Paper Confines

viii. Otherworld

"What is it?"

"Well—you didn't drink that night at the RRI meeting, did you?"

Colette frowned. "No, of course not. Why?"

Amoret had assumed as much. Colette, in the two years she'd been here, had only gotten drunk once: at a party in her first few months when she'd finally started to settle. At that time, their regularly scheduled soirées had been more conspicuous and without need of false titles like the Required Reading Initiative. One too many drunken escapades and childish gambles dealt by fingers greased with their parents' usher coins changed that, aided by Amoret being the first of their year to find the Room of Requirement and pick up where her sister left off.

It had been sometime in November. Nadya had half-carried a drunken Colette back to the Hufflepuff dormitory, slipping through the kitchens for a midnight snack at her indignant request. She grumbled all the while, her forehead slick with sweat, but she did what Colette asked her to. It wasn't often then that Nadya had the will to deny her.

Amoret had almost been jealous. Nadya's shifting attentions had come so suddenly that it had taken her fifteen-year-old ego months to comprehend why. But it struck her watching the two of them, staggering through the corridors caviling at each other, badly navigating, sometimes giggling at their own absurdity, to realize what they had was different. Where Amoret found solid ground in Nadya, she could see the opposite in her and Colette. Like static crackling along a tightrope. Nothing to catch them if they fell yet they walked it anyway.

"Right," she muttered, "I figured, I just... wanted to know if you remembered exactly what happened. I know it was weeks ago, but I've never seen Nadya like this after a fight."

Colette glanced around before landing on her shoes. "I... I only remember what I saw after."

"Really?"

"Yes?"

"You're a terrible liar."

"I'm not lying!"

The clock at the back of Amoret's head chimed. She didn't have enough time to push. "Okay, fine. What happened after?"

"Well, Nadya punched Antonin first, and..." Colette pondered her words carefully before perhaps realizing there was no way to be careful with them. "He used the Cruciatus curse. He broke her nose while she was on the ground."

Amoret swore under her breath. Antonin Dolohov had used an unforgivable curse—and she had been the one to clean up his mess.

Reason took Reid's voice. What could have done? Dragged an intoxicated, broken-nosed Nadya to Dippet's office and have the boy expelled? Amoret argued with herself that it mightn't have been so ridiculous to try. With Dippet's unconditional adoration for her family, she imagined she could have gone to him and told him a Peruvian Vipertooth was crawling across the parapets slashing its wings against the shingles and he would've believed her.

The issue (and Amoret didn't mean to take on Nadya's absolutism) was the RRI. They had no short list of qualms against Nadya, and they'd likely been waiting for an opportunity to use them since third year when she sawed Zenith Mulciber's broomstick in half with a pocketknife. Or when she concocted a plan to plant ashwinder eggs and pearl dust in the old Astronomy professor's desk after finding him ogling at Gryffindor girls all year—ingredients for a love potion and most definitely unorthodox in the hands of a member of staff. Or when she broke Olive Hornby's arm in second year after getting called mudblood one time too many. "Just give her a dose of Skele-Gro," Nadya had grumbled, "she'll be fine." Or the bone shards up her sleeve, or inexplicably bloody fists, or the sickles in her coat from a few games too many of unregulated wizard's chess.