#( nothing serious but they’ve been time eaters ) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theclockworkmonk · 3 years

Text

Out of the Mouths of Babes — Chapter 2

Read on AO3

Read on FanFiction.net

Chapter 1 on Tumblr

Prompt: “Uncle Ron said something about Harry knocking Ginny up, but I don’t know what he means,” Teddy said.

************

"They can't be serious…." Harry muttered in disbelief as he stared down at the very official-looking letter.

"Who's serious about what?" asked Ginny, stepping into their living room.

Harry jumped and quickly tried to hide the letter behind his back. "Nothing!" he squeaked.

He should have known better. Ginny got a mischievous glint in her eye and darted around him, trying to get at the letter. They spent a minute chasing around each other, but eventually Ginny faked him out into tripping over the coffee table, and she quickly snatched the letter out of his hand with a triumphant laugh, making Harry once again wonder if she wouldn't be even better at Seeker.

"Ooooo," Ginny sang dramatically as she saw the emblem at the top of the parchment, "an official statement from the Wizengamot! Have they come up with a new award to bestow on you?"

"No, it's even worse," mumbled Harry.

"Oh, well now I'm very interested," Ginny teased, "am I worthy to take a peek at such official correspondence between such important people?"

"Well, it actually concerns you too, Missy," said Harry, crossing his arms, "so go ahead."

"Hold on, let's see if I can get the right tone." Ginny cleared her throat, pointed her nose in the air, and continued in her haughtiest tone,

"To the esteemed Harry James Potter,

After consideration of your actions to serve and protect the Wizarding World of Great Britain, as well as the recent discovery of your lineage to the Ancient and Noble House of Peverell, previously thought to be lost, it is with great honor and pleasure that we offer to restore your line to its former status by bestowing upon you one of the vacant Lordships!?"

Ginny dropped her character and her mouth gaped open in disbelief. "Along with the accompanying seat on the Wizengamot!" she finished quickly.

She looked up at him with wide eyes, and her face split into a wicked grin and Harry knew he would never hear the end of this.

Harry snatched the parchment back.

"Yeah, so in other words," he began before she could start getting her jokes in, "they're embarrassed by how many of their seats are still empty after half their members were thrown in prison or fled the country for being Death Eater collaborators, so they're once again trying to use me as their poster boy so they can look like they've turned over a new leaf. Except they clearly haven't, since they only deemed me 'worthy' after they found out which dead pure-bloods I'm descended from, so they're still the same navel-gazing, inbred aristocrats they've always been!"

By the time he was finished, he was shouting and he panted to catch his breath.

Ginny, however, still found the whole thing hilarious.

"Oh, it breaks my heart to see Lord Potter so displeased," she bowed low to him with a flourish of her hand. "Let me know if there's anything a lowly peasant like me can do to serve you."

"Yeah, yuck it up, Weasley," said Harry dryly, "Like I said, this affects you too."

She looked back up at him with a sardonic look. "How does your having to sit through long parliamentary bullshit have to do with me?"

"Well," said Harry, stepping toward her, "if I'm a Lord, that means that, if I ever get married one day—"

"Hypothetically speaking," said Ginny.

"Yes, then that hypothetical girl — whoever she might be — would become a Lady."

"Hmmm," hummed Ginny thoughtfully. She wrapped her hands around his neck and he snaked his arms around her waist. "So you think this is relevant to me because you're hoping to make me your Lady? That's mighty presumptive of you, Lord Potter."

"Well, I wouldn't say hoping," lied Harry. "It's just a logical possibility to consider, strictly because you're pure-blood, of course. But I'm still keeping my options open. After all, you know how much of a ladies man I am."

"Yes, of course. But you know…" said Ginny thoughtfully, tracing circles over Harry's chest with her finger, "'Lady Ginevra Potter….does have kind of a nice ring to it."

"Oh, but things would be expected of you, m'Lady," said Harry, "and you would definitely have to stop all that Quidditch nonsense. Such a vulgar and violent activity is beneath a woman of your standing."

"Oh, well, I guess that's settled, we have to break up," Ginny sighed, "We're just a part of two different worlds."

"I'll always remember you," said Harry romantically, "but alas, I must kiss you goodbye."

He bent down and gave her a kiss, then they broke apart as they cracked up into laughter.

"Come on, I'm not going to let anyone call me a Lord," said Harry, rolling his eyes, "and obviously I'm not actually going to sit on the bloody Wizengamot. Those seats are transferable, so I can give it to someone who will actually know what they're doing. My first instinct is your dad, but he probably won't want it either, and they'll do anything to get him off again. Andromeda would probably feel at home there, but could do some good. Or maybe McGonagall."

Ginny groaned. "You can be so boring sometimes, you know that? You have a chance to put Luna in a position of power, that would drive them insane! Oh, or how about Aberforth, that would be hilarious!"

Harry laughed. "We're not all agents of chaos like you, Gin. I swear, sometimes I think you're Eris in disguise."

"Oh, you think I'm a goddess?" Ginny flirted, "then I guess you better worship me."

"Hmmm," Harry kissed her again, but then sighed and pulled back. "Sadly, there's no time for that, we're already running late for dinner at the Burrow."

"Alright, should we go together or do you want to keep up the pretense that we're actually living in different flats?" she asked him pointedly.

He gave a weak, embarrassed smile. "I know it's ridiculous, and I might be a coward, I've just managed to escape your mother's disapproving stare so far in my life, I'd like to keep it that way as long as possible."

Ginny rolled her eyes but led him by the hand out the door of their flat, past the wards they had put up. Harry wrapped an arm around her waist, and turned on the spot, feeling the squeeze of Disapparition.

*********************

"Come on!" urged Ron, "I'm hungry!"

"What else is new?" laughed Hermione, as she finished a letter she needed to send and tied it to Pig. After she sent the little owl on his way, she turned around to see her fiance standing by the fireplace, bouncing on his feet like a child on Christmas morning.

"Honestly Ron," said Hermione, shaking her head, "one would think you haven't eaten in a week, and there's no way that your mother even has dinner ready yet."

"Yes, but her pre-dinner scones should be coming out of the oven right now!" said Ron cleverly, "And I might as well have not eaten in a week, don't pretend like I'm the only one who's sick of our sad attempts at cooking."

"Alright, alright!" said Hermione. She joined him by the fireplace, threw some floo powder into the grate, and together they stepped into the green flames.

"THE BURROW!" Ron shouted clearly, and after the spinning sensation and flashes of various fireplaces, they stumbled into the sitting room of Ron's childhood home.

Ron's excited smile faltered when they saw the sitting room completely empty, with no one there to greet them. He recognized the overlapping voices of his family instead coming from the kitchen, and with a rush of horror he feared that his precious scones were already being eaten by an army of Weasleys. He led Hermione by the hand across the room towards the kitchen, and he started to make out individual voices.

"I just don't understand why they haven't told us!" said his mother.

"He probably knows what we're likely to do to him," grumbled Charlie.

"You've been away too long, brother mine," chuckled George, "I guarantee you she's the one keeping it under wraps."

"In any case, we know that pushing the issue will do nothing but make things worse," said Ron's dad gently, "We just have to—"

"Scones ready?" asked Ron loudly as he and Hermione entered the kitchen, and Hermione had to resist the urge to swat him. The conversation he had interrupted seemed interesting, and her suspicions were confirmed (and her curiosity inflamed) when all talk instantly ceased the moment they walked into the room. Six heads snapped towards the arriving couple as Molly, Arthur, Bill, Charlie, Percy, and George widened their eyes in surprise and fear, like they were caught discussing something covert. Hermione also noticed how a few of them (mainly Ron's two oldest brothers) then narrowed their eyes venomously at her and her boyfriend.

While the kitchen of the Burrow was usually one of the warmest, most welcoming rooms in the world to Hermione, she noticed a distinctly cool, tense atmosphere this time. She looked sideways and saw that even Ron had clearly noticed, his eager smile slipping from his face.

There were several seconds of silence as the older family members' eyes all flittered between each other, holding a silent conversation that Ron and Hermione didn't know how to join. Then the loud ding of the kitchen timer made them all jerk suddenly.

"Wow, do I have great timing or what?" said Ron proudly, trying to ease some of the tension in the room, but some of his laughter died in his throat. His stomach didn't let him dwell on it, however, as Molly bent down to take the scones out of the oven, and the sweet, fresh smell filled the kitchen.

After she put the plate of scones on the table, Ron casually flicked a cooling charm over them before grabbing one greedily. The other Weasley men took their own, but they looked more like it was just something to do with their hands. While Ron hummed as he took a big bite, they chewed theirs thoughtfully.

"I should check on the washing," said Molly quietly, without looking at anyone. She grabbed a laundry basket and headed outside towards the clothesline.

"I'll help!" said Hermione cheerfully. She was always happy to help with the chores at the Burrow, but she also wanted to get one of the Weasleys alone to figure out what they had been talking about.

Molly didn't answer and continued outside with Hermione behind her.

"How have you and Arthur been?" asked Hermione pleasantly.

"Well, my days are still dreary, with no children left in the house," Molly sighed. "I knew that children don't stay children forever, but I certainly wasn't expecting my younger ones to hit so many milestones so quickly….and in the wrong order." She finished more quietly

Hermione frowned. Did Molly think she and Ron were getting married too soon? She had never expressed that before, she was overjoyed when they had announced their engagement.

"Er….well, Ron recently got promoted from Junior Auror," said Hermione uncertainly as she began helping Molly take garments off the clothesline and put them in the basket. "He'll be taking more serious cases now." So his career is well on track, if that's what you're worried about.

"I'm touched that you and Ron are willing to indulge that to me!" said Molly sharply

Hermione pursed her lips. Her patience was running out.

She stepped towards her soon-to-be mother-in-law and gently placed a hand on her shoulder. "Molly…"

For the first time, Molly turned to look at Hermione and the younger woman flinched back at the cold distrust and disapproval she saw in her eyes. Hermione felt a rush of deja vu, and after a short moment she realized where she had seen that look before: it was the same look she had received from Molly her fourth year, when the older witch had believed Rita Skeeter and was under the impression that Hermione was Harry's manipulative girlfriend, breaking his heart by messing around with Viktor.

"Mrs. Weasley...have I done something wrong?" asked Hermione weakly.

Seeing the hurt on Hermione's face, Molly's own harsh expression softened and was replaced with a wave of guilt. Her eyes got watery and her lip trembled, and before Hermione could say anything else she suddenly found herself being hugged tightly.

"No dear, you haven't done anything wrong," said Molly in a choked voice, as Hermione awkwardly patted her back, thoroughly confused. "I'm just being silly. I understand you're not choosing sides, you're just being a good friend."

Molly pulled back, and was smiling weakly at Hermione.

"Er...thank you," said Hermione, more bewildered than ever. "I don't mean to be rude, Molly, but I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

"Oh no, of course not," Molly winked dramatically, "There's nothing to tell, I'll drop it. Come on, dinner is just about ready."

Before Hermione could insist more strongly that Molly explain what the hell was going on, Molly picked up the now-full laundry basket and returned to the house, leaving Hermione blinking dumbly behind her.

******************************

As Hermione followed his mother outside, Ron continued to chew into the warm, buttery scone, barely looking at his surrounding family members, the earlier tension all but forgotten to him.

"So….little Ronnie doesn't come around for dinner as much as he used to," Bill pointed out.

"He and Harry have been burning the candle at both ends at the Ministry," said Percy.

"Hmm-hmm," Ron nodded, engrossed in his scone, not looking up to see the stern looks on his brothers' faces. "More than we need to be, honestly. But because of Harry's saving-people-thing, he's always sure that the next case will end in disaster if the dark wizard isn't caught right now, and of course he would be lost without me, so whenever he's working overtime I am too." He shrugged.

"Oh yes, I think we're all well aware how loyal you are to Harry," Charlie said darkly, "Even over other, older loyalties, as a matter of fact."

"Charlie…." began their dad warningly.

Ron looked back up, and grew uncomfortable again when he saw that all of his family members were looking directly at him. Earlier, he had assumed that the awkward tension in the room was because he and Hermione had interrupted an important conversation, but it seemed to go beyond that, like they were pissed directly at him for something he had done.

"What's going—"

He was interrupted by his mother re-entering the house, holding the laundry with one hand and wiping tears from her eyes with the other. Hermione followed in shortly behind her, and Ron looked pointedly at his mother and gave his fiance a quizzical look, but Hermione just returned a confused, helpless shrug.

"The roast should be almost done now," said Molly happily, and waved her want to send a flurry of plates and cutlery flying to settle in front of where each of the Weasley men were sitting.

"And I'm such a terrible mother, I neglected something," chuckled Molly, and bent down to kiss the crown of Ron's head. "We all missed you, dear."

"Mum…" Ron grumbled awkwardly, but he saw his brothers look at each other with slightly guilty expressions, and as they followed their mother's lead, the atmosphere of the room became friendlier.

Charlie drew in a deep breath and sighed. "I need a drink."

"Excellent idea!" pipped George. He waved his wand and summoned a large bottle of firewhiskey from the cabinet along with several glasses, which zoomed right past Molly's face, causing her to jump and shriek.

"For the last time, only the cook can summon in the kitchen!" Molly scolded him, "I won't have this room devolve in complete chaos of flying objects until someone gets a concussion!"

"And I know you don't always act like it, but you are all of age," said Arthur, raising his eyebrows at George pouring several glasses of whiskey, "so I see no reason why you can't bring your own drinking supplies instead of raiding mine."

Molly huffed. "Well maybe it will be best if we stopped keeping that poison in the house—"

She stopped abruptly as they heard a faint pop from outside, coming from down the pathway, and Ron knew that Harry and Ginny must have arrived. Instead of beaming and rushing out into the garden to greet her two favorite children, however, Ron saw his mother gasp and a bit of the color drain from her face. His family members all looked at each other with that same expression he first saw when he came into the room.

Charlie gave a low growl and picked up a glass. "Yup. Definitely need a drink."

#hinny ficfest #hinny fanfiction #hinny fluff #romione #hinny #hinny fanfic #ron x hermione #ron and hermione #harry and ginny #harry potter #harry potter fanfiction #romione fanfic #harry x ginny #fanfic #fanfiction #ao3 link #ao3 fanfic

65 notes · View notes

ianthe-is-a-bitch-and-i-love-her · 3 years

Text

Flesh, Part 1

Excerpt from Memoirs of a Flesh Eater, never published

Previous Excerpt

Next Excerpt

And now we come to what you’ve all been waiting for, the meat of this book {Editing Note: Boooo}. The gory details, such as they are, of how we acquire our flesh. It’s a topic that’s captured the public imagination for a long time - we’ve all heard plenty of lurid stories and speculation all our lives. I frankly wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve skipped straight to this chapter to finally hear it straight from the monster’s mouth. I’ll do my best to satisfy your curiosity. Understand, though - this topic is deadly serious, and more than almost any other subject I’ve covered, I’m aware of the danger inherent in revealing this. If the information I lay out here compromises these avenues of flesh, people will die for it. I will tell you as much as I can without risking that outcome.

{Editing Note: Everything after this needs strict review, and not just from me. Get as many eyes as possible on this before publishing.}

Nearly every ghoul has or will participate in the direct acquisition of flesh at some point. Finding food is an involved process, and not a particularly scaleable one. There are no factory farms for humans, nor should there be. Truly steady supplies of flesh are rare. Most of our methods involve gathering a small group of ghouls periodically, rather than just one or two of us working continuously. This, unfortunately, causes inconsistencies in supply more often than is comfortable. As such, we’ve had ample opportunity to figure out exactly how much flesh we need to survive.

For the average mature ghoul, 5 pounds of flesh per day is the ideal consumption rate. Very roughly, we should be eating one adult human body per month for peak health. Put that starkly, it’s a grim picture. Extrapolate from that, and that means each of us is eating 12 humans a year. Obviously, we don’t eat that much from the moment of birth. I remember starting to get hungry more often around age 15, and I can count on one hand the number of ghouls I’ve met over 50, so let’s call the 35 years between those two ages our lifespan. Over the course of our lives, we will each eat over 400 humans. When you look at it from that angle, one life against 400, it’s no wonder that you have, as a whole, decided that we need to die.

But that angle misses some important subtleties. For one, we can handle some remarkably flexible feeding patterns. We can subsist on much less than an ideal diet for a very long time without serious ill effects. For example, I follow a fairly common feeding pattern and only eat half-meals three weeks out of every four. The only ill effects I notice are increased exhaustion and soreness, usually beginning towards the end of the second week and gradually escalating until the fourth. We can also go for multiple days without eating before noticing any ill effects. Many ghouls have only one or two very large meals each week. I personally prefer to have smaller meals more consistently - it makes me feel more human - but it’s a pattern I’ve followed plenty of times when flesh is scarce.

The other main subtlety that the math I presented above misses is that, often, we do not have to kill for flesh. People die all the time from causes that have nothing to do with us, and rarely in ways that make their flesh inedible. We have hardy constitutions and strong stomachs - most diseases and toxic chemicals can be processed and rendered inert in our digestive tracts. There are nearly three million deaths every year in the U.S. alone, the vast majority of which have nothing to do with us. If we could utilize all of that flesh, we could comfortably feed 250,000 ghouls without harming a single person. Obviously that’s never going to happen, but I also doubt there are that many ghouls in the country, so… Suffice to say that there is, theoretically, more than enough ethically-sourced flesh to go around.

Utilizing that flesh, however, is a significant logistical challenge. People aren’t in the habit of donating their bodies for our dining pleasure, and people tend to take the security of their loved ones’ remains pretty seriously. Taking flesh by force, even when we’re not trying to part it from a living body, is difficult, dangerous, messy work, so we prefer to sidestep that wherever possible. This brings us nicely to the first of our three main strategies: farming.

Farming is, unfortunately, our least productive method, but it’s the one that I hope we’ll be able to rely on entirely, some nebulous day in the future. Farming is the practice of discreetly smuggling dead flesh, produced by natural causes, out of the facilities where it is held. This is the only method we use that is sustainable, in the sense that it requires one or two ghouls working constantly and delivering a steady supply, rather than the periodic group efforts I described earlier. This method is also unusual in that it depends on us being integrated in human society, integrated enough to have unsupervised access to dead flesh.

There are two primary sources that we farm. First, there are hospitals. Countless surgical procedures result in the separation of flesh from living humans. Sometimes this flesh is passed along for scientific analysis, but most of it ends up classified as medical waste sooner rather than later. As I’ve said, though, we can safely handle most of the factors that cause limbs to be amputated or organs to be removed. Once these have been marked for disposal, ghouls working at the hospital can usually hide away the flesh for later retrieval without anyone noticing its absence. Unfortunately, caution requires our farmers to take less than is truly salvageable, given how damning it is to be caught stealing flesh. They also avoid taking whole cadavers, which are much more closely observed while in the hospital, and are typically handed over to other people rather than fully disposed of. We also, as a general rule, are careful to avoid eating anything cancerous. Tumors are something of a taboo, only to be eaten in times of extreme famine. We are as vulnerable to cancer as humans are, and there is a strong fear that eating tumors may cause you to absorb some of the cancerous cells into your own body, where they will be free to grow again. I can’t speak to the truth of that, but it’s not a fate I’m interested in tempting.

Our other main farming source is funeral homes. Contrary to popular perception, and to government defence policies, we actually have very little interest in robbing graveyards. By the time bodies go in the ground, they’ve usually been rendered inedible by embalming practices. Given how robust our digestive tracts are, it’s my theory that embalming practices were, at some point in history, specifically designed to protect human bodies from us. Obviously not all bodies are properly embalmed, but there’s no way to tell that without digging one up, and digging up a grave is hard. It is far more beneficial for us to intercept the bodies before they get to that stage. Therefore, we find it very valuable to train as morticians. This allows us to take cuts of flesh before a body is embalmed. Over the years, we’ve figured out exactly how much flesh can be taken and from where without showing at an open casket funeral. For closed caskets, or for cremations, we can take nearly the entire body without detection.

{Editing Note: That’s going to be upsetting for anyone who’s ever buried a family member. I’m not sure how to address that gently. I don’t know how receptive most people would be to “it’s okay that we ate your grandma because it means we got to live long enough to eat other people’s grandmas”.}

Unfortunately, there are a limited number of jobs with access to farmable bodies, and as the number of ghouls in those positions increase, so does the chance of one of them being discovered. Some of you, I’m sure, have seen how paranoid everyone gets when one of us is outed among you. We can’t even come close to fully utilizing these outlets without risking a lot of us dying. My household is fortunate - three of our members are farmers, and we may be gaining a fourth, depending on what degree Scarlet actually settles on. But that supply of farmed flesh is not always enough to feed all of us, and it certainly isn’t enough for Yaga’s charity projects. So about once a month, we send out a group to engage in our second method - gathering.

As I said, there are a lot of deaths that have nothing to do with us. Gathering is our attempt to get ahold of some of those dead before other factors take care of them. Death is, unfortunately, unpredictable, so the best we can do is send people out at irregular intervals to scoop up what we can. A gathering party typically consists of at least half a dozen ghouls; the exact size depends on the amount of ground we want to cover, how many bodies we expect to be transporting, and how worried we are about getting into a violent confrontation. Ideally, no one gets hurt by our gathering parties, but no one is going to look too kindly on body snatching, and sometimes we just attract the wrong kind of attention. If we need an especially large group, or if we intend to cover a particularly large area, we might even reach out to other households for extra help in exchange for a share of our find.

A gathering run typically begins at night, in the poorer parts of the city. I’m sure gathering happens in rural areas, but I can’t speak to their methods. In the city, though, it’s the poor and the homeless and the addicts, the abandoned of human society that are most likely to die somewhere we can get to them. So we put on anonymizing clothing and start looking. Our most reliable leads come from homeless communities and drug sites. Sometimes it’s enough to just show up, make small talk, and look around for the dead or imminently dying. If it’s the latter, sometimes we just wait - keep them company while they wait for the end. Unfortunately for us, people don’t generally die all at once at predictable intervals; it’s not uncommon for us to find no bodies at all. Fortunately, there are some people who are desperate enough to sell us leads. Buying leads is a dangerous game - any person who knows us to be ghouls, even if we take pains to conceal our identities from them, is one more person who could bring the exterminators down on us - and the more effective the method of gathering leads is, the more dangerous it is. The safest thing is to find a stranger and offer them money for a lead, one time deal, and never contact them again. Regular contacts have more opportunities to expose us, whether for exterminator money, moral duty, or just by being careless, but if they know to expect us, they can amass leads, or sometimes even hold bodies for us to buy off them directly. I’ve heard that some households even have arrangements with organized crime to act as free, efficient body disposal.

Once we’ve thoroughly checked these areas, the next step is to check accident sites. Typically we’ll separate to stake out common suicide and accident sites. These aren’t particularly reliable either, but they turn up bodies often enough to be worth staking out once we’ve exhausted our more proactive options. Sometimes, on particularly slow gathering parties, we’ll break out a police scanner and listen for any incident reports likely to produce a body and see if we can get there before the cops. It’s a dangerous game, and often no more lucrative than our other approaches, but there is nothing more depressing or upsetting than coming back from gathering empty handed. Coming home empty handed means we need to take more drastic measures.

I’ve been on around a dozen gathering parties so far. Most of them went well enough, with minimal incident and moderate success. I’ve been on two where we had to chase police scanners. And I’ve been on one that came back empty-handed. That isn’t the only one my household has ever run that came back empty-handed, but it’s the one that stuck out most in my mind because it’s the one time I felt personally responsible for what happened next. When our regular gathering still doesn’t produce enough flesh, we have three options, none of them pleasant. We could all tighten our belts, ration our flesh carefully, and try to endure until we can make up our shortfall. There are a lot of factors that can make this approach unsafe, though. Starving isn’t any more pleasant for us than it is for humans, and it can make us less careful than is safe. Or sometimes someone is injured or sick and wouldn’t be able to handle stricter rationing. Our next option is to organize a gathering raid. There are plenty of hospitals and funeral homes that we can’t farm, for one reason or another, but sometimes we can steal from them. This is a high-risk endeavor, obviously. Anywhere that handles human remains is on the lookout for this kind of thing, and even if we get away clean, the raid will almost certainly make the news and bring exterminators sniffing around. That’s not even touching the fact that, just because we aren’t farming somewhere, that doesn’t mean someone else isn’t. The kind of scrutiny a raid draws can be a death sentence for any ghouls working at the raid target. So, most of the time, Yaga chooses to take our third option. She calls for a Hunt.

{Editing Note: I need to talk to Spatha before I write the rest of this. I need to convince her that I’ll just listen this time, and then I need to actually do that. I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t want to reopen this wound between us. I don’t want to risk our friendship. Is this project really worth that? Do I seriously think it will make a difference?}

#my writing #memoirs of a flesh eater #original fiction #not tlt

28 notes · View notes

comfortwriting · 3 years

Text

Ashtray Part 2 - D.M

Masterlist, Requesting Rules, Writing Prompts

Draco Malfoy x Fem Gryffindor Reader

Part 1 , Part 3

Warnings: swearing, smoking.

Your first kiss in the hallway blossomed into a beautiful yet secret relationship with Draco, you got to see the side of him no one else knew existed. The two of you met up every evening whilst the whole of Hogwarts slept, going for the longest walks - hand in hand, sharing laughs and kissing.

Part of you wanted to express your happiness out loud to the world - but you and Draco made an agreement to date in private, if either house found out, the two of you would be stuck in more mess than a spilt cauldron.

Unfortunately, no matter how well you tried to hide your feelings for Draco and your relationship - your two best friends Ron and Harry already knew, and Hermione would find out sooner than later.

Walking into Trelawney's class Hermione, Harry and Ron were already sat down, talking amongst themselves with sour expressions on their faces.

‘okay...’ you sighed to yourself ‘stop overthinking, they don’t know, they just hate this class’

“Hey” you smiled, pulling out the spare chair and sitting down next to them.

“Hello Y/N” Hermione smiled

Okay, good, she doesn’t know

“We missed you at lunch, where were you?” she asked, the whole class talking amongst themselves.

Ron and Harry looked at one another, raising there eyebrows and looking annoyed.

“Detention with Mr Filch” you lied, fast on your feet.

“With Malfoy?” sneered Harry, running his finger over the crystal ball, still not making eye contact with you.

Draco wasn’t at lunch either, of course the two of you went for a picnic, you knew going for dates mid week in the middle of the day was cutting it close - but you didn’t realise people were catching on that fast.

“Well yeah” you replied “did you not hear about him sneaking around after lights out?”

Ron went to speak but Harry shook his head at him, Ron shut his mouth and huffed - Miss Trelawney coming over and bothering Harry with this weeks predictions.

“you will face great betray” her voice called out to Harry rather wavily “by someone you hold close”

You swallowed hard and shuffled in your seat ‘she’s full of shit’ you thought to yourself ‘anyway, she’s probably got someone else in mind, I haven’t betrayed anyone’.

Once the class had finished, Harry wasted no time hurrying away from you, dragging Ron with him and telling Hermione to hurry up. Hermione stayed behind and pulled you aside whilst other students walked out and pushed past.

“Has something happened between you, Harry, and Ron?” she asked softly.

You looked at your shiny shoes, debating whether you should come clean about dating Draco - but there was no way Harry and Ron could know.

“I’m not sure” you replied “they’ve been off with me for a few weeks now”

Hermione pursed her lips, thinking to herself and nodding “I’ll speak to them after I’ve done some studying.”

Hermione left the library after hours of reading, writing and researching, bursting into the common room you collapsed on the sofa next to Ron and dumped her heavy bag on the floor next to her feet.

“Why have you both been off with Y/N?” she asked them, staring at Ron and then Harry, who was messing with his wand, staring into the fire.

They didn’t answer.

“She’s really upset and you owe her an explanation-”

“We owe her bloody nothing” Ron hissed, staring at his finger nails “she’s done the worst thing imaginable and doesn’t even have the heart to tell us.”

Hermione knitted her eyebrows together “what are you talking about?” she looked over to Harry, his jaw clenched and nostrils flared “Harry, tell me!”

Hermione knew this had to be serious, Harry had been crushing on you for months after the two of you shared a dance at the Yule Ball, the way you comforted him after Cedric’s death.

“Y/N is seeing Malfoy, the two of them have been together for a few weeks now”

Hermione opened her mouth and let out an airy laugh “don’t be stupid, she hates Malfoy-”

“Is that right?” Ron cut her off “show her, Harry”

Harry turned to face them, his back against the fire, reaching into his pocket he pulled out the Marauders Map.

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good” Harry mumbled, tapping the map it opened up and red spread across the paper.

Hermione got off the sofa and crawled over to Harry, peering over his shoulder and looking at your footsteps along side Draco’s walking together outside school grounds - she looked at Harry and mirrored the painful expression on his face.

Hermione pulled out her wand “Mischief Managed” she croaked, tapping the map, turning it blank.

“Harry I’m so sorry” she pulled him into a hug but he didn’t hug back, no matter what, he would always feel empty, betrayed knowing that the girl of his dreams fell for his enemy.

Holding onto Draco’s hand, the two of you laid down on the cold grass and stared up at the night sky, watching the stars twinkle above you, some brighter than others.

“It may sound silly but I think Harry and Ron are onto us” you said quietly.

Draco’s happy expression wilted and his face turned as hard as stone “and if they are?”

You swallowed hard and pulled your gaze away from the stars, focusing on your boyfriends face “can you just all get along?”

Draco looked as if vomit had come up through his throat and pooled into his mouth “you know that can never happen, don’t even suggest it again”

You nodded, after all what did you expect?

The chill in the air attacked your neck and face, you sat up and hugged your knees, pulling them into your chest. “I don’t want to lose you Draco, but I don’t want to lose my friends either.”

Draco sat up and stared into your eyes “as long as we’re a secret, you won’t have to make that choice” he stood up and out stretched his hand, you took it and he helped you get to your feet.

“Thank you for today” you said softly, the two of you walking back to the castle.

Draco ignored you trying to change the subject, his insecurities whispering in his ears “if you do have to choose, will it be me?”

You stopped in your tracks and stared at him, your heart weeping and your head pounding “it won’t come to that, Draco-”

“it might” he stressed “and if you aren’t sure that you’ll stay with me, there's no point in us being together” Draco stormed off in front of you, his black sleek suit hiding him in the night.

Tears pricked your eyes and you felt nauseas at the thought of being with Draco, although you had known this side of him for a small amount of time, you didn’t want to miss a second of that part of him - the Draco that enjoyed to slow dance under the moonlight, the Draco that spent time picking flowers making them into the perfect bouquet, the Draco who gave you his house scarf when you were freezing cold.

You didn’t want to go back to hating him, you didn’t want to go back to knowing the Draco who hated you, who called you Ashtray, who made it his job to make your life at Hogwarts miserable.

Running inside the castle, pushing past the nosy prefects and spitting the password at the fat lady, you hurried through the portrait hole, your group of friends already waiting for you - you were hoping they would open their arms and welcome you in, for Ron and Harry to be understanding and comforting - but they were the complete opposite.

“Enjoy your date?” Hermione glared at you, her arms crossed over her chest.

they know, it’s too late

“how could you do this to us? to Ron, to Harry, to me!” Hermione shrieked “after what he’s done to Harry, to all of us, he’s a death eater Y/N!”

Your hot tears streamed down your face, your lips red and puffy.

“Draco isn’t like that with me, you wouldn’t understand, if I told you, you would hate me-”

“better for us to find out from you than to see you kissing him in the middle of the night” Harry snapped “I trusted you, my feelings for you were... pure”

Your breath hitched in your throat, Harry.. in love.. with me?

“You’re not one of us” Ron butted in “not anymore, you may as well just go and pledge allegiance to-”

“I’m not a fucking death eater!” you yelled, everyone had come down from their dorms all in their pyjamas, staring at you.

You pushed past the people you called your friends, trying to go to your dorm but the dorm mates stopped you, pushing you away from the stairs.

Everyone was against you, everyone knew and there was nothing you could do; Draco wouldn’t have you back, not your moment of hesitation.

“Fine” you cried “have it your way”

Storming out of the dorm, you wails filled the halls, breaking out into the cold and harsh night, you pulled out your last cigarette, shoving it in-between your lips and setting it alight.

