Ch. 5 Twit in a Garden

Rose knew she aced the practical. Well, aside from that last Lapifors charm at least. The wand movement might not have been as refined as she'd hoped, although the spell still worked perfectly. If someone criticized that the rabbit's claws were still stone, Rose could easily say it had been an intentional action. Luckily, Professor Patil hadn't seemed to notice.

As she exited the office her eyes naturally drifted down the line of victims awaiting their turn. Albus gave her a toothy grin from his spot in line and a few of the Slytherin girls glared at her.

Her green irises lingered on Scorpius's grey ones as he stared over her shoulder, a small frown causing the crease form above his brow. Rose's lips twitched, he was almost cute when he was nervous- no, concentrating would be a better word. He would be offended if someone accused a Malfoy of feeling nervous.

But it wasn't just the test that seemed to be on his mind as his frown deepened and she realized he was truly upset about something. She straightened her spine and pulled up her chest as she started to walk out of the room, letting him know exactly how confident she was feeling. She had definitely just beaten him again. Professor Patil called in the next student and Rose glanced back to mouth 'good luck' for her fellow Gryffindor.

Then the door closed after them and not two seconds later Rose felt someone grab a fistful of her hair and slam her into a wall, enticing a screech of pain as the fibers were nearly ripped from her scalp.

Turning to confront the offender she found herself staring into those murky grey eyes- only now they were full of loathing and much too close for her comfort.

"Where is he?" The steady, calculated hatred in his tone was more terrifying than if he'd screamed.

"W-wha- who?" Rose tried to take a breath as she blinked to clear the reactive tears in her eyes. Despite what the boys in the clan said while they were growing up, pulling hair hurt and it most certainly was not fair.

That evidently wasn't what he wanted to hear since the fist in her red mane tightened even further. "Potter. Where. Is. Potter." Each word was punctuated abnormally well considering his flawless teeth were clenched the entire time.

"I- I don't..." She didn't have to ask which Potter he was referring to. Rose glanced around, wondering when someone was going to step in and help. Malfoy's hand was white knuckled as he clenched his wand. She didn't know what he wanted with James but didn't where he'd gone after he'd escorted her to class anyways. Rose opened her mouth to tell him that when Scorpius let go of her and took a step back.

Rose started to sigh in relief when the exhale halted and made a full retreat into a nervous swallow at the sight before her. She looked cross-eyed at the tip of the wand now pointed at her face and tentatively lifted her gaze into the grey eyes of its wielder. The entire class held its breath as they beheld the scene.

Her heart was racing faster than the rabbit she had just transfigured- surely he wouldn't dare, not with so many witnesses and a bloody Professor not twenty feet away.

One of the Slytherins Malfoy spent a lot of time with very hesitantly stepped forward, his empty palms spread wide. "Mate, think about what you're doing..."

For a second it seemed Scorpius would listen to his friend, then his hand flicked to perform a Bat-Bogey Hex and Rose threw her hands up instinctively as...

Nothing. A few moments later the room burst out laughing. Hesitating a heartbeat longer, thinking she now had bat ears or was the victim of some other prank, Rose slowly peeked through her fingers. The "wand" Scorpius held was now ejecting a bright red banner from its tip with the word BANG printed in large yellow letters. Rose Weasley recognized it instantly.

After all, it was a Weasley's Wizard Wheezes product.

Rose looked from the prank toy to Malfoy and saw that for once he didn't care that the whole class was making fun at his expense. He was the victim, not her, but he only cared about one thing. She opened her mouth to tell him she hadn't a clue but was too rattled to barely even squeak.

His expression didn't falter as he silently looked at her, waiting, and Rose was struck with how pathetic she must seem. Cowering into the blackboard and shaking like a terrified puffskein, she hadn't even managed to pull up her wand let alone say a word to defend herself.

To everyone's surprise, Albus was the one who broke the silence, stepping around the desk that separated the two of them from the rest of their class. His head bowed in shame, he softly asked for their attention. "Malfoy?"

Twin storms left Rose to bore down on her cousin, and the Potter met them in a rare show of sincerity. Then he said, too quietly for anyone outside of the four of them to hear, "I'm sorry about my brother."

