Fred Weasley never hesitated. Ever. It was a little intimidating; Angelina Johnson often felt as if she were being swept away in a current completely out of her control. The things she found herself a part of because of that boy...the detentions she had suffered through....

He treated the detentions as if they were part of the prize for his grand scheming, not the punishment for bad behavior. Filch's frown would grow deeper as Fred whistled while down on his hands and knees scrubbing a floor. It deepened even further on those occasions when he looked up in time to catch Angelina doubled up in silent laughter.

Try as she might, she couldn't refuse him. Sometimes she would protest that she should really study instead of running around the castle barely evading capture by teachers and caretakers and Peeves and the like, but he always saw her hesitation and exploited it.

"You'd rather be studying in the dusty old library than off having some fun with George and me?" he'd ask, and he and George would twitch their faces into identical expressions of mock misery, and it would all be over with studying for that evening.

"George and me." That's how he always asked. For the longest time, she didn't realize it was growing annoying. Not until the Yule Ball was announced. Because she didn't want to go to the Yule Ball with "George and me," as if it were just another prank that would land them all in detention. She wanted to go with Fred Weasley, to dance like a maniac and laugh like a fool and not care about those people who would be watching her dubiously, as if she should calm down, because the only person who mattered would be dancing harder and laughing louder.

But he was her friend first, and for all she knew that's all she was to him, a really good friend, and that was enough. Really.

One night she was sitting by the fire, chatting with Alicia Spinnet about balls and what a huge waste of time they were, girls waiting around all twittery for boys to ask one silly question, a question which would not change the world in any epic sense, even should it be asked. But throughout the entire conversation, a conversation she herself had initiated, she was angled in just such a way as to catch a glimpse of red out of the corner of her eye.

Then it happened.

"Oi! Angelina!"

She looked over at the table from which the shout had come. Fred, George, Harry, Ron, and Hermione were all looking at her rather expectantly, although everyone but Fred looked a little taken aback.

"What?" she said.

"Want to come to the ball with me?" said Fred.

With me. Not with George and me, with me.

She watched him carefully, wondering if this would change their friendship, wondering if their friendship had really been something more all this time, and she had just missed it.

"All right, then," she said.

Fred turned back to his table, and Angelina turned back to Alicia.

"Well?" asked Alicia. "Doesn't feel like the world has changed all that much, does it?"

"No," said Angelina. She couldn't stop grinning.

"No, indeed," scoffed Alicia.

There came that current again....