Slytherin Dragons

1. The Slytherin

Certain elements mark, without a doubt, the night before the beginning of the school term.

On all accounts I should've been packing (the evidence: my trunk ajar), but for some inane reason I was staring out the window, on a summer night just before my return to Hogwarts. There's a window punched in the wall behind my bed, just a little bit to the left; near the bedside table, where I place my single cactus, which rises up like a messy green thumb missing several spikes. The curtains I had drawn aside. They're an inch short of the mantelpiece, so I suppose the dark of the window beneath them had beckoned me to the outside air.

My window got punched in on the opposite side of the building, where the neighbours don't leave their wet laundry to drip and perchance I won't meet Mother just by sticking my head out of the building.

During the day, the view can sometimes be fantastic. But in the night, I content myself with the dotted streams of the streetlamps in their deep orange. I had followed the lamps' mathematically acute spacing from one end of my vision to the other, and when I met their glare before me, I could just make out the foundry. Its smoke-stained walls camouflage it with the night of course, but it is hard to miss something when it rises with such prominence just after the apartment's twisted back fence. Tonight, the acid light and clear skies had also put into focus the oak out back, with one of its branches hugging this length of the building. Leafless, as usual. With more light, the canal - and the mills beyond - would be visible from the bulk of the foundry. The breeze wafted past me the scalding stench of evaporated rain on asphalt. Tonight, I stuck my head out of the window, letting the warm draft finger my hair with whatever moisture remained from the afternoon downpour. The flickering starlight had almost been drowned by the glare of the orange lamps, yet I could discern Orion, then Taurus beside him. I allowed myself, for those seconds, to lose myself in my recollections of the year before. I've discovered my mind has this method of putting before me images, like those of a flashing projector, locked within my head, of memories, of thoughts - if I think hard enough.

If this were one year earlier, I would've been in London, in that inn down at Diagon Alley, after the World Cup. Ironically, even then I was looking out of the window somewhere around this time, too. I had been quite upset by something... can't exactly remember what though; perhaps it was Ireland winning the cup (not that I support Bulgaria anyway, I hate the Irish team for their fine fortune), or was it that little brawl the night after? Then there was the school term, and that tournament which was all but mere pomp and pageantry. I would've thought Hogwarts was worth more than an entertainment venue for an exhibition of foreign students.

No, I didn't really enjoy the Triwizard Tournament, and I suppose to say it was all bloody funk wouldn't do much justice to Diggory, wouldn't it? He was alright actually - I opened my eyes, realising the breeze had no for no reason subsided, then closed them again - yes, he wasn't that bad. I played against him once in my Fourth-year; at least he's better than our Seeker. I guess there are some things I shouldn't be sarcastic about...

So they killed him, and I got my OWLs back, and then I came home for summer, and then I played for the Swanage Silvers all summer...

And before I had come to terms with it myself, I had found the reasons for me gazing out of the window on a the eve of my return to Hogwarts: I was all wreck and perhaps beyond repair.

I had endured the death of a fellow Quidditch player, with the coldest, hardest response that could've been put forth: my indifference (not that sympathy was common in the team I played in). I had only received three out of six OWLs. And not forgetting, the summer I had squandered hardly touching a broom for the team I had begged for a place in.

Steady there, I caught hold of myself. I was feeling the same way when I had received my OWLs; it was a blow, damn it was, considering the effort I had poured into it. The grades were significant, I suppose; not only had I come from a rather competitive Muggle school before the Hogwarts letter arrived, I needed the grades to convince half the teachers I was more than capable of balancing my commitment to Quidditch, my studies and my affairs at home. But then again, there seemed to be nothing really wrong with the first one - and the last.

I laid my hands on the mantelpiece, hunching my shoulders as if trying to elevate my head. I had hardly reached full arms-length when I could feel the pane nudging the top of my head. I turned back to the sky, and starlight burst onto my face like a bucket of cold water. They didn't seem as beckoning as they were before. But I wasn't ready to go back in. I wanted to console myself in the blackness of vision before me for these few moments, rather than face the real world.

