In the pitch-black dungeon corridor, Kate let out a muffled grunt as her back met the cold stone wall with a dull, solid thud.
She looked down, brow furrowing slightly, and fixed her gaze on the golden hair now inches from her face.
Do all little girls in the nineties enjoy wall-slamming people taller than themselves?
The corridor was dim, but the faint, rippling light filtering in through the window from the Black Lake outside was just enough for Kate to make out Malfoy's pale grey eyes — staring directly at her.
Oh. The little miss is angry.
A hundred different ways to coax a girl out of a temper flashed through Kate's mind in an instant — and were dismissed just as quickly.
With Malfoy, there was simply no need.
"Unhappy with my suggestion?" Kate said, crossing her arms with perfect composure, her expression making it abundantly clear she was not particularly concerned.
The words — delivered in that cool, indifferent tone — made the fire smouldering in Malfoy's chest leap straight up.
"You know this had nothing to do with me!" Even now, she was still trying to be reasonable.
Kate regarded her behavior with a faint flicker of surprise, then simply settled her weight against the stone wall. "That's right. The fault lies with the others entirely. You were just an innocent bystander — that's how you see it, isn't it?"
"I..." Malfoy faltered. If she was being honest, she hadn't stopped Crabbe when she could have — which meant she wasn't entirely without fault.
Still, compared to those who had been the instigators, the ones who had pushed and pressured and then walked away clean — she was, relatively speaking, a bystander.
"But when they were forcing me to teach Fiendfyre," Kate said calmly, "you just watched. Didn't say a word, didn't step in. Doesn't that make you, in some sense, complicit?"
"There were so many of them, they — they—" Malfoy's gaze slid sideways, then snapped back up as she lifted her chin. "Even so — shouldn't you be pointing the finger at them first?"
She heard Kate let out a short, involuntary snort of laughter, and her face went scarlet. The hand still pressed against the wall balled into a fist.
"If a victim can only seek revenge in strict order of priority," Kate said, "that's terribly boring, don't you think?"
She reached out and gently took Malfoy's fist, and with equal gentleness blew away the fine dust that had settled on it. Her eyes lifted slowly. "Still feeling hard done by?"
Malfoy's face burned. She yanked her hand back and retreated two steps, something close to alarm in her expression. "Kate — what exactly are you trying to do?"
With so many Slytherin students involved in tonight's affair, if Kate decided to go after each and every one of them, she would make enemies of half the house.
Maybe it would be better — maybe it would be far better — to simply let her go to the Head of House tomorrow and tell him everything, exactly as it happened. Whatever punishment came, whatever points were deducted, she would accept it.
The only problem was that it would likely cost Slytherin any chance of winning the House Cup...
"Why are you so nervous?"
Kate's voice cut through the tangle of her thoughts and dragged her back to the present.
"You — you want to get back at them, don't you?" Malfoy stiffened her neck and forced herself to hold Kate's gaze.
"Why not?" Kate spread her hands with a picture of perfect innocence. "Don't forget — the only reason they agreed to my suggestion was to keep the punishment off themselves."
"They used you and Crabbe as their scapegoats. After being treated like that — you still want to cover for them?"
Her voice was soft and low — and in Malfoy's ears at that moment, it sounded exactly like a devil whispering up from the depths of the underworld.
"If you do what I said earlier, the worst you'll get is a reprimand, and Crabbe gets at most one detention."
"Crabbe himself will probably go along with it too — you saw how he didn't make a single sound the whole time. That's as good as agreement."
Malfoy's expression shifted through half a dozen things at once, her eyes going unfocused under the weight of Kate's "temptation."
If she hadn't heard those words about revenge — if she hadn't known what lay beneath the surface — she would have genuinely thought this was a brilliant solution. Everyone appeased, every party managed, and the only one truly wronged being Kate herself.
But now...
Malfoy kept telling herself, over and over, that what happened to the others had nothing to do with her. That whoever Kate wanted revenge on was Kate's own business.
But —
The thought of watching Kate get caught up in someone else's disaster, forced to swallow her anger and spend her days quietly plotting retaliation in the dark — it made something inside her feel deeply, inexplicably wrong.
The Kate she carried in her mind was not supposed to be like that.
Watching a friend become a stranger over a catastrophe that had never even truly happened — Malfoy found she couldn't stand it.
And then, all at once, she snapped back to herself.
When she raised her head, all she could see was the edge of Kate's profile half-hidden in shadow.
Even that small sliver was enough. Malfoy could feel it — the faint, unmistakable weight of grief emanating from her.
Yes. It was someone else's fault entirely. And yet Kate — Kate — was the one being made to pay for it. By what right?
And moreover...
"Kate," Malfoy said, mustering her courage and speaking before she could stop herself, "I think I've already started to think of you as a friend!"
Heaven only knows what had possessed the perpetually tsundere Young Miss Malfoy to say something so embarrassingly sincere out loud.
Kate certainly couldn't work it out. The sudden, out-of-nowhere declaration left her genuinely bewildered.
This isn't how the script is supposed to go...
Malfoy, for her part, had stopped caring what Kate was thinking. She pressed on quickly: "Tomorrow I'm going to the Head of House and telling him everything — so don't you dare try any funny business!"
And then, as though terrified Kate might grab her and forbid her from going, she turned and fled — a flash of gold disappearing into the dark.
Kate stood alone in the corridor, thoroughly baffled.
If she'd understood correctly, that last line was supposed to be a threat.
So what, exactly, was the "I think I've already started to think of you as a friend" before it?
Was it a Malfoy family tradition to say something bizarre and disarming right before issuing a threat, just to short-circuit the enemy's brain?
What a strange, strange custom.
Kate scratched her head in genuine incomprehension, then turned to glance out the nearby window at the jellyfish drifting past on the other side of the glass, their bodies casting a faint, pale glow.
She walked over and gave the windowpane a light tap. The jellyfish startled and darted back, vanishing into the surrounding darkness.
Kate smiled faintly, turned away, conjured a soft light with her wand, and retraced her steps back the way she'd come.
· · · · ·
First thing the next morning was Potions.
As was customary, Snape examined her work, added two points with his usual air of carefully maintained neutrality, and then moved on to stand beside Malfoy.
"Professor," Malfoy said, shifting her weight nervously beside her cauldron, "I need to speak with you after class."
Snape looked her over with a slight frown. "Come to my office when class ends."
Oh, the show is about to begin.
Kate carefully angled her ears in their direction to catch the exchange, then raised an eyebrow with quiet understanding.
As much as she would have loved to witness Snape's inevitable eruption up close — for her own sake, it was probably wiser to make herself scarce before it happened.
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