Studying in Silence ((cue Selwyn))

Piles of books and papers scattered the table where Amelia had been sitting for what seemed like the better part of two days. A neat stack of bare parchment beside her, another on the other side filled with her tiny, neat script. She had two books open in front of her, each propped up against another stack of books so they could be easily read without her having to stop writing.

Amelia had been cooped up in this room for quite some time now, quite alone. The silence and solitude had given her ample time to be productive, and she had already completed most of her homework for the weekend and was not working ahead on an essay for potions which she knew would be due a few weeks from now.

Pausing to allow her hand a rest from writing, Amelia swept up the curls of her hair into a high ponytail, wondering why she hadn't done this sooner. Most of the time, Amelia had her hair pulled back to prevent it from being a distraction from her work. The elastic band now holding the tendrils back, Amelia picked up her quill once again and resumed writing, her eyes darting from the book to her parchment and back again with each line she wrote, checking facts and figures she copied down.

((Cue Selwyn))

"Twenty cauldrons of water in the hall
Twenty cauldrons of water!
Take one down
Splash it around
Nineteen cauldrons of water in the hall!"

It was a good thing Selwyn was on the seventh floor, because his song was very repetitive and it did somewhat give away what he was up to as he sloshed another full cauldron down the seventh floor corridor. Only eighteen to go now.

Of course, there were always the Gryffindorks, and Aden would pull Selwyn up at the slightest excuse, but that was why Selwyn had put Sir Barnabas on lookout at the other end of the hallway. The tapestry knight was more than keen to show his competence in this duty.

Now the hallway was getting nice and wet, it was time to get it nice and soapy. There was no point making a ride like this if you didn't make it properly dangerous.

"Scourgify!" Selwyn flicked his wand at the sodden floor of the hall.

Hmmm. Now... something to ride....

That classroom probably had something. If it didn't, Selwyn could test the severing charm on the desk legs. He pushed the door open and froze on the perimeter.

Amelia was in the middle of a sentence when a blot of ink appeared on the parchment she was writing on, spreading wider to smear the words she had already written. This mishap in her writing was not caused by unsteady hands or a lapse in her focus; instead, it was caused by a ruckus being made in the hallway by a very loud individual with an affinity for screechy songs.

I swear if this is Peeves I am going straight to the headmaster… Amelia thought, setting her quill down rather more forcefully than she usually would. She took out her wand to remove the offending ink from her parchment, checking to make sure her wandwork was accurate before pushing her chair away from the desk she was using. The wooden legs rubbed against the stone floor in such a way as to add harmony to the already dissonant noises coming from the hallway.

Rolling up the sleeves of the white blouse she wore, Amelia strode toward the doorway, mentally prepared for an encounter with the pesky poltergeist when she nearly ran into another student who reached the doorframe just as she did. Startled, Amelia immediately inhaled quickly and took a step away from the boy, her hand flitting up to her throat in an automatic reaction to the surprise.

A few moments later the shock wore off and she was able to get a better look at what had interrupted her progress into the hallway. It was a boy, perhaps a year or so younger than she, who held his wand at the ready with a look on his face that spelled guilt. Amelia couldn’t identify what had made the boy’s expression so condemnable, but having been a prefect long enough now Amelia had learned to read the signs of a person who had just been caught doing something they ought not be doing.

“What are you doing?” Amelia asked, her naturally blunt method of getting to the point coming in handy, as it usually did in situations during which she was called upon to exercise her prefect status. Her no-nonsense approach might offend some, but it was the easiest and most efficient way of getting to an answer. She simply didn’t have the time to beat around the bush.

The girl didn't look happy, but Selwyn had never let people not looking happy get to him. If he had, he'd be a paranoid bundle of stress, and probably never survive in the cut-throat world of the Slytherin common room.

The real question was whether a lie would get him further than the truth. She looked the prissy type. They were hard to deal with, people like that. Egos out to here; either assumed that because you were Slytherin, you were automatically lying, or because you weren't "as good" as them, you'd defer to them and tell the truth.

Oh no wait. This could be fun.

"I'm trying to walk into this classroom, but you're standing in my way," he replied with the truth they both knew she didn't want.

The younger boy did not seem to be at all phased by the fact that she had confronted him at the door, nor was he deterred from what he was doing. He had an expression on his face that was a mix of stubborn and sly, definitely not something Amelia was in the mood to deal with at the moment.

Why can they never wreak havoc when I don’t have any work to do? Amelia silently wondered, crossing her arms across her chest as she stared the boy down, his eyes dancing with the light that meant he was plotting something. Something Amelia surely would not like.

His words were flippant, clearly meant to annoy Amelia. Mission accomplished. His voice matched the one she had heard screeching from the hallway, so clearly this boy was her screaming singer. No surprise that he had managed to grind on her nerves more than once in under five minutes – Amelia was easily annoyed by noise and rowdy behavior, and this boy seemed to be a master at both crafts.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Amelia retorted, adapting a snarky tone to match his, “I think I probably could have answered that for myself. What I meant, as I am sure you are aware, was what are you doing vociferating your way down the hallway and then storming into what is supposed to be a study room?”

With a smirk that indicated the girl could go on wondering all day for all he cared, Selwyn pushed past her into the room. While she was trying to interrogate him, the corridor was slowly drying, and the tapestry had a limited attention span.

What's it to you? he cut off the words before they made it out his mouth. It might have been tempting to rile her, but she'd just get even more narky and probably go find a teacher to dob him in to.

He paused in the middle of the room, looking around for something to use as a sled, when he had the brainwave that was going to get her nose out of his business.

