SMILE » n. longbottom

liii

"CLARITY"

Alana stayed just underneath one of the Forbidden Forest's many trees, watching the snow fall just past its hanging branches and collect onto the forest floor. She had passed a note to the bodyguard that her parents had sent to guard her just after the end of their Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson. She hugged to knees to her chest and wondered how snow had came so early to Hogwarts, perhaps it had been due to her disinterest in the year.

She heard footsteps that crunched the snow beneath them. The girl stoop up, wiped the dirt from her legs and saw Slytherin robes swaying just past the trees with the snowflakes already collecting onto the student's shoulders. Alana noticed that it had been Jayden Brooks, not anybody else.

"Hello, Wallace," he had greeted, stepping underneath the cover of the trees. He seemed uninterested in what she had to say to him, which made Alana visibly uncomfortable. "What did you want to talk to me about?"

Alana crossed her arms in discomfort, not knowing how to come across the topic. She mumbled, taking in his stare, "I think that you may already know." The Hufflepuff saw him return to the face of distress that Erise had talked about the night before. She could tell that he had been thinking about the meeting, and she could tell that the incoherent mention of it had made him uncomfortable. "I'm sure you know about Erise's feelings for you, as well. And the truth is: we talked about how I — I mean how both of us had become worried for you."

Both of Jayden's eyebrows raised in speculation at her last words to him. "Oh, you mean how I am 'distressed'? Erise had seemed to ask me that as well, only way less indiscreet ... she isn't so careful about her words around me, surprisingly." Jayden softened his glare and stared out into the falling snow like how Alana had just moments before. The girl saw him ease into a more calm state, her shoulders dropping, as if trying not to pressure him even more.

Alana began to stare at the forest's calmness. There was no sound emitting from it, as if she could hear every snowflake collect more and more. She began to wonder what made the scene captivate her bodyguard so much. The snow fell like pure white ashes to the forest floor.

"I know that you consider me only a bodyguard, someone to guard you while you're here at Hogwarts. The truth is —" he shuddered, shivering in his robes. He pulled his sleeves around his arms more, trying to pretend that he was cold. "The truth is I actually care about you. I feel like I failed when I saw you in that room, I had been hired to protect you."

"I don't understa—"

"You aren't expected to," he interrupted me. "It's not my place to tell you these things. I'm sorry." Jayden Brooks looked at her, her eyebrows sunken on his face. He pulled his robes tighter against himself and started to head towards the school's grounds. "We should head back, I'm sorry that I came here."

Alana only nodded. She noted how his whole personality had changed since he arrived at the room where everyone had met the day before. As if he had been recollecting thoughts in his mind all day, and that is all of what he had to say. She didn't expect more to come. She saw how Jayden tightly pressed his lips together, as if he had regretted even becoming friends with Alana as well.

It had been four days since Alana and Jayden last spoke. He always seemed to be disappearing whenever Alana had decided to begin speaking again to him. She had arrived at the Great Hall and saw in the corner of her eye a familiar face. It had been Brooks, who sat next to his fellow Slytherins, especially the nastier lot of the house, Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle, and some other students as well.

Once Brooks stared at her, the rest turned their heads and sneered. A badge hung from their clothes and Alana had realized that he had joined the group that had became determined to get rid of the meetings that Alana had been apart of, named the Inquisitorial Squad.

She didn't see the same glare in Brooks' eyes that the rest of the squad had seemed to have. Alana bowed her head at the memory of their conversation that they shared in the Forbidden Forest, and at how vague he had been and especially when she thought that he had just begun to open up to her. Alana walked down to the other side of the large room and sat down at the table where other Hufflepuffs had sat.

Erise had been reading the pages of her Defense Against the Dark Arts book that sat propped up on the Hufflepuff table with a confused look. Her cat sat across her the top of her legs, Erise's cloak covering the cat as she leaned forward, trying to understand the meaning of some of the sentences in her book. She grumbled as if she was in physical pain, "None of this makes sense..."

"It never made sense," Alana sighed, then looked curiously at the cat which chirped quietly. She whispered, careful for Professor Umbridge to not hear: "What is Buttercup doing here?"

"Sshhhhhh!" Erise whispered with a furious eyes just above her book from across the table. She rolled her eyes before focusing back onto the book, "That's besides the point. I'm trying to learn this." Erise winked, then Alana had realized that she had been putting up a façade that she had actually been trying to learn whatever Professor Umbridge had chosen to teach, but they both knew otherwise.

Alana nodded in response, and pulled out an assignment that she had planned to work on for the day.

A couple of hours had passed, and the assignment was almost complete and she became bored with it and started to look around the Hufflepuff table, and saw again something in the corner of her eye yet again like she had when she entered the Great Hall. But this time it was no traitorous bodyguard, but instead a friend of hers: Neville Longbottom.

He had been walking down the room in between the two tables, down to where Alana had been sitting. She quickly turned her attention to the front of the room where Professor Umbridge had once been, to realize that the toad had disappeared. Maybe she had left even before Neville had even thought of walking to her, Alana was uncertain as she had not exactly been paying attention to her surroundings. And, well until now.

Most of the students that had once been in the Great Hall had left, presumably to their houses' own common rooms. Only a few Hufflepuff students were still sitting at the table, but they sat on the opposite end of it.

Alana turned to see that Neville had just arrived.