Tangled in a Nott

Dinner never meant socializing, food never meant people.

He sat situated in the midst of it all with naught but a nod of greeting to those who addressed him first; it wasn't difficult to feel so detached from everyone around him - boys around him could only speak of the opposite sex, or else sports or teachers that just don't understand, and they were mirthless with their laughter, brutish in their treatment of each other; girls, on the other hand, they were waspish, the lot of them, ears trained for gossip and gossip only, running a sort of fashion commentary on the so-called misfortunes of other houses - which was laughable, really, when the great equalizers known as uniforms made sure distinctions only by house were made. But no, the girls were merciless, getting off to pimples, hair styles, and make-up alike - freckles, even, as well as moles and beauty marks, how far apart one's eyes were and the way one rounded her shoulders or walked duck-footed to her seat. He was swimming in a vat of malicious intent and while as likeminded as he could be, picking fights with anyone - witch, wizard, Mudblood, house member alike - he somehow had an unnerving ability to sit with a group without hardly being there at all.

It wasn't that he was invisible; for as much as he preferred to keep to himself, it did not save him from the notice of others. Theodore Nott was sandy hair and a lank exterior with blue eyes that could hook and pierce, like claws that dug so deep, talons to scathe and harm when crossed. It wasn't that he was designed to be feared. It was that he was understood by others to be a loner, antisocial to the nth degree; he was overtly selective in who earned his attention, but even those who won a shred of his conversation changed by the day, by his mood, picked up one second then dropped the next. It wasn't to be taken personally - no, not necessarily. Theodore, it had to be said, just bored very quickly.

"There you are, Nott," came that familiar drawl from above, and as he raised his eyes, he saw Draco Malfoy swinging his leg around the bench across, apparently deigning tonight a perfect evening as any other to attempt a confabulation with the standoffish bloke currently mulling over the pros and cons of jabbing a fork through his palm.

Draco seemed impervious to the displeasure etching its way over the frosted planes of his face. But Theodore, however nettled, could not abandon the table just yet - not especially when the feast had yet to be exchanged for dessert from the kitchens. "You've found me," he sighed, sounding so defeated in tone that however honest the statement had been, Malfoy seemed to take it for a wisecrack instead and laughed.

Irritating.

"I've been meaning to ask you about this afternoon. In the corridor. With that Mudblood."

At his words, Theodore's eyes traveled past Malfoy's shoulder to gaze searchingly up and down the Gryffindor section, weeding out every stupid, befuddled face and finding -

"Ah, Granger?" he said, just as he was unearthing her from the incompetent fools she had immersed herself with; she wasn't laughing like the others, merely smiling around the fork that obstructed her mouth, and he blinked as Draco snorted, a noise in his throat somewhere between derision and incredulity.

"Yes, Nott, her," he snapped impatiently. "Who else?"

A beat.

"She's had it coming to her for a while. I trust you put that filthy Mudblood back in her place? She damn well believes she is better than us, if you haven't noticed, always teaming up with Saint Potter and his blood-traitor friend Weasley... and when I saw you giving her the one for earlier today, I thought, finally, some damned justice. After all, who better to give it?"

His smirk was set fully in place, wide and twisted with the raw pleasure of retribution, Theodore couldn't help but think. He eyed Malfoy, at the rapt attention seeping from the greys of his eyes, and it was a good long moment before he ceded speech, his mouth forming around the words tired and slow. "I was on my way to the commons, she was on her way to class; for all the fucking room in the corridor there had been, you'd have thought she would have proper sense to dodge around, but fuck no, she took me to the ground with her; always with that bloody nose in a book, she collided in with me, and it was like a fucking parade - papers everywhere, and I mean it, I mean, you saw." He looked at Draco, at his hungry face, and kept on. "And her filth, fuck, she had landed full on me and she enjoyed it, that dirty Mudblood - I had to fucking shove her off - and I told her Mudblood ass to get fucked, basically."

