Dominique Weasley would never claim to be beautiful, not because she wasn't aware of the fact, but she deemed that beauty was seen more in the way you held yourself than in your body or features.

Beauty was held in the light of your eyes, in the manner you treated others, in the confidence or fluidity of your walk, in the brightness of features or excitement when talking about or to something you loved.

Body size or features might hold relevance to others, but Dominique couldn't bring herself to think of them in the manner of dictating attractiveness or beauty.

Those girls she found herself admiring always held confidence over conventional attractiveness.

There was Callie Roy with her quiet assuredness that stood out as remarkable among the other Gryffindors that clamoured for attention. Then there was Keire Nott-Zabini with her hyper-intelligence and straight backed grace, confidence and strength held in every inch of her short body that was by no means to be underestimated. Mercy Gwana in the year above who commanded attention with the authoritative nature of her voice, even with the volume held low, and who could crack a joke about anything under the sun.

All people to be admired for strength rather than outward beauty.

All people that coincidentally, were female.

Dominique had always believed that when she looked at them it was in the manner of envy, that she wanted to be more like these incredible girls that weren't shy or awkward in the way she herself was, but the more she thought about it in that sense the less that that assessment seemed to ring true.

Was it possible that the reason she didn't consider the idea of dating all those boys because she genuinely held no interest in heading down that path at all? Could it perhaps be not a matter of youth, but a matter of looking for attraction among the wrong set of people?

She hadn't been lying to herself of anything, she quite literally hadn't made considerations as to this turn of events.

But now she knew as sure as day, that if  she were going to date anyone, it would be a girl that she sat besides.

This remarkable self-realisation had occurred over the course of several hours of physical labour in the stables, and was being pondered upon as she stared across the Great Hall to where Bethany Yau was laughing with a group of Gryffindors including Ricky Jordan.

She had barely even noticed the other girl before, beyond the bare minimum of seeing her in a few classes, yet almost immediately she was looking at her in a curious manner, picturing herself next to Bethany without even realising it.

In her mind, Bethany Yau was the one she attempted to rationalise her thought processes off of. Did she prefer the thought of holding her hand in Bethany's or one of the boys? Which gender of students did she look at more? Was there some way in which the other girl acted differently that might imply a different preference? Honestly, no, there wasn't.

Yet some of the other questions gave Dominique the answers she needed, as even the thought of standing besides Bethany was sending butterflies dancing in her stomach and tingles of anticipation to arch around her body.

Certainly a change from the typical embarrassed annoyance that she felt from boys professing that they liked her.

She was neatly concluding the trails of thoughts in her mind when Louie jogged up to her with Leila by his side, the two appearing quite cheerful.

"Hey!" greeted Leila, sliding into the space next to Dominique. "Did you know I'm on the Quidditch team thanks to you?"

"I did know you were on the team," Dominique nodded, with a look at Louie. "However I was under the impression that the outcome had already been finalised by the time I began my... escapade."

Leila shrugged. "Maybe. I hear that you were super badass! I can't believe I missed it -- I was sleeping. Everyone keeps muttering your insults, they've even been adapted to apply to different houses--"

"Never mind all that. We made you something!" cut in Louie, pressing a thick roll of parchment into Dominique's hands.

She unrolled it, to see writing from left to right in handwriting so neat it looked printed:

Hours of Detention | Served under [name teacher] | Signature | Total Hours Completed

The scroll had been filled in with the hour of detention served under Professor Flitwick, complete with a signature that the two must have collected from the man, and so Dominique jotted down the six hours of help she'd just given Professor Hagrid in the stables, leaving the signature column blank.

"Thanks Louie," she told her brother, a grin on her face as she rerolled the scroll. Her brother didn't really know what to do in the situation, that much was evident as his older sister had gotten into trouble defending him, leaving the boy unable to help in any way.

Meaning that he had to watch and do nothing as Dominique suffered fairly harsh consequences.

As a result, he was simply attempting to be as kind as possible to his sister in the meantime; where usually he'd only greet her if their paths happen to cross, now he was actively seeking her out.

It had been Leila's idea to make the scroll for Dominique to record detentions on, leaving Louie to write in the titles as neatly as possible.

Over the course of the weekend, Dominique managed to complete another eight hours of detention, leaving the time spent in an effort to work it off at fifteen hours. Just over three percent of the way through her punishment, which seemed like more than it probably was.

