Kjærlighet Verbrennt

V.

Rotis was sitting on her bed, scanning over her star charts from last week's Astronomy lesson while gathering her things for tonight's trek to the Tower, but her mind was anywhere but on her studies. She read the names of the constellations jealously, wanting to hop on her broom and fly to them, find her own planet where she could live free of the constant reminders of last year and its happenings.

Because everything reminded her of him. She heard his voice in the commotion of hallways, she read his name in textbooks only to blink and find it gone, she dreamt his face and eyes and hands every night. And it was torture, because she was helpless to stop it.

It had been no one's fault he died - she heard the phrase over and over from Dicken and Gaiter, in their countless futile attempts to help her forget. But she knew, deep down, that it could have been prevented had one boy not been noble and insisted they both grab the cup simultaneously, had one boy just taken the cup for himself like, she'd heard, Cedric insisted he did.

Harry Potter was the root of all her grief and anger, her hostility and sorrow. It was all his fault, and sometimes, when she dwelt on it, she wished He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named would just hurry up and

"Rotis, you ready to go?" she looked up to see Gaiter in the doorway. Snapping out of her thoughts, she nodded slightly, grabbing her books as she went to join the rest of the sixth-years.

The common room went absolutely silent as Rotis and Gaiter entered, all the eager gossip of Rotis' Great Stand at Dinner quickly dying. They passed to the tapestry that hid the entrance like a royal procession, all of the room's eyes on them. Gaiter was beginning to feel a bit tired at all this staring she was being subjected to on Rotis' behalf, but ignored it as Dicken fell into line behind them.

"Hey, Ro!" shouted a tiny second year named Owen Cauldwell. "That sure was - "

Both Gaiter and Dicken shot him glares of pure ice, silencing him better than any spell could. Rotis saw Pidge standing sadly by the fireplace, his usual gleeful grin sucked into the vacuum that everyone's voice was in. She felt a pang of guilt as she pushed back the tapestry, wishing her actions didn't have such an effect on the rest of her House.

"You all right, Rotis?" asked Gaiter once they were safely away from the common room.

Rotis nodded, imagining the common room gossip slowly picking back up again till it resumed its deafening volume. They continued their walk to the Tower in silence, speaking only to the wayward Sir Cadogan, a painting of a knight that had recently taken to plaguing the paintings near the Hufflepuff dormitories, and then only to silence him.

But it didn't work.

"Have at you, you scruffy scoundrels!" he threatened as he hopped into a portrait of a very wizened wizard, who awoke with a start as Sir Cadogan trampled his beard.

"My apologies, Sir Klingaman," he said, before resuming his threats. "I know you!" he suddenly shouted, trying to cross the portrait's mass of whiskers. "You're the Wood maiden, the Beater with the broken hea - "

"Really!" said Gaiter, picking up her pace. "Can't you leave us be for just one night?"

But Rotis stopped in front of the tiny knight, peering at him. "Who told you that?"

"The walls have ears, my dear, you forget - "

"Who told you?" she asked, reaching for her wand. The plume of Sir Cadogan's helmet drooped.

"Peeves! 'Twas Peeves the Poltergeist! But it was not a telling, merely an overhearing," he said quickly, his eyes shifting nervously towards her wand.

Dicken watched the little knight suspiciously, feeling misled. Gaiter snorted, causing the knight's attention to waver.

"How very unladylike," he said, but Gaiter ignored him.

"It was just Peeves," she said. "He's probably got some terrible rhyme about you, he does about everyone. You should hear mine."

"I must go and fetch my steed from that terrible equestrian mural," Sir Cadogan suddenly remarked, unbeknownst to the students, and he dashed out of the frame.

Rotis still felt unsure. "Why would Peeves make a rhyme about that?" asked Dicken, speaking for the first time since they'd left and catching them both off guard.

Gaiter threw up her hands. "Oh, who knows what a poltergeist thinks!" she cried. "We're going to be late."