Tag list: @amourtentiaa @inglourious-imagines @reeophidian @alwaysnforeverfangirl

113 notes · View notes

ktheist · 4 years

Text

heartbreaker of mine

muses. jungkook x reader

synopsis. ah, here we are again. the overtold, cliche as hell story about two best friends who might or might not be in love with each other. except you can’t - wouldn’t dare to dream about being with jungkook.

alternatively, wherein you fell for the one who could break your heart.

words. 7.5k

universe. university / slice of life

warnings. mentions of physical insecurities; appearance, commitment issues

you should have known that in the absence of two of your best friends, nothing ever goes right when you decide to hang out. it isn’t the fact that you’ve known each other since diapers and basically know anything and everything about the other, that at some point you feel like your friendship is stale and need new additions - that’s where park jimin and kim taehyung comes in; a year older but several younger at heart, you couldn’t have imagined going through uni life with someone but them - but it’s the fact that realization hits you at the end of your final year that makes you drift apart.

the fact of the matter is, you prefer the solitude of your room, the library of that one spot in the cafe that you’ve claimed as yours. and jeon jungkook prefers the blare of music, strobe lights and bodies grinding against him.

by your final year, as you receive a job offer at the company you interned in on your second year, taehyung is already working part time at the company he interned in, jimin thinking about that modeling offer he just got scouted for and jeon jungkook is getting daddies of the girls he’s having a thing with to get him to work at their office just so their daughter can see their favorite boy more - yours and jungkook’s friendship has dwindled down to mere silences as you wait for the other two to knock on the door and fill the place up with their endless bickering about whether dumplings are better than mochi.

“shouldn’t you like, give me advice?” are the words jungkook said to you while you type away on your laptop, trying to do some light reading for tomorrow’s class before your mac gets confiscated for ‘pooping the party’ as taehyung likes to call it.

and you know what he’s talking about without even having preambles of the topic make its way into the conversation.

yet you still take off your glasses and set it down in your lap and ask, “what could jeon jungkook possibly have not known and needed advice on?”

he scrunches his nose, not appreciating your sarcasm but humors it anyway, “you know,” he shrugs, as though shrunk into the sofa from either shyness or embarrassment - you don’t know, “on like, how to start being serious about life - and settling down.”

the silence that stretches is a stale one, filled with your blank stare and jungkook’s peering eyes - even at the age of 22, the stars still glimmer like they’ve been freshly plucked from the skies.

“you want me to help pick, out of the many job offers you got from your girlfriends’ rich parents, for you to do?” is your conclusion - though if you were 2 years younger and had a little bit more faith for the boy you basically called your twin, it would have been a good natured jest. but you’re older and jungkook isn’t exactly portraying characteristics of an upstanding citizen either.

“no,” his hair brushes against his brows as he shakes his head almost too eagerly - as though he saw that coming but still got upset and wanted to prove you wrong, “like how to start taking things seriously like settling down with someone and no, not with out of my many girlfriends - can we not call them that? it makes me sound like an ass.”

it takes you less than five seconds to digest his words, eyes drifting to the white screen of your mac for the sole reason you can’t bear to hold his intense gaze while you conjure up a response, “well for one, you are but there’s honestly nothing i can tell you that you don’t know already and there’s nothing i can possibly say to make you want to change - it has to come from you. or like, a professional that could help and if you think you need one, i’ll be with you all step-“

the brief scoff is what puts a rest to your racing thoughts while the smile on his lips put your heart at ease, “i’m not addicted to sex.”

“oh, okay.” is all you say, not seeing where the conversation is going as you watch the boy scratch the back of his ear, lips pulled into a pout - one way you know he’s trying to strum words into existence. and when he does, confused is an understatement to describe what your face is portraying.

“okay, i’m saying if and if you’re looking for a husband, no, scratch that, would you even introduce someone like me to your parents?” but that’s the thing, you’re not confused because you don’t know where this is going but you’re confused because you don’t pretend to be oblivious.

but you’re also not a master at the art of heart-to-hearts and the gargantuan elephant that it brings. so you settle with a, “uh, i don’t know, you already know my parents, don’t know how i can reverse that and reintroduce you-“

“that’s not the point,” he blinks, the sight almost endearing as he freezes in his spot for a split second in contemplation of how to approach the matter and explain it to you who seem like you’re way off, “the point is-“

“i get it.” you nod, arms crossing over your chest as jungkook’s wide eyes peers into you like a mixture of relief anticipation.

“you do?”

“you’re worried if your future partner will be insecure about the bodies you’ve seen before them,” there’s a knock on the door just as you’ve finished speaking.

as you get up to get up to answer it, knowing already who’s there from the obnoxious chatters - more like argument - you’re not sure if your brain is playing tricks on you or if jungkook’s shoulder line really falls as well as his face.

but the, “uh, yeah, i guess,” is what makes you push the image of dimmed stars and downturned pink lips to the back of your mind as you unlock the door, welcoming the two halfway-into-a-deep-quarreling men and their two bags of take-away roasted chicken, chips, mashed potatoes and whatever else they thought necessary to fill the game night with.

“thanks, shortcake,” taehyung smiles at you after you take a plastic bags off his and jimin’s hands and proceed to place it on the coffee table.

“tae, you’re literally taller than everyone,” throwing him a side glance, you shrug as you begin taking out the packed chicken wings and placing it in front of jungkook while taehyung helps with unpacking the add-ons from another bag, “calling me short isn’t exactly an insult.”

“i’m just saying we should demolish mint chocolate chips all at once,” jimin plops down on the couch adjacent to jungkook, “and no, we can’t let these savages go eating them - we need to educate-“

somewhere in the middle of jimin’s colonial-esque speech, you turn to the boy who’s never said a word since the two came in. not that those too needed an additional converse partner with how taehyung is advocating for leaving mint chocolate chip eaters alone and jimin staying with his stance that these people haven’t had a taste of all flavors in the world yet.

the way he seems to look at something past your shoulders tells you enough - he’s still deep in his thoughts about settling down, or changing or whatever. you don’t know why exactly he wants to change his heartbreaker ways but- “there’s nothing wrong with two adults having a - or multiple - consensual sexual relationship prior to finding their significant other. and if they have a problem with that then that’s something they need to work on, not you so no, i don’t think you should change anything unless you want to.”

it’s some days later that taehyung brings up the remnant of the conversation he overheard before the four of you began arguing about what movie to watch and ended up putting the fate of humanity in rock paper scissors. and so you tell him, without ever thinking of the one thing that spurred his ridiculous thought and the hesitance of pouring it onto you.

“don’t look at me, i’m not snitching.” jimin’s round, disbelieved eyes stares back at taehyung as though surprised the latter would ever think he’d do such a thing.

“okay but someone’s gotta tell her.” taehyung lowly mumbles, upper body turned to jimin, gracing you with his beautiful side profile - whoever gets to date him will forever be the lucky one.

“guys, i’m literally right here.” the sound of your voice warrants a turn of heads and a wide-eyed stare as though they’re seeing your ghost rather than your physical form that entered and picked a spot together with them.

it takes a moment for the elephant to settle somewhere in the corner and crush you with its invisible weight before taehyung turns to you, hand behind his mouth as he fake coughs into it. then, another moment for you to register taehyung’s words as you watch his mouth move and his gaze trained on you like a father teaching his daughter a life-lesson before he lets her out into the world. once his mouth stops moving and a second passes for you to take in the information, only two words leave your lips.

“you trippin’,” with a half-manic smile and brows knitted together, you look almost like you’re made for the asylum- but understandably, your admittance is overdue.

as your heart palpitate inside the confines of your rib cages and the scene from that night replays at the back of your eyes like a broken record - jungkook’s hesitant glance, the windows to his soul shutting tight with hesitance and the teeth that traps his lower lips as though his body is forbidding him to say whatever his heart and mind wanted - as much as it pains you to admit it, the signs were all there.

you just didn’t want to admit it.

that’s what pining over a best friend you’ve known for over a decade does.

the denial that comes after realizing you don’t want anyone else to touch jungkook when im nayoung stood on her tippy toes and pecked jungkook’s lips before running off with a flustered expression - you were both in elementary and jungkook was more into sleepovers with the abundance of plushies you had than hanging with ‘other kids’.

then comes the ugly head of self-loathing and guilt as you fixed park jihyo a smile as jungkook introduced you two. one, as his girlfriend and the other, his best friend.

both, in love with him.

it’s ugly and disgusting, jealousy that is. but you’re uglier for smiling and laughing with jihyo over the things you would with a best friend who’s a girl - there were things you couldn’t share with jungkook as a girl. but you’d let your eyes linger a second too on them as they shared a peck when he’d meet you too in front of the school gate after his extra class was over - you lost count of the times you wished you were her.

you carried the pathetic little mask of a smile to uni. by then, jungkook had broken up with jihyo. there was a lot of tears and consoling and empty words of assurance.

“hey, if you guys are meant to be, you’ll meet again someway somehow.” you’d fixed her an encouraging smile as your heart bloomed with hope for when you’ll get jungkook’s attention all to yourself once you start uni.

getting into the same one had been pure luck.

it didn’t bring you far though. jungkook started gaining attention for his friendly nature and bunny smile that attracted both males and females. it wasn’t long until he’s bringing you to parties where he’d keep you by his side because he knew you didn’t know most of these people. tried to get you involved in the conversation but there was nothing interesting about the dude who drank himself silly and woke up in front of an old lady’s door butt naked or about that girl who woke up a five minutes before class in a city an hour away from where her dorm is.

well, at least, none of them seemed like jungkook’s type. he never had a girlfriend throughout his years in uni though he had plenty of other experiences that makes you wonder what in the world he hasn’t tried yet.

being in a relationship, is probably the only thing he hasn’t done.

jungkook liked kind people. ones that didn’t point at a random person and say an offhanded comment and collectively laugh about it. someone that laughs and smiles a lot because and didn’t have a single bad bone in their body.

liked.

because you don’t know what kind of person jungkook likes now. but you never thought him asking a hypothetical question from what seems like another person's perspective about his lifestyle would be, as taehyung calls it-

“i’m telling you,” he slams a hand on the table, a loud pap! resonating in the air but he doesn’t seem bothered by the pain - if there is any - as his eyes bore into you, “that was jungkook shooting his shot!”

“i don’t know,” you take a sip from the metal straw of your matte black tumbler for the sake of doing something, “it doesn’t feel real but i can kind of see it?”

“take it for what it is, love,” the pull of his eyebrows together couldn’t have been more frustrating, “jungkook has every reason to have the fattest crush on you - i mean look at you, you’re funny, adorable and nicer than all his friends combined.”

jungkook has multiple friend groups he hangs out with. funny how you started out as duos and merged into a quadruplet and ended up being that friend group that jeon jungkook doesn’t really look like he fits in but he’s probably hanging out with you guys from time to time because you’d known each other the longest. or so word has it.

“that’s basically everyone who’s not his friends.” with an eye roll, you wrap your mouth around the straw. this time, for the sake of hiding the smile that threatens to bloom on your face as it is in your heart.

and that’s how you find yourself in more than one ‘don’t you dare’ moments. jimin has begun randomly pointing out something about your hair accessory to your clothes to your fucking strawberry printed socks.

to prove a point, he said.

“hey beautiful,” oh, and he’s resorted to calling you all the adjectives in the world - but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work in making jungkook’s face scrunch in displeasure for the briefest moment as he glances at jimin as though he’s an adjective away from beating the man into a bloody pulp, “nice shirt.”

despite knowing the comment is every bit staged - and probably doesn’t mean that your minnie and mickey mouse shirt is anywhere compliment-worthy, you still look down at the two mice, one kissing the other on the cheek.

the “uh, thanks,” couldn’t have been more dubious and skeptic.

and so begins jimin’s not-so-secret mission to bring jungkook’s attention to you.

“isn’t the stickers on ___’s mac cute, jungkook?”

jungkook skims at the grizzly, panda and ice bears scattered across your mac before breaking into a smug smirk, “of course they are, i bought them for ___.”

you can almost hear jimin and taehyung high-fiving on the row behind you just as the professor walks in.

while jungkook seems to oblivious to it all, eyes trained to the display on the on the front, you allow yourself to indulge in the heat that seeps through your pores and warms your heart.

it’s not like jungkook stopped going to parties.

but finals season is almost upon you and he’s been hanging out with you more. sitting next to you in class while jimin and taehyung dozes off at the back.

“they sleep in class just to spend hours on end studying at the library,” jungkook huffs, eyebrows knitting together adorably as he stresses over your two friends’ stamina for sitting in one place for six hours straight and only needing a bottle of water at their disposal, “i mean, why can’t they just focus in class so they don’t have to study a whole semester’s worth of syllabus in the last minute and drag us into it?”

the six hour mark ended and they’re out getting some snacks for you to secretly munch on until the library closes.

“i mean,” you begin, eyebrows jolting upwards at the more-than-obvious fact he’s supposed to already know, “you technically came here with your own free will, you’re free to leave whenever you want.”

another sigh hits the air as the boy slams his onto the book he has open in front of him, “yeah, but i need to study to pass and i needed you guys to push me,” he laments.

ever since then, there’d been far too many moments of where you’re stuck with jungkook to wait for the two non-time-abiding asses. at first, excuses like ‘sorry we’re late, we were getting mcdonald’s’ or some other poor fast food restaurants’ name that became the patsy, but they started dwindling to ‘oh hey, sorry, we didn’t notice the time’ and eventually a ‘hey, jimin’s got a meeting with a professor and he’s my ride so you guys go first’.

and before you know it, finals pass and you’re visiting your hometown while jungkook stuck around for a part-time job with taehyung whilst jimin drops off the face of the earth after having mentioned that he’s going on a family vacation at some private island with apparently the worst wifi connection ‘like ever.’

the two now-co-workers keep spamming the group chat with pictures of them in their uniforms, holding different drinks which they personally every time. when you’re staying over with your grandmother, it’s your turn to spam pictures of her great black cat who seem to only like sitting in her lap and glaring at you in every picture you take of the two watching tv together. almost as if he had a sixth sense when it comes to cameras.

“when are you coming back?” jungkook grumbles from the other end of line.

you’ve just got a shower and he’s just got home from a night shift. he’s probably haven’t even taken off his jacket yet when he proposed calling you like the sporadic times you both did throughout the break.

“i don’t know. i don’t feel like going back maybe even until the ceremony,” you confess, half-meaning it. the gardening, and saying hello’s to everyone you see while buying groceries because everyone knows everyone here, and the best-tasting cookies your grandma make, and waking up to her cat suffocating you in your sleep, isn’t so bad.

“i’m dying here,” he sighs, sounding more relaxed and probably lying on his bed now, “if i have to insist that i can’t ‘reheat’ coffee and can only make a new one and end up having to hide in the kitchen for five seconds to pretend like there’s a secret microwave only for coffees,” he says all in one breath before letting a suspenseful silence hang in the air and then finally revealing the next big thing he’ll do, “i’m seriously going to spit in their coffee while in the kitchen pretending to reheat it with an invisible microwave.”

the laughter that tumbles out of your mouth is probably ugly and you probably snorted a couple times but jungkook doesn’t seem to notice. or care as he keeps insisting ‘i’m really gonna do it’ whilst you end up laughing until your stomach hurts and tears begin to prick your eyes.

“is this the same regular that like, wants their coffee like super hot?” you finally manage to ask, traces of laughter still threatening to spill from your lips.

“yeah,” his sounds impressed, “how’d you know?”

“tae told me,” you make an incredulous face and shrug even though he can’t see, “you do realize you work at the same place, right?”

“yeah but i never see him talk about it in the group but i probably missed it-”

“oh no,” your hand goes up in a dismissive wave, “we talk on the phone and he told me about it.”

“you guys talk on the phone too?” there’s a strain in his voice, possibly out of surprise.

“yeah, like every day.” you say, tongue subconsciously lapping over your bottom lip.

“oh,” is all he says for the longest moment before chirping out the billion dollar question, “why aren’t we talking every day?”

“i don’t know,” your shoulder line rises, almost swallowing your neck as a war breaks out within yourself, “we did try at the beginning of break but you always had a party to go to so...”

“oh,” this ‘oh’ is a little bit dejected and perhaps hits a little different before he continues, “i don’t go to those anymore.”

this time, it’s your jaw that falls. your voice is small, almost as though cautiously teetering on tightrope as you ask, “...why not?”

“i just didn’t see the point of going anymore you know? once we graduate, i won’t even talk to these people anymore - but i wanna continue being friends with you guys.”

the ‘you guys’ meaning you, taehyung and jimin. the bros. the homies. it’s no secret that he probably sees you all as the same gender, not a guy nor a girl but just friends.

well. it’s not the first time jungkook’s friendzoned you.

“that’s great,” you can’t help but nod even though you know he can’t see you, “i wanna keep being friends with you too, jungkook.”

ever since then, you talk almost everyday. sometimes in three’s and when taehyung had a shift and jungkook got off his, it’d just be the two of you. and for the first time, in ages, it feels as though the ‘best’ in your friendship has somewhat reintroduced itself once more. jimin somewhat manages to get a connection somewhere along the way and the first thing he did was complain about the three digit number in a red bubble in the corner of the message app and then managing to get one picture of him in flowery trunks, and a baby monkey eating a banana perched on his shoulder with the beach in the background before disappearing for the rest of the month until two weeks before the graduation ceremony.

“so like, do you have anyone to pick you up?” jungkook asks from he other end of the line. he sounds more free since it’s the last day of his job.

“yeah,” you announce, attentiveness laced in your tone for your next words might be indicative enough, “my sister.”

“what.” he drags out the word in a disbelieving tone and it’s no secret why he’s doing that- “i haven’t seen you in ages! and you’re going to your sister’s? wait - this isn’t like a permanent thing right? we’ll get to hang out before the ceremony, right?”

it takes you a moment to register the series of questions he bombarded you with and before you know it, the silence has already turned your voice into a small and guilt-ridden, “um, yes and no?”

a groan.

“i haven’t seen seulgi in forever too and she kept nagging me to visit her during break but i never did so now she has like a whole week’s worth of itinerary planned out for us to do before the ceremony,” the excuse trickles out of your mouth hurriedly, “jungkook, i have to do this, or the next time we’ll meet it’s at my funeral and you’ll be talking to my dead carcass before they bury me.”

it takes a moment of anticipating silence before he grumbles out a “fine. but after that, you’re staying over at my place.”

“okay but i mean if we’re having stay over’s wouldn’t tae’s place be better since he has a whole ass apartment for himself?” you’re at that point where you’re discussing stay over arrangements before actually consulting the owner of the place.

“i guess,” his voice is a little lower and smaller but it revives at the mention of the new pizza place that just opened before you decided to invite the other two in the call to make plans to visit there.

when the day finally comes for you to don the royal blue robe and cap, you do so with barely enough grace and composure for someone who’s about to receive her blood sweat and tears on a stage all because you and your sister are - this must be karma for shading taehyung and jimin for being - a bunch of non-time-abiding asses.

the double doors are almost closed as you struggle with not tripping on your high heels whilst trying to keep your hair out of your face.

“where have you been?” you almost didn’t recognize the golden man who tapped you on your shoulder from behind.

“jimin! you made it!” is the first thing you say.

“rich coming from someone who barely got to her seat in time,” he gives you a once over and you’re not quite sure what he sees because your back which he’ll be looking most at is clad is oversized blue robe. but despite that, you reach out to give his hand a squeeze and he takes it with just as a tight, ‘we made it’ kind of squeeze before you turn to the chancellor that’s beginning his speech.

you’re not sure which row jungkook is at or if he even sees you and you read taehyung’s ‘i feel like a proud momma’ text because his major adds another year to his studies than you, jimin and jungkook.

the ceremony goes on without a hitch and you’d like to believe your picture is as perfect as your make up which your sister claims to be ‘out of this world!’ - only because it’s her that did it.

“so you guys talk everyday?” jimin pulls you into him, a smile gracing his beautifully tanned skin as he steals a glance at something behind your shoulders - possibly jungkook whom you saw was being swarmed by his friends to take pictures with.

“yeah, i guess,” you casually say with a shrug.

“it’s true, i was there,” taehyung comes up next to you, replacing jimin’s arms with his in a side hug.

“man, i really wish i witness it all,” jimin grumbles, “but the connection on that island was shitty.”

“i’m sure you connected in different ways,” the taller man adds, a strain in his voice which the shorter doesn’t seem to notice as he try to wave off the belatedly relayed fact that his family is a different kind of family.

like the kind that invites sex workers and other business colleagues alike to enjoy themselves for as long as they wanted, as long as the park family was there.

“okay but how long is he going to take?” jimin quizzes, eyebrows soaring whilst you and taehyung follow his gaze to the growing size of people a few feet away who clearly look like they’re here for a photoshoot than a simple graduation ceremony, “my parents kinda skipped work to see me go on stage and get a piece of paper they paid a lot for so i kinda want to get the family pic done before i go to my second family...”

time doesn’t seem to stop like they do in the movies. it happens all too fast, in fact - jimin’s voice fading into the background, the countdown of the person taking the picture of the group of graduates jungkook’s in starting from three, two, one! and a girl with the prettiest curls that seem to bounce as she turns around and stick her tongue into jungkook’s mouth.

it must have been your uncanny silence that draws the attention of the two boys and a ‘oh shit...’ from one of them - you’re not sure who even though taehyung and jimin has two distinctly sounding voice.

all you’re sure of is the involuntary movements of your feet as they carry you away from the scene. your eyes are dry but that’s probably only because your brain hasn’t registered what exactly happened though deep down, you’re perfectly aware of the fact that those daily calls, the spams of good mornings and randomly sending each other selfies were nothing more than exchanges between two people who were onlu ever connected through a childhood bond that got translated into best friendship just because there was no other name for knowing someone for so long even though you probably stopped being friends first year of college.

“___! wait!” someone calls for you and you wish it so badly to be jungkook but you know better than to expect for the impossible. a modern day fairy tale.

“hey, don’t cry. jungkook’s a fucking dick,” the tall stature that finally caught up to you and trapped you in his arms, whispers. gentle, understanding and pitiful.

it’s not just the comforting warmth, it’s also the hand that’s rubbing your back that you know is probably jimin’s that makes you break out into your first sob. whilst the day isn’t exactly free of tears, those who did shed them did it out of gratitude and a sort of ‘i did it’ kind of relief but not you.

today, your cheeks are marred by the excruciating pain of a heartbreak. you might as well tear your chest open, take out the beating organ and hand it over to jungkook so he could crush them with his own two hands.

maybe it’d hurt less.

somewhere amidst your fit, you choke on your laughter as you catch the two bickering.

“that’s not how you comfort a crying lady, taehyung, what the fuck?” jimin doesn’t hold back with his colorful words.

“what? what did i do?” the taller man sounds all the more confused but still pass you on to the shorter one like a gift basket when a hand pulls you into another pair of arms.

a hand patting your head as jimin murmurs, “there, there, you’re going to be okay, sweetie,” he hugs you just a tad bit tighter as though to say i promise, “you’re young, you’re beautiful and you just graduated with honors. in five years you won’t even remember your little crush for jungcockhead.”

you would have laughed if not for the shadow in your periphery stopping dead in its trek just a few feet away from you and close enough to hear every word jimin uttered in his attempt to placate your rising desire to flee the scene.

“what?” even a simple syllable is enough to tell you who the voice belongs to. perhaps it’s because you’ve heard it in real life and on the phone countless times and countless more during the span where he worked sporadic shifts and you were gardening and getting scratched by your grandmother’s cat that you tried relentlessly to befriend.

“nothing, jungkook.” you wish it was you who said it but it’s jimin who’s hugging you tighter like a mother comforting their heartbroken child, “why don’t you go back to your girlfriend and stick your face where it’s actually wanted?”

almost as though physically slapped in the face.

with a brick.

jungkook’s shoulder line jolts as he flinches, brows knitting together as you can almost see the rewind of the moment your heart gets split in two. she has the prettiest, softest tanned complexion, luscious curls and body that fits the definition of a glowed-up.

he takes one step forward but stops when you shrink into jimin’s arms, almost as though seeking protection. but it takes everything in you not to run to him and make up an excuse about feeling hot and stuffy and that being the reason you left, when the crestfallen expression mars his otherwise ever-smiling features.

“that wasn’t what you thought it was-” you could almost swear he chokes at the end of his words but the pause is too short to tell, “i left her as soon as i saw you running off.”

“oh my god, cut the bullshit! this isn’t the first time and this won’t be the last. don’t talk to ___, don’t even look at her, douchebag,” the rumble of jimin’s voice vibrates against you as he pokes taehyung in the rib, making the boy cry out in pain.

the assaulted man has half a mind to ask for further instructions when he turns to you and jimin but decides against it, squaring up his shoulders and placing a warning hand, “just leave, man. ___ clearly doesn’t wanna talk to you right now.”

“ever.” jimin half-shouts.

those deep brown eyes search for yours as though holding on the last strand of what you call best friendship - hoping, wishing that it isn’t true. but as soon as they find your puffy eyes, you throw your gaze to the ground, finding the crack in the asphalt in a better state than your heart.

you can only imagine jungkook’s face falling at your refusal to affirm the strength of years’ worth of friendship. because the fact of the matter is, you’re not so sure if you want to keep pretending to be oblivious as he wraps his arms around another person and kiss them like he means it.

“___,” the bed dips as you feel the weight of the blanket get yanked off you. seulgi’s sweet peaches perfume filling your senses, “get up, it’s been days since you had an actual meal.”

“i’m not hungry,” you grumble against the pillow just as your stomach starts making the most monstrous sound ever existed in history of mankind.

“yeah right,” she scoffs but her hand on your arm is warm and soothing, “come on, please eat something - i’m saying ‘please’ here and you know i never say ‘please’. people say ‘please’ to me.”

you can’t help but laugh at that. seulgi’s never truly begged anyone for anything in her entire life. she would have asked once and left you be until you were done moping around over jungkook getting with jihyo. it was after you did get over your first heartbreak, did she get you ice cream and you’d spent the night in her room with fairy lights and forts, watching the notebook.

“don’t let a boy hurt you like that again, ___, promise me.” she held up a pinky, and yours felt like a ton of weight just dropped over you.

in the end, you hooked your pink with hers and made a promise of sisterhood.

but she hadn’t been there when you needed your off days in college when rumors started spreading about jungkook and a different girl every week.

the wounds to your ever bleeding heart don’t heal. but you got used to picking yourself up and you got better at that with that one class you failed, that one presentation you blew, the humiliating mistake you made in front of your supervisor and every time after that. seulgi had her own ways to deal with problems and you had yours - or maybe patching yourself up after a fuck up was more of your forte.

who knows?

“what’s for dinner?”

“really?” at your inquiry, the face you thought would light up like a christmas tree - doesn’t. if anything, she bites her bottom lip just like you just caught her red-handed for doing something you probably won’t like.

“what?” you ask plainly, at this point, you won’t even be surprised if she said the sky is falling.

it’s not.

but her next words are far more foreboding than the end of the world, “look, jungkook came over like he always did everyday since that day and today i wanted him to stop coming for good so i told him if you at least have the energy to get some food, i’d let him see you,” her eyes glimmer with a sort of remorse that you can’t even hold her against.

“then can’t you tell him i still don’t wanna eat?” is what you say, completely unperturbed or rather not registering the fact that your best friend whom you’ve been in love with for as long as you can remember is in your sister’s living room because he probably heard about your hunger strike.

but the only problem is, he’s not in the living room-

“he’s right outside the room. i told him he can stand there and see for himself how bad he fucked you over so he’ll feel bad enough to leave you alone.” she says in a hurried whisper, eyes glancing to the half-agape door every second.

a spark lights up inside you, like smolders blown by wind and flares into flames, “seriously? you couldn’t talk to me first about it?”

her eyebrows furrow as her mouth opens and closes for a moment before she confesses, “...i didn’t think you’d say yes to lunch.”

“whatever just-” you tear your gaze away from your sister’s involuntary puppy eyes just so you wouldn’t end up clawing them out yourself, “...just go, seulgi.”

for the longest yet briefest moment, the only thing you can hear in the room is your steady breathing. the flame still burns but it doesn’t flare into a raging fireball. and you know full well it probably isn’t easy for jungkook to pass to through the door after having heard how you reacted when you found out he’s just outside.

when he does, he doesn’t even hide the way his doe eyes shine with something you can’t pinpoint as he takes you in. all of you. with your mused, oily hair and three day’s worth of hoodie and puffed eyes.

“hey,” he murmurs ever so softly, the bed dipping where seulgi sat.

you echo the same greeting back but with a hoarser voice compared to his velvet one.

“so, what do you want for dinner?” he begins, cautious eyes finding yours.

“i don’t want it anymore,” is all you say as you shrug casually.

“oh.” he sounds fragile. nothing at all like the self-assured jeon jungkook you’ve come to know.

silence fills the room like a big, blue elephant. seconds stretch on into minutes and you find yourself leaning against the headboard, drawing invisible patterns over the sheets while jungkook-

you don’t know what he’s doing. he could be fiddling with his fingers like how 10-year-old him would whenever you met at your favorite spot after a fight. but you’re both no where near 10 and if there’s any traces of the boy you once called your best friend, it’s probably only his appearance that’s never really changed.

either way, you don’t dare to even steal a glance his way.

“i like you too.”

the words hit the air like a drop of water that vaporized faster than what science dictates it too. you almost thought you were hearing things if not for the way he looks at you. as though waiting for something. anything.

“i...” you trail off before shaking your head, almost as though coming to your senses, “i can’t do this.”

jungkook laughs awkwardly, hand scratching the back of his head, “yeah, i understand - i’m sorry i- i just wanted to make sure you’re fine and then i got carried away- i should leave.”

but before he takes a step towards the door, you call for him, “jungkook, wait.”

“i’m leaving for japan in two days,” you finally let the cat out of the bag.

“what?” comes out a second later - you don’t dare to look up from your hands to see what kind of emotion he’s making.

but he at least deserves an explanation, “for the longest time, i feel fucked up because i get so jealous of the girls that dated you...” taking a deep breath, you continue, “but i know it’s because i think i’m not enough-”

“you are - you’re more than enough,” the interjection is what makes you look up involuntarily, if not to confirm it yourself - the knitted eyebrows and heartbroken gaze proves it and then the sinking realization settles in, “but you don’t believe me.”

you shake your head, a bitter smile on your lips, “i’m not enough for me and that’s something i have to work with.”

“by running away?” his voice rises to the ceiling, confusion and frustration pooling in his eyes.

“by finding myself,” you correct, “you know like how people go to a different country and come back a different person except i’m hoping to find that person.”

“in japan,” he sounds like he’s a word away from hooking you up with a specialist - not that you haven’t thought of one but-

you laugh and he looks at you like he’s stuck in the middle of a never ending maze, “my mom’s planning to visit my aunt in japan and since i’m officially unemployed i guess, i’m tagging along.”

“oh,” his shoulder line sags as he sighs in relief, “so like a vacation.”

it tenses back up when you say, “i might look for a job there.”

“you’re permanently moving to japan?” jungkook’s body seems to be here but his conscience seems to have flown out - probably to japan.

you want to laugh but it doesn’t seem like a proper setting for it. especially when you’re confessing to your crush that you like him but also subtly admitting that he’s partly the reason you’re leaving the life you know for a new one. and you might not even do it willingly.

“i might find a job with a branch company in korea - work there for a year and then transfer here,” you shrug, “i don’t know.”

“i-is this because-” he starts but you shake your head.

“yes and no?” you say, “none of this is your fault but i’m projecting my frustrations onto you and this isn’t healthy... i need- i need to go away for awhile and figure myself out.”

and that’s how jeon jungkook finally comes to the realization that nothing’s been the same. you haven’t been the best friend you prided yourself to be for a long time and that best friend completely disappeared in second year of college after he started spending nights at parties and only lunches with you. until eventually, you’re stuck in a habit - a cycle that you can’t break from until something dramatic or life changing happens.

and so it goes, he sees you off at the airport with taehyung and jimin. unsure of whether they were still friends after they’d deliberately stopped him from running after you on your graduation day, they were the first to approach him. they understood that it’d only be worse if he chased after you but they didn’t hate him - dislike him at times when - as they called it - he was so damn clueless, yes but they didn’t hate him. and that was a relief.

nothing major changed. he moved in with taehyung and jimin and even got a job at the same company as jimin. you went off radar but still kept in contact every once in awhile - it was like that time jimin went to that private island except you had all the reception you needed, just not the time to text as much as you used to.

job hunting was tough and he understood the competition. when you got a job, you were plagued with a newbie’s role, having to do overtimes to finish up work that was piling before they gave you that position.

then one year turned to two and two years turned to three. jungkook became a manager while jimin took up the position as a secretary in their rival company - it’s funny because everyone at the office would shit-talk him and they would make fun of those people as they drink into the night.

jungkook lost contact with most of his party friends - they were great with hooking him up with a potential client but besides that, he was basically living the workaholic life with his two apartment mates as his only source of social interaction outside of work.

from meetings to gatherings to meetings and then private dinners with clients. the cycle goes on until that one evening where arrives at an invites-only event.