Scorpius's Slytherin friend steamed with anger as he realized what had happened. Albus, with the bravery of his House, kept talking despite the fact his knees were threatening to knock together beneath his robe. "He's taking Herbology right now but I'll guarantee he's skipped out early- check the greenhouses. We'll stall Patil for you as long as we can."

The stormy grey gaze jerked away, back onto Rose as Scorpius leaned toward her once more. "If I find out you knew about this, Rose Weasley, you're gonna wish that hex had worked."

Rose immediately shook her head to deny her involvement, her gaze flicking down as she licked her dry lips. She was so flustered she couldn't speak if she tried; where had her prided smarts gone?

His point made, Malfoy turned and stormed from the room- the door slamming behind him. His friend went after him a moment later, looking just as murderous and slamming the door even louder, if that was possible. While everyone stared after their dramatic departure Albus kept his eye on his cousin, who was trying to catch her breath. Her flushed red face had changed in a subtle way that only a Weasley could differentiate.

His moment of maturity over, the fourteen-year-old boy walked over to Rose and patted her shoulder sympathetically, shaking his head and mourning, "You've got it bad, girl. You've got it bad."

Scorpius could barely hear anything over the roaring rage pounding in his ears, surprised the trick wand didn't just snap in his grip. Stalking down the corridor the Malfoy was carefully running through all the darkest spells he would cast on James as soon as he got his wand back, vaguely aware of his name being called as though from down a tunnel.

Carelessly he kept walking until he was grabbed by the shoulder and spun around, looking into the scowling face of his best friend. Nott was panting with rage as he said. "I'm coming with you."

Seeing the anger clouding his friend's judgement Scorpius felt the murky fog lift from his own mind and he gripped the wrist on his shoulder in gratitude. "You need to take your final."

"I will." He set his jaw. "After I jinx his feet to the floor and hex all of his hair to fall out."

They shared a humorless grin at the image until Scorpius shook his head again. "There's no way to make it to the greenhouse and back before Patil calls for us. I won't let you fail the class too."

Nott frowned, but was coming to realize his friend was right. "You don't have a wand, how are you going to get yours from him?"

"The old fashioned way," Scorpius assured and ignored the voice in his head that asked Are you a magic-less twit without it? "I'm gonna punch his lights out."

Nott looked at him doubtfully.

"Oh Joy, the little Malfoy has a new toy!"

"Peeves." They groaned in unison, watching the blue poltergeist step out from a suit of armor and wander inbetween them. "We do not have time for this."

"Time is lost, time is found, Malfoy needs to reach the ground! Peeves can tell, does Peeves know, or is he lying through his nose hahaha!"

Scorpius looked down the black suit the poltergeist wore as he tried to understand the rhyming reason. "Are you saying there's a shortcut?"

That seemed to be the right answer as the little blue man did somersaults through the air, knocking over suits of armor until he reached a portrait, where a portly man looked at him in abject terror. "Not again Peeves, please- nooo!" He cried as his frame was ruthlessly spun around by the merciless poltergeist. The picture started separating from the wall like a screw until it twisted on its side with a pop and revealed a chute behind it.

Peeves looked at him and proudly declared "Here's a way, down you go, where you wind up, does Peeves know?" before he cackled some more.

Nott watched the man in the portrait lean to the side of the frame, retching, while Scorpius carefully looked at the slide, keeping the poltergeist in sight. His mind was going fast, whirling, as he asked "Why did you show us this?"

The poltergeist looked confused, jerking around in the air until he stopped in front of Scorpius again and poked him in the chest twice. "Peevesies friendzie."

Friends? His mind shot back Malam's bizarre greeting to the poltergeist and a slow grin crept over his face. Dye his hair pink and call him a pygmy puff, the girl had honestly befriended Hogwarts's biggest pest. And Scorpius, by grace of standing next to her when she did it, had gained an ally as well.

Or, the blue poltergeist was trying to dupe him like a first year mudblood.

