Hogwarts: The Legacy

(c)2005 by Josh Cohen. May not be reprinted, except for personal use. The Potterverse was created by JK Rowling, and remains her property. I\'m just borrowing it for a little while.

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TWENTY-FIVE: FOR JAMIE

Warning: contains Quidditch, and a tiny bit of masturbation toward the end.

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Saturday progressed slowly, most of the students staying in their common rooms or dormitories, reflecting upon Professor Snape’s lecture. But for the Ravenclaw Quidditch side, there was a very different form of reflection going on.

“We can’t let this sit,” Wesley said, his voice soft. He was sitting in one of the benches in Professor Flitwick’s classroom, his arm around Marianne, who’d been excused from prefect duties for the day so she could meet with the team. “I didn’t like Jamie very much, but none of us should’ve let this happen.”

“One of us tried to stave it off,” Andrew noted, looking at Jason, who sat on the other side of Marianne’s chair, his chin in his hands. “One of us tried to be there for her.” Jason had told the team everything, from meeting Jamie during summer holidays to the parts of his meeting with Snape, Vector, and Flitwick that were already public knowledge. “I should’ve seen what was going on. Amber told me what MacTavish was doing, and while I didn’t much like Jamie either, this was unfair.”

“You were at the Quidditch party, Andrew,” said Fabian. Wesley had been suffering from influenza that weekend and hadn’t made it. “But from what I hear, there’s enough liquor at those things to render the entire student body blind.”

“Sounds about right. Not that it would’ve mattered.”

“Why not?” Francesca leered at Andrew. She knew what he would say, but she was looking forward to taking a mild amount of perverse pleasure in hearing him admit it. “Found yourself a nice groupie?”

He fought the urge to rise to the bait. “What I did is none of your business, Francesca.”

“Oh, but I think it is most definitely our business what you and Amber got up to.”

“I never said!” Andrew protested, but the flush in his face gave him away.

“I don’t follow,” said Colin, who had been very quiet through all of this – he was Jason’s friend, to be sure, but still so new on the team that he wasn’t sure exactly where he stood all the time. “You and Amber...”

“That’s right,” Francesca said, exultant. “He’s shagging Amber Locksley, the Slytherin seeker.”

“But...”

“No, Colin, she’s right.” Andrew stood up – he’d been sitting on the edge of Flitwick’s desk – and then leaned his hip against the corner. “I’ve been in a relationship with Amber since the train at the start of last year. She kissed me on a dare, and we both got into it, and... well... here we are...”

Marianne blushed a little; no one except Jason noticed. She’d been the one to initiate the dare, and her older sister, the now-graduated Slytherin chaser Aurelia Flint, had let slip during winter holidays that the seeker was seeing Andrew. She’d thought it the better part of valor to be discreet.

Jason had known as well, but it hadn’t mattered to him. Even when Amber had caught the snitch during the match against Slytherin last year, Jason hadn’t worried; Andrew was fanatical about Quidditch, and there was no way he’d sabotage their chances, not even for love. Or sex. He was sure of that.

Francesca didn’t seem to want to let it go. “I still can’t believe you kept it quiet for so long. Andrew Colwyn, the untouchable Ravenclaw who never responds to anyone’s advances, and look at you, getting it on with our opponents. I’d laugh if I could. This is just so absurd!”

“Shut your mouth,” Jason snapped, his voice soft.

She rounded on him. “Excuse me?”

“What Andrew does in his private life doesn’t matter. What any of us do in our private lives doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, but it does.” Francesca had been lounging on the desks across the aisle; she got to her feet and stalked across to where Jason was sitting, lowering her face and peering at him with yellow-amber eyes. “It certainly mattered for Jamie–urk!”

Jason’s hand was wrapped around Francesca’s throat. No one had seen him move. “Shut. Up.” His voice was a growl.

“Let her go!” Andrew roared, but Jason just flicked his eyes in the captain’s direction and looked back at Francesca.

The other beater was clawing at his fingers, drawing bloody furrows with her nails. Her face was turning a strange shade of red, and a green glow was growing around the tips of Jason’s fingers.

“You will never say her name again, except to agree with me that we will make this right. Do you understand?”

