Dark

Chapter 21

Draco
“We’re splitting into teams of three for a good old game of Chase and Charm!” Gabriel Vaisey called out over the sea of Slytherin students crowded in the common room.
“You, pick two team mates.” Adrien Pucey instructed a sixth year.
“Warrington and Montague,” the boy said.
“Alright, next…” Vaisey said as she scanned the room before her eyes settled on me. “Malfoy, pick your team mates.”
“Zabini!” I called out immediately. Crabbe and Goyle may be decent muscle when needed, but they were incredibly slow. Zabini would be far more valuable in Chase and Charm. I looked around the room trying to decide who else to pick. I considered Nott for a moment, but he was too loud, he would give us away too quickly. As I kept looking through the crowd I noticed Pansy start moving towards me. My eyes shifted toward her for a second but then I looked back again. Eleanor was sitting on one of the couches. Why was she still wearing that dress if she left the Ball hours ago? It didn’t matter, all I knew is that her reflexes were quick enough to get the other players before they could get us. “Potter!”
Eleanor’s head snapped up from the book in her lap.
“What?!” Pansy shrieked as she came to a halt half way across the room from me.
“Shut it Parkinson. Next…Bletchley, pick your team mates.” Vaisey called out.
Eleanor glared at me for a moment before turning her head back to her book. I nodded towards Blaise and we made our way over to her. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, I could tell she enjoyed a good competition. That was one of the very Slytherin traits about her.
“You’ve been down here for hours but you’re still wearing that dress?” I asked as we approached her.
“Not my choice. Astoria wouldn’t let me change.” She mumbled.
“Why is that?” I chuckled.
“She thought I might change my mind and decide to go back. Quite a stupid idea.”
“Why did you leave anyway?” I asked her.
She glanced back up at me, for a moment I thought she was going to answer my question. Instead she ignored what I had asked her and posed her own question. “What is Chase and Charm?”
“You don’t know what Chase and Charm is?” Zabini asked her with a smirk.
“Of course I don’t.” Eleanor said simply, completely unperturbed.
“You split into teams and each team gets a color. Then you have to chase after the other teams and try to hit them with a color charm. The goal is for your team to get the most hits. That’s how you win. And if you get hit by another team then you have to return to the common room and wait for the game to end.” I explained. “You can do a color charm, right?”
“Yes.” She said. “So it’s basically the same as paintball?”
I had no idea what Eleanor was talking about, and from the look on Blaise’s face, he didn’t either. “Like what?”
“Never mind.” Eleanor grumbled.
After a few minutes the teams had been divvied up and Zabini, Eleanor, and I were assigned the color purple.
“Everyone has five minutes to run, then the game begins!” Pucey yelled over the chatter of the crowd.
Suddenly there was a mad dash toward the entrance of the common room. Rather than rush with everyone else, Eleanor lazily stood up from the couch and tucked her book beneath one arm. Looking around at the rest of the students she started to laugh lightly. Her hand immediately jumped up to cover the small smile that had crossed her face.
“What?” I asked her, turning to look at everyone else as well. What was so funny?
“All of these idiots tripping over their dresses and wobbling around on heels.” Eleanor answered before she kicked off her own shoes. “Do any of the Slytherin girls think before they act?”
“You’re probably the only one.” Zabini chuckled.
Eleanor retrieved her wand and pointed it at the skirt of her dress. Before our very eyes the hem started to move upward. In a matter of seconds the hem had gone from scattered upon the floor to only reaching down to Eleanor’s ankles.
“I knew those damn transfiguration books would come in handy someday.” She said simply before pushing past me and Blaise and making her way through the common room entrance.
Following her into the corridor Zabini and I started to quickly make our way farther down into the castle. It was only a moment though before I had noticed that Eleanor wasn’t right behind us. She was still up the corridor, slowly making her way in our direction.
“What are you doing?” I shouted back to her. “Let’s go!”
“I’m really not that worried about it.” She said.
