Cast yourself (you are the spell)

Chapter 41

Hope remains frozen the entire night, only passing out in exhaustion during the early hours of the morning. Several times over, she tries to remind herself that this isn't personal, that it's just a necessary part of the prank war, that she's done worse than this before, but Josie's involvement in what happened still causes her to ache in a way that claws at her insides and makes any sleep she gets restless and futile.

She dreams of two words whispered apologetically in her ear, a hand clamped over her mouth, a wand pointed at her chest, an empty bottle of Firewhiskey-

Hope finally wakes up with a pounding headache, her mouth dry and the back of her throat terribly sore. Someone is shaking her, but she's too dizzy to even let that small detail register in her mind.

"Come on, Hope," the boy urges, and Hope groggily opens her eyes to catch a head of black locks. "Finite Incantatem."

Hope drops to the floor as the magical restraints binding her to the broom loosen and then disappear completely. She pulls at the tie dangling from her head and runs a frantic hand through her hair to dislodge the pigtails.

"Kirby?" she rasps out, coughing slightly. It's pretty dark in the great hall, but she's pretty sure the boy is Landon Kirby, which is super weird, if she can summon the energy to think about it.

"Here," Landon says, conjuring a goblet with his wand. Hope is slightly shocked, since she had previously thought that he was denser than a bag of rocks and couldn't perform spells past a first-year's level of knowledge. "Aguamenti."

He fills the goblet with water before passing it to Hope, who gulps it down so quickly that it dribbles down her chin. She chokes on the last sip, her throat closing up uncomfortably. She can barely inhale right.

"Oh, Merlin," Landon breathes, looking her up and down in a way that isn't sexual or crude, but horrified instead. "Did they...?"

Hope kicks off her heels, blinking. She's too astonished that he's even helping her to be rude or hostile. "What?"

Landon just stares at her, his green eyes wide. The pureblood understands after a long moment of dreadful silence.

"Oh, no," she says offhandedly. "They didn't. What time is it?"

"Four o'clock," he tells her, slightly breathless. He starts to dig through the bag on his shoulder Hope hadn't noticed before, pulling out a pair of yellow and white checkered pajama pants and a grey hoodie. Hope's eyes shine with excitement. She loves hoodies. "This is for you. I'm sorry, Hope, I wish I could have been here sooner."

Hope takes that moment to examine him, to really look at him. Although his eyes are wide and frantic, there's something tranquil and easygoing about him, something light in his smile, something in the way he calls her by her first name even though they don't talk.

It all gives her pause as Landon hands over the pajamas and turns around for her to change. Her voice might be too rough when she asks, "Why are you here?"

Landon's own voice becomes faint as she tugs on the hoodie over her unicorn shirt. She doesn't know why he's looking away, since she isn't really changing. Hope immediately feels much warmer with the hoodie on. To be fair, she's been freezing out here for quite a while. Hope then peels off the stockings and attempts to lift her foot into a pant leg.

"Rafael told me about what they were going to do, he actually wanted me to join, but I couldn't. It wasn't right, house rivalry or not. Josie told me where you'd be. She said, she said-nevermind. You have every right to tell a professor, Hope. You should know that."

Josie? Hope almost doesn't hear the rest of his sentence, every thought focused on the mere mention of the girl. Did Josie tell Landon to help her? Did Josie...?