May Merlin have mercy on Audette and Guy's souls.
Audette stood in the fourth floor corridor bickering with a rather argumentative, elderly chap in a long red cape who'd popped out of the blue, swirling a hilted sword at her and blocking the hallway.
"En garde!" he cried playfully.
For all the world to see she stood there with darling green eyes bulging in wonderment, wondering why on Earth the man was permitted to roam freely at all amongst underaged witches and wizards, and especially wielding such hostility.
"I beg your pardon," she rasped with increasing disdain, now wagging her finger in his face, "Sir, I don't doubt that you have quite exquisite fencing skills. However I would implore you to charitably allow me passage as I on the other hand am veritably ill with a blade. Better yet, I come unarmed."
The man snickered in a forgotten British accent, bouncing left and right before her. They went back and forth until Audette's long, sweaty hair began to swing unfashionably into her vision and her little fists were clenched helplessly.
The blade was withdrawn into it's hilt and the man bowed, "Why I'd be so honored to permit an accosting guttersnipe such as yourself. Go ahead then, off with you." He finally made to move out of her direct path, holding his hand out in decent gesture.
Audette yanked down her unkempt dress shirt in a huff, "About time you found your gentlemanly appropriations."
Slam.
Her nose hit the stiff painting canvas first, just as the knight made to jump into an adjacent portrait hosting a wild giraffe, howling through his grisly red beard.
His hysterics were met in duet by Draco behind her with his veiny hand over his mouth. Audette turned bewildered to the handsome boy who was watching her with bright frosty eyes twinkling in the candlelight, "Took you long enough. Come on you belligerent junkie, I'm growing exhausted of this delirium."
With a wretched burn in her prefrontal cortex, Audette continued to struggle to identify the physical parameters of her surroundings.
She must have mistook a tall painting for a hallway passage, although, why?
She felt terrifically discombobulated, peering at Malfoy who's arms were full of far too many satchels, and beyond him, a most peculiar, familiar boy playing in an indoor water feature like a child at a theme park.
"Guy!" Audette called out giddily when it clicked, racing past Draco who groaned loudly.
"No, no, no, I just hauled you out of there!" he complained, hanging his head back with a drained growl.
Indeed, Audette was already drenched before she threw herself back into the shallow water which Cosmos was having a scandalous good time in. They both laid back in the warm pool, humming in sync.
The stained glass window overlooking the fountain presented as kaleidoscopic, sacred geometry in their revolving hallucinations.
"We ARE water. We are waterproof bags of water," Guy cooed dreamily, his eyes like two black holes in his face.
Draco approached the fountain and dropped all three of their satchels, cursing down at them over his pointy nose, "For fuck's sake. Must we spend another minute in a public setting acting like doltish schizophrenics? You aught to see your fucking eyes - you two look like sleep paralysis demons. Get up this instant."
Four passing by, giggling Ravenclaw girls frowned when they were suddenly on the receiving end of his acidic glare.
"Shoooooo," Guy raised a weak hand out of the water, and Audette laughed boldly when to her it presented instead as a pig's hoof.
Draco glanced away with a half-smile, "Charming Cosmos, what you fail to determine is that I will gladly abandon you to rot in there. Bellarose however, is coming back with me. This is no condition for a lady of her sort to be spotted in."
Guy turned to Audette with his eyes watering dramatically from giggling like a maniac, holding his wonky wand across his upper lip to mimic a mustache, "A lady. My, what a refined young specimen we have here tonight. Yes, distinguished and no doubt presenting in court. We would not want her to be late for pianoforte practice."
Audette stretched in the water like a lazy hippo, eyeing Malfoy down with out of place, sultry orbs, "I'm quite capable of speaking for myself. What if I wish to swim for an eternity?"
The beautiful blond snorted, shaking his head, "And what of you? Grow into an old spinster in there? I should think not. Your teddy bear needs you, might I remind you." He pointed a long finger then to the front chest pocket of his forest green robes, where a frightfully unimpressed Think-Think was hanging on by his armpits in his blue sweater with both arms clean out of the pouch in protest of his captivity.
He was hissing like a mad goose, not that Draco would hear it.
To Audette it alarmingly looked at first to be something much more concerning.
She crawled to the edge of the fountain to grip onto his robes with her mouth open, "Oh no, I believe your heart is hanging clean out of your chest."
"Look again, that pink glow is your carnivorous pet that won't cease biting me," Draco took the opportunity to grab onto her upper arm and harshly drag Audette out of the water for the second time that evening.
