on that tree i'll carve our names (03)
pairing: Ominis Gaunt x fem! Hufflepuff Reader / Sebastian Sallow x Male MC
summary: St. Jude thinks about that. You see his jaw work, as if he’s trying to speak around a word. “You’re friends?” As if he can’t believe you are capable of having one. He isn’t wrong. “Friends is a bit much.” If you had a Galleon for every time you have made out with Weasley in a corridor to throw off prefects from the One-eyed Witch Passage, you’d have two Galleons. Which isn’t a lot, but it is weird it happened twice.
notes: [01] || [02] | [04]
words: 6k
a/n: almost finished with hogwarts legacy, i can't believe it's taking me so long. done with sebastian's questline i think 🥲 feeling lotsa feelings about this one
03: arsonist's lullaby
The Howler explodes at the end of corridor, echoing through the Central Hall and drawing everybody’s attention to a stocky little Gryffindor boy who might be in his first or second year. It seems they get smaller each year.
“HOW DID YOU EVEN GET YOUR HANDS ON DUNGBOMBS?! DID YOU SNEAK INTO HOGSMEADE?! HAVE YOU NO SHAME EMBARRASSING YOUR FAMILY LIKE THIS?!”
Poppy Sweeting tugs a loose thread from the hem of her robe, waiting for you to play the next card. Her never-ending patience seems almost menacing, stretching bottomless like the Black Lake until you dive too deep and find yourself swallowed by darkness. “Indeed, how did he get his hands on Dungbombs,” she wonders aloud, raising her dark eyebrows at you. Her gaze is the sort of steely that passes judgement and falls for nothing.
Sitting cross-legged on the dusty ground in front of the Potions classroom, you pass time until the lesson starts playing Exploding Snap. With soot-black fingers and a singed collar, you’ve made your peace that within the next turns, you might lose your eyebrows—and worse, the game. If only Poppy’s expression would give away any hint, but she has an impressive poker face, and is still impeccably put together after three rounds.
Your skills are horrid. Or maybe the old suit of armour behind you is helping Poppy out, which you wouldn’t put past it after you accidentally knocked it over last year. These suits can be so resentful and petty. Whenever you lost a round, it creaks and clanks, laughing wheezily.
“Curious, isn’t it?” you muse. Poppy knows of your side business, but she’s been a good friend since year three, and not quite innocent herself when it comes to disobeying rules. “I don’t remember us having such a generous service when we started at Hogwarts.”
“Generous?” Poppy snorts.
Your answer gets stuck in your throat—you feel his gaze on you before you see him rounding the corner from the Central Hall. The feeling in the pit of your stomach is less that of a hook pulling you than a black hole sucking you in, leaving you breathless. The only satisfaction dampening the blow to your gut about how you react to this appearance is that St. Jude isn’t left unaffected as well.
He stops dead in his tracks—comically so, as though he’s walked into an invisible wall—and stares as if he’s seeing you for the first time. His chest is rising and falling, as though he is a drowning man who just got out of water and breathes air for the first time.
It’s just seconds. It feels like a lifetime—and then Sallow flings his arm around St. Jude’s shoulders and leans into him, lips almost brushing the shell of St. Jude’s ear as he whispers something.
St. Jude flinches at the sudden proximity but the grin splits his face, and he laughs at whatever Sallow said.
They walk past you inside the classroom, St. Jude doesn’t spare you another glance and the moment he disappears out of sight it’s like a noose lifting from your neck.
It takes a minute to shake off the heavy feeling, like fog lifting from your head. You wonder if St. Jude spent the night with your face imprinted on the back of his closed eyes. Like you did. You wonder if that is a side effect of whatever strange magic spun your wands together, so tedious and annoying you had stuck your wand tip-down into the pot of a young Kris plant in your bed chamber, only to wake up this morning and find the plant completely wilted and dry, much to Lenora’s horror who’d gotten that plant on a trip to Africa. Her cries were just background noise as you’d stared at your wand. The hawthorn whose cut branches smell of death.
Poppy’s small hand settles on your shoulder and the contact disperses your thoughts. When you look up at her, you reel back at Poppy’s knowing gaze, the secret smile flirting with her lips in the half-shadowed hallway.
“A troubling pair,” she states as though you’ve given any indication to the opposite. “But quite good-looking, aren’t they?”
