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12
A BATTLE OF WITS
MUSICAL MOOD:
FIONN - HOLD OFF
"Has anyone ever told you that you are a shit liar, Woodley?"
A/N: First of all, I just really want to thank all of the majorly AWESOME people who read my story and take the time to leave me a note in the review section, or favourite it. Every single one of you makes me infinitely happy and had me grin stupidly in the middle of class more than once already. You are literally the reason I am writing. So thank you for that.
Katie watched me as I plopped a tea bag into my steaming mug, stirring the hot water absentmindedly. The buzz of Ravenclaw common room enveloped us, even though we had made sure to steer clear of the centre of attention, which was the Ravenclaw keeper Hector Chang and his gormless friends, downing questionable amounts of slug slime for a bet.
Ravenclaw was seriously going to the dogs.
"Is it safe?" Katie asked quietly, her blue eyes looking unusually anxious.
I lifted my steaming mug to my mouth and took a sip of scalding hot tea, waiting for the group of fourth-years to be out of earshot before I replied. I had succeeded in brewing the basis for the potion, which now had to sit in a dark, damp spot until it was fully developed. I had left it in the potions classroom, hidden behind one of the shelves filled with books, banking on the fact that Slughorn rarely used any of them, and I could only hope that he would not suddenly realise that he did, indeed, need them after all.
"I think so."
Katie nodded, sipping on her own tea as she watched Hector empty his fourth glass of slime, heaving quite violently in the process. "And James?"
"What about him?" I shrugged my shoulders with an air of indifference. Since the disastrous tutoring lesson two days ago, I had not heard from James Potter again and, honestly, I was relieved; glad, even. It was obvious that we shouldn't be in a room together.
Katie pressed her lips together, still observing the ruckus in the middle of the common room. I followed her gaze just to see one of the boys actually throw up and, completely disgusted, quickly turned away again to look at one of the tall windows where rain was pelting the glass.
I didn't see him at first, too absorbed in my own thoughts, but then he moved and I froze. Sam Henderson was standing in the corner next to the window, staring straight at me with a hollow expression on his face. Apart from the one class we had together I hadn't really seen him around lately and I was shocked by the dark circles underneath his eyes that bordered on black, standing out against his sallow skin. Hidden from the bright light of the torches, candles and fireplaces, he could have easily passed as an Infirius and I felt a cold shiver run down my spine.
"I, um, I should get going," I said to Katie after finally forcing myself to look away from Sam again and got up from the comfortable wingback chair.
"Sure," Katie said, stifling a yawn. "Have fun." She stretched her arms above her head as she watched me hoist the handle of my bag onto my shoulder. I would have given anything to not have to monitor detention tonight; there was still a ton of homework I hadn't done yet and I felt tired and exhausted. Unfortunately, as a sixth year prefect, I didn't really have a choice.
The rain was drumming a steady pattern against the tall stained glass windows that adorned the Charms classroom, bringing the colourful figures to life. I hardly noticed, however, as my thoughts kept circling back to Sam and the miserable state he had seemed to be in. Maybe I should have told him that I was brewing the potion for him, but the more people knew about it, the higher was the risk that it got out.
I shook my head to myself and tried to direct my focus back to the books that were strewn across the large desk in front of me. I had planned to use the hours I had to spend locked in a room with half a dozen teenage delinquents to get started on my Transfiguration homework but my concentration kept slipping and I found myself reading entire paragraphs without actually knowing what they were about. The soft scratching of quills on parchment was oddly hypnotising and I let my gaze wander around the room, unable to reign in my meandering thoughts.
Suddenly, just as I was looking at it, the heavy oak door at the back of the room began to open slowly. For a second, I stupidly thought that it was Peeves, ready to wreak havoc, but then a tall – and quite solid – figure slipped into the classroom and made its way towards the desk I was occupying.
By the time he had reached the front, everybody in the room was staring at James Potter, who casually pulled up a chair and sat down right next to me as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
"What are you doing here?" I hissed under my breath, uncomfortably aware of the sudden hush that had fallen over the room as the scratching and shuffling of paper had faded away.
