The Window

"Okay, wait, so then I ... add...?"

"Right, add all the numbers to get a total. J-A-M-E-S- P-O-T-T-E-R. That's forty-three."

"Uh-huh, and then I add four and three... to get seven?"

"Exactly. I think you're finally getting the hang of this." Kate Nott sat back and admired her accomplishment. Teaching a seventh year Gryffindor Arithmancy was no easy task, especially when it was getting late and all he wanted to do was cuddle. Although James Potter's version of cuddling could more accurately be called snogging and frottage most of the time, sometimes he actually did just want to cuddle. Those were rare blessed days Kate thanked Merlin for each time they occurred.

"Well, now that I've got that figured out... what does it mean?" James scratched his head full of shaggy, curly chestnut-colored hair and glanced at his girlfriend, who was busy scribbling something down with her pencil.

"Bright and understanding, you enjoy hard work and challenges," Kate recited. "Serious and scholarly--." Here, she muffled a chuckle with her hand. "But with a tendency to be pessimistic and insecure. That's your character number, which is pretty much your general personality."

"Think it fits me?" he asked, smirking at her as he leaned over to read what she had written. "That's odd."

"Hm?" In turn, she looked up at him as he read over her shoulder, but noticed he wasn't looking at her paper, but rather the pencil she held in her left hand. "What's odd?"

"You're using a pencil." He stated.

"Oh, yeah, it's something I picked up from my mum." Kate shrugged and continued writing.

"So she's a Muggle, then?" James asked interestedly.

"Well, yeah, was." She pressed her lips together pensively for a moment and went back to her business.

"Oh, I'm sorry... I didn't know." James immediately felt just the littlest bit awful for bringing it up. He hadn't known Kate's mother died, otherwise he wouldn't have mentioned it. He rarely felt guilty about anything, but at the moment he was feeling like quite the arse.

"It's fine," Kate said though she bristled a bit at the comforting arm he wrapped around her. "I was young... it's just one of those things that you tend to get desensitized to after awhile." She cleared her throat and resumed her tutoring. "If you add just the vowels together, that's your heart number, which is what you're really like on the inside. That's eight for you." Before he could ask her to elaborate on the result, she supplied him with his answer. "Practical, ambitious, generally successful, but also greedy, jealous, domineering, and power-hungry."

"Now that's more like it!" James chuckled and leaned toward Kate again, this time to rest his chin on her shoulder and kiss her neck softly. She let him wrap his arms around her waist but didn't stop writing or put her pencil down.

"Your social number's the same. That's how everyone else perceives you." For a moment, she was silent as James continued to assault her neck with sloppy kisses. Then, dead-pan, she spoke, "Eight is the most spontaneous of the numbers."

Spontaneous, eh? James thought, and without warning, lifted Kate off her chair with one arm and placed her on the table in front of them, leaning heavily into her to kiss her passionately, his free hand moving down the front of her shirt. When she wrapped her legs around his waist to keep from losing her balance, he took it as a sign of encouragement and slipped his hand beneath her shirt, feeling the soft, warm skin of her abdomen. "How's that for spontaneous?"

"Predictable," she murmured against his lips.

"Huh?" He pulled back a bit, clearly bewildered.

"See, I knew you were going to do something to prove your spontaneity, so you weren't really being spontaneous at all," Kate told him matter-of-factly. He still stared at her, confused. "Well, I didn't tell you to stop, stupid." Eagerly, he dove in again for round two.

James had just finished unfastening the last of the pearly white buttons that held Kate's school shirt closed when the door to the otherwise empty Arithmancy classroom creaked open and a high-pitched, drunken cackle filled the dimly lit room.

"And then he said to me, 'Pass me the essence of Sarpa salpa, would you, Abi?' And I said, 'What? That was Sarpa salpa oil? I thought it was pumpkin juice!'" Professor Abilene Babbling, dignified instructor of Arithmancy, but otherwise completely undignified, even almost trashy, stumbled into the classroom adjoined to her office, escorted by a student and leaning heavily on Darling Rosier, the tiny school nurse, who looked quite flustered under the weight of Professor Babbling.

