Detention and Quaffles

21 June 1971

"So next thing I know McGonagall's hat is suddenly a pink flamingo—and not just any pink flamingo, but one that, for whatever reason, has fur instead of feathers. And then—get this, the flamingo jumps out the open window and tries to fly!"

Lucius gave Rabastan an appropriately amused look at the former's story, despite barely paying attention. He found that today he wanted to use the walk from the dungeons up to dinner to concentrate on other matters, specifically on the fact that he had not seen Amycus since the prefect-Slughorn incident. Transfiguration mishaps seemed uninteresting and unimportant by comparison. "So, the moral of the story," Lucius heard Rabastan continue, "Is that Mudbloods shouldn't be allowed to take NEWT level transfiguration. That, or you should have signed up for the class, because it was absolutely hilarious."

"Ah. I see," he disinterestedly replied, for they had just reached the Great Hall, and now his attention was solely fixed on the Slytherin table or, more precisely, on scanning the Slytherin table for a certain dark-haired boy who had managed to avoid him for the entirety of the day. When his eyes actually found the boy, Lucius let out a small gasp of surprise and his mind immediately began racing as to what he could do or say, especially in such a public place.

"Do you want to sit, uh, not in our normal spot? Just to, uh, change things up?" Lucius nervously ventured to Rabastan.

A slightly wondering crease appeared across his friend's forehead before he shrugged. "Sure. We can sit here," he dispassionately gestured towards the nearest section of the table.

"I was thinking a bit further down the table."

"Ookay…how about here?"

"How about a bit further down? Why don't we sit around the middle section of the table?" At Lucius's prompting the two boys finally took a seat, while Lucius attempted to pretend that it was a complete and utter coincidence he was seated directly next to Amycus.

With little success he valiantly tried to combine an apologetic and a nonchalant tone, "Good evening, Carrow."

The other boy regarded him out of the corner of his eye. "Sod off, Malfoy."

Not quite the way Lucius had intended the conversation to go. What he had intended to happen he wasn't entirely sure, but he knew that wasn't it. Take two. "Er—how do you do, Carrow?"

"I said, sod off, Malfoy." The clearly annoyed boy abruptly stood up and, without another word, turned to leave the Great Hall.

"No, damn it," Lucius muttered under his breath, before also leaping up from his seat. "Amycus, wait!" The dark-haired boy did a perfect job of pretending that he had heard absolutely nothing and, if anything, quickened his stride. They had both just exited into another hallway when Lucius finally caught up enough to grab the other's shoulder and force him to stop. After casting a quick glance around to be sure no one was within earshot he near-whispered, "Amycus, I'm sorry about last night."

"Sorry isn't good enough. Slughorn gave me detention, you know." He gave an annoyed, impatient look before adding, "And you lost points for Slytherin." Lucius felt an uncomfortable, squirming feeling in the pit of his stomach. Had he really caused Slytherin to lose points? Amycus's previously annoyed voice took on an almost sadistic, mocking timber as he continued. "So, as I was saying earlier Lucius, or—oh, sorry, are you friends nearby? Should I call you Malfoy? Because it's perfectly clear that you won't even admit that we're on a first-name basis, much less anything else! So, as I was saying, sod off, Lucius!" He spun around and continued walking down the hallway, leaving Lucius to dejectedly trudge back to the dinner table alone.

"What was that about, mate?" Rabastan fixed his friend with a questioning look while keeping the other half of his attention focused on the slice of pie he was eating.

"I caught Carrow breaking curfew last night and now he's mad at me, quite unreasonably, I might add," Lucius said, attempting to ignore the stirring feelings of guilt at such a lie.

"And that puts you on a first-name basis…?"

"Er—Carrow's just improper like that. Doesn't understand the point of manners or formality, so he just prefers going by first names. Can you imagine?" he gave a feeble laugh, attempting to squash his feelings of guilt at yet another lie.

"Can I imagine what? And why are we seated on this side of the table?" Narcissa innocently asked, lovingly clasping Lucius's hand with her own by way of greeting before taking a seat next to him.

Rabastan laughed. "Carrow's being—well, Carrow, for lack of a better word."

"At least he's not a Mudblood," Lucius blurt out the least objectionable defense that had leapt to his mind.

"That's true. At least he deserves to be at Hogwarts. Unlike, say, some people," and here Rabastan glared at a specific Hufflepuff and muttered something that sounded like "furry pink flamingos" under his breath.

22 June 1971

Lucius stood, hesitating, in front of the library's engraved wooden doors. His feet had led him here, after asking Slughorn where Amycus would be serving his detention. How he was going to make this different from their encounter yesterday, he still wasn't quite sure, but he strode through the double doors anyway.

Admittedly, though, he had been hoping to receive something other than "Sod off, Lucius," as a greeting upon entering the library.

"Why are you still mad at me?" Lucius snapped, his annoyance mounting at what he could already see was going to be a failed reconciliation.

"Why am I mad at you? Why am I mad at you!?" Amycus angrily set down the pile of books he had been reshelving. "You backstabbed me, you coward."

"I—I did no such thing! You're the one who insisted on walking with me!"

"Under the assumption that you weren't going to lie and say that you had found me breaking curfew," he hissed, haphazardly continuing to shelve books.

"It wasn't a lie, you were violating curfew," Lucius stonily reminded him.

"Whatever. Whatever, Lucius."

"Well, you lied to me when you said that Slughorn had deducted points from Slytherin! I walked by the counters on the way to the library, and Slytherin was at exactly the same point total as the day previous."

"Maybe I said that 'cause I knew it'd be the only way to get through the thick skull of someone as self-centered as you."

Lucius gaped. "I am—I am no such thing."

