Chapter Six: Sticky Green Death

Three years ago—

'I hate him,' said Rowena; fifteen years old and therefore brimming with vanity, hormones and the utter, unwavering conviction that she was always right. 'I mean, I actually hate him.'

'Sexual tension,' said Henrietta Bagman, knowledgably.

'Hatred,' said Rowena.

'Same thing,' said Henrietta.

Rowena didn't like Henrietta. She had a certain…aura about her. As if she was always staring at you voyeuristically, but looking down her nose to do so. Besides which, her father was a doctor. This lead Henrietta to consider herself the number one authority on matters of a sexual nature, and therefore not the easiest person to talk to.

'No,' said Rowena, levelly, 'I think there's a marked difference between wanting to throttle someone and wanting to jump their bones.'

'You can do both at the same time,' said Henrietta, folding her legs primly and leaning over her homework, 'some people enjoy it.'

Rowena stared at the top of her curly, mousy head. 'What…?'

'It's true,' she said, without looking up.

Rowena stared at her a while longer, before leaning back against the tree trunk and deciding not to pursue the subject. But under her breath, in a muted effort to win the last word, she mumbled, 'Never.'

'It's true.'

'What the hell does your dad talk to you about, Henry?'

'I know these things,' she insisted.

'All my dad ever taught me was how to plant carrots.'

'Yes, but that's a coded phallic symbol in itself. Besides, your father died.'

And that was another thing about Henrietta. Yes, of course her dad had died. Everybody knew as much. But no one else would dream of mentioning it so casually.

A few deep breaths and mental executions later, Rowena mumbled, 'Yeah, well…' which wasn't much of a concluding argument, but made her feel a lot better all the same. She focussed on her essay.

In the left margin, during an idle moment, she scrawled the words, Damn you, Helga Hufflepuff. Do you realise how awful it is trying to work with Henrietta? She's entertaining sick fancies about me shagging Slytherin, do you know that? I swear to God, if you weren't Sick and Dying right now I'd rip your eyes out.

The words shone for a moment, the wet ink gleaming in the sunshine, before dissolving into the paper before her very eyes. She awaited a response for a minute or so but, receiving none, dutifully continued with her homework, ignoring the worried feeling bubbling inside her.

The summer months had signalled another outbreak of fever; although no one was sure of its name or origins, the teachers had begun to refer to sick students as S/D. These initials, too, were a mystery, but it had come to be agreed amongst the pupils that it stood for Sick and Dying, which was very funny up until the moment your best friend caught it.

And so, with only twenty or so pupils left in school, Rowena had been forced into a temporary alliance with Henrietta Bagman: snob, teacher's pet, and writer of pornographic novelettes. In her later years, Rowena would cringe to recall that this was the girl she'd learned the Facts of Life from, in all their anatomically correct glory.

'You know, he's not all that bad,' she said, while Rowena glared expectantly at her margin for a response from Helga to arrive.

'Who's not?'

'Slytherin.'

Rowena scoffed and met her eyes. 'Yes, he is. He's a complete tit-witch no more deserving of life than the humble house fly, and with about as much charisma. I'd like to bury him neck-deep in sand and hit his face repeatedly with a shovel, before making him eat his own severed manhood.' "Manhood" was another word she'd learnt from Henrietta. Before this, she'd been in the habit of calling them "nadgers" which wasn't, apparently, very mature of her.

'Sexual tension,' said Henrietta, again.

'It is not sexual tension!'

…To which Henrietta replied the five most annoying words in the English language: 'Yeah, alright. Whatever you say.'

Rowena stabbed the ground with her pencil. Before Henrietta had the opportunity to inform her that this was, like everything else she ever said or did, a phallic symbol of some kind, Rowena plunged on: 'Well, he's S/D now, isn't he? So it's all irrelevant. If I'm lucky, he might die a torturous death.'

'Don't say that,' said Henrietta, harshly – whereas Helga would have told her not to get her hopes up. Helga would have known she was (sort-of) joking. 'That's a terrible thing to say.'

Rowena said, 'Ugh.'