"I needed to talk to you," James replied in a low voice, albeit not bothering to whisper, and produced a couple of pages from the back-pocket of his jeans. "And Minnie told me you were monitoring detention tonight."
Minnie.
Of course he'd call our intimidating, no-nonsense headmistress Minnie.
I stared at James for a second, not sure if he was entirely sober. Or maybe he had sustained a particularly hard blow to the head during Quidditch practice. It really was the only explanation for why he would suddenly show up during detention on a Friday night like this, wanting to talk to me.
"As much as I hate to admit it," he said, furrowing his brow, "you were right."
"About what?" I was still struggling to catch on. Maybe this was a prank and, any minute now, one of Potter's friends would come running in and dump a bucket of slime over my head. But when James pushed the paper towards me, I realised that it was a potions essay on Hephadore's Theorem with a thick, purple Acceptable scribbled into the upper left corner.
"The trick with making a mistake first to understand actually worked, I guess." He put his arm up to tousle the back of his head. "I thought you were a nutter but you're actually pretty smart."
"Wow, thanks." I pushed the essay back towards him again, feeling my irritation with him reaching a new high. "I'm glad we sorted that out. And now go away."
Even without directly looking at him I could see the amused grin that curled his mouth as he watched me bend over my Transfiguration homework. I wasn't actually reading the passage I was staring at, but I was trying to make a point, namely that our conversation – if one could even call it that – was over.
Arrogant git.
"You're actually pretty good at pretending that you don't like me."
I looked up momentarily, caught off guard by the sudden closeness of James's face as he leaned in a little, still smirking. His smile wasn't even. One corner of his mouth was slightly higher than the other and there was a weird hitch behind my chest. Like an anchor, pulling tight.
Naturally, I ignored the feeling.
"And you're shockingly full of yourself. It must be hard to get out of bed with that big head of yours."
James shrugged, his grin widening so that a dimple appeared on his right cheek. "I manage, but thanks for your concern."
It rather seemed as though he was enjoying this and I rolled my eyes before looking back down to my half-finished homework. At this rate I would accomplish exactly nothing. Leave it to Potter to ruin even my prefect chores.
"So what about tomorrow?" He said, not even missing a beat. "I'm sure Sluggy will let us use the potions classroom again."
"No." I continued to highlight random sentences in the book in front of me, well aware that I was not playing this as cool as I wanted to. "Go away, Potter."
I was determined to remain stubborn. Tutoring James Potter had been a catastrophe so far and I didn't need that sort of chaos in my life right now. I needed to focus on school and on qualifying for head girl next year.
I needed to not get caught brewing a very illegal potion in my potion teacher's classroom.
"Please, Woodley," James said quietly and I looked up at him unwittingly, realising too late that he was much closer than I had expected. "I really need your help."
He was frowning and there was a dent next to his eyebrow that held none of the easy nonchalance of his usual smiles. I could still feel the room's attention on us - through the soft scratching of quills and the rustling of pages that seemed too deliberate to be casual - and I briefly wondered if he knew. If he even noticed it anymore.
"Why?" I didn't think. I didn't even know why I was asking. The question had just slipped out in a whisper and James gave me a weird look like, maybe I was taking the piss.
"Because I'm shit at potions?"
"No." I shook my head, mostly to fight the laugh that threatened to bubble up my throat. "I mean, why the tutoring? You don't have to care."
James raised a dark eyebrow at me, holding my gaze for what felt like a second too long. "I don't?"
His voice rasped and I swallowed and something felt weirdly off.
"Fine." I rolled my eyes and then dragged my gaze away from him, back to my display of books and papers that coated the desk. "But just so we're clear, I'm not doing this for you."
I really wasn't. I was doing it for easy access to the potion I had stupidly hidden in a classroom like the most incompetent rulebreaker ever.
"Sure." The smirk was back on James's face, replacing any trace of earnestness so entirely that I wondered if it had ever been there in the first place; if any of it had been real.