What in the world is wrong with her tonight? I thought she’d be ecstatic about the chance to shoot spells at people. She seemed off, especially at the Ball. She wasn’t one to stutter, and she wasn’t easily thrown off but when we danced it felt as though she had almost let her walls down. I thought for a moment that she was going to finally answer one of my questions. But of course, that would have been too easy.
Frustrated, I raced back up the hallway and took hold of her wrist before tugging her back in the direction Blaise and I had been headed in. We ran down two more corridors before I pulled open an abandoned classroom and pulled Eleanor inside. Blaise closed the door after he entered and we all lit our wands.
“We’ll wait here, give the other teams some time to dwindle themselves down. Then we’ll head out.” I told the other two as I took a seat on top of one of the dusty desks.
Blaise took a seat near me and I expected Eleanor to do the same but instead she made her way to other side of the room, sitting as far away from us as possible before pulling her book out again. As she flipped through pages she quietly asked, “So what’s to stop me from using the color charm on the two of you?”
“That would just be stupid.” Blaise answered. “We’re on the same team.”
“But would it?” She asked with a raised eyebrow, though she didn’t bother to turn away from her book to look at us. “Then we’d have another two hits for our team, wouldn’t we?”
“Just shut up, Potter.” I growled.
After that we simply sat in silence. I tried to avoid thinking of Eleanor, but the same questions that always cropped up seemed to push themselves forward yet again. Tonight though, I wanted more than anything to know if she knew what people had been saying about her. I wanted to know if that was why she came alone. And I wanted to know why she left the Ball early. She was already there, she could have stayed. Was she really that upset about the scars, about the people pointing at her as we had entered the Hall? She was never bothered by the cruel things we all said about her at the beginning of the term. So why would she be bothered now?
“Why did you leave the Ball early?” The words left my mouth before I had truly considered whether or not it was a good idea to ask. Blaise’s head immediately shot up and he raised his eyebrows at me. Eleanor on the other hand didn’t look up from her book.
“Why do you think, Malfoy?” She said shortly.
“I think maybe you would have had fun for once if you had stayed.” I answered simply.
“I doubt that.”
“What is your problem lately, Potter?” I raised my voice, frustrated at the way that she refused to open up. Even with people in her own house, she was a mystery.
“My problem, Malfoy?” She finally looked up from her book to shoot me a glare from across the room. “I don’t want to attend some stupid dance and now suddenly something must be terribly wrong with me?”
“Why didn’t you want to go?” I pressed.
“I think you know perfectly well why I didn’t want to go and exactly why I knew better than to think that someone would ask me to go in the first place.” Eleanor said as she stood from the desk she had been sitting at and crossed the room.
“So you know then?” I tried to keep the smugness in my voice, to not reveal that I had been trying to figure out the answer to this one question all night.
“Of course I know.” Eleanor spat.
Beside me Blaise shifted uncomfortably. Eleanor looked livid as her eyes bore into mine.
“I know exactly what everyone was saying behind my back. And there was no way I was about to force anyone to suffer having to be near me for one whole evening when my very presence seems to disgust everyone.” The more she spoke the angrier she sounded, and yet her eyes seemed to change in the opposite way. She had looked ready to kill me merely seconds before, but now her eyes seemed different, unsure.
“I doubt that’s true.” I said quietly.
“Really, Malfoy? Because not one person asked me that Ball. Pretty much everyone was talking about how unfortunate it would be to get stuck with me.” Eleanor’s eyes narrowed at me again as her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “Though I’m sure you know that all too well. I can’t imagine you not being a part of those terrible discussions.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?” I said loudly.
“You know exactly what it means, Malfoy.” She said, practically spitting venom with her words.
“No, I don’t think I do.” I was too infuriated now to sit. I jumped up from the desk and closed the space between us, standing right in front of her as I continued, “If you think for a second that I’m bothered by your stupid scars then I don’t know what to tell you. I have no idea why it bothers you so much in the first place.”
“It doesn’t.” Eleanor said quietly. Too quietly.
