At the end of an era one does start thinking of the beginning and where it all blossomed into fruition. Whether that is fondly or in somber recognition, this one aspect is an inevitable outcome of time's blurring dynamics within the mind.
It was the summer of 1991 in remote Ireland, and Audette was about to turn eleven that July.
Hot rain fell with tickling grace onto the globular conservatory integrated into their mossy stone castle, the glass dome chalk full of magical creatures and their associative habitat plants - specialized, endangered or rare in natural qualities.
The ancient Bellarose castle stood overlooking an expansive lake, which was often filled with fluffy white swans and floating green lily pads. Thick cordate leaves stemming from invasive vines fluttered constantly in the breeze, covering the medieval brickwork and masking the stellar ruins from curious eyes.
The conservatory was so large that it impressively managed to house towering old-growth trees, various fruit-bearing species including delicious dirigible plums, and an assortment of peculiar environments for especially peculiar beasts.
Such a quintessential biome garnished the visitation of many high-ranking scholars, authority figures, and the odd tour of lucky students.
Montgomery Bellarose had held tenure at Erenholl School for Witchcraft and Wizardry for some time, eventually making a well-received career change to run the Ministry of Magic's Department for Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.
His academic accomplishments, including the arboretum within the glass house, were the sum of her father's greatest life achievements. He preferred to remind her of this factor constantly; that his work was elevated in ranking above Audette herself.
He'd craved a male heir, and unfortunately, Audette had been the only surviving twin at birth.
After they had buried her baby brother he would never forgive Audette for something that was entirely out of her hands, essentially dismissing himself from her upbringing.
Dismissed himself, Montgomery did best, but with harsh instructions.
She was to be raised to reflect the noblest degree of class, educated and cultured, to wear aristocratic garments concealing just about everything but her hands and face, and she was to be wed appropriately. And beyond that, Audette expected that when the time came her father would not be a prominent player in her life other than to ensure she catered to the survival of their polished rapport and the family lineage.
It was a fairytale at the Bellarose castle, where everything was covered in plentiful, blooming flowers and the vitality of foreign life, yet it was devastatingly lonely. An only child, with nothing but private tutoring and rolling hills for miles.
She often felt like she was Sleeping Beauty, trapped in some dystopian version of the tale, out in the middle of nowhere with governesses combing her hair, sticking their fingers in her face and following her around everywhere in the gardens and glasshouse.
She was inherently a good child, but due to the oppression Audette learned quickly to put up a fight for her freedom within the estate, and it was only ever considered to be insurgency.
By the time she was eight she'd figured out how to scale the thick vines running up the side of the glass panes of the conservatory in order to escape her overlookers and onto the suspended catwalks above, which could only be properly accessed by her father through his heavily locked study in the tallest tower of the castle.
Until one very peculiar day broke the cycle of isolation.
Her mother's autocratic voice lilting through the conservatory was the first thing that Audette recalled of that quintessential day, laying flat on her back in a patch of periwinkle groundcover below her favorite gnarled oak.
T-T was sat on her tummy, speaking in his pitched voice to her about how they might play a dirty trick on the wild Niffler that lived in the conservatory and was infamously known to tear jewelry straight off of people's bodies.
In all fairness, there was only so much the Bellarose's could do to warn the tourists.
"We might find some metallic paint and obscure a useless piece of wood to present as a valuable necklace," T-T piped, rubbing his stubby paws together. He rued the platypus, who on more than one occasion had stolen his precious pennies even though they were only mildly shiny.
Audette had on the bluest of baby blue dresses, cuffed at her neck and wrists with white lace, and she was absolutely not supposed to be mucking up her lavish attire in the gardens.
It was her preferred method of revolt at the time.
She giggled at the Consciaur, "We might, if we can get past father's hounds at the back doors."