Making up his mind Malfoy turned back to Nott, who was looking at Peeves as though he'd declared undying love for the Bloody Baron. "Get back to class." he said even as his mind churned out the new plan.

"I can't let you face James unarmed!"

"Look, if this is-" he glanced at the poltergeist, not wanting to call him a liar to his face. "-if this as fast as Peeves says it is then there's a chance I could actually make it back in time. But only if you tell everyone to go as slowly as possible, ask stupid questions if they have to, and get the bratty Potter- Albus," this was the first time Scorpius ever thought of his classmate by his first name, "to make the Gryffindors do the same."

Nott still looked doubtful, but a glance back toward their classroom let Scorpius know he was considering at least. "I don't like letting you go alone."

Peeves, seemingly bored, stopped blowing raspberries at the motion-sick portrait to say "Alone down he must go, otherwize, kabloom! he goes."

"You see?" Scorpius tried not to seem unnerved about the prospect of Peeves making him explode as he swung his feet into the chute. "Not a choice, mate."

"Scorpius?" Nott waited until his friend looked him in the eye before demanding "Be careful. Jump him before he casts anything."

Malfoy nodded, already planning the quickest route to search the seven greenhouses as he pushed off the ledge and down into the dark. Nott watched after him until the portrait spun and locked back into place, it's inhabitant falling over in a dead faint.

He and Peeves stared at eachother in silence, until the poltergeist turned invisible. The Slytherin sighed and started walking back to class only to jump when someone grabbed his nose from behind and shouted in his ear.

"GOT YER CONK!"

Kingsley had decided to check in on Jonovan's progress and invite the boy to break with him over a late lunch, finding a ghost writing on the board and talking to an empty classroom. "Professor Binns?"

"And in the case of the Giant Wars- hm? Oh, yes, mister Stanley?"

Kingsley suffered a moment of deja-vu as the Professor called him by the same wrong name he had during seven years of his childhood, but shook it off. "Where did your assistant go?"

"My assistant?" The ghost repeated in confusion, and for a moment Kingsley worried the ghost had even forgotten what he was lecturing about. "I was under the impression that he would be assigned to a different class. I need no 'assistance', I assure you."

"Of course," the Minister assured and back out of the room quickly. He wasn't going to be the one that told Binns his tenure as a Hogwarts Professor was reaching its end. He had more important things to do.

Like manage the entire Ministry of Magic, and figure out where his two charges had got off to this time.

Two seconds after entering the chute Scorpius decided maybe he didn't want to. It was pitch black, cramped, cobwebbed and most notably, there was a screeching sound that made his teeth vibrate.

He was sure he ate at least three spiders on accident as he was forced down a near-vertical drop that went on without end, his mindset of using the trip to plan forgotten as he scrambled for a purchase to slow himself down. His nails clicked against the stone and he felt the tread on his shoes start to come off, but all he managed to do was bloody his hand when he tore a fingernail.

Seriously worried that his teeth would shatter like glass from the noise, Scorpius reluctantly admitted he had no choice but to resign himself to whatever fate Peeves had sentenced him to. Never should've trusted a poltergeist, he swore as the trip just kept getting longer and longer.

Peeves' little dance and jig as he shouted the word kabloom! kept running through his mind as Malfoy closed his eyes and covered his ears, feeling as though he was below the castle and perhaps traveling toward the infamous Chamber of Secrets itself.

Then light started playing at the back of his eyelids and he slowly opened them to see shimmering white lines dash by him on the round tunnel he was falling through. He narrowed his eyes in thought, letting them adjust to the brightness as he considered what could cast shadows like this.

Water reflections was barely a notion in his head before he was submerged, bubbles trailing after him as his momentum carried him deeper down through the clear liquid. Then his infinite fall came to an abrupt end as his feet struck something hard, and Scorpius was pinned to the ground with a thousand gallons of water pressing him in place.

What a disappointing way to go, drowning, was his very distant thought. A whole world of magical monsters and adventure, and it seemed Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy may as well have jumped off the First Year boats before he even went inside Hogwarts.

