“Love is not consolation. It is light.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
For as long as any of the fifth-years and below could remember, the table at the back of the Hogwarts library had belonged to Scorpius Malfoy. He left no visible sign of ownership when he was not there, but the very wood seemed to give off a faint aura of deterrence, as though it were cursed or jinxed (which many students believed it to be, despite all contrary evidence). As it was, the single chair behind the table was rarely unoccupied, and the presence of the Malfoy heir was enough to daunt all but the most brazen N.E.W.T.-age students.
What exactly Scorpius did during all those hours in the library was much debated by the students of Hogwarts. Nobody, not even a student taking seven O.W.L.-level classes, had that much homework “ yet Scorpius was always the first to enter the library when it opened, and the last to leave it at night when the doors were locked. Some suspected that Scorpius had even hexed Madam Pince into giving him his own key, so that he could continue his mysterious labors after hours, although nobody had ever proven the rumor true.
The most mysterious thing about Scorpius was not, however, his unnatural bibliophilic tendencies. It was not even his unMalfoyish eyes “ dark, deep brown, like those of his Greengrass relations “ that made his peers wonder. No, what amazed people about Scorpius Malfoy was that he was, in essence, a mute, and only spoke when asked a direct question by a professor or classmate, which did not happen often.
At first this oddity had been attributed to the usual Malfoy haughtier, but it had quickly become apparent that Scorpius simply held himself apart from the rest of Hogwarts life. The glass wall between him and his peers and teachers did not seem to be fashioned of arrogance, nor of shyness, nor fear; it existed of itself, as a part of Scorpius. His professors soon realized that Scorpius was bright and studious, but their attempts at prodding more than a trickle of words out of him in class proved so fruitless as to discourage repeated endeavors.
After a while it no longer mattered. Scorpius got along well enough with his housemates, and did not appear to lack friends “ or at least, people to sit with in the Great Hall. Scorpius’ fellow Slytherins even seemed to hold him in quiet respect, and never once commented upon his peculiarities, although it was quite obvious that very few of them understood his character, and even fewer, if any, the root of his silence.
Not far from Scorpius Malfoy’s tabular domain there was a larger table, a place often frequented by a knot of fifth-year Ravenclaw girls who, unlike the Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors surrounding them, did more actual studying than giggling. Due to Scorpius’ presence, that corner of the library tended to be less popular (and therefore less noisy) than the rest, and so the Ravenclaws, out of simple studiousness, had adopted it as their own.
However, even Ravenclaws have little use for libraries on the first day of classes, and so it came to pass that there was only one person at the table nearest Scorpius’ on this particular September day.
Althea Burbage enjoyed nothing so much as reading, especially when it came to Muggle literature. Being Muggle-born herself, she had little difficulty in acquiring books of fiction and poetry, which her parents readily sent upon request, although they did have some trouble when it came to owl post, even after four years of experience. Althea rather suspected that it was their aversion to the magical mailing system that delayed the arrival of her most recent selection.
It was on days like these, when Althea was between books and had nothing to do but sit and stare vacantly around the nearly empty library, that she found herself wishing most earnestly for someone to confide in. She would have been content with a single magical relative, perhaps a cousin at Hogwarts, or even a warty old grandmother who would write her letters and bake her inedible cookies. As it so happened, Althea did have one “ she was simply beyond reach. Althea’s sole witch-relation, an aunt, had been murdered seven years prior to her birth. The only reason that Althea knew about her aunt at all was that she had spent several days researching her family history at the start of her first year, and had discovered that she and her aunt were the only two Burbages with magical capabilities for nearly twenty generations. She had also discovered various newspaper and magazine articles with headings such as “You-Know-Who’s Victims Finally Accounted For” and “Murders Revealed: The Saddest Tales of the Second War.” From these, as well as the few lessons of modern wizarding history covered in her History of Magic classes, Althea had pieced together the story of her aunt’s death.
