Written for:
200 Characters in 200 Days Challenge: Tracey Davies
Writing Bingo: Theodore Nott
Chocolate Frog Card Challenge: Billywig – Write about someone feeling invisible.
If You Dare Challenge: 997. Wondering
Gringotts: Great Literature Quotes: "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." – Nicole Krauss, The History of Love. Love Quotes: "Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." - Zora Neale Hurston. "True love stories never have endings." – Richard Bach
Valentine-Making Challenge: Write about a couple's first kiss.
Word Prompt Express Challenge: write, worried, work, witness, wish, wind, will, wild, whose, whole, weird, weekly, wear, weak, waste, Voldemort, visit, vast, value, use, upstairs, upset, unlikely, understand, type, tune, trouble, trip, tree, travel, trade, top, tool, tone, tomorrow, tip, tiny, tie, terrible, tend, temporary, teach, target, tank, tall, talk, tale, take, table, sympathy, suspicion, surround, surprise, support, sun, suggestion, suggest, sudden, suck, such, successfully, succeed, stupid, stuff, study, struggle, strong, stretch, stress, strange, strain, storm, stop, stomach, stick, steal, stay, startled, star, stand, stable, spot, spell, spare, source, sound, sort, song, slip, single, significance, see, sad, roll, name, heart, guy, good, friendship, bubble.
Words: 1828

Act of Defiance

I think he and I were always the same; we were both a little bit invisible. Draco Malfoy had his posse, and Pansy Parkinson had her clique, but Theodore and I, we tip-toed around the edges. We were friends with them, of course, but for me, I didn't like to get involved in the stupid stuff they did; the trouble they caused. I just wasn't that type.

But, back then, I didn't know Theodore. We sat at the same table for meals, of course, and knew each other's names, but we didn't talk. It was our seventh year when things began to change.

I was quiet, and so was he, and because of that, for years we'd been able to slip under the radar. We were people of no particular significance, and we avoided unnecessary attention. We believed what we were taught to believe and said what we were supposed to say and stood alone as single stars in the night sky when everyone around us was making constellations. We'd have stayed that way if they'd have let us.

Professor Snape wasn't the problem. It was Voldemort's other cronies, the Carrows, who saw some value in us. They used us, along with the rest of Slytherin, as some kind of shiny example. We were Holy Grails, unlikely beacons of perfection. The whole thing was weird, but true Pureblood faces were getting fewer and further between, so they wouldn't waste even one. We were held up beneath the bright yellow sun, while everyone else was made to stand in our shadows.

Most of the Slytherins respected this, and knew it was the right and just order of the world, the way things were supposed to be. It made us targets of jealousy and anger, but we were the ones on top, and we could teach them a thing or two without fear of retribution. The Slytherins turned in on themselves, looking only at their own. They lived in some sort of bubble. But I was so used to being on the outside looking in that I didn't know how to stop seeing. I saw the storm that surrounded us and I couldn't turn away. We were in class trying to work when I witnessed the Cruciatus Curse being used on a student. A Hufflepuff. Just a girl. My stomach gave an uncomfortable turn and I looked around at my housemates. They all had their heads down to study; all but one. Theodore's eyes caught mine, and that was when we began to understand.

The girl was too weak to stand, and her friend rushed to her side to tend to her injuries. She asked if she could take her to the Hospital Wing. She was told to go back to her work. I never imagined things like that, such terrible things, could happen at school. I just hoped the situation was temporary.

I tried to write down what I thought that night, but the paper remained empty. It came as a surprise to me to know that all it took was one little thing, and suddenly I didn't know where to place my sympathy. Curfew wasn't really a thing for Slytherins anymore, so instead of lying in bed staring at the ceiling, I went out for a walk. I wasn't going anywhere in particular, I just began to wander the dungeons. When the cries of despair began to travel through the corridors to meet me, it was a struggle not to run. I stayed rooted to the spot, listening. The strange, human sound was almost like a song. It was a Dementor's Kiss, sucking all the happiness I'd ever known out of my soul. I was wondering whose voices they were, straining against their vocal chords, but I soon decided I didn't want to know. An unknown force began to compel me forward, towards the source, asking me to visit their misery.

"Don't." A voice, a deep, strong tone, startled me from my reverie.

I turned around and my blue eyes met green. A tall, thin boy stood in the shadows behind me, suspicion written all over his face. Theodore Nott stared me down as I stood there, half-turning, torn between this way and that.

"I just… I just want to see," I said, weakly.

"Well, don't. They don't want to be seen like that. Don't steal their pride. It's all they've got right now." His voice was harder than I'd ever heard it, like he'd never heard of laughter.