Theodore put on the pretense of going back to his food, knowing full well what was to follow.

"And?" came Draco from the other end of the table, dropping a clenched first onto the wooden surface. "I know she didn't take that lying down!"

Theodore shrugged after a moment, twirling his fork in a puddle of mashed potatoes. "She told me to watch my language because of my mum," he continued, skating over the sadness mixed with fury mixed with grief he felt at the subject of his mother, "and I told her she was dead, and you should have seen her face, Draco. I fucking won. Hearts are useless, they either feel too much or not at all, never knowing the right time for each extreme, and she bit it, she was about to cry, so fucking pathetic, and if that weren't enough do you know what she did?" Draco shook his head no. "Apologized. How's that for a laugh, yeah? She fucking apologized. They're all the same, that miserable lot. And that's where you came in."

"And after?"

This was getting boring. Theodore glanced irritably in Draco's direction, before acquiescing with a final stab at the meat on his plate where the fork stood on end. That made him feel a little better. "I put her in her place, Draco, what else? I told her to get down there and clean up after her worthless self," he lied, for even the truth perplexed even him. "And she obeyed like the good little Mudblood she was, she picked up all of her things - like a house-elf, actually, and I walked off to the common room and spent the rest of the time till dinner there."

This seemed to satisfy Malfoy. The thought of an obedient Granger delighted him to no end and so well chuffed about that insufferable know-it-all finally getting her comeuppance was he that Draco remained somewhat civil towards Pansy for the remainder of the meal.

But being left alone to his thoughts made him wish, only slightly, that Draco would wring him out for more details. He could have used the distraction because, putting it simply, thoughts only complicated things. Thinking, it always did him harm. After the run-in with Granger, he had left all fragments of the event in the corridor he had abandoned her in. He hadn't spared the situation one single thought until just moments ago when Draco was looking to siphon off the entire story - it hadn't even occurred to Theodore to lie until the moment seemed to call for it and he realized, with a leaden feeling, that by heaps and mounds, helping Granger had been so strictly out of character. He fancied to think he had been a thing possessed, but there was a hole in the plotline, he'd displayed charity instead of allegiance to his own house, and did this make him a blood-traitor, too? How disturbing, he thought, how totally ill-fitting. What had come over him? The generosity, however fleeting, had him wondering if he'd been diseased. Infected upon direct contact. She'd stained his robes. He'd have to wash them, surely. He told himself that by gathering her things for her, he was proving a point - that she was Muggle by blood and that purebred magic was better, but there had been no malice that he could think of, no residue of loathing; it was likely he did it out of impatience, that she had been wasting both his and her time scrabbling on the floor - but was he merely confused by the expression, the brown eyes that met his with a myriad of emotions - inquisitiveness among them? Perhaps chivalry had been a dormant trait of his personality all along. But being chivalrous toward a Mudblood?

None of it made sense.

He chanced a look over at the Gryffindor side of things, quietly observing from a distance: though unsmiling, the happiness and warmth of the table didn't escape his scrutiny -- and she looked content, almost brooding, eyeing Potter and Weasley with a look that exuded a balance between both affection and loftiness. What was it about her that disarmed him, that had peeled away the enmity and venom? His brow furrowed, he tried to find enlightenment in her exterior - but there was nothing to write home about when it came to her looks; she was ordinary, plain, like vanilla. She wasn't special. She was basic. That had been the concept of her design.

But then she seemed to feel his eyes on her and with one dangerous swivel of liquid toffee, blue and brown met, clashed, a swirl of paint, a big bang theory put to the test.

She gazed at him in an unreadable fashion that Theodore, despite all intuition, returned, willing her to be the first to look away, to be the first to back down. It was always a question of power. He always had to win.

She looked away.

He was comforted by this.

