Flashback (#01) → Lucius and Augustus
Tagging: Lucius Malfoy and Augustus Rookwood
Location: Slytherin common room
Date: Nonspecific month, 1968
Time: Close to eight PM, but not quite
Notes: Lucius and Augustus engage in a less-than-friendly confrontation during the 1968 school term at Hogwarts, which was surely not the first and absolutely not the last.
Extra Notes: As will always be the case, threading isn't necessary at all and it just my preferred format. Also, feel free to improvise the actual date for background purposes!
Lucius Malfoy
For over two years at present, Lucius had found himself comfortably and pleased with the lovely place that was the Slytherin common room. He found it to be a truly magnificent place that was not only representative of the history of the House, but also representative of its spirit. It wasn’t gaudy in the slightest, which was something he had come to half expect from the school, and it was actually inviting with its darkness and elegant decor. Nothing ever compared to the manor he called home, though, which was due to not only excellent decorative tastes on his family’s part, but also to the fact that he wasn’t the in the business of “yours over mine,” and never would be.
So far, the term had been simple enough. Classes were simple business, even with the added electives that were supposedly such a treat for Third year students. Lucius didn’t find any of it to be much specialty, especially since he was well acquainted with enough of it through reading and observing over the years. He wouldn’t necessarily have pegged himself with the word studious, but he did know that diligence in studies carried over in other endeavors, and furthermore, that intelligence was by far the best tool to use for anything. ‘How better to know,’ he mused from time to time. ‘than by taking the time to learn?’
This evening, Lucius chose to spend his time there in the beloved common room, both alone in his thoughts and also speaking with the occasional person who sat down nearby. At present, the high backed chair to his right happened to be empty, and the common room as a whole was more silent, more empty that it had been earlier. Lucius was writing in a small book, which was a gift from his mother for his thoughts, and pondering inconsequential thoughts that occurred to him with each pause of his quill. Really, the only gist to be found in his writing was that he disliked several people, outright hated others, and was developing a strange apathy to those who he had found to be useful in the past two school terms. By now, there was nearly solidified hierarchy within his own year, and he was happy to conclude that he had made his way quite far up, all the way to the point in which discerning who was who became nearly impossible. That was, unfortunately, the downfall of schoolyard politics. One could never be certain of their standing once they reached the top platform. That was what had caused him to learn a very special lesson just a year previously, and that lesson was that the best battles were waged and maintained on all sides.
‘The best gardener is able to reap the fruits of an entire grounds,’ he wrote in the elegant script that his father had strictly forced him to conform to at an early age. ‘And he does this because he understands that every portion must be tended to year round, whether it suits him initially or not.’ Notes such as these made up the majority of his book’s content, with the remainder being blank pages. While he didn’t necessarily like writing, he didn’t mind sharing his thoughts with himself in cryptic context. It allowed some freedom he might not otherwise get, seeing as the idiots he considered acquaintances were just that - idiots who didn’t understand much outside of the schoolyard troubles that, as a child raised in cold upper class society, were below the bottom line for Lucius.
He dotted the end of the sentence with a period and then flipped the page. However, along with the ruffling of the paper, he heard the sound of someone moving, and so he looked up to see just who might be up and about. It had escaped his notice just how late it had gotten, being not quite eight but close enough to lead him to think someone might be headed off to bed. In the darkness of the common room, away from his own light, he spotted that someone was in fact moving around, but not to bed it appeared. Internally, he huffed, while his previously neutral expression shifted to one of distinct displeasure.