Francesca’s slender, strong hands were clutching at Jason’s wrist. She nodded fiercely, and he let go by pushing her away. She fell backward and stumbled, landing on her bottom in the middle of the classroom.

Marianne performed a quick healing spell on the scratches on Jason’s hands – he didn’t even notice, though; his eyes were locked on Francesca, who was pulling out her wand.

“Stop!”

They all turned to look at Fabian, who had been leaning against the desks next to where Fiona had been lounging.

“This is getting us nowhere. I think Jason has a plan, and I think we’d all better listen to him. He was closest to her, of all of us, and he deserves the right to do what he thinks is best. And we all should be helping him, not antagonizing him.”

Jason looked over at Fabian. “Thank you,” he whispered, tears glittering in his eyes.

“Think nothing of it. Just tell us what’s on your mind.”

Jason stood up, massaging the fingers of his right hand. “I don’t really have a plan yet, despite what Fabian thinks. But there’s a few people who I’d like to have a bit of a reckoning with.”

“Like whom?” Andrew asked.

“Well, we can’t do anything about the Hufflepuffs. Antonovich and Taggart are at university or wherever, and Alexei had nothing to do with this. Savant probably kept it quiet, but I don’t know.”

“Then what do we do?” Marianne’s voice was quiet; she’d been glad to hear that Lisa had broken her sister’s nose in the match against Slytherin last year after Aurelia had knocked her off her broom and sent her to the hospital wing, but planned revenge was not her thing.

“I want MacTavish,” Jason said. “When we play Slytherin, he’s mine. And I’m not too thrilled with the Gryffindor team as a whole. If I was in trouble, I know you all would come to my aid, but the fact that Jamie didn’t think she could go to them says something about that whole group. But it’s MacTavish that’s going to take the fall for this.

“That fucker is going down.”

The Ravenclaw team put in extra time at practice the next week, preparing for their postponed match against Hufflepuff, which had been scheduled for the next Saturday. The face-off went the same as it had on November First, but this time, Professor Bryant did not run out onto the pitch to call “hold!”

It was a textbook match, as close-fought as the previous year, and after about half an hour, both teams were tied at 110.

That was when the snitch was spotted over the Gryffindor stands and the announcer, a fifth year Gryffindor named Allan Michaels, announced, “and there goes Keeler; she stops on a knut and accelerates better than anyone I’ve seen, except maybe Jamie Dupree, rest her soul.”

Jason had been chasing Laura Bones, the yellow 46 on the back of her Quidditch robe fluttering in the crossbreeze. When he heard Jamie’s name, he pulled up and curved over Bones, left leg hanging onto his broom, snatching the Quaffle out of her hands in what Michaels called “an amazing steal; Bones had no idea it was coming!” and barrel-rolling to an upright position toward the goal hoops.

Marianne called out a play; Jason ignored it.

Colin yelled for him to pass; Jason ignored it.

His eyes were on Oliver Wilson, the Hufflepuff keeper. And Wilson and his yellow 39 were growing closer by the second.

There was no subtlety to the play. Jason simply pointed his broom wherever Wilson moved to, bearing down on him like a blue-robed rocket.

But Oliver realized that Jason wasn’t stopping, and with less than five feet to spare, he dropped out of the way and Jason flung the Quaffle through the center hoop, scoring his first goal of the match.

The Ravenclaw stands erupted in cheers. Jason swung around and formed up with the other chasers, then turned to the Gryffindor stands. “For Jamie!” he yelled.

To his surprise, most of the younger Gryffindors took up the chant: “For Jamie! For Jamie! For Jamie!” The Ravenclaws immediately latched on; the Hufflepuffs abstained, since it was after all their keeper who’d just let in Jason’s goal, no matter who it was for.

To everyone’s surprise, even some of the Slytherins started chanting as well.

The shock was too much for the Hufflepuff chasers; their beaters kept the bludgers away, but the chants were too loud for Savant, the seventh year Hufflepuff captain, to communicate to his new chasers what plays to run.

The Ravenclaws had no such trouble, and two goals later – both scored by Jason – the Hufflepuffs were floundering.

Andrew sent a bludger in the direction of Keeler, who had to pull up to avoid it, and Wesley grabbed the snitch a moment later, ending the match, 280 to 110.

