PRETENDING TO LIVE~ {The Lestrange Daughter #2}

𝟖. Accidental

TRIGGER WARNING; Contains depictions of child abuse. Not overly graphic, but anyone particularly sensitive to scenes involving child abuse please take care.

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"Val. Hey. Hey, Val."

Valentine grit her teeth, hand tightening on her quill. Leah's mood had brightened to a new height in recent days and she seemed to have reached a new level of annoying.

"Val." Leah poked her shoulder. "Val. I know you can hear me with your freaky good ears."

And maybe because you're also barely an inch away from my face. 

At the front of the class, Valentine made direct eye contact with Snape who was standing by the blackboard. He saw Leah, knew she was talking and damn near almost grinned. 

Jerk.

He just turned away like he'd seen nothing, ignoring Valentine's glare. It wasn't as if she wasn't glad for Leah and thrilled that she was clearly moving on from what had happened, because she was. All those months, she'd wanted nothing more than for Leah to find a way to live with what she had lost and now it seemed that she had. The only downside to that was Leah had months of pent-up energy to expend. She'd missed out on so many opportunities to drive her friends to insanity and it appeared she had every intention of making up for that. 

"Valllllll. Val. Val." The forcefulness of Leah's poking steadily increased. "Oi. Valllllllll. If you don't answer me I'm going for your eye next." 

As Leah lifted her finger to land another poke, Valentine slapped her hand away.

"Stop it or I'll be the one going for your eye." 

"Ah, there you are!" Leah beamed. "I have something to show you! Here, look."

Leah gestured all too excitedly at a haphazardly folded paper crane on the desktop, clearly constructed from a page of her textbook.

Valentine blinked at it dully.

"Isn't it great?" Leah picked it up and waved it in Valentine's face. "I named her Velma." 

"You have got to be kidding me." Blaze turned around in his chair in front of the girls. "Velma? I feel sorry for anything named by you."

"Well, I don't." Leah just shrugged and went back to her crane.

Blaze frowned deeply, unable to reply to that. 

Although Leah had perked up to near normalness, she hadn't started or engaged in a single argument. Not even when Blaze called her the spaz to end all spazzes. Or when he accidentally spilt gravy on her sleeve at dinner the other night. She didn't even bite back when Draco said only a complete lunatic would ever put up with her enough to marry her. All of that and Leah seemed content to sit back and it with a shrug. 

Valentine had never imagined that she could miss the sound of childish bickering over the colour of fruits or what names Leah had given to particular inanimate objects. It was strange, bizarre and downright disturbing. Even the boys couldn't wrap their heads around it. Especially since picking on Leah wasn't nearly so much fun when she didn't scream back at them. 

"Val. Hey, Va-"

"What?" Valentine snapped at her. "What the hell do you want?"

Leah held up her hand and beamed at her.

"Look, I made this baby crane for you." 

Valentine, against every inch of willpower in her body, almost smiled. She felt her face twitch and just hoped it would be taken as annoyance.