Scorpius walked up to me, smiling.
"Do you remember when I first met you outside of school?"
I did.
--
"We're on our way to Amsterdam, to Amsterdam, to Amsterdam! We're on our way to Amsterdam to see all the sights!" sang James as my family and I stood in front of the fireplace, shrunk their bags and tucked them in various pockets.
"Oh James, could you please be quiet?"
"Yes mother. I could." And he sang quietly.
"Silent?"
James grumbled and stopped.
I sighed, and Albus rolled his eyes at me.
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When we arrived in Amsterdam, we checked into the hotel, but the rooms were not yet clean, so of we went out to explore the immediate area. Mum seemed to have lost the map in one of the pockets of her bag, and of course we got hopelessly lost, and wandered around until, by pure fate, the hotel was found again.
It was decided (as in Mum and Dad decided without any input from the three of us) to go to the Van Gogh museum that night, after dinner. We ate at a muggle restaurant, sitting outside on a square containing at least a dozen places to eat, in the warm evening. I personally was amazed that we managed to walk the short distance to the museum without getting lost, given Mum's tendency to look at anything that caught her fancy, and James's aimless wandering.
We got into the museum fairly quickly, as evening was not peak time, and began to walk around. James started complaining the second we walked through the door, but personally, I liked it. I think Albus enjoyed it as well. Unfortunately, James just would not shut up.
Dad finally grew tired of listening to him, and of the looks the other museumgoers were giving him, and finally decided to give James a talking too.
"When I was a boy I would have given up owling to my friends during the summer, just to get out of the house, let alone to go on a vacation! You have no idea how very privileged you are! If you don't like this, then next year you can stay over at Vernon and Petunia's for the whole summer!"
James blanched, and shut up very quickly. Finally, we could look at the paintings in peace. I had gone to a Muggle School for a couple years, and so I had heard of Vincent Van Gogh. He was actually quite famous, though nobody in the wizarding world seemed to have heard of him. The paintings were beautiful. One that I really noticed, having done an art project on it at age eight, was Bedroom in Arles. Somehow, it was more crooked in person than it looked in the pictures. My dad, the boys, and I finished looking at the paintings before my mother was halfway through, so the three of them went to buy tickets, to some museum we would go to tomorrow, my mum kept looking around the museum, and I read, sitting on the edge of the fountain. The sun had gone down, it was twilight, and the fountain was lit.
I looked up slowly from by book of short stories as someone coughed next to me, as if to catch my attention. It was Scorpius Malfoy. Against what most people would have predicted, he had been sorted into Gryffindor two years earlier. I hardly knew him though, as I had been sorted into Ravenclaw.
He looked at me, seeming to be wondering of something.
"Why are you glowing?" He asked.
I looked down at my hand, sitting on the stone edge of the fountain. It was glowing slightly.
"I don't know." I answered. "Maybe it's the lights of the fountain?"
"No." he said, standing up. "It's you. Your soul."
I sat there thinking until my mother exited the museum, holding a large bag full of things she had bought from the gift shop. It wasn't until I was lying on my bed that night, trying to fall asleep, that I realized that he had paid me a compliment, and a really deeply heartfelt one at that.
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The next day, another museum was on our agenda. Fortunately, the hotel provided breakfast, eliminating at least one of the multitudes of chances for us to get lost. After breakfast we walked by the canal side, towards the museum.
Albus nudged my shoulder. "Look" and he pointed.
A little lost sailboat was floating down the canal. We walked faster to keep up with it, but the canal connected with the river, and the current swept it away.
A few minutes later, we had arrived at the museum. Having bought tickets the night before, we didn't have to wait in the line that stretched around the curved path of the park, and on, past the ticket office and into the museum into the museum. We were inside the museum in a few minutes.
My dad was standing in front of a picture, examining it closely. The sign said 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. I walked up beside him.
"I saw Scorpius Malfoy last night."
"You did what?" He looked incredulous.
"I said I met Scorpius Malfoy yesterday evening."
"Why? How? Where? When? On purpose?"
"Because he came up and talked to me by the fountain outside the Van Gogh Museum, and not on purpose."
Now Dad looked angry. "You are not to trust any relations of former followers of Voldemort!"
"Dad! Think rationally about this! You trusted Sirius, didn't you? And he was a son of one of the worst Slytherin families there was! It's the same thing with Scorpius! He is a Malfoy, yes, but Sirius was a Black! And they were both sorted into Gryffindor, were they not?"
By now people were looking at us, but Dad kept on going.
"Comparing Scorpius to Sirius is going too far!"
"How do you know that they are at all different? How?"
"They, they're different-"
"See you don't!"
Dad finally conceded. "You're right. I don't. That's true. And you didn't see him on purpose, so I guess I forgive you."
I rolled my eyes. He guessed he forgave me. I went back to looking at the beautiful, seventeenth century dollhouses.
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The rest of the Amsterdam trip went mostly as planned. We got lost a fair number of times, and James never did shut up, but that was normal with our family. We flooed back home, happy and tanned, after 2 weeks there, and spent the rest of August doing our summer homework and playing Quidditch. I even beat James in one-on-one a couple of times. A visit to Diagon Alley got our new schoolbooks, and new sets of robes for me. I had grown three inches over the summer. I didn't see Scorpius again until he passed my compartment while I sat on the Hogwarts Express that September 1st. He dragged his trunk past my compartment and didn't notice me at all. I noticed him though. I watched him for as long as I could, without putting my head out of the compartment and into the corridor. I snuck glances at him during the feast, but he didn't seem to be doing the same. My friends began to look at me funny, so I stopped, but that didn't mean I still didn't want to find out more.
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Third year was the beginning of electives, and I had signed up for Arithmancy and Ancient Runes. He was in a few of my normal classes, as well as Arithmancy, but he never looked at me, and we were never paired up. Eventually I forgot about watching him all the time. The fountain incident (as I began to call it) would stay in my mind forever, though.
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He finally asked me out towards the end of our seventh year.
--
As I came back to the current time, Scorpius bent down on one knee in front of me.
"Lily, that was the first time I really ever noticed you. And almost immediately, I was in love with you. I noticed when you snuck looks at me during our third year, but I was too shy to sneak them back."
I was about to say something, but he kept going.
"I love you Lily. You are the only woman I could ever be happy with."
He looked up at me hopefully, and I looked down at, my face shining with tears in the lights of the fountain. I nodded, to happy and tearful to say anything. He slid a small ring onto my finger, stood up and pulled me into an embrace.
"It is funny" I observed in a whisper. "How almost everything between us has happened here!"
And he laughed into my shoulder.
And, as I faced the fountain, there it was. The sailboat floating around in the tranquil waters, so many years after I had first seen it. Maybe it was not so lost after all.