But the feeling wouldn't last. As students poured into the vastness of the entrance hall, extricating themselves from the crowd to march like ants to their designated common rooms, she found him on the outskirts of the masses; she touched his sleeve and he recoiled, jostling between the couple in front in a feeble attempt to separate himself from her. What was she playing at? And what was that he had felt - fear? Panic? No. No, of course not. She'd soiled his robes enough. He was merely looking out for the quality of his clothes.

But then she'd found him again, hissing, "Nott!" after his retreating back and it was all he could do to whip around and silence her, lest anyone else hear her calling his name. And as he turned around, he saw her forcing her way through the same couple he had parted like shutters of a Western door, only instead of leaving a peeved couple in their wake, she rejoined their hands the moment she passed through, encouraging their fingers to twine and lace.

It was sickening. And Theodore had just eaten dinner and dessert.

"Are you fucking out of your mind, Mudblood?" he snarled, stealing refuge from behind one of the many shining knights in suits of armor that gleamed under the evening torchlight.

She winced at the tone, but his temper did not subside.

His eyes narrowed, his face slowly contorting . "You do not address me in public! The fuck, Granger, did you knock your head when you fell? We are not friends."

She mouthed soundlessly after him, infuriated, but recovered her tongue fairly quickly.

"I had just wanted to apologize," she fumed with a spitfire expression on her face, "about earlier, I didn't know about your - your... and I just, I felt awful, I --"

"Leave me the fuck alone!" he shouted, and he was surprised at the explosion himself. There were too many thoughts stirring about in his brain, her words were ringing in the hollow of his skull, gentle yet harsh at the same time; he could see her eyes, the gleaming color of them like amber, and hear the malice of his own voice, the confusion that distorted it all as the image of his mother swam into view, the delicateness of her features, the eyes that proved she cared; he felt as if he were shrinking away from himself, but why? What he felt was bigger than himself, it was as if his whole world had been upended in a matter of hours - and she, that girl -- she was the catalyst.

He looked at her and she him; his chest heaved in the aftermath of the destruction.

"You don't mean that," she said quietly, and where he expected an eruption in return, he received tenderness instead. He felt like an animal gone astray, lost and confused, but then there was a hand placed gingerly along his right shoulder, one that felt warm and soothing, and for once, from her, he did not draw back from the touch.

"You've never talked about her, have you?" she said, so soft, and bewildered, he answered her honestly, wordlessly, offering a single shake of his head.

She gripped his shoulder comfortingly before he stepped abruptly out from her reach.

"Look, Mudbl - Granger," he started, backing away from the refuge of the knight, "I don't need your help, if that's the seed that's somehow wound its way into your oversized brain."

The dungeons. He had to get to the dungeons. He had just turned his back on her when -

"Theodore."

A pause.

"If - if you change your mind, Theodore, you know where to find me."

Footsteps echoed, then stopped. He hadn't thought to stop.

"And where is that?" he asked, speaking aloud to a portrait who, thinking she had been addressed intead, tilted her head, nonplussed.

"Don't be thick now, Theodore. It will be the first place you look, trust me."

He revolved on the spot in time to see her smile dissipate into darkness.

And, though immersed in bronzing light, Theodore, too, felt as though he had plunged into black. He thought back to his outburst, where the ugliness of his temper had reared its head at last; perhaps, after years of bottling, his emotions had won out against their stopper. It had been more than he had allowed himself to feel in the longest time, and he felt alive - though, he couldn't decide if he liked the change or not. It was as if a dam in him had broken and now emotions ran rampant through his heart; the current was strong and he was clinging onto familiarity, he wanted to escape from being swept away: a part of him could still be so stubborn, so indignant - he didn't know how to accept help, he had always been so proud - and so overwhelmed by her benevolence was he. He had only ever known cruelty without realizing it for what it was but now, at the mere offer Granger had dangled to him on a string, he had something with which to compare.

Yet where choice should have been liberating, it was fettering instead.

No.

It wasn't as simple - or easy - as she'd made it seem.