Eloise, her mother, sighed theatrically, and Audette's ears pulled backwards in dread when she realized that the grate of several invader's shoes were scratching at the gravel pathway nearby, "She's around here somewhere, without doubt up to something absolutely preposterous. Audette is...reserved, you see, but not due to shyness. She's bricky, and too excitable for a young lady. Montgomery and I feel that is time she be assigned a new governess, someone with an iron regard; she's scared off the last three, would you believe?"
Another dreamy female voice, "You speak of her as if she is a wild mutt, Bellarose. How opprobrious."
Her mother was apparently speechless for a moment, "You're well aware of the obligatory decorum required for an upper-class betrothal - we simply desire what is best for Audette. She will hopefully level out as the years pass, but I fear not."
Frowning, Audette turned her face to the side with small flowers blocking her left eye, but her right eye had caught sight of the intruders through the palmy vegetation.
Every bone in her body shook with rageful expectation that a new governess was about to be introduced to her right then and there, but perhaps if she laid perfectly still in the flower bed then they would fail to spot her blending in.
The second woman's voice suddenly pitched dramatically, and Audette narrowed her eyes where she was certain two people were moving on the other side of the foliage, but all she could make out was black material as if they were comprised entirely of shadows, "Draco, do not touch a single thing in here do I make myself explicitly clear? I will not have you growing ill; you realize how important this eve is to your father."
Due to the distraction Audette had no warning when her mother's firm grasp clamped down on her forearm to drag her to a dizzy stance, barely hanging onto Think-Think in the process, "Merlin's beard, you're all frowzy Audette, whatever will we do with you. Have you finished your Shakespearean readings yet?"
"Well it's a fifty-fifty chance that I have, why don't you take your best guess?" Audette's eyes shot sarcastically down to the archaic books she'd abandoned in the garden bed, most of the spines nearly at their limit from the wear of time and Audette's abusive touch.
"Compose yourself, child," Eloise's wand waved at lightning speed all over Audette's figure to cleanse her dress and hair in an obviously desperate attempt to render her child presentable before they were spotted.
She spun Audette around with fierce hands by the shoulders and forced her to face the strange woman and young boy in all black who had just rounded the bend with their eyebrows raising identically at the humiliating scene.
Audette was certain her scalp was being torn straight from her skull as her glossy hair was yanked backwards and the blue silk ribbon that was mangled there was reinstated at the crown of her blond head.
The boy snorted inside of his nose, his hands in his pockets with nasty grey eyes lingering all over the display of grooming. Audette instantly wanted to stick out her tongue, and point out that his hair looked equally as ridiculous with all of the gel slicking it back.
"Well," her mother puffed out a heavy breath of exasperation, her pointy pink nails returning to dig into Audette's frail arms, "Audette, this is Narcissa Malfoy, and her son, Draco Malfoy."
"Pleasure," Audette murmured nearly inaudibly, wondering if perhaps the two mysterious people with matching platinum hair and snarky expressions had just come straight from a funeral.
She squinted, blinded then as the sun momentarily broke through the dribbling rainy clouds and shot straight into her green eyes from above.
Draco Malfoy made a face at her, as if he thought she had about two brain cells and was struggling to conceal his hilarity over the concept.
Eloise laughed nervously, squeezing Audette's arms inwards so tightly that her collarbone ached. Her voice was shaky but laced with warning, as if she had zero confidence in what she was about to suggest, "Audette, their family has travelled a long distance for special business with your father, all the way from England, isn't that thrilling? Narcissa and I wondered if you might consider skipping your pianoforte lessons this afternoon in order to chaperone Draco until sundown."
A staring contest ensued as Draco's cold eyes flared and he crossed his arms, the corner of his nose pinching up in a judgy sneer. Audette's eyebrows pressed together as if they were trying to form a unibrow without cause.
She weighed her options carefully; pianoforte - vomit, or sit around alone with a boy - something she had never done, having been sent to an all female young witches boarding school as her sole experience away from home.
Thrilling.
Her mother shifted around to the side to evaluate the menacing grin spreading on Audette's pretty little face.