You leave that without comment as you let Poppy pull you up to your feet and follow her inside the classroom. You assume people call Sallow handsome, the sort of generic handsome any growing boy with acceptable features might be.
St. Jude though—St. Jude is pretty in the same way the larkspur lining the road towards Hogsmeade are pretty: pretty dangerous, pretty lethal. Even brief contact with the flower can cause skin irritation or allergic reaction—which is pretty much what you feel crossing paths with St. Jude.
You shove the thought of him away.
Contrary to what everybody believes due to your grades, the subtle science and exact art of potion-making is one you sort into the more interesting classes. The classroom always smells pleasant—of dried herbs and rich fumes, of burnt wood and charred coal which you enjoy most with your love for setting things on fire. But you have no patience for looking after a softly simmering cauldron day after day, the care more demanding than looking after a delicate newborn.
Where you usually sit next to Javi, the seat is occupied by Imelda Reyes, which is the first warning flag that something is off.
“Right on time.” Professor Sharp rises like the fog over the Black Lake, stepping right between you and Poppy, and brushes the non-existing speck of dust from his handcuffs. “Despite my clear instructions that in your fifth year, you will switch your potions partner, I have yet to see any actual change. Thus before we waste any more time, let me do it for you.”
You flick your eyes to Javi. He doesn’t seem too sad about losing you in favour for Reyes, which is no surprise with his embarrassingly raging crush on her: he looks at her as if she is the moon and he the ocean’s waves, her pulling him in with such gravity he can do nothing but let her do what she wants with him. It is a bit embarrassing, really.
You quickly turn to Poppy. “Poppy, would you—”
“Miss Sweeting will pair up with our new student,” Professor Sharp announces. “And you will work with Mister Gaunt.”
Your stomach drops to your feet. Better than St. Jude but compared to them all it just feels like the lesser of two evils.
You trudge over to his potions station, unsure what face to make after what happened yesterday. It takes you ten seconds to realise how stupid that is because Gaunt can’t see you, so you just slide up right next to him and shrug off your robe. It won’t take long until the classroom feels like an oven, hot and humid from the fire and steam rising to the ceilings in swirling tendrils.
“So, what are we cooking?” you ask.
Gaunt’s head slightly turns your way. He looks very unimpressed. “Ah,” he says, recognition dawning upon hearing your voice. “You.” Only it sounds as if he’s addressing a servant or house elf.
“Me.” You throw your robe over the chair’s backrest and yank your sleeves up. “A pleasure, Gaunt.”
“We’ll see about that. If you think you’ll get easy grades from working with me, I must disappoint.”
“Disappointment is pretty much what I expected.”
Gaunt’s milky eyes flicker towards you, sending a scathing look in your general direction. Without another word, his hand reaches across the table, and he yanks the textbook towards him. With an impatient flick of his wand, the book snaps open to today’s lesson: how to brew the Draught of Peace.
After Professor Sharp’s usual instructions about the powers and dangers, and emphasizing twice that it often comes up at O.W.L.s, he leaves you to work.
You skim over the ingredients and see what is already at your station and which ones you have to collect from the ingredient shelves.
“I’m going to grab some syrup of hellebore,” you tell Gaunt, and from the trunk under the worktable, pull out a few stewed mandrakes. “Here, cut the mandrakes into cubes.”
Gaunt doesn’t move. He barely dips his head towards the sound of you shoving the chopping board his way. “Bold of you to trust a blind man with a knife,” he states.
You click your tongue. “Fine. Then portion the powdered ingredients. Can you do that?”
“I don’t know what the ingredients look like.” A hint of impatience steals into his voice. “Do you want us both to end up at the hospital wing?”
“What can you do then?” you snap back. As if you’ll do the whole work and just let him ride on your coattails.
Gaunt raises his chin. “Read the instructions.”
“Oh, yes. You prefer ordering people around, what a surprise.”
“If only people would actually listen.”
Merlin’s beard, you want to be done with this. You leave Gaunt at the station and get the remaining ingredients. Gaunt reads the whole recipe out first, loud and clear, the tips of his index and middle finger following after the flashing tip of his wand as it runs along the black lines on the page. You’re not sure how that magic works, but as long as he assists, you don’t care (you still make sure he doesn’t read something wrong off the list, glimpsing at the book whenever you finish one step).
