Act Two

She doesn't like anybody.

Or that is what she tells herself, when she thinks of it at all. It's easier this way, to ensure that her grimace remains satisfactorily intact. That it does is necessary for her continued existence as Slytherin, menacing, untouchable.

Imagine what they would say if she let a wayward smile break forth. "Ye Gods!" they would cry. (She doesn't think they would really say such a thing, but in her mind, that is what they exclaim, with dramatic, silent-movie sighs and hands pressed to their chests.) "Be that Bulstrode who giggled so girlishly? Forsooth and begone with you! It cannot be!"

Or something to that effect.

Her thoughts are littered with exclamation points and stage directions, perhaps because such things are missing from her life. There are no dramatic entrances and exits, aside from the flouncy, door-slamming fits Pansy gets into when she's in a mood. There are no romantic soliloquies, no graceful swoons. She sits too much, she thinks. Sits in classes and in common rooms and even her thoughts are taken at a leisurely pace, nothing urgent enough to require any mental calisthenics.

This is why she is friends with Pansy.

Pansy's entire life is taken at breakneck speed. She hurls herself at it like she hurls herself at everything else, with no thought for consequences or common sense. She is very like a character in a play, Millicent thinks rather wistfully. The way she tries and somewhat fails to move her shoulders like a cat when she walks, in weak imitation of the born-to-it aristocracy in Slytherin; the way she talks a bit too fast, sometimes tripping over her tongue in her haste to get the words out; her absolute lack of self-consciousness.

Millicent is the bulwark against which Pansy crashes, something solid to nod and not take her too seriously. Some people think Millicent is Pansy's, but in fact it is, if anything, the other way around. Millicent looks upon Pansy with a kind of motherly affection, stolid toleration of her fluctuating presence. And admiration, somewhere in the confines of her immutable existence. She was stagnate; Pansy was anything but.

Pansy knows how to make people like her, too, the kind of charisma that is a necessary possession for leading ladies. Millicent does not have the knack of charming manipulation, Slytherin though she is. Even she can see that Pansy is not pretty, but she assaults you with bare skin and red lips and biting comments until you are cornered into believing that she is. Millicent is taller than a good portion of the boys in sixth year and built to scale, an Amazon of a witch. Her feet hung over the end of her bed for a year in fourth before they learned the proper spells to enable her to enlarge it. Female Slytherins were constructed gracefully, born of proper breeding and therefore adhering to the acceptable measurements of their sex. Small and fine-boned, made to wield knives meant to stab in the back, not great hulking swords.

Millicent is excellent at fencing.

She thinks sometimes of this, of how she would love to engage in a duel, no wands, just swords, real swords, with swashbuckling steps and bantering capers that continue even as the combatants parry and thrust across the stage. She wants to force a fight of this sort upon one of the whinging midgets in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw. (Nobody fights a Hufflepuff; it isn't dignified. They simply aren't worth the trouble it takes to squelch them. Thus does Millicent live up to her ancestry in her secret thoughts.) The kinds of girls that populate Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, the ones who have everything. Looks and brains and boys in every flavor licking their boots. The kinds of girls every boy goes for. Ginny Weasely, with her shockingly red hair and ever-present effervescence, who never worked for anything and treated boys like dirt and then got angry when someone expressed a negative opinion about her family's integrity. Cho Chang, who struck the poses of the damsel in distress for so long Millicent thought eventually someone would have to realize that if she kept going at this rate, she would just begin to leak mucus and saltwater whenever spoken to, out of habit, like a Pavlov experiment. Even Hermione Granger, who was an insufferable know-it-all and had a face like a rabbit to boot, even she belongs to their ranks, having finally attained everything she could desire--top marks, a (professionally awkward) boyfriend, and the friendship of the Boy Who Suffered Loudly Whenever Convenient. Millicent would love to back these girls up against a wall and hold a blade to their throats. They don't possess every kind of power there is.

But only she knows that, and therefore the point is rather moot.

Still, the thought steals into her mind when she spots Ginny pressed up against a wall, enthusiastically trading her own saliva for Hero Spit. (Harry comes in capital letters in the Wizarding world. By now, it's a habit for Millicent to think of him in such terms. It's born from years of hearing whispers of the Chosen One, and the Dark Lord. It's born from years of trying to make those capitals a stigma, rather than a commendation, along with all the others in her house.)

Millicent's own experience with other people's saliva is fairly narrow. She is sixteen, and has been kissed once in her life, by a shrimpy second cousin who had wiped his mouth afterward and told her he was breaking up with her because he thought his heirs might turn out a bit funny with the family connections between them. She didn't particularly care about him, nor did she want any more kisses from his wet and girlishly plush lips. Kisses were damp, fumbling, uncomfortable affairs. She didn't understand the Weasely girl.

She presses it out of her mind and walks to Charms.

Day follows day. Millicent feels that she must drag her ankles thickly through time. Is there never to be a second act?

She almost doesn't recognize change when it arrives.

It arrives slowly, unfolding in the corners of her eyes at the margins of lessons. A glimmer of awareness. The awareness is Hufflepuff shaped, but not really, not really. He is not a Hufflepuff at heart, no more than she is a Slytherin at heart. They are burdened by their families. She doesn't know how she knows this about him. Perhaps she doesn't and she is merely projecting.

On Tuesday he smiles at her in Double History of Magic and she is so startled she forgets to smile back. He is confronted with the sneer that is comfortable habit to her features now, and looks away before she can rectify her mistake.

Zacharius Smith, she writes at the bottom of her essay for Snape one night, and then is horrified at this new transgression of her quill and cuts the end off the parchment with too much force, so that the edges are singed and the tip of her wand wheezes feebly.

She goes to Slughorn's Christmas party wearing the only set of dress robes she owns. They are green velvet and make her look like a Christmas tree, especially if she wears earrings.

She doesn't wear earrings, but she goes anyway and stands in the corner alone while Pansy chats up the visiting vampire, who eyes the cleavage on display and swallows visibly, Adam's apple bobbing. She feels like a fool.

Around one in the morning, when she has had time to get well acquainted with the house-elf hawking free drinks, Slughorn suggests that they all wear masks and then unmask in an hour, regardless of the fact that it's not midnight. Millicent doesn't wear a mask. She finds the whole affair boring and wishes she could leave, but Pansy will likely find herself rather dehydrated should she continue to press like that against Sanguini.

Millicent presses herself further into the wall, wishing she could sink into the stones.

A boy wearing a Tragedy mask is suddenly in front of her with a mighty hiccup. She hates the drunk. All drunks, all temperaments. She wishes he would stop breathing liquor on her and leave before she vomits.

"Not one for masks, eh?" he says, jolly and unaware that she is aching to rip the false frown from his face.

She doesn't answer him, just looks gruffly at the floor.

"Dance with me?" he tries, despite the fact that no one else is dancing.

Her head jerks up and she looks at him in disbelief. He does not seem to be joking.

"Well?" he prods. "Can you speak?"

"Yes, and without slurring my consonants, astoundingly," she tells him. "You need to learn to hold your drink. I could probably drink you under the table."

He sweeps the mask from his face and bows deeply. "Touche!" he says merrily, and when he straightens she sees that it is Zacharius Smith behind the mask of Tragedy. He takes her hand. She makes a noise.

She doesn't like anybody, she thinks to herself, but it is a thought that doesn't belong in the new kind of play she has suddenly been flung into. The new one might even possess something of a happy ending.

Millicent takes his hand and still does not smile. Some things take working up to.

She is closer than she has been in years, though. Somehow she thinks he might know that. He returns the smile she never gave him, and for a moment there is nobody Millicent doesn't like.