Wandering

London was starting to get boring. Especially when you had your brother appearing at almost every corner of every street. She was starting to get annoyed and at one point she'd almost tried to hex Nathaniel. But she still wasn't of age and she had to bite back her anger and keep her hands away from her wands.

What was worse was that Nathaniel was of age and he could actually hex her whenever he wanted. It bothered her so much, but at least she wasn't stupid enough to be held back a year. All that time he spent drooling over that Gryffindork girl was wasted time. And she'd found out recently that she died, that was something Nathaniel didn't know, because she hadn't seen him mourning over her, not even for a moment.

After finally managing to get away from Nathaniel, Dani walked through the streets and wasn't really watching where she was going. Her mind was preoccupied with schemings of how to tell Nat that his precious Gryffindor crush was dead. She wanted to see his face so badly. In her thoughts she had turned her head completely away from the path she was walking and soon she bumped into someone. Taking a quick step back, Dani looked in front of her. "Oh, I'm sorry." she said softly.

Dear lord, why did it take girls so long to buy clothes? Of course Destrey had insisted on "browsing" the funky little clothes shops that riddled the side-streets behind Charing Cross Road, and now as a result Shylock was stuck pacing up and down outside while she decided whether she wanted to pay for a dress made out of string.

No, really.

That wasn't what was irritating Shylock, though. Shylock had no interest in what his sister wore or how much it cost, only to how long it took her to buy it. He'd been able to purchase his own clothes in under twenty minutes.

He was just turning back toward the shop when someone crashed into him.

"Don't worry about- Oh, hey Mulciber," he said. It was so weird seeing purebloods out of context.

He leant on the nearest wall and wished he smoked. Or that there was some wizard equivalent of smoking that was just as cool but not as unhealthy.

"So, slumming it with the muggles, are we? What's that about?"

Once she realized who it was that she'd bumped into, Dani raised an eyebrow. "Ashcroft." she said in a sort of greeting with a slightly nod. She gave a small scoff and shook her head at him. "As if." she sighed and ran a hand through her long blonde hair.

"I'm here to get away from my brother. I meant to go somewhere else, but it doesn't matter." she told him. "As long as I've lost him." she sighed again.

Nathaniel was just plain annoying to her. If he would actually help her with something, then maybe she wouldn't try to get away from him. All the time he says that he's only doing what their parents told him too, which she was still unsure what that was, but she didn't believe him.

He just wanted to be a pain in her arse and she was sick of it. "So, what are you doing here?" she asked him. "Keeping your sister company?" she added with a small smirk.

As Danielle voiced her revulsion at the idea of deliberately mixing with muggles, Shylock's gaze deliberately wandered to the bare legs of a pretty thing walking down the opposite side of the street. There were plenty of other half-bloods and even some muggle-born students in Slytherin, but few of them fit in well enough that the rest of the house forgot their blood status.

His attention was drawn back and an amused smile curled onto Shylock's lips as the girl complained about her brother's protectiveness.

"Do I need to watch my back, then?" he began, intending to tease her about having the sort of brother who wanted to keep her an innocent virgin forever.

"Hey! Are you trying to imply I'm like your brother? I assure you, when Destrey doesn't like me being around her, she's perfectly capable of getting rid of me."

"When she spends half the day buying clothes, for example," he added with a wave toward the shop his sister was currently inside. "But we're really here because we were on our way to Diagon Alley."

Dani saw his gaze wander to the other side of the street and she rolled her eyes. She didn't even need to turn around to know what he was looking at, it didn't take much to figure out where he was looking. Sometimes she wondered how halfbloods and muggleborns got into their house, after all that was against Salazar Slytherin's views. But their personalities had something that made them a part of Slytherin, even though she never saw it. Like one of their recent graduates, Yumi Zante. She wasn't exactly sure what the girl was, but she knew she wasn't a pureblood. Yet she'd been sorted into Slytherin.

"I wouldn't worry about Nathaniel." she said, waving her hand passively. "Right now, he's too 'heart-broken' to even think straight." she rolled her eyes again. For once, she was grateful that Nathaniel had fallen in love with that stupid Gryffindor halfblood. "His little 'crush" got herself killed recently." she smiled. Any other sister would feel bad for her brother when he lost what he called the love of his life, but she didn't.

Dani waved her hand in his face, almost flicking it with her long, slender fingers. "Oh calm down. You're nothing like my brother." she told him. "At least I hope you aren't. Otherwise, you'd be no fun just like him." she said. "That, and you'd be heart-broken over a Gryffindor who rejected you twice before she got killed." she added.

Shylock jerked back to avoid her flickering fingers, then reached across to roll a lock of her hair between his own.

"Dani, Dani, Danielle," he murmured.

"So spiteful so young? It's just you and me here, and I'm not impressed by that sort of thing," he went on. "Relishing another person's death is not an attractive trait, regardless of who they were."

He dropped her hair with a smile, though. Shylock barely knew Nathaniel Mulciber and had no idea who he'd been keen on. In the last few years, people were knocked off at Hogwarts all the time. The staff had long since dispensed with making announcements about it.

"But maybe you can tutor me. I understand the pure blood thing, even if it is based on faulty premises, but Gryffindor hatred? Plenty of purebloods have been sorted to Gryffindor."

Dani rolled her eyes again and smirked. "And who said I was trying to impress you?" she asked him. She didn't pull away when he grabbed a strand of her hair. She waved her hand passively at him. "That doesn't matter to me." she said and tossed her hair over her shoulder.

It was just really annoying to have a brother who was so heart broken over a girl he would never be able to have. Not just because she was dead now, it was that their parents had set up arranged marriages for them shortly after each of them were born. Either way, he would never be able to have that girl. And frankly she was glad about that.

"It's not so much about the pureblood status that counts for the Gryffindor hatred. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it has something to do with the feud between Salazar Slytherin and Godric Gryffindor. I'm sure you know about that." she said as she played with a strand of her hair.

Shylock raised an eyebrow. A Slytherin who didn't care about image? Surely he'd heard wrong.

"What do you mean it doesn't matter?" he asked. "What about your reputation? I mean, sure, Slytherins won't care how you act, but we're just one house out of four. Not to mention the rest of the world."




((sorry, so short. I have to sleep now!))