So they do bother her? What everyone had said, the reactions when we walked into the Hall tonight, it all bothered her when nothing else did.
“Well I find that hard to believe.” I scoffed.
“Hush!” Zabini said as he jumped up from his seat.
My and Eleanor’s heads turned toward him to see that he was pointing toward the classroom door. When we stopped talking, the sound of running footsteps became clear. Another team was in the Hall, and if we didn’t stay quiet, they would corner us in here.
I turned back to Eleanor, surprised by what I saw. She was standing just inches from me, looking up at me with a wide smirk on her face. I narrowed my eyes in confusion at the sudden change in her attitude, but before I could say anything she had opened her mouth.
“QUICK, THEY’RE IN HERE!” Eleanor shouted before quickly turning and dashing into a dark corner of the room while extinguishing her wand.
The door to the room flung open and before Blaise or I could utilize shield charms, we’d been hit. A splash of bright blue stretched across my left shoulder and upper arm. Zabini had a similar splotch of the same color over his chest.
Then a small sound came from the other end of the room and splashes of purple hit the two Slytherins standing before us. As they turned around in surprise Eleanor stepped out of the shadows, twirling her wand in her right hand.
“Damn it!” One of the other students cursed loudly before they both turned and left for the common room.
“Now that you two are out of my way,” Eleanor said with a smirk, “I have a game to go win.”
We watched in shock as Eleanor strode out of the room.
“You just had to piss her off, didn’t you?” Zabini said.
“Shut up.” I hissed.

Eleanor
I had been roaming the lower corridors of the castle for nearly a half hour by the time I ran into the only other remaining Slytherin. I had managed to hit every student I had come across. None of the other girls seemed to have thought about removing their shoes or shortening their dresses for the game. Which meant that each time I came across a fellow Slytherin girl, she was attempting to dodge me on wobbly feet and was tripping over the hem of her dress. While this made them easy targets, the boys weren’t much more difficult either. In fact, the ease with which I seemed to hit my targets made me truly wonder for the first time how many of my fellow Slytherins were pressuring other students to do their work for them in class. Surely some of the upper years would have been able to deflect my color charms better if they had ever bothered to pay proper attention in their classes.
The boy before me looked like a seventh year. As I raised my wand in his direction he simply took off running. We were only a corridor away from the common room and as I followed him around a corner I was unsurprised to see that was where he was headed. I slowed down, knowing that I could easily corner him in there and simply walked the rest of the way to the concealed entrance. Muttering the password I waited for the wall to melt away before I stepped inside. Sure enough the room was filled with students, the majority of which were sporting purple stains.
The students parted as I made my way toward the boy I had followed. He raised his wand to shoot the color charm towards me but I easily blocked the spell. I continued to block the spell for another minute as he moved around the room and tried to hit me. It was more fun to let him think he stood a chance than to just simply hit him myself. As the dance of spells between us grew old, however, I moved swiftly out of the way of one of his color charms. Without wasting time to block it I had the perfect opportunity to hit him. So with a quick flick of my wand, a splash of purple exploded across his dress robes.
“We won!” I heard someone shout triumphantly.
I turned to see Malfoy looking smug, Zabini standing beside him.
“Correction: I won. You didn’t hit anyone.” I told him.
“Only because you sold us out.” He said as he narrowed his eyes at me.
“Because you would have only gotten in my way.” I told him shortly. “At least this was more fun than dancing.”
With my victory fresh in my mind and no desire to be surrounded by people I knew had been talking behind my back the past couple of weeks, I retreated to my dormitory. As I laid down I couldn’t help but hear Malfoy’s words repeating in my head.
“Why did you want to come alone?...Why did you leave the Ball early?...If you think for a second that I’m bothered by your stupid scars then I don’t know what to tell you…”
What did any of it matter to Malfoy? Why did he think I would want to open up to him? Of all people, he was the least likely person I could trust. He hated Harry. He hated me.
Didn’t he?