CHAPTER SIX- Breaking a Truce
It was easy enough to force a truce for one day's tutoring, and even the next day's tutoring came and went without incident. Rob's insistence and overprotective nature were still weighing heavily on Gen's mind, and so she forced herself to behave, keeping her demeanor frosty and haughty in the face of the miscreant's taunting and willful stubbornness.
It was only natural, however, that the reluctant and shaky cease-fire Gen had maneuvered herself into would come to an end sometime, and the fifth day of tutoring was as good a time as any.
It would be easier to convince herself of that if she weren't trudging behind the world's biggest git on the way to, of all places, his house.
"Son of a-" she started, only to be interrupted by the scathing look he threw over his shoulder.
"Oh, no you don't, Wesley," Drake grated out, angrily tugging his cigarette case out of his pocket.
When he got the smoke between his lips, he remembered he no longer had his lighter.
It had all happened so fast, she'd been pointing at something in his book, and he'd merely told her to move. Actually, his exact words were "I can't see the bloody page, beggar." And then one of those small, weaselly, freckled hands had snatched up his lighter, flipped open the lid, and set it to going like a pro.
And then she'd dropped it onto his homework, right next to his bloody fingers, causing a merry little blaze and a merry little row with the librarian, ending in their term-long ejection from the library. The librarian hadn't even bothered asking what happened, Drake thought woefully. He couldn't even put blame where blame was due.
So not only did he not have his custom monogrammed silver lighter, Drake thought, stopping and turning on his heel to face the ragamuffin trailing behind him, he also didn't have a place to be tutored.
"This is all your fault," he said, the longing for the cigarette raging through him. "You realize this, yes? Completely your fault." What sort of lunatic set something on fire in the everloving library, anyway? And moreover, what sort of tutor set their pupil's assignment ablaze?
Granted, he had called her a beggar.
But really, was that any reason to get them barred from the library for the rest of the term, any reason to get his lighter confiscated?
"If you hadn't started with the name-calling, Mallory," Gen said, stepping toe-to-toe with him on the walk in front of his house, "We wouldn't be here. All you had to do was answer one more bloody question on that assignment, but no, you had to open your big… bloody… gob," she enunciated, poking her finger into his chest.
God, it felt good to do that. Two days had been a long time to keep her mouth shut, and now she intended to tell him what she thought.
"And another thing, the last thing on earth I want to do is step foot into your hell-trap of a house," she added, glancing balefully at the towering three-story structure with its imposing iron gates.
Bloody show-offs.
"And your hair looks stupid," Gen added as an afterthought.
Oddly enough, that one seemed to sting him, and he raised a reassuring hand to hover over the elaborate spikes atop his head.
Bint.
"Looks better than your carroty mop, Wesley," Drake retorted, but the fire was lacking. He really didn't want to step foot into the hell-trap of his house, either, especially not with the freckled little vagabond in tow, but it seemed he had little choice. "Make sure you wipe your shoes," he added, throwing open the front door and sending a maid skittering to the back of the house with a single sneer. "And don't touch anything, Wesley. God knows I don't want your grubby pawprints all over my home."
She momentarily considered hefting the heavy-and undoubtedly priceless-glass vase that sat just inside the front door and heaving it at his head, then thought better of it.
They could have come to her house, she supposed. She had been the one who had lit his homework on fire, provoked or not. She didn't really see what the big deal was, anyway-it hadn't even left a burn mark on the table.
She looked around the house's expansive first floor, the towering ceilings flanked by the balconies of the second and third floors.
It didn't matter that she hated the sloppily-clad punk who had already sprawled on a black leather chair in the center of the house, she still recognized the beauty and luxury for what it was. Her own house could easily have fit in here four times, and that was the reason she'd completely nixed the idea of taking him to her home. Shame was one thing when the insults were theoretical; it was quite another if your insulter actually saw your tattered, secondhand house.
From his comfortable vantage point, he watched her nonchalantly, watched her eyes widen and her jaw drop slightly open. It was on the tip of his tongue to make a sarcastic remark, to point out her obvious naïve appraisal, but something made him still his instinct.
It was amazement that had him amazed, the look in her eyes he'd never seen on anyone before. His type of people-wealthy people-were bored by nature. Their houses matched his own dollar for dollar, antique for antique, servant for servant.
In the life of a Mallory, there was no room to be amazed, only to make others amazed.
