Chimaera Of Judgement

7: Seek, And Ye Shall Find

The following week rushed past so quickly Albus was sure he'd been slipped a broken Time-Turner. Other than a nice long tea with Hagrid on Sunday afternoon, during which they tried to avoid eating his appropriately-named rock cakes and laughed about things going on both in and out of school, most of their time outside class seemed to be spent poring over homework or sleeping, neither of which seemed like the spark of life exactly.

All throughout the week, Rose became increasingly nauseating about him trying out for the House team, and it was all she could talk about as they pored over their homework Friday night. Finally, when Albus found himself rewriting the same sentence for the fifth time, he became so frustrated that he snapped his quill in half.

"Would you give it a rest?" he growled, digging in his bag for a spare quill. "How am I supposed to explain why Uric the Oddball was so odd if you keep up a constant flow of 'Seeker' in my ear? It's starting to sound more like 'kill Rose'!"

"But I know you'd do well if you'd just buck up and-"

"FINE!" he bellowed; several paintings stared down at the two of them in outrage at his volume. "If it'll butter your crumpets, I'll do it, but don't blame me when I get laughed off the pitch - again!"

Though he'd known she would start grinning like a cheshire cat, he still found he couldn't look at her and returned to his essay, which he immediately blotted and had to start over anyway.

They spent a good deal of the next day in the library, bent low over their textbooks and scratching away with the end goal of devoting Sunday to their Quidditch dilemma. Their fingertips were very nearly bleeding from overwork by the time they returned to Gryffindor Tower late in the afternoon to stow their schoolthings, hoping for Albus to get in a bit of practise. As they were heading through the castle, Rose's Nimbus Two-Thousand-Twenty-Five over her shoulder, they heard a commotion from a corridor on the fifth floor. Trotting along it, they spotted two Hufflepuff girls arguing ferociously near the statue of Gregory the Smarmy, gesturing and shouting.

"Hey!" Rose said loudly. "What's all this?"

"She's stolen my grandmother's ring!" Upon closer inspection, Albus recognised her as Belvina Hitchens, a notoriously paranoid fourth-year with a rather long nose. "I had it a moment ago, and now it's gone, and it was a birthday present, and she has it, she's taken it!"

Albus put himself solidly between them, lest they suddenly decide to attack. "Who's taken it?"

"Dorika!" she screamed, pointing at the other girl, a third-year with tight golden shoulder-length curls who looked thoroughly bewildered and close to tears. "She's the only one here, isn't she?"

"Calm down, the pair of you," Rose ordered. "The way your arms are windmilling about, the ring might've flown off your finger."

Belvina looked up at her indignantly. "Where would it have gone, then? Why didn't I hear it echo off the floors?"

"Well... maybe it ended up in the swamp," Albus suggested, leading them over to the roped-off puddle of swamp water beneath a window. "That would've made more of a 'plop' than a 'clink', wouldn't it?"

"Go get it back!" she demanded. "Dorika should do it, it's her fault!"

"I'm not putting my hands in that muck!" Dorika squeaked. "I didn't do anything, please, you must believe me!"

"I do," Rose sighed wearily. When Albus raised his eyebrows at her, she told him in a low voice, "Everybody knows Dorika Dunsmore is such a goody-two-shoes she wouldn't so much as look at you wrongly; somehow I don't think she went from that to sneakthief."