Sinners and Serpents {g.w.}

Chapter 26

a/n: sorry for the delayed upload its just been one of those weeks where life sucks but this chapter is a bit longer than usual so hopefully that makes up for it :)

"Dor?" Dorian looked up at you from the textbook he was reading on his bed. You were standing in the doorway of his dormitory, twisting your hands together nervously. An easy smile spread across Dorian's face as he patted his bed. You walked over, flopping onto the mattress with a heavy sigh.

"Hey, you. What's up?" he asked, closing his textbook and tossing it onto the chair of his desk next to his bed.

Rubbing your face, tired from the night before- studying until two in the morning tended to incite exhaustion- you said, "I had an interesting conversation with Bram the other day."

By the way Dorian winced, he probably guessed what it had been about. "I'm assuming it was the same blood purity bullshit he's been talking to me about since Christmas."

"Unfortunately. It just...it shocked me, you know? What happened to him over Christmas? Why did he come back all..."

"With his head stuck in his arse?" Dorian sighed, his shoulders sagging. "I don't know, really. I mean, we've known his parents support a lot of the things the people like the Malfoys do, but Dorian's never parroted that stuff back until now."

"It just worries me, you know? Like..." you searched for the right way to word what you wanted to say. To correctly convey the unnerving way Bram's calm words had grated so roughly against your senses. "Like the way that he was talking about Hermione and the Weasleys. As if...as if he's better than them, somehow. As if we're better than them, just because of our parents and our House. That's not Bram. His parents must've done something over the holidays to him, right?"

Dorian chewed on his lip. "I don't know," he answered hesitantly. "Maybe it is? Maybe he's always felt that way but it's never been brought up until now. His parents are nearly as bad as Parkinson's with some of the shit they say. We've been friends with him for so long that maybe we just forgot. He never really talks about his parents, does he? It's easy to forget who they are."

Easy to forget that in the first Wizarding war, Bram's parents had been among the first of Voldemort's most dedicated followers. They had claimed being cursed, claimed that they had had no control over their actions. Those who knew them during those years argued that they had acted entirely of their own free will. The only reason they weren't in Azkaban along with the rest of Voldemort's inner circle was the fact that they'd sold most of those now-prisoners out to the Ministry.

You had a vague idea of the actual extent of their involvement; Pureblood society feasted on rumors and stories, and your parents had relayed many of the stories they knew about Bram's parents to you over the years. Your own parents weren't involved in the war, not in the way Bram's were. It was hard, though, not to wonder if they were telling you the truth, or if they were leaving out unsavory details that would sully the family name. They were good people, when they wanted to be, but you knew where many of the Pureblood families stood both in the first war and now.

"Yeah, but..." The way that Bram had spoken to you had left your stomach in nauseating knots for days. "You should've heard him, Dor. He wasn't even angry or bitter. It was like he was talking about something as simple as the weather or homework. That was the worst part. It was like he didn't even see how wrong the things he was saying were."

"Maybe he doesn't think they're wrong at all," Dorian pointed out. "I mean, his parents have been spewing that shit since before he was born, and Bram doesn't spend time with the other Houses like we do. Haven't you noticed that? You, Briar, Eva, me; we all have friends in different Houses. Bram doesn't."