"All you care about is what others think of you. And that—" here Amycus turned towards Lucius again, his dark eyes venomous, his face stony and serious and rejected while Lucius silently thought to himself how much he missed Amycus's grins, and how he would plead with the gods themselves if they would allow him to see just one more grin directed towards him. "That is why you are too ashamed to associate with me. You're ashamed of me."

"You're right," Lucius spoke, his voice softer than a whisper. Amycus seemed almost at a loss as what to do, as though he had not expected the other boy to admit such a thing so quickly. Eyes downward in an almost humbled facial expression, the blond-haired boy timidly ventured, "I don't want to be though. Do you—do you want to start eating together at meal times? Publically? I'll just tell everyone that we've been becoming friends of late, that's all."

"And you'll acknowledge me when you see me in the common room, instead of treating me like thin air?"

"I'll acknowledge you in the common room, too, and maybe we can see each over the summer holidays, too, since they are coming up and all."

The cold look on Amycus's face started melting away, the stony exterior being broken away, piece by piece, by the emerging radiant grin. "That'd be nice."

1 July 1971

Spinning through the ashy green flames, Lucius wasn't quite sure what to expect when he stepped out of the Floo network into the Carrow's house. He was almost expecting a mud hut, or a hole in the ground. Instead the first sight to greet his eyes (once the room was finally in focus) was a living room sparsely decorated with a few worn chairs.

"So you're Lucius Malfoy," a girl's voice greeted him. He glanced first towards the open doorway for the source of the voice before realizing that the source was significantly closer. Namely, she was standing directly in front of him, and he had accidentally managed to look completely over her head. He looked down at the diminutive girl as she continued talking. "Hm, I've never seen you up close, before," her dark eyes seemed to be scrutinizing his face. "Narcissa Black's very lucky to have you." Lucius idly thought that Amycus was much luckier than Narcissa.

"Alecto! Stop being creepy," Amycus barked as he strolled into the room. The petite girl whipped her head around and shot him a death glare the way only a thirteen year-old can. "Scram, pipsqueak."

"I don't see why I can't be friends with your friends, too, Amycus," she pouted, surveying Lucius out of the corner of his eye.

"Because you just can't. Now, scram." With a huffy, annoyed sigh, she left the room and slammed the door behind her.

"Charming sister of yours. Only augments my displeasure at being an only child," Lucius sarcastically smirked.

"Ah, she's not normally that bad," he reassuringly grinned. "Hey, want to throw a quaffle around?" After going through a small dining room, they were outside in the warm summer weather, a slight breeze stirring the air.

"Have you been reading the Daily Prophet?" Lucius asked, wishing they could have used magic to make the game of catch a bit more interesting, while mentally wondering if it was 18 or 19 days until his seventeenth birthday.

"Vaguely."

"How does one vaguely read the Daily Prophet?"

"Okay, I see the front page every day, but I don't exactly read it cover to cover."

"Then you probably haven't seen the articles," he said confidently, almost smugly. "A disappearance here, an unsolved murder case there, a line about a hexed Muggle in the back of the paper. Those sort of things."

"Yeah, so? Crime's existed for a long time, I'm surprised you're just noticing it now," Amycus gave him a jokingly mocking grin.

Lucius adopted a conspiratorial tone. "But that's just it. It's not your average sort of crime. I think it's debatable whether it even qualifies as crime."

Amycus caught the quaffle and turned it over in his hands before throwing it back, a questioning look on his face. "What d'you mean?"

"Isn't it obvious?" he teased, his eyes sparkling, glued to Amycus's. "There's a new order rising."

A suspicious look. "What sort of order?"

"One based on blood, on equality. It's simple, if one is pure of blood one then on is worthy. If not, then not."

"How is that new? Everyone already agrees that Mudbloods are at the bottom of the food chain."

"But it's more than that. Do you not understand? If one is pure of blood one is worthy. It doesn't matter what your social class is. It doesn't matter who your parents are, as long as they were pure of blood. Now everyone who is pure of blood is a pureblood."

An enlightened, fascinated, mischievous, scheming grin spread in a diagonal slash across Amycus's face. "I like the sound of that. Tell me about those who aren't worthy."

"The half-bloods and Mudbloods?" Lucius returned the conspiratorial, scheming grin. "Well, of course, the movement is going to have to start with the Mudbloods, and let's just say that things happen to those who aren't worthy. The sorts of things that the newspaper has been reporting."

"They're animal-like, aren't they?" Amycus blurt out. "The half-bloods and Mudbloods. Dense. Cruel. They lack that spark of humanity, they don't realize their proper place in relation to us purebloods."

For once Lucius didn't mind Amycus using the term "pureblood" self-referentially; under the New Order he was a pureblood. "I would agree with that. The half-bloods and Mudbloods are certainly too thick to realize what's happening, the New Order that is rising."

"I like the sound of that," Amycus darkly murmured, before uttering in a much lighter tone, "Hey, I'm gonna go get a cup of water; it's a bit warm out here. Wanna come with?"

Lucius dropped the Quaffle before walking towards the kitchen with his friend. Amycus was so noisy in grabbing two cups from the plain wood cupboards that Lucius jumped to realize there was someone else in the room with them. A middle-aged woman who looked as though she would have fit in well with Hogwarts' ghosts sat at one of the counters, staring vacantly into space.

"Oh, er, don't mind my mum," Amycus spoke, handing Lucius a cup of water. "She's kinda quiet." Lucius vaguely wondered what the Carrow's father looked like to produce two solidly-built, black-haired, black-eyed children when their mother had pale hair and a fragile, spindly build. "Wonder if she'll still be that quiet when the New Order takes power," Amycus wondered in an idle whisper as they left room.