**Author's note: Patience is a virtue, my dear readers. All things will be revealed to you at some point or another, but if I told you everything right off the bat, why would you want to keep reading? If there is some confusion, read the summary and re-read the first two chapters. If there is still confusion… well, then, you'll just have to wait and keep reading!! Now go, enjoy!**
CHAPTER THREE- Making a Point
She was ready to bolt.
She'd watched the clock for five minutes, and Gen had already told herself she wasn't going to wait any more than ten.
And everyone knew Drake Mallory's idea of "on time" was twenty minutes late.
So Gen didn't even bother unpacking her bookbag, but fixed her eyes on the wall clock and happily watched the minutes tick by. After nine minutes and thirty five seconds of this vigil, she slipped the strap of her bag over her shoulder and stood, carefully pushing in her chair so as not to make excessive noise in the massive library.
All that effort was wasted when she turned, bumped nose-first into a very male-and only half-clad- chest, and uttered a loud, startled screech.
"Oh, well, bugger," she said miserably, backing away from the history failure and slinging her bag onto the table, not giving half a hang if she was quiet now.
If only she'd left a few minutes earlier.
"Careful, there, brainbags, you almost broke my sunglasses," Drake said, polishing a spot off the lenses of said glasses. "Were you leaving so soon? I'm heartbroken." He followed this statement with a show of wide-eyed hurt so facetious she wanted to smack him.
But kindness killed just as well as anything else, and if the freakish half-albino prat thought he could scare her off, he could just reassess the situation. So she smiled sweetly and took out a book, slamming the spine of it down in the spot he had very nearly rested one long-fingered hand on. "I suppose you could be heartbroken," she said sympathetically, laying the syrup on extra thick. "Provided you first found a heart."
"Would that I hadn't given it away to Melissa Bulfinch already," he said, barely restraining his laughter as he sat down. At the sharp look that earned him from the Wesley brat, he merely beamed. "Oh, come now, pauper, that wasn't what you were fighting over, was it? Me?"
This time she did raise a hand to smack him, her cheeks burning with pure and complete fury. Before this moment, she
wouldn't have thought it possible to be so conceited, so bloody self-involved. But he caught her wrist when she
swung it toward him.
"Ah-ah, Wesley, teacher must play nice," he said calmly, tilting his head to one side and regarding her
frankly. It could be worse, he supposed. It could be that Wesley boy teaching him, the idiot soccer player.
And it was just the mention of "teacher" that had her blood immediately cooled. She had something to do, and she'd do it whether he tried to stop her or not. She jerked her hand away from his grasp, eyeing him balefully-he'd abandoned the jacket and sat casually in his carelessly draped dress shirt, its few fastened buttons barely doing their job. He looked like he'd just gotten out of bed, the slob.
"Do your assignment," she said flatly. "It's only ten questions, and it would take even the slowest of your ilk no longer than a half an hour to do them." Turning slightly away from him, she tipped over her bag and rummaged through it, finally emerging triumphant with a plain band. She pulled her hair back, took her own homework out, and began to write.
He watched her, torn between amusement and amazement as he watched the bookworm plow her way through a mound of very serious-looking homework. Poverty-stricken little know-it-all, he judged with a sneer. If he tried hard enough-and he rarely did-he could recall several of the girls he knew talking about the poor tomboy, the lone Wesley female with the big brains and even bigger mouth.
Why a Mallory would ever need help from a Wesley was beyond him, and so thinking, he leaned over and flipped her book shut. "Not time for your homework, troublemaker," he said flippantly. "Y'supposed to be helping me."
Gen placed her pencil on the cover of her textbook and regarded him expressionlessly. What was it about money, she wondered, that made people think they were above others? Clearly it didn't buy intelligence. "Page 210. If you don't actually understand it, that's one thing. If you're just being lazy, which wouldn't shock me in the least, then there's little I can do. So at least open the book and prove all your daddy's money can buy you an education, would you?"
That got to him, she could see. The flawless skin of his face mottled an indignant red and his pale grey eyes narrowed to slits.
"Score one for the pauper," she said nastily, hating herself just a little as the words came out of her mouth. But something about him just made her stoop to his level, curse it all.