"See you Tuesday then, Woodley." He had gotten up from his chair and walked a couple of steps backwards, still grinning infuriatingly. "I owe you one."
As the door closed behind him, I couldn't help the small groan that escaped my mouth. This was not going to end well.
There were owl droppings everywhere. The dried ones – while maybe unsightly – didn't actually matter but, judging by the squelching sound underneath my shoes, I had apparently just stepped into a fresh heap of excrement.
"Ugh, great," I mumbled to myself, inspecting the damage while ignoring the snickering group of girls that huddled in the corner of the Owlery. There was a gooey white blob on the sole of my trainers, which basically meant that it would stay there forever.
"Don't worry, owl droppings are lucky," someone said next to me and when I looked up, I saw Tarquin, attaching a small parcel to a school owl's leg.
"At least my nana used to say that."
"Well," I sighed, "let's hope your nana is right then."
Tarquin grinned, releasing the owl with his delivery into the sky. "Usually," he said as he watched me feed a couple of owl nuts to Archimedes who had just returned from delivering my latest excuse for a letter to my parents. The fact that I had carelessly scribbled it with an ordinary ball-point pen had probably caused a minor scandal in the Woodley household, but, fortunately, I wouldn't have to hear about it until the Kick-off in two weeks.
"How are you? You've skipped a lot of dinners lately." Tarquin observed me from the side, falling into step with me as we walked down the staircase together.
"Oh, um, yes." I pushed my hair behind my ears, hoping that my blush wasn't too obvious. "I've just been really busy. That's all."
He nodded and, to my great relief, didn't seem to want to inquire any further. "Hey, um, can I ask you something?" He said tentatively, a somewhat sheepish expression on his thin face.
"Sure. Shoot." I entirely expected this to be about Katie. After all, he had been pining for her for years already. However, just for once, Katie didn't seem to be the first thing on his mind.
"This might sound weird but – what is going on with you and James Potter?"
"What?" I stopped walking in the middle of the staircase, feeling my insides churn. It was a weird question, and I needed a moment to wrap my thoughts around it.
"This came out strange," Tarquin said lamely when he noticed my shocked expression. "What I meant was, I heard a couple of girls talking in our common room about Potter and I kind of picked up your name?" He finished the sentence with a rising intonation as though he was asking a question, his eyebrows raised.
"Oh, well, I'm tutoring Potter in Potions. Slughorn set us up," I explained, adding a casual shrug for emphasis. It wasn't a big surprise that people knew about this by now; following and discussing James Potter's social life – as sad as it may have been – was the sole purpose of many a student's existence at Hogwarts. I doubted that he could even go to the loo without someone writing about it in the school paper, really.
"Oh, yeah. Right. Okay." Tarquin's eyes did a weird sort of blinking thing before he looked away, taking a curious interest in the ugly tapestries that lined the corridor wall.
"What's wrong?" I asked slowly, somehow sensing that there was still more. He looked thoroughly uncomfortable, obviously trying not to make eye-contact with me, and I couldn't help the feeling of foreboding that wrapped around my chest.
"Oh nothing. I'm sure it's just worthless gossip-" He stopped talking abruptly and pressed his lips together as though he was trying to keep something in.
"What is?" I had halted in the middle of the corridor, giving Tarquin an inquiring look. Part of me didn't actually want to know, but my curiosity was stronger.
"Well," he said, still avoiding my gaze, "they said something about you stalking Potter but that –"
"WHAT?" My voice reverberated from the high stone walls and Tarquin flinched at my sudden outburst. Why on earth would anybody think I was stalking Potter? After all, he had approached me, asking to continue tutoring him. I hadn't wanted any of this.
"They were just silly fourth years," Tarquin tried to reason, but I was only half-listening to him anymore. I didn't know why it bothered me so much that random people I had never even talked to gossiped about me. I had never cared about what other people thought about me before. Then again, I had also never been accused of stalking anyone, either. Except by Potter, of course.
"Seth?" Tarquin asked carefully, disrupting my train of thoughts, and I looked up at him, slightly confused.
