands when she wanted to interrogate a secreted part of the greenhouse where the Weasleys supposedly stored the ingredients for their inventions. Immediately when touching the glass frame, her hands had inflated like giant balloons. Only her swollen hands had disabled her from grabbing her wand and demolishing the greenhouse right there and then.
Sometime later, Fred had resolved to magically transform the carpet of a corridor on the second floor that Otillia was patrolling into glue. Although the floor had looked naturally enough, when stepping on the hexed area, her feet got stuck, affixing her tightly. It had taken a lot of attempts until Linette had found a spell that could sever her from the ground beneath her, ruining her shoes.
But it did not end there. Around Christmas that same year, Otillia found her umber hair being suddenly transformed into a lively knot of snakes, hissing dangerously around her head. Also, her Ravenclaw robe was greened, indicating that the Weasley twin thought that her slick and ambitious behavior better fitted the dungeon. If she would have sighted the boy, she would have turned him into stone.
All hairs on her legs and arms had once turned purple; her nails grew 20cm because Fred had swapped a charmed apple with her own; her nose was changed into a pig's nose to warn her to stop being nosey; when she had looked in a bewitched mirror, she could not open her eyes anymore; the prefect's emblem flaunting on her breast was transformed into a cuckoo that cuckooed as soon as she opened her mouth; her teeth were blackened when Cho Chang had accidentally given Otillia purposefully bewitched Weasley candy.
Too often, she found herself trapped in one of his contumacious complots.
Too often, Fred Weasley had escaped her attempts of catching him in the act.
As a result, Otillia had started a manhunt. Whatever he would do, she would get him. Wherever he would try to escape, she would follow. Whenever he would try to initiate a collision, she would be ready.
Yes, she was aware that the Weasley twins were with two. But it was Fred who got in her hair mostly. More extravagant, more loud, more present, he was the main reason why she could not persist in ignoring the twins. And since he was instigator of much of the twins' symmetrically conducted misbehavior, she blamed him most. Besides, George never called her out or joked about her perfect prefect punctuality. George uttered an occasional sorry and at least pretended to care.
No, it was not George she detested. It was his elder incognito-snake of a brother.
Because of the constant clashes with the eldest twin, Otillia had learned how to tell the twins apart instantly: a mischievous bad omen of a smile was always spread on Fred's lips. No matter if he was remarking on her "uptight heron posture" or was drowning students in patches of swamp, there was always that beaming grin. Otillia, however, found the fact that he always laughed neither innocent nor comic. Devilish, his grin foreshadowed his nefarious plots. The Gryffindor attire, a mask for his serpentine conspiracies.
Even though she was extraordinarily capable of distinguishing between the two brothers, still the fact that her antagonist had a walking proxy in his mirror image absolutely maddened her. Due to their twinness, her vexation had doubled. There was always twice the possibility to encounter him. Twice the flaming hair, twice that big built body of his, twice the strident high-pitched laugh. Twice the man, double the trouble.
Even though Otillia despised the twins' misdemeanor, she was not risking handing them over to Dolores Umbridge. The woman's kittish evilness she despised even more. Prefect or not, in no way did she want a part in Umbridge's downright malevolent schemes. Luckily, the function of prefect allowed Otillia to save her peers from Hogwarts High Inquisitor's brutal disciplinary manners while still upholding the old and familiar orderly prefect authority. Hence, Otillia decided to brief Professor McGonagall directly about the wrongdoings of her most notorious pupils. At least in this way, she could still exert her power to influence the punishment of the twins.
While debating all the ways in which she would smash that smirk of his, Otillia knocked two times on the wooden door separating the hall from the classroom's McGonagall's classroom to announce her arrival. She had suspected that her Transfiguration teacher was still busying herself with her students' work, as was often the case. Almost immediately, the door swung magically open.
"Sorry to interrupt you Professor," Otillia spoke without any regret in her voice. She walked confidently into the room and looked around quickly to inspect if there were other people present beside her and McGonagall.
"How can I help you?" Professor McGonagall asked interestedly and slightly alarmed, putting down her quill.