While Audette began to calm down once more and pet T-T's blobby head with barely audible pixy whispers, Draco watched her with hooded eyes, "Let me guess - he's excessively displeased that I picked him up. It's a miracle I was even able to allocate his invisible arse. Just look at the scratches on my hand, I could have lost a finger to the brute."
"He's impeccably abhorred," Audette chewed her lip with a silly grin, noticing that the Consciaur was now avidly biting chunks out of Draco's pocket. She felt her cheeks grow rosy, basking in the tall boy's close attention on her face.
"Well look at these two moon-eyed dandies," Guy joined them in a sopping, sullied mess, heeding neither reason nor rank amongst the three. He began to run his eyes up and down the area as if he'd just apparated into the ingress, "Who the fork is in charge of the temperature in this building? It's positively freezing."
Draco narrowed his eyes between them now having lost his cool altogether, "You would not be living in discomfort had you avoided taking your annual bath on the fourth floor instead of in the common room showers." He pushed T-T's head deep into his pocket and stepped back to wave his sleek black wand between them.
An incredible red stream jetted like a river of silk from the end, then split into two and sealed around Audette and Guy's wrists like cuff's on children in a park. The two that had ingested psychedelics watched in rapture, both gasping in awe.
Draco tapped the wand on the end of his own wrist so they were all bound, "There. Now we're going, and we're going at my pace. Fail to keep up and you can slide along on your face."
He forced them both to shoulder their own bags, then marched along through the halls and down long staircases, dragging the bumbling, snickering idiots behind him in the wake of his piney scent and fluttering platinum hair. It was all going well and good until there was no other way downwards, regrettably, save for two flights of moving, floating staircases.
At the precipice of an opened balustrade Draco leaned over the edge with a grimace, watching as multiple sets of lethal weightless stone detached from docks at random in the open channel.
On any normal, given day the vertical corridor of supernatant architecture was already dreadfully treacherous to students of unencumbered states of mind.
Audette and Guy were shuffled back in a harry by Draco when he noticed them trying to also grip the railing and sneak a peak at where they were headed, "Have you both completely forgotten where you are?"
The world for Audette was pulsing and vibrating, her eyes imbibed by a formidable fish-bowl effect.
She blinked rapidly at Guy who was holding up his wrist to investigate his manacle, "Why Audette, are we balloons? Might we fly away if we weren't tethered? Let us jump from this cliff and go flying!"
"Certainly not!" Draco spun and seethed with such a dark tone that they both nearly swallowed their lips guilty.
He stepped forward to glare and tower over poor Guy who was innocently at the peak of his high, "You are NOT balloons. That would require you to be inhaling pure helium, which in turn would suffocate you within minutes. That, and whether or not you were tethered, you would already be off the ground. No matter what it is you have consumed, basic deductive reasoning should have already arrived you at that conclusion."
After the grumpy rant, from then on out it was virtually silent as Audette and Guy managed to inwardly process their phantasmagoria separately and in their minds.
The only time something was spoken happened once they'd reached the final stretch to the Slytherin commons, and Guy began to paw at his hood without explanation, pulling it over his face.
While Draco was speaking the password, principatus, Guy leaned towards Audette behind Draco's back with scary, squirrelly eyes that gave her the shivers.
"You put an end to that look, it's making me ill," Audette squeaked in perturbation, smushing her fingers into Guy's sweaty face.
She too was drifting into a place in her mind that she dared not afford too much absorption. They were careening towards a devastating crash, it could not be denied.
Once the gravelly stone wall had shut Draco snapped the jinx he had been using to coral them back to the safe chill of the dungeon, going to flop on the couch with his head hanging off the back.
Guy took off scampering and whimpering, apologizing out loud for no particular reason to the small group who were seated at the fireplace before retreating behind a very thin pillar, obviously of the impression that he'd hidden himself when in fact this was not the case.
Audette felt her heart sinking like a ship in a submarine battle. She stood in place in the entry tunnel filled with cobwebs and moldy bricks with her eyes prickling and her fingers ringing together. Every feeling of heartbreak she'd ever experienced was superimposing and compiling at the forefront of her mind all at once.
"Come sit, Audette," Draco stared at her sideways, his hair hanging off his head in long white strands.
She would not sit.
