Huffily Puffily || Golden Trio

Inner Eye || liv

* * * * *

Through a pulsing red light, Montague loomed closer and closer, knife in hand. Lucy stumbled backward, but with each step it became more difficult to move. With each flash of light, he drew closer. She looked down— ink? It was growing higher and higher, up her legs, up to her waist, and Montague was still moving toward her. Her heart felt like it was going to explode.

Harry lay dead at her feet, snakes crawling out of his throat. Lucy blinked, and suddenly he was Anthony. Then Daisy. Montague stepped on Daisy's hand as he stopped in front of her.

He raised his arm up, poised to strike. His smile held traces of blood in it. "Mudbloods like you get what you deserve—"

"Again?" a high pitched voice laughed right in her ear.

A flash of green light erupted from somewhere in the darkness, striking Montague dead.

* * * * *

Lucy woke up as soon as soon as Montague's body hit the floor.

She blinked, staring at the ceiling. What? Was that even a nightmare? It started out roughly, but she'd declare that end almost a victory. An extremely sudden victory, but given the patterns of her usual dreams, she had to take what she could get.

Megan, Susan, and Hannah were all still sleeping soundly. Slowly, so as not to wake them up, she crept into the bathroom to get ready for the day. She dressed into her uniform and left the dormitory as quickly as possible.

She'd expected the awkwardness between herself and her fellow Hufflepuffs, but that didn't make it any less unpleasant. Last night the silence between them had been so heavy that Lucy gave up on reading altogether. She drew her curtains shut and went to sleep with Grayble, Ford, and Tom Marvotoad Riddle all laying beside her.

She held her toad in her hands as she walked, humming to herself. Tom Jr was nearly as grouchy as her namesake; when Lucy passed another student, her toad would make a growling croak in their direction. It was loud and very unsettling. Lucy approved.

"Walking through the school, looking all cool, nobody's trying to kill me, and that's a victory," she sang, doing a little spin. The ghost of Ravenclaw House paused, stopping to stare at Lucy after she finished her tune. Lucy stared back at her with a pleasant smile on her face. "Good morning!"

The Gray Lady eyed her with mild disdain.

"Hufflepuffs," the ghost muttered at last, gliding away without another glance at her.

Lucy took that as a compliment.

Most of the Gryffindors hadn't arrived at the Great Hall yet, but the Hufflepuff and Slytherin tables were mostly filled. As she headed toward Anthony and the rest, Malfoy pretended to faint, dramatically falling into Blaise's side. Lucy stopped walking, turning to look at him. Her shoulders tensed, thinking of his words yesterday. When Malfoy crossed the line from teasing to bullying, she tended to forgive him.

Not this time. He must have forgotten that she, unlike Harry, didn't have any reservations about starting a fight with him in the middle of the Great Hall.

"Is there something you'd like to say, Malfoy?" she said, her tone laced with sickly sweetness. She stepped toward him with her hands clasped behind her back.

Blaise smirked behind his goblet. Malfoy straightened up, rolling his eyes at her. "Yes, actually. Why the hell did you keep sending awful items to my father?" He swung his legs over the bench so that he was facing her fully. He lowered his voice so that nobody, bar Blaise and Theodore, could hear him. "One of them was cursed," he hissed.