CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT;

THEODORE NOTT

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Harry Potter's Secret Heartache
A boy like no other, perhaps – yet a boy suffering all the usual pangs of adolescence. Deprived of love since the tragic demise of his parents, young Harry Potter thought he had found solace in his steady girlfriend at Hogwarts, Muggleborn Hermione Granger. Little did he know that he would shortly be suffering yet another emotional blow in life already littered with personal loss.

Miss Granger, a plain but ambitious girl, seems to have a taste for famous wizards that Harry alone cannot satisfy. Since the arrival of Bulgarian Seeker Viktor Krum, Miss Granger has been toying with both boys' affections. Krum, who is openly smitten with the devious Miss Granger, has already invited her to visit him in Bulgaria over the summer holidays.

Harry, however oblivious the boy is, must have noticed his girl drifting towards his foreign competition, and decided to make Miss Granger as jealous as he by asking her best friend, Cassidy Lupin, to the Yule Ball [ long standing Triwizard Tournament tradition ].

Miss Lupin is well-known amongst her classmates, despite her late arrival to Hogwarts; in case you are unaware of her story, she only became enrolled in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the fall of 1993. She's particularly skilled at Divination, says Professor [claimed Seer] Trelawney. Miss Lupin has a dark aura surrounding herself, however much she tries to conceal it, and it is obvious that she is hiding something from her dear classmates. Perhaps it could be the fact that her father* is a werewolf? Or does it lie deeper than the lycanthropic liar?

It went on, but Cassie's cheeks burned too hot for her to focus on the newspaper. Hermione, despite how Rita had written her out to be, was snorting with laughter and claiming Rita could've done better. Harry seemed absolutely mortified, which was unusual.

"She said I only asked Cassie to make Hermione jealous," he said, his eyebrows furrowed as he skimmed the article again. "Which isn't true, I– I wanted to go with Cassie of my own accord!"

"It's alright Harry," said Hermione, calming herself from her fit of laughter, "you didn't even make me jealous."

Cassie still had her eyes on the article and was gripping it so tightly that her knuckles turned white. Rita knew. She knew that Cassie was not who she said she was. She knew Cassie's real father. Cass skimmed the rest of the article to see if she'd explicitly said the words "Sirius Black", but there was nothing about the mass murderer. She exhaled a small sigh of relief.

Potions couldn't have been more of a nightmare than it was that day.

"Reading magazines under the table, are we?" Snape's dull voice said from behind the Cassie, Hermione, Ron, and Harry. He snatched up Witch Weekly and his black eyes fell on Rita Skeeter's article. He quirked a brow. "Ah, I suppose Potter does have to keep up with his press cuttings.."

He began to read the article aloud. If Cassie thought the voice in her head had made it sound bad, Snape's jeering and the Slytherin's laughter easily made it ten times worse.

  "Well, ten points from Gryffindor. Each," said Snape after he'd finished reciting the article, an evil smile on his thin lips, "and I think I had better separate you four, so you can keep your minds on your potions rather than your tangled love lives. Weasley, you stay here. Miss Granger, over by Miss Parkinson. Potter, the table in front of my desk, and Miss Lupin, next to Nott. Move. Now."

   The three of them begrudgingly moved to their assigned seats, though neither Ron nor Harry had it as bad as Hermione and Cassie.

   "Welcome to the Slytherins," said Theodore Nott as Cassie took her spot next to him. Luckily, he was just far enough from the rest of his friends that Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle were not within earshot. He gave her a charming grin. "Hope you enjoy your time and rate us five stars."

   Cassie flashed him a sneering smile and got to work on her potion-making. Determined to not look at Theodore, she focused on smashing her scarab beetles in silence.

   "I read the article about you," said Theo after a few minutes. It wasn't in a degrading way, merely as though he were stating a fact. "Skeeter's writing is, at most, tolerable. I could do better than that." When Cassie didn't reply, he glanced over at her. "It'll calm down, you know. The staring and the whispers. They'll move on after her next article comes out."

   This took Cassie slightly aback. She looked up from her beetles, an eyebrow quirked curiously. "Has this sort of thing happened to you before?"

   "Loads of times," he replied, his gaze flickering to her for only a moment. "My dad... well, suppose you could say he's not a great guy. There're new rumors about him nearly every month."

   "Oh." She returned to her beetle crushing. "And they go away? The stares, I mean."

    "Mostly," he said with a half-shrug. Then added, with a slight smirk, "Unless it's something horrible that nobody could ever forget and would change your entire life and how others view you until all your friends leave you. Though... I doubt that's going to happen from one article."