When the wall shifted behind him his eyes snapped back open, certain his oxygen-deprived brain had imagined it. Then the wall broke and he was falling back down once again. He experienced a very disorienting sensation as his back broke through the surface of the water and he was suddenly airborne, a hundred feet above a giant lake of clear blue water with the metal wall in the air with him. An unfamiliar mountain loomed in the distance.

He screamed as he started to fall and, at this point, felt it was quite all right for even a Malfoy to do so. The wall knocked into his shoulder painfully and as they spun away from each other his hyperactive senses noticed it was smaller than he remembered it. The ground was closer than it should have been by now and the lake had a large dam surrounding it.

Scorpius watched in astonishment as they all kept getting smaller and it was only when he saw the 'distant mountain' was really a gargoyle statue that he realized it was actually him was getting bigger.

He landed on soft grass with no more force than if he'd sat down and watched, bemused, as the 'wall' he'd been trapped by landed a few feet away and was no bigger than his notebooks. A glance around let him know was at the bottom of the Hogwarts Grounds, next the courtyard fountain overlooking the Herbology Greenhouses. Exactly where he had wanted to be.

Scorpius nervously ran a hand through his hair and was shocked to find it dry as a History of Magic lecture, proceeding to check himself over in astonishment. Other than a bruise on his right shoulder and his bleeding finger, he was fine and completely dry despite his ordeal. He even, he noticed with a trace of pride in himself, still had a firm grip on the trick wand.

"Ahem." The gargoyle had moved from its pedestal to sit on the fountain wall, paw outstretched as it looked at the student that had just exploded from his plumbing.

"Oh, right." The Slytherin scrambled to his feet, grabbing the hated wall and handing it to the stone construction. It took it without a word and set the grate- the impenetrable wall had been a grate- back in it's place at the bottom of the fountain. Then the gargoyle reclaimed the pedestal and, with what might have been a glare at Malfoy, resumed a pose.

Scorpius looked down at the six-inch pipe he'd come out of and decided that no matter what happened, he was never taking advice from Peeves again.

Zoey blinked at the spectacled boy in front of her. "Rainbata leaves? Is that what these are?"

"Don't act stupid." His face grew red as he gripped a stick at his side. "You know exactly what those are and what they're worth."

"I'm not acting stupid." her instinctive reply threw him off as she put her latest batch of leaves on the table. Then she picked one of them up and inspected it as she leaned against the table, voicing the many questions about the plant that had been bothering her while she worked. "These are called Rainbata? Why do they change colors? Is there a pattern to how they change? And why do they keep changing colors after they're plucked? Shouldn't they just shrivel and blacken, or will they do that eventually?"

The boy looked at her, then scowled. "Stop trying to distract me and tell me why you're stealing leaves worth six Sickles apiece from Professor Longbottom."

"Six Sickles each? That's not very fair," Zoey looked at the many leaves she had gathered. "They're not all the same size, I mean, some of them are larger than the others so a flat price for all of them really doesn't seem-"

Her gaze jerked up and she twisted aside as a beam of magic shot by her when the boy cried "Stupefy!"

The sizzling taste of the near-miss let her know the spell had been meant to immobilize, though the close proximity of his magic had broken the unvisibility Jon had given her. As always Zoey's mouth kept running while her mind took it's time to analyse this. "-like an even evaluation process. Weight would probably be a better measure. Is it it based off one of those potions things where the count is most important, like an ingredient being three hairs even if those three hairs were one before somebody cut it?"

Her babbling, she knew, would lead him to underestimate her. And her sensei always said surprising an opponent was even more useful than a weapon in a fight. Why this person was acting so hostile was still a mystery, but the Malam trusted her instincts and was ready as always to fight fire with fire.

The blue spell hit an empty pot behind her and shattered it, making her take yet another step closer to him to avoid the shards. Growing a bit pale and glancing in the direction of the other greenhouses the boy quickly waved his wand and muttered "Reparo", the scattered pieces fitting themselves together like a complicated jigsaw. Zoey's eyebrows rose at the unblemished pot he recreated. She filed that away as one of the potential benefits of having one of those sticks.

He pointed the stick at her again and threatened "Start walking." and Zoey did, gently extending her empty hands toward the air while she backed out of the greenhouse.

