Lilith.
After I leave Mattheo's, I go down to the common room where basically everyone is.
Everyone turns when they see that I'm coming in the common room. I raise my brows at them, and a few turn away.
"She's back from the dead!" Blaise yells, flipping someone off. "Fuck off!"
Pansy stands up and glares at people. Draco stays sitting with his legs crossed, glaring and sneering at everyone.
"Go back to your collective shit talking!" Pansy says loudly, sitting back down.
Blaise looks at me, raises his brows, and nods to the couch across from the three of them.
Thank god they're not mad at me. I hope, at least. So I walk over to them and sit on the couch across from the three of them.
They sit and study me, just watching. Probably searching for something, anything to give away the fact that I'm not real.
"So," I say after a minute, crossing my leg over the other. "How have you guys been?"
"You're seriously going to ask that?" Draco asks like I'm an idiot. I mean, I am, but still.
I sigh. "Look, I've never disappeared and came back to people thinking I was dead. I don't know how to act in this other than trying to make it seem as if I never left."
"That's gonna be a little hard to do," Pansy says, raising her brows.
"Mattheo has informed me."
"Yeah, about him," Pansy started, glancing at the other two. "We all started talking again like a day or two ago, but I was watching from the sidelines. I thought Mattheo was going to go crazy, if he wasn't already."
"Oh, he already was," Blaise puts in. "Seriously, every time I saw him he was either drunk, hungover, high, fighting someone, or debating whether to fight someone."
I raise my brows. Did he seriously keep getting into fights? "You're kidding," I say, but I know he's not.
Blaise shook his head. Great.
"How many fights?"
"Too many to count," Blaise replied, shaking his head. "He refused to go to the hospital wing every time because 'if Lilith isn't doing it, I don't want it.' So, he would walk around with a broken nose for a week until Luna insisted on fixing it for him."
Luna. Oh my god, I forgot about her and Blaise.
"How are you two doing?" I ask, then clarify. "You and Luna, I mean."
Blaise smiles, and that makes me glad. "We're doing good. Never better, actually."
"Are you sleeping in Mattheo's room tonight?" Pansy asks after a moment.
I shake my head. Hell no. "I don't think he wants me in there. I'm not even sure if he still wants to date."
Pansy shakes her head. "Nonesense. Look, I bribed my parents to bribe Dumbledore into getting me my own room after you left. You'll stay there with me until Mattheo decides to stop being a little bitch."
I breath out a laugh. "He doesn't understand it, and to be honest, I don't think I do either. And I don't really blame him for it. But, yeah, I think I would like to spend the night with you. Just like old times."
That brings a big smile onto Pansy's face. "Yeah," she says, chuckling, "just like old times."
Blaise and Draco stay quiet.
"Draco?" I ask. He hasn't said a word to me since I got down here. "You okay?"
He finally looks me in the eyes and shrugs after a couple seconds. "Yeah, totally. I'm just fine."
"You sure?"
He nods. "Sure."
Pansy claps her hands together and stands up. "All right, then. Come on, Lil, we have a lot of catching up to do, yeah?"
She grabs my hand and I say, "Yeah."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," I laugh, and let her pull me up and drag be to the stairs.
She shoves me in her room, flicks in the light, closes and locks the door, and gestures around the room. "Do you like it?" she asks.
"I love it," I breath.
It's beautiful. The walls are a dark green, and the door to the bathroom is black. There is a black desk across on the left side of the bed, with a marble top and silver accents. The bed had black sheets, a white comforter, and black pillows. I don't think Pansy has ever remade the bed, because the blankets are everywhere. Not that I'm complaining.
There are fake vines hanging from the wall. Some were hanging from the frame of a mirror on the wall.
Pansy walks over to the green curtains and opens them, tying them to hooks on the wall. "Sit on the bed, we need to talk," she says.
I sit on her bed and watch her tie the other curtain to the side.
"Okay," she says, walking over to the bed before sitting across from me, "talk."
"About what?" I ask because I really don't want to talk. If I start talking, I might not stop. But I don't want to keep secrets from her because I know she means well. But we all need to keep our secrets, and I'm still going to keep mine, no matter how much I trust someone.
She rolls her eyes. "Everything. Spill."
"Okay, well, after Mattheo and I got together, things started changing, I guess. I don't know," I say, and laugh. I don't know why I'm laughing. I shake my head. "I'm not sure what started happening. I love him, Pansy. You know that, there's nothing he could have done for me to stop. And I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it's just that the war is coming closer. I mean, we all know this is probably the last half way sane year here before it all goes to shit."
Pansy nods, and she looks like she is actually listening. Maybe she had changed a little bit. Sometimes she would listen really well, and other times she would just completely ignore you when you were trying to talk to her. I just hope that I won't regret this.
"I screwed up, Pansy. I screwed up really bad. Like really, really bad."
She furrows her brows. "What do you mean? What did you do?" She makes her voice sound soft, as if she's a sort of good therapist. But she's better than one.