Which is simply the consequence of all my actions.

"Have you done with your packing in there?"

The voice echoes from the living room, crashing into my bed and eventually gets entangled with a blast of hot air as it reaches my ears. The distant movements I discern out from the extreme corners of my eyes would be Mother's trudging around the living room and to the kitchen, and back to the living room again. My eyes shift conveniently to meet my trunk, still ajar, almost gorged full with books, but lacking largely my wardrobe.

Apparently not.

Turning back into the comforting blackness of the night, I tried, in vain, to stifle the responsibility nudging me from behind. It didn't seem as easy as I thought it would be. I glanced past the obstruction of shadow which was the foundry, attempting to fix my vision on one of the few trails of lights skirting the roads. Such a Muggle thing to do, I thought to myself, I doubt Christine has to open her window and see a district sprawling in front of her eyes.

Whether I hate being Muggle-born, Mudblood-taunted and Slytherin-inclined, I still can't seem to derive an opinion on my own existence - yet. I had to admit: it had been a closely guarded secret, until my Third-Year, when all those attacks on Muggle-borns began. Was I really scared? On hindsight, not enough perhaps. But some people - Slytherins, mind you - thought that I being Muggle-born was so intimately appealing. And since then, I suppose, I've decided not to care.

About everything, since I could not understand the reason for all the attention. I have a wand (eleven-and-a-half inches, unicorn hair, hemlock), I play Quidditch and I attend Hogwarts. I don't fuss about it, and neither should anyone else.

The breeze had strengthened, exposing the glittery half-moon once hidden behind the clouds. The cold was beginning to stiffen my neck, still stretched out the window like a giraffe. Again I picked out the trail of streetlamps, the orbs of intense orange and followed them. Helped by the mingled light of the stars and moons, I traced their trail into darkness, their straight lines winding off into the night. Almost magical it would seem to any of my wizard/witch friends.

"I said: have you done with your packing yet, Miss Bletchley?" went the voice from the living room. I hate it when my Mom addresses me like I'm some kind of stranger.

I decided not to bother yet, considering I felt so comfortable in the night air, my arms flat on the dusty mantelpiece, deep in thought. I had no reason to separate myself from the peace of the night, and return to the frustrating picking of my wardrobe (though I knew I had to get back to it, sooner or later). I wished all night could be as simple as this: contemplating, reflection, the putting aside of duty.

"Did you hear me in there?"

The voice had developed, too, a tone of frustration that I decided would be better to avoid further provocation. Forcefully, I brought myself away from the comfortable darkness and into the dim interior of my room. I had stowed away all my books - mostly thick, mildewed second-hand volumes my Mom and I bought at Diagon Alley over the fortnight - while several rolls of parchments of homework were fitted in between. A large, unoccupied space remained, and I was just going to collect my wardrobe when my eyes fell on my broom.

I took it in my arms; for much of the summer it had been the only thing I touched, save for homework and food. I had yet to clip several bent twigs, now sticking out almost parallel to the broom, after all those long hours of training. I brushed away a piece of dirt that had been caught within its bristles, and set it down carefully between the empty space I had reserved for it. It had to be that moment for Mom to stride, irked by my silence, into my room.

"You don't look too deaf to me," she noted sarcastically, "because I've been wondering about your packing. You have to be up at eight tomorrow to catch the train to London." Her eyes rolled ceaselessly across the room, examining it with the usual mathematical detail that comes from being maternal. She appeared to have found some fault in the open window, where her eyes took immediately to the faint imprint of my arms and hands on the usually dusty mantelpiece. But she overlooked it in a moment, and as I straightened my broom and first set of school robes into the trunk, I could feel her disdain - or a measure of it - waiting to tap me on my back so I would turn around to embrace her scorn.

She inspected the books in my trunks, as ordered as flagstones on a pavement. "Glad to see that you'll be planning to set your mind on your studies this year," she said, her words trailing from her mouth and across the floor into my face. "Instead of wasting your time on all this Quidditch."

I should've left it at that, but I, too, felt as likewise bothered by what it really meant.