Eloise's strawberry hair tumbled in beautiful waves as she leaned forward closely in her creamy Victorian dress, her emerald eyes sharp and serious, "Only for two hours, Audette, to stay put in this conservatory, and best believe your father's beasts will be reporting back on any uncouth behaviour. Remember, there are eyes everywhere in here."
Yes, how could I forget the dynamics of my own cage? she thought bitterly.
Audette swung her head to her mother, placing a lacy glove on her chest,"Oh no, not the pianoforte. Just this once won't be of tremendous detriment, surely."
Draco hadn't torn his eyes away from the strange, silent stand off they were having, seeming to be almost critically bored. He crossed his arms stubbornly, that same long line forming down his forehead that indicated contempt, "You can't leave me with...her, here in this...jungle, why can't I wait by the carriage?"
Mrs. Malfoy's face had remained stiffly upright and to the side, her beady, icy orbs unfriendly and calculative. She ran a pale, bony hand over her son's shoulder possessively, "Hush, Draco. Eloise, you're quite certain she will not lead my son astray?"
"I'm not," Audette's mother pressed her lips into a thin line, "But if Draco is as well-mannered as you claim he is, then he should be able to keep her in line. They are barely eleven, I dare not concern myself with which definition of leading astray was intended."
Audette rolled her eyes skywards, to where a flock of magical flying squirrels were flapping around the top of a tree, collecting pine cones from it's highest peak. Below, a massive diricawl dug it's sharp yellow talons into the needle bed that had formed under the rare evergreen species, ruffling it's colourful feathers and spraying debris backwards at least fifteen feet.
When their mothers had both left and vanished through the greenery Draco started to circle predatorially around Audette in his black trousers and button-down dress shirt, rolling up the sleeves to his elbows and trampling the periwinkle brutally.
His right eyebrow drove up near his hairline, snorting once again at her, "And what are you supposed to be? Alice in Wonderland?"
"For all you know I am, and in that case all of these magical creatures are at my beck and call, waiting to tear you limb from limb," she pointed her white glove at him, the tiny bow on the back wobbling as she did.
Starstruck by her first true encounter alone with the male variety, Audette forgot that he was a guest and proceeded to banter right back rudely.
"And in that case you'd also be a St. Mungo's patient, she's a psychofrenic is she not?" Draco asked vaguely.
"Now here I've been given the impression you might be a naughty girl; is that true or this going to be a bore?" Draco prodded, his face twisting with moderate disgust as a pack of flying, poisonous Billywigs shot past his hairline.
Think-Think clawed up the side of her arm from the tiny lace pocket he'd been stashed in against his will. He plopped his pudgy bum on her collar and cleared his throat, "We are a good girl, let us use this opportunity to prove our parents wrong, and gain more freedom in the long-term."
"Next," Audette snapped reflexively aloud without thinking, then sucked in her lips when Draco's eyebrows tented in confusion.
As T-T begrudgingly switched gears and climbed around her neckline to her other shoulder, Draco scratched out the gel hair style so it was loose and spikey, "Are you having a stroke? That doesn't answer my question at all."
The Consciaur yawned flamboyantly in her right ear before providing an alternative perspective, having now been awake for an hour straight which was quite a time for a creature of his species, "We should take this chance to play games, as the overlookers are never partial to it."
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
"Hmm," Audette looked down at the ground near the boy's shiny black shoes, "Alright."
She lifted the bear off his perch and pushed him head first back into her pocket, where he began to claw his way upright, scratching at her white pantyhose through the dress fabric.
Audette really did not know much about boys - whether they were akin to females or wildly different. Hence she felt terribly nervous waltzing up to him and placing her hand on his chest, where magic bloomed from her touch to spread a pink glow onto his clothing in the shape of her palm - the very first magic she'd accidentally began to procure years prior.
She looked into his bright eyes, "The only way you'll find out what kind of girl I am, is by catching me. You're it."