“jungkook, come here,” the director gestures him over and because there’s a server blocking his view, he only notices the girl standing in front of his superior, when he’s finally by his side.

“...a hardworker - every project he’s ever handled hits the internet like a boom!” the director was saying.

“ah jungkook,” the man taps him on his shoulder but he can barely feel it when his eyes are trained on you, stunning in that deep toned dress and new hairstyle, “meet ___, you guys will be working on the twin tower project together.”

“so you’re back for good?” he asks when you’re finally alone, lingering at the balcony and away from your superior’s eyes.

“not quite - i still have to fly to japan every week,” you shrug casually.

“oh,” he nods.

“you look great by the way,” he adds a moment later, scuffing his foot against the floor.

you can’t help but giggle at how boyish he is, even at the age of 25, he still acts like a child, “thanks - you don’t look half bad yourself.”

he echoes a “thanks” as well before throwing his gaze over the magnificient view of the cityscape. artificial lights from the buildings appear like stagnant fireflies. it’s sad that they’re the reason you can’t see stars anymore.

but fate is too cruel.

because hoseok, your partner is calling you over - a couple of middle aged people standing next to him, smiling that mechanical smile that isn’t any different from your business smile.

“i gotta go,” you sigh but shoot him one last melancholy smile, “i’ll see you this monday?”

“yeah, see you this monday.” jungkook smiles a smile that says he’s not so sure where you stand. colleagues. ex-best friends. acquaintances?

with a wave goodbye, he watches as you strut to the couple, transforming into a woman so sure of every gesture, even a smile and a throw of your head back as you laugh. everything you do, every movement you make is mesmerizing.

and he knows he’s not the only one who thinks so as he watches your partner gaze at you with eyes that doesn’t seem to see anyone else but you. laughs at something you say as if he’s completely enchanted.

jungkook turns around, hand propped on the railing as he takes a sip of the wine he’s been holding. without realizing it, a smile slips onto his face, he makes a mental note to check your company’s dating policy.

most forbid office romances anyway.

note. i’ve had this in the draft for forever! and thought i was never gonna finish this but i somehow got a burst of inspiration yesterday and here we are! hope yall enjoyed!

#bts smut #jungkook smut #bts scenarios #jungkook scenarios #jungkook fic #bts fic #jungkook fanfic #bts fanfic #bts au #jungkook au #bts fluff #excerpt from a fic i'll never write

543 notes · View notes

fanfics4all · 3 years

Text

Torture

Request: Yes / No

Requests are closed <3 Have a nice day/night

Harry Potter x Fem!Lupin!Reader

Word count: 4190 (Probably could have gotten to the torture party quicker, but I just had to add backstory lol)

Warnings: Torture obviously, and Dobby’s death

Y/N: Your Name

Y/N/N: Your Nickname

A/N: Bingo card made by @slyttherins

PLEASE DO NOT STEAL MY WORK, I WORK HARD ON MY FICS AND IT’S NOT COOL TO STEAL SOMEONE ELSE’S WORK!

If you want to be on the tag list for anything (My series fics, specific character fics, or just all of them) All you have to do is send me an ask and I will add you!

Masterlist

(Not my photo, credit to whoever made it!)

Harry and I have been together since he and Cho broke up. Now we were in our seventh year and everything was going to hell. Professor Snape had killed Dumbledore and was now in charge of Hogwarts. I feared going back to school, but I feared for Harry more. So, when the summer was coming to an end and my older brother Remus said he was going with the Order to Harry’s I immediately demanded to go with him.

“Y/N/N, it’s dangerous.” He said.

“This is my boyfriend’s life in danger. I am coming with you.” I said, standing my ground.

“Y/N/N… if anything happened to you Mum and Dad would kill me.” He sighed.

“If anything happens to you or Harry, you won’t have to worry about Mum and Dad.” I threatened.

“There’s nothing I can do to convince you to stay home with Edward, is there?” He sighed again.

“Not a thing. And if you go without me I’ll just follow you.” I shrugged and he sighed once again.

“Fine, fine. You can join me, but you better not leave my side.” He said and I smiled.

“Thank you!” I said and hugged him.

Before we went off to Harry’s house, The Order met up to discuss what would be happening. You-Know-Who was searching for Harry. He was going to go after him and we needed to act first. We were the only line of defence for Harry and I was going to fight for both our lives till the very end. Once the plan was in order we all got on our brooms and headed for Harry. When we all landed Harry opened the door and I ran up to him, throwing my arms around him and holding him tightly. He hugged me back and I leaned up to kiss him.

“What are you doing here?” He asked shocked.

“Did you honestly think I would just sit around while your life was in danger?” I laughed and walked into the room with the others.

“I tried to get her to stay home, but she’s stubborn.” Remus said and I smiled.

“All righ’ ‘arry? Yeh look fit.” Hagrid said with a smile.

“Yeah, he’s ruddy gorgeous. What say we get undercover before someone murders him.” Mad-Eye said in his usual rough tone.

“I thought you were looking after the Prime Minister, Kingsley?” Harry asked.

“You’re most important.” Kingsley answered. Harry smiled and Bill Weasley walked in, extending his hand to Harry.

“Hello, Harry. Bill Weasley.” He introduced himself.

“Wasn’t alway this handsome.” Fred joked.

“Dead ugly.” George joined in.

“True enough. Owe it all to a werewolf by the name of Greyback. Hope to repay the favor one day.” Bill said. Fleur walked in next to him and kissed his cheek.

“You are still beautiful to me, William.” She said.

“Just remember, Fleur, once you’re married, Bill takes his steaks on the raw side now.” Remus said, finally walking into the room with Tonks.

“My husband, the joker. By the way, wait until you hear the news! Remus and I are-”

“Alright, alright! You’ll all have time for a cozy catch-up later! We’ve got to get the hell out of here and soon!” Mad-Eye cut her off. He dropped a sack by his feet and turned to Harry.

“Potter, you’re underage, which means you’ve still got the Trace on you.” He said.

“The Trace?” Harry asked.

“You sneeze and the Ministry will know who wipes your nose. Point is, we have to use those means of transport the Trace can’t detect, brooms, thestrals, and the like. We’ll go in pairs. That way if anyone’s out there waiting for us- and I reckon there will be- they won’t know which Harry Potter is the real one.” He explained.

“The real one?” Harry asked.

“I believe you’re familiar with this particular brew.” He said, pulling out a flask.

“No! Absolutely not!” Harry exclaimed.

“I told you he’d take it well.” Hermione sighed.

“If you think I’m going to let people risk their lives for me-”

“Never done that before, have we?” Ron joked, cutting him off.

“This is different. Taking that. Becoming me- no.” Harry said.

“Well, none of us really fancy it, mate.” Fred said.

“Yeah, imagine if something went wrong and we were stuck as scrawny, specky git forever.” George joked.

“Reckon Y/N would love having more than one Harry.” Fred added and I rolled my eyes.

“Piss off, the both of you.” I said and they laughed.

“Everyone here’s of age, Potter, and they’ve all agreed to take the risk.” Mad-Eye said.

“Technically, I’ve been coerced. Mundungus Fletcher, Mr. Potter. I’ve always been a huge admirer.” Mundungus introduced and just about everyone rolled their eyes.

“Nip it, Mundungus! Alright, Granger, as discussed.” Mad-Eye said. Hermione nodded slightly and grabbed a bit of Harry’s hair and pulled.

“Blimey, Hermione!” Harry groaned.

“Straight in here, if you please.” Mad-Eye said, holding open the flask. Smoke rushed out the top and he handed it to George first.

“For those of you who haven’t taken Polyjuice Potion before, fair warning. It tastes like goblin piss.” Mad-Eye said.

“Have a lot of experience with that, do you, Mad-eye?” Fred joked. Mad-Eye’s eye rotated towards Fred.

“Just trying to defuse the tension.” Fred said. George took the first sip, then Fred, Ron, Hermione, Fleure, Mundungus, and finally it was passed to me.

“Y/N? No! Lupin, you can’t seriously be alright with this!” Harry said, before I could take a sip. Everyone else was already transforming.

“I’m not, but like I said, she’s stubborn.” Remus sighed.

“Who’s she gonna ride with?” He asked and everyone was silent. That was something they haven’t figured out yet.

“I’ll go on my own. They won’t expect it and probably will just leave me be.” I shrugged.

“Absolutely not!” Remus said.

“It would look less specious than two Harrys riding together.” I pointed out.

“Very well.” Mad-Eye nodded.

“What? You can’t be serious! What if she gets hurt? There’s no one with her to protect her!” Remus said.

“She can’t go on her own!” Harry said.

“Y/N, are you willing to take the risk?” Mad-Eye asked and everyone looked my way.

“If it means Harry is safe, then of course.” I answered.

“She agrees, now hurry up and drink so we can get on with this.” He said. Before my brother or boyfriend could stop me I took a gulp of the awful potion and handed the flask back to Mad-Eye. I soon also looked like Harry.

“Wow, we’re identical!” Fred and George said together.

“Not yet you aren’t.” Mad-Eye said. He walked over to the sack he dropped earlier and dumped out eight pairs of identical clothing.

“Don’t you have something a bit more sporty, do you?” George asked.

“Yes, don’t fancy this colour at all.” Fred agreed.

“Fancy this, you’re not you, so shut it and strip.” He said to the twins and turned to Harry.

“You’ll need to change too, Potter.” He said. All of us started stripping, and I think I can speak for everyone when I say that it was a bit awkward.

“Bill, look away… I’m ‘ideous.” Fleur said dramatically and I rolled my eyes.

“I knew Ginny was lying about that tattoo!” Ron said with a smirk.

“Harry, your eyesight really is awful.” Hermione said, wobbling a bit.

“Don’t worry Harry, I still love you.” I said and he smiled.

“Blimey. I almost forgot!” Mad-Eye rummaged through his pocket and pulled out a bunch of glasses.

“Right then. We’ll be pairing off. Each Potter will have a protector, except for Y/N, As for you, Harry…” Mad-Eye started.

“Yes?” Everyone but me answered, again I rolled my eyes.

“The real Harry! Where the devil are you, anyway?” He asked.

“Here.” Harry said, walking towards him.

“You’ll ride with Hagrid.” He finished.

“Brought yeh here sixteen years ago when you were barely bigger than a Bowtruckle. Seems only righ’ I should be the one ter take yeh away.” Hagrid said and I smiled at how sentimental he could be.

“Yeah, it’s all very touching. Let’s go.” Mad-Eye said and stormed out of the house. Everyone got on their brooms and thestrals, while Hagrid got on his motorbike. As the real Harry walked out of the house Hagrid tapped the sidecar for him. Instead of going to him he walked over to me.

“Please be careful, love.” He whispered.

“I’ll be fine. And if for some reason I’m not then you and Remus can tell me you told me so.” I smirked.

“Harry, we need ter go!” Hagrid called him.

“Go, I’ll see you soon.” I smiled and he nodded. He got in Hagrid’s sidecar and everyone looked towards Mad-Eye.

“Good luck, everyone. On the count of three. One… two…” Before he could finish Hagrid’s bike came to life and off he went. Everyone flew to the skies and split off. It wasn’t long until an uneasy feeling filled the air. Death Eaters dropped from the clouds and started surrounding us. Green flashes lit up the sky as they tried to hit us. I glanced ahead and saw the real Harry was getting away. Everyone was splitting off more and I found myself alone. I couldn’t see anyone ahead or behind me, no one was around to help me if I needed it. I pushed those thoughts away. This is for Harry. This is so he’s safe. Suddenly three Death Eaters came out of nowhere and shot a spell at my broom. My broom stopped flying and was now pulling me towards the ground. Fear gripped my heart as the wind harshly hit my face. I suddenly stopped falling and was grabbed by one of the Death Eaters.

“Think he’s the real one?” The one holding me asked.

“No, they wouldn’t let the real Potter go off on his own.” Another answered.

“Doesn’t matter if he’s the real one or not, he could have information. Let’s take him with us. Bellatrix will get ‘im to talk.” The last one said. My eyes widened and my throat went dry. Harry and Remus were going to kill me if Bellatrix didn’t first.

I didn’t say a word as we arrived at Malfoy Manor. I knew the potion was going to wear off soon and they would know exactly who I was. Just as we were arriving at the large gate I could feel myself turning back into myself.

“Oi, looks like you was right, this ain’t the real Potter.” The one gripping my arm said.

“She’ll still be of some use.” Another said. We walked up to the gate and standing on the other side was Bellatrix, Lucius, and Narcissa Malfoy. Bellatrix walked forward and the Death Eater holding me pushed me against the metal bars.

“She was a fake Potter, but we thought she might have information.” One said.

“Bring her in.” Bellatrix said with an evil smirk. I was roughly brought into the Manor and pushed down to my knees.

“Call Draco, he might know who she is to Potter.” Bellatrix said. She kneeled down in front of me and roughly pulled my chin up to I was facing her.

“Tell me dearie, why were you left all on your own?” She asked, but I said nothing.

“What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?” She asked with a smirk. We heard footsteps enter the room and I saw Draco. His eyes widened slightly and I saw worry swimming in them.

“Draco, I was hoping you would know who our guest is.” Bellatrix said, turning to face him and letting go of my face.

“S-She went to Hogwarts.” He answered. It was obvious he was scared and that he didn’t want to give me up.

“We know that much, but who is she to Potter?” She asked in a slightly annoyed tone. Draco stared at me for a moment and gulped.

“Now Draco, all you need to do is tell us. She could be the key to keeping the Dark Lord from killing all of us.” His Father said. It was now my turn to gulp. Sure Draco was a huge git to my boyfriend and friends, but he oddly never said anything about me. Always just questioning why I was with Harry. Perhaps it was because I was nice to him despite everything he did.

“I’m Y/N Lupin. Harry’s girlfriend.” I answered and everyone looked at me in shock, Draco especially.

“See dear, that wasn’t so hard.” Bellatrix said, her smirk growing and seeming to get more evil.

“If you simply answer all my questions then no harm will come to you.” She said, walking closer to me again.

“I will not betray my friends, family, or boyfriend.” I answered with a hard stare.

“Then this will be a very hard time for you.” She said, her fake kindness dropping.

She wasn’t lying when she said that. At first it was just little cuts with her knife. It was painful, but nothing I couldn’t handle. However, she was just warming up. She then moved on to the Cruciatus Curse. The pain was like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Even when the spell was over the pain still lingered for a little while. That lasted a month or so, I’m not entirely sure, but once she realized that I wouldn’t be talking by that means she moved on. She said she didn’t want to damage me to the point I couldn’t say anything. Nothing she was doing was working and I could tell she was getting frustrated. That’s when she had her brilliant idea. She brought me up from the cellar and standing there was Lucius, Narcissa, and Grayback. I felt my blood run cold and boil at the same time. He was the man that hurt my poor brother at the age of five!

“I’m sure you know Fenrir well.” Bellatrix smirked. She pushed me to the ground and held me down.

“Now, I’m going to let him do the same thing he did to your brother, unless you tell me what I want to know.” She said.

“Where is Harry Potter?” She asked.

“Now that you’ve all taken over the Ministry, he could be anywhere.” I answered. I didn’t know where he would be at this point. I didn’t know what the plan was.

“Liar!” She shouted and started carving something into my arm.

“Tell me where he is!” She shouted at me.

“I don’t know! Please! I don’t know!” I cried out in pain.

“You are a pathetic little liar. Fenrir!” She called and got off me.

“I think it’s time you gave her a little gift.” She said, that evil smirk appearing on her face once again.

“With pleasure.” He smirked. He crawled over to me and sniffed me. He laughed and licked the blood that split from my arm.

“I’m going to enjoy this.” He said and bit into the same arm that Bellatrix carved into. I screamed and cried as his sharp teeth drug into my skin. He was suddenly pulled off me and Narcissa was there placing something on my arm.

“Wormtail! Come lock our new little puppy up. I suspect she’ll become hungry soon.” Bellatrix smirked. I was pulled off the ground and brought back down to the cellar. Wormtail locked a metal collar around my neck and smirked.

“Be a good dog and keep the howling down.” He said and left with a laugh.

It wasn’t long after he left that I started transforming. I thought the Cruciatus Curse was the worst pain I’ve ever felt, but that was wrong. Transforming into a werewolf was way more painful. It felt as though all my bones were breaking and shifting into different places. It felt like my mind was going hazy and I had no control over myself. I felt the hunger hit me and the need to hunt became strong. I tried to run, but the collar around my neck kept me in place. I screamed, growled, and howled trying to get out of the chains and to something to eat. When I realized that I couldn't, I started hurting myself. I clawed at my neck and arms, ripping the skin from my body. That was the longest night of my life. And the next few days I felt incredibly ill and weak. It didn’t help that they were hardly feeding me anymore.

That was how it went from then on. They didn’t bother torturing me for information anymore, I was now torturing myself. They had done the worst to me and now were just leaving me with my own thoughts. Remus would blame himself for this. I know he was going to say how he should have tried harder to make me stay home. Or how he should have made sure he was with me the night we all split up. I knew Harry would blame himself too. He’d say how it was his fault all this happened. All because I was with him.

“Y/N?” Someone asked quietly and I looked up to see Draco. He was standing over me and I pushed myself closer to the wall.

“Please, don’t come any closer…” I whispered.

“What did they do to you?” He asked, kneeling down, but not coming extremely close.

“They made me like my brother…” I answered and his eyes widened.

“Grayback?” He asked and I nodded.

“They’ve kidnapped Luna, they’re bringing her here.” He said.

“They’re keeping her with me? I’ll kill her!” I cried.

“No, you won’t. You’re locked up and can’t get to her, she’s smart enough to not come near you.” He said.

“I’ll bring you something to eat later tonight, I know they’re starving you.” He said.

“Why do you care so much?” I asked.

“You’re one of the only people who was ever nice to me.” He answered with a small smile and stood up.

“I’ll see you tonight.” He said and left.

Just as Draco said, Luna was thrown into the cellar with me. She looked at me with wide eyes and came towards me.

“Y/N?” She asked.

“Luna, stay away.” I said.

“Why? Why are you in chains?” She asked confused.

“I-I’m a werewolf now… So please just stay away.” I begged.

“Oh Y/N, I’m so sorry.” She said and took a few steps my way.

“Please Luna! Just stay back, I don’t want to hurt anyone.” I cried.

“You’re not in your wolf for now Y/N, you won’t hurt me.” She smiled and came to sit next to me.

“I don’t know when the full moon is…” I whispered.

“Then I’ll stay away at night, but you need a friend right now.” She said and hugged me. It was the first kind touch I had since I got here. She was right, I needed that.

A month went by and as promised Luna stayed away from me each night to be safe. When the night was finished and I was back to human Luna came to comfort me. She helped keep me distracted and even helped Draco when he came to check on me. The two of them patched up my wounds that I had given myself. Luna was sitting with me and talking about something her Dad had written about in their paper. I tried to pay attention, but my mind kept drifting off to Harry and my brother.

“What are we gonna do? We can’t leave Hermione alone with her!” A new voice said and Luna and I looked at each other confused.

“Ron?” She asked as she got up and looked around the corner.

“Harry?” She asked and my heart skipped a beat.

“Luna?” Harry asked and a few tears fell down my face.

“Y/N is here too, just this way.” She said. She came back around the corner with Ron and Harry following her.

“Y/N!” Harry said, his face looking a bit odd, but it was definitely him. He ran up and hugged me and I held him back.

“What happened to you? Why are you locked up like this?” He asked, worry clear in his voice

“They tried to get me to tell them where you were…” I answered.

“What did they do to you?” He asked again.

“Grayback…” I whispered and his eyes widened.

“You’re…” He couldn’t finish his sentence.

“I’m just like Remus now…” I whispered.

“I’m so sorry Y/N.” He said and pulled me to him.

“We’ll get you out of here, I promise.

“There’s no way out of here. We’ve tried everything. It’s enchanted.” Ollivander said. He was here before I was, same with Griphook. Harry pulled up his pant leg and pulled out a piece of mirror.

“You’re bleeding, Harry. That’s a curious thing to keep in your sock.” Luna said.

“Help us.” He whispered to it. Then quickly put it away as footsteps grew closer. Ron and Harry ran towards the door as it opened.

“Let her go!” Ron growled.

“Shut up! Get back!” Wormtail growled at them.

“You, goblin, come with me.” He said and then they left.

“Aah!” A new voice said suddenly.

“Dobby? What are you doing here?” Harry asked.

“Dobby has come to rescue Harry Potter, of course.” He answered.

“Dobby will always be there for Harry Potter.” He added.

“You can apparate in and out of this room? Could you take us with you?” Harry asked.

“Of course, sir. I’m an elf.” Dobby answered like it was obvious.

“Works for me.” Ron said.

“Dobby, I want you to take Luna, Y/N, and Mr. Ollivander-”

“Shell Cottage on the outskirts of Tinworth.” Ron cut him off.

“Trust me.” He added.

“Whenever you’re ready, sir.” Luna said.

“Sir? I like her very much.” Dobby said and they made their way over to me.

“Meet me at the top of the stairs in ten seconds.” He said and Luna grabbed my hand. We were suddenly out of the cellar and on a beach. There was a little cottage that was quite cute, I wondered who it belonged to. Luna kneeled next to me and smiled.

“Are you alright?” She asked. I felt my neck and the chain was no longer on my neck, but I felt some blood dripping down from where it dug into my skin.

“I should be, but I shouldn’t be around anyone. The next full moon could be soon for all I know.” I said, slightly freaking out at just the thought of hurting my friends.

“Shh Y/N, we’re free and safe now. Just enjoy that.” She smiled. I suppose she was right, but Harry wasn’t with us yet.

It wasn’t that long until the others arrived. Their landing was a little rougher than ours, however.

“You’re alright. We’re safe. We’re all safe.” Ron said to Hermione.

“Harry Potter.” Dobby said and we all looked at him.

“Dobby. Dobby! No, just… hold on.” Harry said and ran to him, holding him in his arms.

“Hold on. Look, just hold on, okay?” Harry begged.

“We’ll fix you. Hermione will have something. In your bag, Hermione? Hermione? What is it? Help me!” Harry begged, but she didn’t move.

“Such a beautiful place… to be with friends. Dobby is happy to be with his friend… Harry Potter.” Dobby said, his last words he’ll ever speak. No one moved except for Luna.

“We should close his eyes, don’t you think?” She said, kneeling next to them. Harry nodded and she gently closed his eyes.

“There. Now he could be sleeping.” She said.

“I want to bury him. Properly, without magic.” He said and everyone nodded. I got up and made my way to him.

“I’ll help you.” I said and he nodded. We all buried him without magic, but in the end it was just Harry and I left at his grave.

“I’m sorry I didn’t protect you. I should have stopped you from taking that stupid potion.” He said and I shook my head.

“Stop it. This isn’t your fault.” I said.

“Yes it is Y/N, it is entirely my fault! You were brought into this mess because of me!” He said and I hushed him with a kiss.

“Stop it. I love you Harry Potter and I would have done this no matter what. You and Remus are going to blame yourselves for the rest of your lives, but I will not ever blame either of you.” I said and he went to say something, but I stopped him with a kiss.

“Whatever it is, don’t say it.” I said and he sighed.

“Remus is going to kill me.” He said and I shook my head.

“Not if he knows what’s good for him.” I said. That was when everything turned around. I was safe and with Harry and my friends. I’d allow myself these few moments of peace before the full moon came to ruin it again. But for now, I need to focus on the good. I needed to be happy that I was reunited with Harry and my friends.

Tag list: @les-bio-lie @tashy-bear @ashwarren32 @hollie-blogs-blog1 @schisbro87 @lover-of-books-and-teas @nerdygaloresposts @teenwolfbitches2 @genius2050 @drw0301bieber @lady-of-lies @ravenmoore14 @ravenempress101 @cillianchamp @rowanthomasknapp @rachelxwayne @in-slytherin-we-trust @accio-rogers @sambucky8 @bruisedfists-and-splitlips @answer-the-sirens @andreasworlsboring101 @vanessa-kom-skaikru @impulse-anchor @vamora

#Harry Potter #harry potter imagine #harry potter and the deathly hallows part 1 #harry potter x reader #harry potter x fem!reader #harry x reader #Harry x fem!Reader #harry x lupin!reader #harry potter x lupin!reader #Remus Lupin #remus x siser!reader #remus lupin x sister!reader #fanfic #torture #harry potter bingo

120 notes · View notes

orderofthepygmypuff · 3 years

Note

“Do you even know what a whisper is” for jily please :)

This is way longer than the drabble I had planned on, hah. You can read it on AO3 here.

“Potter.”

James’s favorite person glared at him from the entrance to the head office. “Alright, Evans?”

“You have us partnered for rounds tonight.”

“Er, yeah. Remus isn’t feeling well.”

“Oh.” The annoyance fell away from her expression immediately, and James fell in love just a little bit more. “Is he in the hospital wing? Does he need anything?”

“He’s just in bed for a bit,” said James evasively. “Sorry about the last minute switch though.”

“Oh no, that’s alright. I thought you were just being — you know…” she trailed off, looking flustered.

“I wasn’t trying to annoy you on purpose,” said James, feeling miffed now. Why was it so hard to have a normal conversation with her? Every time he thought they were on friendlier terms, something like this happened and it became all awkward again. He hadn’t tried to annoy her on purpose for at least a year now; he thought she’d have noticed.

“No — of course you weren’t. I’m sorry for assuming. I’m still getting used to James Potter, Head Boy,” she said with a little smile.

Yeah, he still loved her. “I’m very grown up now. No more immature, juvenile nonsense.”

She laughed. “I’ll see you at rounds, Potter. Meet you at the portrait hole?”

“I will be at the portrait hole at nine, being extremely mature and serious.”

“You can’t be Sirius though; you’re James.”

James honest-to-God gasped. “You — what — you made a Sirius joke.”

She grinned. “Maybe Head Girl Lily Evans is into a little immature, juvenile nonsense.”

It was all James could do to not swoon.

He was at the portrait hole at 8:45; a decision that Sirius found both deeply amusing and highly annoying. “You’re just going to stand there for fifteen minutes? Without doing anything or talking to anyone?”

“I am waiting for the love of my life,” said James firmly.

“You’re just doing rounds, oh my God —”

“I think Remus mentioned wanting some help with that bandage on his calf earlier.” Remus had said no such thing, and Remus was more skilled with healing charms and tricks than any of them, but Sirius still turned towards the stairs to the dormitory.

“Enjoy standing around like an idiot for a quarter of an hour.”

“Thank you, I will.”

He only waited five minutes though, before Lily walked out of the stairwell. His palms felt suddenly sweaty.

“You’re early.”

“I told you, I’m very mature now,” said James, adopting a lofty voice that he associated mainly with Sirius’s mum.

“No more joke-y James Potter, I guess.”

Unfortunately, that particular veneer fell through almost immediately because Lily led them straight to the dungeons, because she liked to start her rounds at the bottom and work her way up.

“Er. What’s happened here?” she said, crossing her arms at the knot of Slytherins that had gathered in a hall.

“Some moron charmed our Seeker into the portrait,” burst an angry fifth year. “And he’s supposed to play in the Slytherin/Ravenclaw match tomorrow! This is sabotage!”

“Okay, okay, calm down. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.” They approached the offending portrait — and sure enough, there was Regulus Black, sitting furiously on an upturned bucket in a painting of a stable full of horses. James turned his laugh into a cough.

“Black, how did this happen?”

The Slytherin boy glared at them. “I’m not telling a couple of Gryffindors,” he spat.

Lily rolled her eyes. “We’re Head Boy and Girl. We can help you get out of there.”

“Get me out, then!”

“Very helpful, thanks,” said Lily drily. “Come on James, we better go get Flitwick. This looks like a charm.”

James followed her around the corner — and then suddenly he was being forced into a broom cupboard.

“Oof! Evans, what —”

“Did you do it?”

“Er.”

“JAMES. POTTER.”

“Sshhhh, the Slytherins are right around the corner!”

“Did you do it?” she demanded, not bothering to lower her voice.

“Lily. Please whisper.”

“But why?! Gryffindor’s not even playing tomorrow! Why sabotage the Slytherin Seeker now?”

“Do you even know what a whisper is?!”

“We are having entirely different conversations!”

“Okay, okay. I may have had something to do with it. But he didn’t see me, so there’s no way he would know! We were extremely stealthy.”

Lily groaned, her hands over her face. “You are just the most, James Potter.”

“It’s not what you think,” said James quietly. Her fury seemed to be quickly giving way to disappointment, and that made his stomach hurt. “He — he did something really shitty to Sirius. We had to get back at him.”

“This is all just about some sibling drama then? Are you kidding?”

“It’s not just drama! Sirius was disowned by his parents two years ago. And Regulus told him that their mum wanted to meet at Hogsmeade to make amends last weekend, but it turned out to be an ambush. There were literal Death Eaters there! It was lucky Remus and Peter and I were there too, and Peter, of all people, managed to talk them down and let him off without a fight.”

Lily went pale. “That’s horrible.”

“Yeah. Regulus is a spineless little shit, so I’m sure he was forced into it. But we had to get him back. I know it seems like immature nonsense, but —”

“No, I get it. You can’t very well go attack the Death Eaters back.”

James sighed. “Yeah, well. Not yet.”

Lily looked up sharply. “What does that mean?”

“I mean, we can’t go fight them while we’re still in school and risk putting the other kids in danger. But once we’re out — well, there’s nothing stopping us, is there?”

“That doesn’t sound like you’re just angry about the ambush.”

“What? Of course it’s not! There’s a war on, Evans. Do you think I’m going to stand by and let You Know Who finish round up all the muggles and muggle-borns? I know you think I’m shite, but come on.”

He looked at her, miserable. But she was looking back at him through the dark, and in the dim light of her wand, her expression was — unexpected. Fierce. Determined. And then she leaned right up and kissed him.

James was still catching his breath when she said, “I don’t.”

“What?”

“I don’t think you’re shite. And I’ll be with you.”

“Be — what?”

“On the frontlines. In the Order. Wherever, however I can help.”

“Oh.”

“Good, that’s settled then. Come on, let’s go find Dumbledore.”

“Wait. I thought we were going to find Flitwick?”

“We can let the little beast stay in that painting a while longer,” she said, flashing a grin. “You’re about to join the Order of the Phoenix. Dumbledore’s asked me to keep an eye out for promising recruits, and it looks like I’ve found one.”

“Wait — you’re working for the Order? Already?”

“There’s a war on, Potter.”

“You kissed me.”

“Yeah. I like you.”

“I like you,” said James. She grinned at him, and he felt his heart thudding in his chest.

“I’m sorry I’ve been a prat to you. I guess boys aren’t the only ones who act out when they’ve got a crush.”

James laughed, mostly in disbelief. She thought she had a crush? “Go out with me, Evans?”

She took his hand. “Come fight with me, Potter.”

The look on her face took his breath away — her smile, and the resolution underneath. “You’re on. Let’s go.”

#prompt #theroomofreq #jily #madhu writes

151 notes · View notes

weasleyswizardpleases · 3 years

Text

Funny Girl (Pt. 2)

Summary: Being serious has never been your thing, but when you find yourself at the center of a conflict that tears Fred and George apart in the midst of the second wizarding war, it’s hard to find something to laugh about.

Warnings/Notes: Violence, hospital setting, blood, crying. This is a second part per the request of several of you and also my own brain goblin. There will be a part three!

tags: @weasley2x @weasleyfilms

It’s been several months since your falling out with the Weasley twins. The tensions in the wizarding world are coming to a head; the dark lord grows stronger by the day. Purebloods are becoming bolder in their oppression of muggleborns and wizards of mixed heritage, not to mention no-majs. Potter and his little crew have disappeared. Dumbledore is dead. Things look rather bleak.

