Chapter 2
Hey! Sorry this took so long: I'm not the most techno-literate person and it's taken awhile to figure out how to post something new. Chapters will come much quicker now. Enjoy!
Okay, he thought as he prowled the moonlit halls. Where in the world was the entrance to Gryffindor Tower? He had been searching the castle for the last few nights, and had actually found the entrance yesterday. However, the suit of armor he had used for a marker had moved during the night; he was now hopelessly lost in a dark, damp, and disused wing of the castle. As if the week could get any worse.
He leaned against the wall and sighed. At this point, there was no reason to try and find the girl. His best course of action would be to find something, anything, that looked familiar and use it to get back to the common room. Try again another night. He got off the wall and turned the corner.
SMACK!
He had slammed directly into what may have just been a suit of armor; but suits of armor didn't generally clank about the halls carrying textbooks. Tomes the size of pillows rained down on him and a squeal from their owner came from the other side of the wall.
"What the devil…what kind of hare-brained nose breather would be out here in the middle of the…?"
A face came around the wall. The voice stopped. Draco could do nothing but stare.
Her. Merlin's most saggy Y-fronts.
He pulled out his wand, and the head vanished. The sound of running footsteps went down the hall.
direction of the footsteps. "Don't just run off! I want to talk to you!"
He turned the corner and realized the only steps he could hear were his own. "Rats." He stood in the hall and listened. If he strained, he could almost hear breathing. Was he just hearing the wind in the glass panes, or was she still here?
He decided to take the chance. "Look," he said, slipping his wand into his pocket, "if you can hear me, I wasn't going to hurt you. I just…I just wanted to ask you why. Why you did it. There have been plenty of other times where I've picked on Mud…first-years and no one's said or done anything about it. Why you, and why then?" Silence. "I don't know, it's stupid…"
"It's not."
Draco whirled around. She was standing right behind him. How had she crept up without him noticing? "Are…are you a ghost?"
"No."
Light from the windows glittered down, enough for Draco to get his first coherent look at his adversary. She was certainly tall for a girl, with a slim and boney frame. Too boney, in fact. Her shoulder blades nearly poked holes in her shirt. Her muscles more than made up for that; he wondered how someone so thin could have acquired such strength. As for her face, it was just as slim as the rest of her (you could clearly see her cheekbones), but you could somehow tell that if she put a little meat on her bones, she would be strikingly beautiful. Her eyes were a hypnotizing shade of green-grey; her nose small and pointed; her mouth more of a thin chapped line. Her black hair ran in a simple braid down her back, each strand neat and in it's place. All in all, nothing about her was really extraordinary; so, why did her stare make him want to back whimpering into a corner?
She stepped forward until they were barely three feet from each other. Staring back at him listlessly, she tugged her braid forward and started playing with the tip. "To answer your question, Mr. Malfoy, I stood up because no one else did. If you don't remind a bully" she spat out the word as if it tasted sour "that the rest of humanity can be as tough as they are every once in a while, they'll get completely out of hand. Start going after everyone. And I think you've lost sight of how we're all wizards."
"If you're saying all wizards are equal, you're barking!" Draco shouted, starting to get angry again. "Pruebloods are far superior to half-breeds in every…"
"How?" she shouted, her tiny frame filling the corridor with sound. "Give me one good reason why purebloods and muggle-borns are so different, and I'll leave you alone for good!"
"Easy. They're…well, they're…" His mind was an utter blank. He stared at her helplessly, waiting for her eyes to vaporize him.
She smiled. "Thought so. There isn't a reason, is there?"
"Well, just because I can't think of it off the top of my head doesn't mean one doesn't exist!"
She rolled her eyes. "Men. Always so stubborn! So concerned with being correct all the time that they can't see past their won noses!"
"Wha…?"
"And you know what scares me more? You are the future of the wizarding world, Mr. Malfoy. One day, you will be leading us into the future, giving the values you hold so dear to your children and their children, polluting the world with bias you don't even fully understand!"
"Now, wait just a bloody…" But there was no stopping the spew of sentences issuing from her mouth. The rafters were starting to rain their dust on uncaring heads.
"You can't think! You can memorize every world that comes out of your textbooks but it will never prepare you to do what is right! To discover, to find things out for yourself, to question! Without that ability in people like you, the wizarding world is surely doomed. And with your limited abilities, what could you do anyway? I certainly hope your parents have a nice cushy job you didn't earn to force you into after you leave Hogwarts, because with your prejudice, boorishness, and lazy attitude, you are most unlikely to land a job anywhere else! Or did you expect to live off Mummy like a leech for the rest of your life?"
The resounding silence was broken only by the howl of wind though the broken panes. A storm was brewing in the clouds above the school.
No one, in the history of wizarding England, had ever dared to speak to a Malfoy with such open contempt. Draco was so shocked that his brain took minutes to put together a coherent rebuttal. And ever then, what finally came out was almost a pitiful whine. "Ha…Wha…Mi…Who…Who do you think you are?"
Before she could reply, a fain light appeared on the other end of the corridor. They whirled around. Silhouetted by the lantern light was Mr. Filch, the caretaker, and his horrid cat, Mrs. Norris. They could hear him mumbling as he hunted, "Students out of bed, my sweet, students yelling in the corridors. We'll find 'em, yes, we will…"
The girl cursed under her breath and ran to the wall. Under Draco's astonished gaze, she stuck her bare feet into the crevice in the wall made by the crumbling mortar and started pulling herself up the wall. Well, Draco thought, that explains how she gets around the school undetected, and why she's so strong.
