She wanted to reach out and touch him - she always wanted to reach out and touch him. As though just a simple touch would make him turn to her, make him see her for the first time in all the years they'd known each other. The years she'd spent hating him from nearby, then slowly the feeling merged to admiring him from afar. And all that time she wasted arguing pointlessly with him, just to get him to notice her, to talk to her, for once. She loved having his attention on her, even if it was in the negative light that it always seemed to be in.
She just loved him, period.
As Rose Weasley, though, she knew her father would hate her loving Scorpius Malfoy, even if the boy was Albus Potter's very best friend in the entire world. Her father was one of those thick-skulled nincompoops who could never let go of a grudge even when it should have been long dead and gone. Sometimes she hated her father for that, almost as much as she hated the fact that she let herself fall in love with Scorpius. And she was surprised he hadn't seen it yet - or if he had, she was surprised he hadn't resorted to tormenting her about wanting the one thing she would never, ever have. Rose wasn't being fair to him, she knew, for he had his decent moments, but it was still kind of bittersweet for him to always be so near and then again always be so far away. It killed her inside to know that he was out of her reach.
She loved him.
Scorpius Malfoy, with his pale skin, white-blonde hair that looked windswept, and slate grey eyes. He could freeze her in her tracks with just one glance if she let him - and, she was ashamed to admit, she let him do it quite often - and then he could unfreeze her with just a gentle smile. The smiles were a rarity to Rose, for they had a longstanding rivalry and both were too pigheaded to back down. Al always said he thought they got it from their respective fathers, and Rose was somewhat inclined to agree with him. As her father was Ronald Weasley, with a longstanding hatred of Draco Malfoy, Scorpius's father, she could fully see the possibility that their stubbornness had been passed down.
So day after day, she glanced at him from afar, going about her own business in Ravenclaw as he went about his own, with her cousin and also her best friend Al at his side, both Slytherins. Rose and Albus were the only two in the family to get any other house but Gryffindor. For him it had paid off, Rose always thought dejectedly. But what had it done for her?
Put her farther out of Scorpius's reach, probably. Wouldn't her father be pleased?
Maybe Ronald Weasley would be pleased to know that. Unbearably so. But not Rose - oh, no, not Rose. She despaired in that fact, wishing that it weren't true and that she had been brought closer to the Malfoy boy rather than farther away.
Year after year, Rose grew to have a deep respect, and more, for the intelligent Malfoy boy who, on countless occasions, proved that the expression 'like father, like son' was not always true and who occasionally forgot to be mean to her for the sake of the family rivalry. Even more than respect, she felt a strong attraction to him, but she expected it to come to naught. After all, he was Scorpius Malfoy. The Scorpius Malfoy. What chance did she have? She, the Rose Weasley, who was rather plain in her own opinion, with her amber-flecked blue eyes and auburn curls?
The answer?
There was more of a chance than she could have even dreamed.
He just wanted one chance. A few moments of her time in which they weren't arguing so he could tell her, just once, that he didn't want to argue anymore anyway. He wanted that one chance to tell her that he would never mean half of the things he had said to her, that they were just spur of the moment words that flew from his lips because they had been trained to be upon them from an early age. He wasn't like his father, he wanted to tell her. He wanted her to see him as a man for the first time, let her know that he had been watching her from afar, under the cover of his best friend being her cousin, for several of their school years. He loved the way her lips curved into a pout when she couldn't seem to find the right words to come back with. The way her eyebrows sloped gently down as she tried to solve a difficult problem. He loved the way that she twirled a lock of her hair around her finger as she read a book, too entranced to realize that he was just four or five feet away, on the pretense of pulling a book off the library shelf, just as entranced by her as she was by the novel.
He just loved her. All of her.
It's not as if he didn't know that her father would hate him if he even dared to approach her, because that was one of the first things to cross his mind. But just one person of her family wouldn't be too much hell to wade through, would it? The rest of her family liked him well enough, didn't they? After all, they'd had nearly seven years of having him around during the summer holiday, even though it was grudgingly on his father's behalf. And the things he felt for Rose…they weren't just going to go away. He knew his own father wouldn't much like the fact that he'd fallen for a Weasley, of all people, but slowly he would learn to understand. Would Rose's father? If Al was to be trusted, Ronald Weasley was even more of a stickler when it came to that grudge than Draco Malfoy was.
Why couldn't he just tell her how he felt?
The Weasleys and the Potters had such a deep family connection, he couldn't even hope to compare to it. And if she ever felt the same for him, would it be enough to go against her own father, someone of the same flesh and blood who she loved dearly?