You wish you could say that you worked things out with your friends, but they both felt betrayed, even though you tried to explain the misunderstanding. How could you have known that they’d both have feelings for you? How could you have predicted that they’d both make their move on the same day, within minutes of each other, nonetheless? You weren’t prepared to choose, then or now. And that’s what they demand- me or him, him or me. So you distance yourself. You’re still friends with Lee, but your friend group has really broken apart since you and the twins have begun avoiding one another.

In confidence, Lee tells you that he’s never seen Fred so on edge, and George has become more withdrawn than ever. He reassures you that they’ve patched things up between the two of them, though. It was your biggest worry after the fight, that they’d let you drive a wedge between them. That was foolish to even consider, of course. You’ve always known that, although the three of you had been a trio ever since you met, their connection to one another was closer than their connection to you. It’s only natural. They were born together, and, apparently finding the provided companionship sufficient, have clung together ever since. Blood runs thicker than any matter of the heart. No falling out could change that for very long.

You, on the other hand, are left alone, without your two closest friends since first year. You try to throw yourself into your final year of studies, but your heart isn’t in it, and you wind up working with some others outside of class to hone your defense against the dark arts skills; you sense something big is coming. When the battle of hogwarts arrives, you have your first conversation with fred and george since your falling out. Mrs. Weasley sees you and pulls you across the room, eagerly shoving you in between the twins. You groan and nod curtly at each of them as she bustles away. It’s a sweet gesture- Molly has always liked you, and clearly wants you and the boys to patch things up- but it feels much more grim given the circumstances. Some people will certainly lose their lives tonight. It may be your last chance.

You sigh and look at Fred almost shyly. His eyes meet yours gingerly, and in that glance is all you need to know. He pulls you into a tight hug, and you match his embrace.

“I’ve missed you,” you whisper.

“I’ve missed you too,” he says softly.

You turn to George, who pulls you into his arms without hesitation. His broad shoulders heave with a massive exhale.

“It’s good to see you again,” he says.

“I bet it would be even better to hear me,” you say, grinning. He fingers the bandage over his mangled ear and smiles.

“We’ve been making some adjustments. Trying to see how smooth we can get his noggin, bit by bit. Soon he’ll look just like an egg,” Fred says, putting a hand on your shoulder. The way the three of you interact is like before, but more careful. The tension is still there. There’s a lot you need to talk about to really smooth things over, but the urgency of the situation forces you to bandage the wound as best you can. It’s comforting, at least, to know that they’re intentions are for the restoration of your friendship.

When the barrier is lifted and the hordes come rushing in, you fight right alongside the Weasleys. The three of you work in tandem perfectly, knocking out death eaters one after another as if this is your job. You wipe out a particularly nasty one and George whistles in admiration.

“Done this before?” he asks. You spray covering blows as Fred and Percy run across an open stretch of courtyard into the castle’s corridors, into the fray. By the time you hear the corridor collapsing, taking Fred under its enormous weight, you’re too absorbed by the encroaching crowd to pay it any mind. It’s only later when you realize that you heard, even saw, the explosion, and did nothing.

When the battle pauses, George is still right there beside you. The arm of his jacket is ripped, and you can see blood caked on his skin through the tear. The air is dusty and morale is low. You look around, watching as those who are able emerge with stretchers and collect the injured. Your breath catches in your throat as you watch a classmate, the girl who sat next to you in potions, lifted onto a stretcher, writhing in pain. Now that you can finally think, fear clouds your mind. George’s voice breaks your reverie.

“Y/N,” he says. You turn to him. He puts his hands on your shoulders and looks into your eyes. “We made it.” You nod, blinking tearfully, and pull him to you. Your small frame shakes, adrenaline still coursing through you, your thoughts clear and urgent. George’s chest rises and falls as he tries to regain his breath. Over his shoulder, you see Percy jogging alongside a stretcher. He looks stricken. You freeze, your eyes widening. You shake George’s embrace off and nod towards the scene.

His face darkens and you both take off running to catch up with Percy and the students carrying the stretcher- on further inspection, it’s two boys from your year looking nearly unrecognizable, drenched in sweat and the grime of battle, their faces ashen.

Percy looks at you but doesn’t speak. You brace yourself and look down at the stretcher. It’s as you feared. Fred. He’s pale, his breathing shallow, his body limp.

“Freddie!” you scream, your heart in your throat. George nearly collapses at the sight but you pull him onward, knowing that above all, you must be together now, that in this dire moment Fred must be with George, and George with Fred, to the very last.

George, weak in the knees, casts an arm around your shoulders and you follow Fred into the great hall. Time seems to move slowly. You wave down the Weasleys, and they crowd in. Fred is set down on the stone floor, and you move to wave down a healer, but it’s impossible to find one who isn’t occupied with some other task.

In this moment, nothing matters to you more than saving Fred. You yank on the shoulder of nearest healer, who’s working on a wounded leg.

“Get over here,” you say roughly. “He’s dying,” you add, waving toward the grim scene. She nods curtly at the owner of the bloodied leg and turns her attention to you.

“There’s nothing we can do. We’re waiting on transport to St. Mungo’s to arrive, but we can’t fix the unforgivables here. We just aren’t equipped.”

“Waiting? Waiting?!” you shout, grabbing her by the shoulders. “There’s no bloody time for waiting. Save him! Do something! Now!”

The healer, a sallow-cheeked woman in her forties, pries your hands off her shoulders and pats your arm sadly. She shakes her head.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly, knowingly, “but I have to focus on saving those who can be saved.” She turns back to her patient and continues mending the leg. You look around frantically, but George is there, pulling you to kneel around the stretcher with the others, before you can decide what to do.

“It’s no use,” he says, his mouth set deep in a frown. You finally take a good look at Fred, and it’s almost too much. You know that this may be the last time you see him alive, if this can be called living. You bury your face in his side, breathing in his scent. You feel yourself begin to cry.

“Freddie, my Freddie. I’m so sorry. I love you. I love you,” you murmur into his bloodied jacket. You feel him shudder, and he moans what may be an attempt at speech. Soon, the healers from St. Mungo’s are there to take him. By that time, you’re sure he won’t live. George, of course, goes to St. Mungo’s to wait, and you follow. The rest of the family stays to fight, Molly and Ginny especially resolute in their quest for revenge. Later, you hear reports that the Weasleys all fought like animals, hardened by grief. The waiting rooms at the hospital are overflowing, and you and George are left to slump on the floor. You throw your overcoat across your laps for warmth and rest your head on his shoulder.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says, after many moments of silence.

“I love you, George Weasley.”

“I love you too.”

“I’m sorry about everything.”

“Me too,” he says. You feel him shake softly with tears, and you hold him as he cries. Eventually, his breathing becomes more even, and he slumps into your lap, asleep. You hold him protectively for hours, waiting for any news at all, but none comes. A few times you flag down St. Mungo’s staff and ask about Fred, but they have nothing. By morning, when rumors arrive that Voldemort has been defeated, cheers ring through the halls, but you and George remain in limbo. Others like you fill the waiting area, their faces timid and bleak. Nobody speaks very much.

Finally, the nurses let you in to see him, and he’s a pitiful sight. But he’s alive. Watching the hospital sheets rise and fall with his breath is the greatest gift. The nurses tell you he should regain consciousness soon, and you sit alert beside the bed, hope flooding your body. You clasp George’s clammy hands in yours while you wait, stroking the back of his hands soothingly.

Finally, Fred stirs. He blinks gingerly and looks around the room, unable even to raise his head from the pillow. Immediately, George is at the bedside, grinning.

“Fred!!” he cries, grasping his brother’s face in his hands excitedly. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you, you handsome devil.”

“What happened?” Fred asks weakly, looking dazed. Your body goes electric with joy at the sound of his voice, and you run to find a nurse, as you were instructed to do. You grab the first person you see in scrubs and pull him back to Fred’s room. When you burst in the door, Fred inhales sharply.

“Y/N?” he asks softly.

“Freddie!” you exclaim. “You have no idea how happy I am to hear that dopey voice.” You rush to his bedside and hold his hand while the nurse checks his vitals. “There’s so much I have to tell you. If you had… well, you didn’t, I suppose is the point, and… Freddie, I love you. And I’m sorry about the past few months.”

“Y/N. I love you too. And I’m sorry, too. Even sorrier.”

“Good,” you say crossly. George looks at you questioningly. “What? He started it!” Fred laughs weakly and you kiss him gently on the forehead. You’re not sure what your relationship to the boys will be going forward, but for now, it’s clear: all is forgiven, and acknowledged, and accepted.

60 notes · View notes

wondernimbus · 4 years

Text

in case we don’t live forever — fred weasley

pairing: fred weasley x female!reader

summary: there are only a few hours left before the war and fred is scared, just like anyone else. but reader takes some of that fear away.

a/n: this was inspired by the song "in case you don't live forever" by ben platt so i highly highly recommend listening to that while reading!

requests are closed for now. please refrain from plagiarizing my work!

The last few hours before the battle of Hogwarts is one of the most terrifying hours Fred has ever had to live through.

There's a sense of dread looming over the Burrow; that feeling of impending danger you get when you look out of the window and across the horizon to see a storm brewing in the distance. Fred feels tension in the air so palpable he finds it hard to crack a joke or fake a laugh, but he tries, still, and it brings him even the slightest joy to see the half-assed smile Ginny gives him when he jokingly says "Why the long face? You're acting like we're about to head into battle" and the exasperated but loving smack his mother delivers to both his and George's heads whilst they're demonstrating a dramatic sword-fight with their wands in the kitchen.

But they're about to go into war five hours from now, and in truth Fred is just as scared as the rest of his family.

At some point he goes into his room, claiming to need to put on his full-gear battle armor, when in reality all Fred needs is some time to gather himself. George disappears into the garden, and Fred is left alone sitting on the edge of his bed, twirling his wand over and over in his hand.

Five hours from now, Fred is going to fight against Death Eaters. People who have killed other people and won't hesitate to do it again. He's going to walk through the gates of Hogwarts not as the student he once was but as someone fighting for his freedom and the rest of the wizarding world's—the thought is almost surreal. And it's that very thought of risking his own life—and his family risking theirs—that has him burying his head in his hands and squeezing his eyes shut, taking slow, deep breaths to calm himself.

He's never felt fear like this before. Fear so suffocating it feels like it's coiling around his heart and his lungs and his throat and rendering him completely immobile.

But then Fred hears her—her voice. Cutting through all of his worries, grabbing at him and pulling him back to the surface. At first he thinks he's hallucinating, but then he hears it again, muffled and yet at the same time clear as day, saying something that sounds like "it's nice to see you again, Ginny" and just like that, Fred is scrambling to his feet and dashing down the wooden steps leading to the kitchen.

And there she is, standing in the doorframe as though having just arrived. Fred's mother is fussing over her, asking her if she's had anything to eat, and Ginny is grinning. (Fred feels betrayed—so Ginny can smile at [Y/N] doing absolutely nothing but not at Fred's attempts to cheer her up?)

He pauses at the foot of the staircase for a moment, his half-pounding heart doing odd little flips inside his chest as he watches her, and she's smiling at something his mother is saying but Fred has lost all sense of hearing—lost all sense of everything but her. [Y/N] and her smile, wide and bright and utterly breath-taking. Like a beacon of light. Something that doesn't belong in a time like the war.

And fear—fear is that cold hand that reaches into his chest and squeezes his heart into a pulp. But happiness is this: happiness is when Fred strides forward and practically throws his arms around her, feeling oddly emotional—and just like that, he forgets what fear is.

All traces of it—the dread, the foreboding, the anxiety—disappears, and Fred is left with the overbearing sense of joy and calm he has always felt whenever he finds himself in her presence.

”Fred,” he hears her breathe into his shoulder, laughing, and when she slides her arms around his middle and squeezes, just as tight, Fred has to try very, very hard not to cry.

It’s ridiculous. He rarely ever feels emotional like this; even during the most serious of moments, he always manages to be that one person still trying to lighten up the mood no matter how grave the situation is. He’s always the one trying to cheer everyone up even if things are a matter between life-and-death. But hours away from a full-blown battle, it no longer matters what Fred is. It doesn’t matter if he was the joker—the ice-breaker, whatever you want to call it—because he, like everyone else, is scared. Not just for himself. For his family, his friends, for [Y/N].

But [Y/N] reaches straight into him and floods him with euphoria, drowns all of the fear out, and Fred is left in complete and utter disbelief because how can a person feel like the very epitome of happiness?

He pulls away when he deems it safe enough—when the prickling feeling behind his eyes has subsided. His hands go from her waist to her face, cupping her cheeks in his hands as his eyes dance over inch of her face almost frantically, drinking all of her in.

”Hey,” she whispers, looking up at him, her eyes shining with the same sort of fondness that’s in Fred's.

”Hi,” he exhales, and then he’s grinning—laughing—pressing a kiss to that spot in between her eyes. And then her nose. Her cheeks. her lips. “Hi, sweetheart.”

She laughs, nose scrunching, and reaches up to grab at his hands once he has stopped his onslaught of fleeting kisses. “I missed you,” she tells him, turning her face so that she can press a brief kiss to his palm.

Fred’s heart swells.

—

The two of them disappear into Fred's room, which [Y/N] is familiar with by now. She no longer has to ask if it’s okay to lay down on his bed; she just goes, flopping down onto his mattress, and Fred watches from where he’s standing in the doorframe with a fond smile playing across his lips. He’s always fond. Always feels thankful to the universe because despite the many things it didn’t give him, he instead has the fortune to have this—to have her.

He must be staring a little too fondly, though, because [Y/N] starts giggling and says, “You have heart eyes, Fred.”

Fred grins. “Suppose I’ll have to get that checked out at St. Mungo's, then,” he says, and closes the distance between them to clamber onto the bed and slide into the space next to her. It’s muscle memory, how he angles his body to fit [Y/N]’s own, arms and legs falling into place so that he can hug her into him.

Happiness is this: happiness is when she ends up with her nose pressed to Fred's neck and his lips on her forehead, holding each other the way they’ve always done.

The two of them don’t say anything for a while, but when the silence is broken, it’s [Y/N] that speaks first.

“Are you scared?” she whispers into his shoulder.

Fred takes several seconds to respond. When he does, he doesn’t bother with words—all he offers her is a quiet hum.

She nods. “Me, too.”

All of them are. But if Fred could somehow take all of that fear away from [Y/N], even if it means worsening his own, he would do it. He’d do it in the blink of an eye.

“Let me look at you,” he says quietly, pulling away slightly so that he can do just that—so that he can reach up with one hand and trace the line of her cheekbone with his thumb. And then he really looks at her.

This close, Fred can't help the way his breath hitches in his throat as he sees all the familiar bits of her; the freckles scattered across her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, the curve of her lips that he has memorized with his own, and the look in her eyes that she always has around him; the one of awe and wonder and love.

And Fred looks at her like she is everything magical in the world all bundled up into one person. He looks at her like when the sky opens up, like she’s the first ray of light peeking through the clouds after a long winter solstice. And that is exactly what she feels like. The rainbow after the rain. The calm after the storm. The new beginning after the end.

There are many words for it, but Fred just likes to call her happiness.

Overcome by that same overwhelming sense of emotion he’d felt earlier, when he saw her at the threshold after so many weeks apart from each other, he says, “You’re so beautiful.”

And Fred means every word of it. His heart feels like it’s lodged itself into his throat when he whispers, gaze fixed on her lips, “If only you could see what I see.”

She pauses. There’s a smile tugging on her lips; Fred watches the motion and leans in to press a kiss to the edge of her mouth. Laughing a little, she says, “I’m pretty happy with my own view.”

Fred is reminded of how much he loves her. He's reminded of it every single day, but he feels it even more intensely now, when they're so far away from everything else in the world that should matter but don't. Not right now, when he's lying down with her like this, all wrapped up in each other's arms and legs.

"I know you don't want to talk like this," Fred begins. "I don't want to think about it any more than you do. But in case something happens—in case either of us don't live forever—" [Y/N] opens her mouth to protest, but he presses his thumb to her lips, silencing her, and waits until the indignation in her dies down before he continues, tone soft and soothing but at the same time so very sad; "I want you to know that I love you. I always have and I always will, and I consider myself the luckiest person to have met you and to have been with you for so long.”

"Fred."

"And if I could do it all over again, I would. Every last second."

And happiness is this: happiness is when Fred thumbs away at the single tear that trails down her cheek and leans forward to press their lips together into a firm kiss. Happiness is when he whispers "I love you" into her mouth, and she doesn't have to say it back for Fred to know that she feels the same way.

But fear?

Fred doesn't quite know what that is anymore.

#harry potter #harry potter oneshots #harry potter oneshot #harry potter imagine #harry potter imagines #harry potter fanfiction #harry potter fanfic #harry potter x reader #fred weasley #fred weasley oneshots #fred weasley oneshot #fred weasley imagine #fred weasley imagines #fred weasley x reader #fred weasley fanfiction #fred weasley fanfic #george weasley #weasley twins

614 notes · View notes

missdawnandherdusk · 4 years

Text

Monster

Hufflepuff!Reader X Draco

Again is this what you came for?

You paid for?

To watch somebody burn and crumble and stumble

Then fumble all my words and let you twist them and listen

To all the ugly things you tell me I am

Chapter 1 Chapter 2

Chapter 3 Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Summary: Things go from bad to worse. Not all stories have happy endings, and it would be stupid to only read the ones that did. You and Draco learn that the only way to fight prevailing evil is unconditional love.... but can you two manage?

A/n: I’d like to formally apologize right now for how much this is going to hurt all of you because... oh boy. This gets really angsty and depressing and I’d like to remind you that Draco actually had to go through all of this alone. Sure, JKR does a lot of fucked up shit, but what she did to Draco Malfoy, I will never forgive her for. She lost my respect even before she said what she did on Twitter. But as I said before: watch me save Draco Malfoy. (P.S. If you haven’t listened to Special by Gabbie Hanna or watched the music video, I highly recommend it and then crying over it because Draco Malfoy man)

Draco paced his room, scattering his possession in his fury. His room shredded once more. What had he done? What had he said? What had just happened?

“You have some nerve showing up here,” He heard his mother hiss from downstairs.

For a moment, he thought it might be you, and false hope fluttered in his chest. Wiping away his tears, he slipped your locket into his pocket and stood. Snapping his fingers, his room started to put itself back together as it pained him to remember the first time you had done that spell for him.

Now you were gone.

He let you walk away. He said the cruelest things to you. He watched you break in front of him at his own hand. He broke his promise.

“Where is she!?” Your mother’s voice demanded from downstairs. “I know she’s here!”

Draco frowned, his thoughts spinning on a dime. Why was your mother looking for you? Wouldn’t that be the first place you ran to? Fear and panic struck his chest. Were you hurt? Did you need help? His anxiety turned back to fury.

“What do you mean where is she!?” Draco snarled, leaning over the banister. “She’s gone! No thanks to you!”

“What your tongue boy,” Your mother snarled. For a fleeting moment he saw the same fire in her eyes that resided in yours when you fought him. He dismissed the thought.

“No,” He glared, defiant. “You did this! You took her from me! She thinks I always knew! She thinks that I’ve kept it from her for years!” He descended the stairs, hurling the accusations at your mother. “She idolized you! She loved you! And you manipulated her! You manipulated me!”

“I did what I had to do,” Your mother said coolly.

“You lied to your daughter! You made her think you liked me! That you approved! And for a moment I believed it too!” He spat.

“Draco, what are you talking about?” His mother asked, coming to stand beside him.

“She gave me Y/n’s father’s wand for Christmas and told me what really happened.” He took a sharp breath in. “She never told Y/n the truth. She made me do it. She tricked me into doing it so that Y/n would hate me.” He was seething fury as he realized just how deep this treachery went.

“I had to protect her from you, but she figured it out too,” Your mother sputtered. “You Malfoys are all the same, I had to protect her!”

“No.” His mother spoke up, her voice like glass shards. “He is nothing like Lucius. The only one acting like him around here is you,” Drawing her wand, he watched his mother put a full body bind on yours without an ounce of pity. “How dare you manipulate my son! How dare you make him give up the one girl he’s ever loved! You have no idea what you’ve done!” There were tears in his mother’s eyes. He had never seen his mother cry before.

Her eyes met his.

“Go. Find her. Bring her home.”

He flew up the stairs, grabbing his wand and cloak and broomstick, racing off into the night. He had no idea where to start looking for you. If you weren’t at home and you weren’t with him, he didn’t have an inkling to where you would go. As Pinnae you could be anywhere.

Panicked, he started to scan the landscape below him for any sign that you would actually try to come back here. There was no sign of you.

His thoughts raced out of control believing that you could be in serious trouble, or worse, taken by the Dark Lord. That would be his luck at this point. There was one thing that gave him hope: you knew that he never meant to hurt you with the truth about both of your fathers.

His wand, tucked in his robe pocket, began to grow warm until it almost burned him. Drawing it, he realized that he had picked up your father’s wand, not his own. It hummed in his hand, he wondered if your mother lied about the wand wanting to protect you as it responded to him.

Silvery streams emerged from the end... the residue of a Patronus.

He couldn’t cast a Patronus at any other time let alone now. He was hopeless and angry and scared.

But he had to find you before a Death Eater did. Before Voldemort did. Before his aunt did.

“Expecto Patronum!” He roared, thinking of how much he needed you.

A silver roaring lion burst forth from the wand.

“Oh, you’ve got to be bloody joking,” Draco muttered and watched the Patronus leap to the ground and race off in a direction that held no consequence to him. But he trusted that it would lead him to you.

He raced into the city, watching the glowing lion soar over the rooftops before stopping at a home of no consequence to him. Draco dropped to the street, veiled under darkness. His Patronus paced anxiously along the small path to the door of the house.

__________________________

“Y/n?” A familiar voice called my name and I dared to look up.

“Abby?” I squeaked.

“Merlin Y/n!” She rushed to my side, wrapping her arms around me. “You’ve had us worried sick!”

“Us?” I asked, wiping away my tears.

“Our mothers and me,” She answered, and I scowled.

With a shaky voice I explained to Abby what had happened. About Draco and my fight, then the confrontation between my mother and me. It was almost easier when I retold it. It seemed less real.

“Lucius killed my father,” I said the words again, and they were just as heavy on my lips. My eyes falling on the gravestone. “I’ve lost... everyone, Abby,”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Abby scoffed gently, tucking my hair behind my ear. “Everyone? Really? I didn’t know your life began and ended with Draco Malfoy,” There was a soft smile on her face.

I gaped at her and the words set in. I didn’t really lose everyone. Not even close. She right there beside me. And I thought of her parents, and Pansy, and Ernie, and Luna... My life didn’t begin and end with Draco—no mistake, he was a very nice part of it—and though it might have begun with my mother, it didn’t end there either.

“And I know, between Draco and Pansy, we haven’t hung out as much as we used to. And I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through, but you haven’t lost me Y/n,” She wrapped me into a hug, and I clung to her. “I’d still give anything for you. Hufflepuffs for life,”

I let out a hopeless laugh, pulling away from our hug.

“He probably hates me. I should have stopped and listened...” I confessed the sad truth. “Maybe he’s right... I run away to my stories and ignore reality,”

“Those stories have kept you alive,” Abby encouraged. “They’ve kept you going in the midst of reality.” She took my hand. “So, how about we try again and find a new story?”

I nodded, smiling and feeling better. Something was pacified in my chest. It still hurt, sure, but there was a comfort that I wasn’t alone any longer. That I could try again. That I could take the next step.

“Come on,” Abby stood. “Let’s get out of here,”

I nodded and took her hand, finding my balance. She grabbed her broomstick and there was a silent question in her eyes: was I going to ride or fly? I smiled and we both boarded the broomstick and flew back toward the outskirts of London to a town house I knew well.

Crashed on Abby’s bed—after Abby gave a quick run-down of what was happening to her parents—I rubbed my face and finally felt myself relax for the first time tonight. The familiarity of Abby’s roomed calmed me and her comforting words—reminding me that I wasn’t alone— now covered me like a blanket.

Just like when we were kids, Abby and I curled up in her bed and watched the stars peer over the rooftops of London as the glow in the dark sticker stars smiled at us from the ceiling.

________________________________

Draco rang the doorbell and was met with a stranger with the same piercing eyes that your best friend had.

“She said you might find your way here,” Mr. Bones smiled. “Come on in son,”

“Is she here? Y/n?” His voice was quick and panicked.

“Asleep upstairs. Both girls are,” Abby’s father locked the door behind him.

Draco stood, rigid, not sure what to do. He wanted to see you more than anything. He wanted to know that you were okay. He wanted to apologize and plead for forgiveness and hold you close until everything was secure... but if you were asleep, he knew you needed it. So, he could wait. Mr. Bones led him into a sitting room, and he felt like he was being scrutinized.

“Now, from what I understand, you have been through quite a lot recently,” Draco nodded at his words, clenching his jaw. “And though I am not your father, I am here for you. My wife and I both are. This is a safe place for you, as it always has been for Y/n and Abby.”

That caught Draco by surprise. Surely, he knew of what his father had done. Of what he had done. If you had spoken with him, then he knew a lot more than most. And yet, those were the first words offered to him by a stranger who didn’t know him from Adam. Draco was welcomed in this small home? He didn’t understand it.

“I know this road isn’t easy for you either.” Abby’s father sighed, not noting Draco’s bafflement. “You are aware of what is coming, more than I will ever understand,” His tone was sympathetic. “And I fear that I cannot change what has happened or what will come, but I can encourage you and offer some guidance if you are willing to listen,”

Draco nodded mutely, a strange feeling growing in his chest. Now that he was over the shock of the situation... something else settled within him. It was kin to the one he felt around his friends and perhaps his mother... but this was different. This was new.

“Draco, son, from what I’ve heard from the girls, tonight was difficult between you and Y/n. She is like a daughter to me as much as Abby is, and though I would love to protect her as such, I know that you perhaps need me a bit more.” Abby’s father offered a kind smile.

“Though I cannot step into your shoes, I can only imagine that you are upset because you had no choice in what happened tonight, or the information that you were given, and yet the fault and responsibility was laid on your shoulders. And therefore, you lashed out with angry words in fear, and it’s understandable. But you must remember why you were afraid, of why you were angry.”

Draco nodded and looked down at his hands. The strange feeling in his chest grew a bit more and his hands began to shake slightly as his eyes stung with unshed tears. For the first time in his life someone blatantly said they understood why he has such a sharp tongue. It was a strange feeling of relief. But it went deeper, Draco was challenged to think of something he never had before: why was he scared and angry?

“I can’t pretend to think that you’ve had a proper view on what love should be from those around you,” Draco’s eyes flashed up, his internal monologue pausing, about to protest but Mr. Bones held a hand up, stopping him. “I understand that you may love Y/n, and I do not deny it, but love is so much more than you will ever believe,” Mr. Bones pressed on.

“So, you both lashed out—I cannot place all of the blame on you, I know Y/n can be a bit hot headed when she’s angry,” There was a soft reminiscent smile on the wizard’s face. “You lashed out because your love was being threatened.”

There it was.

The realization washed over him. Of course, it made sense as to why he lashed out. Of why he said those unforgivable things. That was the reason he never found to the question he never asked. He left like his love was being threatened. His love for his parents, his love for the life they had given him. His love for you, his love for the second chance you had given him at life. He lashed out in anger and fear because he loved... and maybe he loved too much... too fiercely that ended up getting him into trouble.

“But love, it keeps no record of wrongs. It always protects. Always trusts, and always hopes...” Mr. Bones sounded like he was quoting something, melancholy in his voice. “Knowledge... it’s important. The truth just as much so. Words are said, but they’re forgotten with time... but love prevails despite it all,”

Draco wanted to believe in that sort of love. A selfless unconditional love that could forgive him, but what evidence did he have that it could exist?

He stopped the depressing thought and truly began to think, picking up his early train of thought. You were unconditional when you held him that night his father was sent to Azkaban. Abby was selfless when she trusted him enough to be alone with you and didn’t mind that he took up a lot of your time. Pansy’s defense of him was always unconditional, no matter if he was right or wrong, even before he had you. His mother loved him and his father despite the abuse she suffered over the years and refused to leave his side even now.

And before him, Mr. Bones, Abby’s father, a man who married a muggle, invited him into his home in the middle of the night, sat him down, and gave him advice. Good advice. A man who kept you safe and loved you like a daughter. A man who held no hesitancy in calling him son or extending the same protection over him as well. A man he had met maybe ten minutes ago.

Draco could believe in that sort of love.

____________________________

Padding down the stairs half-awake in the morning, it was still dark, and the sun hadn’t had a chance to rise yet. Abby’s parents were both awake: Abby’s mom was a teacher, having already left for her muggle school, and Abby’s father worked for the Ministry. Abby herself was still fast asleep when my body decided that it was awake.

I nearly had a heart attack when I looked up and Draco was causally sharing a cup of coffee with Abby’s dad like he’d been doing it his entire life. His hair was a mess—as it always was in the morning, but there was the same sleepy smile on his lips.

Then he caught sight of me and dropped his mug. It shattered on the floor and he jumped cursing. Abby’s father laughed and easily cleaned up the mess with magic and I might have giggled too.

“Hey,” I offered softly, going into the kitchen getting two new mugs from the cupboard and making us both coffees.

“Good morning,” His voice was a bit shaky as he leaned against the counter. I offered him his mug and took a sip of my own.

“So... look, I’m sorry about—”

“I’m sorry about what—”

We both tripped over the other’s words, then I started to chuckle, and Draco dissolved into laughter beside me. It was a sad, hopeful sort of laughter that held yearning and forgiveness. He took my hands and in his gentle voice, he began again.

“I lashed out in anger and fear. And I said some awful things to you. And I’m very sorry,” His blue eyes seemed to hold the world in them. “Forgive me?”

“If you can forgive me,” My eyes watered as I looked up at him. “I should have stopped and listened and I’m sorry,”

He wrapped me in his arms, and though, I knew that my life didn’t begin and end with Draco, it was still nice to have him be a part of my life. It was like a part of me had come home. Now that we were together and everything was more or less settled between us, I didn’t feel alone at all anymore.

He withdrew from the hug and reached for his coffee, but I grabbed his arm.

“Have you slept at all?” I narrowed my eyes at him. His lack of response gave me my answer.

I went to the cabinet over the stove and pulled out a vial. I glanced to Abby’s dad and he nodded in permission and I gave it to Draco.

“You need to sleep,” I pressed.

“Do you just know where everything is here?” He mused, taking the vial.

“Draco,” I chided, noting his sudden change of subject.

“I know, I know. But I... I’d like to be able to sleep in my own bed,” The confession was almost guilty.

“Then we go back to the Manor,” I took his free hand. “You need to take care of yourself.”

“But what about you and—”

“It’ll still be waiting when you’ve woken up,” I smiled and took a deep breath. “Can Abby come with us?” I looked around Draco to her dad.

“I think this is something that you two need to do alone. Abby will be available; all you need to do is send a Patronus message.” He smiled. “Let her sleep though,”

“But I can’t—” I started to explain that neither of us could cast a Patronus to send a message.

“I can,” Draco blurted out.

My attention turned to him, a shocked look on my face.

“You can what now?”

“I... I can cast a Patronus?” He admitted sheepishly, like I was going to yell at him. “I picked up your father’s wand on accident, when I left to find you,” He still wasn’t daring to look at me. “I... I was frantic thinking that maybe they got you... and the wand just... I cast a Patronus, and it led me to you,”

“The wand... and you... and... wow.” My mind processed all of the information. “So, I guess the wand really is yours,”

I wasn’t as upset about the ordeal as I was last night. In fact, I felt better knowing that my father’s wand was in good hands and that it had helped Draco find and protect me. Maybe my father was watching over me after all. The thought made me smile.

“Y/n, wait, no,” Draco fumbled. “You can have it back, you were right—”

“Hey,” I called softly. “It’s alright. The wand belongs to you. He would want you to have it,” I smiled. “Wand lore is a finicky subject, and a wand’s loyalty even more so... but I do believe in my father’s spirit, and I do believe that that wand found its way to you for a reason. Even if the methods were... questionable.” I decided. “I would like my locket back though, if you don’t mind.” A warm smile grew on my lips as I held out my hand.