And the subject was dropped as they continued toward the tower.

Meanwhile, in the common room, the Hufflepuffs were still heatedly discussing Rotis.

"I hear she's got plans to use one of the unforgivable curses on Potter!" shouted a blonde, pigtailed girl.

"That's ridiculous!" shouted another student, a red-headed third-year boy. "That'd send her to Azkaban - why not just kill him with a Bludger?"

There was a smattering of laughter.

"Either way," said Justin Finch-Fletchly, a fifth-year, "she wants him gone. It's the one thing, I think, that she wants just as much. . . " he trailed off.

"As having Cedric back?" someone ventured, and the whole room turned to see a seventh year known as Morris Delaney. The usually upbeat boy was sitting away from the rest of the group, the shadows of the flames making him look almost sinister. There was unease in the room as silence fell again.

"Well, yeah," said Justin. The silence continued.

"I think you're all wrong." The room swung around to see Pidge standing by the fire, looking resolute and unhappy, much unlike himself. "Rotis doesn't want anyone dead, except maybe herself, and that's just because she's so sad all the time."

Everyone's eyebrows raised at such big words coming from such a tiny student.

"And you all gabbing about her behind her back isn't helping much, I can guarantee that. Maybe you should try and comfort her instead of," he paused, searching for the words.

"Instead of being such sharks," finished Jiminy Tolken, emerging from the shadows. Pidge looked up at him, but did not smile.

"Now I'm going to bed," shouted Pidge, knowing he had the room's full attention, his usually bubbly voice taking a dark turn. "I suggest you do the same."

And he marched out of the common room, followed by Jiminy. The rest of the room looked at each other, and then did the same. Morris Delaney lingered for a moment, however, before darting off through the tapestry.

Professor Sinestra regarded the group of sixth-year Hufflepuffs with sharp eyes from the doorway, studying them as she did every class. These students had been molded around their house, and it showed: they all carried their books in the same haphazard fashion, and only four out of the ten had thought to bring scarves. Most noticeable, though, was the smiles that abounded throughout - it was wickedly cold in the Astronomy Tower, and they had a long hour of star-watching ahead of them, but all the students looked generally happy to be there, a trait the teacher found both vexatious and refreshing.

All except one. The blonde girl on the end, a student she recognized as Rotis Wood, the Gryffindor Oliver's younger sister, was staring out at the night sky, completely removed from the chatter of her classmates, though she stood only feet away from them. Her scarf hung unused around her neck, and she gave off a sorrowful aura that was impossible not to notice in the sea of happy faces.

The girl jerked out of her phase once the professor entered the tower, calling for quiet.

"All right, class," said the professor, a few of the students still whispering. Faced with so many sunny expressions, she felt slightly bothered. Professor Sinestra was a woman of the cold and the dark, preferring the chill of midnights high in the tower to the brightness and noise of a summer Quidditch match. She spent all her time indoors during daylight, and had since she came to Hogwarts, giving her skin an unearthly pale gleam in the darkness.

But the students didn't seem to notice or care, or at least, this bunch didn't. Their eyes never left hers as she read her plans for the night's lessons ("plot Aquilla and predict its position in the spring, compose a thesis over the rotation of Jupiter's moons, and calculate the distance between Mizar and Antares to the tenth of a light year"), each one of them nodding eagerly, smiling all the while. After dismissing the group to their telescopes, she lingered by the doorway, making marks in a very battered copy of Galaxies and Gattaca: DNA in the Stars, and glancing up occasionally to check the group's progress.

"How can she read in this light?" Rotis overheard Paisley Yale whisper to Gaiter. The sounds of squeaky telescope knobs being adjusted mingled with unrolling parchment and quill scratches, as well as every student's mandatory command of Lumos.

Gaiter shrugged. "You learn those things in the dark, I suppose," she ventured. Paisley shuddered - though she was an excellent Beater and clever student, Paisley was not fond of the out-of-place or bizarre, a trait Rotis found odd at Hogwarts, where staircases moved and portraits spoke.

