At seven in the evening I made my way down to the staff room for the meeting. This time, I made sure I was wearing shoes and even pulled my hair back in a neat ponytail.

The room that we were supposed to meet in was at the end of the corridor, and so I moved down the hallway, passing the staff room door when I noticed it was slightly ajar. I hesitated, then moved to close it when I heard someone shouting.

"I know who is behind this, Horace, and you cannot convince me otherwise!"

Professor McGonagall's voice was sharp and angry.

"My dear Minerva, I grant you that the boy was a bit attracted to the Dark Arts but to make the accusation that he would-"

"Then who, Horace? Who would do such things if not Tom Marvolo Riddle?"

"Shush, Minerva! You must calm yourself!"

"Calm, Horace," McGonagall said and her voice was scornful. "You expect me to sit back and do nothing like you when these things happen, do you? Well, you thought wrong. It's not that we must simply tolerate Muggle-borns, Horace, it's that we must fight for them and protect them."

"Yes, but Minerva, didn't you hear what happened to the Kingsley family? Best witches and wizards I've seen in a long time- but you see what happened to them? Who's not to say that they would have lead better lives by living quietly and putting their heads down, eh?"

I slowly stepped away from the door.

"So this is where the staffroom is!"

Julian came striding forward triumphantly. "You Hogwarts people forget I'm not accustomed to your castle, beautiful though it undoubtedly is."

Jared also found his way just then, though as usual, he had no trouble with remaining silent and morose.

Hardly aware of what I was saying, I nodded my head and said, "Yeah, we weren't thinking…undoubtedly…"

Just then Professor McGonagall appeared from the staffroom. "Champions, if you will please follow me."

She led us to the room at the end of the corridor and we all shuffled in to see Hamish MacFarlan, from the Ministry of Magic, and Professor Dumbledore standing there.

"Yes! Welcome! Welcome, Champions!" Mr. MacFarlan said, striding over to greet us. "This meeting shall be kept brief, I assure you. I only wanted to congratulate you on your achievements from the First Task and bestow onto you a hint for the Second Task. But first, basic information, yes. The Yule Ball is to be held over Winter Break and as Champions; the three of you are expected to open the dance! Wonderful, isn't it? We'll meet ten minutes before the Ball starts in front of the doors of the Great Hall."

"I beg your pardon?" Jared said in a frosty voice. "Open the dance?"

"Yes, you and your partner will open the dance! Er- that is, be the very first dancers on the floor," Mr. MacFarlan said again, a little less exuberantly this time.

"Anyways," Mr. MacFarlan ventured forth bravely under Jared's icy stare, "the Second Task. Yes. It will be on February the twenty-fourth, which should give you ample time to prepare. And my hint to you is this…"

We all draw closer, lest we miss his words.

"Compassion. Friendship."

Smiling at our bewildered faces, Mr. MacFarlan nodded. "Yes, those are your clues. Now off with you, keep up with your studies, and stay healthy."

"Compassion and friendship," Julian repeated slowly as the three of us left the room. "Odd words to pull out in the midst of a Tournament, don't you think? Makes me rather confused."

"I assume that was the effect he wanted," Jared commented evenly.

"And have you got it all figured out in that genius head of yours?" Julian teased as we reached the foot of the stairs.

Jared looked Julian dead in the eye and said, "And if I did, why would I tell you?"

Julian did not reply but neither did he lose his genuine smile and when Jared made to climb the stairs up, he suddenly grabbed my arm and whispered, "Stay a minute, won't you?"

I did so, utterly confused. I hope he didn't think that I had it figured out- far from it, I was incredibly confused.

"Well," Julian said with a shrug, "it was worth a try, wasn't it?"

"What was?" I asked, puzzled.

"To try to make friends with him. This Second Task sounds like it's going to require friends."

When I still looked confused, he smiled at my puzzlement and said more plainly, "I'll need you and you'll need me to get through the Second Task."