The more Gaunt reads the more you get used to listening to his voice—and realise he has a nice, soothing voice, slightly higher in pitch than his other male classmates. Clear as spring water, like pearls gliding off a smooth surface and then you don’t listen to the words he’s saying, just his voice.
When he suddenly stops, it’s like a rope snapping in half and suddenly you’re in free-fall.
“You are not paying attention,” he snaps, slicing your thoughts apart with his sharp voice. You blink through the dark grey steam rising from your cauldron. Gaunt must have picked up on the small cues; he must have heard you’ve stopped moving about, stopped measuring the ingredients and just left the cauldron on the stove without reducing the heat. The smell itself doesn’t give away that your Draught of Peace is in danger of becoming a catastrophe.
You quickly lower the temperature of the flames, knocking over half of the other glass bottles and an inkpot as you reach for the hellebore. Black spills over the surface, drenches your parchment scrolls, the textbook; fizzes as small drops fall into the gentle fire beneath the cauldron.
Gaunt’s hand moves out in a flash, slender fingers curl around your wrist, pressing into the inside of your thin skin where your pulse hammers against his fingertips.
“What are you doing?” he hisses, and for a moment you think he sounds like a snake.
“Adding the hellebore, just like the recipe says.” You try to move your hand, but for someone with bony wrists Ominis Gaunt is surprisingly strong. He pushes your hand down until the small bottle smacks with a decisive clink on the table and your hand becomes trapped between the hard, cool surface and his warm, rough hand.
With a deceptive calm, Gaunt says, “You’re supposed to let it simmer for seven minutes. I’ve heard you don’t care much about grades, but I cannot afford to fail Potions.”
A snicker crawls its way up your throat, spills like the ink. The black pool has reached the table’s edge and leaves dark smudges on your white shirt, sticks to Gaunt’s long sleeves dragging over the surface. Somehow this is far more satisfying than anything you could say. “And now your grade hangs on how well I perform. How does it feel having to rely on other people your whole life? Maybe you should be a little nicer to me, Gaunt.”
His nostrils flare. You feel him dig his nails into your skin and you brace yourself for his retort, ready to devour any ammunition fired your way.
A familiar redhead pops up beside you. Garreth Weasley has one of the kindest faces you have ever known, and gentle green eyes. None of which means he is the innocent sheep walking among the students. He slumps against the desk, leans his waist against the edge and considers the mess on your potions station.
Weasley grins. “Am I interrupting something?”
Gaunt immediately shakes your hand off as though burnt and retreats to his side of the station. You turn to Weasley, scowling. You are spoiling for a fight and looking for trouble, but that trouble wasn’t supposed to be 6’5’’ tall, broad-shouldered, freckled-faced with almost any type of powdered potions ingredient perpetually embedded under his fingernails. “What do you want, Weasley?”
“My darling Hufflepuff,” he starts, and you see the warning signals for what they are.
“No.”
His face falls. “I haven’t even asked—”
“I don’t want to know.”
Weasley groans. “Come on, do your favourite Gryffindor a tiny favour, will you?”
“You’re nowhere near my favourite Gryffindor. I’ve also decided I am going to live an honest student’s life from now on.” You solemnly place your hand above your heart. “Steer away from any trouble.”
Weasley snorts. He looks like he doesn’t believe you. Gaunt looks like he doesn’t believe you. He doesn’t even pretend he’s not overhearing your conversation, eyebrows drawn together, head slightly inclined towards you. It seems he barely endures your presence as if you are a stone in his shoe, a minor but constant annoyance.
“Thing is,” Weasley says as though you haven’t said anything, “I sent the new kid to fetch a Fwooper feather for me from Sharp’s office. He hasn’t come back yet.”
Involuntarily, your eyes swivel through the classroom—and indeed, you don’t find St. Jude.
You exhale air very, very slowly. “Why in Merlin’s tits would you ask him to do that?”
Weasley rolls his eyes as if you’re some simple-minded Muggle incapable of comprehending that Unicorns indeed exist. “Well, I can’t just waltz in and take it. I’m pretty sure Sharp has enchanted the door with some anti-Weasley spells.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“And besides,” Weasley continues, ignoring you, “you’ve just run out of hellebore.”
“We have not run out of—”
With a swift swipe, Weasley pockets your glass vial, and winks. You feel an awful itch to cast a toenail-growing hex on him as he turns around and strolls back to his station.