"You sound like you support them," I suggested, calling him out against his loyalties.

"And you've been stood there for five minutes listening to their wails; with upset written all over your face. You're worried about them, about what will become of them tomorrow. If I support them, so do you," he retorted.

I sighed. It was all I could do.

"Tomorrow," I repeated. "Is that tomorrow as in the day after today, or tomorrow the mythical land where everyone's wishes come true and the things they've been stretching for are finally within their grasp?"

"Neither. Both. Take your pick."

The wails grew louder again and the symbolic beauty I'd heard in them before Theodore had announced his presence was gone. Only suffering remained.

"Well, I'd love to stay and trade pleasantries, but I can't bear to stick around much longer," I announced, and turned back the way I came, towards my warm bed.

"How do you think they feel?" he asked, stopping me in my tracks.

"A million times worse than me, I would guess. But what can I do about it? Tell me what I can do, and I'll do it, but I don't think I've got the tools for the job," I snapped, angrier than I meant to be.

"What if there was something?" he asked. The suggestion that I might be able to do something lit a spark in my heart, my heart that hadn't cared about them at all until that day. My heart was beating a wild tune I didn't recognise, but I was tied to it, and I was desperate to succeed.

"Like what?"

"They aren't fed or given water in those cells," he stressed. "Without them, they'll die. The Gryffindors are doing their best, but they're going in like those muggle tank things with their guns ready. We don't have to do it like that. We need to be like trees in the wind, bending and swaying a little differently than normal, but not so much that it catches anyone's eye. Me and you, we can do that. People are used to not seeing us around, we've never attached ourselves to anyone's side like the others. We can take a spare roll at lunch; visit the kitchens in the evenings; tiny things that no one will notice. If we don't do our bit, Tracey, aren't we part of the problem?"

As I nodded, and told him I'd helped, it felt like we'd gone from having less than an acquaintance to a full blown friendship in five minutes. In fact, everything seemed to have changed. I didn't even feel like a Slytherin in that moment, given how little I was concerned with myself and my own ambitions. We were trying to be the good guys, but in secret.

We started the very next day, collecting bits of food at mealtimes, taking it away under the premise of 'saving it for later' and using spells to miniaturise and hide the items. We crept away upstairs to the kitchens just after curfew, and I made sure to get a bowl.

Downstairs, in front of the old dungeon cells, I used Augmenti to fill the bowl with water. Seeing the misery first hand began to wear away at the rough edges of my soul painfully, so I tried not to look. As Theodore had told me, they wouldn't have wanted me to anyway. He carried the water to their waiting arms, passing it through the bars to them, wading through the vast expanse of misery to reach them.

It never bothered me that there were no windows in the Slytherin dormitories, but here their absence was more keenly felt. The whole space felt like a vast and timeless expanse, like there would never be an escape, and I wasn't locked in.

We were nearly at the Slytherin Dungeons before we allowed ourselves to call it a trip successfully carried out, but I still wasn't quite stable on my feet. My knees had gone weak down there, and they hadn't quite regained their strength.

After that, it became a weekly thing. I didn't even think at the time that one day it would be a tale to tell. It wasn't one I ever wanted to recount.

Months later, there was talk of the fight coming to Hogwarts. We didn't quite believe it. I don't think anyone really did until it was here. But I'd spent so much time with Theodore in the time that had past that the thought of war was also the thought of losing him. We were in the kitchens, for what we didn't know yet would be our last time, when I learned that he'd been thinking the same thing.

"Tracey, if the war comes, you know they'll expect us to choose," he told me, his eyes narrow and uncertain.

"I made my choice a while ago, when a boy stopped me in the corridor and told me we could do something to make a difference," I replied, the words falling easily.

He smiled, but there was something more on his mind; I could see it in his sea-green eyes.

"Tracey… war means fighting, and fighting means that people die. And I don't want to face death knowing I never told you. I love you."

I smiled at his admission, knowing in my heart that it was right.

"I love you too," I told him. "I think I loved you all along. I heard once that love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place, and mine did that a long time ago."

"This might be the end, you know," he replied, "and if it is, I'm happy, at least, that I know."

I shook my head as I looked at him. "True love stories never have endings."

He smiled, and somehow our smiles turned to laughter, laughter in the face of horror, our own little act of defiance. Our laughter brought our bodies closer together, and suddenly he was leaning down, hesitant, like it was a question. I brought my lips up to his and closed my eyes, allowing myself a moment of forgetting everything but him and me; allowing myself a moment of bliss.

"Well, in that case, if there is no ending, we should at least have a beginning," he told me. "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."