"Oh!" I thought about it for a second and then asked, "But what does that look like?"

Julian responded, "Well, I don't know the particulars, obviously. But the hint Mr. MacFarlan gave seems to suggest something like that, don't you think?"

"Right," I replied dumbly. In truth, I wasn't quite up to level yet, but if this was a chance to gain an ally, there was no way I was going to miss it. In skill, knowledge, or talent, I fell far beyond the Julian and Jared; they would make natural allies to crowd me out. This was an opportunity I would not risk losing.

But how to take it? I hesitated. I was not particularly good at "reaching out to people". But I had to try.

"There's a Hogsmeade trip the students go on the last weekend before winter break. We could go together… and invite our friends," I added hastily.

"Excellent," Julian nodded his approval and then he said, "Well, then. I'll see you then."

He climbed up the stairs and out of sight.

I meant to follow him, but at that moment, Professor McGonagall exited the staff room.

When she saw me, a strange look came upon her face- one that I would have questioned had I not heard that snippet of conversation before the meeting. But I could decipher it now- it was pity mixed with pride. My heart swelled for this woman and despite the fact that we were technically at school, I went up to her and put my arms around her.

"Ms. Kingsley, may I ask what do you think you are doing?" Professor McGonagall reprimanded sternly, but she made no move to remove me from her.

"I was only wondering… whether you planned on going home for the winter holidays, Professor?"

I thought I heard a chuckle in McGonagall's voice as she shrewdly said, "So you've been informed about the champions' tradition of opening the dance?"

I buried my head against her and nodded.

"Well, Ms. Kingsley," McGonagall said, gently squirming out of my hold on her, "I'm afraid you'll just have to play along with the farce. I have absolutely no intention of going home over the holidays."

"And nothing I say will persuade you otherwise?"

"No, Ms. Kingsley. Nothing. You are not very good at persuasion, anyways. So don't even attempt the attempt, my dear girl."


Snow had begun to fall steadfastly upon Hogwarts and Regulus and I risked another encounter.

We chose to go outside into the snow where there were relatively less students. Besides, the both of us enjoyed the fresh wintry air; for some, it may have seemed bitterly, almost painfully cold, but we agreed that it felt refreshing, like breathing in new hope, fresh strength, and pure heart.

We walked alongside the side of the castle, avoiding the sloping lawns in front that were the prime spot for snowball fights and the like.

He was dressed in a long navy blue coat and his sharp, pale cheeks were tinged with a pale pink. His silvery eyes, which I saw so often under starlight, were lit aflame by the pure whiteness of the snow and the clear sparkling light of a brave winter sun.

We walked, laughing as we kicked at the snow and attempted to catch snowflakes on our tongues.

Dizzy, I lost balance and fell into the first bank of powdery snow. He joined me, again, being careful not to touch me, but nestling into the snow pile beside me.

Catching my breath, I laid my head back and squinted up at the bright, white sky from which crystal snowflakes fell even now.

As per usual, he waited for me to catch my breath before asking, "What are you thinking about?"

"Nothing," I replied blissfully. "Absolutely nothing."

It was true. My mind was blank as the white sky. My thoughts were only in the purest form. For the first time in a long while, I felt like I was breathing free from anxiety.

We sat there in silence as the air thickened with snowflakes and I knew he only wished not to disturb me.

Slowly, my eyes closed and I allowed myself to be content for just this one moment.

When the moment had passed, I opened my eyes again and looked at Regulus.

He, too, was laying perfectly still with his eyes closed, his dark hair, shorter than his brother's, but still quite long, had snow scattered across its locks.

His eyes slowly opened a moment later. His eyes shined bright with happiness.

"You have snowflakes caught in your eyelashes," I commented.

He smiled and slowly rose to a sitting position, snow falling off of him.

He turned to me, "I'm surprised with how at home you seem with winter."

"Why's that?" I asked.

He shrugged. "For some reason, I always associated you with sun."

We got to our feet, shaking off some of the snow that had settled on us.