She felt his eyes on her, that strange pewter gaze, and the blood rose to heat her cheeks. Of course she'd gaped like an idiot in the very devil's own house, and it was a right embarrassment.
"Well, what are you looking at, Mallory?" she snapped, the defensiveness impossible to quash. Now, she knew, she'd made a mistake. She shouldn't have come here at all, showing herself as the bloody bumpkin she was. She might be smarter than the punk in front of her, but she wasn't richer.
"I could ask you the same, Wesley. What are you looking at?" His amusement this time was genuine despite himself. It kindled a certain measure of pride to see someone so captivated with a home-his home.
But that dry drawl did nothing but further inflame Gen, compounding the week's incidents in a hot ball of mortification. In the face of that flat bemusement, she snapped.
"Well, Mallory, I'm looking at a rich, lazy simpleton who couldn't even use all his money to hire a decent tutor. Oh, no, he had to wait until a pitiful, poor peasant was forced to help." Gather up a full head of steam, ashamed of the envy she'd felt in the face of his house, she jabbed a finger in his direction. "Would that I had half your problems, you wanton, ungrateful prat." Her breath was already coming in great gasps after the verbal barrage, but what happened next made her breath stop.
He rose from the massive leather chair in one fluid motion, his face now dangerously blank, frighteningly composed. He took one step toward her, perversely satisfied when she didn't budge.
"You," he said quietly, making the hair on the back of her neck stand up and looking down into her eyes. "Have no fucking clue what my problems are. I'm sure it's quite easy to judge from the gutter." He thought of his father-how could he not?-and how Drake himself spent more time away from his 'home' than he ever spent in it.
Though she was shaking inside and more than a little sorry she'd started the argument, Gen lifted her chin and looked at him directly. It chilled her, though, to stare into those iced-over eyes. "That's a little hypocritical, isn't it, Drake? It's just as easy for you to judge the lowly from your pedestal when you've no idea how they live." Snatching her bookbag from the floor where she'd dropped it, Gen turned and headed back toward the front door, her last words floating back to his ears.
"I think we've both learned enough for the day, don't you?"
~~~
"You've got to promise you won't tease me." Her voice was earnest and her face a study in worry-big eyes wide, mouth drawn into a tight bow.
Hermione wanted to locate her friends, certainly, but she didn't want to earn Harry's disapproval. She'd worked much too long and much too hard to just be friends with him, blind though he apparently was. At this rate, she reckoned he would notice she fancied him in oh, say a decade or so.
Harry shoved his glasses up on his nose impatiently, looking at the wooden bowl of water and the pile of woodchips Hermione had sitting on the Common Room floor. "You know I won't, 'Mione," he said, shuffling his feet. "But I certainly can't if you'll never tell me what it is you're on about."
She'd been secretive for days, maddeningly so, slinking around and staying up late. This time, he had paid careful attention, but to no avail-this time, she had no Time-Turner; she was just acting dotty all on her own.
"Okay, listen," Hermione said pedantically, moving the bowl of water to center it in front of her and waving her wand to calm the surface of the liquid. "Delilah Duckworth says in The Divulgence of Divination, this is the simplest way to divine the true nature of someone and to determine whether or not they're in trouble."
"Hm," Harry said, hunkering down to watch. "Well, knowing Ron, he's probably in trouble no matter where they are." The laugh shared between them, though quick to come, was uneasy. Though Hermione hadn't yet convinced Harry of any sort of mishap regarding Ron, Ginny, and the other missing students, he wasn't ready to be at ease, yet, either.
He liked having his best friend nearby.
Hermione quickly explained the simple process, combining a handful of woodchips and a single bright strand of Ginny's hair. Once dropped into the bowl, the hair would instruct the elements as to the person's identity, and the woodchips would form shapes, much like tea leaves were said to.
"There are all sorts of combinations," Hermione said, flipping to a diagram in her book, "But Duckworth says the first five are the only ones that can really be trusted." Confidently, Hermione sprinkled the hair and wood into the bowl and both she and Harry were over it in a flash, watching with wide, fascinated eyes as the chips began to scatter, some forming around the outside of the bowl and a scant few staying in the middle.
"Okay," Hermione breathed, careful not to disturb the water. "There are four chips in the middle, two pairs, so that extra pair is likely Ron. A pair means..." she glanced at the book for confirmation, though she already had it nearly memorized. "The person has a double nature, as though they're keeping a secret."