She turned to look at him, looking like a spider caught running up the stall in a girl's toilet. That image was broken when she hissed, "Hide, you idiot!" and scrambled out of sight.
Despite the warning, Draco's brain had frozen. The corridor was a dead end, there was nowhere to hide, he couldn't climb after her, and Filch would round the corner any second. Sighing, he turned toward the light and held his head high, ready to face the nasty detentions the caretaker would no doubt insure he got.
"Wingadrium Leviosa!"
Without any other warning, Draco found himself hanging in the air twelve feet above the floor. The spell then turned him toward the wall and smacked him against the molding like a bug. He scrambled for a handhold on the crumbling stone, finally having to stick his fingers into cobweb-filled cracks nears the ceiling. Finding no purchase with his feet, he was forced to simply hang in the darkness like he was on a medieval rack.
Shuffling to his right made him turn his head. The girl was now hanging by one arm ear his ear. With her free hand, she wrapped her arm around his shoulders to his front, clamping her hand down on his mouth. "Stay still and silent, unless you want detention for the rest of the semester. I've got a plan, but if he sees you, we're through. Clear?"
She left without even waiting for confirmation, hopping down the side of the wall like some kind of demented frog, and leaving Draco to wonder why she was bothering to help him at all. Didn't she hate him, or something?
He glanced at the floor and saw with horror that Filch was directly beneath him. The caretaker sniffled wetly and raised his lamp higher, the yellow light coming up to just below Draco's shoes.
Well, Draco thought to himself, this is just great. Not only am I going to be bloody tanned by Snape, but I'm going to look like an idiot doing it. Instead of facing my punishment with my head high like a true Malfoy, I'll be found hanging from the ceiling covered in dust and cobwebs, whimpering like a…
Wait, that's not me.
A squeaky sobbing sound was coming from the far right side of the corridor. Filch's head snapped toward it. "Ha, got you!" he shrieked in triumph, closing in on that side.
But the sound was already gone, waiting for him at the other end of the hallway. Mrs. Norris hissed; Filch whirred around and stamped to the left, cursing wildly under his breath. But, as Draco knew from his spot on the ceiling, she wasn't there anymore.
This went on for a while; it was a truly absurd spectacle. After a few minutes, Draco had used the distractions to haul himself up to the ceiling beams for a better view. He had to admit she was making a good show of it; she even allowed Filch to glimpse her once or twice, resounding in a cackle of fury. But, he soon realized, she was stuck. She had no finale, no dramatic finish, certainly nothing that would make Filch go away. Did that mean the end was up to him? Musing over various schemes already churning in his brain, he looked out the windows where stormy midnight brewed, and heard the moans of the wind through the glass. And smiled.
As the girl scampered past on her next round, he motioned for her to join him on the center beam, and that he had an idea. She looked skeptical, but slipped up anyway.
Draco slipped off his necktie and unbuttoned the color of his shirt, much to the astonished gaze of his partner. He then undid the knot in the tie, redid it around his own neck, and knotted the longer end around the beam. The girl, who had of course figured it out by now, reached out to hold him on the beam, but it was too late. With a quick mock salute to his partner, Draco Malfoy took a deep breath and fell sideways, right in front of Filch's nose.
The resulting scream was heard a mile away by the threastral herd in the Forest, who perked up their ears and whinnied at the shrill sound.
It was lucky that Filch ran when he did. Draco wasn't sure how much longer he could have held his breath. With a laugh far too big for her tiny frame, the girl used her wand to slit his necktie, dropping him to the floor. She dropped down herself, squatting like a toad, and with no preamble they rolled with laughter on the cold stone floor.
"That…that was mean." She finally wheezed, sitting up and looking at Draco. "He'll probably never walk the castle alone again!"
"He has no choice, he's the caretaker." Draco sat up too, and picked up the strips of emerald silk. "The…the true calamity in this whole situation…is I have just ruined a two-Galleon necktie!"
Unable to stop, they laughed for what felt like blissful hours. When they finally had their wits about them, they stood up and just stared at each other.
"Well," said the girl, "for a spoiled, ego-centric parrot of a Slytherin…you're all right."
"Yeah." Draco felt just as astonished as she probably did. Was this really the same Gryffindor that had beaten him up in front of half the school? If you just stopped and looked, she was kind of…cool. "You too."
She smiled. For some reason, that simple gesture flooded Draco with warmth. "I…I really should be going." She said suddenly, and quickly turned down the hall to vanish.
"Wait!" Draco called. "I…I don't even know your name."
She blinked in surprise, and then shrugged. "Oh, all right. I know who you are, Draco Malfoy, so you can skip the formalities. My name is Ladybird River Dowel. My friends call me River. Or at least, they would, if I had any friends." She held out her hand to him. "Want to be the first?"
He eyed her hand suspiciously. "But…but the fight…"
She smiled a coy little half-smile. "Why, Mr. Malfoy, I have no idea what you're talking about."
He smiled and took her hand. Overhead, the storm broke.
So, what do you think? Should do you want me to keep going, or is no one ever reading this? Reviews are lifeblood, my friends. Also, I am not J.K. Rowling, so I don't own Draco or anything else to do with the Harry Potter universe (except my own wand!)