Draco reached into his pocket and carefully slipped the necklace into my hand and I took a moment to fasten it around my neck, the familiar weight soothing me.

Abby’s dad led us to the hearth and took out the box of Floo Powder.

“Maybe I should go first,” Draco caught my hand. “Just in case. I’ll come back and let you know if it’s alright or not,”

I nodded and watched him grab the powder and with practiced ease, clearly state Malfoy Manor. I waited anxiously for his return my mind started to draw up worst case sceneries, then another part of my mind telling the former to shut up.

“Thank you, for everything,” I smiled and hugged Abby’s dad. “It might not seem like it, but it means the world to him, what you did.”

“I’m glad I could help darling, let me know if you two ever need anything at all,” He smiled as Draco reappeared in the hearth.

“Come on,” Draco smiled and we both were whisked away to the Manor.

Narcissa greeted us as we stepped into the grand living room. She gathered Draco into a hug, and then pulled me into her embrace as well. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, an unspoken promise passing between us as we hugged. Draco and I headed upstairs without another word.

I watched him toe off his shoes and head to an en suite bathroom to change, and after a while I heard the shower running. His room was a bit different in the daylight. My things were still in the corner and everything seemed a bit too neat. I could hear the words echo off the walls that were said less than twelve hours ago... it felt like a lifetime ago.

I picked up Draco’s copy of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and smiled when the dandelion greeted me on the page that I had underlined over a year ago.

“Don’t you have that memorized by now?” His voice was soft and playful. My heart skipped a beat at the sight of him in sweats and messy damp hair.

“Not entirely,” I quipped back, setting the book down.

He gathered me into his arms carefully as I glanced around the room. It had such a strong scent of just him that I relaxed easily. With the curtains drawn, it was as dark as it had been the night before, save the bedside lamp. Crawling under the cover of his bed, we curled up together as we had done so many times before. Draco’s eyes had a hard time staying open and never really opened completely.

“It’s a lion,” He mumbled out.

“What’s a lion?” I asked, running my hand through his damp silvery hair.

“My Patronus.”

A small chuckle escaped my lips.

“Oh, what would Harry say?” I teased softly. “Or your father?”

“I don��t really give a damn,”

I laughed again and continued to card through his hair. I remembered that he had told me that I was cute when I was half awake and I understood, because a half-awake Draco was precious. He didn’t curse too often, but the word just slipped out almost naturally, like he didn’t have a care in the world.

After a while his eyes didn’t open again, and his breathing evened out. I tried to sleep; I really did. But I couldn’t. I picked up the book from the bedside table and began to read once more. The hours slipped by, my eyes becoming heavier.

When I opened my eyes again, I was extremely stiff. Without thinking I stretched my arms and heard a muffled grumble from Draco who I had just dislodged from his curled-up position next to me.

“Sorry,” I ruffed his hair as an apology and slipped out of bed, stretching completely this time.

“What time is it?” His grumpy voice mumbled.

“Uh, I think a little after six?” I squinted at the clock on the wall. “Yeah, that’s how clocks work,”

“Our sleep schedules are so screwed.” Draco sat up and rubbed his face, groaning.

“Well, we’ll take a Sleeping Potion later and everything will be fixed,” I said, not so optimistic that that would be the course of action in a few hours.

We headed downstairs where dinner was laid out on the dining room table. Narcissa was eating quietly, nose in a book. She looked up when we both hovered by the door.

“Good morning sleeping beauties,” She teased lightly and gestured to the food laid for us. We ate in silence, still not fully awake.

Draco was right, our sleep schedules were screwed. It was about ten and the stars had come out to play and we were both still wide awake. Narcissa had bid us goodnight not too long ago and Draco and I were out on the grounds, the moon and our wands lighting our way.

“You’re going to forgive her, aren’t you?” Draco asked softly. “Your mother.”

I hummed in acknowledgement and couldn’t deny that I had been toying with the idea. On the one hand, she was my mother but at the same time, she hurt me deeply and she hurt the one that I loved.

“Forgive... I think so. But it won’t ever be the same again...” I whispered to the gravel path under our feet.

Draco took my hand and stood in front of me, his other hand tilting my chin back softly.

“You know I’d do anything to keep you safe, right?” He murmured softly.

“Of course,” I replied reaching up and stroking his cheek. “But we’ve never faced anything like this before,”

“And we need to plan, because I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not live in constant fear without some idea of what to do,”

I nodded. “So, what were you thinking?”

“Well, I’ve more or less organized our problems,” He admitted sheepishly. “I was hoping that you might have some solutions,”

“Well, what problems do we have?” I nudged his side as we sat on the soft grass under an apple tree on the outskirt of the Manor. Fireflies danced around us. It seemed almost surreal, to talk of such darkness and evil in the midst of beauty. Like something sacred was being tread upon.

“In forefront,” He began. “Would be my aunt. She is still quite taken with my mother, and though my mother has shown her disdain for Bellatrix... she’s obsessed with the family name. And she won’t be too keen on you with me. I thank the stars you’re a pureblood, but...”

“In her eyes, I’m a blood traitor,” I mused, resting my chin on my knees. “Yeah... and a Hufflepuff,” A giggle left my lips despite it all. “How ridiculous that seems now... a Hufflepuff and a Slytherin,”

Draco rolled his eyes and chuckled. “But I think my mother has something that might help, but it would be asking a lot...”

“I think we’re a bit passed being hesitant around what we ask of another,” I pointed out.

“Maybe so,” He sighed. “But I want you to know that I wish it would all go away, and we could be normal teenagers and not have to worry about a war... and I’d give anything for that,”

I looked up at him. His face was pressed into a cold, somber mask as he looked off to the stars in the sky.

“I know, I do too.” I acknowledged. “But... this is what we have... a war. Reality,” He flinched at the word.

“Sorry,” I mended. “Bad choice of words.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for saying those things to you,” He admitted softly. I sighed softly and intertwined me fingers with his, resting my head on his shoulder.

“I think that comes with time,” I shrugged softly. “Forgiving ourselves of what we’ve done... learning to love what we see in the mirror,” A quiet moment passed. “You know I forgive you right? For that night?”

He nodded, moping. I smiled because it was so like him to do and I was happy to know that even though it all, Draco was still there, underneath all the fear and worry.

“So, Bellatrix,” I took a deep breath. “You said your mom might have an answer?” He nodded. “Okay, next problem?”

“The Dark Lord,”

“I think that’s everyone’s problem Dray,” I drawled and pouted at the flat look he gave me.

“He’s going to come for me. I know it. Because my father failed him... and because it seems like I’ve been marked for it since birth...” He rubbed his face, hiding in his hands. “I don’t know what he’s going to want from me but... I’m terrified that he’s going to make me take the Mark,”

“You think he’ll make you?” I squeaked, trying to keep my voice even. “I thought he was selective about his inner circle?”

“I think he’ll do it just to punish my father, regardless if he wants me or not,” That was the sad truth of the matter.

I nodded and thought a moment.

“Then we can talk to Snape... he should know something that could help us... and I guess your mother would have an idea because she went through it with your father...” I paused. “I’ve never really looked into Dark Magic before...”

Draco gaped at me.

“Are you hearing yourself!?” He demanded, standing and pacing away from me. “You... you can’t look into Dark Magic. I... I won’t let you,” His voice was shaky.

I rose, nearly stumbling and caught myself.

“Draco, we don’t have a lot of options here,” I pressed.

“But you can’t!” He almost roared.

“And why not!?” I shot back.

“Because I need you to be my sunshine! I need you to stay pure and good! I need that!” Tears streamed down his face. “I need you to be my fairytale that I can run to,”

Whatever I was about to say to him fell from my lips. My heart about shattered as I took a careful step towards him. He didn’t back away from me, so I took that as a good sign.

“Draco,” My voice was soft. “I will always be your sunshine, but I won’t leave you to walk through this alone. I said it was stupid, but I am a Hufflepuff. I believe in kindness and good and always will, but ignorance is dangerous. It’s the difference from being harmless and peaceful,”

I reached out and took his hand. His shoulder shook softly with tears. I tilted his chin back and wiped them away.

“There,” I whispered, smiling. “Problem solved,”

He laughed at my poor excuse for a joke and curled his arms around me.

“Any other problems?” I teased lightly.

“Loads,” He mused back. “But... they’ll come in their own time I suppose.”

____________________________________

“Mother,” Draco spoke softly. “I think it’s time that you took Y/n to Paris,”

“Paris?” You squeaked. “Like Paris, Paris? This is your solution to Bellatrix?”

“Yes darling,” Draco cooed softly, smiling. “If you’re going to be by my side through all of this, and you’d like to be protected from Bellatrix, well, you need to look like a proper Malfoy,”

You gawked up at him, something shining in your eyes. He could see the excitement growing and wondered if you ever had anything new or designer before. Recalling your cutoffs and t- shirts, he thought maybe not.

“But I can’t ask this from you guys,” You fumbled turning to his mother. “Really, it’s a nice gesture but,”

“Think nothing of it dear,” Narcissa fluttered her hand. “Draco is correct, if you’re going to get through this, you need to look like a Malfoy.” She rose and set down her book. “Shall we then?”

“Wait,” You pulled Draco’s hand. “Abby will actually kill me if she doesn’t come,”

“Of course,” Narcissa smiled.

“Should I feel this ridiculous?” You walked out of the fitting room for what seemed like the hundredth time and Draco’s heart still skipped a beat.

He couldn’t deny, though he loved you in your casual clothes, seeing you formal and proper did something else to him. The ladies in the shops all fawned over you and your beauty and fluttered around with about twenty new things for you to try on each time you found one thing you liked.

“Yes,” Draco smiled smugly. “But you get used to it,”

“Isn’t this all a bit much?” You looked down at your jet-black dress that hugged you in all of the right places and the pair of high stilettos and sheer tights that were paired with it. “I get keeping up appearances but how the hell am I supposed to walk around Hogwarts in these?”

“Balance Charm,” Narcissa chimed in. “But you may be right, you are still going to have to attend school,” His mother switched to French, “Maybe something a bit more casual. Not as tight. She needs range of motion,”

“You’re still getting that dress, right?” Abby peeked out from the other dressing room curtain.

“Yes,” Both you and Draco answered at the same time, both turning varying shades of red.

Before either of you could make the situation worse, the associates of the store pulled you back into the fitting rooms, yelling at you in French and he laughed because he knew you had no idea what they were telling you. With an entire new wardrobe—that you pulled him away from the register before you could hear the total—you looked like you had walked out of a high fashion catalogue.

Sure, you were in something simpler—a deep green flowing high-waisted skirt and a black blouse with pearl earrings and necklace, still in the same heels you complained about earlier— but Draco couldn’t stop looking at you. Nor could he stop himself from finding your reflection in the shop windows and feeling a bit satisfied about how well you fit by his side.

Abby bid you a goodbye after lunch and pestered you about taking pictures of everything else you bought. You laughed and didn’t exactly promise anything, but there was something hidden in your eyes. After a while you relaxed and really started to branch out. Choosing things that you were interested in, and not looking so nervous—like you were going to break whatever you touched.

“She really is lovely,” His mother spoke softly in French. “I’m so glad you have her through all of this,”

Draco nodded and watched your fingers run over the soft fabric of new dress robes that were the same deep green as the dress you wore to the Solstice Ball the summer prior. How things had changed since then.

Draco was sure that he had seen it all, and that you couldn’t get any more perfect and beautiful, but Merlin was he wrong. His mother shooed him out of one salon and told him to wait outside. He did, not without rolling his eyes, however.

You emerged, looking at him expectantly. Though your hair was still short, it was neat and not the normal disarray that occurred when you ran your hand through it to keep it from your eyes. Your face looked as if it had been airbrushed, a light pink to your cheeks and a deep red to your lips that invited him in. You noticed him noticing you and the pink on your cheeks deepened.

Yet, he still missed something about you that held summer days, and reading in the sun, and muggle t-shirts and bare feet.

“Y-you look lovely,” He stammered out.

You blinked at him. “What?”

His mother laughed and placed her hands on your shoulders.

“He said you look lovely,” She rolled her eyes at her son. “And to think you still know French after all this time,”

Draco realized his mistake and turned pink.

“I didn’t know you knew French,” You took his arm and walked with him down the Parisian street.

“Mother taught me,” He explained. “I thought I had lost touch with it, but apparently not,”

After returning to the Manor, his mother took you away for a moment and left Draco to his thoughts. The big house didn’t seem so cold and empty anymore now that you had made a home here. Your echoes and ghosts danced through the room that he walked into.

________________________________

“Narcissa, I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve given me,” I sat beside her in the smaller sitting room.

“Nor I, you my dear,” She smiled. “I understand what went down between you and your mother, and I truly am sorry.”

My eyes flickered to the floor, studying the Persian rug beneath my feet.

“And after everything that you have done for this family, and for my son, I extend an invitation for you to have a home here. Many things are coming for the both of you, and I think it would rest easier on you both, as well as my own heart, if you were close and safe.”

“Mrs. Malfoy—I... I can’t. That’s too much,”

“It is just enough,” She nearly scolded.

My eyes met hers and I tried to figure out what I should do. Did she mean that she wanted me to stay? Would the Malfoy Manor be my new home? Could I give it all up and stay?

Then I thought, what was I giving up and what was I gaining?

“I’ll stay,” I smiled.

“Wonderful,” She stood and drew me into a hug. “Now, I know that you and Draco are both concerned about my sister, and perhaps I am as well, but, for right now, I wish nothing more for you and Draco to have these last few moments to be kids,” She stroked my hair softly. “So do not fret darling, not now,”

I nodded, knowing that her words were easier said than done. But I tried anyway.

Draco and I spent the next few weeks together as we had the summer before. I read to him, we walked the grounds, he played the piano for me, I spent some of the days flying as Pinnae with Draco flying on his broom beside me, Abby and Pansy came over, we practiced magic and defense spells, I read up on Dark Magic, Draco tried to stop me from doing that, we went swimming in the lake in the wood, I pestered Draco until I achieved making him speak French for me—the language not...

Anyway.

It became a new sort of normal. I had written to my mother and we were on speaking terms, but I had boundaries now. I wouldn’t let her hurt me again like she had before. Slowly my books started arriving from my mother as well as most of my other belongings until I had my own room at the Manor filled with my books and other possessions. A room that was heavily enchanted so that only I or Draco could enter.

Though I read to Draco most days, and sometimes Narcissa would stay in and listen—she was gone most days, meeting her sister at other locations trying to keep her from the Manor—there was something to be said about the silk that fell from Draco’s lips on the rare occasion he read to me.

We were a tangle of limbs and blankets one night and he took the book from my hands after my words began to slur too much for his liking. Setting the book side, he chose another form my pile and opening the book, he began to read:

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'

So, she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, 'Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!' (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”

His voice was as honey when he read. He wove together the story in my mind taking my hand and pulling me further and further into the tale. I was lost, my hand in his. Down the rabbit-hole and into a wonderland.

Dawn filtered in through the curtains and I woke up meeting silvery blue eyes continuing to read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I shifted, scooting up and laying my head on his shoulder, letting him know that I was awake.

“Morning,” he greeted softly. “Did I wake you?”

I shook my head softly and slipped my eyes shut.

“Do you want me to read aloud?” He pondered; his voice soft.

“If you want,” I yawned.

That was the last day it seemed that we had to ourselves. Darkness spread that night. An evil that no one could deny nor escape. And it came for Draco and me.

Draco was asleep beside me and I read the end of Dante’s Inferno wondering why I had even started to read it in the first place. The tragedy offered me no comfort. The light from the bedside table was snuffed out, plunging me into total darkness. I drew my wand, trying to cast a lighting charm, but my voice didn’t seem to work.

“So, you thought you could hide from me, young one?” The voice was sinister and made my blood turn to ice.

“Bellatrix,” I whispered, my eyes adjusting, catching sight of the deranged witch.

“Come quietly little pet,” Bellatrix smiled manically. “No need to wake the young prince,”

I looked down on Draco, who was sleeping so soundly. There was not a fear nor worry on his face. He was at amity.

“Wouldn’t want to ruin his moment of peace, now would we?” She purred. “Don’t worry, The Dark Lord has plans for him too,”

I squeezed my eyes shut and carefully extracted myself from Draco’s grasp, placing a soft kiss on his forehead before turning to Bellatrix.

“Just don’t hurt him,” I begged softly.

“That is not for you to bargain,” Bellatrix snapped, grabbing my arm violently, ripping the wand from my hand.

I felt the familiar pull of Apperating and was in the middle of a forest that held no consequence to me surrounded by hooded figures. I wanted to crumple to the ground and cry again. Couldn’t I have just one moment of safety?

“No, my dear I think not,” A raspy voice purred.

The hooded figures turned and dipped their head in reverence to this voice. This thing. This monster.

“You,” Fear froze me into place.

Bellatrix pulled my hair and I felt a sharp blade run across chest. I let out a sharp cry.

“You will speak with respect to The Dark Lord,” She hissed into my ear, throwing me down.

“Me,” His smile was wicked, his red snake like eyes seeing straight through me. “You should consider yourself quite honored, not many have the privilege of meeting me,”

“So, you’re going to kill me then? To get to Draco?” I hissed, surprisingly courageous for the given situation.

“Quite courageous indeed,” Voldemort mused. “And yet you are nothing but a Hufflepuff. Weak. Kind,” He sneered the word. “Favoring fair play?” The Death Eaters jeered around us. “The world isn’t fair, my pet,”

“I’m aware,” I narrowed my eyes at him, pulling myself up. The cut on my collar began to sting and burn. I covered it with my hand in an attempt to stop the bleeding.

Again, his crimson eyes delved deep into my psyche, peering at me as if I were something to be studied.

“It seems you might,” He took a step closer to me. “But you truly have no idea, do you?”

It felt like I was being ripped from my mind and placed somewhere else. A room I knew well, the foyer of the Manor. A man I had only seen in photos was bloodied and bruised on the floor.

“Please, please,” He rasped. “Please, I have a child, Lucius,”

Tears sprung into my eyes. I reached out to my father, trying to comfort him, but my hand passed through him, as I were a ghost.

At wand point, I stood between my father and Lucius, greeting a cold stare that I loathed. This was the man that had hurt the people I loved. First my father, then my mother, then Draco.

Voldemort’s claw like hands snatched me out of the way and gripped my neck and waist, forcing me to watch what I knew was coming. I found myself not able to look away, even though my muscles screamed to, my body would not respond.

“See where love gets you? What happens?” He hissed over the sound of my father’s screams and a bright green flash.

I was released and crumpled to the ground.

“Then your mother... she was supposed to love you. Didn’t turn out so well either did it?” Voldemort laughed as did the others around me. I hung my head, tears streaming silently.

“Just kill me,” I whispered. “And be done,”

“But where is the fun if we don’t break you first?” Voldemort mused. “It’s one thing to kill, another to watch someone be utterly destroyed when then realize that everything they believed in was nothing more than a fairytale. To be so impossibly wrong that it extinguishes you.”

“How have I been wrong?” I snapped, looking up.

“Watch your tongue!” Bellatrix shouted, casting a curse sending me reeling in pain. I didn’t even notice that I was screaming.

“Now, now dear Bella,” The Dark Lord chided. “She does not know to whom she speaks. Her ignorance is no reason to punish her,”

The pain stopped.

“Your utter blind belief in love however,” Voldemort smiled maliciously. “That is something to break,”

“You can’t break that,” I gasped out. “You can break my body, and my mind, and maybe my spirit, but not my love,”

“But my dear, who do you have to love? Your father is dead. Your mother betrayed you. Your friends? Where are they now?”

“Draco,” I rasped out. “I love him.”

“He does not belong to you,” Voldemort laughed. “He is mine and has been since the moment he was born, you foolish girl.”

“Yes, I am a foolish girl,” I refuted, drawing up on my arms. “I love him, and he loves me! And you cannot break that, not with a thousand swords, and you cannot track that! Not with a thousand spells,” I stood on shaky feet.

The pain that exploded in my chest had me back on the ground writhing in pain. In utter agony. Every cell was being burned alive as they seemed to unattached themselves from the other. I felt myself being ripped apart and unmade by the universe.

“Stop,” I heard faintly. “We need her alive, for now,”

_____________________________

When Draco woke, inky blackness surrounded him. He was alone in bed, even though knew you were beside him when he fell asleep. You book was thrown unceremoniously to the floor. Fear gripped his heart.

When he rose, he found your wand discarded on the ground. Anxiety and terror began to grow in his chest. Dressing quickly, he hurried downstairs and found the Manor completely empty. He called for you, but there was no answer.

Come and join us young Malfoy, A dreadful voice hissed.

Without a second thought he plunged into the darkness of the night, desperate to find you.

Desperate to make sure that you were still alive.

Draco rushed into the circle of dark cloaks, coming face to face with Voldemort. He didn’t care though, he just wanted to find you. His eyes fell to the forest floor and he almost collapsed in relief that you were alive, cowering on the ground. His aunt’s wand was trained on you, and he could see the deep gashes along your skin. Blood mingled with dirt.

“Young Draco!” Voldemort called, a wicked smile on his face. “What an unparalleled delight, I had rather hoped you come,”

There was a snickering that rose from the Death Eaters around him.

“Free her,” Draco snarled. “Do what you want to me, but let her go,” His voice was cutting, like his father’s. “She has no hand in this,”

He heard your feeble voice try to protest, but you were silenced when Bellatrix raised her wand, not even having to cast a spell. The Dark Lord laughed.

“Your lover makes a passionate plea,” Voldemort knelt down beside you, gripping your chin with his claw like hands. “Perhaps you haven’t been lying and he truly does love you,” He threw you to the ground, where you didn’t get back up again.

Draco’s blood boiled as Voldemort faced him.

“You have become weak like your father. He failed me and now I will punish him by taking you.” The Dark Lord stalked closer to him. “You will join me. You will take my mark. You will execute a task for me,”

Draco held his head high and squared his shoulders, his eyes not leaving your unmoving form. He knew this was coming, but he didn’t care. He had to keep you alive.

“If you refuse,” The Dark Lord chuckled. “She dies, and you become mine anyway,”

You lifted your head, your large round eyes meeting his, almost no light left in them. He couldn’t bear to think of any moment when the light was completely gone from them. He understood his father a bit more.

“I will join you,” Draco breathed out. “My loyalty is yours,”

“Very good!” Voldemort clasped his hands together. “I hope you will not disappoint me like your father.”

“I am not my father,” Draco hissed.

________________________________

I watched as black robes and masks surrounded Draco, one holding his shoulders, one forcing out his left arm and another yanking his hair so that his head was raised and trained on the Dark Lord. Crazed fear was written on his features as he locked eyes with Voldemort who drew his wand.

Hopeless cries left my lips at the sight, my eyes wet with unshed tears. Bellatrix dampened her foot on my arm as means to quiet me. I bit my lip, trying to hold back a scream.

Then a hopelessness settled over me, pure darkness and evil that took away every inkling of love and faith that I possessed. Despite the utter despair, I kept my eyes trained on Draco. I wouldn’t abandon him. Not now. He wouldn’t be alone.

The darkness coiled like a snake, slithering from Voldemort’s wand and bound Draco’s arm. There was a chanting that I didn’t understand the meaning of. Trembling words left Draco’s lips in the same ancient chant.

A piercing sound tore through me. It was worse than the darkness. It was worse than hopelessness. Draco’s desperate screams of agony shattered me to my core. I covered my ears with my hands despite the pain from the broken bones and deep gashes. It was nothing in comparison to the pain that Draco’s shrieks punctured my heart.

Then it was over.

A chill washed over me. I dared to open my eyes and lowered my hands from my ears.

The mass of black robes had vanished. Draco was kneeling on the ground not yards from me, shaking. His head was bowed, his hands grasping at the dirt.

I pulled myself up and dragged myself over to him. Part of me marveled that I was still alive.

“What did they do to you?” Draco’s voice shook as he lifted his right hand and stroked my hair.

“I’m fine,” I rasped, wincing as I sat up. “Draco,”

“Don’t.” He breathed out. “Just...”

I nodded and pulled up next to him, laying my head on his shoulder. I could see the deep dark etching on his skin of the Dark Mark. It burned my heart that it was there to save me.

“Let’s go home?” I whimpered.

“Y/n, you... you shouldn’t... I’m not...” He stammered out.

“You just took that to save my life,” I reached up and lifted his chin; his blue haunted eyes met mine, filled with hopelessness and despair. “Hell, if I’m going anywhere,”

He nodded and pulled me into his arms. Drawing his wand—my father’s wand—from his blazer he whispered a soft spell and my wounds started to undo themselves. I felt my strength returning and my hand mending itself. I flexed it and the pain was gone.

“Dray,”

He shook his head.

“No, you’re going to hear this,” I took his face in my hands. “Thank you. Thank you for what you did for me.” Stroking his cheek softly I pressed my lips to his softly. “I love you,”

There was a loud crack and Draco and I flinched until there was a familiar tear streaked face.

“Mother?” Draco rasped.

“Oh Draco,” She rushed and knelt beside us. “I’m so sorry, they wouldn’t let me be here, I would have,” Her hands brushed through his hair in the same delicate way mine did.

I leaned away and let them have their moment. Then she reached out for me, tears glistening in her eyes as her hand stroked my face.

“I am in your debt once again my dear,” She whispered. “You were there for him when I couldn’t be,”

“It’s all my fault,” I sniffed. “He did it to save me, he... he was gonna kill me.”

“I know, but the fault does not rest with you.” Narcissa pulled us both close. “Let’s go home you two,”

My mind seemed to go numb and onto autopilot. Draco and I carried another back to the Manor and back up the stairs to his room. His mother started to draw a bath, the sweet scents sending a calming aura that had no effect on Draco or me. Narcissa left a jar of cream on the counter and stroked his cheek softly and squeezed my hand before leaving us alone.

With shaky hands I unbuttoned his shirt, slipping it from his shoulders. Silent tears fell down both of our faces. Somehow, we managed to end up in the silky water together. His hands, trembling and unsure, unhurriedly washed the dirt and blood from my skin. I reached out, taking his left hand and turning it palm up, gazing upon the gruesome mark that was left.

A sob wracked through Draco’s frame as he pulled his arm away and curled in on himself, weeping.

I had been wrong.

I could be shattered.

I could be broken.

I stretched out, my quivering hand resting on his arm and a broken cry left my lips.

For once in my life I had no idea what to do. I had no idea how to fix this or what next step to take. I was scared and felt estranged. For the first time in my life I was angry with the universe because why had it come to this? What had either of us done so wrong to deserve this?

It sent me into tears and panic. Draco eventually pulled me into his arms, and I clung to him, as we both broke down on each other. Dawn glittered in through the window, but darkness still loomed over us like a heavy cloud.

I don’t remember curling up in his bed, but I found myself there anyway.

Neither of us attempted to sleep. We knew that it was a lost cause. I came to my senses when I noticed that Draco was raking his nails along his forearm, in a feeble attempt to clear the skin of the dark ink.

“Draco,” I chided, taking his hand, pulling it from the irritated skin.

He jerked away from my touch and rolled over in his bed, facing away from me. I tried to shove down the rejection that spread through my chest and rose from the bed. Padding softly to the bathroom, I took the jar that Narcissa had left, understanding its purpose.

I knelt down beside Draco, my hand extended in a silent question. His tear-filled eyes barely met mine but when they did, he gave in. The cream in the jar was a soft white color and it tingled on my fingertips. Carefully, I smeared it over the Mark, gauging Draco’s reaction. He was stoic. The redness around the Mark began to fade and it seemed that the mark itself began to fade into the skin.

Setting the jar on the bedside table, I stood.

“Do... do you want me to stay?” The words were unsure from my mouth. I had no idea what he was thinking or feeling, and I didn’t know what to do.

“Sunshine,” Was all he got out.

I nodded, understanding, thinking to the night in early summer. Burrowed in his arms, we both clung to one another, saying nothing, but meaning everything. This was what we had been waiting for. And now it was here.

“We... He’s... He’s in my head,” Draco rasped out. “I can hear him... he... fuck, Y/n, he... he wants me to kill Dumbledore,” He voice broke. “That’s my task, that’s...”

Impossible, I wanted to finish, but I didn’t.

...........................

Our O.W.L. results came in and I couldn’t find a smile to give when I saw that we both passed with the highest marks. Jobs after Hogwarts seemed so impossible. Almost trivial.

Draco and I did sit and talk about his trial.

“Is there a way to get someone else into Hogwarts to do it?” I looked up from a book of cursed objects. “I’m sure Bellatrix would love to do it...”

“It has to be me,” He snapped and rubbed his face. “But we are going to need a distraction so that we can... I can do it.”

I took his hand and laid my head on his shoulder. We both agreed only spending one hour a day on plans for his trial. The rest of the time we desperately tried to escape it all. We spent quite a bit of time in Paris. Draco took me to the Louvre, and we walked along the Seine.

Abby and Pansy noticed immediately the deep bruise like shadows that lingered under our eyes from sleepless nights when they arrived to spend an afternoon with us. They never asked, but I could see the glances exchanged between them.

Abby pulled me aside one day and finally asked.

“It’s not my secret Abby,” I whispered softly. “I just... I really need you to remind me it’s okay, because I need to do that for Draco and I’m slipping Abby,” Tears stung my eyes.

Gathered into her arms, I broke down into tears again, gripping at her shirt.

“I... I was there... The Dark Lord... he... I watched my dad die Abby... He made me...” I sobbed out. “It’s all I see when I close my eyes,”

She stiffened, not saying anything. Stroking my hair softly, she just held me. Some part of me wished that it was my mother that was holding me and telling me it was alright, but I knew that it never could be.

“We’re gonna kill this son of a bitch, you hear me?” Abby took my shoulders. “We’re going to make sure that he pays for what he’s done. If that means getting along with Potter, then so be it, but we’re going to make him pay,”

I nodded and wiped away my tears, smiling for the first time in maybe a week.

____________________________

Your legs were draped across his lap as you read to him. Maybe it was stupid, but you were reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe again, and despite it all, it comforted him.

“I wish there was a wardrobe that could just transport the others into Hogwarts. It would make our distraction a lot easier.” You paused reading, thinking aloud.

He frowned, and something sounded familiar in your words. He gently set your legs in front of you and stood, his fingers trailing the spines of book that surrounded the two of you.

“Dray?” You stood, you hand resting on his shoulder.

“I knew there was something familiar about that book,” He murmured, selecting an ancient book from the shelf, scanning the index then flipping to the proper page. “Here, vanishing cabinets. They were common in the first Wizarding War... they created a passage between two cabinets.”

You took the book from his hands and your hour had begun.

“There’s one at Hogwarts, I... I remember George saying something about it...” You murmured, scribbling in your notebook.

“Weasley?” Draco raised an eyebrow.

You nodded and looked up. “If we could only find it... and another on the outside.”

“The Room of Requirement?” He pondered. “If it were anywhere...”

“It would be there.” A smile reached your lips and his.

Maybe this wasn’t completely hopeless.

“We can check Borgin and Burke’s,” His mother suggested after your epiphany was shared. “They have a lot of old artifacts and relics. We can go tomorrow. Draco needs to be fitted for new robes anyway, and your book lists have come in,”

You two nodded, his hand in yours.

The next day the three of you headed to Diagon Alley. It was one of the first times that you had been on his arm in the Wizarding World looking like a Malfoy, and he couldn’t help but smile at how effortless and beautiful you made it seem.

While being fitted for his new robes, Draco was becoming very irritated and he looked to you for constant comfort because he was breaking down inside. There was so much fear that someone would accuse him of being a Death Eater, that he would be taken to Azkaban, that he would be torn from you.

“Bloody hell, doesn’t he have a life?” You muttered, your eyes drawing his to a boy with messy black hair and piercing green eyes.

Both Ron and Harry stood with their wands drawn, and Draco took a small step in front of you, glaring the golden boy down, sneering.

“Now I don’t want wands drawn in my shop,” Madam Malkin scolded. His mother stood, standing between him and the trio.

“Put those away,” she said coldly to Harry and Ron. “If you attack my son or Miss Y/n again, I shall ensure that it is the last thing you ever do.”