This was not going as planned, Drake thought as he flipped angrily through his textbook for the first time since he'd received it. She definitely wasn't supposed to be the one insulting him. So he flipped to the page she'd suggested and stared at the questions in front of him, planning his next move.
When he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, he saw she had returned to her homework.
"I don't know how to do this," he said petulantly without even reading the questions, an evil gleam in his eye. She wasn't getting off that easy, by God.
Gen scratched long division on the margin of her physics homework, sorting out an equation. When she'd balanced the mathematics of the problem, she looked at him, exasperated now. How was she really supposed to deal with someone like this? They barely even spoke the same language. "I refuse to believe you're that much of an intellectual wasteland," she said, blowing out a breath. "Though your state of dress has undoubtedly aroused my skepticism."
"Aroused your what?" he returned easily, shifting in his seat to cause his shirt to gape even more.
"Loathing," she enunciated, correcting her statement. "It has aroused my loathing." At a loss for what else to do, she leaned over, ducking her head just beneath his chin, and quickly scrawled the answers in his textbook. "There," she said with finality, standing and gathering her own homework. "As long as you can manage to write that in your own handwriting, or cave-scratching, or whatever it is you do, you'll manage to pass this assignment." Without waiting for his response, she had slung her bag over her shoulder and walked out of the library, leaving a bewildered Drake Mallory wondering how she'd gotten the upper hand and left him looking like a fool.
~~~
"I don't agree with this." The tall, thin man paced the headmaster's office nervously, his black robes flapping around his ankles, the cleric-style collar wrenched open. It wasn't often Severus Snape was ever bothered enough to show his discomfort, but here, with this man, he could. He did.
"I'm aware of that, Severus," Albus said, turning away from one of the many gadgets on his shelves. "I'm well aware of your disagreement, and the disagreement of the other house heads." He'd momentarily considered not letting them in on everything, but knew he had to. Secrets bred mistrust, and mistrust was not welcome in such an unsteady time.
"It's not safe," Severus continued. Three of his own house were gone, playing "ambassador." It was ludicrous, madness. "How can you expect them to be safe away from here?"
Dumbledore pounded a fist on his desk, his ordinarily kindly blue eyes now glowing with a mixture of emotions-fear, anger, understanding. Most of all, there was guilt at his inadequacies, at the things that had been beyond his control.
"Do you, Severus, expect them to be safe here? Six years ago Tom-Voldemort-came in with a professor. A professor I helped to hire! And do you think Virginia Weasley was safe her first year here, when she was chosen by a Death Eater to play consort to Voldemort? Or what of our tournament, a school event which ended in death for a student? They are not safe here, Severus, as much as it pains me to admit it!" The fire had left his voice now, replaced by melancholy, awareness of his own failure to keep his students safe.
"They are there for a reason, for a purpose I am not willing to abandon. And it appears to me they are safer where they are," he continued quietly, "Than they would be here. I hope this hiatus will be beneficial for our selected students in many ways." Standing and laying a hand on his Potions Master's shoulder, he spoke quietly. "Perhaps it will be beneficial for all of us."
~~~
In another wing of the castle, a young woman lay awake in her room, staring at the ceiling. She hadn't yet been able to shake the feeling of loneliness that had settled in upon the absence of her friends, but what persisted even more strongly was the niggling feeling that something wasn't quite right. Though Hermione Granger believed more firmly in fact than in intuition, she felt as though she'd missed something, as though she was wrong about something.
If there was a feeling Hermione didn't like, it was the feeling of being wrong.
Harry had listened to her concerns all day, sure-but he'd also dismissed them, she could tell. He had other worries-captaining a Quidditch team with missing players, making it day by day without Ron to lean on-but he didn't seem worried about the explanation Dumbledore had given them.
Well, Hermione thought, drawing her knees up to her chin and staring into the large fireplace of the Head Girl's room. Harry might be one to blindly trust, but as for her, she'd take cold hard facts over sentimentalism any day.
As her eyes grew heavy and her body reclined back in the large bed, however, she was not feeling rational or factual. She was feeling sentimental as she wondered where her and Harry's friends were and when they would return.