Turning to run into the pathways that she had the advantage of having memorized, her heart shot into hyperdrive when she heard him take off seconds later.
They both panted and giggled, swiping leaves and branches aside, Audette screaming like an idiot when she heard him get too close several times on the narrow and meandering trails. She clambered awkwardly over rocks, logs and across steep terrain, realizing her mistake when it became crystal clear that he was very athletic compared to her voracious clumsiness.
"You're fucked Wonderland, might as well give up now," he jeered at her when she almost trapped herself climbing up a rock wall with large holds.
The dome above stretched at least five storeys tall and it's circumference approximately a third of a kilometer. It was a world of it's own that tended to change rapidly, and if one was not an inhabitant of the castle and ventured out without a map, it was quite possible to get lost.
The magical biome was arguably a dangerous place for children to play, given that many of the creatures within were capable of providing some fairly serious side effects with bites and stings. Thankfully Audette knew most if not all of them by heart but there was no way that Draco Malfoy was used to the wilderness.
His skin was soft and pale, indicating that he probably spent a lot of time in controlled environments and indoors. Yet still, he was hot on her tail and not at all concerning himself with his surroundings.
The game ended abruptly when Audette did the predictable and tripped hard on a very small rock embedded in a sandy clearing, barely stopping herself from breaking her nose by putting out her hands at the last second.
"Ha, that rock was smaller than a remembral. You're pathetic," Draco laughed, slapping his hands on his trousers.
She rolled over on her back, sucking in scalding air and checking that T-T was alright from the fall.
One reach into her pocket told her that he was more than healthy when he bit her finger in outrage of the chase, then hissed out the pocket hole. He would probably defecate in the pocket later as he sometimes did when angry, just to ruin her day in return when her hand landed in the smelly sludge.
As she stood and brushed off desert sand she noticed Draco yanking on his shirt to clear away the pink glittery magic from his clothing as if it were fire that would spread to the rest of him and result in third degree burns.
He finally gave up and marched at her, fuming, "Alright you've had your fun. Now take this rubbish off of me."
Audette bit her lip and carefully aligned her hand to it's previous shape on his dress shirt, and the magic migrated back into her skin like a beautiful poison.
Draco scratched his neck and frowned around the new section of the biome they were in, where the vegetation had drastically altered.
Trees characterized by bulbous trunks filled with water surrounded them, appearing almost like obese wooden people with poor spines and small tufts of coarse green hair.
Artificial floating suns overhead produced a sweltering microclimate, and Draco wiped at his forehead, obviously unaccustomed to the ferocious heat, "Where the fuck are we? Have you lost us in this zoo?"
"We're in the Erumpant habitat of course," Audette responded point blank, as if they hadn't just wandered into the home of an extremely dangerous, rhinoceros-type being that ejected deadly fluid, which...morbidly...caused it's victims to literally explode.
She pointed her glove carelessly, "Look, there's one now. I've named that one Mr. Bubbles because his snotty nose always produces prismatic bubbles. But don't be fooled by how jurassic his movements are. He has dire issues with temperament."
Draco narrowed his eyes at Mr. Bubbles, who was across the way lumbering by a watering hole with his button-sized eye inspecting them from within his monstrous leathery head. Indeed, a very rotund bubble of snot was oozing into a balloon from his nostril.
The platinum haired boy seemed to make up his mind instantly. "Then I'm climbing a tree for safety from that hideous beast so I can find my own way out of here. I don't care what you do, Wonderland," he remarked cruelly, then stomped over to the pregnant trunk of a nearby Baobab tree and began pulling himself up the protruding bark.
Audette was not so easily dismissed and made to follow him, only making it up onto the branch he'd placed himself on at half the speed.
When she sat next to him with her legs also dangling he ignored her, twisting around a black wand that had come out of nowhere.
She was dumbfounded.
No witch or wizard was permitted to possess a wand until the week before their first year at a graduating school in the United Kingdom; yet here was this boy, brazenly rotating a powerful weapon in his fingers two months before it was legal for him to do so.