"The Weasleys have flooded the fifth floor with patches of… swamp." If she had not been aware of the inventive powers of magic and the boundless fantasies of the Weasleys, she would have laughed at her own statement.
"They, what?"
"The twins. I found students stuck in patches mud, unable to get out. Naturally, I liberated these students from their imprisonment, and I repaired the ground. But sadly, the Weasleys had escaped before I could get to them," Otillia reported looking steadfastly at her professor.
"Oh dear." McGonagall uttered. Oh dear indeed.
"Was… Was anyone hurt?" Concern revealed itself through McGonagall's intonation.
"No Professor. Nobody got hurt." Not yet.
"Thank goodness. And thank you for informing me personally, Burdett. I will make sure Mr. and Mr. Weasley will get their due." Otillia nodded once to her professor, smiling sweetly.
"It's my duty, Professor," she replied proudly. Swiftly turning on her heels, she stepped out of the classroom again, leaving her professor to her work.
Otillia still had to finish her rounds and thus quickly strolled back to the fifth floor, all the while scanning the hallways for potential misbehavior. These were, to her surprise, emptied completely. Her surprise ebbed away, however, when she arrived on the fifth again. Pushing herself through the crowds of students, who were filling the corridors with murmurs of excitement, and had gathered to watch some, to Otillia still unknown, spectacle, she tried to discover what the fuss was all about. The second the focal point of excitement came into her view, her blood began to boil again.
Bloody hell, you've got to be kidding me.
Instead of the small patches that Otillia had cleared up earlier, a giant swamp had started to envelop the entire fifth floor, going around the Paved Courtyard to the Clock Tower. She stood there, motionless and dumbfounded, watching the unfolding spectacle.
"Oh goodness, what have we here?" A familiar voice rang in Otillia's ears.
"Weasley misconduct, sir. The second time today they've tried to flood the area." Otillia and the Ravenclaw Head watched the growing swampy surface increase bit by bit, nibbling away at the floor.
"A swamp! What great craftsmanship…" Flitwick uttered silently impressed.
"But sir–"
"Of course, child, it is highly inconvenient… I have never seen anything like this before." Flitwick admitted.
"Professor, the entire fifth floor is turning into a swamp!"
"I know, I know. But the craftsmanship…"
"Students should not be admired for their misconduct." Otillia muttered silently with resentment. Even if these two rascals would burn the entire Forbidden Forest, Flitwick would find a way to appreciate their magical skills. Skills the boys were indeed in the possession of, however how they choose to use these talents was, to Otillia, a waste of time. "I had just cleaned the mess they made," she sighed.
"We think it wise to at least practice our practical jokes, don't we George?"
Otillia's head immediately shot to where the voice had sounded. At the corner connecting the hallway to the next corridor, Fred Weasley leaned against the wall grinning at her, arms folded, his brother standing next to him looking amused at their creation.
She could still hear Flitwick chuckle and respond, "Practice makes perfect," while she stormed towards the brothers. Maneuvering through the crowd of spectators, Otillia tried making her way to the Weasleys. But it was as if the students had been positioned there as obstacles on purpose to withhold her from reaching the twins.
"Get out of my way." Her outcry seemed to generate the desired effect, because the students created a narrow path for her to move through. Upon arriving at the corner where the twins had just been standing, she realized it had been vacated and she immediately turned around the corner to pursue her hunt. At the end of the hallway, she spotted the backs of the Weasleys and sprinted after them. Stalking through the empty corridor, Otillia looked like an anxious bird in flight, her mantle blown in the air in the shape of two unfolded wings.
Another corner. She was not closing in but their bodies in flight were still in sight.
Another corner. The muscles in her breast started to hurt.
Another corner. This corridor was a dead-end, she would sure get them now.
Another corner. They were gone.
How in Merlin's name did they get away?
She scrolled the area with her eyes quickly and frantically.
"Weasley-s!" She shrieked desperately almost forgetting to add the 's' to pluralize the surname.
"If I find you–"
But you won't, will you?
