"I hate you, I love you
I hate that I love you
Don't want to but I can't put
Nobody else above you"
MARAUDERS ERA
plot by @nikolaislantsovs
cover design by @Thalina_Stark
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The great, scarlet steam train pulled into King's Cross Station in the early hours of the late June evening. Camilla caught her own reflection in the glass of the window she had been staring out of for the last five hours and frowned. The prefect carriage bustled around her, everyone rushing to join the swarm of trolleys, students, pets, parents and siblings outside, but she couldn't look away. She studied the tired lines of her face, the shape of her jaw, the arch of her eyebrows and the outline of her nose. All so carefully arranged, as if since birth she'd had to be perfect, the correct fit so that she would fit into society as a proud, pureblooded witch. A demure, fanatical, respectable pureblooded witch. A lock of hair, that bright, warm red, fell across her eye and she turned away, the spell broken. She disliked its colour, and the colour of the eye it had obscured. Far too similar to her mother's. A short exhale left Camilla's lungs and she leaned her head back against the seat.
"Are you coming, Camilla?" Malfoy, who was in the chair across from her, asked as he rose. She appraised him silently. Since the disaster of the DADA exam, people had been looking at her with strange expressions. Pity mixed with a healthy dose of fear, perhaps. But what had been most intolerable about the whole thing were the reactions of her own party. Obscene curiosity, muted mockery and innocuous snide. It had been a relief to get away from most of them when they boarded the train this morning, but Lucius had been hanging around her, a fellow prefect. It had been five hours ago when he began to pry. And they'd been having such a good time, too.
"You go ahead," she responded coolly. "Have a good summer, Lucius. I'll send you an owl." He smiled back equally coolly and dragged his trunk behind him towards the stairs to the platform.
Camilla waited until the carriage had fallen all but silent. Then she stood up, pulled out the overhead bag and trunk from above and beneath the seats — both charmed while she was still at the castle to be lightweight — and hauled down the owl cage too. Augustus gave her a sleepy squawk, ruffling his feathers in irritation.
"Don't be like that," she said to the owl, tossing a piece of dried meat into the cage as penance for waking him from his nap. The bird snapped it up without opening his large, golden eyes. A truce. "Time to go," she said to him, wishing fervently that it wasn't.
Camilla descended from the train onto the platform as gracefully as she could with a birdcage in one arm and a trunk in the other. It was still busy, but mostly with muggleborns or half-bloods who couldn't be apparated away immediately, and younger students battling the crowd to escape. She forced her way through, heading for the back wall to cross into the muggle side of King's Cross Station, hardly noticing who she ploughed past. She was almost there when Augustus shrieked and nipped at one of her fingers. Camilla swore sharply and had to stop herself from dropping the ungrateful bird's ridiculous cage, immediately walking right into a solid body in her distracted state. Whoever it was stumbled forwards with a grunt, and turned around. Their protest died on their lips.