Instead she kicked off her boots and walked past the couches of unusually quiet Slytherins who were drinking and chatting, past the stair cases, and up to the great wall of thick glass that provided a crystal clear vision of the Black Lake. She pressed her nose flat against it like a child peering at toys behind a claw machine, attempting to dissolve into the endless shadows of the depths beyond.
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"Just leave her, she's at the end of the rope now," she heard Draco command the rest of the murmuring group. "I've been parading around the castle after both of them for two hours now, it's not likely it'll be a serene decline."
Somewhere in the farthest extents of the room Guy belched loudly behind his pillar, "I LOVE this song, turn it UP."
A short chuckle from Blaise, then, "There's no music playing, Cosmos."
It went on for a good while in that way, until Audette's eyes were silently streaming. Her ears had long blocked out all the wild ranting and her nose had denied the stench of obscene partying.
All her mind could comprehend was the boundless void of the Lake and all of it's artistic nightmares, and how perhaps this body of water might even be a metaphor for her own life. The possibilities were limitless and unknown, intimidating, and she was constantly in danger of annihilation, yet it was all so bewitchingly complex.
A hand on her shoulder caused her to horrendously scream and jump, her quiet meditation broken like a vase on porcelain tiling.
Theodore had appeared behind her in one of his dark suits, and in the funeral of her high her heart melted at the navy monsoon within his eyes as he peered at her with very real worry, "Audette, I am told you were drugged today. Now I see you are undeniably distraught. Do you need to go to the infirmary? Where is Think-Think?"
Before Audette could move an inch Draco had stood in her peripherals from the largest couch with his face twisting, "Back off Nott, I have the bear and the girl taken care of."
Theodore cracked his neck with the hostility from earlier in the day returning to his features in full blast. He spun on his heel to glower at Malfoy, his voice pitching in disgust, "You know nothing of taking care of a Consciaur, and you are equally as piss poor at attending to Audette's best interests. Look at her - you've abandoned her sensitive mind to collapse into totality."
"She desired to be alone, learn to respect boundaries you control freak," Draco stormed across the room and they met in the middle, puffing like prowling jaguars into one another's personal space. Pansy and Blaise slowly stood and wandered closer with keen, mitigative demeanours, their eyes blank but their body language stiff and worrisome.
"You want the bear, take it," Draco dug into his chewed up pocket, handing over the dozing puddle of teddy bear with merciless force, pressing the little man into Theodore's chest.
"Come on then Audette, play time is over," he swept around Nott, and Audette flinched as he grabbed her hand and guided her rapidly over to the couch, forcing her to sit next to him. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and rigidly turned his pointy face to scald into Theodore when he came to sit in the chair most adjacent to them.
Nott darted his eyes between them resentfully, then cradled the teddy carefully on it's back in his elbow.
Despite having absolutely no vision of it's disposition he had already calmed it, then proceeded to dig in his pocket and produce nothing more elaborate then a penny.
He held it before it's face and the Consciaur's eyes widened exultantly. It's tiny paws yanked away the copper disk and it began to ferociously chew on the unsophisticated currency with a gentle purr emanating from it's chest which grew a notable shade of darker pink.
The phrase penny for your thoughts, had been derived from age-old bribing of the thoughtful beasts. Desperate magicals who wished to own one would leave out pennies as an offering, hoping that it would draw in a hungry Consciaur.
With a heart sliding like butter down her rib cage Audette watched the two interact, remembering summers spent on his sailboat and winters curled up by a fire. It had all been as natural as the rains in the countryside and sunshine glittering on the crests of the ocean.
"So," Theodore straightened his spine, his eyebrows particularly flat and low as he raised his chin to the group before them, "Who is responsible for the state of Audette. I should report all of you for reprehensible negligence."
"It was meeee, it was meeeheehee," Guy whimpered guiltily on the carpet, now having crawled on hands and knees to a spot before the green fireplace, plunked onto his back and hung his arm over his eyes, "I thought they were different pills but they were Leprechaun's Leer and now I can't stop seeing unibrows on everyone. Make it stopppp."
Pansy jeered at the boy laying spread Eagle on his back next to her, pinching his leg hard and causing Guy to gargle even more in self-imposed wallow.
Draco delicately placed one feathery kiss on Audette's rainy cheek, never peeling his eyes from Theodore, "Oh, I can just see the disappointment in your eyes that it wasn't me, Nott. You think I'd really benefit from the wild goose chase I was forced to endure just hours earlier?"
