BROKEN PIECES & GOLDEN SEAMS

XIX

37. to be celebrated is to be miserable
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Pansy is not a worrier. Blaise, on the other hand, is a worrier. Pansy is susceptible to the atmosphere she's stuck in though, her mood flows and turns as the course of events take her. So when Blaise worries, she worries as well.

Percy has no reason to all these calculations. Anyone could see the two alternating between pacing and damaging the fine upholstery of the common room. They are anxious.

Millicent sits with the demigod to scrutinise them, unable to offer any reassurance that could help. She does take a moment away to glare at the worn yet opulent divan by the window. The dramatic bastard that occupies it is the reason for their uncharacteristically anxious nature.

"We can look for him," it's more than a request from Percy when she says or rather commands it. It's the obvious step to take when one of theirs goes missing for her.

Pansy swirls around to face her, her bob dancing with the movement. She squints at her as though she had went to the trouble to kidnap and hide him.

The demigod raises her hands, "Or not? We can simply tear the couch to shreds,"

Blaise's fingers freeze in the middle of doing the very thing. Millicent makes the choice. "We're looking for him," she stands and claps her hands twice, her stare does not invite any disagreement.

Soon, they're spread out throughout the castle after they've borrowed one of the maps of the castle given to first years. They pick out the possible spots and venture into the cold beneath the high moon to look for their friend.

Percy is tasked to search the Astronomy tower. She does not do so. She climbs the stairs and solidifies water droplets in the air to make her own when more than attempts to make her plummet to her death.

She is delayed at the fifth floor. Filch passes by her and she is thoroughly taken with how he doesn't even look her way. She marvels at it and walks past him a total of seven times to test the notice me not charm layered with a simple muffiliato.

"Awesome!" she shouts and still, he does not look her way. She continues on giggling. That leaves her when Pansy's worried face comes back to her. Her downturned lips and pinched forehead.

It is not that she doesn't care for their friend. It is just that she recognises that the things that are happening are far more than she wants to understand. They are well aware of that as well. It showed in their hesitancy to agree to her so called rescue mission. That has itself brought her into this.

She skitters to a stop by an interesting tapestry by the seventh floor. Their moving figures still can't see her. The marvel of magic halts there. When she lays her wand flat on her palm to mutter the point me spell as it had been taught to her, nothing shows.

Percy abandons the stick to seek out magic herself. As someone that has grown with godly magic igniting their veins, it's almost effortless to identify other sorts of magic. It's the ancient, massive river of magic that meets her first. The castle's intricately woven magic that's a tangle of different auras throughout the years. It's a breath of fresh air, a clear spring through the mountains.

It's welcoming, it's home in a way she's never known. Camp is alive with the lives around her. Hogwarts is alive with the lives she'll never know. It pulls her in as it has been since she first stepped in here. The ill suited wand and distrusting glances of others did not matter in these walls that accepts her as its own.

She drags herself out of the spell, narrowing her concentration to seek out a particularly unique magic. It's a tricky thing to identify and separate magical auras yet not unheard of. Heads and Heirs of houses are better suited for it. The Slytherin House overflows with those and they've had nothing to say about it but to only chime in that it was something of an instinct, honed to be summoned at will with practice.