"Will you stay for winter break?" Regulus asked me.

Remembering the Yule Ball, I felt a pang of anxiety and discomfort, but I tried to hide it as I said unevenly, "I suppose so."

"You sound as though you're only doing so because you have no other choice."

"Well, Champions have to open the dance…"

Regulus, suddenly understanding my troubled look, laughed. "And that's what's making you so nervous? Dancing?"

"Well, I'm not accustomed to it!" I shot back, defensively.

"That's true, very true. A legitimate ground for anxiety," Regulus said, but his tone was still teasing.

I scowled.

"If you're opening, I imagine you must have a partner?" Regulus questioned, but his tone was less teasing now.

"No, I haven't gotten quite that far," I admitted.

"Well, make sure he can dance. So long as somebody else leads, it's not so bad," Regulus advised.

I paused.

"You, um, perchance…wouldn't want to…?"

"What? You're mumbling."

"Are- are you staying over the holiday break?"

"Perhaps," Regulus mused. "It's the best way of keeping away from my parents, I suppose."

"But you wouldn't come to the ball, would you? You never do."

"I've never had a reason to. My presence has never been wanted there."

I fell silent.

Regulus suddenly laughed cheerfully. "I'm only teasing you, Raylynx. We both know full well I would willingly be your partner. But, as the Yule Ball is not a Masquerade, there's really no option but for me to keep my head down." His voice had sobered by the end.

"Besides," he continued, "this whole time I was only flattering myself that you would want me to be your partner, and I know full well that may not be the case."

I felt embarrassed and confused.

"And if you were to ask, well…" He scrutinized me with a playful eye. "Let's just say you don't quite meet my standards."

Trying to hide my embarrassment, I scooped up snow and threw it in his face, "Whoever asked you anyways!"

Regulus laughed and expertly ducked another barrage of snow I flung at him.

I leaned down to scrap together another icy snowball, unawares of the footsteps that came around the corner of the castle wall.

But Regulus spotted that group of people turning the corner and when I straightened up and made to throw another snowball at him, he suddenly caught my arm and shoved me backwards. I fell against the wall and he held me there. The snow that had been in my hand dislodged itself and fell over both our heads in a shower of flurries.

He pulled up his coat collar, and covering my face, ducked his own underneath the collar.

The unmistakably cruel laughter of Slytherins could be heard.

My face was pressed nearly against his chest, I glanced up at him.

His eyebrows were knitted together, and though his eyelashes yet again had snowflakes in them, his entire face was suddenly stern, all the childish playfulness from a moment earlier completely gone, replaced by a grave seriousness. He did not seem frightened at all, completely mastering his own fear and in control of the situation. But I could hear the frantic thundering of his heart in his chest.

Suddenly, I realized how much he risked by spending any time with me at all.

I thought of what might happen if we were caught. We were so very foolish, spending time together like this. A shudder passed through me that had nothing to do with the melted snow trickling down my neck.

So close together, he couldn't help but notice.

The moment passed, the Slytherins rounded another corner, and Regulus immediately let go of me and stepped away.

"I'm sorry," he said, and his voice was tense. "I wasn't thinking, I shouldn't have-"

"I know," I said quickly. "I know, Regulus."

But both of us averted our eyes as we continued on walking. Neither of us had verbally agreed to return to the castle, but we both somehow knew that our time together was over, if ever we had had a right to time together at all.

"Look," he said suddenly, when we were nearly at the entrance, "Look at the snow. It doesn't give a soft white damn who it touches. Why can't humans be like that too? But no, the blood purity of the person, the race of the person, the gender of the person, the aesthetic beauty of the person- we care what it is that touches us."

He looked at me with piercing eyes, and I knew he was speaking directly to me.

"I'm sorry," I said, suddenly swallowing back the hot guilt that burned in my throat and eyes, "I know I shouldn't be afraid of you. I know I'm just being foolish."

