Loneliness

"Rowan, if you don't stop ignoring me I'm gonna have to do something drastic."

It had been a quiet, peaceful evening in the Great Hall. Anon was going to change that. "I'm serious. You have five seconds before I get...insistent."

Four and a half seconds later, Rowan broke. "I thought you were being insistent already?" Sadly, it had taken him more than half a second to finish his remark, and that was all the reason Anon needed.

"Glacio." In the time it took for Rowan to realise what had been said, the section of bench he had been sitting at iced over, and a slight nudge from Anon was all it took for him to tip back and crash into the ground with a thud. Heads all over the Great Hall turned, but they soon lost interest when they saw Rowan brush himself off without a word and sit back down.

"I hope you realise..." Rowan said calmly as he sat back down, waiting until Anon was bringing a piece of chicken to his mouth. "This means war." With a whispered spell, Anon's hand smacked into the table with a bang, as the piece of chicken he'd been about to eat was now solid stone.

Anon shot a hurt look at his friend, only to see Rowan staring back without a shred of sympathy. "Oh, it is ON!" And the incident that would later be known as 'The Feast Firefight' began. Before Rowan had a chance to react, Anon hissed out "Petrificus Totalis." and Rowan's body snapped together, causing him to rock back out of his seat onto the floor. Before he or anyone else had a chance to undo the spell, Anon had grabbed Rowan's plate, consisting of a Hogwarts Hugewich™ and a jam pudding, which he then proceeded to upend on his friend's face. Immediately after impact, someone whispered the counter curse and freed Rowan from his paralysed state. While Anon scanned the table to find the perpetrator, Rowan quickly scourgified his face and sat back down.

Before Anon could come up with a new plan of attack, Rowan cast "Depulso" and with a "Wha-", Anon's face was immediately forced into the bowl of soup in front of him. Anon pushed his head back up, now covered in tomato soup, and between the gales of laughter from the other students, began casting a complex transfiguration. Rowan looked around, but could see nothing amiss.

And then a dough ball smashed into his glasses.

"Gah!" He flinched, throwing his head back, before pulling his glasses off and wiping them clean. He put them back on, and once the world came back into focus, he started scanning for what had attacked him. Looking back at Anon, he was taken aback to see his friend acting as if nothing had happened, leaning on arm on the table as he munched on a (non-stone) chicken wing. Before Rowan could ask what had happened, he felt something wet and sticky impact his back, and feeling around, was able to discern it as jelly. Looking in the opposite direction from Anon, Rowan finally found what had been assaulting him.

Across the table, various plates of chicken wings had animated, and began setting up miniature catapults to launch food at Rowan. As he stared in shock, another catapult was loaded with salad, before being launched at his head. With a yelp, he ducked and heard someone else shout as the salad hit them instead. Rowan quickly disabled all the catapults and turned back toward Anon, who had finished his chicken wing and appeared to be trying to enlarge a portion of jelly. Rowan was hesitant, almost wanting to see where Anon was going with this, but when the jelly began to vibrate, caution won out, and he cast Reducto on the jelly, blowing it up.
This apparently did not work well with whatever spell Anon had been casting, because the jelly shot everywhere, throwing both Rowan and Anon back and covering them in the sticky substance.

"Khanna. Ymous. Detention. Now." Professor Snape's voice cut through the silence following the explosion, with what sounded like barely restrained anger lacing his tone.

With the night's entertainment cut short, most of the great hall went back to eating and conversing normally. At the end of the Slytherin table, however, one witch tapped her foot restlessly. Merula Snyde slid her wand back into her pocket. She had freed the bookworm from his paralysis, not to help him, but because she wanted to get them in trouble when they inevitably escalated the situation. She was certain of that. 'Those idiots don't know what they're doing. I could have done so much better...' She thought to herself, imagine what she could have done in the same situation. With a sigh, she halfheartedly tossed a pea at Barnaby, who didn't even register it as it bounced off his forehead. 'If he made me fall off a bench like that, I would have done much worse than dunk his head in a bowl of soup...'

Finding herself without much of an appetite, she left the great hall and began to wander back to the Slytherin common room. 'Imagine if either of them did that to me...I would destroy them!' She stuffed her hands in her robe pockets, pulling it closer around her. 'Not that I'd ever want them to...I'm not that childish.' She repeated to herself, attempting to affirm it in her mind.

She entered the common room, finding empty as everyone was still upstairs at the feast. She quietly proceeded to an empty study table, pushed the chair back and kicked her feet up on the desk. Listlessly, the small Slytherin stared out the giant window to the Black Lake.

'I don't have time for stupid things like that...' She resolutely ignored the voice in the back of her head as it whispered to her about how she wanted to be involved in the crazy things Ymous got up to.

She sat there for several minutes more before heading up to her room, where she climbed into bed and stared up at the ceiling, before slowly drifting to sleep, where she dreamt of her own food fight in the great hall.