Rotis was unhappily reminded of the bumbling Sir Cadogan as she set up her telescope. The Beater with the broken heart ran through her mind, and she ached for her broom back in the dorm as she surveyed the millions of stars above her. It was as if she was miles from the earth, close enough to touch their brilliance, if only she had her broomstick to give her the extra jolt. She shivered and wrapped her scarf around her, wondering if space was as cold as Muggle scientists said it was (the wizarding world had stayed away from astronomical advances, thinking astronauts too much in the public eye, and while their knowledge of the stars far surpassed that of Muggles, there has yet to be a wizard or witch in space). She could handle it, she thought, smiling at the prospect of living on the moon. What Quidditch games they'd have in zero gravity. . .

"You'd think there was a better way to do this," remarked Roderick Childermass as the lens fell out of his telescope. "Professor, wasn't Galileo a wizard?"

The teacher looked up from her scribbling and nodded. "One of the first to safely pass over to the Muggle world, or so he thought. Then he was quarantined to his house for fear of further disturbing the public. Muggles hail him as a genius now."

Rod nodded thoughtfully before returning to fix his telescope.

She was safe in the air - in the air, she was touching no one, she saw no one, she knew nothing and was only in the here and now. There was no such thing as the past when Rotis was flying; the simple act of it was the ultimate escape.

But then her eyes fell on the Forbidden Forest far below on the ground, and she felt a chill not caused by the wind pass through her. Her longing for flight intensified, and a burning curiosity awoke. Had she really seen what she thought she saw at practice today? How could it be possible?

A hope she knew would never be reassured bubbled up in her as her mind raced off into impossible tangents. She smiled for the first time in what felt like forever, idly turning the gears of the telescope, daydreaming.

And then an icy fear crept up in her as her thoughts took a sinister turn. She stopped her mindless twisting as she remembered all too well what she had been told on that fateful night one year ago, the images flitting through her mind like snapshots.

Harry Potter, still shivering, as he told Dumbledore about the Portkey at the Final Task.

The cemetery, the confusion.

The horrible words of the Dark Lord as he saw Potter had not come alone.

"Kill the spare. . . "

"Rotis?"

She snapped back into reality, feeling like an icicle, sweat that had not been there before making her face clammy. She turned to see Dicken, his eyebrows furrowed, his face shadowy in the dim starlight.

"Rotis, are you okay?" he asked.

What she wanted to do was leap into his arms and be held, be protected, be safe from the torments of her mind, to finally answer 'No, I am not all right.' She wanted him to hug her and hold her and not think anything of it, but to know what he was doing for her, to know how much she needed it.

But she kept still, looking beyond him to the other students, all busy with their star charts and books, oblivious as usual.

"Rotis?" he asked a third time, putting a hand on her shoulder. She felt the urge increase and her knees crumble, her eyes prick with tears, and she wanted to cry, she wanted to scream, she wanted to weep and grieve and let everything out so maybe it would just go away.

"I'm fine," she said, wiping her damp forehead. She spied Professor Sinistra's sharp eyes drilling into her, and quickly turned her attention back to Dicken's worried face. She managed a smile.

"I'm fine, really," she said, unwinding her scarf. "Just a little chilly," as she pushed up her sleeves.

Dicken looked at her strangely, and she could see the inner conflict in his eyes: believe her and go away, or stay and demand she tell him the problem so he could help?

"I'm okay, Dicken," she said, sliding out from under his hand as she overheard someone complain that his wand wasn't working. "Really."

Another exclamation went up as more wands burned out. He stared at her harder, but she turned away towards her telescope, her back to him.

Tempted more than ever to touch her, Dicken turned away as well, all the fizzled out wands suddenly jumping back to life with twice the intensity as before.

"Super lumos, huh?" said Roderick Childermass.