“Really?” said Harry, taking a step forward. “Going to get a few Death Eater pals to do us in, are you?”

Draco had to stop a smile from curling onto his face. If only Harry knew exactly who he was dealing with now.

Madam Malkin squealed and clutched at her heart. “Really, you shouldn’t accuse—dangerous thing to say—wands away, please!”

But Harry didn’t lower his wand. Draco’s mother gave a twisted and cold smile.

“I see that being Dumbledore’s favorite has given you a false sense of security, Harry Potter. But Dumbledore won’t always be there to protect you.” Not after Draco finished his trail.

Harry looked mockingly all around the shop. “Wow . . . look at that . . . he’s not here now! So why not have a go? They might be able to find you a double cell in Azkaban with your loser of a husband!”

Draco’s blood boiled and now you were standing, your wand out. His hand went out to stop you protectively as he glared Harry down.

“Don’t you dare talk to my mother like that, Potter!” He snarled.

“It’s all right, Draco,” His mother pressed her lips into a tight line. “The boy is ignorant. We cannot blame him for that,”

Harry raised his wand higher. Draco clenched his fist, knowing that you were holding his wand at the moment. He wished that you would hand it over, but maybe, it was for the best that you didn’t.

“Get lost Harry,” Your voice came in strong and cold. “You’re not going to do anything, and we have better things to do than entertain your pettiness.”

“You’re worse than he is,” Harry spat. “What would Cedric say, if he knew?”

You went rigid under Draco’s touch. He growled at Potter and his friends. Granger was trying to pull Harry away, and Ron was dumbfounded, baffled that Harry would say something like that.

“It’s easy to love those who are good to you isn’t it?” You hissed. “But you will never understand unconditional love,”

Your hand intertwined with his as you turned your back on Harry and his friends and Draco could see your resolve crumbling. Harry had made a low blow by bringing up Cedric and Harry would pay for hurting you like that.

“Come,” His mother decided. “We’ll go elsewhere,”

Draco ignored the tittering from Madam Malkin as he pulled you close to his side and walked out of the shop with you, his mother not far behind. Immediately he pulled you into a tight embrace and your arms wrapped around him.

“I’m so sorry darling,” He whispered softly. “Harry will pay for that,” You nodded into his shoulder.

He stroked your cheek softly and you nuzzled into is touch a small smile touching your lips.

“It’s a shame,” You whispered. “You looked really handsome in those robes,”

He chuckled. “If she stuck me with another pin, I was going to lose it,” He admitted.

Walking along Diagon Alley, you waved at Hagrid, smiling. He seemed quite surprised to see you with Draco but offered a nod and hesitant smile.

“Mother,” Draco gave his mother a knowing look.

It was time for him to go into Borgin and Burke’s alone. You slipped him his wand back and placed a soft kiss on his lips.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” You whispered. “Especially with Potter around,”

He nodded begrudgingly and took off towards Knockturn Alley. Fate seemed to be on his side when Borgin confirmed that he did have another Vanishing Cabinet in the shop. The only issue was that the one at Hogwarts was damaged by the information that Abby had given to you.

Borgin insisted that he see the cabinet, but Draco refused. It had to stay put for this to work.

“Well, without seeing it, I must say it will be a very difficult job, perhaps impossible. I couldn’t guarantee anything.”

“No?” Draco mused, a menacing smile upon his face. “Perhaps this will make you more confident.”

He hated that it came to this, but he revealed his Dark Mark to the shop owner and watched the fear come into the eyes of Borgin. He rather that no one know of what had happened to him and loathed that it had to be a bargaining chip when he’d rather be rid of the wretched thing.

“Tell anyone,” Draco hissed, “and there will be retribution. You know Fenrir Greyback? He’s a family friend. He’ll be dropping in from time to time to make sure you’re giving the problem your full attention.”

It was another part of your plan. You said insurance would be important and Draco agreed. He knew Greyback would be the best insurance that anyone could offer.

“There will be no need for —”

“I’ll decide that,” He snapped. “Well, I’d better be off. And don’t forget to keep that one safe, I’ll need it.”

“Perhaps you’d like to take it now?”

“No, of course I wouldn’t, you stupid little man, how would I look carrying that down the street? Just don’t sell it.”

“Of course, not . . . sir.” Borgin bowed to him, as he once did to his father and it twisted Draco’s insides so much that he barely was able to keep his charade up.

Draco quickly stalked out of Knockturn Alley and back into your arms. You looked to him, expectant and he nodded. Guilt tore through him as relief flooded your features. He hated doing this to you. Making you walk this dark path with him, but he had no idea how he would manage it without you.

That night he curled up on your chest and your hands absent-mindedly ran through his hair. You were humming some sort of lullaby that he couldn’t quite place, but it was a repetitive tune for you over the past few weeks—something that you were clinging to.

“My dad... he used to sing it, it’s muggle I think...” You explained when he asked. “And then my mother did... when I had nightmares.” Your face fell a bit. “You reminded me of it when you called me your sunshine,”

Sure enough, when he did draw the few lyrics you remembered from your lips, it was very fitting. Soon, the lullaby became a comfort for you both.

A ray of sunshine in the middle of darkness.

Chapter 7

Tags: @coffee-addicti @msmcsmutt @ravn-87@artemismohr18 @whygz @crazywritingbug @fuzzy-panda @bitemebro522 @zombiesnips-blog @jillanaholland @shookyungsoo @savingdraco@welcometomyworldwithoutrules @akari180 @slytherin-emerald@chaotic-good-gemini @memalfoy-spidey @theres-a-dog-outside-omg @queenfeatherwings @fanficflaneuse @go-whovian-universe@spicyshenanigans @darling-im-not-okay-i-promise @dietkiwi@katsukink @takemetothekingdom @strangerr-things @tmnt-queen @mccloudchloe @hxneybgb @justsomerandomgur@belcvayelena @moviesbooksandfandoms @howdycharlie@xtrashmouthxtozierx @cocochanelthepupper @ninacotte@braelynn-j @jiggllyy @honeymarvel @darcypottah@atomicpunkrock @thiccheerioss @lottie289 @boredashaeck@beautiful-pegasus @tceedlmao @deadlynyghtshayde@iconjuresnapeingrandmaclothes @anonymous034 @bi-andready-tocry @lunna-does-real-doodle @dragonsandbread@atomicwonderlandmentality @okaydraco @the–queen-of-hell @langdonzvoid @cmxreader @alienmotel @oh-itsnothing@tulippings @thestressedprincess @sunflowerxsadnessw @caps-wilsonn @fattycooter @angelotakunerd08 @thisisahugemistake@fanficsigottaread @gweaslvy @okaydraco@strawberriesonsummer @ughjjloveme @honeymarvel @gaysludge@cleopatera @ray-of-sunrise @artist-bby @shadowsingeraxolotl@peters-legos @quillsareforwriting @ghostlytoadalmondhairdo@wollymalfoy @lilpieceoftoast @paper-cats @floweryjh @sdicapriox@slothgirl22 @peachesandpinks @riathearora @monimillion

480 notes · View notes

shirophantomvox · 3 years

Text

A Night on the Town- Hisoka x Illumi (Hisoillu)

What’s up y’all? Per an anon request, here is a Hisoillu story. Hisoka and Illumi go to dinner at a fancy restaurant to talk about a business contract when a single phrase or word causes them to change the subject. This story will see how they stand on their relationship. Are they only meant to be “friends” or more than? “A night on the town” is a British phrase that simply means someone going to a club or hanging out all night long. Boujee is an abbreviation of the French "bourgeois." A critical term used to describe people, things, and places that are definitively high-class. I am going to try my best to keep this in character. They feel comfortable to joke around each other only. I use places like Earth, Mars, and the US because I assume Yorknew is another name for New York. Yes, I mentioned some Voltron elements too. I love crossovers! Enjoy! Feel free to inbox me. FYI, there’s nothing wrong with eating chicken fingers as an adult. I hate steak and haven’t eaten it in over 15 years. Onto the story!

Rain fell from the sky hard as ever. The sound of the raindrops hitting multiple surfaces sounded like quarters hitting metal. Thunder clapped what seemed like every 60 seconds followed by an alarming amount of lightning. The white and red LED lights lit up the sidewalk in front, casting heavenly shadows on just about everyone that made their way in. “La Lune” is a 5 star restaurant located in the heart of Yorknew City. Tons of celebrities have had dinner there! Madonna, Rihanna, Beyonce, and so many more had taken funny photos with the chef and his wife, creating a memorable moment for everyone involved. Many take the atmosphere of this restaurant as something romantic. The lights were dimmed and the tables were lit by candle light. It seemed like everyone was being serenaded by their lover, except for these two of course. Their occasion was something far from being romantic. Both gentlemen agreed to talk about a mission that would require both of their efforts because if one did not agree, the other would parish. This mission drove them mad. Hisoka lost a few days of sleep just thinking about it!

You see, one of the country’s best space explorers has been running rampant through the streets. These students attended the Galaxy Garrison, a space college and were launched into space. While trying to bring back samples from Kerberos, they were attacked by aliens (known as the Galra), kept in another dimension, and once they returned they began to inflict pain on Earthlings just like how the Galra did to them. These students must have been experimented on because they possessed power that no Nen user could defeat.

Both gentlemen walked to the hostess desk and waited for their attention. Hisoka’s hair was covering part of his eyes. Many people found him attractive; so attractive that people would nudge him on the arm and mimic a “call me” motion with their fingers. What was it about him that people would just swoon over? Illumi stood behind Hisoka with his hands in his pants pocket, impatiently waiting to be seated. You can’t discuss aliens and brats on an empty stomach.

“How may I help you?’” The hostess smiled big as she cupped her hands waiting for his response. Her teeth were pearly white, almost appearing to be fake. But one thing was off about this woman. She stared mighty hard at his face and continued to smile. She seemed robotic. A smile appeared on his face as well; he swore she was undressing him with her eyes.

“Reservation for Gittarackur~♠?” Hisoka nearly said Illumi’s name instead.

“Right this way.”

She led them through a series of staircases and made her way to the rooftop. This building wasn’t too tall, but it was high enough. The roof was decorated with red table umbrellas, glass tables, candles, and hanging LED lights.

This is a little too romantic, Illumi. What gives?

She handed them the menu and walked away. Illumi looked to his right and left to ensure no one was close enough to hear what he was going to say. But before he could say anything, Hisoka opened his mouth and began to make unnecessary comments that got under Illumi’s skin.

“You tend to pick the restaurants with a noticeable romantic atmosphere. Care to tell~♥.?”

Illumi pressed his lips together.

“I do not pay attention to the atmosphere. I pay attention to good ratings and decent prices.”

“Oh! So, you’re a cheap date~♠!”

“This isn’t a date, Hisoka. We are talking about a mission that if it gets out of control, the whole human race will cease to exist as we know it.”

A waitress came over, introduced herself, and offered them a bottle of wine.

Did you plan this, Illumi?

Of course they accepted! Rosé was Hisoka’s go-to. The wine mellowed him out, made him more relaxed and bearable. He placed his thin fingers and sharp nails around the wide-mouth glass and sipped his drink. He smiled as Illumi disclosed more details of the mission.

“What are you saying, Illumi? I’m afraid I do not understand~♠.”

“Listen carefully. These groups of young adults have been experimented on by the Galra. Since their return, they've been stealing, beating, and even killing innocent people. Their excuse for this is by saying that “those people were bad people” based on rumors they’ve heard. They’re a menace to society, not to mention extremely dangerous. For the first time in 22 years, I’m a little worried.”

The waitress came back to take their order. Hisoka had never tried a streak before, so that is what he ordered. Illumi, the picky eater on the other hand, ordered an adult size of chicken fingers and fries. Hisoka gave him the shittiest look of the century. He placed his large hand over his face as he humiliatingly closed his eyes. Illumi squinted trying to ignore Hisoka’s stupid reactions.

“What’s the matter?”

“You embarrass me, Illumi~♠.”

“How?! What did I do?”

“We’re at a nice, romantic restaurant and all you order is chicken fingers, fries, and ranch?! Ma’am could you give us a moment~♠?”

“Absolutely.” Poor girl. Why did she have to witness that?

“What’s your problem, Hisoka?”

“You could have at least ordered the steak, salad, or both! Look around you! You’re going to be the laughing stock of this town! Try strawberry vinaigrette~♠!”

“Well, excuse me, Mr. Boujee! Chicken fingers are delicious and anyone can order them! Why would I order salad when I have lettuce at home?”

“Because it’s good for you~♠!”

“Salad doesn’t fill me up and neither does strawberry vinaigrette!”

They began to talk about the mission again. Illumi hid his fear behind his resting bitch face, but he didn’t know if he truly wanted to go through with this mission or not.

“I’m feeling cautious.”

“What for? I’m sure you can handle it~♣.”

“I can’t. I don't even think my grandfather can beat them.”

“Why so?” Hisoka drank from his glass again. Illumi did not disclose much info because he knew how Hisoka becomes when he’s tipsy. He begins to laugh and talk too much.

“They have an ability that can wipe out a Nen user within seconds.”

“Oh~♥?”

“Yes. They can disappear in the blink of an eye, they have this purple electricity shooting from their hands, and these specific men I see with gray masks that remind me of a plague doctor. They have no faces and they’re purple. Once that electricity hits you, it’s game over. They have the ability to determine if it's fatal or not.”

“Ouch. What’s the plan~♣?”

“Someone that I used to know will infiltrate the base that they’re hiding in. It will be difficult because they guard it but that is when my needles will come in handy.”

“But you didn’t have to cut me off…~♣” Hisoka sang.

“What? What was that, that you did just then?” Illumi was serious. This was no time to be joking around.

“What? I just finished what you started~♣.”

“What did I start?”

“You said ‘someone that I used to know’ and I responded ‘but you didn’t have to cut me off’. Don’t tell me you’re not aware of that song~♣.”

Hisoka smiled something softer than usual and laughed at Illumi’s clueless look. This was something he adored about him; the carelessness made him laugh so hard that he forgot about his troubles...if he had any.

“I understand why you brought me here to talk about stopping the Galra, but let’s enjoy this moment. Just you and I~♥.”

“Why? They are dangerous. They could be planning on destroying us as we speak.”

“You worry too much. Besides, everyone knows of your talent and even if they seem more powerful, I’m sure they’re keeping their distance from you.”

“I thought you’d be overjoyed at this opportunity. You can finally put those chrome cards to play.”

“Who said I wasn’t? I am but I’ve learned to hide my arousal rather well~♥.”

“You didn’t hide it well just a few seconds ago.”

“Touché’. But I was not talking about fighting then, I was talking about you~♥.”

“Hmm.” Illumi didn’t know what to say but one thing is for sure. Many, many feelings and thoughts clouded his mind and body but he didn’t know how to respond to them. He has known Hisoka for some time now and he knew of his ways; if he would just tell him how he felt, he might be surprised by his reaction. Hisoka has flirted and with him several times but for some reason he felt like if he responded he may not get a desired response.

Hisoka began to chuckle, more of a tipsy chuckle. He couldn’t hold back his laughter as he noticed how Illumi’s attitude began to change. Illumi immediately placed his wine glass on the table and squinted in confusion.

“What’s so funny, now?” He sounded a bit irritated but deep inside he was happy he asked.

“You’re blushing~♥.”

“What?”

Damn.

Was it that noticeable?

Sure was.

“I’m good! I never thought that I could make the oldest son of the Zoldyck family blush from my passes. That’s an achievement for me. So tell me Illu, do you dream about me too~♥?”

“Be quiet, would you?”

The magician couldn’t help but to release a hearty laugh so loud that people began to glance in their direction. Illumi frowned and crouched low towards the table.

“Stop it. People are staring.”

“What? I love it when people stare. That means I look good~♥.”

Hisoka continued to laugh. To add to Illumi’s social demise, he stood up from his chair, took a photo on his phone and captioned it: “Best date ever♦”.

“Don’t send that!”

“Oops. Sorry not sorry,” Hisoka gloated covering his mouth. “Guess you’ll have to catch me~♥.”

He continued to laugh but his laughter slowly began to come to a halt and wired down. Now he laid his head on the table, slightly drooling. Illumi decided that he had enough excitement for the night, so he threw three pins in his right leg, which was conveniently under the table. Hisoka had hinted earlier that he would be fine if Illumi ever made that decision. Following behind him for his entire life would be to die for. Illumi smiled as he looked at the man before him, finally silent.

“This might actually work,” he whispered to himself.

The moonlight casted a shadow on him as he admired the star on the sleeping magician’s face.

21 notes · View notes

scribble-blog · 4 years

Text

Soulmate AU part 4!

Tag list is open again! I’m trying to figure out some things, but I definitely want to expand beyond the 50tag limit on mobile!

First • Previous • Here • Next

Marinette had long since shooed her friends back to their rooms, but now she felt at a loss. She had tried to lay down and fall asleep early but her whole body seemed to buzz with awareness, the same livewire feeling as earlier but muted. She tossed and turned as the sky got dark, and eventually she gave up, pulling on a light jacket and bringing Trixx and Kaalki sleeping in the pockets before grabbing a sketchbook and making her way to the roof.

Gotham was gorgeous, even under the dark sky, lights giving shape to the gothic architecture and the silhouettes of darker areas balancing the brightness. People and cars moved down on the street below, and from her spot on high, she thought she saw a few quick shadows leap from one building to another farther away on the horizon. The famous vigilantes of Gotham, she guessed.

And then she heard feet, landing softly on the roof behind her. And she remembered exactly why this city had vigilantes.

She waited, counted to two as she heard their slow approach, and then spun, one leg flying low and knocking them over, her hand reaching out and twisting one arm back while she kicked the other one away from where they had tried to use it to catch themselves. In a half moment, she had them pinned, face into the gravel roof top.

And then she recognized the costume under her knee.

“Mon dieu, je suis desolé, je suis- I’m so sorry, Mr. Red Robin, Sir, I didn’t-“ she scrambled away, and then jumped forward again, grabbing his arm and helping him up. “I’m so sorry.”

To her shock, he laughed. “Oh my god, that was incredible. Where’d you learn to do that?”

She felt her face heat up. “Oh, well, France has its own villains, and I just- I thought you were-“

“I think that’s on me for sneaking up on you like that,” Red Robin said congenially. “Don’t worry about it, Miss...”

“Marinette!” She blurted out. “I’m Marinette.”

“Well, Miss Marinette,” Red Robin gave her an appraising looks, and she couldn’t help but try to stand a bit taller, straighter. “I wasn’t aware there were any major villains in Paris right now, let alone ones serious enough for schoolchildren to be learning that level of self defense.”

“Not aware?” The words almost blew Marinette over. Almost four years of protecting Paris, and people weren’t even aware there was a villain? “We’ve been fighting off Hawkmoth for four years!” She paled as soon as she said it, the implications of her superhero activities in that sentence catching up to her. “That is, literally, everyone has to fight him off, since he targets us with the Akumas, and then-“

Red Robin held out a hand, stopping the flow of her words. “Hold up, wait. Explain what this... Hawkmoth? Does.”

Marinette took a deep breath. “Hawkmoth has the ability to find people with overwhelmingly negative emotions, and then he uses magic to turn those innocent people into monsters called Akumas which do his bidding. He’s been doing this for almost four years, to the point where people in Paris are afraid to feel anything negative, or he might try to use them. And with so many people repressing their emotions, they’ve started breaking down, and the buildup of extreme negative mental states just creates increasingly powerful Akumas.”

She said it all in one very long breath, and at the end felt lighter. On the one hand, it was horrifying that no one outside of France, or possibly even just Paris, knew about any of it. On the other- if they didn’t know, then she could try reaching out again, this time face to face. She could ask for help.

Red Robin just stared at her, incredulous and- worried? “Are there any heroes who are trying to stop him?”

She leaned back, indignant. “Of course! We’ve got Chat Noir and Ladybug, and the entire Miraculous Team!”

Even with his eyes covered in that disconcerting white, she could see them narrow. “Do you think you’d be able to tell me a little bit more about them? About what’s going on in France?”

Marinette assessed the situation, and then very quickly came to a decision. “I think I can do you one better. I personally know some of the heroes, and if you think you can offer anything to them-help, or training, or even just advice- I can ask Ladybug and Chat Noir to come here to speak to you.”

His eyes seemed to widen. “I can’t guarantee anything of that sort, Marinette, I’m sorry- but if I can talk to them, and bring Batman in on this, then we’ll see what we can do and if we can help.”

Marinette nodded. “I can have them meet you tomorrow night. Up here on the roofs?”

He cast his gaze around. “Wayne Enterprises. The rooftop there. You’re certain they can be here tomorrow, say around ten?”

“They can use magic to get here,” she confides, and he nods, seeming to understand.

“I’ll meet with them first,” he tells her carefully. “And then, if necessary, I’ll call Batman in to speak to them as well. I’m sorry that Paris has been suffering alone.”

She nods, feeling tears gathering in her eyes. She wants to hug him but she holds herself back, overflowing with gratitude and exhaustion and over all of it, relief that they might actually finally receive some sort of aid. “Thank you, Red Robin.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” he mutters, and Marinette can’t help but feel that she might not have been meant to hear it. “You should get inside. Even this high up, Gotham can be very dangerous at night.”

She nods, and gathers up the unused sketchbook. “Even if there’s nothing you can do. It’s good to know that somebody- knows. Thank you.”

She turns around before he can say anything else, ducking back inside and making her way back down to her room.

Trixx and Kaalki immediately zoom out of her pocket.

“Marinette, are you sure about this?” Kaalki questions, but Marinette just nods.

“I tried reaching out to the Justice League- several times!- back at the beginning! And Chloé said her father had sent in messages asking for aid as well! And now-“

She sat down on the bed and curled up, putting her head in her hands and just breathing. Trixx and Kaalki settled on her shoulders comfortingly.

“I need Adrien and Chloé.”

She pulls out her phone and calls Chloé first. She answers on the fifth ring.

“What’s wrong, Dupain-Cheng,” Chloé demands.

“Not emergency. But I need to talk to you and Adrien now.”

Chloé huffs, and Marinette can almost see her eyes roll. “I’ll grab him.”

The blonde hangs up before Marinette can say thank you.

Carefully she uncurls her body and stands up, stretching lightly before she starts to pace. Is seems like only seconds after that there’s a knock on her door, and Adrien and Chloé are let in.

“I just had a run in with one of Gotham’s vigilantes,” Marinette begins with no preamble, “and they have no idea about what’s been happening in Paris. I volunteered to have them meet with the heroes tomorrow night here in Gotham in hopes that they’d be willing to work with us against Hawkmoth.”

She watched both of her friends blink dumbfoundedly.

Then Chloé snorted. “Yep. Dupain-Cheng, actual shitty action rom-com main character.”

“I am not!” Marinette yelled as Adrien doubles over laughing. “Listen, I’m going to use Kaalki to retrieve Tikki tomorrow, and then I was going to have the three of us meet them. On top of Wayne Enterprises.” She looked them both in the eyes, trying to impress upon them how serious she was. “We’ve been fighting against him for almost four years now, and between our inexperience and our actual lives, we haven’t gotten any closer to actually finding and stopping him. I think this is our chance to do that, and I need you both with me.”

Adrien hugged her. “We’ve got your back, Mari. You don’t have to worry.”

She relaxed into it as Chloé wrapped them both into her arms. “Thanks, guys. So, I was planning on telling them...”

TAGLIST:

@the-fusionist @rebecarojas07 @lowandco @kotaleartzu @resignedcatservant @alenee13 @mystery-5-5 @ladybug-182 @actual-disaster-human @loysydark @rumbelle18 @magic-miraculous @vixen-uchiha @athena452 @mochegato @ash-amg @worlds-tiniest-spook-pastry @thestressmademedoit @sassakitty @doriebell @jessigurl-design @emotionalsupportginger @kceedraws @kuroko26 @moonystars14 @toodaloo-kangaroo @myazael @theatreandcomicfreak @mer-mel @dahjokester @northernbluetongue @area51qt @renscorpio @redscarlet95 @razzledazzle247 @rosep16 @tired-butterfly @catthhay @shamefullove @imanerddealwith @chaosace @captainmac6 @dast218 @abrx2002 @cici-schnee @multplelifes @shreky-boi @purple-people-eaters-productions @crazylittlemunchkin @weird-pale-blonde-person

#maribat #daminette #daminette soulmates #soulmate AU #fanfic

895 notes · View notes

harrypotterhogwartshitpost · 3 years

Text

I made a timeline of Victoria’s (my MC’s) relationships and how everything happened with her love life:

1984- Victoria starts Hogwarts in the fall of 1984. On the train ride to Hogwarts she meets Charlie for the first time. They’re drawn to each other and have an instant connection. Immediately they become best friends and are inseparable. On that same train ride she meets Bill for the first time.

1985- Fall of 1985 Victoria and Charlie both join their house quidditch teams. Victoria starts as a chaser alongside Skye Parkin, while Charlie starts as a seeker.

1986- Spring of 1986 Bill joins Victoria in taking on the cursed vaults, and assists her in taking on the ice knight.

1987- Spring of 1987 Victoria and Charlie share their first kiss, leaving them both a little confused on where the line of friendship ends and something more begins. They decide not to let this affect their friendship for the time being. During all this Bill continues to help Victoria with the cursed vaults and they become close friends.

1988- Spring of 1988 Victoria and Charlie’s relationship grows more physical. Victoria enjoys playing with his hair and sleeping in his bed. They both enjoy cuddles and this is when some of their early sexual experiences begin to happen. Spring of 1988 is also when the celestial ball takes place. With Charlie not wanting anything to do with the ball, and it being limited to fourth years, Victoria choses Andre as her date. However after Bill makes an appearance to tell off Emily Tyler (and fulfill his promise to share at least one dance with Rowan.) After Andre leaves Victoria to dance with some of the other Raenclaws, Victoria finds herself in Bill’s company. They talk all night and this is when they start to realize they really have a connection.

1988- Fall of 1988 Victoria and Bill’s relationship really blossoms. They spend nights staying up practicing spells and laughing. Soon they share stolen kisses on the training grounds and she spends nights in his bed, however nothing serious happens. One day Bill decides he’s tired of waiting and asks Victoria to be his girlfriend, thus beginning their relationship. Not long after Charlie begins dating Skye Parkin. Despite having not really wanted a relationship Victoria knew Skye liked him and worked really hard in hopes of seeing two of her closest friends as happy as she was with Bill.

1989- Summer of 1989 Bill begins his job as a cursebreaker at Gringotts. Fall of 1989 a new school year begins. With Bill now gone Victoria is back to spending most of her time with Charlie. This takes a toll on his relationship with Skye, as she’s not a fan of him having another girl in his room all the time, or falling asleep in his bed every night instead of her. One thing leads to another and Victoria finds herself hooking up with Charlie one night. She feels absolutely awful. Soon Bill and Skye find out. Bill is heartbroken but decides to forgive Victoria. He can tell how terrible she feels and remembers what it was like to be sixteen and stupid. She swears it won’t happen again (which it didn’t). Skye however isn’t as forgiving and immediately breaks up with Charlie, which he can’t say he was too upset about.

1990- Fall of 1990 Charlie chooses not to return to Hogwarts and takes a job in Romania instead. Victoria goes back to Hogwarts to finish her last quidditch season.

1991- Spring of 1991 Victoria leaves Hogwarts a semester early to hunt down Rakepick and ‘R’ and finish her business with the cursed vaults once and for all. This is also when she moves in with Bill. They share a one bedroom apartment not too far from Gringotts. This is when they really begin planning their lives together, talking of getting married and starting a family. Summer of 1981 Victoria becomes a cursebreaker at Gringotts much like Bill, and they become partners at work, going on missions and breaking curses together.

1993- After five years Bill decides it’s finally time to propose to Victoria in November of 1993. Despite all of years of talk about getting married Victoria freaks out and decides she can’t do it. She moves out of their apartment and starts living with Charlie, though she’s gone a good amount of time for work. Her and Bill stay civil with each other and continue to work together as Gringotts. Despite the break up they’re still friends and still care about each other.

1994- Over time Victoria and Charlie start spending more time together and become closer and closer. Nights in her bedroom become nights in Charlie’s room, become makeout sessions in his bed, become falling asleep together on the couch, become laughing while making sweets at 2am. They never officially ‘start dating’ and they don’t have an anniversary, things just kept falling into place until they started referring to each other as boyfriend/girlfriend to other people. One night they both wake up randomly, and Charlie looks at her and tells Victoria she’s his soulmate, she kisses him and agrees. They’ve never been happier.

1996- While Bill and Fleur announce their engagement, Victoria and Charlie have some news of their own. Despite Charlie not being sure if he wanted kids, and the talk of waiting till after the war to settle down, Victoria finds herself pregnant. Despite wanting to wait to announce anything, Charlie’s so excited about having a kid of his own with the love of his life, Victoria lets him tell their family and friends. With all positive reactions (aside from some snotty remarks from Molly about them not being married) Victoria and Charlie prepare to bring their kid into the world. After four months Victoria loses the baby, devastating both of them. While Bill and Fleur go to comfort them Molly regrets the trouble she initially gave Victoria for not being married. It’s a hard loss for everyone to get over but after what seems like forever life moves on.

1997- Charlie and Victoria attend Bill and Fleur’s wedding together, excited for the couple. While they agreed to wait for the war to end to settle down, get married, and try to start a family again, they’re excited to see Bill and Fleur happy taking this step in their relationship.

1998- Victoria is killed by death eaters during the battle of Hogwarts, before her and Charlie got the chance to get married, to start a family. This paired with the death of Tonks and his brother Fred, Charlie is devastated, and it takes him a while to get over. He keeps thinking about how if he wasn’t so insistent on waiting she could have at least died his wife. Eventually though through time he does move on. He never marries or has any children, because if he can’t do those things with Victoria he doesn’t want to do them at all.

#Harry Potter Hogwarts mystery #hphm #hogwarts mystery #hphm mc #jacob's sibling #bill weasley #charlie weasley #harrypotterhogwartsshitpost #Victoria Ivvy

38 notes · View notes

corinnesamuels · 3 years

Text

Guarding the Gates, Chapter 3: No More Questions, Please.

. . . the Ministry of Magic requests that anyone with information on the whereabouts of any of the aforementioned witches and wizards listed as missing contacts the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at their earliest convenience, as their families would like to see them home. Up next: The Ministry of Magic reports the recent hurricanes reported in the West Country are the work of giants in league with You-Know-Who and the Death Eaters—

“Merlin and fucking Morgana.” Lily curses, running a hand over her face roughly in frustration. The mental notes she had been taking were beginning to look like a NEWT-level essay, but she still hadn’t gotten word that it was time to start working. She watched the skies each morning for owls and even checked the muggle post. Dumbledore had always been peculiar, and if she didn’t know better, she might have thought he’d forgotten.

“I would advise you to rest up, Lily.” He had said in their last meeting. “Once we begin in earnest, breaks may be few and far between.

Lily sighs and lets her attention drift back to the wireless. They had shifted from missing persons and calamities to the upcoming Celestina Warbeck concert. It was almost odd to catch the juxtaposition, but people do need joy in times like these.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Lily looks up to see a barn owl tapping at her window. She opens the window and offers up pieces of bacon to the owl, which hoots happily as it sticks out a leg. Lily unties it and begins to do a quick scan, but the first line lets her know that it wasn’t from Dumbledore.

I’m back, bitches!

Lily laughs out loud, recognizing the telltale greeting style of one Dorcas Meadowes. Lily guesses that Dorcas just sent the same letter to her, Marlene, and Mary to save time. Dorcas talked a bit about her time with family over in the States.

Disco is dying, sadly, but there’s this new upbeat thing happening that I expect to really take off. They’re calling it “rap.” Race relations are still shit, but there’s a little progress, at least. I was hoping I’d be able to at least say the same about pureblood mania in England by the time I got back, but by the looks of things, the opposite has happened.