"It was my grandmother's. I stole it from her casket before she was buried, that old hag," he smirked mischievously, then shot his eyes straight to hers as if daring her to tattle on him.
He waved it around recklessly in front of them, "So, do your parents despise you so much that they've abandoned you to live in this petri dish?"
Audette inhaled to the fullest degree that her lungs would expand, then sighed with a melancholy hum. They'd might as well, from the amount of time that she was locked in the conservatory now that she had terrorized all of her supervising governesses off.
Her mother was a profound socialite, with a full-time career at the Ministry of Magic to top it all off, and had made it abundantly clear that she possessed no spare time to raise Audette herself nor to maintain the sharp restrictions the girl was under.
Ergo Audette had been tossed to the magical beasts to keep her company - many of which would happily eat her alive - and she still hadn't figured out exactly which ones were reporting on her choice of activities to her father, let alone how they were.
She extended her arm across Draco's chest, and his eyes followed where her finger was pointing through the dome's glass, directly up at a tall, spired tower on the western flank of the castle, "No, what sort of barbarian do you take me for? That tower there, that is my bedroom."
He laughed brutally, hissing air through a snarky smile, "Huh. So you've got a real princess complex. That explains a lot. "
"I most certainly do not," Audette baulked, then started to shyly toy with the ornamental fringe of her blue cover dress, pondering how vulnerable she cared to be with a boy she'd met only thirty minutes prior. Her long blond hair fell across her face to shield the sadness there from his prying gaze, "Princesses are happy, anyways...they always seem to be."
The effect was the exact opposite of what she'd taken a chance on.
He suddenly seemed totally put off, an ugly glare illuminating his face, "What could you possibly have to be despondent over? I'm sure you've got a perfect little princess relationship with your parents."
"Hardly," Audette replied in a strained voice. Her eyes grew mildly dewey as she raised them to his, "My father wishes my brother had survived in my place. He abhors my very existence."
Draco's frosty eyes lingered on hers thoughtfully for a few moments before he cast them away, and she could no longer see his expression.
She instinctively retracted her legs up into a crossed position when Mr. Bubbles plonked across the duney terrain and into her peripherals, having grown seriously suspicious of the strangers occupying his nesting grounds.
Draco noticed her concern and did the same, clutching at the branch on both sides of his bent knees to peer straight down at the gargantuan, prowling beast that was now pacing in circles around the globular tree, "Just terrific. Mr. Boulders has trapped us. This is entirely your doing. Your mother will be hearing from me, if we even get out of this alive."
Audette giggled against the back of her mitt at the repudiation rippling across his pointy face, knowing that it was not the time to do so but unable to help herself.
She didn't bother to correct his misnomer of the beast, fearing that if she attempted to repeat the words Mr. Bubbles at that moment then she'd only laugh harder in his grouchy presence.
Draco scoffed, his nose crinkling at the inappropriate snickering, "You're completely mental, I should have kept my distance when you started talking to yourself right off the bat."
Still practically pissing herself laughing, Audette pawed a lacy glove up at a Baobab fruit pod hanging just above their hair.
It was an ugly, brownish-green ball the size of a mandrake pot, and she wobbled on the branch as it detached and landed heavily in her lap. With both hands shaking on either side of the pod she lifted it above her head and tossed it as far as she could with a girly grunt.
It bounced off of the sand and rolled away into a cluster of scruffy desert perennials, but not before Mr. Bubbles took heed of it's trajectory and galloped angrily after the fruit. His massive hide horn tore the vegetation clean out down to the roots, then he started to gluttonously scarf the fruit, rind and all, as if he hadn't eaten in months.
"There, he's not so hard to get rid of," Audette beamed at Draco who chose to roll his eyes.
"Will you teach me a spell?" she pointed to the wand in Draco's fingers.
He pressed his lips together, "Are you eleven? Because if you are, it'll be traced."