Did he, Scorpius Malfoy, stand a snowball's chance in hell of catching the eye of the rather vivacious but bookish Rose Weasley? The Slytherin to Ravenclaw combination was a bit of a stretch, but Hogwarts had started to open up more in that aspect since the war, so that wasn't too much of a problem. Her family liked him, for the most part (except her father), so he had little to lose. Right…?
One reason he would never be a Gryffindor, he always ended of thinking, was because he was too afraid to tell her, or to even tell her cousin Al, that he thought he was in love with her. And honestly, who would believe him when they rarely spoke civilly for longer than ten minutes, if that? And to stave himself off of her, or to try to make himself fall out of love, he'd been rude to her consistently to make her dislike him. If he couldn't trust himself to dislike her, then at least he could trust himself to make sure she disliked him, right?
But it hurt. And it was so, so foolish of him.
No matter what he did, it wouldn't go away, and he faced the fact that he was in love with her, and it wasn't going to ever leave him. Then he had to resort to wondering, sometimes despairingly, if the Rose Weasley would ever feel the same for him, would ever return this feeling he shouldn't have had.
He didn't know the answer was yes, she most certainly did feel that way for the Scorpius Malfoy.
She didn't expect to run into him in the kitchens on her lonely last-night-at-Hogwarts one person party, where she sat conversing gently with the aging house elf Winky while drinking some tea. Definitely not in her list of expectations was that he would be in a state of disarray she hadn't seen before, a completely adorable bedhead adorning his gorgeous white-blonde hair and muggle Batman pajama pants with a Chudley Cannons t-shirt.
He most certainly did not think that he would see her on their last night at Hogwarts when he went down to the kitchens for a drink of tea to calm his nerves. He was nervous because he was going to have to leave her behind him and try to forget about her again, and it kept him awake at night. But no, he didn't think he'd see here there, with her hair falling in slightly messy curls around her pale, freckled cheeks with a white tank-top and some shorts as her pajamas. He had never seen her look any better than this.
Civil conversation was all she had with Scorpius that night. For hours on end, even after Winky made more tea and excused herself to bed. He had refilled the tea once on his own, even as she had stood to do it, and they continued to chat. Until early in the morning, when they both parted ways to catch a few fleeting hours of sleep, not an insult passed the lips of either party.
She was falling even harder, although she knew she shouldn't.
He was so relieved that he managed to keep the instinctive insults to himself, and found that, as the night wore on, it became even easier to do so. As he saw her getting ready to refill their empty teapot, he himself stood and did it. Look at me, Rose! it seemed as if he were saying, look because I'm not like my father. I could never, ever hate you.
And he could never forget about her either, he realized that night.
All too soon, the Hogwarts Express, that scarlet steam engine that had introduced her to the young man she had fallen for for the first time, seven years ago, pulled into the station in London. She disembarked, for the last time, with a fake smile at her cousins and family who stood way in the crowd. Then she turned as Hugo passed her trunk down for her, and she dropped it on the nearest empty trolley, along with another simple bag and her cat, Simba, in a basket where he slumbered peacefully, purring. She waited for her sibling and her younger cousins to come, and even for Al, before she started to leave.
He called her back - the Scorpius Malfoy called to her before she'd even gone ten paces from the train. She stopped and waited for him. He crossed the length of ten paces with only six of his own.
He apologized for the next thing that he did, but she couldn't think of any plausible reason for him to apologize for something that was just so…wonderful.
This was his last chance, he knew. The Hogwarts Express had reached the King's Cross station in London and if he didn't catch her before she left, when she wasn't completely swarmed by her family already, he knew he wouldn't be able to find enough courage to. And after last night's - or this morning's? - realization, he knew that he wouldn't be able to forget about her, even if he had tried his hardest for years. The growing feeling inside him for that girl was at a boiling point, and he felt that it was real. He saw her waiting for her cousins, for Albus, and knew that it was very soon or it was likely to be never.
When she started to walk away after her cousins, just as he deposited his trunk and other things onto a trolley, he called for her to wait. He was so thankful that she did. In just six steps with his longer legs, he reached her where she stood.
He said a soft apology when he reached her, but didn't stop himself from taking her in his arms and pressing his lips hungrily against her.
The best part was that she kissed back.
She didn't know that she had ever done anything to deserve something so perfect in every single way. Something so completely and utterly…wonderful. Just as wonderful as she had first thought it would be.
He wasn't aware of anything that would have merited such a soaring feeling in his heart. He could have flown, he was so relieved. And he had no way of knowing that as he thought it was absolutely wonderful, she was thinking the same thing.