But when it came to lessons on Monday, Dominique was feeling quite satisfied with the balance she'd struck over the weekend.

She had completed all the homework that had been set to a high standard, got decent amounts of sleep, knocked off a pretty good portion of the detention time, and come to a self-realisation that deepened her understanding of what made her tick as a person. All in all, a highly satisfactory couple of days.

The next week went by in a similar vein, with Dominique attending detention for two hours every evening, during which most teachers just took pity on her extended punishment and have her work to do during the time. Along with three lunchtimes that replaced the time she worked for Professor Hagrid, Dominique had completed thirteen more hours of her time, bringing it up to twenty-eight hours in total.

It was a comfortable way of convincing herself that she was being productive with her time, as she often thought that she did too little with the lack of extra-curricular activities that most students occupied themselves with.

However while Dominique convinced herself that she didn't have free time, Keire was certainly looking to challenge that assumption.

It was Friday evening, and the corridors of Hogwarts were dim in the fading light, what little of the sun's rays that were still cast over the horizon being muffled by the mat of cloud cover that stretched across the sky, an unbroken sheet of bruising purple an steely grey. The sort of evening that felt cold even though the temperature wasn't necessarily held at a lower degree, the sort of evening that left Dominique Weasley wanting to draw the curtains around her four poster bed and curl up with a book under a pile of blankets.

But in the mind of Keire, there was no time for such things, because she was in the process of disproving one of the most widely accepted magical principles in the wizarding world, but more than that she was going to do it at such a young age that everyone would know her name.

Keire would not deny to want acknowledgement, to want her name and face across the front of the Daily Prophet, scrawled in textbooks and transfiguration journals and letters that would ask her to join research labs across the world.

But more than to be self-serving she wanted her family names to be cleared from the taint of the past. She wanted people in the future to look back on her lineage and say, "Nott-Zabini, they did great things. They alleviated world hunger and helped those that were worse off, the muggles and poorer wizards who couldn't afford food, those that their ancestors scorned."

Regardless of whether she actually held the bloodlines of the Nott family or the Zabini family -- she didn't -- she did hold the names, the heritage, the future. And she was going to do such great things with the precious gift of family that her parents had given her, such great things that the actions and beliefs held by her parents' parents would fade into irrelevance.

Such was the wish that Keire harboured, a wish that through hard work, determination, sleep-deprivation and probably favourable genetics in the intelligence department, she would make a reality.

However it would be nice to have someone to share the dreams with before they solidified.

Once Keire finally finished crafting her incantation, it wouldn't be nearly as miraculous as it was now. Once she had completed it, she would no longer be doing the impossible, she would have simply done the difficult.

Not nearly as remarkable.

But she got the impression that Dominique Weasley understood the gravity of what was happening, and not only that, but the girl who she'd simply seen as someone to exchange meaningless chatter with had actually provided her with such a key piece to the fluid puzzle that she was creating from ever shifting pieces.

She would certainly give Minnie the credit for that one, Transfiguring water was a vast accomplishment in and of itself. And all it had taken in the end was an hour of an open mind deliberating over the fact that great witches and wizards had never sought to combine two rival subjects.

Water.

Vessel.

Just like that. Keire still shivered in delight just thinking about it.

But in spite of the fact she had cast Minnie's Charm-Transfiguration hybrid spell about two hundred times over the course of the week in the name of "empirical testing", it was time to move on.

Learning how to cast non-verbal incantations was next on the list, as Keire was fully aware that it was necessary if she ever hoped to be able to test her own spell.

"Minnie," she hissed at the closed curtains around her friend's bed, feeling strangely out of place walking into the dormitory during the daytime when the other girls were there. Usually she would be seeking to sneak in or out, fearful of disturbing the sleep of the others who occupied the room. "What do you know about non-verbal incantations?"

A face popped out of the gap between the curtains almost immediately, followed by a hand that held a book and a toothy grin that quirked higher on one side. "I know that I can't do them," confessed the blonde, "but I actually read the chapter about them in the sixth year defence textbook last week."

"I need to be able to perform them -- soon," Keire told her.

The disjointed hand and head were joined by a body that climbed from between the curtains, covered from head to toe in knitwear, from fluffy socks to fingerless gloves to a woolly jumper, and the girl wrapped in then was still shivering, but she ignored her own discomfort completely, the blue light from outside casting eerie shadows over her face.

"Let's go," she urged, and for the first time in her life Keire found herself following.