I stopped my packing, and on one heel, half-turned to Mom. "What's that supposed to mean?" I demanded.

She wasn't there. I found her, just completing her walk to the window, checking the dust on the mantelpiece with her fingers and, finding it cleared by me already, settling down with her elbow on the ledge, her face half-turned in my direction.

"What I mean is: I think you're spending way too much time on Quidditch than on your work," she told me, still calm and unprovoked. "You practically spent the entire summer out of doors."

"Mom... we've been through this before summer already and since I've started playing Quidditch," I said to her, exasperation holding my reasons for this speech. "I can manage everything... look, I've promised to finish up all the homework and make good after the last time. Can you please... please, stop rambling on about my Quidditch and how I run my life. I can handle everything perfectly well..."

She cut me off. "Stop protesting your innocence, young lady. Since you've started with your Quidditch business, your grades have fallen by half, and look what happened to your... your OWLs or whatever as a result! You make me wonder, seriously, whether putting you into that magic school was worth every moment of our hard work and your future..."

I could feel the anger force my hands into fists; I silenced it, coaxing it with reason so it was mild enough to be confined to my fists.

This seemed close... to insane. I wished to deliver her a crushing retort - but all that came out from my mouth was a plain "Oh, come on!", laced with enough frustration and sarcasm I could summon.

"... and yes, YES, I do think you are wasting your summer, flushing the only time you'll probably have for making good down the drain with your Quidditch excuses."

She made that sound like a masterpiece of disappointment.

"What would you know about spending good time anyway?" I retorted. I had spun around to face her, almost on my toes in defiance. "You're out from dawn till dusk!"

"I'm trying to sweat out an income to give your ungratefulness a decent living!" she spat at me. "Don't you dare talk to me about running my life!"

"Then shut up about mine!"

"I'm trying to show that - at least, for God's sake, at least, you won't go through your life as just-another-bastard!"

The rage squeezed my fists into hardened balls; I fought back tears, which if I shed, would be a sign of my submission. I wasn't going to submit!

"What gives...gives you the right?" I hurtled all my disgust at her. "What gives you the damn right to talk about my Father, when you have hardly seen him either, huh?"

I had struck a chord. She seemed stunned. "Don't you dare..."

I felt a touch of moisture down my face to the bridge of my nose. "Who the hell gives you the right to shift the blame to me? Why do you use him as your excuse to..."

"Fine, FINE!" she yelled. "Have it your way! Play your Quidditch rubbish and run your own life! Catch your silly balls and sit on your broom! But don't come to me at the end of everything saying you need help. Because when your school finishes, what good will it be? What good will your magic be in this world, THIS WORLD?"

"Stop..."

"How do I know? I know because I've been through it! I know because... unless, unless you do something worthwhile, you don't get anywhere, ANYWHERE, other than your own mess! And that's where all your magic will leave you! It better be good... it had better be..."

As she stormed out of the room, I called furiously after her: "There's more to Quidditch than just catching balls, you know!"

I stared, as if someone had run a blade through my insides, devastated, for those short moments. My clenched fists were red with strain, my voice hollowed with shouting. I stared, continuously, at the books, the clothes, and finally the broom in the trunk, all the while my mind was raging, all my fury unchecked, allowing it to harden my thoughts with its reasons concrete. What right does she have? To tell me what to do, to tell me what I SHOULD do? Hasn't she set a bad enough example already? How does she think she is? She made that decision anyway! And I'll prove her dead wrong! Wrong enough for her to be sorry! What right does she what right does she what right what right what right what right...

My rage running afoul with some other, rebellious emotion, I turned to my cupboard and punched punched punched PUNCHED... the door, drilling into the wood, drilling through the splinters, and I slammed my tightened fist again and again and again and again and again... until the heard the scream of the bolt being forced free. The cupboard door fell, limp, at my feet, and I found myself fighting with the air.

And I whispered to myself, "fuck you.", and descended to the floor my face discoloured with tears and sobbing.

What have I done what have I done what have I done what have I done...?