"I- I'm sorry," I said, glancing at my watch. If there was one thing I could really do without tonight, it was seeing James Potter. Unfortunately, I had already agreed to meet him in the Potions classroom at five o' clock. "I need to go."
"Oh, OK." Tarquin looked slightly taken aback. "Say hi to Katie for me?"
"Sure." I barely waved at him before turning around and walking back down the other direction, my mind still on those ridiculous rumours. Who else thought I was stalking James? Maybe he had even started the rumour himself, having a laugh with his stupid friends about it. It seemed like something they would do for fun.
By the time I had reached the potions classroom, I had managed to put myself into quite a bad mood. I was determined to cut James down to size as soon as he showed up, but he was late, as usual, which didn't exactly help.
"Calm down," I told myself, muttering quietly as I pushed aside a couple of dusty books on the shelf to get a glimpse of the potion I had hidden there, "don't let him get to you."
"Seth?"
I whirred around so fast that I dropped one of the books on the floor as I stared straight into a sunken, ashy face. Sam looked even worse from up close than he had done last Friday in the common room. His hair was matted and plastered to his face and his uniform was dripping with water, forming a small puddle underneath his feet. But it was the dark look on his face that made me take a step backwards, my back brushing against the shelf behind me.
"Sam?"
"You haven't turned me in." His voice was horribly hoarse, like he hadn't used it in forever. "What are you playing at? Is this some sort of twisted game?"
"What?" I tried to move back instinctively, but there was no room left. I had backed myself into a corner, pressed against Slughorn's oldest, mouldiest books. "No, I -"
"It doesn't matter. I changed my mind." He looked slightly unhinged as he took another step towards me and I fumbled for my wand in my back pocket. "You have to give the ingredients back to me, Seth."
Panic had slipped into his voice, making it higher and shaky, even as he tried to hide it and I noticed for the first time the sheer desperation in his gaze.
Sam wasn't dangerous.
He was scared.
"Sam," I said firmly, my fingers uncurling from my wand again. "I think I can brew the potion for Felicity."
"Felicity." He repeated her name as though he was trying to make sense of it - like a foreign language that he didn't speak - and then he looked up at me, a bemused expression on his face.
"You – what?"
I moved a little to reveal the small cauldron that stood on the shelf behind me, giving off a sharp, herbal scent and Sam peered at it over my shoulder, wild confusion pulling on his features. There was a strange sort of shift in his expression - like he was trying to rearrange the pieces of a complex puzzle - and it seemed slightly off.
Like something wasn't quite right.
"OK, I know I'm late, but it isn't my –" The classroom door had swung open with a bang and both Sam and I whipped our heads towards the entrance, staring at James Potter, who was staring back at us with raised eyebrows. " - fault… Um, Woodley? Is everything OK?"
"Yeah." I said quickly and, then, after an awkward pause, pushed past Sam, ignoring the strangeness of the entire situation.
"Are you sure?" James asked slowly, his gaze shifting to Sam behind me and I wondered what it must have looked like to him - what we must have looked like, standing too close, backed against a shelf.
"Yeah, of course." Sam had apparently gathered himself again, though he still seemed taken aback by James's sudden appearance. "I have to go anyway. Rounds." He cleared his throat and then turned to me, a serious look on his face. "Thank you. Really."
I nodded in response, not sure how else to react. It was only after the door had shut behind Sam that I realised I had been holding my breath.
I turned away from James, inhaling deeply as I walked over to the desk I had started to lay the ingredients out on, trying to sort out my rotating thoughts. How on earth had I gotten myself into this mess of a situation? There had been an obvious solution - one that didn't include brewing illegal substances right under my teachers' noses - and yet here I was, poorly handling the consequences of my unqualified choices.
"Your boyfriend looks like he could use some sleep. And a shower." James arched an eyebrow at me as he approached the desk. I could clearly hear the amusement in his voice, but I was too mentally exhausted to be properly irritated with him.
"He's not my boyfriend," I said quietly, not bothering to put more vigour into my answer, and began to set up the cauldron for the tutoring lesson. James watched me for a moment, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans before picking up the silvernettle I had just laid out.