"Not for another week," she sent him her best, biggest pleading eyes. The boy only leaned father away from her, evidently uncomfortable.
Finally he spoke tensely, "Fine, only if you stop acting...weird. If that's even written in your DNA. Give me your hand."
She held out her right hand, leaning close to him. Their heads practically pushed together as Draco placed the hard wand into her palm, then closed his cold hand around hers on the outside to guide her.
"No, no, Merlin, have you never even held a wand? Arrange your fingers here, and here," he growled impatiently, only causing Audette to launch into another giggling fit.
No, she had not held a wand as her parents held absolutely zero trust for their daughter and kept theirs firmly out of reach.
She also had never held hands with a boy before.
He breathed through the irksome melody of her tittering in his ear, then raised their conjoined hands, "I'll show you the movement, but it's you who's to cast. I've just turned eleven, understand? I'll make your life a living hell at school if you get me in trouble, Wonderland."
She nodded, and he explained the spell incantation, "Praescribo, then, write whatever you want in the air. I intend to use it to cheat on tests at Hogwarts." He popped his eyebrows as if it were the most diabolical plan ever schemed.
Audette took the wand on her own, waved it and spoke the word, and...nothing.
Draco Malfoy started to howl harder the more times she tried, and Audette began profusely sweating under the habitat suns and from the sheer humility of his judgment.
Then.
Just like that, a golden stream started to ebb from the wand, and Audette was able to form words with just what was on her mind.
Draco Malfoy is an imbecile.
"Give that to me," Draco cried in objection, swishing his hand to clear the golden smoke from the air. He reached fully across her to snag back the wand but Audette gripped it like an alligator to it's prey. With their faces so close they locked eyes, and Draco grew rigid in place, his hand crushing hers, "What?"
She swallowed and said nothing but held his gaze, a strange knot forming in her lower tummy. Draco's eyes darted all over the place, "What? Stop looking at me like that."
When she refused to move he lost his cool, electing to plant a firm hand on her back. With one strong shove Audette was ejected from the tree branch as if Draco had pushed the big red button on her car seat in a spy movie escape vehicle.
But instead of rocketing upwards in the safety of a cushioned chair, she fell seven long feet down into the beachy earth below and swallowed an unruly volume of sand upon impact. Draco lept from the branch himself, landing athletically on two feet next to where she had sat back on her haunches to cough up granules of sand. He picked up the discarded wand and hid it in his pants.
"Audette Bellarose!" her mother's shrill voice ricocheted off of all the large boulders in the area, scaring off even Mr. Bubbles as she approached.
Audette knew instinctively from the tone of Eloise's voice that she was in for a belting, but all she could focus on was clearing her tongue of the disgusting mud forming there.
She spat onto the ground several times in front of Draco who was barely concealing his heartless snickers, his poise mother, and a smoking Eloise, then pulled off one of her tiny hand gloves to dump out yet more sand.
"Improper!" Eloise roared as Audette lifted her dirty face to the looming bunch. "You are once again filthy, and what were you thinking leading Draco into the Erumpent habitat? You could have been slaughtered!"
There was no time spared for an explanation, as Mrs. Malfoy swiftly dismissed her family, paused to widen her eyes ominously at Audette, and then the Malfoy's were gone.
They'd been at the Bellarose estate for hardly an hour, and Audette had already left a bruising impression no doubt.
The only person who truly provided zero judgement and a safe escape from her responsibilities was Guy Cosmos. In fact, he was her saving grace at times, and Audette would be forever grateful for his friendship which had formed between them the first week at Hogwarts.
After that July day, well, it went without saying that she was reassigned the most expensive, cutthroat governess in the country, who had molded her viciously into an image of a lady.
An image of a lady, but with a thousand layers of beautiful complexity hidden beneath the heavy dresses and aesthetic parasols; locked up in her own body with the key to her chains thrown away.