The “For Jamie!” cheers grew louder as the Ravenclaws took a victory lap, pumping their fists to the beat, Jason in the lead, followed closely by Wesley, who held the snitch aloft.

The cheers quieted after a while, and the Ravenclaws formed up to shake hands with the Hufflepuffs. As Jason shook Richard Savant’s hand, he leaned in and whispered, “you could have done something.”

“What for?”

He leveled his eyes at the older boy. “For Jamie.”

In the common room, an hour after the end of the match, Jason stood up on the railing around where the Quidditch team customarily held court during the after-party, and raised his hands. The common room quieted, and he raised his voice, the timbre of it filling the entire common room without the need for any magical aid.

“I dedicate that win to Jamie Dupree, who was my friend!”

Cheers erupted, and Jason waited for them to die down.

“Maybe no one else was willing to do anything, but Ravenclaw has never backed down from a calling!”

“Never!” came the answering call.

“Ravenclaw has never allowed a wrong to remain un-righted!”

“Never!”

“Ravenclaw will make sure that what happened to Jamie Dupree never happens again!”

“For Jamie!”

Jason raised both fists. He was nearly crying again. “For Jamie!”

The cheers were still shaking the foundations of the Ravenclaw Tower when Jason stepped backward, his trainers making a small thump as he hit the wooden floor. Andrew put his arm around his chaser and steered him back to a couch. Jason plunked himself down next to Colin, who was basking in the adulation he’d only watched others bask in before today.

“You’re a good man!” Colin shouted over the cheers, his voice a little slurred; Francesca had broken out her contraband for the celebration. “You’ll make this right, I know it!”

“Damn right!” Jason shouted back. Someone pressed a bottle into his hand and he almost drank it before he realized it was butterbeer – which he still didn’t much care for – and passed it on to another waiting hand.

He looked up, around the balcony above them and across the tower. He met Caroline’s dark-gray eyes. She nodded at him and turned to Alison and Dina, who were up there with her. They all looked over and watched him as he met their gaze, then nodded back.

“For Jamie,” he whispered.

“You really cared about her,” Caroline said softly.

Jason already had his arms around Caroline; they were snuggled together on one of the couches in their alcove. It was nearly midnight, and most everyone was sleeping it off or celebrating in more private ways – Jason was sure he’d seen Andrew spirit Amber Locksley up to his room a few hours previously. Jason had broken away from the others to join Caroline, and after Dina and Alison had gone off to bed, the two of them had moved closer on the couch.

“I really did,” Jason said. “It was easy to be her friend in the summer holidays, and she really needed me the past two months.”

“You were there for her,” Caroline assured him. She turned in his arms to rest her cheek against his chest, the cotton of his Ravenclaw Athletics t-shirt soft against her skin. Her arms were around his waist, hands linked at the base of his spine. She wondered why this strange position wasn’t putting a crick in her neck, even though her brain told her it should. She breathed deeply, the scent of soap and detergent and under it all the scent of “Jason”-ness that she liked so much making her lower stomach twist.

“Not enough.” He nuzzled her waves of ice-blond hair with his nose, pressing his lips to the crown of her head. “Or else she’d still be here.”

Caroline felt something drip into her hair, and she squeezed him tighter. “I’ve been with you every day for the past two months. I’ve seen how being with her made you feel. You were there for her. You were a good friend to her. If she’d had more like you, then maybe...”

Jason finished her thought. “Maybe she wouldn’t be dead. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to meet her parents and tell them how sorry I was. Aberdeen’s a small community; her parents know my parents, and my parents are going to be including them in family gatherings for years because of this. Every time I go home for holidays I’ll be reminded of her. They’ll make me visit her grave. I don’t want that.” The last was in a harsh whisper; Caroline felt more tears fall into her hair. His body was tight and tense against hers. “I want to remember her as she was, not as she is.”

“I understand,” Caroline said simply. She remembered watching Grandfather as his age advanced on him and he advanced on his own passing. “I will miss her too.” Caroline had occasionally sat with Jason and Jamie.

“I know.” He snatched his wand up from the table and transfigured a couple of sheets of parchment into tissue, then wiped his face with one. Caroline looked up at him, face serious. “What is it?”

She allowed herself a small smile, then went back to pressing her cheek against his chest, holding him as he cried, silently, for Jamie.