"I did what I needed to do, but not what we wanted me to do."
"What?" she asks, and she looks genuinely confused.
I guess that's one of my new specialties. When you lie, and when you don't tell the whole truth, you have to reword things and it ends up sounding weird. Sometimes it doesn't, but sometimes it does. Holes go into it all, and things need explaining. Sometimes it sounds like a riddle. If you're good enough at it, people don't ask questions because it makes enough sense that they don't feel the need to ask questions.
"I don't know what to do, Pansy," I say, sighing. "Look, I screwed up bad. Mattheo made me promise to never become a death eater, but then—" I sigh again. And I don't know why I don't want to say the words, when it should be so easy.
"Then you got the dark mark," she says, looking at the blankets on her bed with a sort of faraway look in her eyes.
I nod. "Then I became a death eater," I state, and sigh. It feels good to say it. Weight lifted off my shoulders or something. "I started distancing myself from Mattheo. I didn't want him to find out. I didn't want him to see it. And I didn't think about how bad it would be until after it had happened. Everything was running through my head right after I got it. I sat in my room for almost a week not doing anything because I didn't want to think about what I did. How irreversible it was. My muggle friends tried to get into my room the whole time. They slept in the living room the whole week and finally picked my lock to bring me a milkshake from this diner that we always go to. They helped me through the whole thing even though they had no idea what was going on. They thought it had something to do with Mattheo, which it did, but they thought it was like this big thing like he had cheated on me or something. I don't know, it was crazy."
"So, why did you leave us all?" she asks after a second. Damn she takes things in fast. I forgot about that. "I mean," she shakes her head, "why did you leave and have Dumbledore tell us that you were dead? I mean, he even said that they found your body and they identified that it was you."
"It's too complicated." It really is too complicated, especially to explain to someone. And I can't really tell her why, even if she did understand it. "I don't really understand it myself," I lie.
She nods. "I get that."
Goddam, she's a horrible liar. Or is it just the fact that I can sniff them out better than others can now?
"How did you find out?" I ask, trying to change the subject. I don't want to tell her too much about everything that happened. I don't want her to know too much.
"About what?" she asks.
"About me being a— you know, death eater?" I ask, and gesture to my left arm weirdly. She looks like I just told her I know her deepest, darkest secret. I probably don't, but I could probably figure it out at some point if I tried hard enough.
"Oh," she itched the back of her neck, "I did a lot of thinking while you were gone. I guess it was a way of coping. You know, we all had our ways. McGonagall drowned herself in tea. Blaise tried to laugh, that didn't happen that often. Draco closed himself off and accused Mattheo of killing you. Mattheo drowned himself in alcohol, got drunk, got into fist fights. Your dad interrogated people like crazy, also thought that Mattheo killed you, and got you pregnant—" I raise my brows, but she doesn't notice, "—And I acted like I've been a detective for my whole life, just like— who's that one muggle? Sherly Holmer?"
I shake my head, "Wait, sorry, my dad thought what exactly?" I haven't even talked to my dad since I got back. I just saw him in the Great Hall, and the look on his face was terrible. I mean, he looked like I just told him I wasn't actually dead. Even though, quite literally, that is almost exactly what happened. I can't explain it other that that. "Also, it's Sherlock Holmes."
Pansy shakes her head. "Sherlock, Sherly, same thing. Look, your dad interrogated literally the entire school the day after you were pronounced dead to us all. We got like ten minutes in the common room before he came striding in the room telling us all to line up outside his office door. He took us in one by one and asked us all the same questions. Some of us harsher than others."
"Oh God, he was an asshole to Mattheo, wasn't he?"
Pansy nods. "From what I've heard he was super hard on him. He hardly let him breathe. I mean, he was with Mattheo for like an hour and a half while the rest of us were only in there for like twenty minutes. I guess your dad thought that Mattheo had gotten you pregnant, and that he wasn't ready for that so he had—" she gestured to me, and then crossed her thumb across her throat. "You know."
I raise my brows again, higher this time. "Sorry, my father thought that Mattheo got my pregnant and then killed me?"
"Mmhm," Pansy hums, nodding.
I shake my head and breath out a laugh. "You've got to be kidding me, right?"
She shakes her head and shrugs. "I'm not," she laughs, "I mean, seriously, so many people thought that. I guess Mattheo had told him about the whole not having sex thing, and he thought—"
"Mattheo told my father about our sex lives?"
Pansy clears her throat and looks away, nodding while itching the back of her neck. "Yeah..."
"Dammit," I mutter. "Fuck, that's horrible. My dad is going to— oh God."
Pansy starts laughing. "You're in deep shit." She's laughing so hard she can hardly talk.
I smile and start nodding. "I am in deep shit."
"You are," she says, struggling to breath.
I keep nodding and start laughing. And then we're both laughing so hard that neither of us can breath properly.
A mermaid comes to the window and glares at us.
It can't even hear us, so it should really fuck off.