With fear and punishment used as motivators against her, by the time she was thirteen she had almost utterly, and totally unwillingly, shirked her naturally goofy personality traits in order to evolve into exactly the courtly duchess her parents desired. It was either that, or face obliteration and disownership.
Cue Theodore Nott.
Nott fit the description of well-bred, mature, and extremely aristocratic; providing a concrete foundation of influence over Audette that Montgomery approved of tout de suite.
Thinking it was best for her, Theodore had proceeded to keep Audette far away from any sports activities, social nonsense, and the types of characters that he deemed to be vile and callow.
He was a spitting image of her father and she had never even noticed it. She had been distractedly captivated from the cage he'd placed her in by his beauty and intelligence, and an endless, toxic longing for him to approve of her every move.
Theodore Nott had constructed his own glass conservatory around Audette, and then he'd shattered it by his own hand without a single explanation...
Audette's dry eyelid peeled open slowly to the rise and fall of several Slytherin boys snoring like a symphony of competing vacuum cleaners at an expo for desperate housewives.
She groaned from the bizarre, lost memory which had overtaken her dreams, sliding her eye to the side where a glowing illusion of the galaxy was twinkling over her.
Draco's arms were around her naked form, the hoodie of his sweater covering part of her face as he somehow managed not to suffocate with his nose buried in her thick hair. His hot breath felt like a heater against her bare back and it was glorious, but Audette was suddenly wide awake and antsy to chat about her dreamy revelation about their past.
She lifted her arm to paw at his face, twisting her spine to try and speak to him over her shoulder, "You. How could I forget, you're my tree boy, Draco. I had wondered for years..."
A very drawn out and irate moan escaped his lips as he rolled backwards and rubbed at his face, "Audette...for fucks sake...go to sleep."
She twisted more to see his bleary face in the bunk, "You're my tree boy, how could I have completely forgotten?"
He dropped his hand and blinked at her, "You had better be talking in your sleep, because you are going to cost me this fucking tournament tomorrow with your psychobabble, Audette."
She leaned her head on his bent arm, her eyes searching up at his with the same plead she had given him that day in the Baobab tree, "Do you recall the day we first met? You've been to my home before Draco, how has this escaped both of our minds?"
Draco stretched his spine like a cat on his side, then fell onto his back with his eyes shut dismissively, "Hmm, why am I not shocked you've let slip my identity and replaced me with Tree Boy. Regardless it was a decade ago, for perhaps ten minutes."
"It was longer than that, we were all over the conservatory," she whispered to him, rolling over to strap him with every limb she had.
A loud snap of Crabbe rapidly sucking in air broke disgustingly across the room from his sleep apnea, then his snoring continued after it's brief pause of suffocation.
Draco made a noise in his throat that suggested he couldn't care less, "Right, we trod around, and then you face planted. Then you proceeded to fall out of a tree."
"No. You pushed me out of that tree," Audette argued.
"Probably," Draco laughed hysterically in a short burst, digging a knobbly knuckle into one of his eyes so hard it looked like he was a pirate tending to a splintered wooden eye.
"You were my first male friend," she mused affectionately, as if Draco had expressed any desire to continue ranting about the unburied recollection.
"I suppose I could say the same," Draco hushed from behind his closed eyes, then went on to snort, "You were my first male friend, that is."
"You showed absolutely no manners, you know I faced a storm of punishment on both of our behalfs," she muttered against his chest.
He grew quiet, and for a few minutes she was certain he'd drifted back to sleep. Then he spoke again; darker this time, without any lingering traces of grog, "You did change, regrettably...into some ridiculous shell of a prudent duchess, and it's only grown worse each year. I'm aware your parents have shaped you into something that you are not Audette, and that most alterations will be permanent. I understand that reality all too well."
She sat up to peer at his face seriously, gripping his black sheets against her bare chest, "What do you mean? Then what have you been shaped into?"
He swallowed, then covered his eyes with his bony hand as if couldn't bare to meet her gaze. He offered only one sentence before refusing to speak anymore that night, "I pray you never find out."