“You’re right about that.” Lily says to herself dejectedly. At the end of Dorcas’ letter, she recommends they get together soon, and Lily couldn’t agree more. She writes a quick note saying that she can’t wait to catch up and offers up her flat as the gathering place. Lily taps the letter with her wand three times to duplicate it and sends the letters back off with Dorcas’ owl. As it flies away, she thinks of how excited she is to see them, but how difficult it might be for Mary. Lily hopes that gathering in a private place will help make Mary comfortable enough to join them but understands if it doesn’t. Mary had been more timid than the other girls in their year, and a timid muggle born was unfortunately too easy of a target for the Death-Eaters-in-Training over in Slytherin House. Since they’d finished school, Mary had taken a job in muggle London. Not sure that she wanted to risk being the focus of more attacks, she limited her interactions with the wizarding world as much as possible.

Lily doesn’t judge Mary or blame her. But Lily didn’t have anything tethering her to the muggle world anymore. Petunia wanted nothing to do with her. Her parents and the rest of their family were all gone. And when she thinks of her life ten and twenty years from now, it’s always filled with the same wonder she felt when she first discovered the expansiveness and sheer possibility of magic. She thinks of children from non-magical families that need a safe space to learn and grow. She thinks of how the magic running through her veins is as much a part of her as the eyes she inherited from her father or the hair she inherited from her mother. And if that meant fighting for a place here, for herself and for others, then so be it.

The next day a letter comes from Marlene saying she had a few days off from St. Mungo’s and would be in attendance. Among other things.

I’ll bring takeaway too. I don’t have faith that Lily’s cooking has gotten any better in the last four years.

“Tramp.” Lily mutters.

A letter never comes from Mary to let them know if she would attend or not, but she was the first one to stumble out of Lily’s fireplace a few days later.

“I made a last-second decision because I’ve missed you terribly.” Mary says nervously. She tucks a blonde lock of hair behind her ear and looks at the floor before looking up at Lily. “I brought the good stuff, too.” She says, gesturing to a box containing several rather large bottles of mead sitting on her hip.

Lily, who had been searching for a record to put on the player when Mary stumbled in, scrambles to her feet to take the box from Mary. She places it on the ground and immediately envelops Mary in the kind of embrace that makes it difficult to breathe. Mary quickly returns it, holding on to Lily for dear life. Lily feels her shoulders quake slightly and knows that Mary’s eyes are becoming as damp as her own. Yes, Lily had missed her friend dearly. She’d missed all of them. But knowing that Mary fought through her demons to see her? Lily isn’t taking that for granted.

“I’ve missed you.” She says when they take a step back. Lily uses her thumbs to wipe tears from Mary’s face before using the back of her hand to handle her own.

“I’ve missed you more.” Mary says through a watery laugh that Lily returns.

“Now this ‘good stuff’ you say you brought,” Lily says once they’ve gotten themselves composed again. She reaches into the box and pulls out one of the bottles. “Rosemerta’s Oak-Matured Mead, eh? Mary, you spoil us!”

“Yes, well. I wanted it to feel like we were sneaking it into Gryffindor Tower again.” Mary smiles.

“James, Sirius, Remus, and Peter were terrible influences on us.” Says Lily with a smile at the memories of her sneaking through Hogwarts tunnels with James to get supplies from The Three Broomsticks for various occasions. “Why didn’t we start hanging out with them sooner?”

“Because you said James was a git.”

“Well, in my defense, he was at the time.”

Lily and Mary look at each other and break into laughter as Lily’s fireplace turns green again. Dorcas and Marlene step out in quick succession and begin screaming and scooping Lily and Mary into a loud, weepy group hug.

“Oh my God, Mary!”

“You came! I’m so happy to see you!”

“Lily, you’re really back for good?”

Once they settled and begun wiping away tears, Lily summons four glasses and plates. “Mary splurged on us birds and got us the good stuff.

“Is that so? Do I need to put out?” Dorcas asks. “Because if this stuff is as good as I remember when we were sneaking it into the tower, then I might not mind too much.” She says happily as she helps herself to the mead.

“Not necessary, Dorcas, thank you, though.” Mary laughs before looking around at the girls anxiously. “My boyfriend might not like that.”

“Well, you kept that quiet!” Lily says.

“I’ve only been here a few minutes!” Mary replies. “He’s actually the one that got the mead. I . . . I’m still not quite comfortable in public wizarding spaces. It feels too exposed. Especially with things getting worse. But Reg knows I’ve missed you guys and told me that he’d do whatever he could to help me feel comfortable enough to come.”

Marlene, who had been laying out the food she’d brought, looks up and places a hand to her heart. “Mary, that’s beautiful.” She gushes.

“Right. Tell me, Mare,” Dorcas says, scooting closer to Mary and bumping her shoulder lightly. “does he have any brothers?”

They all laugh, and Mary shakes her head. “No, Reg only has sisters.”

“Better luck next time, I guess.” Dorcas sighs.

“Well, I’m flexible, so let me know if any are single.” Marlene wiggles her eyebrows, and they all laugh again.

“Reg . . . this wouldn’t happen to be Reginald Cattermole, would it?” Lily asks as she swirls her mead around in her glass.

“That’s the one.” Mary has a soft smile and a dreamy look in her eyes. “He’s been so good to me. Incredibly patient and kind.” She looks down at her feet, a smile still resting across her face. “He encourages me not to give up on the wizarding world and goes above and beyond to make me feel safe. I couldn’t dream of a better situation.”

Lily’s heart feels lighter than it has in months as she listens to Mary explain how she and Reginald had randomly run into each other on one of Mary’s rare wizarding excursions. It’s beautiful to know that people are still finding and experiencing love, even when it seems like the world is burning. She wishes that she felt like this was feasible for her.

Honestly, had she not been distracted, she might have seen what was coming next.

“So, Lily.” Marlene begins with a mischievous gleam in her eye. “You and Potter finally making the beast with two backs, or are you still both pretending that you don’t want to?”

“Marlene.” Mary scolds as Dorcas laughs.

“I was wondering who was going to ask.” Dorcas grins, leaning in closer to get the details. Lily rolls her eyes.

“James and I are, again, just friends.” Says Lily as she throws a few chips at Marlene. “And besides, he has a girlfriend.”

“Ah.” The other three girls say in unison before dissolving into giggles. Lily is frustrated to find that she can’t prevent herself from joining them.

“Why don’t I have better friends?”

Dorcas gestures around the room. “Because we’re the best there is, love.”

“Ta.” Marlene says, raising a glass in salute before taking a large swallow and pouring herself another.

“Now look, on a serious note. We don’t have to do this.” Dorcas says more kindly. “But Lily, why on earth didn’t you two get together in the first place? We all thought it was just a matter of time. The boys too.”

Marlene and Mary’s eyes wander from Dorcas to Lily, waiting to see what kind of answer they’ll get. Whether it’s because Lily is happy to see them, dying to talk to someone, or pleasantly tipsy, she doesn’t know, but she surprises herself and decides to tell them the truth.

Read the rest at ao3

#Lily and James #Jily fic #Jily #Jily Fanfiction #harry potter #fanfiction #Lily just has a lot of feelings #Lily finally snaps on Miranda #first wizarding war

22 notes · View notes

halothenthehorns · 3 years

Text

TLTNL- THE SLUG CLUB

James took the book from Lily, their hands lingering for an extra second on each other. It didn't seem possible, but somehow every new year of their sons school added an extra layer of worry, and this one was no better. With only more worrisome details for whatever the Death Eaters were planning, the parents terror could only grow when Harry would figure it out.

For now though, they could at least hope the rest of his stay at the Burrow and his soon train ride held no excitement, so James still continued with high spirits.

Harry spent a lot of the last week of the holidays pondering the meaning of Malfoy's behavior in Knockturn Alley. What disturbed him most was the satisfied look on Malfoy's face as he had left the shop. Nothing that made Malfoy look that happy could be good news.

"I entirely agree," Sirius couldn't help but dejectedly say, there wasn't much of a funny spin he could put on that.

To his slight annoyance, however, neither Ron nor Hermione seemed quite as curious about Malfoy's activities as he was;

"They what?" They all demanded, sure they'd heard wrong.

"Let him finish," Harry soothed, though the look on his face showed it wasn't going to end much better.

or at least, they seemed to get bored of discussing it after a few days.

"It is now a good thing Molly never let them join the Order," Remus rolled his eyes. "After the third meeting they'd probably stop attending."

"Be fair, they don't know what we know, which is there is something going on," Lily halfheartedly defended. "They just know that for the past five years Malfoy's been a rotten child, they've just witnessed one of his acts this time."

"They should have believed me when I said it was something more, how else was I supposed to figure out what Malfoy was up to if I couldn't bounce ideas off of them," Harry huffed.

Hermione impatiently agreed as much when he brought it up again. She was sitting on the windowsill in Fred and George's room with her feet up on one of the cardboard boxes and had only grudgingly looked up from her new copy of Advanced Rune Translation.

"I'm still amazed you can accomplish that at all," James smirked.

"Why would she even bring that in there and expect to get any work done?" Sirius agreed.

Reminding there could be any number of things they just didn't know about.

Ron suggested Malfoy could have broken his Hand of Glory.*

"When on Earth did Malfoy have that?" Sirius demanded, clearly thinking he'd missed something.

"I told Ron Malfoy took an interest to it the first time I was in there, maybe Ron thought I meant his dad did buy it," Harry offered, though they'd never actually seen him use it in school.

Harry repeated Malfoy's instructions of keeping â€˜that one' safe, making it seem Malfoy had a broken set of something. When neither of his friends responded to him again pointing this out, Harry insisted with his dad in Azkaban, Malfoy would want revenge.

"I can't see even Borgin and Burkes having anything to help with that though," Remus disagreed. "Revenge against who? Azkaban? The Ministry? You?"

"I would have said the first seemed the most likely, what with the 'it's never been done before' bit Narcissa offered, but just last year there were massive breakouts, so that doesn't seem the problem," Sirius sighed.

"Voldemort's gotten others into Hogwarts if he was the target, and Malfoy's also a student, so that shouldn't be it either," Lily agreed while trying not to bite at her lip.

"And I can not for the life of me imagine what a sixteen year old could do against the Ministry of Magic, even they're not that incompetent," James sighed.

"You're missing the part where this was originally Voldemort's idea," Harry insisted as he felt sure they were missing the mark on all accounts.

"Yet Malfoy's clearly pleased to go along with whatever it is, not just following orders, so it must be something he'd be for as well. Revenge is the best we've got to go on as far as motive," Lily patiently reminded.

Harry couldn't help smiling at them, they'd already offered more for his idea than his two friends, and it felt nice to not be so dismissed.

Ron was baffled what Malfoy could do about any revenge, and Harry agreed in frustration he didn't know, he was clearly up to something serious.

Sirius look muddled, like he wasn't sure what the response he was supposed to give for that was. His preferred joke was most certainly in poor taste, but it would be crass of him not to do it at this point!

Then he saw Harry look to him, almost genuinely concerned at even the hint of a pause, so Sirius finished as if there hadn't been one, "I wish I could still help out with this pup."

Lily gave the obligatory groan and Remus made to flick him in the ear, but all of them had an almost relieved look about them. At least they didn't look like they were counting down how many times he had left to do that.

His father was a Death Eater and-

Harry broke off, his eyes fixed on the window behind Hermione, his mouth open. A startling thought had just occurred to him.

"And that is?" James encouraged when Harry got a rather dissatisfied look on his face for this thought occurring to him now.

"That Malfoy's a Death Eater," he sighed.

There was a pitying little pause at the look of resignation on his face while Sirius nodded slowly.

"Guess you already put that together from what Narcissa said. I wish it was more surprising, or rare honestly, for that megalomaniac to be using anyone and everyone he wants." It was an even more depressing realization his own little brother was hardly older than this Malfoy kid when he'd suffered a similar fate, and likely as undo-able a task from what they'd heard. Sirius couldn't come up with another reason for why he'd desert his lifelong dream other than getting a job he couldn't handle.

Hermione anxiously demanded what was wrong, Ron nervously asking if it was his scar.

"Can't even blame him, after last year, that's the first thing I would have thought to," Remus sighed.

Harry slowly said aloud his idea Malfoy was a Death Eater.

"Actually, why would you have put that together considering you didn't know what we did," James couldn't help but jump at this leap.

"You guys just agreed it isn't so crazy," Harry said defensively at once.

"Because we know it's true," James agreed, "but you haven't exactly seen a lot of experience with it, or had it confirmed before that. You were just chatting about his dad and what he could be up to."

Harry just huffed and muttered, but waved his dad on, knowing he'd have to explain himself to his friends in a few moments already like he'd already been doing all summer.

There was a silence; then Ron erupted in laughter, reminding Harry he was only sixteen, You-Know-Who would have to be crazy.

"Age has never been a factor for him, it's what you can do for him," Sirius scowled.

Hermione agreed it was highly unlikely, where had he come up with that?

Harry reminded how in Madam Malkin's he hadn't let her touch his arm, he must have been branded with the Dark Mark.

"I, didn't even notice that," Lily's brows shot up in surprise, before she corrected, "though joining the Death Eaters doesn't automatically mean you got a Dark Mark. I'd think that was only for those he's marked as worthy, not of every single one."

Harry chose not to argue back since she didn't call him crazy outright for it.

Ron and Hermione looked at each other, clearly unconvinced, while Harry went on Malfoy had shown Borgin something, and it seriously scared Borgin.

"I could scare the pants off of him without pants!" Sirius agreed without the hesitation this time, but as his friends winced slightly and Harry gave a softer laugh than usual, he needlessly pointed out, "You keep invoking my name, I can tell how much you'd been missing me."

Harry grinned at him again, though he'd willingly admit he'd have liked to have his godfathers opinion on this at the time as much as anything.

It was the Mark, he knew it. He was showing Borgin who he was dealing with, they saw how seriously Borgin took him!

"He'd treat him nothing like me!" Sirius insisted while Remus flicked his ear again.

"To Harry's credit, Malfoy did show him something and he seemed much more likely to back down," James agreed with that logic, never not astounded how his son so easily put such things together they'd only given passing thoughts to.

Ron and Hermione exchanged another look.

Annoyed, but absolutely convinced he was right,

"It's not usual you've got to deal with that with Hermione and Ron," Remus sighed, already exhausted by this ongoing argument he could feel brewing.

Harry snatched up a pile of filthy Quidditch robes and left the room; Mrs. Weasley had been urging them for days not to leave their washing and packing until the last moment. On the landing he bumped into Ginny, who was returning to her room carrying a pile of freshly laundered clothes.

She warned him to be careful in the kitchen, there was an excess of Phlegm around.

"What a kind warning," Sirius couldn't help but snicker.

Harry smiled and thanked her, promising he wouldn't slip in it.

Sure enough, when he entered the kitchen it was to find Fleur sitting at the kitchen table, in full flow about plans for her wedding to Bill, while Mrs. Weasley kept watch over a pile of self-peeling sprouts, looking bad-tempered.

Fleur was explaining more wedding plans. They'd narrowed it down to two bridesmaids,

"Who were the other options besides the two sisters?" James wondered at that.

"Hopefully not past girlfriends of Bill's, that wouldn't do him any favors," Sirius smirked.

"Sirius, I'm advising you I don't care how far in advance, don't ever bring that up in your own wedding, it will get you cursed," Lily promised, wanting to smack him herself for the stupid suggestion no matter how much he was joking.

"Padfoot seems to have an unfortunate ability to attract violent women," James pleasantly noted.

"I imagine they were far less violent before they met him," Remus rolled his eyes. "Lily's the only exception I've met."

and their dresses would be pale gold, Ginny would look horrible in pink of course.

"Why?" Harry asked in confusion, thinking Ginny wouldn't look horrible in any color she chose.

"I'm not going to let Lily explain that, no one else cares," Sirius loudly said.

She scowled at him even more than before, honestly wanting to smack him herself now just for thinking she would, she hadn't really a care for that sort of thing.

"You're only proving Prongs' point," Remus happily reminded him while James ignored them anyways.

Mrs. Weasley loudly interrupted at the sight of Harry to explain they'd be getting Ministry cars to the train again tomorrow and Aurors at the station. Harry asked if it was Tonks again, to which Molly explained Arthur said she was already positioned somewhere else.

Fleur inserted Tonks had let herself go, while gazing into her own reflection in the back of a spoon.

"You really can't blame those girls, thinking her so vain, when every time she's been mentioned this summer she's talking about herself and doing that," Lily sighed.

Mrs. Weasley tartly cut in Harry should have himself ready, no one needed the usual last minute scramble.

Indeed, their departure the following morning was smoother than usual. The Ministry cars glided up to the front of the Burrow to find them waiting, trunks packed; Hermione's cat, Crookshanks, safely enclosed in his traveling basket; and Hedwig; Ron's owl, Pigwidgeon; and Ginny's new purple Pygmy Puff, Arnold, in cages.

"The Weasley's really do have the most interesting names for things," Remus cocked his head to the side, thinking Arnold the most mundane thing that could be given to a purple ball of fluff.

"Remember Ginny named Pig to, so as of now it's all her fault, and she seems to have no consistency on how wild they get," Sirius chuckled.

Fleur gave him a double kiss goodbye. Ron hurried forward, looking hopeful, but Ginny stuck out her foot and Ron fell, sprawling in the dust at Fleur's feet.

"What a lovely sister," James noted.

"Growing happier by the moment I never used to have one," Sirius agreed, making Lily flush in surprise and decide not to put extra salt on his plate at lunch, for now.

Furious, red-faced, and dirt-spattered, he hurried into the car without saying good-bye.

There was no cheerful Hagrid waiting for them at King's Cross Station. Instead, two grim-faced, bearded Aurors in dark Muggle suits moved forward the moment the cars stopped and, flanking the party, marched them into the station without speaking.

"There is such a thing as taking your job-" Remus cut himself off with a nasty look at Sirius, who looked disappointed his friend hadn't slipped up.

Mrs. Weasley, seemed a little flustered by this austere efficiency.

"I can't really blame her, it just sounds odd to need security for the short walk it is onto the platform," James agreed.

An Auror even tried to guide Harry straight through the barrier by his arm before Harry snapped he could walk on his own as he jerked his arm away.

"So ungrateful for someone trying to hold your hand," Sirius nodded.

He pushed his trolley directly at the solid barrier, ignoring his silent companion, and found himself, a second later, standing on platform nine and three-quarters, where the scarlet Hogwarts Express stood belching steam over the crowd.

Harry really couldn't help a nostalgic smile as that image lingered in his mind, and he really did wonder for a moment why he'd feel like it would be so long before he saw it again. He still had another school year left of course to be missing such a thing.

Hermione and the Weasleys joined him within seconds. Without waiting to consult his grim-faced Auror, Harry motioned to Ron and Hermione to follow him up the platform, looking for an empty compartment. Hermione reminded they couldn't they had to go check in as Prefects.

Harry admitted he'd forgotten.

"Poor thing is probably going to forget that next year as well, it is odd to get used to," Sirius sighed, it had always thrown him off when Moony did it, and then Prongs as well in their last year.

Mrs. Weasley was hugging everyone goodbye, before Harry made the impulse decision to ask Mr. Weasley for a quick word.

"Well this is bringing back an unpleasant flashback," James grumbled, but tried to ignore Sirius shifting in unease as well for the reminder of when this had last happened.

Mr. Weasley, who looked slightly surprised, followed Harry out of earshot of the others nevertheless.

Harry had thought it through carefully and come to the conclusion that, if he was to tell anyone, Mr. Weasley was the right person; firstly, because he worked at the Ministry and was therefore in the best position to make further investigations, and secondly, because he thought that there was not too much risk of Mr. Weasley exploding with anger.

"Well you're certainly not wrong on either account," Sirius burst out with surprised laughter.

James couldn't get the same enthusiasm for realizing what Harry was going to tell him, it was too depressing to once again here his son turning to someone else who should have been him.

He could see Mrs. Weasley and the grim-faced Auror casting the pair of them suspicious looks as they moved away.

Mr. Weasley interrupted Harry's starting by asking if he was finally going to learn where they'd really disappeared to when they were supposed to be in the back of the shop.

"I'm not really surprised they didn't fall for that," Sirius agreed.

Harry was surprised he knew otherwise,

"I'm more shocked than anything Harry thought they did," Remus snorted.

but Arthur interrupted to remind he was the same man who had raised Fred and George.

"He's got you there," James agreed.

Harry admitted to that, and Arthur said he was ready to hear the worst.

"Oh don't say that, he'll actually be getting it," Lily sighed.

Harry again tried to explain they'd seen Malfoy and decided to follow him under the Cloak- Arthur again interrupted to ask if there had been an actual reason, or just a whim?

"Honestly the second," Sirius pointed out while Harry tried to scowl at him without admitting he was right.

Harry insisted he'd done so because he thought Malfoy was up to something, and then explained the rest. Arthur took it in silence, contemplated for a moment, before saying slowly he doubted You-Know-Who would allow a sixteen year old-

"I'm almost glad that's not as common place in their time," Lily blinked in surprise for that response from him.

"Voldemort also doesn't have the swollen ranks he does in this time," James reminded pityingly. "Now he's got massive followers every which way, from all we've seen though, he really may not have more than his circle. I can almost see where Arthur's coming from."

Harry at least felt better hearing that explained, but it didn't make him feel better everyone kept calling this such a crazy idea when he knew he was right.

Harry shot back no one really knew what Voldemort would do.

Mr. Weasley slowly explained that when Lucius had been arrested, his mansion had been searched, and the Malfoys had been stripped of everything that could be dangerous.

Harry insisted they must have missed something, and Arthur agreed in a tone that implied he was only humoring Harry now.

Harry's scowl increased, this was as maddening as last year! Hadn't he proved himself more than a paranoid child! He should be taken seriously about this!

"Relax Harry," James tried to sooth with a look Harry couldn't quite identify with. "You've come to him with a hunch, and he's at least listening to you. Come back again with a bit more proof, which I know you'll get during your year, and I know you'll get something done."

Harry did relax just a bit, hoping he was right, and missing his dad's smile increasing.

There was a whistle behind them; nearly everyone had boarded the train and the doors were closing.

Harry hurried to the train as it began chugging along, while Mrs. Weasley called after them he was coming to their house for Christmas, the train began picking up speed as she continued, moving along with it, for them all to be good, the train was rounding the bend now as she nearly jogged to keep up with her final warning to stay safe!

Sirius honestly wanted to laugh at the woman again, but the look on Lily's face promised he wouldn't be allowed without getting an earful. She was grateful someone was still looking after her boy.

Harry waved until the train had turned a corner and Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were lost to view, then turned to see where the others had got to. He supposed Ron and Hermione were cloistered in the prefects' carriage, but Ginny was a little way along the corridor, chatting to some friends. He made his way toward her, dragging his trunk.

People stared shamelessly as he approached. They even pressed their faces against the windows of their compartments to get a look at him.

"Suppose you should be grateful they're not all following you around like Collin was yet," Remus sighed.

He had expected an upswing in the amount of gaping and gawping he would have to endure this term after all the "Chosen One" rumors in the Daily Prophet, but he did not enjoy the sensation of standing in a very bright spotlight. He tapped Ginny on the shoulder, asking if she'd like to find a compartment.

She returned she had to find Dean, but she'd see him later.

"Ouch, getting dismissed all over the place this year," James winced.

"What a sight to behold, little Ginny dismissing the Great Chosen One," Sirius agreed.

Harry found their teasing only mildly less annoying than the staring and chose to ignore them just as well.

He felt a strange twinge of annoyance as she walked away, her long red hair dancing behind her; he had become so used to her presence over the summer that he had almost forgotten that Ginny did not hang around with him, Ron, and Hermione while at school.

"Was she really around that much? You hardly mentioned her more than normal," Lily asked in surprise.

Harry chose not to answer, still in a clear bad mood for the gawkers it seemed.

Then he blinked and looked around: He was surrounded by mesmerized girls until a voice behind him called for his attention and Harry turned in relife to find Neville,

Sirius inhaled deeply, and this time Remus swooped in and jammed his finger into Sirius' ear, causing him to yelp in protest but thankfully not again be able to shout about one of Harry's friends showing up. Sirius rubbed at his ear and called Moony a killjoy, who decided he'd rather be that than Sirius, killer of ears.

with Luna right behind him.

"Luna's back," Sirius said pointedly to Remus, though thankfully he kept it at a decent volume, his hand still protectively on his ear.

"Thank you Sirius, that's quite interesting to know," Remus gently pandered now that he wasn't shouting it.

Harry greeted them gratefully, asking how their summer had gone. She replied very well, already clutching a copy of the Quibbler which promised a free pair of Spectrespecs inside. Harry asked their magazine was still going well, having a fondness for it after giving an interview last year.

"To Rita Skeeter though, we just can't forget that part," James wrinkled his nose at the reminder.

"Worth it," Harry shrugged, it had done him much more good than harm for once.

Luna happily agreed circulation was still up.

Harry offered they should go find seats, and the three of them set off along the train through hordes of silently staring students. At last they found an empty compartment, and Harry hurried inside gratefully.

Neville told they were even being stared at, because they'd been with him.

"Congratulations, they're getting what Ron always wanted," Lily rolled her eyes.

"Hope they enjoy it," Harry sighed.

Harry reminded they were staring because they'd also been at the Ministry, the Daily Prophet had made that clear.

Neville had thought his Gran would be mad about that publicity, but she'd been really pleased, saying at long lost he was living up to his dad.

All five of them made agitated faces at that, honestly wishing Neville would stop being compared to his parents as much as Harry wished the same of late.

She'd already bought him a new wand. He pulled it out and showed it to Harry, proclaiming it as Cherry and unicorn, one of the last Ollivander had sold, as he'd vanished the next day.

"Blimey, Neville's already getting some better luck for his life," Remus winced for the reminder.

Then he shouted for Trevor to get back here.

"Glad to know at least that toad won't let a joke die," Sirius chuckled.

And he dived under the seat to retrieve his toad as it made one of its frequent bids for freedom.

Luna asked, while detaching a pair of psychedelic spectacles from the middle of The Quibbler, if the D. A. meetings would continue this year.

"That's actually a good question I hadn't thought of," Lily agreed at once.

"Won't need to will we, unless we actually manage to get another teacher like Umbridge who refuses to teach us," Harry shrugged, very much hoping his luck wasn't that awful.

"Well yes, but who says you can't still use it to help along students. The classes in general are still majorly behind on most basic curses, as was apparent by Fred and George," Remus reminded.

"Plus study groups actually make doing work more bearable," James agreed.

Harry was a bit surprised they were all so encouraging of an idea that hadn't even crossed his mind, and honestly regret just a bit not continuing with it. Though he wasn't sure how it would have even been possible, considering his Quidditch practices and upcoming lessons with Dumbledore would honestly make his schedule as hectic as last year.

Neville thumped his head under the seat, coming out with a bit of fluff in place with disappointment on his face, saying he'd liked the D. A. He'd learned loads.

Luna serenely agreed it had been like having friends.

"Well that was depressing," Sirius said with chipper what everyone was thinking.

"Surely she has friends," Lily tried at once to say positively as if to the girl herself. "She's been known to hang around with Ginny."

"She said friends plural though, making me wonder how many others besides Ginny," Remus muttered.

This was one of those uncomfortable things Luna often said and which made Harry feel a squirming mixture of pity and embarrassment.

"She's rather good at that, I should be taking notes," James agreed.

Before he could respond, however, there was a disturbance outside their compartment door; a group of fourth-year girls was whispering and giggling together on the other side of the glass, all telling each other to go ask him!

One of them, a bold-looking girl with large dark eyes, a prominent chin, and long black hair pushed her way through the door. She introduced herself as Romilda Vane, and offered he

could come sit with them! She finished in a stage whisper, her eyes on Neville's bum again poking out of the seats and Luna in her psychedelic glasses.

"Romilda clearly has no sense of fun at all, not immediately asking what was going on in there," Sirius scoffed.

"Why would they think Harry would want to sit with them anyways," James scowled. "Who wants to sits with brats two years below them."

Lily honestly wanted to tell James he was being a brat by saying that, but she couldn't disagree with him either.

Harry coldly returned those were his friends, and after an awkward pause, she said okay and left.

"Hopefully that taught her right quick about opening her mouth," Remus rolled his eyes. Confidence could be as much a hindrance if not used correctly, which he'd had seven years to watch.

Luna once again displayed her knack of embarrassing honesty by stating people expected him to have cooler friends.

"Who says they're not cool, I'd hang out with them," Sirius scoffed.

"Harry did," James reminded with a chuckle, thinking this wasn't far off from how his last year had started. If Neville's plant spit up on everyone again and Cho came around it would get eerie.

"I learned my lesson," Harry said smoothly.

Harry at once said they were cool! They hadn't been at the Ministry with him.

Luna beamed at him, telling that was very nice to say, before going to her magazine.

Neville quietly reminded they hadn't faced him though, coming back out with his toad in hand. His Gran kept going on about how that Harry Potter had more backbone than all the Ministry of Magic put together.

"Well that's true," James puffed up his chest with pride.

She'd give anything to have Harry as a grandson.

Sirius made a deep snarling noise, well to aware of the feeling your parent wished to replace you, and wouldn't wish that on anyone else! His noise of disgust was echoed throughout the room, Lily couldn't keep going for a moment she was so depressed anyone could think that about themselves!

Harry laughed uncomfortably and changed the subject to OWL results as soon as he could.

James made a little noise of sympathy for Harry though, he had heard Sirius say much the same and had just as quickly himself diverted the topic, there just wasn't much you could say to that.

While Neville recited his grades and wondered aloud whether he would be allowed to take a Transfiguration NEWT, with only an "Acceptable,"

"Highly doubt it," Remus frowned, mind still lingering on other things.

"Did he at once tell you that? Surely he mentioned his better grades," Lily tried to cajole out something positive of that.

Harry distractedly said no, but he hadn't been listening in great detail to what Neville had been saying either.

Harry watched him without really listening.

Neville's childhood had been blighted by Voldemort just as much as Harry's had, but Neville had no idea how close he had come to having Harry's destiny.

None of them had forgotten this, but they'd been happily side stepping that in the hopes it wouldn't bog Harry down. Clearly it was going to now though.

The prophecy could have referred to either of them, yet, for his own inscrutable reasons, Voldemort had chosen to believe that Harry was the one meant.

Had Voldemort chosen Neville, it would be Neville sitting opposite Harry bearing the lightning-shaped scar and the weight of the prophecy. ... Or would it? Would Neville's mother have died to save him, as Lily had died for Harry? Surely she would. . . . But what if she had been unable to stand between her son and Voldemort? Would there then have been no "Chosen One" at all? An empty seat where Neville now sat and a scarless Harry who would have been kissed goodbye by his own mother, not Ron's?

Lily was near tears by the end of this, and James wasn't feeling much better. Their conviction to change this path Harry had been on suddenly put a cold spin on in it like they'd never have believed. What if they did stop this from happening to their family? Could they still guarantee the same for Neville, put this fate on someone else? Were they condemning another child to this life just to save theirs?

James refused to let himself linger on that, he'd find a way to save his family, Neville, the whole bloody world if he had to! He wasn't going to let this happen again, and he wouldn't hear a thing about it otherwise!

Neville noticed Harry's distraction and asked what was wrong, and Luna inserted she thought there was a Wrackspurt going around.

"Didn't she already mention those?" James demanded with more force than the question called for.

"Not that I've heard, unless you're thinking of the Nargles that were never explained," Remus said lightly.

James hardly heard him any more than he'd realized he'd asked a question.

Then she explained Wrackspurts were invisible, they floated into your ears and made your brain go fuzzy.

"Who knew there was an actual reason for the way Sirius was," Lily halfheartedly poked fun. It really was impossible to get on with just twenty minutes without something depressing dragging them all down of late, even the thought of trying to preserve their own future was doing it now.

Sirius was so distracted he didn't even have a response for her.

She flapped her hands at thin air, as though beating off large invisible moths. Harry and Neville caught each other's eyes and hastily began to talk of Quidditch.

"Which Harry is Captain of!" James burst so loud it was as if he was actively trying to see how loud he could say it.

Harry managed a half-hearted laugh for him, and James kept listening feeling just a bit better he'd managed to shout about something good again.

The weather beyond the train windows was as patchy as it had been all summer; they passed through stretches of the chilling mist, then out into weak, clear sunlight. It was during one of the clear spells, when the sun was visible almost directly overhead, that Ron and Hermione entered the compartment at last.

After greeting them, Ron delivered the news that Malfoy wasn't doing prefect duty.

"He what!" Harry wasn't the only one to shout in surprise, but did keep going, "I didn't even know you could do that."