There’s an awful silence as your potion simmers on its flame. In another corner of the room, you’re pretty sure Arthur Plummly is having a crisis because his brew keeps spattering and splashing like hot oil in a pan.
Gaunt clears his throat. “Did Weasley—”
“Yes.” You grit your teeth against a groan of frustration. “Yes, Weasley did.”
Gaunt crosses his arm. He looks as if he’s aged a couple years, which you feel is a common reaction to being subject to Weasley’s shenanigans.
You yank your sleeves back down and shove your chair out of the way—an awful screeching sound which doesn’t go unnoticed by Gaunt. He narrows his eyes. “Where are you going?”
“You heard the man. We’re out of hellebore.”
You don’t wait for his response. Sharp’s office is on the other side of the room; Sharp himself is currently trying to calm down Plummly, so this might be your only chance to slip in unnoticed.
The wooden door opens without resistance, and to your surprise and relief without any noise. In all five years you have only been inside Sharp’s office two or three times—for reprimands, to fetch ingredients, to prove Prewett you could indeed cast Alohomora flawlessly in your first year. Not much has changed. The desk is much messier than the one in the classroom, as though a storm has swept through. Shelves with ingredients line both sides of the room, the usual you recognise from lessons and some you’ve never seen before.
The only thing out of order is St Jude who, with hair askew and dust smudges on his face and shirt, is currently crawling on the grimy, dusty floor, hands scrambling inside a half-opened cupboard. You wait another long minute, just to really cement the picture into your brain.
“Looking for your dignity?” you ask aloud, watching St. Jude start hard enough he wrenches his hands back and hits his wrists against the cupboard’s edge. It looks painful. Good. “I’m afraid you won’t find it in there.”
St. Jude glowers at you, his grey eyes cutting like a sharp blade. It’s a gaze that crawls under your skin and chisels off the carefully constructed walls around the well where you’ve drowned any sort of curiosity at the very beginning of fifth year when you wanted to know who this mysterious new kid is. The fact that it is resurfacing when you thought you got rid of it is more than annoying.
“It’s only your second lesson and you’re already stealing from Sharp.” You whistle, making sure you’re extra loud just to see some fear or anxiety in those scrutinising eyes. “I don’t know if that’s brave or stupid.”
St. Jude climbs to his feet, quickly dusting off his pants where the dust left grey spots on his knees. “What do you want?” he asks, quickly moving past Sharp’s desk to the other side. He looks paler than usual, and there is an urgency to his stride as though he’s trying to run away. You almost ask him if something is wrong. Almost. “I’m busy.”
“Oh, I’m sure. Though you should have told Weasley you don’t know what a Fwooper feather is. You wouldn’t be wasting all our time like this.”
St. Jude stops dead in his tracks. He turns slowly to you, and with grave satisfaction you notice the crimson pinpricks spreading high on his cheeks. He opens his mouth, closes it. He looks like a little boy who’s been caught with his hand inside the cookie jar, which makes you realise two things at once.
“How do you—” he begins.
You nod at Sharp’s desk. “You’ve walked past it twice.”
He swallows. His chin juts out and his Adam’s apple catches—it’s a whole scene as he wearily eyes the clutter on the desk, and finally spots the glass container stuffed with dozen different feathers in every rainbow’s colour. He still doesn’t move.
“It’s the bright pink one,” you tell him.
Very slowly, St. Jude moves over and stuffs the Fwooper feather inside his robe’s pocket. A grin spreads slowly on your face. “You’re not from the Wizarding world, are you?”
Just as quick as the flush has spread across his face, it drains and St. Jude blanches.
“Because I don’t know what a Fwooper feather looks like? Pretty sure I’m not the only one.”
“Because you just told me.”
St. Jude blows a stray curl from his eyes. He looks as if he’s … pouting? “Does it matter?” he asks, casting his gaze from your head to your feet. “You don’t strike me as a pure-blood elitist.”
“I’m not.” You cross the room to the other side and grab another vial of hellebore-syrup from the shelf, shuddering at the dozen unblinking blowfish eyes pressed against the inside of a glass bottle. “Just wondering what your deal is.”
When you turn around, St. Jude stands in front of the door, staring at you for a long minute. “That isn’t what you said yesterday,” he says.
