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s i x t h y e a r
The common room was quiet, only the sounds of the fire crackling sounded in Adeline's ears. It was getting late but the main reason the shared space was so scarce was that she occupied one of the seats. No one wanted to get close to the girl accused of murder and looked like she was going to drop dead any minute.
It had been a week since Blaise had kissed her, a little over that since the mirror incident with Pansy. Adeline was tired and she felt rather useless to the Order. She wasn't sure what help she could deliver them, considering everyone refused to talk to her and she hardly knew what was going on half the time. Adeline had heard more about the vanishing of the handsome Dean Draguar than she had of anything else and that wasn't particularly useful information to relay to them.
Her name was usually partnered with the whispers. The knowledge that they lived together had the rumour mill spinning – in fact, you could even consider the mill to have spiralled so much it broke, rolled down a hill and struck the centre of a small town, destroying everything in its wake. Now light that town on fire and consider there to be no survivors and too many causalities. That's essentially the equivalent of everything Adeline had heard over her time since returning to Hogwarts.
The first being she had, obviously, killed Dean which explains his sudden disappearance. Others being that they were having an illicit affair and had murdered Ryland together, or that Honey and Ryland were sleeping together, and Adeline killed them out of jealousy and Dean out of spite. One of her more favoured ones was that she had killed Dean simply because he knew too much. She supposed it was the closest to the truth.
Surprisingly, no one guessed that he'd been a soldier spy sanctioned by her uncle and then banished back to his insane school program in America and probably killed because he helped lock her up in a gross, dark dungeon in the middle of London. Funny that.
Maybe Remus just sent her here because he didn't want to feel responsible for her. She hadn't bothered writing to him; no one knew what was going on inside the girl's head and she didn't want to burden anyone else with the knowledge.
Adeline touches the skin around her neck, searching for the comforting silver. Her fingers clasped around the cool metal of Draco's ring, hidden underneath her clothes. A large part of Adeline felt weak for putting it on a chain and wearing it around her neck, but when Conrey had her things delivered from Hogwarts an eery sense of ease had settled within her when she touched it. It was akin to the spell that shocked her hand away from Dean's front door except it startled a grounding cool up her arms. She didn't know what it meant but when Draco had looked at her after his apparent argument with Snape she'd felt it again and couldn't resist the urge to wear it.
Besides, Ryland's present just felt like a noose slowly tightening around her neck. She'd made the Amortentia potion in hopes it would have the same effect on her sanity, but the shame was too overpowering, and it created a terrible catch-22 for her. Adeline shouldn't smell green apples and oak wood, she should have smelt sunshine and grass, a summer night and honey tea. Her heart should belong to her dead boyfriend whose corpse she swore she loved instead of the boy who vowed to hate her. While it had grown easier to think of Ryland without feeling like she was on the brink of a meltdown, it was always hard to think of the lie she had left him with.
