Valerie
The seventh floor of the castle was strikingly quiet. More quiet than it usually was at night. But on the fourth door on the left corridor, inside was pure chaos.
The music was deafening, so much that Valerie couldn't hear a thing Audrey was saying, something about the sound proof walls working well. The party was filled with people from different houses, even people Valerie was sure didn't go to Hogwarts. How did Draco Malfoy pull it off? She had no idea. People were dancing, screaming and doing a lot of illicit activities she wasn't going to name. She hadn't seen this amount of drunk people in a room since well, ever.
"Let's go find Maddie and Elyse!" She screamed through the music. Audrey nodded her head, and started walking through the crowd. With the flashing lights and the huddle of people she wasn't surprised when she lost her. She looked around but to no luck, the crowd swallowed her.
"Are you lost?" Two voices in her ear asked. She turned around to see a familiar pair of red heads.
"What are you guys up to now?"
"We? We aren't up to anything" Fred said.
"Why would you think that?" George asked.
"Because you are walking around with confetti canyons"
The twins looked down, as if they forgot they were carrying them around.
"Huh. Do you know why we have this George?"
"I have no idea Fred."
Valerie laughed, "Whatever you guys are planning, be careful. We don't want another bomb incident."
"We know. Can you hold this for a second?" Fred asked, handing Valerie a red cup of god knows what. "Harrison Adams is giving free tattoos to anyone who drinks an entire bottle and we want to see if we can do it."
"What? An entire bottle? That's crazy!"
The twins nodded, "Percy Jackson is getting one right now!"
Indeed he was. He was seated on a chair in one of the separate rooms with a crowd of people watching, his head was down and Harrison was drawing with the needle on the back of his neck.
"Valerie!" Elyse called, appearing next to her. "Can you believe how crazy this is?" She laughed.
"What is he getting?"
Elyse shrugged, "I don't know, but I kind of want one."
"How many drinks have you had?" She asked. Elyse was not the type to get a tattoo as far as Valerie knew her. Her parents would actually kill her, especially her mom.
"I lost count!" she screamed with a smile on her face. "Hey is it just me? Or does Percy look a thousand times hotter tonight?"
Valerie looked at Percy, he was wearing a dark blue shirt that marked every muscle he had, and his black hair laid messily on his head. He looked better than hot.
"I guess," she shrugged.
Just then, Harrison got the needle off and Percy's neck had a small black dragon on it. "Oh I'm definitely getting one now!" Elyse said, rushing over to Harrison. Valerie was about to look for Audrey again when suddenly she felt someone touch her shoulder.
"Do you like it?" Percy asked, pointing at his neck.
She nodded, "It looks good for a tattoo."
"You don't like tattoos?"
"Not necessarily, but it looks good on you." The music pounded louder on her ears, and the lights somehow began to flash a lot more. "Have you seen Audrey?"
"I think I saw her near the bathrooms, i'm not sure though"
She said thanks to Percy and tried to look for the bathrooms, getting through the crowd was the hardest part. When she finally got there there was no sign of her, until she saw Oliver Wood making out with Ellie Green in the corner.
Oh no.
Quickly, she entered the bathroom and found Audrey's shoes behind one of the stalls. She could hear a soft sobbing noise coming out.
"Audrey?" she called. But no response came out. "C'mon Auds I know you're in there."
The door slowly opened and Audrey was on the floor, her mascara was running down her face and her eyes were burning red. Valerie reached down and gave her a tight hug.
"I can't believe I'm crying over a boy I never even dated," she sobbed.
"Doesn't matter whether you dated him or not."
The music from the party was coming through the bathroom really loudly. "Audrey, if he can't see how extraordinary and smart and beautiful you are then it's his loss, if he can't see that he clearly doesn't deserve you. And he definitely does not deserve you crying over him."
Audrey nodded and got up from the floor, and she helped clean her face.
"Okay, enough sorrow. I'm going to go and get drunk." she chirped.
"Maybe you shouldn't"
Audrey shook her head "No, It really feels like I should." Before Valerie could object, she was already out the door.
Great, she thought.
Percy
Percy didn't exactly know what he was doing, all he knew was that he had Willy the dragon tattooed on his neck now. He kept an eye on Hermione the whole time, making sure nobody bothered her, but she seemed to be having a good time. The party wasn't as bad as he thought it would be, however if Malfoy was annoying when he was sober he was aggravating when he was drunk.
"Percy! Come here!" He called. He had his arm wrapped around a girl Percy hadn't seen before. He made his way over there and Malfoy gave him a drink, which Percy had no intention of drinking.
"This is Sophie," he said.
"Um it's actually Sadie" the girl huffed.
"Sadie right. Listen man can you do me a favor? I'm going to need you to find Blaze and tell him that Pansy Parkinson is looking for him"
"Why don't you do it?"
"Mate im kind of busy right now" he smirked, pointing at Sadie.
Percy fought the urge to roll his eyes, "If I see him I'll tell him." He was about to walk away when Malfoy stopped him.
"Another thing. You're friends with Valerie Aesther right?" Percy nodded his head, "Do you know if she's single or not because i heard rumors that-"
"What the fuck Draco!" Sadie screamed.
"What? I was asking a question!"
"You are such an asshole!" She slapped him in the face and walked away.
"Feisty" he said, holding the side of his face. "So do you know if she's single or not?"
"Malfoy if you don't get out of my face I will punch you repeatedly until you're spitting blood." And as soon as he said that Malfoy left.
Percy left the drink he gave him on the nearest table and went looking for Hermione. She was talking to Sebastian Sallow, a Hufflepuff on the Quidditch team.
