It was a simple truth. Money didn't come easily, not any more. As a young boy, his father had lulled him to sleep with grand descriptions of indulgent feasts, bright chandeliers, and balls held in their very own ballroom. But Malfoy Manor had long been stripped of many of its best furnishings. Scorpius had grown up in a mostly empty- albeit large- household. He'd often wondered why they had so many bedrooms for only three people, or four, when his aunt Daphne came to visit.
He was getting sick of staring at the breeze which played with the dingy curtains.
So he figured it wouldn't hurt anything (aside from his father's pride) to get a summer job. He could even use the money to help chip in for his textbooks and things for his last year at Hogwarts. His mate Gregory was working with a catering company and had agreed to talk to the boss.
A week after asking, Gregory came to visit Malfoy Manor, and he brought with him good news. "Manager says you can come. You just need black clothes and dress shoes," he informed Scorpius, before thanking Astoria for the pancakes.
Scorpius tried not to look too disappointed. He had the black clothes- Merlin knew, the boy liked to wear black- but dress shoes? His only shoes were the trainers his parents had gotten him for Christmas the year before. He knew they weren't going to be keen on buying him new ones.
After Gregory had left, Scorpius laid on his bed and read, when his mother knocked lightly on the door before entering.
"Scorpius?"
He sat up. "Yeah?"
Astoria came to sit beside him, revealing in her lap a pair of shiny, black leather shoes. "These are for you," she explained, adding, "They're your father's," at the sight of Scorpius's widened eyes. "Real dragon's leather, too. He wore them to our wedding."
Scorpius smiled as he brushed his fingers against the cool, smooth leather. "Mum… thank you."
"Just don't tell him I gave them to you." She gave his shoulders a squeeze and his hair a soft stroke before slipping out. While a woman of few words, she always knew just what to do to make him feel better.
Catering was boring as hell, but it paid pretty decently, and- best of all- it gave him an insight into the world of the other half. Their weddings, parties, and even funerals were obscenely decadent and elaborate. No matter what part of the room he was working, there was always the scent of somebody's perfume or cigar smoke.
After a while, he started recognizing faces from event to event. There was the lady who always wore absurdly large hats, and the little boy who couldn't seem to keep his shoes on.
And then there were the people he already knew.
Seeing the Potters and Weasleys, some of whom were still his classmates, at an event for the first time was the first time Scorpius felt embarrassed about his job. For the first time, he was ashamed to be working. He was ashamed that his trousers barely hit the tops of his ankles. He was ashamed he'd left his shirt wrinkled, even though it really wasn't his fault that he hadn't had time to charm it because by the time he got to the event, he was supposed to already be filling champagne flutes.
Seeing Lily Potter and Hugo Weasley wasn't too bad, because they were younger and they'd hardly even noticed each other during their years at Hogwarts. It was much harder for him to bear the idea of having Albus or Rose see him, instead of students and equals, but as opposites on a spectrum: he was the help, while they were the glamorous party-goers, society darlings; he was working while they were drinking and dancing and socializing; he was walking around with trays while they stood and occasionally plucked things off of them.
At the event where he first saw them, a wedding, Albus gave a cheerful hello, and Scorpius was happy that the interaction was better than he'd anticipated. As luck would have it (or perhaps would not have it, depending) it seemed Rose Weasley hadn't even noticed him at all. She even placed a lipstick-smudged napkin on his half-empty tray, and he sucked in his breath, waiting for her to turn and look and see him, only, she never turned to look, her eyes caught on something else.
In some ways, Scorpius was glad, because when he had glanced down at himself when he saw her walking towards him, he noticed he had this bright spot of yellow mustard on the front of his shirt. And then he looked at her, as she was still staring at some faraway thing, and he again felt shame, because she was so very, very pretty, with her hair all done up, and wearing a floaty navy dress that he was sure was worth more than half the clothes he owned put together.
When she had waked away, he looked down at himself again, and this time it seemed as though the mustard spot was mocking him.
It's not as though Scorpius and Rose had even interacted much in school. He was a Ravenclaw, and she, the feistiest of Gryffindors. She was one of those beautiful, charming people who just seemed to waltz through life. Everything was a dream to her, not quite real. A game, really. And she happened to play exceptionally well.
Rose was vibrant, and as vibrant people do, she attracted others to her. Lots of friends, plenty of interested guys. It seemed even teachers lit up a bit when she entered the room. And she was damn smart, too.
And Scorpius? Well, beyond the Malfoy name, he was invisible. His biggest claim to fame (ignoring for a moment his father's infamous backstory) was as the Guy Who Saved Hogfest, the annual end of the year party. For some reason, he'd been pegged as the only student capable of casting a concealment charm strong enough to hide the noise. He didn't even attend. He didn't like parties much, because he never knew what to do there.
Oh, the irony.
