A/N: Written for Round Two of Fire the Canon's Fanfiction Tournament, which requires a fic about a third year, and Treacle Fudge in owluvr's Honeydukes Competition, in which no dialogue is to be used.
This is the first het thing I've written in a while. At least, it feels that way. Enjoy!
"That night when you kissed me,
I left a poem in your mouth,
and you can hear some of the lines
every time you breathe out."
– Andrea Gibson
Her name is Weasley, and that should make her stand out by default. But his name is Scamander, and so he's used to war heroes' families and famous redheads, and she only stands out to him because she's practically a genius.
She's just thirteen, but she's already fallen into her own little world where everything is distorted in the best possible way, and she pours it all out onto parchment in shades of blackest ink. He's fourteen, just a few months older than her, but he feels so immature when she opens her mouth and beauty falls out in the shape of poetry.
And he's never known anyone quite like her. But, then again, he is just a boy.
He watches her as they sit in their common room. She is on her stomach on the floor, legs crossed at the ankle and elbows digging deep into the thick carpet. Cheeks flushed from the fire beside her, she concentrates. Her fingers tug at the fraying ends of the blue and bronze scarf that lies on the floor next to her and she tickles her chin with a quill as she thinks. Her red hair falls in a shining sheet, the fire making golds and oranges dance across each strand and Lysander is lost in her.
She looks distracted, confused even. But he knows better than to doubt her.
Her lips move silently, oh so silently, and Lysander finds himself wishing she would whisper at the very least. He wishes that he could pull the air from her lungs with his lips, so that each breath of a word that trips from her tongue falls straight onto his. But he is just a boy, and boys are scared little creatures at the best of times.
He thinks he might have fallen in love just watching her though - not just tonight, the past three years - and it's easier to stay a while longer and imagine tracing his fingers across freckled skin than to part his lips and try to stutter something that won't make her look at him with those big brown eyes, stained with pity. There is nothing he can say to this girl that will make her melt into his arms the way he wants her to, nothing that will make her love him quite as much as he wishes.
But he is just a boy; he is not sure he knows what love is.
So he sits, and he watches, and Lucy scratches at the parchment for hours upon end, lips curled like wild tree branches, eyes burning like forest fires and hell, and he wonders what love should feel like.
He falls asleep dreaming of featherlight touches of feathery quills, sharp, quick fingers tugging at his hair and Weasley red beneath his fingertips.
When he wakes up, she is gone.