   He had probably meant it as a joke, but a sinking feeling in her stomach told Cassie he had a point; if her secret got out, that might've been exactly what would happen. Maybe the fact that Harry, Ron, and Hermione are still friends with her was because they knew Sirius is innocent, but it would be much harder to convince the whole school...

   There was a knock on Snape's door and a moment later, Karkaroff came swiftly in. He seemed very agitated as he approached Snape's desk, twirling his finger around his goatee. "We need to talk," he told Snape abruptly when he reached the front of the classroom.

"I'll talk to you after my lesson," Snape muttered.

"I want to talk now, while you can't slip off, Severus," interrupted Karkaroff. Cassie watched the ordeal with such interest that she didn't realize her cauldron was boiling so high – it exploded, splattering both her and Theodore's faces and fronts with Wit-Sharpening Potion. Theo groaned, but Cassie barely registered the liquid seeping into her robes.

   Snape and Karkaroff continued bickering until the bell rang. Cassie caught Harry's eye and he nodded towards the door, then turned around and spilled his bottle of armadillo bile and knelt down behind his desk. Cassie caught on and met up with Hermione and Ron in the hallway.

   "D'you think Wit-Sharpening Potions have the same effect if you don't drink it?" Ron asked curiously as they stood outside Snape's door, waiting for Harry. "I mean, I'd assume it doesn't, right? How could it work, if you don't directly drink it–"

   "Why am I the one who got splattered in a smartening potion?" Cassie muttered, wiping her face. "Ron's the one who needs it."

   Ron did not get the chance to do anything more than screw up his face, as Harry exited Snape's classroom right then. The three of them surrounded him and he waited until they were a safe distance from the Potions classroom to break into an explanation of what he'd heard.

   "We already know Karkaroff's a Death Eater," Cassie pointed out once he'd finished. "My dad told us that night – they were in Azkaban together, he got out in exchange for names. You don't think Snape's a.." she lowered her voice, glanced around worriedly, and leaned in, "a Death Eater?"

"Looks that way, doesn't it?" said Hermione, who had otherwise fallen silent in thought. "I mean, Harry said Karkaroff was showing Snape something on his–"

   She abruptly stopped, as Karkaroff walked past them, very angrily, Viktor Krum on his heels. The latter paused upon seeing Hermione and walked over to the fourth-years.

   "Herm-own-ninny," he said with a proud grin, either ignoring or not noticing Hermione's grimace, "would you come with me? I haf something to ask you." Cassie realized she'd never spoken one-on-one to him, and his accent was much more prominent than she'd expected.

Hermione and Krum broke off to a very furious glare from Ron. Harry almost began speaking again, though snapped his mouth shut as his eyes landed on something behind Cassie. She turned to be face to face with Theo's wand.

"Close your eyes," Theo instructed. She doesn't know why, but she followed his directions. A pleasant whoosh rid her face of the potion that had splattered it, and a second whoosh rid her torso of it. She opened her eyes and glanced down to her front, then back to Theo. "Oh, it's alright. Don't thank me or anything."

She simpered and nodded her head in gratitude. "Thanks."

"See? Not all Slytherins are bad," he said with a charming grin, then turned on his heel and walked off without another word. Cassie spun to see a very confused-looking Harry and Ron, both boys' jaws open.

"Save it," she said, holding up a hand to stop the inevitable. "Come on, let's get back to the common room. I'm sure Herm-own-ninny will meet us there, and it's easier to talk without interruptions."

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

When a fox appeared in Cassie's dormitory, she truthfully had no idea what to do.

She'd just returned from Hogsmeade with Harry, Ron, and Hermione, the other three having visited Sirius and getting him up to speed. After a brief meltdown over the thought of missing her father, she let her friends tell her everything she'd missed – which wasn't much, other than the fact that Sirius was back in Hogsmeade.

Hermione had holed up in the library after dinner, Lavender was presumably still at Hogsmeade, and Parvarti had earned herself a detention from Professor Sprout when she'd accidentally dropped a bucket of buboter pus on Ron's foot.

Cassie had been planning to use this alone time in her dorm to hopefully speak through her mirror with Sirius, and excused herself from Ron and Harry under the guise of doing so, though she had to stop herself from screaming when she opened her door and a small red fox sat on her bed.

Quickly, she drew her wand; though in her distress, it slipped from her grasp and fell to the floor with a clatter. Having barely looked away from the fox for a full second, she looked back up, only to see that instead of a woodland creature on her bed, it was a woman with ashy blonde hair and striking blue eyes. Cassie gaped at the woman, opening and closing her mouth wordlessly, stunned speechless.

   It was a woman who Cassie had only seen through pictures and snippets of scrapbooks, but she could've recognized her own face anywhere.

"Hello," said her mother politely, smiling warmly. "How are you?"