Second time he saw the Weasley-Potter clan at an event was at some old looking fellow's retirement party. Scorpius freshened up the buffet table of snacks and went outside the back door they'd used to bring the food in. Ross, their manager, had told him to take a fifteen minute break anyways, in order to keep him from looking cross-eyed bored in front of the guests.
He was ten minutes into his break, sitting comfortably on a marble step and reading a book in lantern-light, when the back door burst open. First came a cloud of candy-pink fabric, followed by the red head of one Rose Weasley.
"Sorry," she said when she saw him. She leaned against a porch column near the stars, arms folded.
"You alright?" He set down his book.
She turned and really looked at him. "Hey, I go to school with you. You're the guy who saved Hogfest. Well, shit. You're- you're something-Malfoy."
"Scorpius," he filled in.
She smiled and extended her hand and added, "Rose," and he tentatively leaned over and shook it.
"I always thought that was so funny," Rose said as she came to sit beside him on the stairs. Scorpius winced as the fabric of her dress touched the ground. Her dress probably cost more than he made in the past two weeks. "I always that that was so funny, how you saved a party and then you didn't even go to it." He shrugged. "Do you not like parties?" she asked.
"Do you?" he replied, gesturing with his hand to the house.
Now she looked sheepish. The pink of her cheeks clashed with the pink of her dress which clashed with the red of her hair. "I needed a break." Her voice was soft.
"Hey, me, too."
She gave a little laugh at his poor joke. A moment passed, and Scorpius was suddenly aware the night air was a little chilly, and that the grass was still too green, even in the dim light of the lantern, and a million other irrelevant things. He wondered briefly if she noticed any of it too, because by the looks of it she was lost in her own world again, looking but not seeing.
"Is it not as much fun as it looks?" he managed, once he'd worked up the courage to break the silence.
"What? These stupid parties?" She stared at him with her big brown eyes before looking back at her shoes. "Well, it could be worse."
"I meant being wealthy enough to go to them."
Her short, dry laugh made his skin prickle.
"Are you one of those rich kids that hates being rich?" he joked, hoping his nerves wouldn't show in his voice.
She rolled her eyes but she smiled a little too. "Nope, my cousin James has got that covered for the whole family."
They faded back to silence for a bit, and Scorpius picked up his book because he didn't know what to say, though for the life of him he seemed to have forgotten how to read.
"Fitzgerald? I would never have pegged a Malfoy as a reader of Muggle classics," came her voice, as she plucked a blade of grass from the lawn that touched the sides of the stairs and began to rip it apart.
"So you've read him?"
She laughed. "Do you know who my mother is?" and then, quieter, "Sorry, that didn't mean to come out so snotty."
Shaking his head, he told her it hadn't sounded snotty, not to him.
"You must think we're all a bunch of snobs." She flung the bits of grass from her hand and watched them fall onto the marble like green confetti. "I had to wear this awful dress because it was a gift," she lamented. "Tell me, honestly, is it terrible?"
"I-"
"Oh, nevermind. I'd rather you didn't say."
Now Scorpius laughed, and when he did, he noticed her looking at him.
"Hey, how come we never talked at school?" said she.
He raised an eyebrow. "We're worlds apart."
"That's a silly reason."
He supposed it was.
"Well, I've got to go back in…." She stood, brushing bits of grass off of her skirt. "Nice seeing you, though," she called over her shoulder, right before the little thud of the door being closed.
He didn't know if it was possible to be in love with someone you'd only talked to at most three times before, but he didn't think it implausible. Later, when he was walking around with a tray of wine glasses, they made eye contact, and she offered him a little smile and a wave.
The bartender called him over when he passed by. "What was that?" said Mitch, the bartender and the only other member of the catering staff Scorpius was really friends with besides Gregory. Mitch was in his thirties and had that scruffy look of a guy pretending not to care too much.
"What d'you mean?"
Mitch rolled his eyes as he cleaned a glass with a wet cloth. "Don't be coy, Scorp. The girl. She waved to you."
Scorpius pretended he wasn't blushing. "We go to school together."
Mitch sighed and set down the glass he was cleaning. "Look, Scorpius. You're soft. I don't want to see you get hurt."
"I don't follow."
"Just don't fall for girls who go to parties like these. It never works out. Remember, she gets to drink the wine, you just get to carry it around."
Scorpius nodded and headed back to the kitchen, trying to make sense of what Mitch had just told him.
When the guests started leaving, he tried to catch her eye again to wave goodbye, but she was engaged in a conversation with some bloke who seemed just a few years older than them, and he had to get back to the kitchen to start washing dishes and packing up. He tried to ignore that twinge that had started in his stomach upon seeing her with that other guy, and he cursed himself for caring.
AN: This was just going to be a one shot... and then it grew much, much too long. Meaning more chapters are just waiting to be posted.
Heavily inspired by this letter: letterstocrushes (dot com) (slash) letter (slash) 567378
Please review!
