How to Make a Villain - [Sebastian Sallow x F!OC]

[twelve]

'Well, that was your first mistake,' said Poppy Sweeting, who was so small in stature she had to stretch up on her toes to reach the Thestral she was hand-feeding. 'Never share a secret with a Slytherin.'

Dusk had settled over the school grounds, all melancholic blues and gloomy purples. Three weeks living in the Scottish Highlands had taught Aurélie not to expect the ruby-hued evenings or rose-gold sunsets she'd loved so dearly in Southern France. In fact, it felt to her as if winter had arrived early, staunchly elbowing autumn out of the way to hang thick and dreary over a month it was supposed to have no claim over.

The Hogwarts stables, in which she found herself shivering one particularly dreary evening, were much like everything else in the castle: dim, dingy, and cold. The long stone structure, nestled against the backdrop of the forbidden forest, was set so far on the outskirts of the grounds that only the nearby Quidditch pitch overshadowed it.

Aurélie was no stranger to the inside of a stable, having spent most of her free time with the giant winged horses at Beauxbaton; the familiar smell of fresh straw, damp earth and something distinctly animal conjured memories of home that hurt as much as they soothed. Still, it was nice to know that horses smelled the same no matter which country she was in.

Unlike Beauxbatons, however, whose pristine stables were home to the school's herd of whisky-drinking Abraxans, Hogwarts dealt primarily with carnivorous Thestrals, who ate nothing but raw meat and did so with unsettling vigour. In the rapidly deepening twilight, their skeletal forms were almost indistinguishable from that of shadow and darkness; only the flash of white eyes or gnash of hungry teeth gave any indication they were there at all until her well-practised lumos threw their reptilian faces into sharp relief.

Spending her evenings with bat-winged creatures of pain and misfortune hadn't exactly been high on Aurélie's list of Things to Do At Hogwarts, but since she and Poppy were the only two students in their Beasts who could actually see them, their teacher, Professor Howin, had assigned Thestral care to their N.E.W.T studies.

'It's rare I ever have one student who can see them, let alone two!' Howin had said, delighted, as she'd ushered them toward the stables with a bucket of raw meat and a merry warning to 'watch your fingers!'

Aurélie shifted the weight of the meat bucket from hand to hand as the nearest Thestral - an imposing beast by the name of Sugar - stretched its long sinewy neck toward it with a hopeful snuff.

'And what was my second mistake?' she asked, worrying her lip between her teeth.

'The second,' replied Poppy with a sympathetic smile, 'was letting the Slytherin tell you one of his.'

If Aurélie had hoped that time would quell the novelty of being the new girl at Hogwarts, she was mistaken - and bitterly so. Thanks again to Sebastian bloody Sallow and their ill-fated trip to Hogsmeade together, her notoriety had only increased ten-fold in the weeks that had passed since she'd arrived. Only it wasn't her secret Ancient Magic or tragic backstory that had whipped the gossip mill into a frenzy (for Sebastian, it seemed, had kept true to his word to guard her secret), but the rumours that the tall, gorgeous, Quidditch captain had taken the strange, stuck-up Frenchie as his new girlfriend.

His girlfriend.

Aurélie clenched her fists.

The very notion that anyone could seriously believe -

The audacity to think she'd even consider -

And him, of all people!

The mere thought of it made her want to blast a hole through the nearest wall; only now, the familiar hot spike of magic in her hands was accompanied by an equally hot and spikey feeling in her chest that she could only attribute to an intense, eternally-burning irritation for the boy who would not let her be.