"It's not your fault," Regulus replied quietly and feelingly. "The fact that you spend time with me at all proves that you trust me more than I had a right to expect."

I remained silent, unable to say my true thoughts, to say that I feared the murderer in him and hated even the pretense of blood-purist, but I couldn't say it to him, who hated that part of himself more than I ever could. And I was unsure of what else I could say. The last thing I wanted to do was lie to him.

We had come to the doors of the Great Hall. I thoughtlessly brushed off the snow from my hair and coat, too lost in the turbulent storm of my own thoughts.

"Don't, you're going to hurt yourself if you're not more gentle," Regulus said, noticing how absent-mindedly I was raking the snow out of my hair. He reached out to touch me and I closed my eyes, determined to stand my ground and not shy away from his touch.

He raised a hesitant hand and gently brushed back a strand of hair in my face.

I resisted backing away from his hand as he tucked my hand behind my ear. His eyes, however, were sharp, and he missed nothing, not even the slight tension I underwent when his fingers brushed against my cheek.

We both paused, stood still.

Then he said quietly, "How can I help you not to be afraid of me?"

"It's not you, Reg-" I started, but another couple was approaching the doors. We immediately entered the Great Hall and separated without so much as a good-bye.


That night, his questions ran through my mind.

"Besides, this whole time I was only flattering myself that you would want me to be your partner, and I know full well that may not be the case."

I felt embarrassed and confused.

Why had I felt so embarrassed and confused?

I ran that question through my head over and over again.

"I know full well that may not be the case."

Was that the case?

What was our case, anyhow?

What did we mean to each other?

I thought long and hard about that question, shifting through many a tangled heart-strings.

And I finally came to an answer, a painful one:

I had never really thought about 'soul mates', in fact I was quite skeptical that they actually existed. But Regulus was. He was my soul mate, in the truest sense of the word. I felt like a child with him, meaning that I could show to him all my vulnerabilities and not feel the least threatened. This was mostly because he understood the way my heart worked more than anyone else; he knew how it beat and how it thumped without my having to explain it in words, which were never quite satisfying anyways. He just 'got it'. And I call him 'soul mate' because there is no other explanation for why he would 'get it'. He was no Lily, Alice, Marlene, or Dorcas, to know so much about my childhood and trials as to sympathize with them through understanding. No, he didn't have to make way between his own feelings to make room for mine. Instead, his aligned with mine. He felt my pain as his, my happiness as his, my curiosity as his, even my fear as his. And all this without knowing my past, without having me explain my future, or making me pronounce my wishes about the future in gaudy words that sounded so shallow once taken out of the heart. No, he saw them lying there, as they were; hopeful and aflame.

And what was he to me? I did not find him immediately attractive or impressive. Nothing about him was eye-catchingly "brilliant" or "charismatic". But there was an unshakeable honesty that I saw in his eyes, and the more I knew him, the more I become drawn to him as I saw that, time after time, he proved himself capable of inhumanly noble self-sacrifice.

I loved him, but I was not, as it were, in love with him. He was my closest friend, but I was not in love with him. He was my soul mate, and I would wish him happiness forever, and his happiness would be linked to mine forever, but I was not in love with him.

No, that immature and unnurtured part of my heart was still yet reserved for-

I broke off my thoughts there as it slammed into me like a brick wall why I was so very embarrassed.

I pressed my palms against my eyes, wishing I could unseen, go back, never think of that question again.

I tried hard to distract myself from the thought of Regulus and Sirius, but instead their beings burned into my mind's eyes more and more.

One was starlight, cold and silvery, but quietly and bravely suffering, understanding that he was in a chess game where he was bound to lose and soldiering on anyways, using his intellect to save at least one piece from the massacre, and hiding from the world his natural childish curiosity, colored an innocent dream-like white and soft pale blue, that shined luminously inside.

The other was sunfire, a burning golden blood-orange and roaring Gryffindor scarlet that boldly, almost to the point of foolishness, declared its independence from anything it considered wrong and forgave nothing and nobody who crossed this limit, not even himself.