On this particular day in September, Althea was thinking about her Aunt Charity. This would not have been unusual, except that Aunt Charity had to share Althea’s mind with somebody else “ a very pale, blonde somebody else, who happened to be sitting not ten paces away, leaning very seriously over a thick, dusty tome, his mouth firmed into a frown.
Althea blinked to clear her head and stared in a different direction, looking pointedly away from Scorpius’ table. She didn’t know what had come over her. When had Scorpius Malfoy’s moods and expressions become so interesting? More importantly, when had she, Althea, begun to notice them?
She was lonely, that was all. The feeling was not new; she had friends among the Ravenclaws in her year, had a best friend she could count on when she needed. But that was the very heart of the problem “ Althea never counted on anybody. Sometimes she wondered if that was why the friends she had never seemed to be enough, why her thoughts seemed to stray to Scorpius so often these days. Was it because he seemed lonely, too?
Unable to compose her chaotic thoughts into some semblance of reason, Althea decided that she had better face the inevitable and yield calmly to her contemplations of Scorpius. There had never been any enmity between them, she reminded herself, having never spoken to him at all. Did he even know, had anybody ever told him, that her aunt had been murdered in his grandparent’s house, before the eyes of his father and grandfather? If Scorpius was conscious of that fact, he had given no indication of it during their four years together at Hogwarts, although Althea realized that there had been little opportunity for him to indicate anything. Althea could not decide what she preferred to believe: that Scorpius knew who she was and what he must represent to her, or that he was completely unaware, and did not think of her at all.
Frustrated, Althea slapped her book shut and shoved it haphazardly onto the shelf behind her; in any case, it had been a ruse to keep Madam Pince from banishing her from the library. As she stood up to leave, she caught Scorpius’ eye and felt herself blush under his inquiring gaze. Their connection held for the shortest of moments, during which an indecipherable meaning passed between them. Then, sweepingly, Althea darted for the doors, and was gone.
Scorpius looked down at the book in front of him and was mildly surprised to find that none of the words made sense any more. He closed his eyes and tried to recreate the expression on the face of Althea Burbage, just before she had fled. For five minutes he struggled to pin her down, analyze her like one of his books. With most people it was not difficult for Scorpius to decipher emotions, or even to predict their next words or actions, having had more than the average share of human observation. But at the end of his five minutes, Scorpius had settled on only one thing, which was neither definition nor prediction. All he knew was that looking into Althea’s blue eyes had given him the strangest feeling of solemn warmth, like that of a candle flame from within.
Immediately after coming to this conclusion Scorpius felt an old dread clench his heart. For as long as he could remember he had been trying to forget his family’s legacy “ not to disprove or alter it, but to avoid it entirely. His earliest memories were of his father repeating to him over and over, “You must not dwell on the past…You must not dwell on the past…There are wrongs that cannot be undone…They are not yours to face, but ours…You must not dwell on the past…”
Scorpius had done his best. At Hogwarts he had come to understand almost instantly that he could never integrate with his peers; they regarded the past as something to be held close, and Scorpius shrank from its corrosive touch in the only way he could “ isolation. He did not mind it very much, especially after he discovered the little-traversed Muggle literature section of the library, which included works of both fictions and nonfiction. After that, the trivialities of Hogwarts society did not attract his interest, for he was occupied with all the great theories of the Muggle philosophers and psychologists and, with questions life and death, and the meaning of the universe. It was not long before Scorpius had sunk so far into his ponderings that his past virtually ceased to exist.
That is, until Althea Burbage had caught him looking at her. He couldn’t explain why he had chosen that moment to glance up from Thomas More’s Utopia, or why he had looked toward the Ravenclaw table. But he had, and now his thoughts were heading down a path into a long-repressed past, recalling a story that his mother had once told him about a woman and a snake, and that room at Malfoy Manor that nobody used anymore…
He had looked up, and now he could not forget those blue eyes.
For the first time in four years, Scorpius Malfoy left the library early.