Pansy Parkinson had developed, over the course of the fall, a theory concerning the boy who had fallen.
Her theory was, as yet, not a theory as one might call such things — not the kind Hermione Granger might use the word.
It was an initial formation – the kind of idea a person formed after observing another person, intermittently, over several weeks and having the observation fail to cease being interesting.
Pansy, for her part, did not generally pay close attention to those around her unless they were her own people.
There were certain individuals whom she observed closely, in addition to whom there was everybody else.
Cael Mourne, eight weeks earlier, had been neither.
He was neither of those things anymore.
He was on a list of his own.
That list, in truth, had only a single name on it.
She did not, at thirteen years of age, name the list.
Even in private, she avoided such things.
They were, in her house, dangerous ideas to put into words — to defend.
The list remained unnamed, a matter of habit.
The list contained one boy.
She was, today, at the library at her regular table at the fourth aisle.
She was studying Arithmancy, which, in her mind, was a mechanical subject – a problem set she could do in her sleep.
Today, however, she had already reached the end of the third problem, and her attention had wandered.
She had let it wander.
Normally, Pansy would avoid letting her attention wander in public.
She would say she was a girl who paid attention to the room.
However, the room that day contained the boy Cael Mourne who was, currently, doing something she had been watching for fifteen minutes.
He was organizing his notebook.
Since November, she had watched, gradually and consistently, the development of this project before her eyes.
Every evening he came to the library, and always, with the same notebook, small and dull, bound in a manner that suggested the Muggle price of six pennies.
Additionally, always, there were several reference books as well.
Then, finally, he wrote, in an almost unintelligible handwriting which she could only decipher in its most basic elements from a few feet away.
He was not hiding the notebook, yet he was not displaying it either.
His actions had the character of those of an artisan who did work in public, efficiently and with precision.
Now he was no longer entering entries into the notebook, instead, moving them from one place to another.
He had, she noted, turned to a new double page and started drawing a *grid*, with lines and with *categories* marked at the top of it.
Entries were being copied from the older pages into the grid itself.
He was organizing them.
She watched the process of organization.
For a long time.
The Arithmancy revision book, in front of her, remained untouched as the library at this time of day was nearly empty — Professor Pince at her desk, two seventh-years arguing in whispers in the back stack, a fourth-year Ravenclaw asleep on his book.
Pansy was, in essence, alone with the notebook across the table.
After some time, she began seeing it clearly.
The categories at the top of the grid were spells – classified by their nature.
*Offensive, defensive, utility, classroom.* The entries she saw him writing were, in accordance with their properties, moved into appropriate categories.
However, he was not moving them, he was connecting them.
Arrows led, apparently, across the page — an offensive spell inverted into a utility one.
The defense into offense, utility problem into utility spell.
The columns themselves were flipping.
It was not random.
Pansy was not a girl gifted with theories of magic.
On the contrary, she was good at Arithmancy, because it was mathematics, but also she understood rooms.
Nevertheless, she understood the structure behind the boy’s actions – just as she did understand the structure behind any social event her father drilled into her in the long evenings of her childhood.
The grid across from her contained a *hierarchy*.
It consisted in the inversion principle made tangible and visible in shapes and forms.
He had, it seemed to Pansy, discovered, in the thirty or so entries he had written, what his magic actually meant.
He had not yet realized, perhaps, that this was the discovery in and of itself.
He flipped to a new page.
He created a column, to the right side of his notebook and unclassified.
He labeled it, with small handwriting which Pansy could not read from where she was.
After that, he looked down at the grid and sketched two more arrows crossing diagonally from the offense into the defense column.
She, then, returned to her Arithmancy.
She finished her third problem.
She finished the fourth one, and completed the fifth one twice as fast as she normally would while concentrating somewhere else.
Closing the book, she collected her papers and left the library.
Without a glance towards him, she descended the staircase to the dungeons.
She did not have to look at him – she knew exactly what he was doing and she, suddenly, understood that she did not want him to know.
It was this last thought that was most interesting to her.
She considered it in passing on the staircase.
*I do not want him to know.* She tested the statement – and found it correct.
Then she considered the statement further, and asked herself *why* it was true.
To be honest, she was not immediately able to produce an answer.
There were two answers.
One was that information was something valuable that was to be stored and released properly – and she was not sure how to use it.
It was a satisfying enough reason, though incomplete.
The other answer, which she did not like at all, was that she had observed something private, unwanted, and, yet, watched nonetheless – and she wished to keep it because it was hers.
As a private possession, not because it held value for others.
She disliked the second answer.
Filing it away, she went downstairs to the dungeons.
That evening in the Slytherin common room, she sat in her usual spot on the green velvet sofa, with her Arithmancy book unread in front of her and watched, without watching, as Draco Malfoy entertained his audience of two seventh-year boys with a story involving humiliation of a Hufflepuff girl on that day.
The story was amusing, but not the kind of humor she would have found appealing two months ago.
No, she did not laugh.
Instead, she made the necessary noise and paid attention to the story – though, as she listened to Draco, she did not find the usual laugh in her chest.
She closed the Arithmancy book.
She went up to her dormitory.
In her dormitory, in her bed, and in her private notebook, presented by her mother for her last birthday – leather-bound, locked with a charm that only her wand can open and which was, in general, the only kind acceptable for a girl her age – she wrote, in smaller letters: *Mourne, Cael.
Gryffindor.
Spells’ inverter.
Organized his notebook.
Found a structure in the process.
The structure is the discovery.
Must not tell anyone.* Looking at the page, she added: *Must especially not tell Draco.* She closed the notebook.
Locked it.
Put it under her pillow – her usual hiding place, known to Draco and which, in truth, every pure-blood Slytherin girl in the room could guess.
Protection was provided by the charm, but location was simply where she kept it.
She went to sleep.
But did not fall asleep immediately.
Lying on her back, she watched the pale green light of the lake shining through her window, where there appeared to be a slow-moving big fish – and she thought about the boy who wrote neatly in the notebook and the small feeling she did not have yet but also did not want to have a name for.
Eventually, she fell asleep.
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