You shoot him a quick, warning glance. “Nothing has changed.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Why are any of us here? The universe is funny like that—”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Obviously. Weasley seems to worry about his new protégée. Or he just really wants this feather for his new concoction.”
St. Jude thinks about that. You see his jaw work, as if he’s trying to speak around a word. “You’re friends?” As if he can’t believe you are capable of having one.
He isn’t wrong. “Friends is a bit much.”
If you had a Galleon for every time you have made out with Weasley in a corridor to throw off prefects from the One-eyed Witch Passage, you’d have two Galleons. Which isn’t a lot, but it is weird it happened twice. The conversation after was beyond embarrassing. Weasley had a hard time articulating any words—I’m not interested, I mean there is hardly time; it’s not you, it’s me; I’m not interested in romance to be frank—He’d pulled you out of breakfast for that, doughnut still in hand which you had shoved into his mouth to shut him up. No, you’re not interested in him either, it is called distraction and, no, you don’t care he’s neither into women or men, that’s all his own business.
Weasley had looked relieved—more than relieved. Thankful someone doesn’t ask how and why and are you sure it’s not a phase?
“It’s none of my business,” you had said.
“I think you’re nicer than you let on,” he had insisted.
You’ll show him how nice you are next time you smash a Bludger into his face during a game.
“Having friends is good.” St. Jude’s voice pulls you back to the present. “Beats being alone.”
You shrug, feeling this is the moment to go, to leave and turn your back on him. Your feet don’t move. “Why are you doing all this?” you ask instead, and then you bite your lip because why are you still talking to him?
One black brow twitches up. “Doing what?”
“Being everybody’s errand boy.”
St. Jude leans against the dungeon wall, arms crossed. It seems he’s also building up a wall behind his eyes, they begin to flick from you to the shelves, up to the ceiling—everywhere except your face. “I’m the new kid. It’s kind of hard to get in with people who have known each other for five years.”
“And you think they will like you if you do their dirty work for them?”
A shadow falls over his eyes, the bright grey darkens like a brewing storm over the sea. “I like having people in my debt,” St. Jude says slowly. “You make friends faster than throwing money on the ground.”
“That sounds a lot like something Sallow would say.”
St. Jude’s eyes settle on you. His gaze is like a physical weight on the back of your neck. “You don’t like him.”
You snort. “What gave it away?”
“Why is that?”
You don’t have to think about it—the memory rises unbidden: you high up in the sky and Sallow on the broom approaching with neck-breaking speed. Your spiralling thoughts—He won’t; Sallow isn’t mad enough to fly right into me—though of course Sallow is ruthless and determined enough to do whatever it takes to win. The fall, the pain, the weeks spent in the hospital wing. “Because he is a bad person pretending to be good.”
“And you are a good person?”
“Maybe not. But I don’t pretend to be something I am not.”
“No.” His voice is disarmingly soft. “No, you do not.”
You meet his gaze head on as if it’s a challenge. It feels like everything with St. Jude is a challenge.
Then, all of a sudden, he asks, “Sebastian’s sister. What’s she like?”
“Why all those questions about Sallow? You could just ask him yourself.”
St. Jude gives a slow, inconspicuous shrug as though that is reason enough. You chew on your bottom lip, tipping the vial of hellebore upside down and back. Anne Sallow, now that is a name that has turned into a wisp since her leave last year, nothing more than a phantom’s memory to most students.
“If you think Sallow is good at duelling,” you start slowly, “you should see his sister. She even gave sixth-years a run for their Galleons.”
You remember Anne Sallow—not that she was easy to forget—always in her chequered trousers leading Sallow and Gaunt from mischief to mischief, her laughter boisterous and loud, filling the rooms and halls and announcing her presence. To this day, nobody knows why exactly she hasn’t returned to Hogwarts, but the rumours ran wild. Until people stopped caring. “They were always trouble, but Anne … when Sallow does something, sometimes you might think he actually intends to cause harm. Anne was bolder, and more mischievous. But she was also kinder.”
You see her face, peaking around the curtain, wincing in sympathy at your broken arm stuck in the sling. Only in your third year you realised the Sallow twins had the same eyes. When Sallow had said sorry, he wasn’t sorry for kicking you off during the Quidditch game, he was sorry that he’d been caught and punished for it. When Anne had said sorry, you believed her.