My knuckles, flattened with punching, were threatening to turn bloody from the scratches left by the splinters. What have I done? In my own rage, my self-centered, self-destructive rage I had smashed my cupboard door into jagged pieces. And given my Mom a reason for our shame. What the hell have I done? The tears had carved valleys down my face; I could feel them - their repentance - wet and dry, mingled with a dash of blood from my hands. I sunk down by the side of my bed, wiping my face and hands on my sleeve.

As I stared again at a mixture of sopping fluid and thin, light red blood smudges, I tried to hold my sob, but it broke, a wet tear slicing across my chin and falling square onto the floor. I wiped it up as if it were the most precious thing in the world.

Mom must've been crying too, but for shame she had inherited, of me, rather than remorse at her accusations. I sought my room for any comfort, any reason which I could cling onto to save myself from my own misgivings. All I saw were the trembling curtains by the window, exhaling an even colder breeze from outside. I made my mind not to go over to it, but crawled, as if all that had happened had ripped away my legs, to my trunk. And to my broom.

Mom was right: I was wasting my time, with my Quidditch, with the Slytherins and their hopeless mania for the Cup, with the Swanage Silvers... Since I had learnt, five years ago, that Quidditch was the closest thing that came to displacing all of Mom's pressing demands for my studies, I had become a player. Now, everything had been reversed. My playing had added another burden to Mom's ambition for me and my pressure on myself... and I wasn't even a player now - more of a substitute.

I was wasting my time with all this, this vain glory in my aspirations for being an athlete, this endless grasping for the trash of being someone like Anne Murray - someone who forces out sympathy with her wounds and chokes out joy with her honours; I was wasting my time with flying, when all the world - and my Mom - wanted was someone who could walk.

I smoothened the reddened contours of my fist and eyed the cupboard door bent with its hole of splinters down where my fist had created. Then I turned to my broom. I wouldn't know what stayed my hand. A skinny, skeletal Comet Three-Sixty would've flowed like liquid under my strength...

It wouldn't have been the first time I had thought of doing it. Nor tonight a beginning of my interests crashing with Mom's. I forget, sometimes, the reasons for her ambitions for me: she lived a life much worse off at my age, though she will never admit it. And she was still right, even to the point it bothered me so much that I learnt to ignore it. Her model life was mine, at least she hoped to make it mine, with all her hard work and whatever that could be taken out of Hogwarts.

Wasting my time...

I felt worse than miserable; not just that Mom was right and it took me a fight to make me understand, but the plain, fresh truth, coming out of my own mind, made the broom in my left hand, the books in my trunk on Advanced Transfiguration and Potions, the train ticket to London and my bitter, numb tears seem almost entirely unnecessary. Was I headed for this aimless end that Mom had told me?

I felt sick at myself.

Somehow this feeling had come to me before, and as I tried, to overrule all my doubts, I remembered thinking the same thoughts not too long ago. A spring afternoon, after the Quidditch final, close to two years from this day. I remembered how much effort I had put, how much that Cup had meant to everyone, everyone; not just for revenge, for the team, the supporters, Snape, Adrian and the headmaster. For everyone. So when we lost, no condolence seemed good enough...

And somehow thoughts of the week - earlier - emerged quietly like a phantom, and overtook the memories with feelings of unease, of disappointment. My coach... he never said anything to me that day; he'd kept silent. I would've liked him to say something; if I didn't deserve to play he should've said it: I could contentedly decay in my own failure. But he didn't. His silence made disdain sharper than his words could fashion.

If you don't tell me anything, how do you expect me to do what you wish?

No, Mom was right. But was I wasting my time with Quidditch, or just my obsession to please everyone with it?

That seemed justification enough.

I wiped fragments of my sobbing from my eyes and, packing my broom in, proceeded to finish the final procedures of my packing my trunk.

Flicking the locks into place, I sat at the foot of the trunk. Whether I had convinced myself, I yet couldn't tell; but I knew enough to begin searching for the nail that had fallen from the cupboard door. It had to be repaired before I retired for sleep.

Written by shelter