Pansy Parkinson returned to Hogwarts in September of her fourth year, and the first thing she did was establish whether she still found Cael Mourne interesting, and whether she found him interesting, irritatingly, still was.
It wasn’t that she had, during the summer, intended to do otherwise.
It was also, she had told herself in the middle of the night on a morning in July at her grandmother’s house in the wake of the Quidditch World Cup and the beginning of a long summer ahead of her, that watching the boy who fell had been a project of Year Three, and that the project of Year Four would be entirely different.
It was also, that this different project would be Arithmancy – she had a tutor during that summer for the first time, and she liked the retired professor, who was calm and kind and considered her mature enough to discuss adult topics with.
And finally, beyond Arithmancy, the project for the coming year would be the management of her position in Slytherin.
She was fourteen years old.
Fourteen-year-old Slytherins had work to do.
This was familiar work, and she was quite good at it.
By late August, she had decided that she had come to the end of her watching of the boy who fell.
Forty minutes on the Hogwarts Express convinced her that she had been mistaken.
There had been, at that point, two things that she noticed in him.
The first thing was that he had been, standing with his little witness circle.
And second, he had been laughing at something.
He had also been, on his own, levitating his trunk.
She had not, when passing through the station with Draco and his group, caught his gaze.
Nor had he caught hers.
She had known, from the way she had noticed she had not been meeting his eyes that he had also not been meeting hers.
She had observed the sensation of *not looking* pass through her with a certain disinterested fascination, like a candle flame affected by a sudden draught.
So there it was.
She was still doing it.
She was, this Wednesday afternoon, at her usual table in the fourth aisle of the library with her Charms revision laid out in front of her according to her meticulous revision procedure.
He was also, this afternoon, at his table – *at his table*, insofar as he seemed to have been occupying it for weeks consistently enough that the second years had begun thinking of it as *his table* – with two reference books open beside him and the dark notebook lying open on the wooden desk.
The notebook had grown in size – she had, from the distance, discerned that sometime in the late spring he had replaced his former notebook with a larger one.
She watched, this afternoon, as he worked with the new notebook.
The new page he was working on carried, in his tiny handwriting, the title *Reversed Wingardium Leviosa – Calibration*.
He was using cards.
That was new.
The cards, lying in stacks on his desk near the notebook, were the same kind as one could easily purchase in dozens of the Hogwarts stationery store in packages of fifty each.
What he was doing was sinking the cards, one by one, into the surface of the table – not entirely; only one inch – and then halting the levitation spell.
He was then, after noting his progress, picking the card from the table, and repeating the process with the next one.
She realized, as he reached for the third card, that what he was doing was calibrating to halt levitation at a precise point.
She watched.
She no longer even pretended that she was revising Charms.
He was levitating cards, one by one.
Some of them went straight; some went too far down or too shallowly.
Most went perfectly according to the point of one inch of submersion.
Most of them also did not go quite correctly; but every time he got it almost right, but not quite.
He was practicing the precision with which to do it, precisely as if it was an artist who was practicing drawing the same line again and again until he achieved absolute consistency.
He leaned back.
He surveyed his row of eleven cards.
He lifted them gently by their edges in a row, tapping them against the wood.
Then he set them aside, took a new sheet of parchment and drew a grid onto it.
She had known – in the spring, she had observed from across the library that this young man had a pattern; and she had thought, with the thought *I have made a discovery*, and kept it in her chest as a private possession.
She had never, however, comprehended the significance of the second observation, until today – the boy was not only *discovering* a pattern; he was training the ability to produce it.
He was, day after day, teaching himself to master a precise muscle memory which allowed him to use his magical power with maximum efficiency.
That realization hung in the air between them.
It clicked into place like a key turning in a long-open lock.
She had not, it seemed, before seen what he was actually doing.
He was not managing.
He had, in fact, stopped coping a long time ago; possibly even as early as the month of his arrival.
He was not coping anymore; he had moved on to *development*.
He was developing his skills slowly and systematically, with the confidence and patience with which a craftsman developed his instrument.
And she saw him with a fresh clarity as an instrument to develop.
She watched him for forty minutes.
He never once raised his head.
He either did not know she was watching, or cared that he did not; in any case, it intrigued her equally either way.
She gathered up her things from her Charms revision.
In her dorm room, lying down on her bed with the notebook, she wrote her second-ever entry regarding Mourne: *Mourne.
Calibrating reversed Wingardium Leviosa to within a fraction of an inch.
Doing it by repetition.
He is training, not coping.
The project is years long.
He is – fourteen – and operating with a patience of a man.* She paused.
She added, on the next line, in slightly smaller handwriting: *I don’t know what to do with the fact that I find this attractive.* She sat for some time looking at the admission.
She drew a thin line through it so that she could read it.
She did not erase it.
Her upbringing had taught her that a line through a sentence, still legible, remained the admission that one was willing to retain.
She closed her notebook and tucked it away in her drawer underneath the pillow, and went down to dinner.
During dinner she sat beside Draco in the place where she had been sitting for four years already, laughing in the right places, answering when spoken to, eating a piece of roasted chicken while not tasting it.
Draco, in the middle of the dinner, had asked her if she was *all right*.
She had told him that she was tired.
He had accepted it without questioning further; as he usually did, accepting her competence with the half-interest of a man accustomed to it.
She watched him accept it, and filed it away.
She had a number of things to file away these days.
Across the hall, Mourne was eating with Longbottom.
Longbottom had apparently managed to amuse him – he had laughed, head buried in the hands and shoulders shaking, reluctantly and without amusement in his voice.
She had never seen him laugh like that.
She realized – she had not seen him laugh fully for three months.
He had done so softly, quickly, and recovered his composure.
Longbottom had looked smug.
Mourne had removed Longbottom’s elbow from his place with a movement of a brother.
She observed Longbottom’s amused smile across the room.
She filed that observation away too.
She closed her dinner.
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