Out of nowhere, Audrey appeared in front of him, dancing like a really hungry monkey. "Dance with me!" she screamed.
"I'd rather not."
From the way that she was moving Percy gathered that she wasn't that good of a dancer.
"This is the worst" Valerie appeared beside him.
"What's wrong with it? She's dancing"
"She isn't dancing, she's having a crisis!" Audrey started lifting one leg after the other and moving her hands in circles. "Or a stroke. I can't tell."
Suddenly Audrey fell to the floor and she didn't even try to get up. Valerie and Percy rushed over her and helped her get up.
"How many drinks has she had?" Percy asked, carrying her whole body weight as she passed out.
"I don't know, she ran away from me and i couldn't find her for like twenty minutes"
"We should probably get her out of here. She's not waking up anytime soon."
They carried her back all the way to the Gryffindor tower but because she was passed out, neither of them knew how to open it.
"So what now?" Percy asked.
"I don't know, I would take her back to my common room but if someone finds out she was there we would get into a lot of trouble."
"So we just leave her here then?"
"Are you crazy? We can't let her sleep here on the floor."
They stayed quiet for a minute, wondering what to do.
"Hm" Valerie said.
"What?"
"Maybe we can put her in your room"
"What?" he repeated.
"I mean think about it it's the perfect place, since you don't have a common room or a house"
"No"
"Well do you have another idea? I won't leave her in the middle of the hallway" She picked Audrey up from the floor, "we're going to leave her in your room, it's the only option. I trust you."
"Fine" he said, taking Audrey from Valerie, who was clearly struggling to keep her up. "But you owe me"
"Yeah I owe you big time"
When they got to Percy's room, he laid her on the floor with a couple of pillows.
"It's good enough" Valerie said, covering her best friend in one of Percy's shirts he had laying around.
"Thank you for helping me" she said, "you didn't have to"
"I don't think i had a choice"
"No not really, but I owe you three times now"
"What do you mean?"
"For coming with me to my parents house, and then for going to the Sandhurst ball"
"Right"
"I never really did thank you for that weekend"
Going with her that weekend wasn't even that bad for him. Yes, he hated talking to Valerie's dad, he hated being around rich snobby people and he almost died trying to kill a boar. But he was amazingly mesmerized when he saw Valerie the night of the Sandhurst ball. In fact, he would do the whole trip again, just to see her come down those stairs again.
"I'm sorry for the way my dad acted too. He shouldn't have done that."
"You don't have to say sorry. Shitty dads are my specialty" he smiled.
"What happened with yours?"
"He just wasn't there. For anything."
"Yeah I get you. My Dad always forgets my birthday. And the one time he did remember he skipped it because he had a meeting. I was ten."
"Ouch"
Valerie laughed, "Yeah that's not even the worst part."
"What's the worst part?"
She stared at him, "trust me, you don't want to know."
"I do though"
"It's a long story"
"I got time," he said, as he sat down next to Audrey on the floor.
"Fine," she sat next to him, "I guess it started when I was about twelve. I came home for summer break, my brothers and my mom were nowhere to be found, which was really weird because they would always wait for me in the living room. That's when I heard a noise upstairs. I realized the noise was coming from my Dad's office. I was about to go until a woman came out. Granted, I've never seen that woman before, her hair was all messy and her shirt was unbuttoned. And that's when my dad came out."
"Oh"
"Yeah, I put two and two together and got out of there, but my dad saw me and he took me by the arm. He was trying to say something to me, I don't remember what, I got out of his grip and left the house. I made sure my mom was home when I decided to go back. I was determined to tell her everything obviously but by the way she was looking at me, I could tell she already knew. But she pretended not to. Every time I tried to tell her she would just walk away. This went on for about a week, my dad decided he had enough. He said that I was trying to ruin the family and that if I didn't shut up he promised he would break my face. But I couldn't pretend that everything was fine, so when I brought it up to my mom, he found out and... well, he lived up to his word."
"Valerie-"
"To this day I'm still afraid to go near him" she caught him off, "Or that house. But I have to, because how am I supposed to explain it to my brothers? I can't. Every time we get to go home they get all excited and happy, I can't take them away from that. I don't know, sometimes I wish I could get out of here."
"If we keep going in a straight line we'll get out of here" Percy said. Valerie looked at him confused. "It's just something my mom once told me when we were lost in the forest."
"I feel like there's a story there"
Percy nodded his head.
"Tell it!"
"Right well, once upon a time, my mom and I got lost in a forest. I must have been about ten or eleven. Anyway, we were on vacation; the rural, landlocked, basic kind of vacation I didn't really understand. It was in Canada and we had gone for a run. About half an hour in, my mom realized we were lost. We walked around and around in circles, trying to find the path, but with no luck. My mom asked a poacher for directions and he sent us the wrong way. I could tell she was starting to panic, even as she was trying to hide it from me. We had been in the forest for hours now and it was getting dark. At school, we read a book about a group of people who had died in the wilderness and I found it easy to imagine that would be our fate too. 'If we keep going in a straight line we'll get out of here', my mom said. And she was right. Eventually we heard the sound of cars and reached the main road. We were twenty miles from the cabin where we had started off, but at least we had signposts now. We were clear of the trees. And I often think of that strategy, when I am totally lost, literally or metaphorically. I thought about it when I was going through the worst times in my life, when my heart pounded rapidly with fear, when I hardly knew who I was and didn't know how I could carry on living. If we keep going in a straight line we'll get out of here."