Both were outside my right to care for, too bright for someone as dull as me to touch, and yet… yet I felt for them both, albeit in very different ways. Whether this was good or bad, I couldn't say, but it made me feel like the worst sort of hypocrite and liar.

I still didn't fully understand why I was so drawn to Sirius. Lately, I didn't feel so disoriented in his presence, and I didn't feel such a need to earn his attention. I was slowly beginning to accept that we were, as he said, two different people right now. Of course, my teenage heart wanted him to want me, but life had already taught me that there were far more important things than who was watching you. But the truth was that, ever since I'd seen Sirius at Ollivander's, I'd felt a connection to him. I wasn't sure it was, but some part of him truly spoke to me, and I was sure that, if I was more confident or charismatic of a person, we could have been good friends.

Regulus, on the other hand, accepted me as I was. If anything, it was I who struggled to accept him.

"How can I help you not to be afraid of me?"

It's not you, Regulus. Or rather, it's nothing I can ask you to change. If you give up your disguise now, your family will suffer, and so will you.

The fact that you, a lion, comes to my hand willingly and tamely, is a miracle in itself. But I know you are not only capable of devouring me, but that it is your nature to, it is your purpose to, and someday, I think you will have to. At some point, you are what you pretend to be. How can I not be afraid of that reality?


But often it was difficult to think about those things when it was just the two of us, ignoring the rest of world, and just enjoying being in each other's company. The next time we met more cautiously and yet, once together, we dared to play a prank on Professor Collins. I knew, of course, that he was going to blame it on me immediately. Regulus pointed this out as well and tried to dissuade me from it, but I replied that I wanted to be given detention for something I actually deserved.

"It won't be detention if he catches you, Raylynx. It'll be death."

But in the end, I managed to rope him along into helping me out.


The next day, we waited tensely in class for Professor Collins to arrive. Of course, neither of us could look at the other, but we both held our breath and crossed our fingers when he strode into the room. He took his great long strides to the very front of the room, placed down his briefcase, and then sat down in his seat-

And then erupted the largest, flabbiest, stinkiest, roaring loud fart that lasted for a good twenty seconds. The class tried desperately to hold in their surprised laughter. Professor Collins looked out menacingly at us, surveying our faces red from holding back laughter.

Then, in an angry growl, he began to speak, "Who-?"

But at that moment, a large pop! sounded and from the roof fell a gigantic pile of glitter and confetti. Fireworks then erupted from behind him, spelling out words like "LUNAR-TIC" and "ASTRONMICAL GIT" over his head. We were all dead silent and Professor Collins was frozen still. Possibly he had never been touched by such bright, happy things before.

We all held our breaths, waiting for his reaction.

His voice was a furious whisper, "I will make sure that whoever is responsible for this will never have another spare moment out of detention again."

As he spoke, little poofs of diva purple glitter fell from his face. I tried hard to suppress a giggle, but I was practically shaking with the effort.

"Kingsley."

I tried to keep back the laughter threatening to give me away as I answered at normal volume, "Yes, sir?"

"Stand."

I got onto my feet, shoving the chair against the ground as I did. It screeched quite loudly as I stood up.

"Sir?"

"What have you to say about this?" he said, his voice rising quickly.

"Um…" I said, "Um…"

C'mon. Say one smart thing that'll make it so that you look totally innocent. Just say something like, "I don't know, sir. I think this is all immature and disrespectful, sir."

Instead, I blurted out, "You look good in those colors?"

"Kingsley!"

I was initially given six weeks' worth of detention. But I went to every one of them beaming because they were finally where I felt I deserved to be. On the ninth detention, Professor Collins told me to "get the hell out of his sight" and to cancel all future detentions. When I asked him why, he said it irked me to see me happy and he was getting fed up with seeing my face far too often.

I skipped back to the Gryffindor common room in high spirits and sang in the shower that night.