"Right. Why is he so miserable then?"
"Oh, very funny." I snapped as I snatched the limp bushel of leaves away from him, slamming it down on the desk again. "What a witty reply."
The corners of James's mouth pulled into a grin and he leaned against the desk, his arms crossed in front of his chest. "I know. I'm hilarious."
"You're just really full of yourself." I glared at him, but he didn't seem the least bit insulted. If anything, he looked like he was enjoying this.
The git.
"You're blushing, Woodley."
"And you're a - a dunderhead!"
James stared at me with his mouth slightly open; like he had wanted to say something but the words had gotten stuck somewhere in his throat. Then, finally, he raised an eyebrow at me, his grin growing even wider. "What the fuck is a dunderhead?"
I felt my face burn, all the way to my ears, and just shook my head as I returned to rearranging the ingredients I had laid out on the table before. If I hadn't needed them to have a reason to look away from James who still looked annoyingly amused, I would have chucked them at him.
"Let's just get started," I sighed and sat down behind the desk. "The sooner we do this, the sooner it'll be over."
The torchlight had been flickering dangerously for half an hour already - the surefire sign that it was too late to be sitting around in Slughorn's classroom - but James Potter's Potions notes were a mess. Numbers and words crawled all over the page, interspersed with entirely random doodles that made absolutely no sense. In one corner of the notebook, someone had scribbled 'tonight?' in a loopy sort of handwriting and drawn a heart next to it.
"OK Potter, what is that?" I finally gave up and pointed to the tangle of arrows and crosses and lines that sprawled across most of the page, carelessly overlapping parts of the Potion inversion equations above.
"Um, what?" He gave me a weird look, because obviously he hadn't been paying attention, but then he saw what I was pointing at and I could see the onset of a grin curving his mouth as he shook his head. "Yeah, I can't tell you."
I narrowed my eyes as I regarded him for a second. Was he serious?
"What?"
"You're the enemy, Woodley." His eyes flashed - bright and amber in the firelight - and I knew that I probably should have just let it go, but I was dumb and woefully inexperienced in dealing with James Potter's questionable charms, especially when his full attention was on me.
"I'm - what?"
He shrugged, like it should have been obvious. "You're in Ravenclaw," he said as he leaned forwards and absently picked up one of the bundles of herbs from the table, one dark eyebrow raised at me. "And you're roommates with Bulky Bernie, no?"
"Don't call her that." I snapped before I could stop myself. But it was so typical, wasn't it? Boys like James Potter didn't care about cruel nicknames because they'd never been on the receiving end of all the taunts and vicious laughter that followed you down the hallway. He was smirking even now - that annoying, crooked sort of grin that left a reckless trail of broken hearts in its wake - and I hoped that he couldn't see the blush on my face. "How do you know she's my roommate?"
He just looked at me, unabashedly, like he had every right to stare me down, and then he leaned back in his chair, hands crossed behind his head, giving me an infuriatingly smug smile.
Git.
"You know what… it doesn't matter." I shook my head - more about my own stupidity than his arrogance, really - and then turned back to his abysmal notes. It was late and I needed to get rid of him to work on the morning after potion. The less I engaged with James Potter, the better.
It took me a moment to find back into the chaos that unfolded on the pages of his notebook, picking up where I had left off. James didn't say anything and I tried to focus on the comments I was writing along the margin of the paper, skirting around the sketches of broomsticks and what looked a lot like genitals. As I bent over the desk, my hair kept untucking itself from behind my ear, falling into my face, and I piled it up sloppily, securing it with the hair tie around my wrist before annotating the last of the equations he had copied from the board without any sort of explanation.
No wonder he had no idea what he was doing.
"OK, so I annotated the equations." I sighed and turned to look at James, who jolted in his chair like he had just caught himself before tipping over. "I, um…" I trailed off, frowning at him, because what the hell was that boy doing? Had he actually been snoozing? "I think it might be easier to understand the steps like this."