'And have you noticed that most of the S/Ds are boys, Rowena?'

'Yeah? So?'

Very solemnly, Henrietta told her: 'So our wombs will remain barren and our pleasure unfulfilled.'

'I'm fifteen years old!' Rowena replied, slightly hysterically. 'My pleasure isn't even invited to the party! And I'm not plagued by unresolved sexual tension! And – and I do not have an Electra complex or a fascination with the phallus or repressed homosexual desire – I am fifteen!'

In the same solemn tone, she said, 'You're never too young to have an Electra complex, Rowena.'

'You have an Electra complex,' Rowena snapped, slightly immaturely as she didn't even know what this was, 'and it's a homosexual one at that!'

'Don't be silly.'

'Ugh! You're a crap Helga, do you know that? Crap!'

Henrietta's expression suddenly softened. She lowered her quill and leaned towards Rowena intently, causing Rowena to accordingly lean away. 'Is that what this is about?' she asked softly. 'Are you upset that Helga's dying?'

'She's not dying!'

'She's S/D, Rowena; you've said so yourself.'

'Well she's – she's – Jesus Christ, Henrietta, what are you?'

Henrietta shrugged.

'She's S, that's all. No D.' She tactfully pushed Henrietta's looming pitiful expression away, and resumed work on her essay. 'She wouldn't die on me. We made a deal.'

'I see,' said Henrietta, voice softening more by the second. Rowena ignored her.

She searched her margin for a response from Helga, but none had arrived. She couldn't send her an owl, because owls were unhealthy. She could always—

'Bronwyn!'

—shoot me.

She looked up in time to see Elvina Hart prancing over the horizon, skipping gaily toward them in a manner that almost merited slow motion and a soundtrack of strings and woodwind. She even had the wind blowing freely through her hair, for Christ's sake.

'Hello, Elvina,' Rowena mumbled, as she arrived at the willow tree, eclipsing the sunlight with her massive head.

'Hello Elvina,' Henrietta chorused, eagerly. Elvina ignored her.

'Bronwyn, where's your little yellowy friend?'

'She's S…S,' Rowena replied, unable to bring herself to pronounce the D.

'Oh, that's a shame.' She swished her hair, for the sheer hell of it. 'It's depressing, isn't it, all these people dying?'

'Not dying,' said Rowena, quickly, 'just sickly.'

'Mm? Really? Oh, that's lovely. I never get sick.'

'Good for you,' Rowena mumbled.

'Or fat.'

'Terrific.'

'Or spotty.'

'Well done.'

'Or dumped.'

'Did you want something?' Rowena demanded.

'Mm? Oh…' She shrugged, and waved her hands absently. 'I don't think so. It's so boring, having only you girls to talk to.'

'Sorry.'

'Oh, don't apologise to me. Apologise to yourself.' She smiled with absolute sincerity. Rowena stared at her in disbelief. That was the thing about Elvina: she always, always meant it.

'Dear me,' Rowena mumbled, barely audibly, 'you're both crap Helgas.' She glanced down at her work, and was elated to see Helga's response shining in her margin:

Oh, well that's a fine way to talk to a Sick and Dying child, isn't it? I'll never get better with that sort of attitude.

Henrietta can be effectively dealt with using either the sharp end of a sweeping brush or an actual representation of the male anatomy, which would no doubt shock her into silence for the rest of her natural life. However, if you could get your hands on an actual representation of the male anatomy (oo-er) you wouldn't have to put up with her anyway.

If you ever make sexy shenanigans with any member of the Slytherin clan I will be forced to die immediately as punishment; also because a world of Slytherin-Ravenclaw babies is not a world in which I wish to live. They could not co-exist with the future Gryffindor-Hufflepuff babies of the world.

And being Sick and Dying isn't all that bad, because the hospital wing's comfier than I've previously been lead to believe, and because THE Godric Gryffindor happens to be laying three beds down and I'VE ACTUALLY SPOKEN TO HIM. Unfortunately I threw up on him thirty seconds later, so all in all it's been a mixed day – him having seen the contents of my stomach, and all.