"I've only known one to," Remus frowned uneasily, "and she had Maledictus, though I don't know what kind. Could barely keep up in the corridors she was so sickly, she certainly didn't want the extra Prefect duties."

Harry had no clue what that was, though understood enough by that to understand it was a sickness you wouldn't want, so instead keep going with determination, "this is proof then! Malfoy is up to something! There's no way he'd give up that power otherwise," he finished with his fist in his hand to prove his point.

"Calm down Harry, nobody in here disagreed with you," Lily half scolded why he was being so adamant about this.

"Right, sorry," he muttered, backing down at once but that triumphant look lingered and James kept going despite his friends still muttering curiously if there could be something else going on.

Harry sat up straight, interested. It was not like Malfoy to pass up the chance to demonstrate his power as prefect, which he had happily abused all the previous year. Harry asked what Malfoy had done when he'd been seen, and Ron said the usual, before demonstrating a rude hand gesture. It wasn't like him, well that was, he did the hand gesture again,

"Was that really necessary, I'm sure we got that all on our own." Lily rolled her eyes.

"He's had his fingers threatened for months, let him enjoy his free range," Sirius chuckled while wagging his own.

but why wasn't he out there bullying first years again.

Harry agreed it was odd, his mind was racing. Didn't this look as though Malfoy had more important things on his mind than bullying younger students?

Hermione pointed out he'd probably preferred the Inquisitorial Squad, and Prefect seemed a bit tame in comparison.

"Not really that crazy," James agreed. "It's almost like he's been demoted after abusing so much power."

Harry looked offended, like he thought he was being dismissed, but forced himself not to snap at him. He was being crazy, they knew something was going on, he didn't need to go shouting at everyone like they were his friends trying to tell him otherwise.

Harry began to disagree before he could expound on his theory, the compartment door slid open again and a breathless third-year girl stepped inside.

"What were you going to say?" Sirius asked.

"Exactly that, I think he's got better things to do this year," Harry sighed, already feeling he had no care for what was fixing to happen and would much rather focus on what he'd been interrupted on. "I was still debating how much farther I was going to keep going though. I trust Neville and Luna of course, but wasn't sure if I was going to tell them what I saw on holiday yet."

"I don't see why not, they know about as much as you do on Malfoy's front, and since you're own friends are driving you nuts, I'm sure at least Luna would have indulged hearing you talk about it," James pointed out.

Harry nodded his agreement, now looking even more agitated by whatever this interruption was.

She was holding out two scrolls of parchment tied with violet ribbon for Neville and Harry. Perplexed, they both took the scroll addressed to each of them and the girl stumbled back out of the compartment.

Ron asked what it was, and Harry explained it as an invitation, not inserting, from Slughorn.

Neville nervously asked why he was invited, as if expecting detention.

"Neville's clearly a name in this future, if to a lesser degree than Harry without all the press. I'm sure Slughorn's heard of his parents anyways," Lily said without surprise.

"Why was Slughorn on the train though?" Harry demanded, he'd been right to be annoyed by this, it seemed pointless already.

"He does it every few years or so, scope out new students and invite the older ones in early, a way to reconnect over the summer before school even kicks in," Lily shrugged.

Harry said no idea, which was not entirely true, though he had no proof yet that his hunch was correct.

"Hasn't seemed to stop you yet," Sirius chucked.

He took the opportunity to ask Neville to come with him under the Cloak, so they could spy on the Slytherin Compartment on the way there.

"I completely forgot now Luna and Neville know about your cloak, as well as Ginny if she didn't before," James blinked in surprise.

"Least Neville's getting a new experience out of this," Sirius grinned.

This idea, however, came to nothing: The corridors, which were packed with people on the lookout for the lunch trolley, were impossible to negotiate while wearing the cloak. Harry stowed it regretfully back in his bag, reflecting that it would have been nice to wear it just to avoid all the staring, which seemed to have increased in intensity even since he had last walked down the train. Every now and then, students would hurtle out of their compartments to get a better look at him. The exception was Cho Chang, who darted into her compartment when she saw Harry coming.

"No love loss there eh?" James couldn't help but tease.

Harry didn't even change colors for this, just shrugged while his mind lingered on other things.

As Harry passed the window, he saw her deep in determined conversation with her friend Marietta, who was wearing a very thick layer of makeup that did not entirely obscure the odd formation of pimples still etched across her face.

Lily couldn't help but frown severely for that. "Honestly, was Hermione's curse permanent? That's well going beyond what the girl deserved, making the decision she did. Did she really ruin another girl's life with that?"

"I really don't think so, it was fading, slowly," Harry shrugged. "Certainly at the end of last year even that wouldn't have hidden it as well, so I'm positive given another month it'll be gone."

Lily still looked a bit tart, but couldn't hold it onto her forever so long as Hermione hadn't.

Smirking slightly, Harry pushed on.

When they reached compartment C, they saw at once that they were not Slughorn's only invitees, although judging by the enthusiasm of Slughorn's welcome, Harry was the most warmly anticipated.

Slughorn jumped right to his feet, his velvet-covered belly seemed to fill all the remaining space in the compartment. His shiny bald head and great silvery mustache gleamed as brightly in the sunlight as the golden buttons on his waistcoat.

His reaction to Neville was just as cordial if less bouncy.

They didn't need to ask how Harry felt about this, his unimpressed look spoke volumes. He'd no more cottoned onto all Slughorn could offer from Dumbledore's and their own explanations than decided he wanted to master potions.

Neville nodded, looking scared. At a gesture from Slughorn, they sat down opposite each other in the only two empty seats, which were nearest the door. Harry glanced around at their fellow guests. He recognized a Slytherin from their year, a tall black boy with high cheekbones and long, slanting eyes; there were also two seventh-year boys Harry did not know and, squashed in the corner beside Slughorn and looking as though she was not entirely sure how she had got there, Ginny.

"Ouch, how'd Ginny end up in there and not Ron?" Sirius asked.

"I've no idea, but she doesn't seem any more pleased with it than I was," Harry said with a bit of sympathy, wishing he could swap places with Slughorn to at least let Ginny breath a bit.

Slughorn began introducing everyone for those who needed them, starting with Blaise Zabini in their year, of Slytherin.

Zabini did not make any sign of recognition or greeting, nor did Harry or Neville: Gryffindor and Slytherin students loathed each other on principle.

Lily clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes while the boys grinned.

Then there was Cormac McLaggen, perhaps they'd crossed paths already.

Harry then imitated his mother, rolling his eyes heavily and not at all enjoying the sensation telling him he'd rather forget this one all over again.

McLaggen, a large, wiry-haired youth, raised a hand, and Harry and Neville nodded back at him.

That was Marcus Belby who was thin and nervous-looking, gave a strained smile while Slughorn finished they both knew this charming young lady.

Ginny grimaced at Harry and Neville from behind Slughorn's back.

"As welcome a greeting as Zambini's from that," Remus snickered

He had them all sit down and offered them food he'd brought along, the trolley's tendency to stock licorice wands wasn't good for a poor old mans digestive.

"Considering the man's favorite treat is Crystallized Pineapple, I wouldn't hold him to that," Lily said with the same old indulgence she'd used for seven years when speaking to Slughorn. She couldn't believe how much she was enjoying hearing about him again interacting with a new round of students, she felt like she could have been in there chatting along with the whole thing. It was all too easy to picture the man wagging his finger in reprove at her for giving that away already.

Belby accepted what looked like half a cold pheasant from Slughorn, who began asking him about his Uncle Damocles, who'd gained an Order of Merlin. Did he see much of him?

Unfortunately, Belby had just taken a large mouthful of pheasant; in his haste to answer Slughorn he swallowed too fast, turned purple, and began to choke.

Slughorn calmly vanished it with the spell Anapneo, pointing his wand at Belby, whose airway seemed to clear at once.

Belby gasped, his eyes streaming, not much of him.

Slughorn agreed he was a busy man, what with inventing the Wolfsbane Potion.

"Well this conversation just got a lot more interesting," James muttered while Remus shifted around, not sure how to feel about that being brought up again. Considering it had last been spoken of ruining Sirius' life because of him, not ecstatic, but if he could actually find a way to make that a routine part of his life...

Belby, seemed afraid to take another bite of pheasant until he was sure that Slughorn had finished with him and halfheartedly agreed.

"Frightening the kid into not eating, this man really knows how to push buttons," Sirius huffed.

He admitted his didn't get on with his uncle very well, so he really didn't see him at all.

His voice trailed away as Slughorn gave him a cold smile and turned to McLaggen instead.

"And that's Belby gone from the group," James mimed pointing his wand at nothing and blowing it away.

"Because he doesn't keep in contact with an Uncle? He might still be really good at something even so," Harry defended.

"Doesn't have many proper connections though, to get him many places," Lily reminded. "Or he's not yet realized he should be mentioning those."

Slughorn turned towards Cormac then, saying he knew he spent time with his Uncle Tiberius because he'd seen a picture of the two hunting nogtails on his desk in Norfolk.

"Fascinating creatures, I think they should be studied much more than they're given the chance," Remus began babbling at once with a sad little frown that hunting them was such a popular sport.

"You can only run one off with a pure white hound, and they're known to curse the farm they locate to by suckling on a mother pig, but I'd love to see more studies of the extent-"

"Just remember if you bring one of those home, I can't run it off," Sirius rolled his eyes before waving James on while Remus continued muttering to himself.

McLaggen at once agreed that had been great fun, Bertie Higgs and Rufus Scrimgeour had come along as well, before he'd become Minister of course.

Slughorn beamed he knew them as well.

"I think McLaggen just became his new poster child," James scrunched up his face at this kid somehow managing all that, though trying hard not to yet judge him as pompous as the rest of the Slug Club ended up being. Lily of course never went the same way, so he was trying to be mature here.

now offering around a small tray of pies; somehow, Belby was missed out.

Harry huffed and muttered he wished he'd noticed that before he'd swallowed his own.

It was as Harry had suspected. Everyone here seemed to have been invited because they were connected to somebody well-known or influential, except Ginny.

"I'd consider Arthur well-known and influential from what little we've been able to hear about his life," Lily rolled her eyes.

"Maybe Slughorn recognizes he made a mistake missing him and won't do it again with the first female Weasley in seven generations," Remus shrugged.

Zabini, who was interrogated after McLaggen, turned out to have a famously beautiful witch for a mother (from what Harry could make out, she had been married seven times, each of her husbands dying mysteriously and leaving her mounds of gold).

"Right," Sirius grumbled while making a face.

It was Neville's turn next: This was a very uncomfortable ten minutes, for Neville's parents, well-known Aurors, had been tortured into insanity by Bellatrix Lestrange and a couple of Death Eater cronies. At the end of Neville's interview, Harry had the impression that Slughorn was reserving judgment on Neville, yet to see whether he had any of his parents' flair.

All five of them were shifting uncomfortably by the end of this, all knowing Neville didn't need anyone's validation to know how good he was without his parents constantly being brought up, and wished the world would realize that same as Harry.

Slughorn shifted towards Harry last with the air of a compere introducing his star act. He contemplated Harry for a moment as though he was a particularly large and succulent piece of pheasant,

"Lovely mental image," James' scowl increased, he could still distaste Slughorn even while cheering in the background better this than hearing Snape again.

and began with his title of him being the Chosen One.

Harry said nothing. Belby, McLaggen, and Zabini were all staring at him.

When Harry didn't respond Slughorn kept going, saying there had been rumors for years about him, that terrible night, word already was out how extraordinary he was.

Zabini gave a tiny little cough that was clearly supposed to indicate amused skepticism.

"I don't need a Slytherin in the conversation to know when I've heard such loaded dung thank you!" Sirius snapped.

Harry tried for an awkward laugh that couldn't get through, no matter how many times this was mentioned it just wasn't easy to hear.

An angry voice burst out from behind Slughorn, telling Zabini he was so talented with his posing!

Slughorn chuckled comfortably, looking around at Ginny, who was glaring at Zabini around Slughorn's great belly.

"Ginny really is just growing better with every mention," Sirius smirked, cackles smoothing at once at least someone in there would keep them on their toes.

He warned Blaise should be careful, he'd caught this young lady performing quite the Bat-Bogey hex. She wasn't to be crossed.

"Concurred," James needlessly agreed while Harry smirked without surprise.

Zabini merely looked contemptuous.

Slughorn went right back to Harry, open endedly saying the Prophet had been saying a lot, though it was known to make a few mistakes,

"Tiny, minuscule ones, wouldn't even notice them, why bother," Remus snipped for this being so dismissed.

but there was no doubt he'd been in the thick of it all with the disturbance at the Ministry.

Harry, who could not see any way out of this without flatly lying, nodded but still said nothing. Slughorn beamed at him, calling him modest, but there was no need to downplay the sensational stories, of a fabled prophecy even-

Neville interrupted to say that had been smashed, no one had heard it.

"Thank Merlin for Neville," Lily sighed in relief, she'd hug him right now for getting Harry out of that no matter how unentinally.

Ginny agreed at once, the Prophet was just making up things as usual with that Chosen One nonsense.

Slughorn seemed undeterred, looking to both of them with just as much interest they'd been there to. Both of them sat clam-like before his encouraging smile.

"Not going to get a great story out of this one," Sirius sneered.

"Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll forget our invitation along with Belby's," Harry said dully without any real hope.

Finally he agreed how things could get away from people, why Gweong Jones, of the Holyhead Harpies, had just been telling him-

Harry's good mood swung back at once though, for no reason he could tell, he could just imagine for some reason at least Ginny got a kick out of that conversation.

He meandered off into a long-winded reminiscence, but Harry had the distinct impression that Slughorn had not finished with him, and that he had not been convinced by Neville and Ginny.

"A crying shame, I know I'm done with having him around," Sirius mocked with a smirk at Harry.

"Thank's Sirius, it's about time," Harry smiled.

The afternoon wore on with more anecdotes about illustrious wizards Slughorn had taught, all of whom had been delighted to join what he called the "Slug Club" at Hogwarts.

"Really couldn't have picked a worse name," Remus crinkled up his nose.

"Don't know what you're talking about, it speaks volumes about it's members already, certainly the head fat slimy git," James happily tuned Lily in to many of their jokes growing up with this. She merely rolled her eyes and ignored them.

Harry could not wait to leave, but couldn't see how to do so politely.

"I'm starting to regret the fact you even have manners sometimes," Sirius sighed, he knew he'd walked out of there long before this part with Prongs right behind him.

Finally the train emerged from yet another long misty stretch into a red sunset, and Slughorn looked around, blinking in the twilight. Amazed it was sunset, he set them all free, though gave McLaggen in particular the invite to come see him soon for a book on nogtails he'd mentioned. Everyone else except Belby were departed by name.

As he pushed past Harry into the darkening corridor, Zabini shot him a filthy look that Harry returned with interest. He, Ginny, and Neville followed Zabini back along the train.

Neville sighed gratefully that was over, what a strange man.

Harry agreed while asking Ginny how she'd wound up in there.

Ginny shrugged he'd seen her hex Zacharias Smith.

All of them whooped with further laughter, that story just got ten times better.

They remembered that idiot Hufflepuff from the D. A.

"Hard to forget someone with a nose up his own arse," Sirius agreed.

He'd kept on and on asking about what happened at the Ministry and in the end he annoyed her so much she hexed him.

"Perfectly reasonable," James agreed.

When Slughorn came in she'd thought she was going to get detention, but he just thought it was a really good hex and invited her to lunch! Mad, eh?

"Best reason he's ever invited anyone to those things!" Remus disagreed.

Harry loudly said it was better than being invited along because of a famous mother, his eyes still on Zabini's back.

"I'm glad you agree Harry," Sirius said with such enthusiasm he didn't even take his crack at pointing out the two had essentially said the same thing.

Then he stopped, an idea occurring to him, a reckless but potentially wonderful idea...

"You seem to get those a lot," Lily sighed.

"I blame you," James happily told his wife. "Whenever I got them, a corridor just got filled with all the suits of armor in the castle. Whenever you got them, you put yourself in the hospital wing for a potion experiment, so it's really all you he gets it from."

"I resent that," she halfheartedly defended, "I never went about spying on anyone for fun, that was far more up your alley!"

"Fine then, he gets it from both of you being insane," Sirius happily inserted. James seemed satisfied enough to go onto the actual idea while Lily made a face at him.

In a minute's time, Zabini was going to reenter the Slytherin sixth-year compartment and Malfoy would be sitting there,

"Why on Earth would you think that?" Remus blinked in surprise. "Does he hang around with Malfoy often? You well know the students don't get their own compartments by grade and house."

"I saw them all in there all the other years, they tended to band together," Harry defended. "Sorry I've never mentioned it before."*

thinking himself unheard by anybody except fellow Slytherins... If Harry could only enter, unseen, behind him, what might he not see or hear?

"Them all congratulating themselves for being part of the an elite human species. Idiots." Sirius told Harry in disbelief.

"Or something like what Malfoy's up to," Harry said pointedly.

"Narcissa made it clear this was top secret information, Bellatrix was surprised when Snape knew," Lily reminded. "So Malfoy's not likely to be blabbing it around."

"I didn't know that at the time," Harry reminded. "I just wanted proof of what he was doing."

"You might get something then, you are fairly good at picking up on details," James went on curiously.

True, there was little of the journey left, Hogsmeade Station had to be less than half an hour away, judging by the wildness of the scenery flashing by the windows, but nobody else seemed prepared to take Harry's suspicions seriously,

Sirius at once insisted, "I'm telling you, I'd totally believe you!"

"I know Sirius," Harry said quietly, trying to force a laugh again, but now all the more determined he could pull off something he was sure the Marauders would approve of, no matter how much they thought it a goofy idea at the beginning.

so it was down to him to prove it.

Quickly telling the other two he'd catch up later, he slipped on the Cloak and hurried away before either could ask why. Darting after Zabini as quietly as possible, though the rattling of the train made such caution almost pointless, the corridors were almost completely empty now. Nearly everyone had returned to their carriages to change into their school robes and pack up their possessions. Though he was as close as he could get to Zabini without touching him, Harry was not quick enough to slip into the compartment when Zabini opened the door. Zabini was already sliding it shut when Harry hastily stuck out his foot to prevent it closing.

He angrily began smashing the door repeatedly on Harry's foot.

Harry let out a hiss of breath in remembered pain, shifting his foot uncomfortably, and ignoring the almost pitying look of those around him. He didn't want to hear what better idea they would have come up with to avoid that happening, but Sirius gave it anyways. "It's too bad you didn't bring an extendable ear with you, or even just manage to leave a crack in the door they wouldn't have noticed. Then you could have stayed on the outside and avoided this problem of actually slipping in."

"You lot just come up with the best strategies sitting around comfortably in here," Harry grumbled, though admittedly he was just as sure they would have come up with that on the spot, they'd trained their minds to think up such on the spot lies and solutions, as they so constantly reminded him.

Harry seized the door and pushed it open, hard; Zabini, still clinging on to the handle, toppled over sideways into Gregory Goyle's lap, and in the ensuing ruckus, Harry darted into the compartment, leapt onto Zabini's temporarily empty seat, and hoisted himself up into the luggage rack. It was fortunate that Goyle and Zabini were snarling at each other, drawing all eyes onto them, for Harry was quite sure his feet and ankles had been revealed as the cloak had flapped around them; indeed, for one horrible moment he thought he saw Malfoy's eyes follow his trainer as it whipped upward out of sight. But then Goyle slammed the door shut and flung Zabini off him; Zabini collapsed into his own seat looking ruffled, Vincent Crabbe returned to his comic, and Malfoy, sniggering, lay back down across two seats with his head in Pansy Parkinsons lap.

"That right there was almost worth the price you going in," Sirius laughed heartily, imaging all those dumbfounded expressions for this happening.

"I'm now regretting not pulling more stunts on the train like doors randomly opening, would have been a kick," James agreed.

"Best we didn't, wouldn't want the trolley lady giving us hell if she caught us," Remus pointed out. "She might have withheld snacks from us," he finished with a horrified look.

"I wouldn't put it past her to tell McGonagall though, so I guess it's best," Sirius sighed.

Harry lay curled uncomfortably under the cloak to ensure that every inch of him remained hidden, and watched Pansy stroke the sleek blond hair off Malfoy's forehead, smirking as she did so, as though anyone would have loved to have been in her place.

Lily in particular had a crude look on her face, that sounded like a punishment, pampering such a toerag.

The lanterns swinging from the carriage ceiling cast a bright light over the scene: Harry could read every word of Crabbe's comic directly below him.

Malfoy casually asked of Zabini what Slughorn had wanted, and while still glowering at Goyle he answered their new teacher was just trying to make up with well-connected people. Not that he'd managed to find many.

Malfoy was clearly displeased with that information, demanding who all had been invited?

"Not him? Oh, the horror!" Sirius managed a simpering impression of a teenage girl.

"The horrifying part is, he might have actually got one the year before his father lost so much favor," James crinkled his face in disgust.

McLaggen from Gryffindor, Zabini began listing off,

"I didn't realize he was a Gryffindor," Lily said in surprise.

"Shows how much Harry pays attention to even his fellow students in his house," James shrugged without much concern, though there hadn't yet been anything wrong with him, it was still annoying he'd been a prime example of everything wrong with that Club.

-Malfoy agreed he had a big Uncle in the Ministry-

Belby, from Ravenclaw, Zabini continued-

Pansy referred to him as a prat.

"Been liking him more and more lately on principle," Remus rolled his eyes.

Zabini finished with the last three Gryffindors.

Malfoy sat up very suddenly, knocking Pansy's hand aside, demanding Longbottom had been invited!

"I really am glad Neville outranks me on the scale of his outrage," Harry shook his head.

Zabini indifferently agreed he assumed so, since he'd been there.

Malfoy demanded what about Longbottom had Slughorn interested?

Zabini shrugged.

Malfoy went on to sneer about Potter, that was obvious, him being the Chosen One.

Then Harry sighed without surprise that had come soon after. He'd have to be sure to mention to Neville he wasn't in fact the person Malfoy hated most though, perhaps he'd get lucky and Neville would put Malfoy in a dress and feathered hat for him next.

That Weasley girl though, what was so special about her?

Pansy pointed out a lot of boys liked her, obviously watching Malfoy for a reaction.

Harry felt his blood start boiling at once at the idea, that was ridiculous! Of course Ginny was good looking, but surely Pansy was just being her usual pugnacious self!

Even Blaise had mentioned how good-looking she was, and they all knew how hard he was to please.

"Her exact sentiments as well I'm sure," Sirius rolled his eyes while Lily giggled a bit at the expression on her sons face, he looked far more agitated by this than she would have thought. He really must have grown fond of her over the summer.

Zabini coldly replied he wouldn't touch a filthy little blood traitor no matter what she looked like.

"Well at least he won't turn out like his mother," Remus snarked.

Pansy looked pleased. Malfoy sank back across her lap and allowed her to resume the stroking of his hair.

"Allowed her," James couldn't help but repeat that like speaking of curdled milk, it really was odd to think of Malfoy having a girlfriend.

Malfoy decided he didn't think much of Slughorn's taste in all, a shame, as his father had spoken of him highly in his old days. Slughorn probably just hadn't heard he was on the train-

Zabini cut in to point out Slughorn didn't seem to have an interest in Death Eaters, Nott hadn't gotten an invitation either.

"The one good thing that man has going for him," Sirius sighed.

"As if they need a way to make more connections," James agreed solemnly.

Malfoy looked angry, but forced out a singularly humorless laugh. Deciding who cared then, he was just some stupid teacher.

Remus went wide eyed in mock concern. "Of course! Now next time, try backtracking before you go out of your way to show how much you care, it'll come off much better."

"Why couldn't you be on the train again Moony," Sirius muttered.

Malfoy yawned ostentatiously before declaring he might not even be at Hogwarts next year, what did it matter.

"Considering I already had my fingers crossed he wouldn't be there this year, I refuse to get my hopes up again," James grumbled.

Pansy indignantly demanded what he meant by that, ceasing grooming Malfoy at once.

He just smirked when he told he'd soon be moving on to bigger and better things.

Harry perked up with interest in the conversation again, easily distracted from picturing Ginny releasing a few more Bat-Bogey Hexes in this compartment again. This was exactly what he'd been in there to hear!

Crouched in the luggage rack under his cloak, Harry's heart began to race. What would Ron and Hermione say about this?

"Probably dismiss it again," Harry pessimistically answered himself.

"They haven't dismissed anything love," Lily patiently corrected, clearly determined to stop him griping about this. "They just need more to go on than you. It's not that they don't believe you, they know you're right, they're just not as convinced it's as terrible as you seem to think."

Harry looked simmered at least, though not at all comforted he hadn't found himself as wrong as he found her right.

Crabbe and Goyle were gawping at Malfoy; apparently they had had no inkling of any plans to move on to bigger and better things. Even Zabini had allowed a look of curiosity to mar his haughty features.

"Praise Merlin!" Sirius mock raised a glass.

"I'm not thankful we don't have to hear about him more, as if we needed to hear of more smug expressions," Remus told him with an obvious look Sirius happily ignored.

Pansy resumed the slow stroking of Malfoy's hair, looking dumbfounded.

Clearly enjoying the attention, Malfoy continued his mother wanted him to complete his education, but did the Dark Lord care about N. E. W. T. grades? Of course not, it was about service and devotion that mattered when the time came.

"I really hate it when he's not wrong," James sighed.

"At least he's right in all the wrong ways," Sirius said with mock chipper.

Zabini scathingly returned Malfoy thought himself a fully qualified wizard to be doing anything like that.

Malfoy returned maybe the job he was going for didn't require a fully qualified adult.

James hadn't meant for his voice to go so quiet at the end, but he certainly hadn't been expecting Malfoy to bring up something so casually that had reduced his mother to tears and pleading.

Narcissa hadn't been joking when she'd said Malfoy was eager to be doing this. Maybe not anytime soon, but even then Malfoy was impling whatever this job was wasn't far off in the future.

Crabbe and Goyle were both sitting with their mouths open like gargoyles. Pansy was gazing down at Malfoy as though she had never seen anything so awe inspiring.

The moment was broken by Sirius snorting viciously and snapping, "here I thought she'd get that expression any time she tried to look in a mirror without breaking one!"

"Those poor deluded kids have no idea what they're hearing," Lily gave a resounded agreement.

Malfoy then chose to change the subject by pointing out he could see the castle in the distance, and got up to get his robes.

Harry was so busy staring at Malfoy, he did not notice Goyle reaching up for his trunk; as he swung it down, it hit Harry hard on the side of the head. He let out an involuntary gasp of pain, and Malfoy looked up at the luggage rack, frowning.

"Uhoh," all five of them muttered in unease. Harry was pinned with five against one, that wouldn't be a friendly fight even with his slight advantage of getting the first surprise attack in.

Harry was not afraid of Malfoy, but he still did not much like the idea of being discovered hiding under his Invisibility Cloak by a group of unfriendly Slytherins. Eyes still watering and head still throbbing, he drew his wand, careful not to disarrange the cloak, and waited, breath held. To his relief, Malfoy seemed to decide that he had imagined the noise; he pulled on his robes like the others, locked his trunk, and as the train slowed to a jerky crawl, fastened a thick new traveling cloak round his neck.

Harry could see the corridors filling up again and hoped that Hermione and Ron would take his things out onto the platform for him;

"I have no doubt they'll grab Hedwig for you," Lily distractedly agreed, wishing he'd get out of there already, but knowing he had to wait anyways for them all to leave. It was only a slight relief Malfoy hadn't noticed anything, but they were all acutely aware now how much trouble Harry could have potentially gotten himself into, and it wasn't much fun now.

he was stuck where he was until the compartment had quite emptied. At last, with a final lurch, the train came to a complete halt. Goyle threw the door open and muscled his way out into a crowd of second years, punching them aside;

"It's good to know they really are as terrible as the one they follow around," James rolled his eyes.

Crabbe and Zabini followed, but Malfoy had to wave Pansy out, saying he wanted to check on something.

Pansy left. Now Harry and Malfoy were alone in the compartment. People were filing past, descending onto the dark platform. Malfoy moved over to the compartment door and let down the blinds, so that people in the corridor beyond could not peer in. He then bent down over his trunk and opened it again.

The others perked up with interest at once, thinking that would have been worth it if they could know something so early of what Malfoy was up to, while Harry sank back uneasily in his seat, not at all getting a good feeling about this.

Harry peered down over the edge of the luggage rack, his heart pumping a little faster. What had Malfoy wanted to hide from Pansy? Was he about to see the mysterious broken object it was so important to mend?

He was not expecting the spell Petrificus Totalus to be shot right at him.**

Sirius was so surprised a spell had come out of James' mouth he accidentally drew his wand and shot a hex right back at him, causing the book to sail away along with his glasses.

"Really Sirius? Was that necessary?" Remus asked him as James scowled and summoned them back.

"You were just as thrown by that as I was!" Sirius defended.

"Least I didn't try to throw him across the room for it," Remus rolled his eyes.

Lily had yelped in surprise and tried to jump away from James, they'd all startled hard at a spell of all things coming out of his mouth!

"Bloody hell, I take it back!" James groaned as he gazed at that and back to his son, unphased by his best mate, eyes only on his kid. "Don't you ever do this again without backup!"

Harry just nodded with a resigned expression in place, he wasn't looking forward to the shock wearing off and all of them realizing he'd just been bested by Malfoy!

Without warning, Malfoy pointed his wand at Harry, who was instantly paralyzed. As though in slow motion, he toppled out of the luggage rack and fell, with an agonizing, floor-shaking crash, at Malfoy's feet, the Invisibility Cloak trapped beneath him, his whole body revealed with his legs still curled absurdly into the cramped kneeling position. He couldn't move a muscle; he could only gaze up at Malfoy, who smiled broadly.

Lily groaned and put her face in her hands, while the boys as well looked miserable for how this was going to go. Harry would be lucky to leave with tentacles on his face, for all the revenge Malfoy could give of the past few train rides.

Malfoy jubilantly declared he'd known as much, he'd heard Goyle's trunk hit him and seen his shoes when he'd come in.

"Pity he's really not as stupid as he looks," Sirius ground out, clutching his wand tight and wishing more every second he could retaliate in some way against someone who deserved it.

He continued Potter hadn't heard anything he cared about, but just for good measure, he stamped hard on Harry's face. Harry felt his nose break; blood spurted everywhere.***

Harry couldn't help but cover his nose now, his face still leary of what was to come next, while James hissed in outrage for an extra moment before noticing this part was almost done. He couldn't decide if that was a good thing or not.

That was for his father. Malfoy dragged the cloak out from under Harry's immobilized body and threw it over him, deciding no one would be looking for him until he was back in London. Guess he wouldn't be seeing him around.

And taking care to tread on Harry's fingers, Malfoy left the compartment.

Not, most definitely not!

"Of all the cowardly, black-hearted things to do!" Sirius snarled in outrage. "He's just going to leave you there!"

"I- what's going to happen to me!" Harry demanded in a panic. It had certainly been funny enough to do the same to Malfoy back at Nine and Three-Quarters the past two years, but not at Hogsmeade station!

"I, honestly have no clue, never tried," James groaned as he passed Sirius the book, no one looking forward to finding out.

HPHPHP

*The Hand of Glory and this are both guilty of just randomly inserting things that apparently should have been common knowledge. Zabini hangs around Malfoy though he's never been mentioned since his sorting, Malfoy just apparently has a hand of Glory though it was mentioned all of one time in book two Malfoy certainly didn't own. I feel like this was one of those moments JK just made up something on the spot and obviously by this point didn't have a chance to go back and put in, leaving me unable to help noticing both of these would very obviously be important later. One out of two was.

** I think JK meant Stupify, as that one paralyzes you the way you are, where as Petrificus Totalus has all your limbs snapping together before you do the same.

***Four people to do with that Prophecy have their noses broken. Voldemort doesn't have one, Neville got his broken last year in the Department of Mysteries, Dumbledore by Aberforth all those years ago, and now Harry here. If something had happened to Trelawney's nose, I would have thought it was some curse of Prophecy type thing for this to happen.

#Harry Potter #fanfiction #reading the books #HBP #HP #Marauders #Jilly #James Potter #Remus Lupin #Sirius Black #Lily Potter #The Life That Never Lived

2 notes · View notes