"Great." He sounded a little weird as he pulled the notes towards him, bending over the page with his head propped up and his hand entangled in his hair. There was a look of deep concentration on his face as he studied my comments, strands of his messy dark brown hair spilling through the cracks between his fingers, and I thought that he looked different like this somehow; hunched over school work without the confident smirk and the casual posture, he looked entirely too harmless.
I made myself look away from him before he would catch me staring at him like a lovesick fangirl and, instead, turned towards Slughorn's bewitched windows. They showed nothing but pitch black darkness and it was only because of the soft drumming noise that I knew it was still raining outside. If the weather stayed like this, there was still a chance that my parents and grandparents would not bother to come to the Quidditch Kick-off next weekend.
It wasn't that I didn't want to see them at all. After all, they were still my family; but I just knew that, having them here at Hogwarts, things were bound to get complicated.
"OK, I'm not sure I get this," James stretched his arms above his head and something in his shoulder cracked.
"Which one?" I bent over the paper as well, studying the annotations I had scribbled around the inversion calculations. It looked a bit of a mess, but I had never been a neat note-taker. There were just too many thoughts in my head to write them down orderly.
"That right there." James pointed at a particularly long equation that had tiny numbers in superscript next to the different ingredients.
"Oh, that's just proof for Salman's Law," I said as I underlined the relevant symbols with my pen to highlight them. "See, the equal reduction of the amount of ingredients doesn't produce less quantity of the same potion. It usually changes the substance-integrity."
James frowned at the page, apparently mulling the new information over. "And that's the same as this here." He pointed to another equation at the bottom of the notebook and then, suddenly, my head bumped against his.
I hadn't realised how close he was.
"Bleeding Circe." I groaned, unable not to laugh a little bit and holding my throbbing head as we moved apart.
"No, it's my fault." James snorted, mirroring my gesture. "I shouldn't have come so-"
Our eyes met and he stopped talking abruptly and, for a second, everything felt weird.
"Well, um," I finally said after a strange stretch of silence, trying to ignore that my heartbeat felt distinctly off as I began to assemble the dozens of papers and books that lay scattered across the table. "Maybe we should, um…"
"Yeah, good idea." James cleared his throat and then practically jumped up from his chair, scratching the back of his neck. "I've got intense Quidditch training scheduled until the Kick-Off so I won't really have time for tutoring lessons."
"Sure," I said quickly, shrugging my shoulders for emphasis. "I wouldn't have time anyway."
It was a lie, but I wasn't going to admit that to him when he had just made it sound as though I was a moony-eyed stalker, desperate to tutor him.
"Okay, good." He looked at me for a moment and then simply nodded his head casually in a farewell gesture. "Bye then."
"Bye."
The door snapped shut behind him and I could feel the muscles in my shoulders relax momentarily. I hadn't even noticed how tense I had been; it somehow felt like, with James, I was constantly on my guard and it cost me a lot of energy.
I stifled a yawn and pushed myself up from the chair, re-tying my topknot which had entirely come apart and half-dissolved again the minute I made my way to the wooden bookshelf that stretched across the entire left wall. The small pot was still visible where I had pushed aside the books and I peered over the edge, examining the gooey, greyish liquid.
Carefully, I took it from the shelf and put it down on the desk, kindling a fire underneath it with my wand. It didn't take long for the substance to react to the heat and, within a minute, it was bubbling sluggishly, emitting thin bands of smoke.
"I forgot my books."
I snapped my head up and my stomach flipped at the sight of James standing in the middle of the room, staring at me.
Without thinking, I leaped from my chair in an attempt at hiding the cauldron from his view, but it was too late; he had already seen everything.
"I'm, um, finishing off a potions project," I stammered lamely, my face heating up instantly from the blatant lie. But James only frowned at me as he walked up to the desk, peering into the cauldron.
"Has anyone ever told you that you are a shit liar, Woodley?"
A/N: Sooooh – Seth got caught. By James. What did you think about that? And what do you think about Seth and James together? I am really curious to hear what you guys think! Let me know what you like or didn't like or what you would like to happen :)…