"Look, man, I wasn't stealing anything. I was just-"

"Then why were you sneaking around here invisible?" He reasoned. "Don't tell me this is your first time; I'll bet you're the ghost the castle's been talking about. Been stealing for a while, haven't you?"

"I'm a what?" She asked, amused, then cleared her throat. "Well, I'll admit I'm not really supposed to be here right now but that doesn't mean I was-"

"Enough excuses," He interrupted, and twisted his stick down the covered walkway. "I'm bringing you in to see what Professor Longbottom has to say about this."

"'Bringing you in'?" Her eyebrows rose in indignation, even as her heart hammered while she walked under his direction. Jon would kill her if she got caught on their last day here. "Who says you can do that to me? Right now it's your word against mine."

He shouted another spell at her in the narrow passage, and seemed even more flustered when she dodged it once again, easily dashing to the side as she shifted neatly from one foot the the other. She started and stopped in a deceptively casual stance, all of her weight on one bent leg and her other foot barely touching the ground, allowing her to slide it quickly in any direction to move when she next needed to. This attack tasted more like cotton, and she started judging the distance between her and his weapon as she demanded "Well? Why does a student have the right to take me anywhere?"

"I'm James Serius Potter, Harry Potter's son, and you-"

"Does it matter who your dad is?" Zoey titled her head. "We were talking about you, right?"

He flushed with anger once again, and he fixed his glasses with his free hand. "He defeated the Dark Lord Voldemort. The Chosen One, the Master of Death, The Boy Who Lived..." His voice trailed off at the complete lack of recognition on her face.

Realizing he was waiting for her to comment, the Malam said the first thing that came to mind. "What a surprise, your dad lived through being a boy."

When he lifted his stick in a silent threat Zoey took the chance to cross her hands in front of her as though cowering, fingering a charm that dangled from her right wrist. "Don't insult my father."

"Sorry! Sorry," She apologized, her fingers tingling upon her silver charm bracelet before she decided to release it anyways. If she used that there would be no hope of Kingsley not finding out. "I just felt we were getting off track, that's all."

James grinned again, almost gleefully as he pulled the stick over his head. "Yeah, I rekon we were."

"Hey Potter!" someone cried at her assailant and ran down the hallway towards them.

The boy's surprised start delayed his attack, and he turned to the right. After just a few seconds his face paled again and he cried "Petrificus Totalus!"

His distraction was all Zoey needed as she sunk her weight and shot her right foot forward, reaching James in a single bounding step and hitting his arm. His third and last spell passed overhead harmlessly as the strike deflected it. Zoethia mused she was lucky the boy had so little combat experience.

She was vaguely aware of a shout, but concentrated on her opponent, who was quickly realizing their sudden proximity. Her left hand gripped the tip of the stick in his hand and her right came up to strike his inner arm as her left leg caught up with her. Holding on to the tingling wood with all her might Zoey pulled her arms in and spun out of his guard, her right wrist forcing the handle of the wand out of the boy's grip as she twisted away.

She stepped away from James quickly, and though she felt decidedly dizzy, she was triumphantly holding the stick he'd been threatening her with not five seconds ago. Zoey shook her head to try and clear it, but it only made things worse and the world spun for a few nauseating moments, made harder to stomach by the smacking sound that came a few seconds later. When she finally rediscovered up from down there was a tall back in front of her, white-blond hair reaching the collar of green lined robes that separated her from James.

The back turned and revealed a startlingly familiar set of grey eyes that looked surprised to see her, so she just grinned and walked stiff-legged to the boy that was unconscious on the floor with a black eye. She sat down next to James to make sure he was really unconscious, pinching and poking him to check for muscle twitches, then returned the stick she had taken.

As she tucked it into his pocket she found it already occupied by a different stick that was very familiar. She pulled it out of the James-boy's robe and looked at her ally from her sitting position. She was still very suddenly dizzy and doubted she could stand, let alone walk over to him.

"So Malfoy," she said breathlessly, deliberately making herself say it slowly to fight the adrenaline that still coursed through her, "Are you a magic-less twit now?"