Children's Games

"You know what, Malfoy, I don't like you very much."

Malfoy looked up from Weiss, who was on his hands and knees, licking juice off the cold dirty stone floor.

"What's the matter, Colton?" A small smirk crept on that white, foxy face, and Malfoy pushed Weiss' head a little lower with his foot. "The entertainment isn't good enough?"

The fire burned slowly in Slytherin Hall's fireplace, illuminating little. Beyond the torches, the corners were full of shadows. Crabbe and Goyle framed Malfoy on each side, Parkinson sitting wistfully behind him, on the other side of the small table.

Sekineh Colton tried to think of something to say. She tried to stop from shaking in anger, and to keep her expression neutral. She knew she was failing. She had to say something. "If that's your idea of entertainment..."

"Yeeees?" His eyes were half-closed, his lips twisted in a small smirk. He knew he was winning. Damn him.

"Forget it." Sekineh turned away, and her eyes fell on Flint and Edwards and the others, faces in the half-light, and they had the same look on them as Malfoy. That or worse. Or they were looking away. She turned back, burning. "No, don't forget it. You're an asshole, Malfoy, and you're acting like a bloody idiot. Just let him up, already." She knew her voice was full of emotion, and emotion was what got your face booted into the floor.

"Acting like an idiot, huh?" He eyed Weiss lazily and rocked his foot on the boy's head. Tears and snot were running down Weiss face, and Sekineh knew exactly how he was feeling. It wasn't just the humiliation, although that was probably the worst of it. No. The worst was impotence in the face of humiliation. And there would be impotent rage, too, as soon as the misery passed enough to allow for it. Now Sekineh was feeling it for him.

"Now who's making an idiot of themselves here?" Malfoy purred. "What's Weiss to you? Are you two. Y'know. Going out?"

Weiss was over-weight and had a severe case of acne. He was also a year below Malfoy and Sekineh, a second-year, whose successes so far had been in history and potions... classes that required memorization skills rather than magical powers. He'd been a spitoon since he arrived.

This was the first time Sekineh had said anything.

Now she had to think of what to say again. She was too bloody slow, and she knew it. In her place, Malfoy would have answered already. "Cut the crap, Malfoy." Her voice broke at the last syllable. Shit.

"You are, aren't you?" Malfoy raised a delighted eyebrow at her. There was a smattering of laughter from around the room. "I never knew. Did you do it yet?"

"At least he's prettier than your two girlfriends." She nodded at Crabbe and Goyle. She'd spoken without thinking. And admitted that she was dating Weiss, although she wasn't. It shouldn't matter. But for fuck's sake, it DID.

Malfoy opened his mouth, but right then Pansy Parkinson's chair clattered loudly against the floor as she stood up, slamming her fists on the table. "Take that back, you little Mud-Blood whore." Emotion. An opening. And for once, and for the first time, Sekineh took advantage of it.

"Please." She rolled her eyes. "You don't know anything about my bloodline." Don't defend. "Besides, I wasn't talking about you, I was talking about Malfoy's girlfriends." She knew, of course, as everyone did, that Parkinson had impossible romantic dreams about the little white snake...

Sekineh was getting quicker. She could feel the poison flowing through her veins, cool and strong. "Although on the looks department you'd fit right in... How about it, Draco? Is she your type?" She smiled and cocked her head at Malfoy, who was sitting quietly by the table going red from anger. "Or don't you, y'know... like girls?"

Malfoy was breathing faster. He was still such a kid, Sekineh thought. She felt like she was looking through a glass at a lobster she was about to choose for her dinner. She turned to Crabbe, but she didn't really see him. Her attention was still on Malfoy as she started innocently, "I've always wondered how threesomes work. Do you guys take turns or do you just put him on his hands and knees and--" She would have finished, but the dirt was left hanging on her tongue as Malfoy jumped up and charged at her, hand reaching into his robes for the wand--

***

Madam Pomfrey thanked Professor Sprout and pulled the cover tightly over her basket and the roots in it. She ignored the look on the herbalist's face, smiled and hurried away, back through the lawn to the school and through the echoing corridors towards her offices.

Well, the hard part was over now. Professor Sprout's inquisitive looks had felt easy after seeing Professor Snape. She hadn't known quite what she had expected to see on his face, but as usual the professor hid everything behind a cool, dry mask of resent. What else. Yet she had expected something a little more this time... since the boy was his favourite.

The little monster probably doesn't even get points off, or it'll just be two or three, Madam Pomfrey thought bitterly. Apparently the professor liked the sadistic ones, the ones that were just... bad. I hate those damned little...

She stopped herself. She hadn't really intended to think that she hated the children in Slytherin. Had she? Oh, Levi's boots! They were just... children, weren't they?

Children, who send other children to the hospital room with horn-like warts growing all over their face and arms. Not to mention black and yellow bruises along their back...

And this wasn't the first time something like this happened, either. Not at all.

She ground the roots and muttered the incantations and picked up the potion and set them all on a tray, the powder on a tiny saucer, the potion in a small cup, and a big glass of water to go with them. Then she picked a wad of clean tissue from a drawer, unpackaged a surgical knife, and set those on the tray too. Then she pulled back the cloth around the bed.

"There, dear," she said softly to the slim thirteen-year-old figure laid out among the white sheets. "You weren't asleep, were you?"

The skinny child was remolded by vicious magic into some demonic totem of anger. The conical warts had grown from the cheeks and forehead and ears, and two of them effectively sealed up the mouth, making any speech beyond a gurgle impossible. Pomfrey forced a smile on her face and pressed the tissue under the warts gagging the mouth. She had to open the mouth in order to get the potions into the child. She sighed, but only a little. "This is going to hurt a bit now." And she picked up the knife.

There was a loud, intense gurgle, and then a clear, angry scream of pain.

Malfoy lay groaning, head against the soft pillow stained with blood and yellow fluids, and tears of pain.

***

"Never did a wizard go bad who wasn't Slytherin."

Ever wonder why?

-the end-