Poison began to seep throughout the air around the fire, as invisible as carbon monoxide and as lethal all the same.
Audette felt a tap on her ankle, looking down to see that Blaise had a large bottle of rum held up to her. He gave her encouraging eyebrows, motioning to the fact that the two boys on her other side were distracted. She took it and gulped, needing some sort of revitalization and simultaneous escape.
Theo's free fist clenched tightly over his knee, speaking in what sounded to Audette like complete nonsense with no context, "Why don't you just get it over with then, Malfoy? If you're so confident you've won, why wait?"
Draco sighed, playing with Audette's robes with his fingers and grinning wickedly, "Why? So we can all go back to the way life was before? I'm sure that's what you'd prefer - it's not unlike you to focus solely on your own contentment."
"Don't mock me with notions that you're anything more heterogeneous than a common rake," Theodore growled, digging his finger nails into the leather of the sofa while T-T chummily chewed on a second penny in his lap.
Draco poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue mockingly, sarcastically glancing over his shoulder and driving a finger into his chest in fake disbelief, "Who me? Are you accusing me of being heartless? I shall take that as a compliment - I do aim to impress, but sadly you've missed the mark as usual." His arm slid tighter around Audette's shoulder, who was now beginning to tune out the rather strange chatter as her blood turned to whiskey, staring distantly into the licking green flames across from her.
Theodore sat forward like a viper, his dark blue eyes had grown ruinous in the shadows of the subterranean common room as he snarled at them all like a rabid dog that had gotten loose in their dormitories, "You will find Malfoy that my fist does not miss the mark and that teeth can be quite deciduous, with enough force."
Guy obviously found this sentence to be highly engulfing, as he bellowed aloud and nearly rolled his long hair into the fire's coals.
Pressing on with vindication Malfoy shrugged carelessly at the second threat that had been passed his direction that day, "Perhaps prolonging my move is as simple as savoring that foul look on your face. I'm enjoying watching you crumble under the sensation I was contrived to withstand for years. I don't doubt you've figured out that the agony makes time pass twice as slowly, and frankly I have no pity to spare. Come on, you're a quick study - you know this is far more complicated than a single victory of that nature."
The entire room was now furrowing their eyebrows back and forth at the cryptic exchange.
"This is a complete and emotional robbery - you are acting outside of the parameters of our exigencies," Theodore snapped hatefully, his face twitching all over as if he were a malfunctioning robot.
He shot his gaze down to Blaise for support, who did not even appear to be breathing from how statuesque he was sat with his knees bent. "I would like not to speculate," was all he calmly remarked, casting his eyes to the carpet.
"But you would like to get Bellarose even more inebriated?" Draco took Blaise's bottle out of Audette's fingers when he noticed she'd drunken nearly half of it, then proceeded to swig from it himself.
He breathed out a fiery gasp, hissing through his teeth, "What's the matter Nott? Can't stand the taste of your own potion?"
"What ever do either of you mean?" Audette whimsically asked in a breathy voice, now almost paralyzed by the hippie-flip she was undertaking. The entire room grew still at the sound of her fairy voice chiming in.
She swayed with a tall spine and glassy eyes under Draco's arm, lost almost entirely to reality and hanging on by the fringe. She gave each boy a look of puzzlement and they both strangely broke away from her.
Pansy slanted her head to the side with a knowing smirk, her unbelievably silky bob swinging across to hide half of her snide face. The rest of the boys, some older at a table farther off playing Wizard's Chess, all watched with brightened eyes.
Audette was of the abrupt inkling that she was the only person in the room incognizant of the topic at hand.
Draco sipped at the whiskey again then passed it back to Blaise, "Yes what do we mean Nott? Should we talk about Monaco - fill precious Audette in on your less than decent summer?"
Cassius Warrington grinned up from his chess game, exposing his rotting teeth. His voice was ragged from abusive smoking even for such a young man, "Neither of you can speak on that matter."
Only for a fleeting second did Audette's sensibilities clear enough to comprehend, "Monaco? You spent the summer in Monaco?" Her heart started to skip a million beats a minute, only increasing the rate in which the effects of the alcohol set in.
What was in Monaco?
Nott's entire energy oozed with blistering contradiction; regret, humility, and superior rage.
In a flash he had placed T-T in Audette's lap and stood, swinging his Yew wand into Draco's face in fury. They all laughed so loudly that they might as well have been watching a stand up comedy and not a distressed acquaintance of theirs.