"Now, Abilene, I know you've only had a few, but you really need to stop drinking so much. It's positively bad for your liver..." Darling's voice was soft but firm, and although she was quite small in stature and very vulnerable-looking, she commanded an air of authority unlike many of the students had ever seen. The curly-haired Ravenclaw alumna was the granddaughter of Poppy Pomfrey, who had retired from her long-time post as Hogwarts's nurse to pursue the safari life. Although Darling was quite young to hold such a formidable job, she was certainly nearly overqualified and the Headmistress had welcomed her warmly after she'd eradicated a rather nasty bout of Fwooper pox that had swept through the school the year she began working there.

"Just get plenty of rest so you don't hurt yourself, or worse, a student," Darling told her sternly as she let the other woman go now that she was securely in her office. "Make sure she gets in safely," she told the boy who had escorted the professor as she bustled out the door. "I have more important things to take care of than a drunkard."

Professor Babbling had begun to open the door to her office, aided by her student escort, when the squeak of a table from across the room caught her attention. "Eh?" She stumbled away from her door, further into the classroom to investigate.

Abilene Babbling, the daughter of Hogwarts's Ancient Runes professor, had been awarded the position of Arithmancy teacher upon Septima Vector's retirement from the post shortly after the Second War. Abilene was highly skilled in Arithmancy, but had a drinking problem that was no secret to anyone. Normally, she kept herself sober enough to teach classes during the day, but the minute the dinner bell rang, she was already throwing back her third or fourth tankard of ale.

Professor Babbling was a former Slytherin, and her affinity for green clothing showed it. Her dark skin was flawless, her eyes dark like chocolate, and her build tall and voluptuous. She usually wore her wavy black hair in a peculiar style for which she was renowned, one which resembled a lionfish's spines. In fact, her whole appearance vaguely resembled a lionfish--interesting and exotic, and yet dangerous when provoked.

"What's that? Someone in here?" she called into the darkened room, her drunkenness blurring her vision too much to see properly. Squinting, she stepped closer to the two snogging students until she had just about bumped into the table. "Oh, hello there, dears."

James and Kate simultaneously jumped and moved away from one another, looking around abashedly as they adjusted their clothing. "P-professor Babbling," Kate choked as soon as she had quickly pulled her robes closed to cover her open shirt. "I was just, uh, tutoring James like you asked."

"Oh of course you were! Well, I certainly wish you good luck, Mr. Potter. The next exam is a bugger!" Professor Babbling winked at the flustered James, and giggled, before skipping back to her open office door and disappeared, slamming the heavy door shut behind her.

"Merlin," James breathed a sigh of relief before it caught in his throat again at the sound of footsteps coming from the shadows.

"Tutoring, eh?" The student who had escorted Professor Babbling was not drunk and had in fact witnessed the snogging pair. Scorpius Malfoy was not very pleased to see James Potter snogging his best friend in an empty classroom after hours. Kate was the prefect, not he, and there she was breaking the very rules she was supposed to uphold. He was being too critical though. If it were anyone else, he wouldn't have given a damn, but seeing Potter running his grubby hands all over Kate, his Kate, was enough to make him want to vomit. "Looked a lot more like sucking face to me."

"Well, I was tutoring him," Kate admitted, staring at the floor sheepishly. She folded her arms over her chest to keep her robes from coming open and watched James as he frantically slid the Arithmancy textbook and all of his notes as well as Kate's into his schoolbag. He wasn't nearly as flustered as Kate, whose cheeks seemed to darken to match her hair.

"Sure. In a dark, empty classroom," Scorpius scoffed.

"Shut up, Malfoy!" shouted James brashly. "You're just jealous that you're not failing a subject so you can be tutored by her."

Both Scorpius and Kate stared dubiously at James for a moment. Kate covered her face with her palm, but it was Scorpius who spoke. "What? That doesn't even..." he groaned, aggravated. "You're a real idiot, Potter."

"Will you two just stop it for five minutes?" Kate hissed as James made a move to charge at Scorpius. "Seriously, grow up. We're not kids anymore. Stop acting like first years and start acting like adults."