“Interesting,” says St. Jude. “You can say nice things about people.”
You brush past him and stop in front of the door for a moment to listen if anyone is walking past on the other side. “Don’t think you’ll get the same treatment, St. Jude.”
“Callum.”
You wait for him to add something, but nothing comes as he looks at you expectantly. “Yes, that is your name,” you say after a moment.
“You should start calling me Callum.”
You consider him with a blank expression. “No thank you.” With that, you push the door open, ear pressed against the hard surface to listen to Sharp’s limp.
St. Jude hesitates for but a moment, a shadow flitting over his face.
Before you can remind yourself you don’t care, your mouth speaks, “What’s wrong?”
He shakes his head as though trying to shake off a weight. “I am not fond of the smell of smoke and fire.” There is a scratch to his voice, like a broken record that keeps on spinning despite the damage. You don’t know what to say to that—you can’t remember a time where that smell has not brought you comfort.
“You’ll get used to it. I mean, it’s not the worst smell that can stick to your clothes down here.” You don’t know what you’re trying to do—reassure him or make light of the mood. Anything that would wipe away the pale, blank slab that his face is.
St. Jude sighs, resigned. He waves his hand at you with impatience, your cue to leave. You push the door open and squeeze past the narrow opening, slipping back out into the classroom. When you return to Gaunt, the damage is long done. Thick, black curls of smoke rise from the cauldron. The Slytherin boy sits on his stool, arms crossed, a slender finger tapping against his arm.
“I take it I was gone for more than seven minutes,” you say with the clinical observation of someone who messed up and does not want to admit she has messed up, or take the responsibility for it.
Gaunt has switched from sulking in his seat to trying to balance his wand on the tip of his index finger. “At least it seems most of the class has failed the task,” he says sullenly. “Professor Sharp advised us to ‘use that pile of pudding we call brain for once.’”
You assume Sharp’s mood might be worse than an offended Hippogriff, which also means that hopefully Weasley’s concoction works out for once instead of causing even more trouble—which is of course the moment Weasley’s cauldron explodes in a fit of colourful blasts, sparks, and a pungent odour of rotten eggs that has the surrounding students ducking away, retching.
From across the room, you meet St. Jude’s eyes. It takes exactly five seconds for Sharp to appear beside Weasley’s potions station despite his limp, rising like a Dementor ready to deliver punishment. There is no need for words: Sharp dips his chin, and then his eyes swivel like a compass and they settle on you first, then on St. Jude. Again, Sharp does not speak. Again, you meet St. Jude’s eyes, and you both move towards Sharp who is waiting for you two with an unreadable expression. You imagine facing a real Dementor might be more pleasant.
“When I allowed you to fetch what you needed from my office,” Sharp speaks and you can feel St. Jude deflate beside you which should give you some sort of satisfaction, “I did not mean that you can hand out my ingredients as if this is a common marketplace.”
St. Jude recovers quickly, lowering his eyes to the ground in unabashed guilt that reeks of shameless pretence. “I simply helped a friend in need, Sir.”
Two sets of dark, unimpressed eyes spear him; Sharp turns to you next, even more annoyed. “And you were not allowed to set a foot inside my office in the first place.”
“We’ve run out of hellebore essence,” you say, not looking at Weasley. “And I heard an Auror once say it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
It is a dirty card, quoting Sharp himself and he does not appreciate it judging from the glare he bends on you. When he cuts his gaze to Weasley next, the Gryffindor standing next to you actually flinches.
“There is only so much I can say to you Mister Weasley before turning into a broken record. Yes, you might have a gift for potions, but no, it does not give you permission to brew chaos—certainly not during class.”
“Sorry Professor,” is all Weasley says, crestfallen. He seems more disappointed about the fact his little project didn’t work out than getting caught.
“That’s ten points from Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Gryffindor. Again. I do hope that in the future, should anything happen, it won’t always be you three causing trouble. Are we clear?”
“Yes, Professor,” choruse you, St. Jude, and Weasley in surprising and probably never-to-be-repeated unison.
“Good. And since all four of you seem so keen on taking responsibility, detention for the whole next week will suit you just fine.”
Weasley and you sputter at the same time. “But, Quidditch—”
“Sir, Quidditch practice starts next week!”
Only St. Jude picks up what you other two miss. “Four of us?”