Think I'm getting better. Probably not going to die in immediate future. Are you getting my homework for me? Because if I fail this year because of you I'm going to rub your face with an onion.

- Helga.

Rowena grinned. Perfect Helga.

In a distinctly heterosexual sense.

Back in the here and now, Rowena balanced upon a shaky stool and, stretching her upper body as far as biology would allow, pushed a pear-shaped potion bottle towards the back of a shelf. It was, she told herself, a Good Job Well Done. She was really Getting the Hang of This Sort of Thing.

She lined up the other potion bottles with the kind of enthusiasm that stems from the joy of the menial, then hopped down from the stool and stepped back to admire her handiwork.

'There!' she beamed, proudly. 'I've put myself to great use.'

'Uh-huh,' said Helga vaguely, having spent the past half an hour arranging desks, chairs and everything else Rowena considered "grunt work", and not feeling terribly happy about it. 'Marvellously done, Ro,' she said, sarcastically.

Rowena decided to ignore her tone, and instead nodded. 'Yep. I mean, it took some effort – couple of rough minutes there, up on that stool – but my devotion to task was unwavering, and I managed to pull through.'

'Well done.'

'And now I can look back on my achievements with pride and an overall feeling of catharsis.'

'Do shut up.'

Rowena continued to beam out of amiable spite. It was hardly her fault that whenever she attempted to partake in any physically exertive activity her lungs seemed to shrink and her throat closed up. But whenever she reminded Helga of this, the blonde merely laughed at the "physically exertive" bit, and somehow managed to cover the phrase "dying a virgin" with one massive cough.

'Well, that's one room done,' Rowena announced, admiring the layout of the classroom, 'just another three hundred and forty-seven to go.'

'We're not going to need that many, are we?' Helga half-asked, half-pleaded. 'Ro, my arms hurt! We don't have that many chairs…'

Rowena grinned. 'Calm down, Hel. We won't even have that many students.'

'Oh thank God. Godric promised he'd sort a couple of rooms out, didn't he?' Helga hinted, hopefully. Perhaps not simply out of a reluctance to undertake anymore manual labour, but also the shining hope that she'd glimpse a certain sweaty Gryffindor balancing a chair on his biceps. That, Rowena considered, would probably confirm the reason for Helga's very existence.

'Yes, he did. But I think he's visiting the village instead.'

Helga winced. 'What for?'

'Advertising, I imagine. Not that our attempt was anything short of spectacular, of course.'

'Of course,' Helga dutifully agreed, as they vacated the room and began a leisurely stroll along the fourth floor corridor. The castle seemed to have an infinite number of floors; she tended to lose count after the fifth. Finding your way around Hogwarts was more a matter of luck and willpower than any level of navigational prowess. 'What about Slytherin? Think he'll be of any use?'

They wandered into the large room at the end of the corridor which, despite not looking very much like one, would one day go on to become a well-stocked library. For now, the room was bare save for a group of lazily assembled book shelves, each containing no more than three books, and at least one of which consisted of pornographic doodles. Rowena shrugged and leaned lazily against a shelf.

'No idea. Maybe. Probably not. No. No,' she repeated, shaking her head, 'I don't honestly think he'll be in any way useful, unless we ritualistically drain his blood and offer his bones to a primitive deity of good fortune, but even then I think he'd be rejected on account of his oozing black plasma of sticky-green death.'

Helga nodded. 'Yeah. That's exactly what I thought.'

'Really?'

'No, you mental bitch.' She glanced around the room, reached the conclusion that Rowena had led them in there due a complete lack of work to be done rather than a determination to crack on with the task at hand, and leaned against the opposite bookshelf. She found herself wishing for chairs. 'Has he done anything particularly irritating recently?'

'Oh, you know, the usual…sneering, lurking, accusing me of having a penis, that sort of thing.' She sniffed. 'I hate men.'

'Really?'

'Yes. No,' she decided, after a moment, 'mainly I hate Slytherin, but the mood felt right for melodrama.' She sighed. 'Just humour me.'