Draco gradually disentangled himself from Audette with his spine bent far back, gracefully standing in slow motion with Theo's wand nearly up his nose. He carefully slipped his own wand out of his robes, breathing with impressive robust control.
Blaise Zabini appeared to be the only one disinterested, his gorgeous brown eyes trailing along the series of arched stone supports above.
Malfoy's face twitched lackadaisically, chuckling in derision as if Theodore were pointing a stick of cheese in his face and not a weapon, "Surely you've got more enthusiasm than that, Nott."
One could almost hear the silent conversation occurring between their eyes.
Do it, Draco was daring his friend to make a move with a hard glare.
Nott caught his breath sharply in return a few times before taking a hostile step ahead, turning his handsome face to the side with critical warning as his wand did the same.
Do it, once again Draco's nasty frozen eyes flickered menacingly. Not a single person breathed. Even the crackle of the fire seemed to wane in trepidation.
Theodore shouted to lethally cast a Confringo spell, and Audette foolishly cried out. From only a foot away the explosive curse aught to have blown Draco into a mess of unidentifiable meat and she couldn't bear to look at first as the sounds of blasts permeated the air.
Luckily Draco had swung his head just hardly to the side resulting in a red rash along his neck as the spell shot right through the bricks ahead. Broken pieces of wood and stone splattered down on their heads and the onlooking Slytherins scattered apart with their hands up.
A full blown duel continued to unfold as feathers plumed into the air from wrecked cushions. Dangerous spells lit up the common room like a meltdown was occurring at a rainbow factory, and people scrambled at low heights just to make it into stairwells or behind flimsy furniture for cover.
Audette cradled her baby Consciaur against her chest as she ran in the direction she believed to be the entrance to the female quarters when she was struck on the back of her skull by a comet of brick debris.
Her brain burst into a snow storm of pain and little silvery sparks that were moving about like minuscule insects across her vision.
Stupid, stupid boys.
Thank god she was drunk as a skunk.
A large pulsing wave of bright white light rippled throughout the entire common room.
The powerful spell translated like a wave of freezing ice against the skin, leaving every single person perfectly frozen in place, some with comparatively goofy expressions of terror.
As the dust and destruction cleared, Audette happened to be one of the lucky ones facing towards the entrance to the dormitories to see Severus Snape standing there with his obsidian wand held confidently outwards.
The look on his pale face could turn sand to glass, his black eyes alight with the dying colors of the spell work still ringing around.
When all of the feathers had fallen into a carpet of calamity he brushed a long strand of greasy hair aside and walked briskly to the center of the room where he'd only just miraculously caught Draco with his wand pointed directly at Theodore's forehead.
With only their eyes moving both young men watched as Snape snatched each of their unique wands from their hands, speaking in a drawl as usual, "You'll get these back...when we've had a little chat. One-hundred points...each...from Slytherin House. Your dishonor will not go unpublished, either."
He paused with especial disappointment burning into Draco's face. He smacked Draco's wand hard against his forehead, "Malfoy, I foolishly expected better of you. Then again...I have been known to be wrong about people, on the odd occasion."
How's that for stellar academic and competent athlete, Audette thought with an internal eye roll.
Her dry eyes met Guy's across the room, where he'd made the intelligent move to press himself into a corner with the end of a twiggy, training broomstick over his face. Through the frizzy wood his yellow gaze widened to hers, silently signalling he was equally as blown away.
She wondered if he was still perceiving everyone with unibrows, including the outraged Severus Snape.
The grim professor walked back to the entrance, flicking his wand over his shoulder. All of the furniture and architecture began to rebuild itself seamlessly at the orbed tone of his casting.
He spun like a ballerina wearing dementors capes, pointing his hand first to Theodore then to indicate the stone balconies lining each level of the male tower, "Nott, you will switch bunks with Montague on the tenth level. Tonight. The two of you will visit me separately tomorrow to address the consequences of your actions. Deal with your...romantic...angst, in a more mature manner henceforth, or there will be two less students at this school by the end of this semester."
He paused to narrow his eyes at Audette who gulped anxiously, then unfroze the lot of them and barreled off through the sliding stone wall.
The minute she was freed from suspension Audette didn't look back; she clambered up the cool rock staircase to her bed with T-T cursing in her fingers. He wanted more pennies for the trials and tribulations he'd been put through in the past five hours, but Audette had much larger issues than appeasing a creature that didn't require copper sustenance to survive.