“Precisely. I can see you listening in on our conversation, Mister Gaunt.”
Three heads swivel around to Ominis Gaunt still sitting where you left him, his face turned towards you. His brows are tightly knit together. “Why me, Professor? I didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly. To my knowledge, Mister Gaunt, you are blind. Not deaf. You could have stopped your potions partner from embarking on something stupid. It is in all our interest to teach students to look after each other.”
Now that leaves Gaunt actually speechless. It would be funny were it not for a tiny prick of guilt settling in your chest for dragging him into this. As though he can smell your guilt, like a hound on the scent, his grey eyes glare in your direction as though everything about this has been your very idea from the start.
“Until Monday evening,” Sharp says. He dismisses you with a curt nod, then limps back to his class as he dismisses class with a sharp flick of his hand.
You scuff back to your place to get your robe and schoolbag, bracing yourself for whatever Gaunt has in store for you because going for conflict seems to be your default setting for anyone hanging around St. Jude lately.
But Gaunt just packs up his scrolls and quill and manoeuvres around the stations towards the exits, his wand flashing an angry red on his way out.
~ ⋆｡°✩ ~
It starts with a hunger.
To be touched, to be loved, to feel anything at all. It is such a familiar feeling that at first, nothing strikes you as out of order. Then comes the laughter—bright like clear bells, innocent. Unmistakably young, children’s voices.
They echo down a decrepit, narrow hallway drowned in shadows, the lily-of-the-valley wallpaper damp and overgrown with something dark and reeking of waste. Portraits, framed in rotten wood, hang askew, showing cobblestone alleys and crooked church towers. The only light crawls from open doors to adjacent bedrooms with bunk beds and half-deteriorated cabinets. Children’s toys lie scattered on the muddy ground as if recently used. On these walls hang crude crayon drawings of small children crying blood and adults hanging from the gallows, their neck crooked and twisted. A feeling of wrongness blooms within your chest, thick and sharp vines that grow up your lungs and make it hard to breathe.
You pass these corridors, eyes roaming over the unfamiliar faces on the portraits—James, Annabel, Theodore, Alice—but how? You have never seen them before.
The corridor ends in a wide-open hall with long tables and benches placed in an even distance from another. There are just leftover scraps on the dirty plates, an amount not meant to satisfy anyone’s hunger. The hunger in the pit of your stomach grows, snarls, gnaws at you.
The sense of wrongness spikes, a steady built up at the back of your head until you find him, cowering in a corner, face hidden behind his hands, save for the narrow gap between his small fingers where one eye is peeking through—looking right at you, at the world, like a single silver star flashing in the dark night.
The pressure is a steady column building, growing, pushing until you feel it overflowing from your pores.
Destroy it.
Destroy what?
Everything.
Everything?
And then everything is swallowed in flames.
You come out of the dream with the scent of burnt flesh and thick smoke in your nose and the taste of hot ash in your mouth. The fire took a dozen lives—the orphans whose name everyone forgot, everyone but you. James, Annabel, Theodore, Alice—except it wasn’t you who blew up the orphanage. Your sense of self shudders before separating enough for you to get a grasp of who you are and who you are not.
Callum St. Jude.
“What about him?”
You blink away hot tears from your eyes. Lenora shakes you with an urge as if she’s trying to shake the sense back into you. “Wake up. You’re scaring the other girls.”
“Fire—” You gasp, and choke as your lungs fill with clean air free from smoke and fire. “There’s a fire—”
“There is no fire.” Poppy’s wand swirls through the air and a small cup with water floats into your shaking hands. “It was just a bad dream.”
No, not a dream. A memory.
Poppy yelps when you shove the cup back into her hands, spilling half of its contents onto your and her nightclothes. Scrambling for your robe, you tumble out of bed and grab your wand before rushing out of the bedroom, the racing of your heart in your ears drowning the other girls’ voices.
The common room is dark and abandoned, the only light the softly crackling fire in the chimney still burning and for the first time you look at it and feel terrified. But the terror mashes and mixes with a rapidly swelling anger that chokes you up, sits on your chest and squeezes your ribs because why does he do that to you? What exactly is it about this boy that holds you like a bird in a cage?
The barrel’s entrance swings open and out of your way, revealing the dark kitchen dungeons and before the entrance, soaked in vinegar, St. Jude, staring at you.