'Oh,' said Helga obediently, 'OK. Me too, in that case. Except Godric.'

'Except Godric,' Rowena conceded; Godric was so generally inoffensive that it was difficult to harbour a grudge against him. You could enter a room to find him towering above your slaughtered family with a bloodied axe in his hand, and he'd only have to say, "Oh I do beg your pardon, I appear to have got a bit carried away with the homicidal mania and all that rot. I do hope you'll forgive me," and you probably would.

'Alright,' she decided, 'we can hypothetically hate all men except Godric.'

'And that boy from school,' said Helga, thoughtfully, 'the one you went out with.'

'Yes—'

'For about two days,' she added, under her breath.

Rowena gave her a scolding look. 'It was at least a week.' She opened a book and, upon seeing its contents, rapidly snapped it shut again. 'Anyway, he's the only boy I ever went out with, and we didn't even get to kissing. I only liked him in the first place because he had double-jointed kneecaps and I was easily impressed.'

Unfortunately, Salazar Slytherin's reputation as a "snakey bastard" was based primarily upon his ability to manifest very silently, and at the worst possible time. He cleared his throat noisily.

'Holy god!' Rowena screeched, automatically throwing a book at him.

Salazar grinned. 'I can roll my tongue in two directions, does that mean I'm in with a chance?'

'You!' said Rowena, not exactly at her mental peak. Helga winced on her behalf. 'You,' she said again, as calmly as possible. She cleared her throat. 'You, er...weren't stood out there very long, were you?'

'Oh my,' he said, admiringly, 'what a fascinating shade of crimson.'

'Shut up!'

'I have a friend who can belch the alphabet. Is that impressive enough for you?'

Dammit dammit dammit! 'Shut up,' she said, pointing a warning finger, 'or I swear to wizard god I will gut you like a fish!'

Salazar carried on grinning. 'OK,' he said, 'I'll stop.'

'Good!' She crossed her arms, and waited for some of her dignity to come back.

'Er...Ro?' said Helga, delicately. 'He won't.'

Slytherin chuckled. 'She's right. I won't.'

Rowena sighed.

'When you finally get your first kiss,' he said, leaning comfortably against the door frame, 'I hope there's rainbows. Really.' He smiled. 'Fireworks, angels, the whole kiboodle.'

'I hate you.'

'And I hope it's by a waterfall,' he continued, with a dreamy sigh. 'In the summer.'

'I hate you.'

'While kittens purr and babies sing...I mean, if the world's going to end, it might as well go down in style.'

Rowena said something that sounded like "duck off", and threw another book at him. 'And have you done any work today?' she demanded, desperate for a change in subject.

Slytherin scoffed at the suggestion. 'My work here is done, Ravenclaw. I'm the one funding this misadventure.'

'We're all funding it!' she yelled, which wasn't strictly true. So she quickly changed tact, and went with: 'We wouldn't have to do as much work if you hadn't sent Elvina packing.'

'That was a group decision,' he reminded her, while Helga remained diplomatically silent.

'Yes, forced upon us by you! We could have just reached a compromise, but—'

'Feel free to retrieve her,' he said, mockingly, 'since you loved her companionship so much.'

'That's – that's not the point!'

'We're better off with just the four of us, in any case. It has certain advantages.'

'Like what?'

He shrugged. 'We could always form a barbershop quartet?'

To her eternal disgust, she actually snorted. She clamped a hand over her mouth to silence the noise, damning everyone within a five mile radius. Slytherin looked incredibly pleased with himself.

'Besides,' he continued, stretching out a cramp in his arm, 'my company's limitlessly preferable to hers. She's like a haemorrhoid with legs.'

She had to purse her lips again before insisting, 'No. Nothing's preferable to you.'

Salazar shrugged, with the vaguest of grins on his lips, and said, 'But at least I've managed to get a snog in my entire life.' He stalked away.

Rowena stared after him.

Helga took a few silent steps backwards.

Rowena blinked.

Helga hid behind a bookcase.

And Rowena screamed, 'I HATE HIS HEAD!'