Harry frowned at this. "Ginny keep a secret? I think she outgrew that with Tom's diary."
Hermione started to respond, but the words dropped into a gasp. The pairs-both the two pairs in the middle and other scattered pairs around the edges-grew closer and closer together, until one chip in each pair slipped under the other chip, floating one on top of the other. "What on earth?" she breathed, her eyes growing even wider as the water in the very center of the bowl started to eddy in a tiny whirlpool.
"I don't think that chip-on-chip status is in your book," Harry said worriedly, staring at the diagrams upside-down. "We could ask Trelawney, but something tells me she'd foresee my death."
"Hush," Hermione said, still awed by the movement inside the bowl. "The two pairs in the middle in that whirlpool? It means tension, but not danger. Just personal tension."
"Ron and Gin fighting, imagine that," Harry said sarcastically.
"Double in nature, but not separate," Hermione said, sitting back on her heels as the chips and water started to wear themselves out, their motion slowing and the eddies growing weaker and weaker.
"I think we'd know if Ginny had a secret," Harry said doggedly. "It isn't as though any of us could keep secrets from the other ones." Even his own secrets were always found out eventually.
So thinking, he completely missed the arch look Hermione gave him.
No secrets, indeed.
Men were so daft.
~~~
Her nerves were raw from the confrontation, typical though it was, her unease close to the surface, and so when Gen ran into a much larger person as she thundered down the steps, her breath tore from her in a breathless, shocked scream.
Her jitters trebled when she looked up, up, up and saw the cruel, sharp face, its features so much like Drake's, the pale hair impeccably styled. Where Drake may have looked at her with anger, distaste, this man looked at her with hatred.
"Oh look," he said, narrowing his freakishly pale eyes and laying one slim-fingered hand on the iron rail running the front steps of the house. "We've had a visitor." Lucas leaned down then, his hot, hateful breath stirring her hair as she stood rooted to the spot. "A Wesley, isn't it?" he asked, sneering even though she hadn't responded. "Absolutely disgusting." His eyes cut to the front door of the home, and the cold anger Gen saw in them made bile rise in her throat.
His words and expression shocked her in a way Drake's hadn't. She expected anger from Drake; after all, what else good were teenaged boys?
But from a grown man who didn't even know her?
"I-I-" she couldn't seem to find the words, the right words, and he didn't seem to want them.
He flapped a hand at her, looking somehow horrified. "Are you speaking to me Wesley?" he asked, flapping his hand once more. And then it was as though she didn't exist, his eyes were no longer on her, his attention completely withdrawn.
And when he opened the door to go into his house, she heard him shout for his son.
~~~
"The father worries me."
Severus wouldn't sit down, preferring instead to pace the length of the headmaster's office, turning sharply on his heel each time he reached the edge of the room.
Dumbledore wondered when his Potions Master would realize the headmaster was widening the room slightly with every circuit he made. Widening the room by two inches, he addressed the dark-clad professor wearily. "I know the father worries you, Severus, but I have told you-"
Severus stopped, turning sharply to face his employer, his mentor, his superior. "You have told me why, Albus. You have told me of the accuracy needed to maintain this experiment and the binds you hope to bestow to the divided of our school. But you have not told me how such a thing can be so. If you have created this Muggle world and its trappings for students only, how can there be a man so much like Lucius there? And how can it be safe for the boy?"
It was the most he'd said in a long time, giving Dumbledore time to think, to create his answer. In truth, the headmaster himself had spent much time mulling over that particular mystery. The Wesley parents in the Muggle world were good parents, but nondescript. They were not Molly and Arthur by any stretch of the imagination. But Lucas Mallory had been a surprise to even Dumbledore.
"In any situation such as this, the conditions will duplicate themselves as befits the situation," he told the man who had once been his pupil. "And so in order to really be the same person, the same wizard upon his return, Drake must have Lucas. Lucius has clearly been a large influence in the boy's behavior, Severus. You cannot argue this."
"It's dangerous!" Severus burst out. "We do not trust the man in our world, how can we trust a re-creation of him in a Muggle world?"
And though Dumbledore liked to believe nothing from his mind, this world, these people surrounding his precious pupils, nothing from his wand, could be harmful, he knew there was never any predicting magic, and he knew his experiment could not last longer.
"I am watching them, Severus," was the best answer he could give Snape.
The father worried him, as well.