"If you must know, I'm on detention," he told her. "I have to scrub the floors up here the muggle way. Muggles sing while they work, you know. Because they haven't any wands and they say it makes the job go faster. It's in that film they make us watch for muggle studies; Mary Poppins."

He glanced back over his shoulder.

"So, I guess that makes you right. I am the evil, guilty Slytherin you thought. Another small victory, no doubt."

Amelia’s defensive stance didn’t stop the boy in the slightest as made to move past her. Her lithe form was easily pushed aside by the younger boy, something that bothered her almost as much as the self-satisfied smirk that had crossed his face just before he made his move. Regaining her balance after being jostled out of the way, Amelia spun on her heel to watch the boy pace the room, seemingly looking for something.

Why can’t they go bother another prefect? Amelia mentally pondered, wondering for what seemed like the hundredth time this year why she had even taken the prefect position. Oh yeah, that’s right: Mother.

With a sigh, Amelia crossed the room toward the boy, reaching her hand toward his shoulder to regain his attention, but just as she did she had to retract her hand because he spun around to face her once more, a distinctly different look on his face now.

Amelia surveyed the black haired boy for almost a full minute after he spoke, not at all ready to believe a word he said. His excuse for being in the room was flaky at best. Although Amelia had to admit he was a good liar and clearly quick on his feet, she spent far too much time observing the habits of others to be so easily fooled. She had never learned the art of legilimens, mostly because it would be a superfluous talent considering the knack she had for reading thoughts based on expression and body language alone.

“If you’re on detention, who is overseeing your muggle cleaning?” Amelia asked with a raised eyebrow, pointing out an obvious flaw in his otherwise convincing lie. Detentions at Hogwarts were never unsupervised, a natural enforcement considering the relatively low amount of work a student would do if left alone to serve his or her detention. Amelia had never herself served detention, but she had seen students every now and again polishing trophies in the alumni case or writing lines on the blackboard of a spare classroom.

“And for the record, my frustration has very little to do with your house and far more to do with your sarcastic comments and lack of respect for authority. The only victory I am hoping to achieve through all this is to be able to get back to my work in peace,” she finished, holding tight to her wand in case the boy decided that he wasn’t going to bother with words any longer.

He ignored her question and laughed instead.

"I'm supposed to respect you?" he mocked, just as a table of the right size caught his eye. This was going to take more than a severing charm, and Miss Prissyboots wasn't helping.

Selwyn hadn't even touched his wand, and that was probably a good thing. He could see she was touching something in her robe pocket (??), and that something could probably give him a good case of gigantic facial-attacking bogies.

With that in mind, he kept his hands in clear view. But that was some hair she had there. Selwyn could see even though it was held back from her face, making her look like one of those fierce spinster witches who'd been strict citric diet for the last fifteen years. And witches and wizards never expected a physical attack. It was all wands and words, because only muggles use their fists and who'd want to lower themselves to that standard?

Selwyn figured there was no harm sinking a little bit lower right now. He launched himself at the girl with intent to hair-pull.

((Amelia isn’t holding her wand in a pocket, it is out in the open. She grabbed it off the desk a few posts ago))

Amelia’s irritability was growing by the moment, the boy’s snide tone only increasing her frustration with the entire situation. She had come up here with the specific purpose of studying, as the study room was intended for, and this little “rebel” was making this task significantly harder than it should have been. She didn’t have the patience to deal with this right now, but she had the prefect badge whose job it was to remind her that what she felt like doing and what she needed to do were often not the same thing.

You should have known better than to accept Shacklebolt’s offer… Amelia thought, cursing herself for adhering to her parents’ idea of perfection, which obviously had included being a prefect or she wouldn’t have been here in the first place. She would have packed up her books and left someone else to deal with this nonsense.

In the process of rolling her eyes at the boy’s comment Amelia missed the critical moment when the intruder went from annoying distraction to the top of the hit list. He managed to accomplish this in one swift motion, moving toward her quicker than she would have expected for someone as lanky as he was. She didn’t have the reflexes of an athlete to get out of the way in time, which is how she found herself being pulled downward by the full weight of the boy’s body, which dangled from her ponytail in a n extremely painful way.

“Oooooooooooooooouch!” Amelia screeched, her entire body pulled downward with the force of his pull. Because she had pulled her hair back earlier, the boy had managed to get all of it in one grab, pulling taut the curls and sending a million shocks of pain down every red-gold strand. Her disbelief at the immaturity of the action paled in comparison to the anger that seethed through her veins at being attacked. Although her red hair had been the target of his attack, he was about to find out that her red hair also gave her a temper reserved specifically for moments like this.

“Incendia de Manus!” Amelia shouted, the pain she was feeling banished from her voice by anger. Her wand hand flourished the strip of holly she held tightly in her first, pointing it at the boy’s hand which held fast to her hair, hoping to cause his palm to present with a nasty burn.

((This spell means “Fire of the hand” in Latin. It is meant to cause your hand to burn so you will let go. I didn’t want to god-mod and say I hit you, so you can play it how you want.))

Selwyn dropped the handful of hair that he was holding as a stinging sensation travelled across his palm. It started out cold and then turned red-hot, and he didn't know what that incantation was that she'd just said.

He staggered away from her, drawing his own wand and switching it to his other hand in case this was going to turn bad. It was just lucky he was one of the few who could do that. If only he was still out in the hall; he could bathe his hand, but then again, if he were still out there this probably wouldn't have happened.

"You crazy sphinx!" Selwyn yelled at the girl. "What'd you do to me?"

Selwyn's main problem was the he was a good student, and not used to being outmatched, even by people in higher years than himself. But now, he was clearly outmatched and he could feel the confrontation going downhill damn fast. Thank Merlin it was Christabelle in the Hogwarts Tournament and not this girl.