"You should talk, Miss Prefect." Scorpius scowled and moved away from James, careful not to turn his back completely as he started toward the classroom door. "Isn't it sort of your job to keep students from shagging in empty classrooms? I wonder, can a prefect take points away from herself? Not that you would anyway, since obviously you seem to think you've done nothing wrong."

"Scorpius, what is wrong with you?" Kate followed him to the door, glowering furiously. "You're out of control." Kate had always known Scorpius to be a relatively passive individual. He never took out his anger aggressively but usually just let it slide right off him. Lately, though, he had become almost belligerent, especially towards her. She had never seen him act like this towards anyone.

"What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you Kate? You're the one shacked up with Hogwarts's Golden Boy on some table in an empty classroom. It's disgusting. I don't even want to look at you." It wasn't a lie. Scorpius couldn't look at her without having to curb the strong desire to turn James's face into a bloody, unrecognizable pulp. Sure, Kate had some hand in it, but he'd be damned if she was entirely eager to be disgustingly affectionate with anyone in a classroom of all places. She had been acting different lately, ignoring him and forgoing their usual rituals, routines they had been doing since they were first years. Maybe he was even the slightest bit jealous, but he wasn't completely overreacting. It was unfair that she just cast him aside like this without warning, especially for someone like Potter...

He felt the bile rise in his throat and could no longer stand to stay in the classroom with them. He turned and stormed out, resisting the urge to run as fast as he could, as far away from the nightmare the situation had become. It would take a miracle to get on Kate's good graces after that. He was probably digging himself a deeper hole by being stubborn, but he just couldn't sit back and accept the fact that Kate was truly happy with James. She seemed to enjoy herself around him for the most part, but every so often when she thought no one was looking, Scorpius swore he caught a look of emptiness in her eyes. It barely changed her expression, but it spoke volumes regardless. Kate deserved nothing but the best, and James Potter certainly was not it.

As he walked away from Kate and James for what seemed to be the hundredth time that week, from the other side of the door, he heard her half-scream, "Goddamnit!" He disappeared into the darkened corridor to make his return to the common room.

Moments later, Kate burst out of the classroom in the middle of a heated diatribe directed at James. "I don't care if he starts it, James! You can't say things like that to him, it only fuels him. You just need to leave him alone. I've asked him to stop too, but if you keep provoking him it's not going to make it stop. You two are driving me mad!"

"Kate, he's an ass! Why are you even friends with him?" James shot back. "You can't actually like him."

Scorpius, who hadn't gotten very far when they finally got into the hallway, peered around the corner to see the two arguing. He popped back around the corner and leaned against the wall, out of sight, but still within earshot. He should have gone, but his interest was piqued at the question.

Kate was quick to rush to Scorpius's defense. She crossed her arms over her chest, one hip jutting out, glaring at James, as was her typical angry posture. "Well, as hard as it may be for you to handle, James, I do like Scorpius. Regardless of how you feel about him! He's been my best friend for as long as I can remember and he knows things about me that no one else does."

"Oh?" James snarled, almost suspiciously. "Things like what?"

"James!" Kate shrieked at the implication and shoved him.

He was going to hit Kate, Scorpius was sure of it. He had seen it too many times before to stand there and let it happen. His mother's father had taken to slapping around his grandmother time and again for something as stupid as looking at him the wrong way. He was not going to let James hit Kate. Scorpius had just barely seen Kate shove him, then James raise his arm when he leapt from behind the wall, misjudging the other boy's actions. He pointed his wand at James and with a flick, shouted, "PETRIFICUS TOTALUS!"

James went rigid and fell to the floor, his body practically a straight line. Kate immediately cried out and dropped to her knees next to James, looking around, dazed, for the assailant, her slim wand already drawn. She murmured the counter spell to the Body Bind and stood up, marching angrily toward Scorpius when she finally saw him standing at the other end of the hall.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" she screeched at him.

James had already begun to regain the use of his limbs and groaned on the floor, rubbing his head where it made contact with the stone floor.

"Kate, I... I thought he was going to hit you," Scorpius anxiously explained, holding his hands up defensively as she neared.

"You're lucky I don't hit you, Scorpius Malfoy!" With that, she pounced on him. The impact sent him to the ground and she toppled to the ground with him, throwing punches at his face.