She had no idea how to articulate how she felt about the force of feeling she was getting from him. She had no idea how to tell him how much she admired – maybe even loved – the way he put his entire being into everything. She had no idea how to tell him...

...she blushed, glad that he couldn’t see her face, and nuzzled his chest, his arms holding her close to him...

...that she thought she might love him.

Two hours later, Caroline finally went up to bed. Jason had dozed off; she’d written him a note telling him that she’d gone to sleep, and that she’d see him in the morning. He’d barely stirred.

Dina was sitting in her bed, her back propped up against a pile of pillows, reading from their DADA text. Professor Lupin’s reading material, Dina had told them – Jason had concurred – was often dry enough to put her to sleep in a few minutes. The curtains around Lady Margolotta’s bed were drawn, and, surprisingly, so where the curtains around Alison’s.

“Is Alison all right?” Caroline asked.

Dina nodded and set a bookmark in the text before closing it. “I think she may have gotten up to something with a boy. She came back around eleven, and her lipstick was smudged. Her shirt was also half-unbuttoned.”

Caroline lifted her brushstroke-blond eyebrows. “I wonder who it might have been.”

“All I know is it wasn’t Christopher.”

“How?” Caroline slipped off her black flats and started unbuttoning the tiny black buttons of her dark-blue dress.

When Dina remained silent, Caroline looked up. The dark girl’s face was flushed.

“Dina?”

She swallowed. “He made a move on me. I actually kissed him.”

“Oh.” Caroline shrugged the dress off, then pulled her slip over her head before walking around her bed to where she kept her nightgown. “Is that good?”

Dina blushed harder. “The kissing was all right. But he tried to... um...” She bit her lip. “Touch me.”

“Did you want him to?” Caroline unhooked her plain blue brassiere and placed it in the laundry bag before pulling the soft flannel nightgown – it was a gift from her mother, pale blue with a large white teddy-bear on the front – over her head.

“Not really. But it felt nice.”

“Did it?” Caroline climbed into her bed – it was on the other side of Dina’s, whose bed was between Caroline’s and Alison’s.

Dina nodded. “But I only let him do it for a moment before I stopped him anyway. It seemed... I don’t know... wrong somehow.”

“But you said it felt pleasurable.” She pulled the covers up under her chin and rolled onto her side, facing Dina, her head on the edge of her pillows.

“I know.” Another flush to Dina’s fine, narrow cheekbones. “I can’t explain it.”

“Maybe Alison can help.”

“Maybe.” Dina glanced over at Alison’s closed curtains. “If she hadn’t just fallen into bed when she got back. I closed the curtains for her.” She picked up her book and reopened it. “I still can’t sleep.”

Caroline took her wand off her nightstand. “I’m going to close my curtains, then, to keep out the light. Good night, Dina.”

“Good night, Caroline.”

A twitch of the wand put Caroline in semidarkness; another twitch and a soft incantation cast a powerful silencing spell around the bed. This was one charm that Caroline exceeded at.

And it was useful, she thought ruefully as she lifted her nightgown and slipped her hand into her pants.

She tended to make a fair bit of noise when she reached orgasm, and realizing her feelings for Jason – and imagining how it would feel when he turned the strength of those feelings full-force onto her – drove her orgasm far beyond the “needs must” type and into the “mind-numbing, knee-quivering, soaked-pants, change-the-sheets” category.

Caroline slept very well that night.

Dina Patil knew exactly what Caroline Malfoy was doing when the curtains were drawn. She had experimented with her own curtains drawn, but even in guaranteed solitude, she’d blushed and pulled her hand away.

She envied Caroline and Alison. She had a feeling that she’d be under much less stress and tension if she could just...

...but she couldn’t.

Dina sighed, closed the book, extinguished the light, and closed her eyes.

She eventually fell into a restless sleep, still angry at herself for being unable to take care of this one little detail.

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Notes: Yes, yes, I know, it\'s inconsistent that some of the team is \"just finding out\" about Amber now. I know I revealed it in the after-party at the end of the previous schoolyear. I don\'t really feel like changing the story (you\'ll find out why in the next chapter), so let\'s just say that Andrew and Amber were snuggling for the hell of it, and no one had put two and two together just yet except for the people I\'ve already explained in those previous chapters.